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

case may be. Without the bodily

states following on the perception, the latter would be purely

cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional

warmth.”

 

Round this hypothesis a very voluminous literature has grown up.

The history of its victory over earlier criticism, and its

difficulties with the modern experimental work of Sherrington and

Cannon, is well told by James R. Angell in an article called “A

Reconsideration of James’s Theory of Emotion in the Light of

Recent Criticisms.”* In this article Angell defends James’s

theory and to me—though I speak with diffidence on a question as

to which I have little competence—it appears that his defence is

on the whole successful.

 

* “Psychological Review,” 1916.

 

Sherrington, by experiments on dogs, showed that many of the

usual marks of emotion were present in their behaviour even when,

by severing the spinal cord in the lower cervical region, the

viscera were cut off from all communication with the brain,

except that existing through certain cranial nerves. He mentions

the various signs which “contributed to indicate the existence of

an emotion as lively as the animal had ever shown us before the

spinal operation had been made.”* He infers that the

physiological condition of the viscera cannot be the cause of the

emotion displayed under such circumstances, and concludes: “We

are forced back toward the likelihood that the visceral

expression of emotion is SECONDARY to the cerebral action

occurring with the psychical state…. We may with James accept

visceral and organic sensations and the memories and associations

of them as contributory to primitive emotion, but we must regard

them as re-enforcing rather than as initiating the psychosis.”*

 

* Quoted by Angell, loc. cit.

 

Angell suggests that the display of emotion in such cases may be

due to past experience, generating habits which would require

only the stimulation of cerebral reflex arcs. Rage and some forms

of fear, however, may, he thinks, gain expression without the

brain. Rage and fear have been especially studied by Cannon,

whose work is of the greatest importance. His results are given

in his book, “Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage” (D.

Appleton and Co., 1916).

 

The most interesting part of Cannon’s book consists in the

investigation of the effects produced by secretion of adrenin.

Adrenin is a substance secreted into the blood by the adrenal

glands. These are among the ductless glands, the functions of

which, both in physiology and in connection with the emotions,

have only come to be known during recent years. Cannon found that

pain, fear and rage occurred in circumstances which affected the

supply of adrenin, and that an artificial injection of adrenin

could, for example, produce all the symptoms of fear. He studied

the effects of adrenin on various parts of the body; he found

that it causes the pupils to dilate, hairs to stand erect, blood

vessels to be constricted, and so on. These effects were still

produced if the parts in question were removed from the body and

kept alive artificially.*

 

* Cannon’s work is not unconnected with that of Mosso, who

maintains, as the result of much experimental work, that “the

seat of the emotions lies in the sympathetic nervous system.” An

account of the work of both these men will be found in Goddard’s

“Psychology of the Normal and Sub-normal” (Kegan Paul, 1919),

chap. vii and Appendix.

 

Cannon’s chief argument against James is, if I understand him

rightly, that similar affections of the viscera may accompany

dissimilar emotions, especially fear and rage. Various different

emotions make us cry, and therefore it cannot be true to say, as

James does, that we “feel sorry because we cry,” since sometimes

we cry when we feel glad. This argument, however, is by no means

conclusive against James, because it cannot be shown that there

are no visceral differences for different emotions, and indeed it

is unlikely that this is the case.

 

As Angell says (loc. cit.): “Fear and joy may both cause cardiac

palpitation, but in one case we find high tonus of the skeletal

muscles, in the other case relaxation and the general sense of

weakness.”

 

Angell’s conclusion, after discussing the experiments of

Sherrington and Cannon, is: “I would therefore submit that, so

far as concerns the critical suggestions by these two

psychologists, James’s essential contentions are not materially

affected.” If it were necessary for me to take sides on this

question, I should agree with this conclusion; but I think my

thesis as to the analysis of emotion can be maintained without

coming to. a probably premature conclusion upon the doubtful

parts of the physiological problem.

 

According to our definitions, if James is right, an emotion may

be regarded as involving a confused perception of the viscera

concerned in its causation, while if Cannon and Sherrington are

right, an emotion involves a confused perception of its external

stimulus. This follows from what was said in Lecture VII. We

there defined a perception as an appearance, however irregular,

of one or more objects external to the brain. And in order to be

an appearance of one or more objects, it is only necessary that

the occurrence in question should be connected with them by a

continuous chain, and should vary when they are varied

sufficiently. Thus the question whether a mental occurrence can

be called a perception turns upon the question whether anything

can be inferred from it as to its causes outside the brain: if

such inference is possible, the occurrence in question will come

within our definition of a perception. And in that case,

according to the definition in Lecture VIII, its non-mnemic

elements will be sensations. Accordingly, whether emotions are

caused by changes in the viscera or by sensible objects, they

contain elements which are sensations according to our

definition.

