relief, but with no desire of being victorious. Engaging in the game he
finds that “this desire which does not exist at first is stimulated to
considerable intensity by the competition itself; and in proportion as
it is thus stimulated both the mere contest becomes more pleasurable,
and the victory, which was originally indifferent, comes to afford a
keen enjoyment.” (Sidgwick, _Methods of Ethics_, p. 46.) But does the
desire really come from some idea of pleasure? The player volleys a ball
successfully against his opponent, and thereby receiving a thrill of
pleasure desire awakes to beat. “Wouldn’t I like to beat him? I would
enjoy nothing better.” This desire foresees the pleasure of triumph. If
he gets no pleasure from returning the ball successfully he does not
desire success; but if unanticipated pleasure comes up in beating his
opponent, as soon as he recognises this pleasure he desires to continue
and complete it. This pleasure in succeeding in competitive activity,
extremely old and integrated from all the struggle of existence, springs
up spontaneously. There may also be added pleasure from activity and
pleasure from skill which will make the game very interesting, _i.e._,
full of desire and other emotions.

Professor Sidgwick allows that pleasure may be the cause of desire, but
not its object. But surely if I cognize pleasure coming from an act, I
attach this pleasure to it in representation; if I take pleasure from
returning a tennis ball and then represent a coming opportunity to
return the ball I also represent its pleasurability. Pleasure or pain
connected with acts is connected by association with representation of
the acts, the pleasure-pain tone penetrates the representation, and only
thus does actualization of an image become object of desire. If it is
possible to conceive an activity indifferent—which may be doubted—we
should have no emotion about it. But we have already sufficiently
emphasized how the perceived experience quality of things determines
desire and all emotion.

Professor Sidgwick’s remark that the pleasurableness of the contest is
“in proportion” (_Ibid_., p. 46) to the desire, _i.e._, that the
pleasure results from the desire rather than desire from the pleasure,
also shows defective analysis. If I desire intensely to beat, and am on
the losing side, I am greatly pained, for desire is always in itself
painful. In any case desire is pleasurable only so far as it is being
satisfied, which, of course, means only so far as desire is being
extinguished. It is not the increasing desire intensity, but the
decreasing, that gives pleasure, _i.e._, desire is negatively related to
pleasure. Intense desire may act as excitement-pleasure, but this does
not bear on the nature of desire.

Another objection that has been brought up against pleasure as desire
basis is that “pleasures are diminished by repetition, whilst habits are
strengthened by it; if the intensity of desire therefore were
proportioned to the ‘pleasure value’ of its gratification, the desire
for renewed gratification should diminish as this pleasure grows less,
but if the present pain of restraint from action determines the
intensity of desire, this should increase as the action becomes
habitual.” (James Ward in _Encyclopædia Britannica_, vol. xx., p. 79.)

But pleasure and so also desire often increases with repetition. One who
tastes champagne for the first time may receive slight pleasure. The
next time he dines out he will, with image of his previous experience,
have slight desire for champagne. As experience is repeated his pleasure
and desire may increase to ecstasy and passion. But habits not obviously
pleasure-yielding, as the morning chore to the country lad, will be
desired after intermittance; the country boy homesick in the city longs
in the morning for the familiar scene and familiar task which was a
source of aversion at home. We painfully miss the customary, even the
painful customary, for thereby the conservative tendency of nature and
organic activity is broken up. Desire arises for relief from this pain,
and the habitual is so far regarded as pleasurable. Thus desire is in
proportion to the “restraint” only so far as the restraint is painful,
and thus relief appears pleasurable. Thus the desire for the habitual
has, like other desire, its basis in prospective pleasure.

That the analysis of desire as regards representation of pleasure is
still an open question certainly marks the psychology of feeling as very
backward; that here is a most common and prominent psychosis, whose
simplest analysis is not yet agreed upon, shows how far we yet are from
a standard of subjective verification. I have expressed my own opinion
that both the evolutionary standpoint and special analysis indicate a
distinct emotion at prospective good which is best denominated by the
term desire. This is a purely psychological result, and has absolutely
no reference to ethics. “Pleasure” has such an inevitable ethical tinge
that a purely scientific denotation would be useful. The “good” is a
better, but also objectionable term. That then the organism should
foresee and image the good and should have a feeling about it which
should stimulate will to its appropriation and realization is a
psychosis of utmost value, and one which is in all psychism above the
lowest an extremely common phenomenon. This does not assert that desire
in all its lower range is a seeking for pleasure, an extremely late
conception and endeavour; but it means that as perception is of things
in their experience values, so representation also, as giving the basis
of desire; but a conscious hedonism is still afar off.

The general function which desire subserves in stimulating advantageous
action is obvious. As anger and fear are primarily useful emotions in
view of potential pain and harm, so desire in view of potential pleasure
and benefit.

The function of desire in stimulating advantageous action is obvious.
Desire answers to potential pleasure and benefit just as anger does to
potential pain and harm. It is a correlative and supplement of fear, and
in general the more one fears a thing the more one desires the opposite.
When sailing I desire fair weather in proportion as I fear a squall.
Desire is the very spring of life and progress, and when desire is
extinguished the will to live ceases, and psychic life declines and
dies. Fulness of desire is fulness of life, and the largest mental life
is that in which desire, constant, multiplex, and far-reaching, is
strong and dominant. Desire seems thus to be a permanent factor, and,
though there is a pre-desire period, no post-desire age seems to be
indicated in psychic history so far.

Somewhat as to the analysis of desire has already been intimated in
touching upon its origin and function, but we are now to study its
elements more in detail. The very young infant certainly experiences
hunger pains in almost its initial consciousness; but it is only
gradually that the need felt leads up to presentation and representation
of the needed thing, and so to desire. Hunger with it, as with all
organisms, sharpens the wits, and leads to knowing things, interpreting
them, and acting definitely toward them. Through touch it first comes to
appreciate object, and object as food, a representative–inductive act.
The earliest meaning attached to object is edibility, and this, indeed,
indiscriminately to all objects, as we see that infants mouth
everything. Gradually from this, or by dint of a good deal of unpleasant
experience, objects are divided into edible and non-edible, the
primitive classification of things.

From the consideration of any such simple example as the desire for food
we determine that the first element toward and in desire is a lack-pain
generating felt want, and so—and such common use of words is
significant—we want, _i.e._, desire what we are in want of. A feeling of
need or lack is fundamental. Now sense of lack is more than pain from
restriction or intermission, for it implies a measure of in-ground
integrated experience with objects, a constant connecting of object with
purely subjective experience. For instance, hunger and feeling the need
of food, the craving for food, are not the same, for it is evident that
to feel lack of anything with such a central pain as hunger-pain means
that this something has often been conjoined with the pain experience.
Hunger is primarily an organic uneasiness and gnawing pain which does
not include any sense of object as of a food or reference thereto. Our
subjective and objective experience have been so completely integrated,
and feeling of lack and that for a very definite thing has become so
ingrained in mind with pains, we feel so spontaneously and immediately
need of _thing_ in connection with organic pains that it is very
difficult for us to realize a state where this connection has not been
formed or is forming. But it would seem that the first hunger pains of
the infant are of this primitive quality, and that need is not felt in
connection therewith. It is only after some crude cognitions of bodies
have been generated in connection with the feeding act and as guides
thereto that on occasion of hunger pains there can occur the sense of
lack of food object, a painful feeling of unrealization, at first very
dimly representative, and so a craving, an incipient emotion. Desire
rests then upon capacity to feel the lack of accustomed satisfying thing
in connection with some form of perception or representation of the
thing. When a satisfying object is missing, it must be _missed_
psychically before desire can awake. The reaction when a customarily
conjoined experience does not occur is a peculiar feeling in mind, a
disturbance, uneasiness, a unique sense of loss and lack which is the
immediate stimulus of desire. Hunger at first leads blindly to
activities tending to satisfy hunger, but the satisfying
thing—food—therewith becomes gradually known, hence thereafter when
hunger comes there is struggle both to know and to act thereby. This
struggle has impulsation from feelings of lack.

Lack pains then prompt to cognitive activities to find the thing lacked
and desired. The first knowledge is that some things satisfy, and an
appropriative activity is excited. The lowest organisms under impulse of
hunger pains reach out after things, feel for them, and as soon as they
sense the edible, appropriate it. It is quite evident that they exercise
cognition only as driven to it, and then it is effort even for the
simplest knowing. But what the first psychic facts are is hard for us to
interpret, because we have progressed so far beyond them. However, we
may well believe that the general form of primitive consciousness is
akin to what we have when dozing or half awake. The realization of
things is dim indefinite, and it is only as pains of considerable
severity are felt and as the psychism gains in capacity for pain that
particular knowledges and particular needs and desires are accomplished.
After having repeatedly sensed something—as a soft vegetable form—in
connection with bodily pain as hunger and with the feeding activity as
allaying hunger, a renewal of the pain from organic conditions will
give, not merely purely subjective pains, but also, as the
pre-associated cognition of thing and the allaying of hunger is not
experienced, there arises as reaction a vague sense of lack which may
lead to equally vague desire. A vague uneasiness and restlessness which
knows object and misses object only in the most general way is the
lowest basis. A study of some case of waking from a doze by reason of
hunger would give the original formation of desire as involving lack
sense. Here a purely subjective pain gradually intensifies till it
wakens a very general objectifying, and we feel need of undefined
something, which soon becomes specialized, when fully wakened, to need
of something to eat, and finally as need of some particular usual food,
as bread, meat, or milk, which is then desired.

Pain from restriction or intermission of some organic activity, as the
digestive and assimilatory, may then lead to sense of lack and desire
for object which is unrealized. However, craving-desire as implying
sense of loss, of something pleasurable missed, is not organic, but is
mere reflex of organization. It is not progressive, but conservative; it
does not initiate, it merely keeps the organism to its accustomed level.
This is the limited range of appetite. Craving rests on past evolution.
However, we have to explain the origin of those activities which, when
intermitted, produce such distressful results. We must first acquire the
liking before we miss what we like, and tastes uniformly originate
through effort, and all pleasurable activity is built up by painful
volition as urged by direct pains or by desires. Desire then is more
than craving. Craving as based on organic lack is satiable, desire is
insatiable. We desire what we have never missed and modes of experience
we have never attained. We, who have never had a gold watch, desire one,
and having received one, we lose it, miss it, and so desire is
reinforced. All the progressive activity of the human world originates
in desire, as ambition, or as desire of truth, virtue, etc. Here we do
not miss what we are accustomed to, but we are forming habits, which
will be the basis for cravings with descendants. For instance, one who
now does not miss beauty of art, but is ambitiously striving to
appreciate art, may come finally—or at least his descendants—to miss
art, and so to crave it. But for the time he has no art craving, only an
art desire. Of course all desire in the craving form, or in the higher
desire form, involves a missing actualization. All desire is
extinguished in realization. But this obviously does not destroy the
distinction of desire as based on craving, a spontaneous resultant from
integration, an intermittence of habit, and desire as itself integrating
habit-forming emotion.

However, with the lowest psychisms, we may perhaps suppose it unlikely
that representation does ever become definite enough for desire, except
when in direct sensing of a thing, as, for example, in a touch
perception. The psychism is impelled to touch activity by its subjective
pains and simple, undifferentiated lack pains. It does not desire a food
through the representation of it brought up by hunger, for such
representation of things in their potentiality is probably not
originally stimulated directly by subjective feelings, though with man,
for instance, we know that hunger and other simple feelings will provoke
representations of foods, which foods will be desired; and particularly
in famine the most lively representations of feasts occur, and thus
there is a strengthening and defining of desire. Thus in famine there
comes a greater and greater urgency to action as its necessity becomes
greater. The vivid representations of foods become through desire—though
there may be no sense connection with food—a mighty force for
self-preservative action.

Yet primitively desire probably awoke only after some sensing was
accomplished, not the mere subjective pain, but the touch perception
awoke the representation, for it would seem the original _status_ that
representation occurs at first only with correlated presentation. Thus
it is that the simplest psychisms are driven by their pains to achieve a
touch or some sensing of a thing before they interpret it as food, and
so desire it; that is, things must have a food meaning attached to them
through actual sense appreciation of them as such, before they can be
directly instanced in pure representation as foods. Hunger leads us
immediately to think of food, but this ability to directly represent
food is based upon having thoroughly learned certain things as food by
repeated direct experiences. A savage who has never seen or known of
bonbons is presented with a box of them, and he may receive them with
indifference, but a bonbon is placed in his mouth, whereupon he says,
“it tasted so good, I want another.” Such is the genesis of desire when
pleasure quality is attached to thing, is learned by experience. The
visual and tactual experience is actively conjoined with pleasure
experience, so that seeing another bonbon, he represents its
pleasurability and so desires it.

