XTbe Tllntversft^ of Gbicago 
 
 FOIWDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 A DISSERTATION 
 
 SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS 
 
 AND LITERATURE, IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE 
 
 OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 (department of philosophy) 
 
 BY 
 
 KATE GORDON 
 
 CHICAGO 
 1903 
 

 EDUC. 
 
 PSYCH. 
 
 LIBRARr 
 
 PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PACK 
 
 Introduction -----------.-5 
 
 The Psychological Interpretation of Value ------ 32 
 
 I, Meaning from the Point of View of Activity - - - - - 39 
 
 11. Meaning in Terms of Discrimination ------ 49 
 
 III. Meaning as Developed in Representation 66 
 
 IV. Meaning under the Experimental Method ----- 74 
 
 130990 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 A SCIENTIFIC statement is the translation of current general no- 
 tions about a subject-matter into the language and conceptions char- 
 acteristic of the science in question. What, then, is the current 
 general notion of meaning? The group of facts which, as a psycho- 
 logical appearance, finds its most apt designation in the subjective 
 category meaning we recognize as objective values under the diverse 
 forms of Worth in economics, the Good in ethics, in logic the True, 
 and in aesthetics the Beautiful. We shall find that only the normative 
 or projective disciplines — those which reckon specifically with 
 personality as a legitimate control — have contributed any very 
 considerable doctrine on value. In view of these observations our 
 first question is : What is the common non-psychological conception 
 of value which such sciences unite to afford?^ 
 
 Economic value. — Value is defined by A. T. Hadley as "An 
 estimate of what a price ought to be. The word value is used in a 
 number of different meanings, but this idea of a permanent standard 
 or cause of price, as distinguished from a temporary or accidental 
 phenomenon, lies at the basis of them all." ^ Economic theories of 
 value may be classed into two chief divisions, represented respec- 
 tively by the English and the Austrians. The early English school, 
 as developed by Smith and Ricardo, has become identified, whether 
 justifiably or not, with the view which lays greatest emphasis upon 
 the analysis of supply or the cost of production as the determinant 
 of value ; whereas the Austrian writers, together with Jevons, have 
 paid special attention to the influence upon value of utility. This 
 feeling of the former school for the importance of cost as a standard 
 may be followed in a few brief citations. 
 
 Adam Smith made a distinction of value in use (utility) from 
 
 '^In the following brief discussions of the economic, the aesthetic, the logical, 
 the ethical, and the metaphysical views of value, there is, of course, no attempt 
 at an exhaustive criticism of all current view-points, but merely an outline, in 
 each case, of what seems to me an acceptable view-point. Neither is there any 
 extended list of references to other writers. Many eminent names, therefore, 
 have not been mentioned, for the reason that the citations are made with a view 
 rather to point the moral than to adorn the tale. 
 
 2 Baldwin's Philosophical Dictionary, on " Value." 
 
 5 
 
6 OAT THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 value in exchange, and maintained that only exchange value was 
 the proper subject of economic theory.^ The group of early econo- 
 mists which Smith represents pointed by a familiar illustration to 
 the fact that the " free gifts of nature " which have a great utility 
 can command nothing in exchange. Water, they said, has high 
 value in use, but it cannot be sold for a price ; because it is unlimited, 
 it has no value in exchange. Diamonds, on the other hand, have 
 no utility, but because of their scarcity they have a high power in 
 exchange. It was the external or objective limit which struck them 
 as the really coercive factor, and it is significant to recall that they 
 regarded it as an instance of divine goodness — and in no wise due 
 to the operation of previous human demand and effort — that the 
 greatest necessities of life should be the cheapest or the most easily 
 available ; it is through God's bounty that we are able to get bread 
 and water more cheaply than diamonds. John Stuart Mill formu- 
 lated his theory of value under a like inspiration. He posited 
 utility as one limit of value, but gave the most of his attention to a 
 discussion of the other limit which is imposed by the difficulty of 
 attainment of any good. Mill and his followers seem to have taken 
 it for granted that desire and utility are relatively simple, constant 
 factors, not in need of discussion. 
 
