Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/68

56 PSYCHOLOGY the distinction of percept and image to the higher level of conception and thought. So, then, reality or actuality is not strictly an item by itself, but a characteristic of all the items that follow. Impene- (6) Here our properly motor presentations or " feelings trability. O f effort or innervation " come specially into play. They are not entirely absent in those movements of exploration by which we attain a knowledge of space ; but it is when these movements are definitely resisted, or are only pos- sible by increased effort, that we reach the full meaning of body as that which occupies space. Heat and cold, light and sound, the natural man regards as real, and by and by perhaps as due to the powers of things known or unknown, but not as themselves things. At the outset things are all corporeal like his own body, the first and archetypal thing, that is to say : things are intuited only when touch is accompanied by pressure ; and, though at a later stage pass- ive touch without pressure may suffice, this is only because pressures depending on a subjective initiative, i.e., on voluntary muscular exertion, have been previously experi- enced. It is of more than psychological interest to remark how the primordial factor in materiality is thus due to the projection of a subjectively determined reaction to that action of a not-self on which sense-impressions depend, an action of the not-self which, of course, is not known as such till this projection of the subjective reaction has taken place. Still we must remember that accompany- ing sense -impressions are a condition of its projection : muscular effort without simultaneous sensations of contact would not yield the distinct presentation of the resistant occupying the space into which we have moved and would move again. Nay more, it is in the highest degree an essential circumstance in this experience that muscular effort, though subjectively initiated, is still only possible when there is contact with something that, as it seems, is making an effort the counterpart of our own. But this something is so far no more than thing -stuff; without the elements next to be considered our psychological in- dividual would fall short of the complete intuition of dis- tinct things. Unity (c) The remaining important factors in the psychologi- and com- ^j constitution of things might be described in general P exi ^' terms as the time-relations of their components. Such relations are themselves in no way psychologically deter- mined ; impressions recur with a certain order or want of order quite independently of the subject's interest or of any psychological principles of synthesis or association whatever. It is essential that impressions should recur, and recur as they have previously occurred, if knowledge is ever to begin ; out of a continual chaos of sensation, all matter and no form, such as some philosophers describe, nothing but chaos could result. But a flux of impressions having this real or sense-given order will not suffice ; there must be also attention to and retention of the order, and these indispensable processes at least are psychological. Still they need not be further emphasized here, nor would it have been necessary at this point to call them to mind at all had not British empirical philosophers brought psycho- logy into disrepute by overlooking them altogether. But for its familiarity we should marvel at the fact that out of the variety of impressions simultaneously presented we do not instantly group together all the sounds and all the colours, all the touches and all the smells, but, divid- ing what is given together, single out a certain sound or smell as belonging with a certain colour and feel, similarly singled out from the rest, to what we call one thing. We might wonder, too those at least who have made so much of association by similarity ought to wonder that, say, the white of snow calls up directly, not other shades of white or other colours, but the expectation of cold or of powdery soft- ness. The first step in this process has been the simultane- ous projection into the same occupied space of the several impressions which we thus come to regard as the qualities of the body filling it. Yet such simultaneous and coincident projection would avail but little unless the constituent im- pressions were again and again repeated in like order so as to prompt anew the same grouping, and unless, further, this constancy in the one group was present along with changes in other groups and in the general field. There is nothing in its first experience to tell the infant that the song of the bird does not inhere in the hawthorn whence the notes proceed, but that the fragrance of the may-flower does. It is only where a group, as a whole, has been found to change its position relatively to other groups, and apart from causal relations to be independent of changes of position among them, that such complexes can become distinct unities and yield a world of things. Again, be- cause things are so often a world within themselves, their several parts or members not only having distinguishing qualities but moving and changing with more or less inde- pendence of the rest, it comes about that what is from one point of view one thing becomes from another point of view several, like a tree with its separable branches and fruits, for example. Wherein, then, more precisely, does the unity of a thing consist 1 This question, so far as it here admits of answer, carries us over to temporal continuity. (d) Amidst all the change above described there is one Tern thing comparatively fixed : our own body is both constant 1 c as a group and a constant item in every field of groups ; tinu ' and not only so, but it is beyond all other things an object of constant and peculiar interest, inasmuch as our earliest pleasures and pains depend solely upon it and what affects it. The body becomes, in fact, the earliest form of self, the first datum for our later conceptions of permanence and individuality. A continuity like that of self is then transferred to other bodies which resemble our own, so far as our direct experience goes, in passing continuously from place to place and undergoing only partial and gradual changes of form and quality. As we have ex- isted or, more exactly, as the body has been continuously presented during the interval between two encounters with some other recognized body, so this is regarded as having continuously existed during its absence from us. However permanent we suppose the conscious subject to be, it is "hard to see how, without the continuous presenta- tion to it of such a group as the bodily self, we should ever be prompted to resolve the discontinuous presenta- tions of external things into a continuity of existence. It might be said : " Since the second presentation of a par- ticular group would, by the mere workings of psychical laws, coalesce or become identical with the image of the first, this coalescence suffices to ' generate ' the conception of continued existence." But such assimilation is only the ground of an intellectual identification and furnishes no motive, one way or the other, for resolving two like things into the same thing : between a second presentation of A and the presentation at different times of two A's there is so far no difference. Real identity no more involves exact similarity than exact similarity involves sameness of things ; on the contrary, we are wont to find the same thing alter with time, so that exact similarity after an interval, so far from suggesting one thing, is often the surest proof that there are two concerned. Of such real identity, then, it would seem we must have direct experience ; and we have it in the continuous presentation of the bodily self ; apart from this it could not be " generated " by association among changing presentations. Other bodies being in the first instance personified, that then is regarded as one thing from whatever point of view we look at it, whether