Further, the relative presentations and feelings must be mentally
correlative, the connection must be more than phenomenal series of
several forms; there must be an active connecting psychic process as
basis. You are told to open your mouth and shut your eyes, and a bonbon
is dropped in; the taste will at once give rise to a revival visual
presentation, and if a person holds up before your eyes a fine bonbon,
saying, “look at this,” there may occur revival taste experiences. But
the immediate basis of desire is not here, for if psychic process
stopped here, there would be no higher elements; these can only be
accomplished by a definite bringing up and attribution of subjective
quality to the thing. You represent its possible pleasurableness on the
basis of past experience, by the action of the inductive instinct, a
complex process. Here revival is not an active correlating, but is
self-contained, lying isolated by itself, and unfruitful till its
revival character is recognised, and it is actively wrought into
experience. That is, integrating act is presupposed in all desire.

The way in which revival becomes the basis representation is hard to
trace, but in many cases it seems to be connected with certain
physiological activities. A revival form implies correlated physical
functions, as when the sight of a peach causes the taste pre-experienced
therewith to be revived, and the mouth waters, as if in actual
deglutition. As the reacting and assimilating process is carried on
without any real thing to be acted upon, there comes a physiological
reaction, which in turn gives rise to peculiar psychic affections, and
specially the uneasy feeling of lack. The unreality and mere revival
character of the revival experience is ultimately recognised, and
representation becomes possible, and idea of pleasure as both
experienced and experienceable is evolved. Thus an unsubstantial
revival, where the thing is sensed in one form only, but thereby
re-awakening other associated experiences, as in the case of merely
seeing a peach, leads finally to know the thing as a potency; I taste,
but after all I taste nothing; hence I am led to perceive the thing as a
sign, as unrealized in its pleasure significance, but realizable. How we
attain sense of reality and unreality we discuss in chapter on
Induction, but with special reference to desire we add here an
illustration. When engaged in reading on a hot day, I have feeling of
discomfort, and then spontaneously arises image of a wonted bathing
place, I have the image of moving in the clear, cool water, but at once
recognising the unreality of the image, I long for realization. I, when
heated, have so often seen the water, and plunged in it, that the
presentation of mode of relief has become firmly associated with the
discomfort, so when it organically returns, presentation revives, and
its unreality known, desire rises. One not accustomed to bathe, but to
taking lemonade when heated, will have visions of lemonade and desire
therefor. One who is just forming some habit of relief will not have
spontaneous images, but must call them up. Desire also will be purely
general, “Oh! to get rid of this heat.” Specific desire, as founded upon
a definite image of realization, is primarily the result of active
association of definite object and mode with a given pleasure-pain
state. The realizing the image as unreality, as suggesting an
actualization to be wished for, is learned from rude experience with
present sensations and perceptions quite at variance with the image.
Thus, that the vision of water is unreality I know by seeing the room
before me, touching the chair, sense of painful heat unrelieved, etc. An
image of actualization barely of itself does not include desire. I may
conceive that I can image myself moving in water without any emotion
therewith connected, but as matter of fact, this never occurs; all our
images of actualization carry some desire value. Even bare phantasy, as
imagining myself living on the moon, is not without a tinge of desire or
aversion, for the origin and growth of imaging has been so bound up with
desire, and is for desire as life function that some desire tendency is
retained even in the purest flights of imagination. It becomes
increasingly evident that such a simple and understandable expression
as, “I want that peach,” implies a great complexity of psychic process
which is hidden from us by the summarizing facility of language. Emotion
is evidently far too complex for full analysis. Its complexity is such
that we may well hesitate to attribute it, as is so often and easily
done, to the lowest psychisms. Since desire includes a measure of
self-consciousness, and also of consciousness of pleasure, it seems
improbable at first sight that such elements should exist in certain low
consciousnesses where primitive organisms seem impelled by desire.
However, though this _a priori_ view has weight, it must not be allowed
to be of supreme value. Yet when we fairly interpret a very simple case,
as when a dog scenting and seeing meat on a shelf, is said to desire it,
and so to spring for it, we certainly imply a complexity of mental
activity, which might by many be thought quite beyond the power of even
a very intelligent dog. We have at least the following factors:—

1. Simple scent or vision of the thing; bare presentation or
representation of object.

2. Either a definite bringing up, or a mechanical re-occurrence of past
pleasurable associated feelings and sensations, or both.

3. Sense of unreality.

4 Feeling of lack.

5. Pain of lack.

6. Sense of pleasure potentiality of the thing, which implies—

      (_a_) Idea of pleasure.

      (_b_) Idea of personal experience thereof, _i.e._, some egoistic
sense.

      (_c_) Sense of experience as in time past, as experienced.

      (_d_) Sense of time as future as implied in sense of the
experienceable.

7. The longing, yearning, peculiar desire quality as feeling mode.

8. Desire pain.

In the first place then, the object of desire, the _desideratum_, is not
the object as such. We do not desire things merely as such, but only as
far as they are significant of experience. Presentation does not, at
least normally and originally, ever end in itself, but it is always
connected, and connects with pleasure-pain experiences. Desire begins by
being vague as to its object; under slight pressures of pain we want
something, but we know not what; we have dim, undefined longing, but the
indefinite object is always a possibility of experience, a centre of
pleasure-pain potency. At the first stirring of hunger pains, we have a
vague uneasiness and sense of lack, with a most general idea of object
and longing toward it, and suffer the pain from hunger. We may be
physiologically hungry without feeling hungry, and so may have a desire
of thing in general to remove pain before the pain is felt and
recognised in its particularity as hunger pain. When hunger comes, or,
primitively, is achieved, then we want something to eat; and as this
feeling intensifies, the craving becomes more and more definite as to
object; bread, etc., is wanted, and in famine hunger there is the most
particular representation, as of certain dishes formerly eaten with
great relish. Lumholtz, wandering famished on a Christmas in the wilds
of Australia, thinks of the puddings in his native Norway. The
evolutionary significance of this increasing definition of object in
desire is obvious in that greater definiteness and accuracy of
self-preservative action is thereby assured.

As far as the nature of the emotion desire goes, it seems quite
indifferent whether there is presentation or representation of object. I
desire equally, whether I actually see the bonbon on the table or when I
merely represent it—see it in my mind’s eye.

Primarily then, and always, even in the latest evolution, as tendency at
least, the desire is for the pleasure in the object, and desire is
excited by every representation of the pleasurable. If one says, “I can
look upon pleasure without desire,” we may well question whether there
is really personal pleasure represented. Dancing, card-playing,
wine-drinking, may be pleasures which do not attract me because I do not
care for them; and by such a statement we indicate the practical
parallelism of pleasure and desire which is forced upon common
introspection. If you care for it, it is a pleasure to you; if you do
not care for it, it is not a pleasure to you; such is the result of
common observation, and a very just conclusion so far as I can see. To
excite desire, we naturally suggest the pleasurable. One person
persuading another to go to a party says: “I know you would have a good
time.” When one answers, “I know that I would have a good time, but I
dread the trouble of getting ready”; here is a conflict of desires in
which desire of present ease and comfort may overcome desire of future
pleasure. We may, indeed, assert that one cannot honestly say, “I know
it would be a great pleasure to me, but I have no desire for it.” When
such a phrase is used, it can only mean that the pleasure is interpreted
as belonging to the generic class of pleasures, yet not a pleasure to
the individual in his present conception, or else its contingency,
implied by “would,” is so great that desire is practically _nil_.

And if the pleasurable is always the desirable, the desirable also may
be said to be only the pleasurable. The martyr in his most eager desire
for a painful death, fixes his mind, not upon the pain as pain, but upon
the enduring it successfully, and the triumphant pleasure, also the
satisfaction of the reward of martyrdom, and the pleasure of suffering
for right and the approval of conscience; these and many other factors
influence him.

Desire is _at_ pleasure, not _in_ pleasure, and thus contains pain,
especially as implied in the preparative factors, sense of unreality and
sense of lack. A bonbon may be so cunningly imitated, that placed in the
mouth it feels like a bonbon, yet not tasting so, the painful sense of
unreality and loss occurs. There is a painful waking up to the fact of
non-realization, much the same in quality as that which we suppose to
have happened in the original genesis of desire. The pleasant
hallucination is broken in upon by actuality not fulfilling the psychic
co-ordination pre-established under more favourable circumstances; and
this occurs in early psychisms on a wider variety of occasions than in
later development. That I am not tasting the bonbon I see on the table,
this fact _per se_ does not pain me. I take it as a matter of course in
an order of nature already well learned and completely acquiesced in.
But with infantile and lower stages of evolution generally, the lack of
immediate correlation seems highly painful. Seeing has directly
developed in immediate connection with a tasting, and the seeing without
tasting seems by its very nature as disquieting as the feeling in the
mouth the artificial bonbon without being able to taste is for later
experience. It is through the negations of customary coincident
impressions that anticipation and desire become forced by the exigencies
of life. The early psychism is limited in its adjustments to a very few
simple coincidences, but in the struggle of life in complex nature there
comes disruption of these primitive co-ordinations, and sequences become
apprehended, and meaning is discerned in things. This disruption
primitively occurred most easily when there was direct opposition to the
usual course of sensations. Just as when mouthing the imitation bonbon,
we apprehend most quickly and easily non-realization when it tastes sour
rather than sweet. By realities continually breaking in upon the common
course of psychic association, the significance of things is gradually
apprehended, and to see a thing is understood not merely as coincident
with other sensations and perceptions, touching, tasting, and
pleasure-feeling, but the thing is cognized as centre of pleasure
potency, and so can become object of desire. Experience loses its
self-contained simplicity, and is forced in the struggle of experience
in a complex environment into some definite understanding of things, and
into a feeling for them or at them, and not merely a feeling from them.
And so a world of desirables and aversibles is formed.

If no pain was felt in the experience of unreality and lack, if there
was mere passivity, desire would not be generated. This pain of loss
spurs the mind to achieve desire, and desire enables the organism to
attain the advantageous. At length a conventionalized world of
desirables so formed, and certain significances, become so inground into
experience that they seem often to be instinctively and immediately
recognised by the individual, anterior to any personal learning by
experience, as in cases of instinctive fear of, and desire for, certain
objects.

While desire is attained at the incitement of pain, it is in itself a
painful mental act. The emotional going out toward the _desideratum_ is
in itself a painful mode of consciousness. The feeling I have for the
bonbon which I see and desire is, so far as desire, painful, yet
negatively and comparatively, it may be pleasurable in that this
psychosis may supplant one more painful still. It may be said that
desire is painful, and also lack of desire, or _ennui_. But mere
desirelessness is not _ennui_. _Ennui_ is a feeling of lack and loss,
and so a feeling of desire, but a peculiar kind of desire. It is desire
for activity, when by a morbid _status_ there is no desire moving to
activity. Lack of desire and interest in things may be painfully
revealed to some active natures, but to the great majority of psychisms
it is a pleasure state. As far as we can judge, the undesire of the cow
leisurely chewing her cud in a warm corner of the barn yard is supreme
felicity. A state of desirelessness, complete yet blissful, occasionally
visits even the consciousness of the nineteenth century busy-body. But
the normality of desire for human adult consciousness in general is
apparent to all. One who loses all interest or desire loses hold on
life. Thus desire is life, and even when it is sought to extinguish it
either as dictated by a philosophical maxim or by religious and moral
scruples, on account of the innate selfishness of desire—Madame Guyon,
for instance—yet desire is sure to intrude, and must as a desire to
destroy desire. So whether we _would_ fly, or _would_ reach desire, we
thereby desire. We may uproot or cultivate certain kinds of desire which
thereby become objects of aversion or desire, but the effort to
extinguish desire as general fact of psychic life involves either a
psychological indefinite _regressus_ which is never desireless, or else
it means the extinction of consciousness itself in any grade above the
lowest.