 Ricardo says : "If any one commodity could be found which 
 now and at all times required precisely the same quantity of labor 
 to produce it, that commodity would be of an unvarying value."* 
 Also : " Possessing utility commodities derive their exchange value 
 from two sources : from their scarcity, and from the quantity of 
 labor required to obtain them." ^ Thus Ricardo like Mill appears to 
 have taken utility as a factor whose law is self-evident, and to have 
 employed himself almost exclusively upon the elucidation of the 
 other determinant. It is to be remarked, however, that both Mill 
 and Ricardo, in bringing forward the element of labor as the expres- 
 sion of the limiting factor which regulates value, have taken a step 
 toward the translation of pure objective scarcity into terms of 
 subjective estimate, i. e., sacrifice or disutility of labor. The extreme 
 of the above view — championed by Karl Marx — states that the 
 natural value of things consists solely in the labor put upon them. 
 
 The correlative view brought forward by the Austrians may be 
 put as follows : The fundamental observation on value is that it 
 
 ^Wealth of Nations, Book I, chap. 4. 
 
 *' Political Economy, chap, i, sec. 11. ^Ibid., sec. 3. 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 is to be defined as the object of human desire, or as that which 
 "avails toward Hfe." From the outset there is a recognition that 
 the " emergence " of value is conditioned by the scarcity of goods 
 or by some obstacle to the satisfaction of want But in contrast 
 with the English writers, who would make value vary precisely 
 with the stringency of this limit, the Austrians maintain that the 
 strength of the organic craving is a more legitimate measure of 
 value. When, for illustration, the craving is strong, a slight stricture 
 is quickly felt and value appears ; but where the desire is slight, 
 there is no consciousness of value at all until supply is quite con- 
 siderably diminished. To quote from Smart: 
 
 Now if, in any class of goods, the supply is not sufficient to meet this 
 demand for satisfaction (either as regards the individual or the community), 
 some want goes unsatisfied; the painful feeling of emptiness points to some 
 good or other as the condition of a certain well-being; the relation of 
 dependence between person and thing is established, and value emerges. If, 
 on the other hand, the supply of any class of goods is so great that every 
 demand is met, and yet there is such a surplus that no ordinary waste will 
 cause scarcity, then no want goes unsatisfied, and value does not emerge. 
 .... In short, the center of value is within us.' 
 
 Again : 
 
 The value of a stock of similar goods is the value of the marginal good 
 multiplied by the number of goods in the stock;' 
 
 for: 
 
 When the quantity of any good produced is increased, the good is put to 
 lower levels of use; the last want supplied determines the last satisfaction; 
 and this last satisfaction determines the value of all the stock.* 
 
 To summarize: We must conclude with Marshall, concerning 
 the controversy whether " cost of production " or " utility " governs 
 value, that " we might as reasonably dispute whether it is the upper 
 or the under blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper." ® 
 The general formula of demand and supply is developed in more 
 detail by the theory of marginal utilities, and this, philosophically 
 expressed, means that certain objects are designed to meet the 
 demands of habit (/. e., they have utility), and that the interruption 
 or denial of a habit is the occasion of a conscious valuation of that 
 object; hence the ungratified want, which will of course be the 
 
 ^Introduction to Theory of Value, chap. 3, p. 16. 
 ''Ibid., chap. 5, p. 32. ^Ibid., p. 33. 
 
 ^Principles of Economics, Book V, chap. 3, par. 7. 
 
8 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 least important want, measures the degree of importance which we 
 attach to the object. When we say that supply has decreased or 
 demand has increased, we are also saying that ungratified want has 
 become more urgent. If we could fancy that there were just one 
 habit in the world, then the value of its object would be either 
 infinity or zero, according as the habit were checked or unchecked 
 but the existence of a plurality of habits and wants makes possible 
 the appearance of a " marginal " want, and the possibility of ascrib- 
 ing to goods various values according to the amount or number of 
 other goods which will be sacrificed for them. Value, then, is an 
 estimate, or equation. In the phrase of von Wieser, it is the 
 " calculation-form of utility." It is a ratio in which the denominator 
 is the area of gratified want and the numerator is the field of 
 ungratified desire. 
 
 Esthetic value must depend for its placing upon the definition of 
 beauty. Says Bosanquet: 
 
 Among the ancients the fundamental theory of the beautiful was con- 
 nected with the notions of rhythm, symmetry, harmony of parts; in short 
 with the general formula of unity in variety. Among the moderns we find 
 that more emphasis is laid on the idea of significance, expressiveness, the 
 utterance of all that life contains; in general, that is to say, on the con- 
 ception of the characteristic." 
 
