Philosophical Review

Modern Psychology and Theories of Knowledge Author(s): J. E. Creighton Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Mar., 1894), pp. 196-200 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2176042 . Accessed: 09/07/2013 13:00
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[VOL. III.

asked, how a 'but-feeling' can be one of content, I would reply: by association. Professor James has left entirely out of account in his discussion the very important process which we may call 'reproducWe sense two impressions as different in tion of the general.' quality or intensity, before we are able to definitise that difference; we find two pressure-points to be two, before we can say in what direction the straight line connecting them would lie. So the 'but' impression calls up a general trend or attitude of consciousness, before the concrete objection, which it introduces, is urged: and this general conscious attitude is the sol-disact 'feeling of relation.'' I do not think that more words will make the matter clearer. Professor James' schematic neurology tells for my position as much as or even more than it does for his own; and what he has said above of the 'feeling of relation' applies, with but slight change, to the 'feeling of tendency.' 2 One has no wish to blink facts; but neither does one desire to introduce the 'judgments' and 'relations' of E. B. TITCHENER. Logic into Psychology.

MODERN

PSYCHOLOGY

AND

THEORIES

OF KNOWLEDGE.

The above analysis - with which I fully agree - seems to me to deal with a particular example of a confusion which still very generally exists between the standpoint of psychology and that of This confusion is one for which language logic or epistemology. is mainly responsible, and to which it largely contributes. For not only is the term ' idea' ambiguous, but the other synonyms in current use, ' mental life,' ' states of consciousness,' ' facts of experience,' etc., are sometimes used to denote the mental processes as existing, and at another time for the ideas as significant.8 But, thanks
1 This attitude, -plus, again, perhaps, the late-formed idea of the relation, in the sense previously employed. 2 J am not at all sure that Professor James is not, throughout, the victim of his terminology. The phrases ' feeling of relation,' 'but' and ' if' feelings, are terribly ambiguous; and may well lead to vacillation between the psychological or logical aspects of the processes considered. But, though I may be fighting the air, as regards the author's meaning in the Princicples, the position attacked in the text is distinctly defended in the review of Dr. Schrader's Die bewzssteBeziehung already referred to. -Of course, I recognize that the phrase ' content-feeling' is in itself as 'logical,' and as much the result of abstraction, as the phrase 'feeling of relation.' 8 I quite agree with Professor A. Seth's suggestion in Mind, No. 9, that it would be an advantage to use the word ' idea' exclusively for the meaning and employ some other expression to denote the " Heraclitean flux of mental events."

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mainly to the influence of Kant and the English neo-Kantians, this confusion occurs less often than formerly in logical and epistemological writings. But many psychologists - and most of all those whom we regard as the leaders of the 'new psychology' in to me to ignore the distinction between logic and America -seem psychology entirely. Professor Ladd, in his address as President of the American Psychological Association, seems to make psychol"It is not," ogy equivalent to the sum total of mental sciences. he says, " in the last supreme and most difficult effort some account simply of the intensity and content and time-rate of sensations which psychological science has to render: it is rather of the faiths and fears and opinions and knowledges of mankind about things." 1 Professor James's psychology is equally frank in identifying thought as ' significant,' with the mental processes as existing. "The first fact," he tells us, "for us, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on." 2 Furthermore, we are informed that the psychologist must necessarily become an 'Erkenntnisstheoretiker.' "The knowledge he criticises is the knowledge of particular men about the particular things that surround them. This he may, upon occasion, in the light of his own unquestionable knowledge, pronounce true or false, and trace the reasons by which it has become one or the other." 3 Another evidence of this identification is the constant use of Thought and Feeling as equivalent.4 Now this fusion of epistemology and psychology is both the strength and the weakness of one of the most important contentions "One of the two epoch-making of Professor James's psychology. Professor features of that work," Gordy tells us, "is its contention at that all our so-called ideas any one moment form one individual all of the work in question will be And readers mental state." the ready to acknowledge important service which it has rendered attack upon the 'atomistic' position of its to sound psychology by and the Associationists; by its insistence upon the continuous nature of the complex fusion, in which psychical processes consist. But - so at least it seems to me - in his zeal against the Associationists, Professor James confuses the continuous nature of the concretely existing conscious processes with the functional unity This confusion, as Professor Ladd has already of knowledge.
Psych. Rev., Vol. I, p. i8. of Psychology, Vol. I, p. 3 Ibid. p. 184. 4 Ibid. p. i86 etjassim.
2 Principles 6 PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW, 1 224.

Vol. I, p. 299.