A further element which appears in all desire is some measure of
self-consciousness. The representation of the experienceable implies
some representation of experiences. In constituting the world as the sum
total of the experienceable, we imply an ego-consciousness, and that
objectifying as psychic act is correlated with subjectifying. Desire,
like all other emotion, implies a subjective reference. We see clearly
that the psychic act expressed by “this is the food,” and as such the
precursor of and ingredient of desire, means an identification with past
personal experience. A similar act is performed, no doubt, by animals
very commonly, though not expressible in speech, yet in measure
expressible, as in the cluckings of a hen to attract the brood to some
seeds. In various ways the _desideratum_ is suggested to the mind, and
in view of it, both in the identifying as having experiences, and the
longing to experience, some consciousness of personality is implied.
This in early forms of psychosis is, no doubt, meagre and indefinite
enough, but not more so than its correlate sense of object. When a
strange object is presented, as when a famished traveller finds a new
house, identifying effort is instinctive; he at once seeks to understand
it, and gropes through his past experience to determine what has been
its life significance for him or other persons, and so what will be.
What is thus done in the full light of reflective consciousness by man,
is done in a summary and imperfect manner, generally by psychisms, as
preparative to making the object a _desideratum_ or _anti-desideratum_.
The assimilating and integrating, the knowing, never exists without some
appreciation of subject, because integration is not only of
something—objectifying act—but also to something—subjectifying act.
Things are from the first apprehended only in their immediate egoistic
significance, and also very early as centres of possible sensations
which become a matter of fear and hope, desire and aversion.

Desire is certainly a very extensive psychic _genus_ including many
varieties which are noted by common introspection, and which are even
denoted by special words. A wish is a momentary act of desire, longing
is intense form; ambition and aspiration are desires for higher order of
objects, as contrasted with desire for food or dress. The kinds as
distinguished by object are numberless since any object may be
desirable, and the realm of the desirable is coincident with the realm
of the knowable. In the course of evolution we become aware of things
and of states of consciousness, so that by feeling about them—having
emotions—there may result the advantageous action with reference to
them. This order, not consciously apprehended of course, is the natural
order of psychic events, and one which, in tendency at least, always
appears, even in latest evolutions. The desire to know what is the full
experience value of things, curiosity, is an early acquirement, since
complete cognition of object is obviously of the greatest advantage,
especially to the weaker animals, as deer, who act wholly on the
defensive. The very strong can afford to be largely indifferent to their
environment.

With reference to intensity, we can place forms from a positive to a
negative pole. Thus with a famished man desire for food is first intense
craving, becoming with continued eating moderate desire, then feeling of
satisfaction, then of repletion, then negative, as aversion in passive
form or satiety, then becoming active as disgust, and intense as
loathing. Content, or desire satisfied, is not desire extinguished,
rather it is an equilibrium wherein desire and its function are in
continual equalizing action. When desire granted means all desire
extinguished, with beings of any high tendency to activity _ennui_ is
the result. Here, as Schopenhauer notes, wish for a wish develops. Even
in complete pleasurable quiescence, there is desire for its continuance,
which is only saying that there can be no complete quiescence short of
coma, or else of a state where reality has never broken in, and
experience is wholly unformed where the being cannot anticipate or note
change. Pure and absolute content never occurs, and as a matter of fact
never will, the point of transition in the desire gamut, in passing from
positive to negative, being like a mathematical form, unreal and
theoretical. When positive desire ends, negative desire springs up
immediately, just as in the pleasure-pain gamut, where the indifference
point of transition has no existence in reality.

Desire in any of its forms may take on an altruistic, disinterested
phase, though much that is taken for altruistic is only apparently or
partially so, being really due to self-extension. If you take an
interest in anything, it becomes interesting to _you_, it is a matter of
personal concern, and becomes identified with the self. Thus in _our_
family, _our_ town, _our_ nation, _our_ race, desire plants itself; it
is in this personal extension of view that most of the pity, sympathy,
and benevolence is exercised. A well-wishing and consequent exertion for
humanity in general is very late, and still later is desire for animals
as sentient beings having a worth of being in themselves.

The remarks we have made concerning desire proper, apply equally to
aversion. We must bear constantly in mind that desire proper and
aversion are really in psychic analysis, merely phases positive and
negative of a certain definite mode of psychosis, hence we often use
desire in this large and generic sense, which instances will be apparent
from the context. Desire, like other emotions, is polar, and desire
generic has its antipodal feeling in some form of active desirelessness.

As desire is naturally and originally connected with all perception of
object, we find it closely allied with other emotions. While we must
suppose that early desire is upon idea of pleasure, upon the idea of its
realization to be attained, without any estimate of likelihood or
unlikelihood of realization, which factor is slow in evolution, yet when
through experience, sense of certainty or uncertainty is attained as to
the experienceable, this psychosis—belief—has a marked effect upon
desire, and is closely associated with it. Bare sense of the
experienceable was sufficient to generate desire, but when the measure
of probability of the experienceable actually happening is measured, we
have belief, expectation, hope, and kindred psychoses, bound up with
desire. The expression, “I hope it will be a good day to-morrow,”
indicates a wish that it would, _plus_ some confidence that it will be a
good day; “I wish it would be a good day, but I fear it will not,” shows
some lack of confidence in the realization of the event. Hope then
equals wish, _plus_ the intellectual element expectation, a desire for a
realization _plus_ some belief in it as actually to happen. A large
share of learning by experience consists in the reaction of this
expectation on the wish, in learning not to set our hearts on what we
believe to be unrealizable or extremely improbable to happen. Wish also
acts on belief, as is plainly expressed in the common phrase, “the wish
is father to the thought.” If belief tends to restrict or magnify
desire, desire also tends to determine belief. Hope, as very commonly
used, as when we say, “I hope it will turn out so,” is a passive
emotion, and does not appeal to the individual as self-determining the
event. As the primary end of emotion is to incite the organism to
determine its own experience, hope as passive seems a rather late
evolution, as having only an indirect and general value by maintaining
general pleasurable tone. The one who hopes it will be a good day
to-morrow is in a better and more advantageous frame of mind than he who
fears it will be a bad day, in so far as the events are equally beyond
self-determination, and it is of no direct use to either hope or fear.

As to the range of desire we must then disagree with Aristotle and later
psychologists, who suppose that desire is limited by the belief in the
possibility of realization. Desire existed before this belief was
generated; and while, after its generation, it may often affect desire,
yet often it does not. I may wish for the moon as readily as the child
to whom the notion of possibility or impossibility of realization is
beyond experience. The unrepresentable only cannot be wished, and desire
is bounded only by the power of conception and perception. Hope is a
species of desire which has to do with belief in the possibility of the
event or act: it is a joyful emotion connected with belief of
realization of the pleasurable. This distinction between hope and desire
in general is implied in the phrases, “I wish he _would_ do it,” and “I
hope he _will_.” The hope includes the desire, but the desire may exist
without the hope, as we say, “I wish he would, but know he won’t.”
Desire may be hopeless, but hope cannot be desireless.

Desire is vitally connected with ideation and volition, but properly it
is the intermediate emotional moment between these, and not idea of
pleasure—as James Mill—nor yet to be placed under will—Bain, James. It
is neither phase of ideation or volition. Desire is neither idea of, nor
striving after realization; it is not the idea of goal nor the effort to
reach goal. I may have idea of a goal without desire to reach it—at
least, analysis discriminates thus as separate mental stages—and I may
desire to reach it without trying to reach it,—impotent desire,
sometimes called wish. The striving is the consequent, and the idea the
antecedent of the desire which is the emotion wave we emphasize by the
word, longing. Desire is neither phase of volition nor ideation.
Volition is properly effort at realization, and is stimulated by the
emotion toward the realization ideally apprehended.

The relation of desire to will has been a fertile subject of discussion
from Aristotle down, but we have to take up but a single aspect, namely,
whether will and desire may with reference to the same object be
contrary or distinct. Take the example of contrariety mentioned by
Stewart. I wish a certain man not to do a certain act, but yet I
persuade him to do it at the request of a friend. If I say I will
persuade him, though I wish him not to be persuaded, this merely implies
that the wish to oblige my friend overcomes the aversion to persuading
the man. And, in general, apparent cases of conflict of will and desire
may be resolved into conflict of desires. Hence the phrase, “I will do
it, though I do not want to do it,” is inaccurate or rather an
incomplete analysis. We should always add, “because I have some
extraneous and stronger desire.” A box of bonbons is hung in a room at a
height to be had by whomsoever will jump and reach it. In any party of
persons there may be some to whom the wish for ease, the disinclination
to jump, overcomes the inclination for the bonbons, so that this
volition does not occur, others who jump even against this
disinclination, the desire for the bonbons being the stronger desire,
and others, very active, who jump without feeling any disinclination to
the act. Conflict of desires is a common and almost constant state with
many minds, and the evolution of man has been mainly through conflict of
desire in sacrificing an immediate to a future good. In lower minds with
so little self-consciousness and consciousness of a consciousness that
they do not grasp conduct as a whole, there is a simple alternation of
volitions flowing from the desires of rival goods, till one by its
intrinsic force dominates with some permanence. These are the creatures
of impulse, unreflecting and unself-directing by principle and reason.
Higher minds realize _their_ situation and consciously bring in higher
desire or motive; they form rules and principles of conduct: they become
ethical beings, having self-control and self-direction.

Desire is based by Mr. Bain on hindrance and opposition to activity, on
“a bar in the way of activity.” This is true if we understand it to
refer to sense of unreality and of lack as connected with an
apprehension of thing where the thing is really absent from the usual
correlation, and hence physiological activities are checked. We have in
the previous pages discussed this, but this is not Mr. Bain’s point of
view. The three elements he emphasizes are: deficiency, idea of
pleasure, and the hindrance. Thus, he contrasts the prisoner who looks
out on a bright day and longs to take a walk, with a perfectly free man
who looks out on a fine day and freely follows his inclination to walk.
However, it appears to me that both have desire, and that in the same
sense both are moved by the motive, though only one is free to attain
the action. So if I get thirsty in a waterless desert or in my room with
a jug of water on the table, the bodily sensations will equally lead to
desire. The conflict in desire is between state actual and state
conceived, and not between will and restraint. Mr. Bain remarks, “If all
motive impulses could be at once followed up, desire would have no
place.” (_Emotions and Will_, p. 423.) But desire is itself an original
impulse, and is more or less an ingredient in all emotion impulse; and
it is plain that emotion impulses as implying representation are the
only ones which can be “followed up.” Where every wish is gratified as
soon as formed, as with a petted child of rich parents, desire still
remains in all its characteristic quality. Such an one, however, by
having only the momentary pleasure of completed realization, misses the
joys of realizing, and loses all that happiness which has been defined
as sense of progress. If every wish were gratified as soon as formed, if
every representation of pleasure was immediately followed by
realization, desire would still exist in all its peculiar force. The
moment of gratification is always second to the moment of desire, and a
Fortunatus with his wishing-cap cannot possess in absolute coincidence
with the wish.

It may be objected that Tantalus’ desire is certainly a form where
hindrance is the main stimulant. When one is continually hindered just
on the point of realization, desire is intensified, but this
intensifying is very largely due to the increased definiteness of
presentation or representation, and to the increase of confidence in the
event. To tantalize is to bring before one an object of strong desire
into the clearest prominence and seemingly certain attainment, yet to
constantly withhold it.

We have spoken of desire as an impulse, and we would include all emotion
as impulse, for to impel is its function and action. Impulse is the will
side of emotion as interest is its intellectual side. If I fear a man,
this is my interest in him and impulse from him. True, we speak of being
driven by “blind impulse”; but emotion cannot be blind, it can only be
kindled by object imaged. Anything which actuates the will may very
broadly but wrongly be called impulse, for impulse strictly connotes an
emotion wave undirected and issuing at once in action. Where unforeseen
ends are served, as when a hen driven by sensation of heat sits on eggs,
we commonly but wrongly denominate it impulse. Without some
representation there is no emotion and no impulse. So when standing over
a precipice I say I have the impulse to throw myself down, this means
that the depth wakens in me image of falling and an awful desire to
realize the image, which impels the act. If I am merely giddy I will
fall, but if I have the emotion-impulse I will throw myself down; I am
not impelled by dizziness or any sensation, but the term denotes emotion
as desire or fear.