 Spencer and Grant Allen agree substantially in the formula of the 
 latter which reads : 
 
 The aesthetically beautiful is that which affords the Maximum of Stimula- 
 tion with the Minimum of Fatigue or Waste, in processes not directly con- 
 nected with vital functions." 
 
 Santayana tells us that the science of beauty is concerned with per- 
 ception or susceptibility, but also with a critical attitude toward its 
 subject-matter; hence that aesthetics deals with the "sphere of 
 critical or appreciative perception." ^^ 
 
 Another definition of beauty suggests itself which offers some 
 promise as a harmonizing formula for several difficult facts. Ac- 
 cording to this definition, beauty is that which unexpectedly offers 
 a secondary or auxiliary stimulus to any act. In order to develop 
 this point of view, let us first see what the facts are which suggest 
 
 ^° History of Esthetic, chap, i, sec. 3. 
 '^^Physiological Esthetics, chap. 3, sec. 3. 
 ^-The Sense of Beauty, Part I, sec. i, p. 16. 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 it, and then try whether the saHent points in other aesthetic theories 
 may not be taken care of under this formula as well. 
 
 The dispute concerning the connection of beauty with utility 
 has reached the point where it would seem that only the unadvised 
 could venture to speak without the backing of extended research. 
 Nevertheless, the following points are once more presented : 
 
 1. Very many undeniably aesthetic experiences do serve utilitar- 
 ian purposes. Examples are the work-songs and battle-chants of 
 savage tribes, the part played by rhythm in facilitating work as 
 demonstrated in recent experimentation, and the moral discipline 
 and regeneration which are effected by some music. 
 
 2. Standards of beauty are changed both for the individual and 
 for the race in the working out of practical adjustments. Fechner^^ 
 points out, for example, the influence on taste of suggestion, asso- 
 ciation, racial experience, etc. 
 
 3. A close connection between the good, the true and the beautiful 
 is indicated in the characterization of the good as the bringing 
 together of the ideal and the real, the true as the correspondence of 
 the idea to its object, and of the beautiful as an absorption of the 
 subject in the object. Furthermore, in popular speech we tend to 
 call moral action and apt demonstration beautiful, as well as to say 
 that beauty is right and true in itself. 
 
 4. The " detachedness " or "disinterestedness" of aesthetic ap- 
 preciation is not peculiar to it. As Hirn^* suggests, there may be 
 an equally devoted self-surrender in the passion for athletic sports, 
 for games of chance, or for scientific research. In any of these cases 
 a person, losing sight of his original motive, may become so ab- 
 sorbed in the immediate process that what was before the means 
 becomes an end in itself. Disinterestedness is an attitude which is 
 not limited to one type, but which may be developed in connection 
 with any activity. 
 
 5. Finally, there is the general contention that intense gratifica- 
 tion of any sort must point to some preceding state of strife ; and 
 to this statement certain cases of aesthetic enjoyment offer an 
 apparent exception. How are we to explain the keen pleasure 
 derived from scenes and colors which we have made no effort to 
 see, and which are as much "given" as anything can be to our 
 consciousness ? 
 
 ^^Vorschule der Aesthetik, Vol. I, chap. 18. 
 
 ^*Origins of Art, p. 19 ; cf. also Groos. Die Spiele der Mencken, p. 508. 
 
ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 In view of the above facts and problems, the conclusion seems 
 forced upon us that the beautiful and the useful, although in no 
 sense identical, must yet be in some very close relationship. To 
 return to our previous formulation, then, the beautiful may be said 
 to be directed toward a utilitarian end, but not purposefully sought 
 as a means to that end. It is in the nature of a gratuitous con- 
 tribution, an unexpected, indirect assistance. It is a sudden acces- 
 sory in the resolution of a struggle. The beautiful differs from 
 the useful in that it is not the original or essential stimulus to a 
 reaction, but is secondary. It presupposes some practical — i. e,, 
 moral — crisis, in which the inadequacy of the stimulus is being 
 made up with effort. The assumption is that the object really could 
 be attained by the painful exertion, but that by an apparent accident 
 it is suddenly made easy of attainment. This sudden increment in 
 the stimulation, this access of fresh power, is what gives us that 
 sense of ease and mastery or poise which is so characteristic of 
 aesthetic enjoyment. 
 
