Chapter X

. The associationists say the mind is constituted by a multiplicity of distinct 'ideas' _associated_ into a unity. There is, they say, an idea of _a_, and also an idea of _b. Therefore,_ they say, there is an idea of _a_ + _b_, or of _a_ and _b_ together. Which is like saying that the mathematical square of _a_ plus that of _b_ is equal to the square of _a_ + _b_, a palpable untruth. Idea of _a_ + idea of _b_ is _not_ identical with idea of (_a_ + _b_). It is one, they are two; in it, what knows _a_ also knows _b_; in them, what knows _a_ is expressly posited as not knowing _b_; etc. In short, the two separate ideas can never by any logic be made to figure as one and the same thing as the 'associated' idea.

This is what the spiritualists keep saying; and since we do, as a matter of fact, have the 'compounded' idea, and do know _a_ and _b_ together, they adopt a farther hypothesis to explain that fact. The separate ideas exist, they say, but _affect_ a third entity, the soul. _This_ has the 'compounded' idea, if you please so to call it; and the compounded idea is an altogether new psychic fact to which the separate ideas stand in the relation, not of constituents, but of occasions of production.

This argument of the spiritualists against the associationists has never been answered by the latter. It holds good against any talk about self-compounding amongst feelings, against any 'blending,' or 'complication,' or 'mental chemistry,' or 'psychic synthesis,' which supposes a resultant consciousness to float off from the constituents _per se_, in the absence of a supernumerary principle of consciousness which they may affect. The mind-stuff theory, in short, is unintelligible. Atoms of feeling cannot compose higher feelings, any more than atoms of matter can compose physical things! The 'things,' for a clear-headed atomistic evolutionist, are not. Nothing is but the everlasting atoms. When grouped in a certain way, _we_ name them this 'thing' or that; but the thing we name has no existence out of our mind. So of the states of mind which are supposed to be compound because they know many different things together. Since indubitably such states do exist, they must exist as single new facts, effects, possibly, as the spiritualists say, on the Soul (we will not decide that point here), but at any rate independent and integral, and not compounded of psychic atoms.[176]

CAN STATES OF MIND BE UNCONSCIOUS?

The passion for unity and smoothness is in some minds so insatiate that, in spite of the logical clearness of these reasonings and conclusions, many will fail to be influenced by them. They establish a sort of disjointedness in things which in certain quarters will appear intolerable. They sweep away all chance of 'passing without break' either from the material to the mental, or from the lower to the higher mental; and they thrust us back into a pluralism of consciousnesses--each arising discontinuously in the midst of two disconnected worlds, material and mental--which is even worse than the old notion of the separate creation of each particular soul. But the malcontents will hardly try to refute our reasonings by direct attack. It is more probable that, turning their back upon them altogether, they will devote themselves to sapping and mining the region roundabout until it is a bog of logical liquefaction, into the midst of which all definite conclusions of any sort may be trusted ere long to sink and disappear.

Our reasonings have assumed that the 'integration' of a thousand psychic units must be either just the units over again, simply rebaptized, or else something real, but then other than and additional to those units; that if a certain existing fact is that of a thousand feelings, it cannot at the same time be that of ONE feeling; for the essence of feeling is to be felt, and as a psychic existent _feels_, so it must _be_. If the one feeling feels like no one of the thousand, in what sense can it be said to _be_ the thousand? These assumptions are what the monists will seek to undermine. The Hegelizers amongst them will take high ground at once, and say that the glory and beauty of the psychic life is that in it all contradictions find their reconciliation; and that it is just because the facts we are considering _are_ facts of the self that they are both one and many at the same time. With this intellectual temper I confess that I cannot contend. As in striking at some unresisting gossamer with a club, one but overreaches one's self, and the thing one aims at gets no harm. So I leave this school to its devices.

The other monists are of less deliquescent frame, and try to break down distinctness among mental states by _making a distinction_. This sounds paradoxical, but it is only ingenious. The distinction is that _between the unconscious and the conscious being of the mental state_. It is the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and of turning what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies. It has numerous champions, and elaborate reasons to give for itself. We must therefore accord it due consideration. In discussing the question:

DO UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL STATES EXIST?

it will be best to give the list of so-called proofs as briefly as possible, and to follow each by its objection, as in scholastic books.[177]

_First Proof_. The _minimum visibile_, the _minimum audibile_, are objects composed of parts. How can the whole affect the sense unless each part does? And yet each part does so without being separately sensible. Leibnitz calls the total consciousness an '_aperception_,' the supposed insensible consciousness by the name of '_petites perceptions_.'

"To judge of the latter," he says, "I am accustomed to use the example of the roaring of the sea with which one is assailed when near the shore. To hear this noise as one does, one must hear the parts which compose its totality, that is, the noise of each wave,... although this noise would not be noticed if its wave were alone. One must be affected a little by the movement of one wave, one must have some perception of each several noise, however small it be. Otherwise one would not hear that of 100,000 waves, for of 100,000 zeros one can never make a quantity."[178]

_Reply_. This is an excellent example of the so-called 'fallacy of division,' or predicating what is true only of a collection, of each member of the collection distributively. It no more follows that if a thousand things together cause sensation, one thing alone must cause it, than it follows that if one pound weight moves a balance, then one ounce weight must move it too, in less degree. One ounce weight does not move it _at all_; its movement _begins_ with the pound. At most we can say that each ounce affects it in _some_ way which helps the advent of that movement. And so each infra-sensible stimulus to a nerve no doubt affects the nerve and helps the birth of sensation when the other stimuli come. But this affection is a nerve-affection, and there is not the slightest ground for supposing it to be a 'perception' unconscious of itself. "A certain _quantity_ of the cause may be a necessary condition to the production of _any_ of the effect,"[179] when the latter is a mental state.

_Second Proof._ In all acquired dexterities and habits, secondarily automatic performances as they are called, we do what _originally_ required a chain of deliberately conscious perceptions and volitions. As the actions still keep their intelligent character, intelligence must still preside over their execution. But since our consciousness seems all the while elsewhere engaged, such intelligence must consist of unconscious perceptions, inferences, and volitions.

_Reply._ There is more than one alternative explanation in accordance with larger bodies of fact. One is that the perceptions and volitions in habitual actions may be performed consciously, only so quickly and inattentively that no _memory_ of them remains. Another is that the consciousness of these actions exists, but is _split-off_ from the rest of the consciousness of the hemispheres. We shall find in