For the ordinary human mind desire seems in general a spontaneous and
instinctive act. We do not make an effort in desiring, though desire
like other mental functions undoubtedly arose in struggle. Originally
this psychosis was a stress and strain activity; it was a rarely
achieved emotion, just as the emotion of pleasurable appreciation of
Beethoven’s music or Michael Angelo’s sculpture is for most minds a rare
uplift of psychic force. Knowing as compound of presentation and
representation and as involving emotion and volition, is, with us,
within certain limits, an habitual spontaneous act of mind. I feel the
pain from cold, without sensation of cold, as bare pain, as
undifferentiated feeling of discomfort, I then feel cold, I feel cold
object, I desire warmth, I will to draw near the stove; here is a
progressive series of correlated psychoses which are constantly
occurring in a spontaneous way in ordinary experience. But this psychic
structure which operates so easily is really the outgrowth of ages of
psychic evolution wherein the separate steps have been achieved and the
correlation established only by the severest _nisus_.

Associations are first achieved in experience established by numberless
reiterations before there is spontaneous tendency to re-occurrence, this
is the law of psychic evolution to-day, and is the only clue we have to
the past. The evolution of mind is not and never has been a mechanical
process, but its basis is in pure feeling as stimulating volition.
Paradoxical as the expression sounds, yet in a sense it is true that the
organism has _learned_ to know and to feel thereupon. It may even be
that in the course of psychic ages with certain species of animals some
emotions may become innate, and such advantageous psychoses as fear or
desire may occur without any integration through individual experience.
The new-born chick, when it hears the note of a hawk, is said to show
signs of fear, though what actual psychosis occurs, if any, seems almost
beyond our power to know. The whole process may be reflex nervous
action, a mere closed neural circuit being affected. It is no doubt true
that all long-continued, often recurring psychoses tend to so embody
themselves in a neural combination that the given activities are carried
on in a sub-conscious and finally in an unconscious way. It is very
probable that much that we take for emotion with lower animals is reflex
or semi-reflex action; yet it is likewise true that there is, as a
matter of advantage in struggle for existence, an inherited instinctive
tendency to certain emotions, to certain kinds of fear and desire, and
there may be a distinct awareness of the potency in things, which has
never been individually realized. In its every transaction with things
the young organism may act by reflex action or by inherited emotional
tendency. How far either or both enter into the first individual
experiences is a matter for the psychology of the future.

The general function of desire in life is obvious; it is the most potent
factor in conserving and extending life. Far back in a paleozoic psychic
period life was below desire; but once originating under the pressure of
the struggle for existence it has since developed into the most manifold
and complex forms. Human life is the outcome of desire, and the human
being is _par excellence_ the desiring psychism. As the moving factor of
humanity history is its record, and present human organization, faculty,
and achievement is its product. Desire, as the force to realize, to
convert seen potency into actuality, the idea into reality, is now in
the very highest examples of psychic development an ever increasing
power, and no prospect of a psychic stage to be reached beyond desire is
intimated in the present course of normal development. The tendency
toward extinction of desire, when it does occur, appears always as
pathologic or retrogressive symptom. It may be the dream of a
philosopher or of a cult, but with Schopenhauer himself desire was a
most forceful factor, and the devotee of desirelessness by very reason
of being a _devotee_ to an object, desires it, namely, the state of
desirelessness. We may desire to extinguish certain desires, and succeed
in accomplishing this, but to desire not to desire, as general act, is a
psychological contradiction in terms. A very low vegetative psychic
status without any desire is possible, but all teleologic activity
implies desire, hence extinction of desire can never be attained as an
end.

Desire moves the world and is the core of psychic being. Deprived of
definite desire, we long for it, and if every wish were immediately
realized, we should desire delay in gratification. The amount and value
of life is measured by the quantity, quality, and effectiveness of
desire. Orton characterizes the Indians of the Amazon as “without
curiosity or emotion,” which must, however, be taken only as relatively
true, but yet marking them as extremely low in the psychic scale.

Education then, is a process of stimulating desire, of leading to
ambitions and aspirations. As what is imposed on consciousness without
desire is a hurtful burden, the true pedagogic method is always to
awaken the wish for knowledge and power before it is granted. Desire as
interest is assimilating power, and without it there is no mental
growth. The art of education is the art of stimulating intellectual,
æsthetic, moral and religious desires, and of providing for their
progressive gratification with the best arranged and most suggestive
material.

                              CHAPTER XIV
                      _SOME REMARKS ON ATTENTION_

The term attention is, like feeling, a word of extremely doubtful and
variable import. Like feeling, attention may be used as denominating any
stage of consciousness, or it may be restricted to some more or less
specific form. As affections of the organism all psychoses are termed
feelings; viewed as subjective-objective acts, a content being attained,
consciousness as such is termed attention. We are said to be attending
when we have any activity of mind, when we have anything in the mind or
before the mind. When consciousness has something in it, consciousness
is attending, whence attention means consciousness acting. But what is
consciousness inactive? Nothing. Hence consciousness attending, used for
consciousness acting, is a pleonasm. Consciousness, by virtue of always
being conscious of something, does not need the word attention to
qualify it.

The attention of consciousness is called, attracted, or engaged, when
any mental act occurs, whether a pain, pleasure, perception, or whatever
form it may be. When the mind is occupied with anything, _i.e._, is
active, it is thereby attending to the thing. If I am conscious, I am,
of course, conscious of something, hence attending to that something.
But all these expressions are incompatible with a purely psychological
point of view. In psychics, as opposed to physics, the thing exists only
as perceived and in perceiving, _esse_ is _percipi_; the object or
content of consciousness exists neither beyond consciousness nor in it;
it is consciousness and consciousness is it, it is nothing more than
objectifying fact. Consciousness does not, like a pail, have contents,
but it is merely a name for the sum of activities we term conscious.
Such a phrase, then, as, attending to something, may be radically
misleading. We do not have both consciousness and a field of
consciousness, a presentation field. A tolerably constant part of human
consciousness is an activity which is a constituting a world of external
and internal objects. This objectifying activity, which may or may not
be object for higher activity—apperception or attention in one
sense—does not, however, persist and subsist as a more or less
mechanical _continuum_, as Mr. James Ward and that school maintain.
Still the word attention may in a vague and general way denote both the
realizing force and will effort therein of every act of consciousness.
But yet as thus a general term for certain aspects or general qualities,
it is liable to misconstruction, and we do not propose to employ it
either as denoting any act of consciousness as such, or any aspect
thereof.

Attention may also denote dominancy in consciousness. When any one
factor is pre-eminent, we say the mind is therewith attentive. When any
element has a marked ascendency, so that all others are much feebler and
subservient, thereby is constituted a state of attention; as when sight
perception monopolizes consciousness in an eagle watching for prey, or
hearing commands all the mental powers of a deer listening to a strange
sound. However, practically all states are in reality complexes in which
some one factor is and must be dominant, and this universal phenomenon
of dominancy scarcely deserves the specific name, attention.
Consciousness is always more or less concentrated in some single
channel; the factors in any state of consciousness are never perfectly
equal in intensity, and so are never in perfect balance. But attention
is not this fact of dominancy, but rather that of consciously sustained
dominancy, as we shall note later.

If attention is not a proper term to denote simple dominancy, may it not
denote that complete form, engrossment, or absorption, where one element
predominates to the exclusion of all others, and so occupies all of
consciousness—that is, more exactly, is all the consciousness—and also
tests the capacity for consciousness to the full? The fixed idea is an
instance in point, and in a certain way also preoccupation or
absent-mindedness. Still, in this last there are manifold elements and
often great complexity—_e.g._, train of thought—hence dominances of
different forms, but yet a persistence of a certain mode with
consciousness running at its full capacity, and the result being that
the general trend is not easily altered. In cases of fixed idea and
brown study we say, “his attention is fully occupied,” which means
nothing more than his mind or consciousness capacity is fully taken. I
do not see that we gain anything by using attention in the same sense as
these two general terms, mind and consciousness, which are surely
sufficient. Further, when one “loses himself in a subject,” the power of
self-activity, and hence power of real attention, is lost. Mental
activity which has slipped beyond the control of will is not in any true
and high sense an attending, nor is attention good term for
consciousness at saturation point.

Again, attention is often used to denote consciousness in its change
aspect. When a new consciousness comes in and supplants a former state,
we say, in popular but misleading phrase, “it takes or attracts his
attention,” as if attention were entity rather than activity. But when
we say that change of consciousness is change of attention, we really
add nothing; it is an identical proposition. Attention does not qualify
consciousness, but is merely synonym for it.

Still again, may attention designate intensity, or some certain degree
of intensity? We may say of one, “he was looking inattentively,” or of a
fixed, intense gaze, “he was looking very attentively.” A strong vision
is thus opposed to weak as an attention. As all psychoses have some
degree of intensity, they are thereby acts of attention, if we reckon
from a zero point, or a more or less large number of consciousnesses if
we reckon from some fixed degree of intensity. But to call a psychosis,
because of its intensity, or because it has reached a certain degree
thereof, an attention, seems an unnecessary procedure. Nothing is gained
by describing an intense psychosis as an attention, and certainly
intense pains and pleasures hardly come under the term. Nor yet are
intense cognitions, merely by reason of the intensity, properly states
of attention. Fixed ideas are commonly intense, yet there is no true
attention, as we have before intimated. Cognitions which come as intense
must be marked off from those which are intense by reason of a
self-determined self-consciousness intensifying. The essence of
attention is intensifying act self-regulated. To be sure, intense
presentations are given as such only by an heredity _momentum_, from
past ancestral intensifyings; their _impetus_ is on the basis of past
cognitive exertions. Presentation intensity, and, indeed, all mental
intensity, is originally and fundamentally volitional; the act had its
force solely in will power; but in late phases psychoses which
originally required intense exertion rise spontaneously and have a
strength and persistence apart from volition, and so the word attention
does not rightly apply to them. Thus also we can solve the problem that
Mr. Ward states when he says, “How the intensity that presentations have
apart from volition is related to that which they have by means of
it—how the objective component is related to the subjective—is a hard
problem; still there is no gain in a spurious simplicity that ignores
the difference” (_Mind_, xii. p. 65). But “objective component” and
“subjective” do not enter into the question; cognition does not arise as
a given, as forced and determined from without, but it is rather at
bottom a mode of volition. Still attention is not then cognition
intensity in general.

If attention is not any form or quality of mental activity in general or
of cognition in particular, we must find its essence in volition—as,
indeed, has been intimated in the immediately preceding pages. Attention
is properly the will side of cognition; it is cognitive effort.
Considering attentively, looking attentively, listening attentively,
mean cognitive efforts in thinking, seeing and hearing. Here is a
cognitive experience which does not simply happen, but is definitely
brought about and held to. There is intensifying act by which the given
cognition is held and kept in dominancy. The word attention must, as a
psychological term, be extended to denote, not merely modes of cognitive
effort prominent in man, but all cognitive exertion of whatever grade.
It will include all will-tension in all the senses—olfactory, gustatory,
muscular, etc.—as well as visual and auditory.[D] A dog scenting game
may be as truly attentive as a waiter listening to your order. So far as
the smelling by the dog is merely instinctive, that is, heredity
survival, there is no real attention; the mental activities are not
efforts of will-attentions—so far as they occur spontaneously and
inevitably. But when, as we often see, a dog is somewhat baffled in
scenting, it plainly puts forth cognitive effort, it exerts its
cognitive powers to the utmost, there is that strain and stretch which
the word attention literally and naturally suggests. As soon, in fact,
as the labour point is reached in any mode of cognition, here is
attention. All toil and work is attention, as a definite exertion of
will including some cognitive element. The labour of life is attention,
is minding or attending to business. Attention is thus will effort in
maintaining and intensifying a mode of cognition.

-----

Footnote D:

  See also my remarks in _Psychological Review_, ii. p. 53.

-----

Concentration of attention is then, we may now remark, a redundancy, as
we make attention equal to concentration. To say his attention was
concentrated upon a certain subject, is equivalent to saying his mind
was concentrated. Sometimes, indeed, concentrated attention may mean
intense attention or concentration, but some concentration being always
involved in attention, it is a confusing and inaccurate phrase.

In a more restricted sense, attention is not merely any will tension in
cognition, but only so far as self-consciousness is involved in all the
exertion. We must sharply distinguish between this attention as willed
activity and as simple act of will. Willed cognitive activity denotes
cognition determined upon and consciously accomplished. The willing in
the knowing act may not be will to know. Willed cognitive activity, when
not against the will, when including choice and acquiescence, is in the
true sense voluntary attention—attention voluntarily, freely, willingly
performed. The term voluntary is not the proper correlative of
spontaneous, but rather volitional, while non-voluntary must be set over
against voluntary. In self-conscious attention of any kind there must be
consciousness of the tension, and consciously exercised effort in
delineating and maintaining cognition. In this narrow sense attention is
conscious furtherance or hindrance of cognition. Effort is consciously
put forth in some particular cognitive form; there is a self-limitation
by the mind in cognitive process. In short, attention here equals
cognition consciously constrained.