 To put this in physiological terms, let us say that an impulse 
 a is moving in the direction of the object o, when it is checked by 
 
 impulse h. The current a, being 
 dammed up, will overflow into the 
 surrounding area, or at least back 
 up in its own channel, seeking for 
 another outlet; and if there has 
 been some past line of discharge 
 c into o, the impulse may suddenly 
 strike the old trail and be pre- 
 cipitated into 0. 
 
 Here I should say that the 
 facility of the adjustment would be 
 the criterion of an aesthetic situa- 
 tion : if the old habit were soon found — i. e., struck into by a short- 
 cut and followed down without resistance — the experience would 
 be aesthetic; but if there were a long delay, and the two opposing 
 lines of excitation were obliged to worry out a new path, then the 
 experience would be merely practical. The aesthetic consciousness 
 in the former case would depend for its intensity upon the number 
 and the depth of such by-paths. 
 
 In illustration of such aesthetic experience we may cite the 
 following: In the successful drama action becomes more con- 
 
INTRODUCTION II 
 
 densed toward the end of the play, and interest is keenest when an 
 unexpected denouement is brought out in a quick succession of 
 varied events. Again, in Hstening to the performance of a musical 
 composition the emotional reaction is usually greatest when one 
 suddenly finds himself caught up and swept along in the final move- 
 ment. If Livingstone, penetrating the African forests, had one 
 day come upon a smooth, broad highway, his first apprehension of 
 it would have been aesthetic. Alcoholic stimulation is probably at 
 first distinctly aesthetic ; but when its results are foreseen and used 
 for specific purposes, it becomes purely utilitarian. When the runner 
 first learns his form, he discovers within himself a host of unsus- 
 pected allies — the better adjusted tread, the lift in the chest and 
 arms, are a revelation to him ; then, as he swings down the track, 
 the consciousness of all of himself working together, which these 
 tributary forces give, is a consciousness of beauty, and his exultant 
 thrill is a pleasure which should be called aesthetic. To the person 
 whose daily routine does not involve physical exertion the gym- 
 nasium offers as many aesthetic possibilities as the art gallery does.^*^ 
 
 ^The formula given in the preceding paragraphs is, in some respects, very 
 like the theory of beauty put forward by Guyau ; in other respects it differs. 
 Guyau writes {Les problemes de I'esthetique contemporaine, chap. 6, p. 6i) : 
 "Pour nous, nous croyons que toute sensation agreable, quelle qu'elle soit, et 
 lorsqu'elle n'est pas par sa nature meme liee a des associations repugnantes, 
 peut revetir un caractere esthetique en acquerant un certain degre d'intensite, 
 de retentissement dans la conscience." And in chap. 6, pp. 72, 73 : "Si toute 
 sensation peut avoir un caractere esthetique, quand et comment acquiert-elle ce 
 caractere? — C'est la, nous I'avons deja dit, une simple affaire de degre, et il ne 
 faut pas demander des definitions du beau trop etroites, .... II faut dire aux 
 adorateurs du beau ce que Diderot disait aux religions exclusives : Elargissez 
 votre Dieu. 
 
 "Toute sensation, croyons-nous, passe ou peut passer par trois moments : 
 dans le premier I'etre sentant constate en lui-meme ce que nous appellerons avec 
 M. Spencer un choc leger ou violent ; il distingue plus ou moins vaguement 
 I'intensite et la qualite specifique de Timpression, mais rien de plus : . . . . Dans 
 le second moment la sensation se precise et prend, s'il y a lieu, un caractere 
 clairement douloureux ou agreable . . . . il survient un troisieme moment, 
 appele par I'ecole anglaise la diffusion nerveuse: la sensation s'elargissant comme 
 une onde, excite sympathetiquement tout le systeme nerveux, eveille par association 
 ou suggestion une foule de sentiments et de pensees complimentaires, en un mot 
 envahit la conscience entiere. A cet instant la sensation .... tend a devenir 
 esthetique ou antiesthetique. L'emotion esthetique nous semble ainsi consister 
 essentiellement dans un elargissement, dans une sorte de resonance de la sensation 
 a travers tout notre etre, surtout notre intelligence et notre volonte." 
 
