of them. The simplest form of psychical life, therefore, involves not only a subject feeling but a subject having qualitatively distinguishable presentations which are the occasion of its feeling.
6. We may now try to ascertain what is meant by cognition as an essential element in this life, or, more exactly, what we are to understand by the term presentation. It was an important step onwards for psychology when Locke introduced that “new way of ideas” which Stillingfleet found alternately so amusing and so dangerous. By ideas Presentation. Locke told him he meant “nothing but the immediate objects of our minds in thinking”; and it was so far a retrograde step when Hume restricted the term to certain only of these objects, or rather to these objects in a certain state, viz. as reproduced ideas or “images.” And, indeed, the history of psychology seems to show that its most important advances have been made by those who have kept closely to this way of ideas; the establishment of the laws of association with their many fruitful applications and the whole Herbartian psychology may suffice as instances (see Herbart). The truth is that the use of such a term is itself a mark of an important generalization, one which helps to free us from the mythology and verbiage of the “faculty-psychologists.” All the various mental facts spoken of as sensations, movements, percepts, images, intuitions, concepts, notions, have two characteristics in common: (1) they admit of being more or less attended to, and (2) they can be variously combined together and reproduced. It is here proposed to use the term presentation to denote them all, as being the best English equivalent for what Locke meant by idea and what Kant and Herbart called a Vorstellung.
A presentation has then a twofold relation—first, directly to the subject, and, secondly, to other presentations. The former relation answers to the fact that a presentation is attended to, that the subject is more or less conscious of it: it is “in his mind” or presented. As presented to a subject a presentation might with advantage be called an object, or perhaps a psychical object, to distinguish it from what are called objects apart from presentation, i.e. conceived as independent of any particular subject. Locke, as we have seen, did so call it; still, to avoid possible confusion, it may turn out best to dispense with the frequent use of object in this sense. But on one account, at least, it is desirable not to lose sight altogether of this, which is after all the stricter as well as the older signification of object, namely, because it enables us to express definitely, without implicating any ontological theory, what we have so far seen reason to think is the fundamental fact in experience. Instead of depending mainly on that vague and treacherous word “consciousness,” or committing ourselves to the position that ideas are modifications of a certain mental substance or identical with the subject to whom they are presented, we may leave all this on one side, and say that ideas are objects, and the relation of objects to subjects—that whereby the one is object and the other subject—is presentation; and it is because only objects sustain this relation that they may be spoken of simply as presentations. On the side of the subject this relation implies what, for want of a better word, may be called attention, extending the denotation Attention. of this term so as to include even what we ordinarily call inattention. Attention so used will thus cover part of what is meant by consciousness—so much of it, that is, as answers to being mentally active, active enough at least to “receive impressions.” Attention on the side of the subject implies intensity on the side of the object: we might indeed almost call intensity the matter of a presentation, without which it is a nonentity.[1]
The inter-objective relations of presentations, on which their second characteristic, that of revivability and associability depends, though of the first importance in themselves, hardly call for examination in a general analysis like the present. But there is one point still more fundamental that we cannot wholly pass by: it Continuity of Consciousness. is—in part at any rate—what is commonly termed the unity or continuity of consciousness. From the physical standpoint and in ordinary life we can talk of objects that are isolated and independent and in all respects distinct individuals. The screech of the owl, for example, has physically nothing to do with the brightness of the moon: either may come or go without changing the order of things to which the other belongs. But psychologically, for the individual percipient, they are parts of one whole; the more his attention is given to the one the more it is taken from the other. Also the actual recurrence of the one will afterwards entail the re-presentation of the other also. Not only are they still parts of one whole, but such distinctness as they have at present is the result of a gradual differentiation.
It is quite impossible for us now to imagine the effects of years of experience removed, or to picture the character of our infantile presentations before our interests had led us habitually to concentrate attention on some and to ignore others. In place of the many things which we can now see and hear, not merely would there then be a confused presentation of the whole field of vision and of a mass of undistinguished sounds, but even the difference between sights and sounds themselves would be without its present distinctness. Thus the further we go back the nearer we approach to a total presentation having the character of one general continuum in which differences are latent. There is, then, in psychology, as in biology, what may be called a principle of “progressive differentiation or specialization”;[2] and this, as well as the facts of reproduction and association, forcibly suggests the conception of a certain objective continuum forming the background or basis to the several relatively distinct presentations that are elaborated out of it—the equivalent, in fact, of that unity and continuity of consciousness which has been supposed to supersede the need for a conscious subject.
There is one class of objects of special interest even in a general survey, viz. movements or motor presentations. These, like sensory presentations, admit of association and reproduction, and seem to attain to such distinctness as they possess in adult human experience by a gradual differentiation out of an original diffused mobility which Motor Presentations. is little besides emotional expression. Of this, however, more presently. It is primarily to such dependence upon feeling that movements owe their distinctive character, the possession, that is, under normal circumstances, of definite and assignable psychical antecedents, in contrast to sensory presentations, which are devoid of them. We cannot psychologically explain the order in which particular sights and sounds occur; but the movements that follow them, on the other hand, can be adequately explained only by psychology. The twilight that sends the hens to roost sets the fox to prowl, and the lion's roar Subjective Selection. which gathers the jackals scatters the sheep. Such diversity in the movements, although the sensory presentations are similar, is due, in fact, to what we might call the principle of “subjective or hedonic selection”—that, out of all the manifold changes of sensory presentation which a given individual experiences, only a few are the occasion of such decided feeling as to become objects of possible appetite or aversion. It is thus by means of movements that we are more than the creatures of circumstances and that we can with propriety talk of subjective selection. The representation of what interests us comes then to be associated with the representation of such movements as will secure its realization, so that—although no concentration of attention will secure the requisite intensity to a pleasurable object present only in idea—we can by what is strangely like a concentration of attention convert the idea of a movement into the fact, and by means of the movement attain the coveted reality.