As to the relation of attention to subject, we remark that psychology as
the science of mental phenomena, rather than science of the soul, is not
called upon to imply a subject as in any wise attending. Yet we use, and
use inevitably, substantive forms and personal pronouns, but while it is
impossible for science to desubstantialize language, yet it must be ever
on its guard against the delusions of language. It is a common impulse
to explain activities by referring them to agents, to describe attention
and all mental acts as being what they are by reason of the actor, the
self, or _ego_; but science in this, as in so many things, inverts the
common order; the agent is made by and of activities, and not the
reverse. Agent or subject is no more than a congeries of manifold
interdependent activities. There is, and can be, no fixing of the mind
by the mind: the word, mind, being used in the same sense in both cases.
When I say, “I fix the mind upon something,” this means for analytical
psychology, that in the complex of consciousnesses which are unified by
an _ego_-sense, there occurs a will effort accomplishing a perception.
This purely dynamic interpretation is the method of all science which
cannot accept inexplicable essences and agents as explaining anything.
Attention is not to be explained by an attender, but it is a mode of
activity in that collection of activities which we term organic life
with conscious process. So even attention, as self-conscious exertion,
is not to be interpreted as an agent which is conscious of itself in
exerting; but we consider it as volitional activity with consciousness
of self as manifold complex of objects vitally connected with will
effort. Self-consciousness does not necessarily mean a self conscious of
itself.

It is obvious from our discussion thus far that we do not accept the
common division of attention into spontaneous and voluntary, which means
for us no more than spontaneous and voluntary—more properly
volitional—cognition. So-called spontaneous attention is the displacing
of one consciousness element by another without any will effort; there
is no displacing or placing as will activity, but cognitions appear,
persist and disappear by an inherent force. When in deep study the noise
of a whistle may spontaneously “attract my attention,” as the phrase is,
but this denotes no more than forcible change of state. There is nought
in the new act but the sensing the noise of whistle; there is no real
attending activity, no will effort at either promotion or inhibition.
However, we must grant that most cognition contains a volition element.
Absolute zero or negative value as to volition is but a momentary and
comparatively rare phenomenon in normal consciousness, where
self-possession and self-direction in some measure is almost constant.
In the case of noise of steam-whistle suddenly breaking in upon a
student, there is quickly attention—either positively, as listening to
quality, or to detect direction of sound; or negatively—true
_in_attention—as inhibiting and disturbing element. When one is made
“wild,” or distracted, by noise, then his mind is occupied unwillingly,
indeed, yet there being no real promotion or inhibition, we must term
the state _unattention_. Another form is where we give up in despair,
and passively suffer the annoying noise. In both cases we neither
stimulate nor repress, and so both are emotional unattentions. On
account of the pain-pleasure nature of all experience, there is even
here, however, some will attitude and tendency, some favouring or
retarding act, though it be wholly impotent in effect.

Just when a cognition rises to attention point, just when volition with
effort becomes prominent factor, this is a difficult and delicate
problem. However, according to the relative prominence or obscurity of
volition element, we must divide cognitions into attentions and
impressions. In the variety of human cognitive activity there is a
constant flow of cognitions which are one moment being strengthened to
attentions, and another, weakened to impressions. With volatile persons
cognitive life is a kaleidoscopic congeries of rapidly experienced
impressions and attentions. Will darts in and out with marvellous
velocity, now vivifying some, now others, in the stream of cognitive
activities determined by pleasure and pain interest. With all of us
there is a manifold complex _continuum_ of cognition, a general
non-attention knowing of external world and _ego_, which we continually
carry with us. Into this field of exertionless cognitive life
will-effort penetrates now to one point, now to another, seizing upon
and enlarging the most interesting and significant facts. As I am
sitting in my chair, I am dimly aware, without will tension, of a large
field of varied objects, any one of which I may emphasize, attend to,
when incited by sufficient interest. Practically exertionless awareness
is a constant _substratum_ for developed consciousness; here, in the
world of habit, it is always at home, and moves with great ease and
smallest friction; but the process of learning, the work of adding to
mental possessions and enlarging the _totum objectivum_ and _totum
subjectivum_, this is attention for complex consciousness.

We must note this, that attention is any general alertness toward
cognizing, though no actual cognition be attained. Cognitive straining
without result is truly a form of attention. A man listening for a sound
is equally attentive with a man listening to a sound. It is not
necessary for an attention to have something to attend to. Attention is
effort at cognizing as well as in cognizing. The stupid boy is often the
most attentive, the most strenuous in cognitive effort, yet there may be
little apprehension. In fact, we must recognise that in cognitive, as in
muscular activity, effort may be excessive, and defeat its own end. When
suddenly awaking in the night we often strain sense to the utmost, but
with no result; nothing is heard or seen. In this, as in some other
cases, we must notice that attention is not necessarily delineation.
While generally a particularizing effort of cognition, attention may
sometimes occur as mere general cognition stress.

If attention consists in cognitive effort, whether successful or not,
what is the nature of the effort to attend? A student says, I try to
attend, but I cannot; I cannot hold my mind down to anything. Professor
James remarks, “In fact, it is only to the _effort to attend_, not to
the mere _attending_, that we are seriously tempted to ascribe
spontaneous power” (_Psychology_, p. 451). But it is obvious in such
phrases attention means simply cognition, and may be substituted for it,
whereas we have just pointed out that attention is both the effort
toward and in cognizing act. Literally interpreted, then, the problem is
whether we can make an effort to make an effort at cognizing. In great
lassitude or exhaustion we lose control of ourselves, we are unable to
exercise volition either as attention or otherwise. We recognise and
lament the fact to ourselves, we feel our powerlessness, but I hardly
think we do ever really make an effort at effort. At the very first
stage of recovery from such state of utter non-volition, the will act is
always toward definite sense adjustments, or in holding to and promoting
certain thoughts and representations, and we thus have real attention.
The utter rout of psychoses, which once possessed us, we now conquer and
control for our ends and interests.

Attention to attention is obviously distinctively different from this
phase. We can and do attend to attention as psychic fact. An act of
attention cannot, indeed, attend to itself, but the volition act in
consciousness of consciousness, as consciousness of some attention act,
is very properly an attention to attention. If I am looking attentively
at a man, I cannot, by the very nature of attention, be simultaneously
volitionally introspective of, _i.e._, attentive to the looking
attentively. When actively sensing light, I cannot at the same moment
attend to this attention, because attention is always concentrative of
will. To be volitionally conscious of light is one moment, and to be
volitionally conscious of this light consciousness is another moment.
The attention attended to is not in process at the same moment as the
attention. This does not deny that we have simultaneous spontaneous
introspection of attentions. Introspection, like sensation, perception,
ideation, is attention only so far as it is effortful.

In his recent treatise on psychology Professor James discusses in an
interesting and suggestive way the relation of ideation to attention,
maintaining that “ideational preparation ... is concerned in all
attentive acts.” Attention is “anticipatory imagination” or
“preperception” which prepares the mind for what it is to experience.
Thus the schoolboy, listening for the clock to strike twelve,
anticipates in imagination and is prepared to hear perfectly the very
first sound of the striking.

It is undoubtedly true that in the form of attention we term expectant,
where we are awaiting _some given impression_, there is a representing,
antedating experience, which may be a preparatory preperception. But
with a wrong imaging of what is to be experienced there is hindrance, as
when in a dark, quiet room we are led to expect sensation of light but
actually receive sensation of sound. Very often, indeed, our
anticipations make us unprepared for experience. Further, the
experiments adduced by Professor James from Wundt and Helmholtz are in
the single form of expectant attention, and we must remark that in these
experiments the reagent is also experimenter, and this introduces a new
attention, consciousness of consciousness, and that of a peculiar kind,
which complicates an already complex consciousness. In general we may
say that experimentally incited consciousness is artificial, at least as
far as it feels itself as such, and for certain points like simple
attention this tends to vitiate results. Self-experimentation or
experiment on those conscious of it as such may mislead in certain
cases, and must, so far as this element of consciousness of experiment
is not allowed for. In physical science things always act naturally,
whether with observation or experiment, but in psychology observation,
other things being equal, is more trustworthy than experiment.

In all cases of expectant or experimentally expectant attention, the
attention does not, however, lie in the expectancy or in the imaging as
such, but it is merely the will effort concerned in these operations.
Yet as we may expect without effort, and preconceive without volition,
attention is necessarily involved in neither. A perception or a
preperception is an attention only as accomplished by will with effort,
but only an unattention when purely involuntary. Professor James’s use
of attention as preperception brings us back to the common idea of
attention, as any consciousness which cognizes something. This is so
inbred in thought and language that it is most difficult to avoid using
the term in this sense. Many psychologists, like Mr. James and Mr.
Sully, frequently mention attention as a will phenomenon, but they do
not treat it under will, and they constantly return to the cognition
meaning. Höffding, however, treats attention under psychology of will.
Attention as the exercise of will in building up and maintaining
cognitive activity, is naturally treated under cognition; but it is on
the whole safer and better to discuss attention under will so as to keep
it sharply distinguished from the presentation form which it vitalizes.
I have endeavoured to hold the term strictly to this sense, yet it is
not unlikely I may sometimes unwittingly countenance the common
confusion, but trust the instances will be few.

When we have, then, a case of expectant attention, we must distinguish
the attention in the imaging from the attention in the actual cognizing.
It is, indeed, true for us almost invariably that cognitive strain
without immediate realization is incentive to ideating. In listening in
the night in vain for a sound we hear in imagination many sounds, and we
form preparatory ideas of what we are to hear. Sense-adjustments call up
a train of sensations in ideal form. But it is obvious that low
intelligences which have no power of expectancy or ideation do yet
really attend. The very first cognitions and all early cognitions by
their very newness and difficulty were attentions long before ideation
was evolved. With low organisms, as cognitive power extends only to the
present in time and space, immediacy of reaction is imperatively
demanded, and every tension of cognitive apparatus is immediately
directive of motor apparatus, so that suitable motion is at once
accomplished. The cognition, though dim and evanescent factor, is yet
powerfully energized, and so a true attention. Always with lowest
sentiencies, and often with higher, pain is suddenly realized without
anticipation, followed quickly by attention as strong effort to cognize
the nature and quality of the pain-giver and so to effectually get rid
of pain-giver and pain.

Preliminary idea, then, cannot occur in early attentions and in late
attentions, it is by no means necessary. It is said that we see only
what we look for, but it must be answered that seeing commonly happens
without any looking for. The kindergarten child, Professor James to the
contrary notwithstanding, is not confined in his seeing to merely those
things which he has been told to see and whose names have been given
him. A child continually asks, What is that? and is quick to discern the
new and strange. He accomplishes a wide variety of attentions without
ideas and gives himself almost entirely to immediate presentations.

To be sure, every one sees only what he is prepared to see, only what is
made possible for him by his mental constitution as determined by his
own pre-experience and the experience of his ancestors, but this does
not signify ideation. Every cognizing is conditioned by the past, but
this does not call for a reawakening and projecting in ideal form at
every instance of cognitive effort before any real cognition is reached.

In fact many, if not the most of our attentions, are merely
intensifyings of some present cognition, of some cognitive psychosis
which has simply come or happened. Take the instance of attention to
marginal and retinal images; this certainly does not always imply
pre-perception, the forming of an idea of what we are to see, though in
the cases mentioned by Professor James it may. For example, I was
writing the above seated with my profile to the window when I became
suddenly aware, through the physiological agency of a marginal image, of
a moving object to my right. This perception of bare, undefined object
was spontaneous, a pure given; I exercised no will in attaining it, and
so the state of cognition was not an attention. However, by attending,
by intensifying the cognition by will effort, I perceive that the
indefinite object is a man walking on the sidewalk, who is of a certain
height, clothed in a certain way, etc. I do not trace the least ideation
in the whole process; the slight attending as act of will did not imply
any anterior or posterior idea or representation. The reason for the
will act was the intrinsic interest of movement, and this intrinsic
interest arises in the fact that moving objects have had for all life a
special pleasure-pain significance; the moving object is the most
dangerous, and so motion perceived has become ingrained in mind as a
special stimulant of attention. This habit of attentiveness to things in
motion survives and continues for cases where it is of no use and even
of harm; thus, in the present instance, it diverts me from my work. It
is obvious that attention often occurs in the same way for other senses
without preliminary idea.

