The Analysis of Mind, Bertrand Russell [best desktop ebook reader .txt] 📗

the piece of matter

concerned.

 

LECTURE VI. INTROSPECTION

 

One of the main purposes of these lectures is to give grounds for

the belief that the distinction between mind and matter is not so

fundamental as is commonly supposed. In the preceding lecture I

dealt in outline with the physical side of this problem. I

attempted to show that what we call a material object is not

itself a substance, but is a system of particulars analogous in

their nature to sensations, and in fact often including actual

sensations among their number. In this way the stuff of which

physical objects are composed is brought into relation with the

stuff of which part, at least, of our mental life is composed.

 

There is, however, a converse task which is equally necessary for

our thesis, and that is, to show that the stuff of our mental

life is devoid of many qualities which it is commonly supposed to

have, and is not possessed of any attributes which make it

incapable of forming part of the world of matter. In the present

lecture I shall begin the arguments for this view.

 

Corresponding to the supposed duality of matter and mind, there

are, in orthodox psychology, two ways of knowing what exists. One

of these, the way of sensation and external perception, is

supposed to furnish data for our knowledge of matter, the other,

called “introspection,” is supposed to furnish data for knowledge

of our mental processes. To common sense, this distinction seems

clear and easy. When you see a friend coming along the street,

you acquire knowledge of an external, physical fact; when you

realize that you are glad to meet him, you acquire knowledge of a

mental fact. Your dreams and memories and thoughts, of which you

are often conscious, are mental facts, and the process by which

you become aware of them SEEMS to be different from sensation.

Kant calls it the “inner sense”; sometimes it is spoken of as

“consciousness of self”; but its commonest name in modern English

psychology is “introspection.” It is this supposed method of

acquiring knowledge of our mental processes that I wish to

analyse and examine in this lecture.

 

I will state at the outset the view which I shall aim at

establishing. I believe that the stuff of our mental life, as

opposed to its relations and structure, consists wholly of

sensations and images. Sensations are connected with matter in

the way that I tried to explain in Lecture V, i.e. each is a

member of a system which is a certain physical object. Images,

though they USUALLY have certain characteristics, especially lack

of vividness, that distinguish them from sensations, are not

INVARIABLY so distinguished, and cannot therefore be defined by

these characteristics. Images, as opposed to sensations, can only

be defined by their different causation: they are caused by

association with a sensation, not by a stimulus external to the

nervous system—or perhaps one should say external to the brain,

where the higher animals are concerned. The occurrence of a

sensation or image does not in itself constitute knowledge but

any sensation or image may come to be known if the conditions are

suitable. When a sensation—like the hearing of a clap of

thunder—is normally correlated with closely similar sensations

in our neighbours, we regard it as giving knowledge of the

external world, since we regard the whole set of similar

sensations as due to a common external cause. But images and

bodily sensations are not so correlated. Bodily sensations can be

brought into a correlation by physiology, and thus take their

place ultimately among sources of knowledge of the physical

world. But images cannot be made to fit in with the simultaneous

sensations and images of others. Apart from their hypothetical

causes in the brain, they have a causal connection with physical

objects, through the fact that they are copies of past

sensations; but the physical objects with which they are thus

connected are in the past, not in the present. These images

remain private in a sense in which sensations are not. A

sensation SEEMS to give us knowledge of a present physical

object, while an image does not, except when it amounts to a

hallucination, and in this case the seeming is deceptive. Thus

the whole context of the two occurrences is different. But in

themselves they do not differ profoundly, and there is no reason

to invoke two different ways of knowing for the one and for the

other. Consequently introspection as a separate kind of knowledge

disappears.

 

The criticism of introspection has been in the main the work of

American psychologists. I will begin by summarizing an article

which seems to me to afford a good specimen of their arguments,

namely, “The Case against Introspection,” by Knight Dunlap

(“Psychological Review,” vol xix, No. 5, pp. 404-413, September,

1912). After a few historical quotations, he comes to two modern

defenders of introspection, Stout and James. He quotes from Stout

such statements as the following: “Psychical states as such

become objects only when we attend to them in an introspective

way. Otherwise they are not themselves objects, but only

constituents of the process by which objects are recognized”

(“Manual,” 2nd edition, p. 134. The word “recognized” in Dunlap’s

quotation should be “cognized.”) “The object itself can never be

identified with the present modification of the individual’s

consciousness by which it is cognized” (ib. p. 60). This is to be

true even when we are thinking about modifications of our own

consciousness; such modifications are to be always at least

partially distinct from the conscious experience in which we

think of them.