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hinted,1 was the almost necessary result of his employment of the perword ' Thought' to denote the series of existing processes -or, haps one might say, of his failure to distinguish between ' existence' and ' significance.' That it is the logical unity of thought which Professor James often has in mind, is obvious from many passages of the chapter on "The Stream of Thought." His very figure of a stream is apt to be misleading. Consciousness is represented as a stream with substantive parts between (and therefore uniting) which there extend transitive portions or flights or feelings of relation. Now this may be a convenient form under which to describe the continuous nature of the mental processes; but these so-called 'feelings of relation' only differ from other ' feelings ' by their temporal quality. It must not therefore be supposed that merely as psychological existences they already bind the whole process into a unity. The term ' unity' cannot be used in any intelligible sense of the mental process as existing. But it will be still more evident that it is the functional unity of judgment of which Professor James is thinking, if we turn to the pages on which he specifically contends for the one individual state of consciousness.2 Taking such examples as, "The pack of cards is on the table," " I am the same that I was yesterday," he shows, as modern logicians have shown, that in the thought we have not a combination of several ideas, but that judgment as such is are excellent from one throughout. But in these remarks -which James has completely lost sight a logical point of view -Professor of the existing processes which are usually, at least, supposed to be the data of psychology. ideas as But, it may be urged, are not our logical ideas -our significant - themselves facts of consciousness, and do they not therefore as such form part of the data of psychology? I can here only assert that ideas, as elements of knowledge, are not existences at all, not phenomena in any sense of the word. The grounds for this assertion are perhaps most cogently given in the introductory chapters of Bradley's -Logic. These universals of knowledge have always indeed a psychological substrate, i.e., they are ideated or imaged in some particular way in the series of mental There are, indeed, many points regarding the mutual existences. relations of these two aspects about which we need to be informed; but the distinction itself must never be lost sight of. If psychology
1 PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW, Vol. I, p. 42. 2 Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, p. 278 ff.

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No.

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is not to be confused with epistemology, it must deal with cognitive states in the way in which it deals with affective or volitional states, i.e., it must content itself with the description and classification of psychical processes as existing. " Ideas . . . as mere fact sequences cease to be considered cognitive at all. We work, as in science, with the category of cause and effect, investigating the causes which have produced these facts, and the further fact-combinations to which they in turn give rise. This is the province of psychology."I And it is also necessary to remember that though the psychological processes are continuous, yet they do not constitute a unity for Knowledge. For the latter always demands some universal objective factor, while the concrete processes are only subjective fleeting particulars. They are, just as much as the atomistic impressions and ideas of Hume and the Associationists, as good as nothing for Knowledge. Notwithstanding Professor James's polemic against the Transcendentalists, then, the problem of knowledge still remains. Psychology indeed exhibits to us the continuity of mental processes, but there is still a gulf fixed between these taken as existing continuously, and the unity of knowledge. No matter what new facts psychology may reveal regarding the nature of the concrete mental processes, we shall fall into error if we forget for a moment that such facts do not form part of a theory of knowledge. We have an example of this in Professor James Seth's article, "The Truth of Empiricism," which appeared in the September number of this REVIEW. The author in that paper undertakes to show that Kant attempted a wholly gratuitous task -to relate what was already given as related. He rests his contention (i) upon Dr. Stirling's criticism of Kant's doctrine of Causality,2 and (2) upon the doctrine of the unity of the conscious life, which, he informs us, is fast becoming a commonplace of the new psychology. With the first of these positions I am not here directly concerned. But, in view of the frequent reference to those articles which has lately been made, I should like to remark in passing, that Dr. Stirling's criticism is not wholly free from the confusion with which I have been charging certain psychologists; and that it seems to me wholly ineffective, if it is to be taken as anything more than a criticism of Kant's unfortunate method of exposition. But let us look a little more closely at the second argument. Professor Seth writes: "Its representatives [i.e., of the new psychology] are
1
2

Professor A. Seth, Mind, No. 9. Mind, IX, pp. 531-541; X, pp. 45-72.

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never tired of insisting that the mental life is characterized, from first to last, by unity and connection, that it is never quite ' chaotic ' or entirely 'raw,' never a 'mere manifold' of 'simple ideas,' but always a continuous ' stream of thought.' The distinction between the earlier and the later stages of knowledge is not, it is insisted, a distinction between absence and presence of connection, but between actual connection and insight into the connection."' The lesson from this fact, Professor Seth continues, is the lesson of realism. The subject does not determine the object, but is determined by it; and Kant's Copernicanchange of standpoint is no change after all. Now, I am convinced that this radical change of front in Professor Seth's epistemology, is due to the fact that he has been betrayed by these 'representatives of the new psychology' into their own confusion between the mental life as existing continuously, and the unity of Thought. If by the expressions, "the mental life," "stream of thought," in the above passages, the author intends to denote the psychical process, I would reply that, as existing, it is indeed continuous, but yet is entirely raw, unrelated, and without significance for knowledge. But if these expressions are taken to denote 'the facts of our knowledge,' 'the unity of our experience,' the answer is that this truth is much older than 'the new psychology,' and is the very fact from which Kant and the Transcendentalists set out. I am here, however, neither defending Kant's way of stating his problemnor his solution of it. Indeed, the language of the Kritik is largely responsible for the view that I am combating- since it gives the impressionthat it is the sensations as actual existences which are held together and related by the activity of thought, and that the result of this concrete synthesis is Knowledge. No one is more fully aware than Professor Seth that a combination of particularswill never give us knowledge; but he seems for the moment to have supposed that the continuous nature of the psychological process constitutes it already a universal, and that its relations can at once be 'read off' or 'recognized.' But whether the mental phenomena with which psychology deals are discrete or continuous, they must always remain for Knowledge
unrelated particulars.
1 PHILOSOPHICAL

J. E. CREIGHTON.
REvIEw, Vol. II, p. 550.

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