 

An emotion in its entirety is, of course, something much more

complex than a perception. An emotion is essentially a process,

and it will be only what one may call a cross-section of the

emotion that will be a perception, of a bodily condition

according to James, or (in certain cases) of an external object

according to his opponents. An emotion in its entirety contains

dynamic elements, such as motor impulses, desires, pleasures and

pains. Desires and pleasures and pains, according to the theory

adopted in Lecture III, are characteristics of processes, not

separate ingredients. An emotion—rage, for example—will be a

certain kind of process, consisting of perceptions and (in

general) bodily movements. The desires and pleasures and pains

involved are properties of this process, not separate items in

the stuff of which the emotion is composed. The dynamic elements

in an emotion, if we are right in our analysis, contain, from our

point of view, no ingredients beyond those contained in the

processes considered in Lecture III. The ingredients of an

emotion are only sensations and images and bodily movements

succeeding each other according to a certain pattern. With this

conclusion we may leave the emotions and pass to the

consideration of the will.

 

The first thing to be defined when we are dealing with Will is a

VOLUNTARY MOVEMENT. We have already defined vital movements, and

we have maintained that, from a behaviourist standpoint, it is

impossible to distinguish which among such movements are reflex

and which voluntary. Nevertheless, there certainly is a

distinction. When we decide in the morning that it is time to get

up, our consequent movement is voluntary. The beating of the

heart, on the other hand, is involuntary: we can neither cause it

nor prevent it by any decision of our own, except indirectly, as

e.g. by drugs. Breathing is intermediate between the two: we

normally breathe without the help of the will, but we can alter

or stop our breathing if we choose.

 

James (“Psychology,” chap. xxvi) maintains that the only

distinctive characteristic of a voluntary act is that it involves

an idea of the movement to be performed, made up of memory-images

of the kinaesthetic sensations which we had when the same

movement occurred on some former occasion. He points out that, on

this view, no movement can be made voluntarily unless it has

previously occurred involuntarily.*

 

* “Psychology,” Vol. ii, pp. 492-3.

 

I see no reason to doubt the correctness of this view. We shall

say, then, that movements which are accompanied by kinaesthetic

sensations tend to be caused by the images of those sensations,

and when so caused are called VOLUNTARY.

 

Volition, in the emphatic sense, involves something more than

voluntary movement. The sort of case I am thinking of is decision

after deliberation. Voluntary movements are a part of this, but

not the whole. There is, in addition to them, a judgment: “This

is what I shall do”; there is also a sensation of tension during

doubt, followed by a different sensation at the moment of

deciding. I see no reason whatever to suppose that there is any

specifically new ingredient; sensations and images, with their

relations and causal laws, yield all that seems to be wanted for

the analysis of the will, together with the fact that

kinaesthetic images tend to cause the movements with which they

are connected. Conflict of desires is of course essential in the

causation of the emphatic kind of will: there will be for a time

kinaesthetic images of incompatible movements, followed by the

exclusive image of the movement which is said to be willed. Thus

will seems to add no new irreducible ingredient to the analysis

of the mind.

 

LECTURE XV. CHARACTERISTICS OF MENTAL PHENOMENA

 

At the end of our journey it is time to return to the question

from which we set out, namely: What is it that characterizes mind

as opposed to matter? Or, to state the same question in other

terms: How is psychology to be distinguished from physics? The

answer provisionally suggested at the outset of our inquiry was

that psychology and physics are distinguished by the nature of

their causal laws, not by their subject matter. At the same time

we held that there is a certain subject matter, namely images, to

which only psychological causal laws are applicable; this subject

matter, therefore, we assigned exclusively to psychology. But we

found no way of defining images except through their causation;

in their intrinsic character they appeared to have no universal

mark by which they could be distinguished from sensations.

 

In this last lecture I propose to pass in review various

suggested methods of distinguishing mind from matter. I shall

then briefly sketch the nature of that fundamental science which

I believe to be the true metaphysic, in which mind and matter

alike are seen to be constructed out of a neutral stuff, whose

causal laws have no such duality as that of psychology, but form

the basis upon which both physics and psychology are built.

 

In search for the definition of “mental phenomena,” let us begin

with “consciousness,” which is often thought to be the essence of

mind. In the first lecture I gave various arguments against the

view that consciousness is fundamental, but I did not attempt to

say what consciousness is. We must find a definition of it, if we

are to feel secure in deciding that it is not fundamental. It is

for the sake of the proof that it is not fundamental that we must

now endeavour to decide what it is.

 

“Consciousness,” by those who regard it as fundamental, is taken

to be a character diffused throughout our mental life, distinct

from sensations and images, memories, beliefs and desires, but

present in all of them.* Dr. Henry Head, in an article which I

quoted in Lecture III, distinguishing sensations from purely

physiological occurrences, says: “Sensation, in the strict sense

of the term, demands the existence of consciousness.” This

statement, at first sight, is one to which we feel inclined to

assent, but I