 

At this point I wish to interrupt the account of Knight Dunlap’s

article in order to make some observations on my own account with

reference to the above quotations from Stout. In the first place,

the conception of “psychical states” seems to me one which

demands analysis of a somewhat destructive character. This

analysis I shall give in later lectures as regards cognition; I

have already given it as regards desire. In the second place, the

conception of “objects” depends upon a certain view as to

cognition which I believe to be wholly mistaken, namely, the view

which I discussed in my first lecture in connection with

Brentano. In this view a single cognitive occurrence contains

both content and object, the content being essentially mental,

while the object is physical except in introspection and abstract

thought. I have already criticized this view, and will not dwell

upon it now, beyond saying that “the process by which objects are

cognized” appears to be a very slippery phrase. When we “see a

table,” as common sense would say, the table as a physical object

is not the “object” (in the psychological sense) of our

perception. Our perception is made up of sensations, images and

beliefs, but the supposed “object” is something inferential,

externally related, not logically bound up with what is occurring

in us. This question of the nature of the object also affects the

view we take of self-consciousness. Obviously, a “conscious

experience” is different from a physical object; therefore it is

natural to assume that a thought or perception whose object is a

conscious experience must be different from a thought or

perception whose object is a physical object. But if the relation

to the object is inferential and external, as I maintain, the

difference between two thoughts may bear very little relation to

the difference between their objects. And to speak of “the

present modification of the individual’s consciousness by which

an object is cognized” is to suggest that the cognition of

objects is a far more direct process, far more intimately bound

up with the objects, than I believe it to be. All these points

will be amplified when we come to the analysis of knowledge, but

it is necessary briefly to state them now in order to suggest the

atmosphere in which our analysis of “introspection” is to be

carried on.

 

Another point in which Stout’s remarks seem to me to suggest what

I regard as mistakes is his use of “consciousness.” There is a

view which is prevalent among psychologists, to the effect that

one can speak of “a conscious experience” in a curious dual

sense, meaning, on the one hand, an experience which is conscious

of something, and, on the other hand, an experience which has

some intrinsic nature characteristic of what is called

“consciousness.” That is to say, a “conscious experience” is

characterized on the one hand by relation to its object and on

the other hand by being composed of a certain peculiar stuff, the

stuff of “consciousness.” And in many authors there is yet a

third confusion: a “conscious experience,” in this third sense,

is an experience of which we are conscious. All these, it seems

to me, need to be clearly separated. To say that one occurrence

is “conscious” of another is, to my mind, to assert an external

and rather remote relation between them. I might illustrate it by

the relation of uncle and nephew a man becomes an uncle through

no effort of his own, merely through an occurrence elsewhere.

Similarly, when you are said to be “conscious” of a table, the

question whether this is really the case cannot be decided by

examining only your state of mind: it is necessary also to

ascertain whether your sensation is having those correlates which

past experience causes you to assume, or whether the table

happens, in this case, to be a mirage. And, as I explained in my

first lecture, I do not believe that there is any “stuff” of

consciousness, so that there is no intrinsic character by which a

“conscious” experience could be distinguished from any other.

 

After these preliminaries, we can return to Knight Dunlap’s

article. His criticism of Stout turns on the difficulty of giving

any empirical meaning to such notions as the “mind” or the

“subject”; he quotes from Stout the sentence: “The most important

drawback is that the mind, in watching its own workings, must

necessarily have its attention divided between two objects,” and

he concludes: “Without question, Stout is bringing in here

illicitly the concept of a single observer, and his introspection

does not provide for the observation of this observer; for the

process observed and the observer are distinct” (p. 407). The

objections to any theory which brings in the single observer were

considered in Lecture I, and were acknowledged to be cogent. In

so far, therefore, as Stout’s theory of introspection rests upon

this assumption, we are compelled to reject it. But it is

perfectly possible to believe in introspection without supposing

that there is a single observer.

 

William James’s theory of introspection, which Dunlap next

examines, does not assume a single observer. It changed after the

publication of his “Psychology,” in consequence of his abandoning

the dualism of thought and things. Dunlap summarizes his theory

as follows:

 

“The essential points in James’s scheme of consciousness are

SUBJECT, OBJECT,and a KNOWING of the object by the subject. The

difference between James’s scheme and other schemes involving the

same terms is that James considers subject and object to be the

same thing, but at different times In order to satisfy this

requirement James supposes a realm of existence which he at first

called ‘states of consciousness’ or ‘thoughts,’ and later, ‘pure

experience,’ the latter term including both the ‘thoughts’ and

the ‘knowing.’ This scheme, with all its magnificent

artificiality, James held on to until the end, simply dropping

the term consciousness and the dualism between the thought and an

external reality”(p. 409).

 

He adds: “All that James’s system really amounts to is the

acknowledgment that a succession of things are known, and that

they are known by something. This is all any one can claim,

except for the fact that the things are known together, and that

the