Is there such a state as negative attention or active inattention? Is
will activity in cognition always positive merely, and never existing as
direct repression or weakening of acts? To some psychologists negative
attention means only that certain elements in a consciousness are
overshadowed by the dominancy of some single factor; that, owing to the
limited capacity of mind, many elements can exist only in enfeebled form
beside their stronger neighbours. If the life blood of mind, will, is
largely absorbed by some particular form or mode, all other forms must
suffer in consequence.

It is, of course, obvious that the amount of will force which is put
into some given cognition is potentially or actually withdrawn from
other factors which then, however, are more justly termed unattentions
than inattentions. But is the withdrawal of energy attained only by
transference? May it not be attained by direct repression and
suppression? When we wish to weaken some particular cognition, is it to
be done only by specially energizing some other cognition? It would seem
on general principles rather strange that we can, under stimulus of
interest, increase our energizing of any given cognition but cannot
reduce it except indirectly by transference. This would mean that the
sum total of actual will force remains constant as far as subject to
voluntary control, and it is only by subdivision into many channels that
any actual diversion is secured. Will force may be withdrawn and
transferred, but not an atom of it can be directly suppressed. But can I
not directly repress a troublesome thought or a painful sight? If by a
great effort of will I keep my eyes closed to some horrible but
fascinating sight, this is a true active inattention, the exactly
opposite exertion to holding my eyes open and fixed upon my book for
reading when very sleepy, which process is always termed attention. When
our energy is going in some comparatively undesirable way we often do
simply switch on to another track, but often also we shut off steam and
reverse. Instead of direct promotion or indirect inhibition there is
direct inhibition or often both forms of inhibition combined. We may,
under pressure of interest, directly weaken any cognition, untensify,
check and reduce the will effort involved by immediate relaxation. In
putting ourselves to sleep we relax with effort, we reduce and stop all
attentions. In awaking we often go through a reverse process. The
attitude of any cognition is either by and through will, or with
comparative indifference and no intervention of will or with will
directly against it, which three states we term attention, unattention,
inattention.

Negative attention is then, I think, a real activity, a will force which
directly hinders and crushes out the unwelcome in consciousness, while
positive attention is will force vitalizing and strengthening the
pleasant. In conflict of interests these forms are complementary, and
attention is here a double will-effort, both the effort at withdrawing
energy from one point, and the effort at applying it in a new point. In
most cases attention is both resistance and insistance. Even in simple
forms the natural tendency to inertia constitutes a constant counter
interest to any particular activity-interest. Attention then is always
resistance to this natural inertia _plus_ the direct energy in effecting
the particular activity. But in advanced consciousness there is always a
multitude of difficulties in the way of specializing cognition, a great
variety of distractions to be resisted, all which, added to the definite
exertion required in the special work, makes the ordinary attention in
human consciousness a very complex affair. A student engaged on a
mathematical problem is incessantly driving out distracting thoughts and
positively fixing his mind upon the problem. Resistance is manifold,
according to the speciality of the task—the more special, the more
distractions—and the direct concentration is also a real and direct
activity.

We may then, I think, see the importance of both positive and negative
acts in attention. As counter to the theory that positive attention is
the only real form, we might plausibly argue the opposite, that it is
only the reverse side of negative attention. If we shut out all but one
element from consciousness, do we not thereby bring that one into bolder
relief and so indirectly strengthen it? May not all intensification of
cognition be thus but an indirect result of negative attention? No, for
even when all distractions are kept away, there is the inherent
difficulty of the act _plus_ the inertia, the general disinclination to
effort. Positive attention may rarely appear as practically pure, and
rarely also negative attention. Consciousness may sometimes consist of
merely pure will tension as keeping off all defined activities; and
persons of great will power sometimes achieve this in putting themselves
to sleep. Consciousness is a blank field, tensely kept, but perfectly so
only for a very brief time.

As to the origin of attention, it must arise with cognition itself. The
past act of cognition was, as we have seen (p. 61), a powerful will act,
an achievement through struggle, and therefore an attention. The history
of cognition and of its ultimate development into the highest forms is a
story of incessant and fierce competition in the struggle of life. Man’s
power of sense, perception and thought is an inheritance from an immense
deal of will effort by untold millions of ancestors. The necessities of
existence compelled an alertness, a general cognitive strain, which
effected progress and discovery, the attainment and integration of new
and most valuable forms of experience which have been handed down to
later generations. The earliest cognitive life is then almost entirely
attentive; cognition does not _come_, it must be _attained_. Gradually,
however, some low form like general sensation is so integrated, and
requires less and less attention, till it _comes_, is _given_, with
comparatively no effort, and a state of unattention thus appears in
consciousness. The child repeats quickly, easily, without attention, the
evolution of the past, and this spontaneous re-enactment continues up to
the full point of hereditary integration. Without effort the child is
carried on at the incitement of instinctive inherent interest up to a
certain comparatively high grade of experience. But heredity _momentum_
gradually ceases, and if there is to be individual progress, attention
must come in. Thus, intellectual education is fundamentally a developing
of attention. Conscious control of cognition, both positively and
negatively, becomes more and more efficient, and the progress of the
race is dependent on exceptional attention in exceptional
individuals—geniuses. Attention becomes more and more limited and
specialized, and a minute subdivision of labour results.

Now, primitive attention is not as Mr. Ward, for example, would make it,
a primordial fact of mind, but as a cognitive form of will or will form
of cognition—it is essentially secondary. However, Mr. Ward, in his
article in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, makes a peculiarly advanced
form of attention the initial fact of consciousness, namely, by the
non-voluntary act of mind being conscious of changes in itself. But mind
is not at first a something which is inevitably cognizant of its own
experience, but it merely is a state, does not have states, and is not
consciously aware of them as such. There is, for instance, pain, but no
consciousness of the pain as fact of experience. Mind is not primitively
a something acted on, reacting, and cognizant of these self-movements,
but merely effortful will activity attaining snatches of cognition at
the pressure of pain and pleasure. It seems, indeed, tolerably plain
that apperception is not necessary to consciousness as such, and the
general law of evolution from simple to complex leads us to suppose that
consciousness was not at first with any apperceptive process. Changes,
whether as occurring or as being brought about, did not imply an
apperception taking cognizance of them. But however this may be, certain
it is that apperception, as consciousness of self-change or as
consciousness of consciousness, must as a form of cognition arise in
will effort like any other forms, must be a real attention, not a
so-called non-voluntary attention. We do not see any reason why this
form of cognition should be an exception to the general law that every
step of consciousness is an acquirement and achievement determined by
the struggle for existence.

The relation of attention to feeling has already been touched upon,
especially as related to interest. Attention, like other volitions, is
aroused by feeling, primarily as direct pleasures and pains, secondarily
by the ideal forms of these, that is, interest. Low organisms are
incited to attentions as simple sensation-cognitions only by present or
immediately impending pain or pleasure. Direct pain does not interest or
include interest in itself. There must be, not merely pain, but
cognition of it as element in experience, before there is interest,
which is always _in_ something. Interest implies representation, the
sense of the value for experience of any given thing. What pleases or
pains interests only so far as perceived as pleasurable-painful; the
thing perceived as source of feeling, or as in any wise related to it,
arouses interest. “I am pleased or pained,” does not equal, “I am
interested”; but only so far as I have cognizance of the object,
pleasing or paining, am I interested in it. The interesting is what
touches my interests, what affects my experience, what potentially
reaches or touches me. It is obviously to the great advantage of the
organism that pleasure-pain object merely perceived should move, excite,
or interest, which brings in attention to the thing, and so fuller
knowledge and preparedness for action. Interest, then, is practically
equivalent to emotion. “It interests me,” is equal to, “It arouses my
emotion.” The interesting picture, book, man, animal, etc., is that
which awakens emotion, and thus incites attention. What affects me or
moves me, interests me. Interest is generally used to denote favourable
emotion of rather low intensity, as when I say, “He interests me”; but
as a psychological term it may well be used in the broad sense to denote
any emotion so far as it stimulates attention. The function of interest
lies wholly in its effect upon attention, it is always a feeling
stimulant to the will act of cognition. I do not exert my cognitive
powers unless I have some interest at stake.

There are, of course, many degrees of interest. Often interest is so
slight as not to rouse attention, being too weak to overcome natural
inertia to will effort or unable to deflect will as bent by some
conflicting interest. A lesson is to be learned, but the interest,
often extrinsic, does not rise to attention point till possibly a
few minutes before recitation. The interest, fear of failure, may
then be sufficiently strong to induce very vigorous attention, and
within a certain range the stronger the interest, the stronger the
attention. Yet at a certain point of intensity emotion begins to
derange will activity and to hinder and even destroy attention. Fear
which has become fright extinguishes attention. Self-controlling
power of attention is lost in a flood of emotion. Yet ungovernably
intense emotion is no longer properly termed interest, which always
implies cognitive power. Interest is properly comparatively mild
emotion state, which includes definite cognitive element. But
interest may be not only at or below attention point, but it may be
of such an intensity and kind as to do away with need of attention,
securing a spontaneous, or practically spontaneous, cognition. Thus,
my interest in a book may at first be insufficient, _i.e._,
practically _nil_, to constrain attention in any degree; it may
become so strong that I make constant cognitive effort, and finally,
as it becomes profound and absorbing, I cognize without any
attention. When anything becomes sufficiently interesting, interest
acts of itself directly upon cognition, which is then performed
without attention. Interest frequently increases to the spontaneous
cognition point, carries cognition in it; but we must remember,
nevertheless, that all cognition had its origin in attention.
Interest acquired and become habitual demands less and less force of
attention, so that our customary interests finally awake cognition
without any attention act. If given cognitions always required the
original will effort,—attention,—intellect could not progress,
delicate and far-reaching reactions could not be initiated, for they
could have no basis. The force of inherent hereditary interests
makes itself felt throughout all advanced psychic life. A survey of
the cognitions of any single day would show us that by far the
greater number are by this type and degree of interest. The common
cognitions and adjustments of every-day life in walking, sitting
down, and in matters of routine, are mostly of this type.

It is tolerably plain that the relation of feeling to cognition cannot
be expressed by any single formula, and it is certainly far from true
that sensation or other cognition is inversely as the intensity of
feeling. If feeling, either as simple pleasure-pain or as interest, is
the incentive of attention, which is the primary measure of cognition;
then intensity of cognition is directly as intensity of feeling for a
certain range, and this is also true where attention has lapsed. The law
of inverse ratio applies only when feeling has risen beyond the point of
highest efficiency, when there is over pressure, and mind runs wild
beyond self-control and attention. Then we should, of course, find at a
certain point, if we could make exact measurement, geometrical decrease
in cognition for arithmetical increase in feeling, but ratio would
constantly change. The centre and spring of any high psychic life is
interest, and as interest increases intellection and volition increases
_pari passu_. In cases of decline, where interest or capacity for
emotion is lost, psychic life as a whole dissolves and disappears. On
the contrary, the progress of mind is in the strengthening and extension
of interest.

Interest leads to attention in the forms mentioned, but it seems also a
mode of attention when, at the bidding of interest, we not only promote
or inhibit some cognition, but some particular feeling. In a fit of
anger we may be prompted by prudence or conscience to forcibly and
directly restrain and abate it. I may similarly maintain an amiable
frame of mind as opposed to crossness. To repel a fit of anger of course
implies repelling the representations which enter into the angry
emotion, and so it is that the repressing or stimulating all emotions,
by reason of their representative nature, necessitates a will effort
with reference to the cognitive element, and thus an attention.

It is commonly believed that attention to a feeling intensifies it—that
the more we attend to our feelings the stronger they are, and the less
attention we pay to them the weaker they are. A soldier wounded on the
field of battle heeds not the pain in the excitement of the conflict.
But the truth is in this case that he has no pain so long as he feels
none, and that he does not attend to the pain signifies simply that pain
does not become a psychic fact, but is wholly physiological, and so not
a subject for psychological discussion. This is a case of the confusing
use of attention for consciousness in general which we have before
criticised. Very often, indeed, such an expression as, “The more he
attends to his pain the more he has,” means simply, the more pain he has
the more he feels, an identical proposition. But we must also
discriminate between attention in a feeling and attention to a feeling.
I work myself up into a passion by strenuously dwelling on
representations involved in anger—this is an attention in a feeling; but
attention to anger would be self-observational effort. The former does
not involve consciousness of the feeling, the latter is nothing more
than strenuous consciousness of the feeling. Men are often angry without
being conscious of it or but dimly so, and attention to the feeling
would consist in intensifying by will effort this consciousness. When a
person says, “I was mad and I knew it,” he asserts the distinctness of
the acts and that the first does not always imply the second. This
cognition originally, like all cognition, required volition, and it is
still subject to volitional control and emphasis, that is attention,
even in advanced consciousness. Attention to a feeling is cognitive
effort in attaining or strengthening consciousness of feeling, hence is
but a mode of apperceptive or introspective effort.