 I should agree entirely that any sense department may furnish aesthetic 
 
12 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 One other class of cases needs special mention — the pleasure 
 we get from things seen or heard when our whole attitude is one of 
 dreamful ease and no special desire for anything can be discovered. 
 Such pleasure, I take it, is conditioned by the agreement of the 
 object with the observer's mood, the mood standing for a highly 
 generalized desire (or for the desire for a highly generalized object). 
 Suppose that what we desire is excitement of any sort at all — this 
 is a wish so general as to be no more than a mood — and we are 
 suddenly confronted with masses of light and of brilliant color, the 
 reaction would be tremendous simply because the experience would 
 give unexpected point and definition to what we had been feeling. 
 
 These, then, are the characteristics of aesthetic experience — 
 that it is unforeseen, secondary in its use, and that it is the re- 
 vival of old habits and hence of emotional complexes. Let us 
 see how they agree with certain accepted observations on the 
 appreciation of the beautiful. As Kant delivers, and many confirm, 
 a distinctive mark of aesthetic pleasure is its disinterestedness or 
 detachedness from utilitarian ends ; it is a thing apart and has an 
 intrinsic worth. The partial truth in this statement is adequately 
 recognized in the remark that aesthetic experience comes unlooked 
 for and unsought, and aside from the direct line of stimulation. The 
 aesthetic attitude, as contemplative or as presenting the absorption 
 of the subject in the object, may be expressed as the resolution of 
 any active striving; such absorption takes place at the end of any 
 adjustment and is the signal of its completion. The observation 
 that we do not desire to possess the thing which we admire may be 
 answered by saying that in the enjoyment of the object — i. e., in 
 the solution of our problem — we are already in full possession of it. 
 The definition of Grant Allen of the beautiful as that which affords 
 
 experience, and that the depth of aesthetic emotion is to be measured by the 
 amount of resonance or accompanying reverberation ; but I should still insist — as 
 Guyau does not — that these associations must come as unexpected stimuli. The 
 element of novelty seems to me essential : an aesthetic experience is necessarily 
 made up of familiar elements, but when the combination, too, becomes familiar, 
 the experience loses its aesthetic character. This point is expressed by Professor 
 Warner Fite in the terms of a theory of the relations of "Art, Industry and 
 Science" {Psychological Review, Vol, VIII, p. 143) : "So far as the element in 
 question is new, unexplored and uncontrolled, it is an object of esthetic apprecia- 
 tion and the demand for it is an esthetic want ; in proportion as it comes under 
 our control it becomes an organic need, an object of industrial activity and a fact 
 of science." 
 
INTRODUCTION 1 3 
 
 "the maximum of stimulation with the minimum of fatigue or 
 waste, etc., " is something similar to the formula of accessory 
 stimulation ; only it does not point out specifically how the increase 
 in stimulation may decrease the waste, nor does it express the 
 '* given" nature of beauty. 
 
 Santayana contrasts moral and aesthetic values in these words: 
 " One .factor of this distinction is that while aesthetic judgments are 
 mainly positive, that is, perceptions of good, moral judgments are 
 mainly and fundamentally negative, or perceptions of evil."^^ In 
 agreement with this is the remark made above, that the moral end 
 probably could have been reached independently of aesthetic aid, and 
 that such assistance was to be counted pure gain, and not merely the 
 eking out of a deficiency. 
 
 The appreciation of beauty represents unity in variety, if there 
 be some purpose as the unifying factor, which is attained with the 
 assistance of various collateral pathways, and it consists in the con- 
 sciousness of the characteristic or expression in that the original 
 instigation to action is a stimulus which stirs up a complex of old 
 habits or is a symbol which points to a rich emotional context. 
 Esthetic value is to be expressed in terms of emotional reference ; it 
 is a function of the number and intensity of these secondary excita- 
 tions. 
 
 The logical view. — Logical inquiry, which concerns itself with 
 descriptions and explanations of judgment, inference, or reason, 
 which seeks for its object certainty and truth, and which erects 
 systems of prescriptions wherewith to attain to a correspondence 
 between the real and the ideal, must formulate value within that 
 circle of categories. 
 