We must distinguish sharply then between the observing act and the
observed feeling, between a cognition of consciousness of pain and a
pain consciousness, and we must note that attention may be either,
neither, or both. Apperception has become such a habit with higher human
consciousness that it is commonly exercised without attention, and so
has seemed to some as a necessary fact of all consciousness, an
anthropomorphism, which seems to us erroneous. When we are conscious we
are generally conscious that we are conscious; when a man has toothache
there is not only pain, ache, toothache, but consciousness of this as
fact of experience; but this does not establish apperception as fact of
all consciousness.

Is it true now that the more we are conscious of a consciousness the
less we have of the latter? Certainly the more conscious we are of it
does not imply having the more of it, though we may say with truth that
within a limited range the greater and intenser the consciousness, the
greater the facility for consciousness of consciousness. A mental fact
must have a certain definiteness and prominence before it is clearly and
easily cognizable. However, speaking of the effect of apperception upon
the consciousness apperceived, it must be evident that it is always a
minifying and not a magnifying. Consciousness is self-divided when there
is both experience and consciousness of experience, hence a loss of
force for the consciousness cognized. A feeling self-consciously felt is
weakened thereby. The feelings we are most conscious of are of
comparatively low intensities. In very intense feelings we lose or
forget ourselves: we do not know what we are doing or feeling.

If now we make the consciousness of consciousness effortful, it is plain
that we diminish the consciousness cognized in still greater measure. A
consciousness of consciousness cannot be forwarded except at expense of
general mental capacity, and so as diverting force from the act
observed, whatever this be. Attention to a feeling must then on general
principles diminish the feeling, and that in a marked measure. The
psychologist who is always twigging his own consciousness to find out
what is going on there must often be surprised to find nothing there. It
is astonishing how fast feeling disappears when we begin to examine and
analyse it. The emotion fades the moment we turn attention to it. We
find that in psychological matters as elsewhere that we cannot have our
cake and eat it too. We murder to dissect. Apperceptive effort is never
intensification in the consciousness cognized, but cognition and
pleasure-pain feeling as a consciousness cognized lose in force, just as
in the body, an undue exaltation of one function is always a depressing
of others by withdrawal of force. The more conscious I am of my fear the
less I fear. While this law of withdrawal of force is obviously the case
when consciousness is at its fullest capacity, yet it may be said that
apperception in other phases acts as stimulant to waken latent forces,
just as in the body stimulus of one function is often stimulus of all,
though we doubt that apperception is original and permanent function in
consciousness. But still in such cases it is a new consciousness which
is stimulated and strengthened and not the consciousness which is being
cognized, and still more then is there decrease in the latter. A given
feeling is never increased by attentive consciousness of it. When a
feeling is said to be intensified by attention to it, we may suspect
either inaccurate analysis or misuse of terms. This, of course, does not
deny that within a certain range _immanent_ attention increases
pleasure, etc., for example, the more actively we taste an orange the
more taste pleasure we get.

We note in passing the very interesting psychological paradox that the
more we view ourselves the less we have to view, the principle of which
has been set forth above. We know well that the very reflective and
self-conscious have little personal force and individual quality.
Moreover the self-conscious stage in youth is precisely the period when
there is the least real self to be conscious of. A strong multiplex mind
is rarely very self-observant.

Finally we have to remark upon the way in which attention may be
divisive of cognition. Boswell makes Dr. Johnson to say, “If we read
without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention;
so that there is but one half to be employed on what we read.” But
admitting the necessity of intrinsic interest, this does not do away
with attention. Attention hinders rather than helps cognition only when
it becomes wearing strain, as in reading when much fatigued. But
attention as fulness of vigorous normal will activity gives a force and
value to cognition which it would not otherwise have, and often makes
its very existence possible. The greatest, most significant cognitions
in the mental life of any individual are those which are achieved at the
top of endeavour. Real knowledge as advancement and acquirement is
always the fruit of long training and attention.

The act of attention is painful and therefore is not exercised by lower
organisms, at least, only under absolute necessity. Often the pain from
attention is so great that the individual prefers to suffer than to
exert himself cognitively and so help to remove pain-giver. It is only
under the greatest pressure that new knowledge and new ideas are
acquired, and the history of mind shows a series of _tours de force_
achieved only in moments of direst need. The strengthening and the
holding of cognitive powers to a given point by effort of will is
peculiarly distasteful and painful activity. All minds tend toward
inaction or toward the regions of effortless action where overwhelming
interest carries them freely along. Attention, while the most
advantageous of actions, is yet most irksome and painful. It would seem
to us at first blush that if pleasure and not pain had attached to the
attentive act from the beginning, the evolution of mind would have been
accomplished in the merest fraction of the time actually required. It
would have been the difference between going down a steep incline rather
than up. Why progress should only be realized through painful effort and
struggle is a problem which has vexed the thought of man throughout
history but upon which psychology has little light to throw. Our present
concern is to simply emphasize the fact that cognitive act as attention
is always painful, and if the act of cognition is performed without pain
we may promptly deny this to be an attention. This is, of course, far
from asserting that all cognizings with pain are attentions.

                               CHAPTER XV
                             _SELF-FEELING_

Popular and scientific observation agree that a very interesting and
important phenomenon in consciousness is the sense of self as involving
such feelings as pride, shame, self-satisfaction, and self-disgust. And
the evolutionary psychologist is bound to consider self-consciousness in
its rise and development as a life factor. What is its significance for
life? How and when did it arise as answering a demand in the struggle
for existence? Further, the psychologist is bound to clearly define and
analyse the self-sense as psychic fact, to understand just what it is,
as well as what it seems. The nature of the self-sense must be carefully
studied by introspection, and its elements and quality determined.
However, the psychist has nothing, of course, to do with the self which
is sensed, an inquiry which belongs alone to the metaphysician.

Self-consciousness has been throughout all our discussion assumed and
implied as factor in emotion life. Object is not merely perceived, for
this in itself has no life value, but is at once interpreted in
experience terms, is self-related, and emotion arises and stimulates
suitable will-response in bodily activities. Thus all response to
environment through cognition of environment means with sense of the
environment as its own. Thus, and thus only, is sense of environment
rendered efficacious, for bare objectivity, which signifies nothing, has
no value for life. Under the conditions of existence in the struggle of
life object cognition could not originate because it has no function.
The theory of natural selection then requires that object and subject
cognition be regarded as complementary psychic factors, coincident in
their origin, and developing in strict correlation.

This corollary from the theory of natural selection, implying a
self-relating act in all cognition under the condition of struggle for
existence, is seen to be a likely hypothesis so far as we can judge from
the action of low psychisms. Any one who closely observes animals must
recognise that self-interest determines their cognitive activities and
in turn is roused by it. The alert listening and looking of a squirrel
is obviously impelled by fear and awakens fear. The object perceived is
constantly interpreted for its experience value, that is, there is
constant self-reference. This is the type of all cognition under natural
selection, _i.e._, where use dominates.

Assuming then psychism as mode of adaptive reaction, we see the
necessity for the correlation of the sense of self with the sense of
things. An experiencer blind to self, who has no awareness of self, but
merely blindly strives, has little advantage, for it possesses no
self-directivity and no power of intelligent action. Its adaptation is
purely general; to be specific adaptation it must appreciate differences
in environment in their differential action upon itself, an appreciation
of the objective in subjective terms. It is probable then that the first
knowledge was the apprehension of thing as painer and then of the thing
as pleasurer. A discrimination of the two is attained, probably tactile,
as hard and soft. The subjective import of the thing is at once realized
from these signs.

It is obvious that the origin of self-consciousness must be placed very
early in psychic life. With organisms which have but a few flashes of
consciousness during their whole individual existence, whose whole
experience is a mere sum of separate pleasure-pain thrills and blind
efforts, there is neither sense of objectivity nor subjectivity. These
very lowest psychisms have experience, but no sense of experience;
pleasures and pains possess them, but they do not possess these. But if
mentality arises and progresses solely by virtue of its function in
saving and profiting the individual living organism, if the end of
psychosis is this self-conservation of the bodily whole in its vitality,
there is an imperative demand for self-cognizance in order to self-care.
Under the law of struggle and survival of the fittest, the organism
which does not look out _for itself_ must go to the wall or be in the
lowest grade. Self-conservation is closely linked with self-sense. Hence
the individual very early acquires some sense of itself in its
environment, and so acts and conducts itself. Thus under adverse forces
it learns to know itself, to realize its own place and power, and to
feel fear, anger, and so to appropriately respond to any environment.
Thus is secured manifold and special response to multiform conditions,
whereas in the organism which has only pure subjectivity of pain the
response would be uniform.

The condition of an _ego_ being sensed or known is, of course, that
there is an ego to be sensed. All experience is an individual’s
experience, is personal, but this does not constitute egoism as an
experience. The experiencer must have experience before he can know
himself as experience centre, that is, there must be experience before
there can be experience of experience. But the amount of consciousness
and integration thereof which is required for self-cognizance is
probably very small. The dynamic organic whole of psychic life, which we
denominate _ego_, has almost from the start self-consciousness, and
grows by self-integration. By the conjoint interaction of subject and
object cognition with feeling and will elements egohood or personality
is gradually developed to the largeness which we see in the human mind.
Experience which does not self-integrate is scarce worthy the name, and
it is noticeable that we usually associate self-consciousness with the
term. “Having an experience” signifies a self-related psychic fact.
Given the first germ and experience constantly returns upon itself and
self-develops. It anticipates itself, experiences the experienceable,
and so serves life. A psychic individual without sense of his own
individuality is practically undiscoverable and impossible. It is
perhaps not too much to say that psychically egohood really begins when
experience cognizes and organizes itself; the self is made by the sense
of self. At first only an occasional achievement upon a very meagre
basis of psychosis, the self-sense rose only through intense pain and
effort, but has now become so built into experience that, with human
minds at least, it seems constant and spontaneous factor. Just what this
means we have to note when we come to analyze the self-sense.

While the ego-sense is to be regarded as a reflection of experience upon
itself, this reflection is far from being abstract, or general, or
spontaneous. The self-sense is wrought out in the direct commerce with
objects demanded by the exigencies of existence, a particular and
concrete apprehension is produced. That is, mind is no purely internal
development nor yet a mechanical impression. Development is forced upon
it in a world of competition and danger, but yet this development is
always active response. The self-sense then by which the individual
becomes aware of its own activities and feelings as its own, originates,
like all other new modes, by stress and strain as a most valuable
psychosis in the struggle of existence.

The primitive self-consciousness is evidently naïve, that is, there is
no consciousness of the self-consciousness. The low psychism is
conscious of itself, knows what is to its own advantage, and is
absorbingly selfish, but it is wholly unconscious of its self regard; so
also with very young children we see an egoism which is perfectly
unconscious and naïve, often humorously so to the observant adult who
perceives the utter simplicity of its selfishness. The embarrassing
self-consciousness of the boy and girl in their teens, a conscious
self-consciousness, is not yet achieved. The immediate consciousness of
self cannot by itself embarrass, it must be complicated with reflection
and with cognizance of other _ego_'s; but later forms we do not need to
discuss here.

In the simplest form of self-consciousness what are the necessary
elements? and what is the essential nature of self-consciousness as
psychic fact?

In the first place, then, what is the nature of self-consciousness as
cognition? If cognition be awareness of object, what is self or subject
cognition? Is subject merely a kind of object? Is self-consciousness a
peculiar conscious mode, or is it merely of the same type as the general
cognition of object? Of course we wish to consider such questions here
simply in the light of psychic fact.

It is often considered that self-cognitions are really in no way unique,
that the subject sensed is merely the individual’s body or his mental
powers. And it is undoubtedly true that subject is always some object,
the subject cognition is apprehension of some object either corporeal or
mental; yet self-cognition is never merely an object seen as object. The
psychic act of self-cognition is a peculiar qualifying of the object
cognition; the individual who merely knows body or mind has not
self-sense, he must be aware of body and mind as his own. The essence of
self-sense is not in the object as so perceived, but in the
subjectifying reference. While the _ego_ then is always constituted as
object, _ego_ sense as psychic fact is more than mere object cognition.
The psychic self as object, as some mode or modes of consciousness, has
naturally been emphasized. Thus the self may be defined as that which is
subject to will. Yet the least reflection shows us that for self-sense
this must imply _my_ will, and so assume what it would explain. A
consciousness of will act as effective psychic fact is not _ego_ sense.
A cognition of effort or _nisus_ is not the sense of self save so far as
the effort is known or felt as _mine_. And so in any other objectivist
definition of self as psychic object, the self in its real nature as
psychic act vanishes. Thus the consciousness of pleasure-pain capacity,
while closely related to self-sense, does not make it, for we have to
add that the capacity must be known as one’s own. In every endeavour
then to define or analyze the self as psychic fact we must either
eliminate it or presuppose it, and this must be taken as very
significant. It means at least that this _stating_ it—being merely
objectifying act—destroys the subjectifying which is its essence. The
radical distinction and polar opposition of subjectifying and
objectifying is therein suggested, and the difficulty of all fruitful
discussion and scientific investigation, which is objectifying, is made
apparent.

The objective cognition of a self can only mean cognition of an object
capable of experience. Objects are thus discriminated into two
classes—experiencers and non-experiencers, subject-objects and bare
objects; but this is not self-sense whereby the experiencer directly
knows _his own_ experience as such, but merely sense of a self as any
individual object experiencing. This objective definition of a self is
simple enough. It merely asserts that any object which at any moment of
its persistence or existence has a consciousness or experience of any
kind is thereby a self. But this is obviously not a definition of the
self and self-sense as psychic act, nor does it explain it. The
scientific statement that individual objects exist as experiencers, and
so are personalities, or _ego_'s, does not clear up the self-sense
whereby the individual is aware of his own individuality as such.
Egohood as selfishness in this objective sense, and ego-hood as
self-experience, as a feeling and knowing myself, are quite distinct. To
the question, What makes an object—this particular object, body with
limbs and various organs capable of feeling pain-pleasure—what makes
this _myself_? the only answer is relation not, be it noted, to
experience, but to _my_ experience felt as such. And what makes an
experience mine is that I consciously experience it; not merely that I
experience—that experience occurs to me, or in me, as objective fact—but
that I consciously experience, subjectively realize the experience as
_mine_; not merely as realizing experience as experience, but as _mine
own_. This ceaseless circle into which we fall in trying to define _ego_
is hinted at in various common expressions. A child even will often
remark, “I did not do it, my hand did it”; “you did not touch _me_, you
touched my _foot_,” etc. That is, even the most cursory observation
asserts that object in itself is not subject, that the me is not mine.

While, then, we must regard self-cognition as a _genus_ by itself and as
unanalyzable simple psychic fact, arising early upon a very slight basis
of experience, and continually developing as most important psychosis
for life, we may yet distinguish what is involved with it, what modes of
consciousness it presupposes, and from which it yet is distinct.

We might speak of ego-sense as an experience knowing itself. But since
cognition implies always a knowing and the known, an experience cannot,
and does not, know itself. The consciousness knowing is never the
consciousness known; and to speak of a consciousness as aware of itself
is misleading and inaccurate. To speak of the cognizance of a pain as
pain self-cognizant is an erroneous expression, for the pain does not
know itself; but it is known by a cognition which is not it. To be aware
of pain as such is awareness of consciousness, but is, interpreted
strictly, in no wise self-consciousness. I may even speak of a
self-conscious self-consciousness. This does not really mean what it
directly implies, but can only mean a self-consciousness _plus_ a
consciousness of it as one’s own; that is, the self-consciousness is not
actually conscious of itself. Even if a consciousness could both be and
know its being as an absolute, simple act, yet this would not be
self-sense, an individual realizing its own individuality, but merely a
single psychic act existing, and at the same time conscious of its
existence. Self-consciousness is more and other than any consciousness
which is self-conscious, if that were possible.

Consciousness of consciousness is not, then, self-consciousness. It is,
indeed, conceivable that an _ego_, in objective sense, might know his
own consciousness not as _his own_—the act of self-consciousness—but
merely as consciousness, and he would thus exist as an individual, yet
without subjective individuality. Yet, as matter of fact, consciousness
of consciousness always carries self-consciousness with it. If I become
conscious of a consciousness which is my own, I know it, not merely as a
consciousness, but as my own consciousness; if I am conscious of anger,
I am conscious of being angry.

Hume, in his chapter on Personal Identity, observes, “For my part, when
I enter most intimately into what I call _myself_, I always stumble on
some particular perception or other of heat or cold, light or shade,
love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch _myself_ at any time
without a perception, and never can observe anything but the
perception.” This is a good illustration of a futile and mistaken
attempt to absorb self-consciousness in consciousness of consciousness.
Of course Hume was not the hypothetical _ego_ which we have instanced as
purely objective observer of his own consciousness; when he was
conscious of any consciousness, as a heat or light sensation, a pleasure
or a pain, he was assuredly, like other mortals, conscious of it as his
own. The sense of mine-ness as psychic fact he should not have ignored,
whatever might be his conclusions as to the _myself_ But metaphysical
psychology is always apt to swerve from fact.

The close connection of self-consciousness with consciousness of
consciousness leads often to their confusion. Thus under the head
“Illusions of Self-consciousness,” J. M. Baldwin, in his treatise on the
Senses and Intellect, says, “Of these subjective illusions we may
mention _emotional illusions_, wrong estimates of our emotional states,
as when an angry man declares that he was never more cool in his life.”
This instance is plainly an illusion of introspection, not of
self-inspection; there is a mistake in the consciousness of
consciousness. Wundt, in defining self-sense as perception of the unity
of experience, falls into the same confusion.

It points to the fundamental value and place of these cognition factors,
that when we say any one is conscious we imply them all. Thus I say of
some one rendered unconscious by an accident, “He slowly recovered
consciousness,” by which I mean, became aware of himself and his
surroundings with awareness of his own mental activities. He is
consciously conscious, objectively conscious, and self-conscious. All
this makes up for us being conscious, and is for cognitive mind such a
simple organic basal movement as circulatory-nervous-motor function is
for body.

An organism must, of course, have had some psychosis before it can
become conscious of it, and of it as its own, and this primitive
psychosis we regard as pure pleasure-pain series. But in the struggle
for existence the organism is driven out of this subjectivity to
cognize its environment as related to itself, to apprehend and
comprehend and so to feel about itself—emotion—and so led to
intelligent will activity as real self-activity. At the very first the
organism has pleasures and pains, without knowing them as determined
in itself by objects, but this primitive pre-cognitive stage is short,
and most psychisms are certainly beyond it; they sense and notice
things, bodily and beyond the body, as of experience value in pleasure
and pain terms. At some most critical moment cognition first arose as
triple movement, object—subject—consciousness knowledge. Just what may
have been its original form it is most difficult to determine, but we
may suppose it to have been a very weak activity, possibly
expressible, as, “it hurts,” object being simply pain centre. “It
hurts,” means object self-related, with consciousness of the
consciousness, and this is our language expression for what seems to
be an extremely common psychosis among many organisms. As simple pains
were probably the first conscious phenomena, consciousness of pain was
probably the first consciousness of consciousness, involving also
subject and object consciousness. Not only to have a pain, but to be
conscious of it as definitely objectively determined is decidedly
useful attainment, which is finally inground in experience, so that it
occurs spontaneously in highest psychisms. But it is only with a few
of the highest human psychisms that consciousness object and subject
are apprehended as general facts. Even by philosophers and scientists,
subject, subjectivity, and object are not easily apprehended in their
distinctness as purely general modes; it requires will strain to
properly know them.

We have throughout sought the origin and place of modes of consciousness
in function, and from this point of view we must view object-knowledge,
subject-knowledge, and consciousness-knowledge as early coincident and
correlative. Cognition springs up as a threefold mode, for in no single
factor by itself has it life value. Pain, we say, forced the organism to
work out to object as painer, cognition arising at once as triple
activity. However, this does not imply that there is a constant knowing
with, an apperception, that every consciousness is accompanied with a
consciousness of it. Pains, pleasures, perceptions, etc., constantly
engross the consciousness field without our apprehending them. Simple,
common folk and children are rarely apperceptive, but yet they are
eminently self-conscious, and consciousness conscious in all their life
of naïve selfishness. They are constantly perceiving the significance of
things for their own experience, and acting upon this felt meaning.
Although not immediately aware of what is passing in their own
consciousness, as is common to certain high types of human psychism, yet
in their self-interest they certainly know themselves as experiencers.
Thus immediate awareness of one’s own psychic attitude as
such—apperception—is a kind of consciousness of consciousness in measure
divorced from consciousness of the object, and so belonging to such a
high scope of psychism that it hardly falls within the range of our
discussion, which is confined to simple direct emotion—value of things
as implying both self and consciousness knowledge. Apperception as a
constant reflection and introspection is certainly not original. In its
original form consciousness of consciousness is merely implied element
in the study of things. The study of conscious self self-possession,
self-poise, conscious psychic self-development, is all very late.

Leaving now the general consideration and analysis of self-consciousness
in the light of the general doctrine of evolution, let us note how it
occurs in consciousness to-day. Let us come to some direct inductive
study.

The simplest method and the most direct of studying the rise and nature
of self-consciousness is in those experiences in coming to
self-consciousness from deep sleep or from coma after severe accident. I
say, “I regained consciousness,” “I came to consciousness,” meaning, not
bare consciousness as in mere sensations or perceptions, but a
self-consciousness involved therein. In becoming conscious I came to
self-consciousness; in becoming aware of the objective, I at once
realize my subjectivity, myself as experiencer. In coming out from under
the influence of chloroform, there is, I have distinctly observed in my
own case, a struggling to realize, which is both objective and
subjective cognition. It is true a person having awakened under very
strange circumstances, as in a bed in a hospital after an accident, may
declare, “I did not know myself,” but this does not mean that he had no
self-consciousness, but merely that for the moment he did not identify
this self, himself, as John Smith, of Jonesville, etc. Sometimes it
happens that self-identification is not reached at all, but the self, as
bodily whole experiencing, is speedily aware of self, a new personality
and sense of personality quickly grows up. Again, a lunatic mistaking
_himself_ for Herod or Cæsar is thus always self-conscious. He has
consciously established himself as the self playing a part in the world,
but according to the opinion of his sane fellows he is much in error as
to what that part is. Strictly speaking, there is no illusion of
self-consciousness, except under the impossible supposition that a being
not a real self or psychic individual should have self-sense; but the
very act of self-cognizance implies reality of self-hood. It is plain
that even the insane man who regards _himself_ as tree or stone, has,
however, the act of self-regard, is really self-conscious. Strictly
speaking, we cannot identify or recognise self, for sense of self is
necessary in any recognition to make it such, a self-consciousness is a
fundamental _prius_. You recognise a tree, a house, but you do not
recognise yourself except as yourself is mere object related to you, to
your experience. Self-identification means only objective act, and is
not, then, the same as self-consciousness, though based upon it.

I have endeavoured to make observations of myself in moments of awaking
from sleep or going to sleep, to find whether subjective reference and
objective apprehension are mingled co-ordinately in consciousness from
the beginning, whether the self-sense reaches through both the
perceptive life and the sensation life. Drowsing in bed I sometimes have
a feeling of bare pleasure as the first stage in a pleasant awakening.
There is here no sensing, no localizing, no awareness of body or of
anything, no self-consciousness. This mere undifferentiated pleasure,
interrupted by “cat-naps,” may often recur. Lolling half-awake every one
has frequently experienced these feelings of pure pleasure, unsensed and
unlocalized, and wholly unobjectivised, the barest and simplest
consciousness, the very first stage in awaking. In this very lowest
_status_ in which I can ever catch my consciousness I have the pleasure
from the warmth and softness of the bed without having to feel warm or
sensing the soft. It is a distinct step to even feeling warm; moreover,
in extreme drowsiness it is an effortful step, an active sensing, an
objectifying self-activity, and hence a real self-consciousness, implied
in the sensing act. To _feel_ warm, to sense in this mode, is primarily