 Speaking generally, we may say that the function of judgment is 
 definition. In the syllogistic logic of Aristotle the act of judging 
 appears as the inclusion of an object within a class — an idea prob- 
 ably derived from the dictum of Socrates and of Plato that true 
 knowledge is knowledge through concepts or knowledge of uni- 
 versals, and an idea not foreign to Kant's definition of judgment as 
 "the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the uni- 
 versal." ^^ According to this conception we define an object by the 
 universals under which we range it. Modern logic, emphasizing the 
 inductive aspect of the inferential act, points out that the universal 
 is defined by the objects which are subsumed. Jevons, in perhaps 
 
 ^^The Sense of Beauty, Part I, sec. 3. ^"'Critique of Judgment, IV, 185. 
 
14 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 the most salient feature of his logic, expresses the act of judgment, 
 not as the subsumption of a thing under a class, but as the "sub- 
 stitution of similars." This conception, together with Boole's intro- 
 duction into modern logic of the quantified predicate, makes us 
 regard the reasoning process as a balancing of equivalents or a find- 
 ing of identities, and gives to every proposition something of the 
 character of an equation. Substitution suggests also the symbolic 
 function of the logical act. Keeping in mind Bradley's ^^ strictures 
 upon Jevons, that the equation, namely, is not merely an identity, 
 but also an implication of a difference, and that in a substitution the 
 substitute is not simply identical with the thing it displaces (else, 
 why the change?), we can see that in the balancing of equivalents 
 or the substituting of similars there is a real definition taking place. 
 For not only is an identity declared which subsumes the subject 
 under some class-concept, but the subject itself is a differentiated 
 particular which extends the realm of the predicated concept, so 
 that the two sides of the equation, or the subject and predicate, 
 mutually define one another. In naming definition, therefore, as the 
 characteristic function of judgment we take cognizance of the fact 
 that the subject of our judgment is being delimited, determined, or 
 defined by its predicates, not only in the sense that it is being in- 
 cluded in certain classes, but also in the sense that it is being 
 equated with the sum of its predicates. 
 
 The task of logic, then, is to investigate the conditions of defini- 
 tion or of precision. " The postulate of logic," says Ueberweg, is 
 " to state explicitly what is thought implicitly." ^® Now, according 
 to one point of view, such a statement will consist in the reduction 
 of phenomena, or the expression of experience in categories of 
 degree, quantity, space, time. Number is the criterion of exactitude, 
 and measurement the ideal explanation. Evidence of this fact is the 
 tendency of all scientific theory in the direction of mathematical 
 formulations ; witness the precision of physiological psychology in 
 seeking to localize mental functions ; the attempt of atomic theories 
 to translate all qualitative appearances into terms of quantity, i. e., 
 into spatial and temporal determinations ; the criticisms passed on 
 John Stuart Mill in ethical writings for his admission of different 
 kinds of pleasure into utilitarian theory; the tendency to express 
 our hopes and fears in the mathematical formulae of probability and 
 
 ^^Principles of Logic, Book II, chap. 4. 
 ^^System of Logic, Appendix A, p. 562. 
 
INTRODUCTION 1 5 
 
 chance — the amount that one will wager is frequently considered 
 the most accurate gauge of his frame of mind on a given point. 
 Things, indeed, are commensurable, or comparable in the strictest 
 sense, only when they have been reduced to a common denominator ; 
 i. e., when they are the same in kind and preserve only a purely 
 formal or numerical difference. Our goal is reached when we can 
 apply a given unit to every aspect of the whole, when we have 
 found the numerical relationship of the unit to the whole. The unit 
 is a symbol, and, whatever content we put into it, we still have a 
 determinate result; for the value of the whole is a function of 
 this primary or unitary value. 
 
 The whole point of any quantitative statement lies, of. course, 
 in its symbolic possibilities. As was hinted above, values and sym- 
 bols emerge simultaneously within the purpose of a facile manipula- 
 tion of materials. It is only when we wish to exchange or deal with 
 goods that we consciously evaluate them, and then we translate 
 them into their common denominator of money and credit symbols. 
 The emergence of value in correlation with the development of 
 symbols is the short cut whereby past experience is appropriated 
 for the guidance of future activity. The more abstracted the con- 
 cept — i. e., the lighter and less cumbrous the symbol — the better 
 will be our mental economy ; i. e,, the more rational and logical our 
 procedure. The nearer, therefore, that we approach to a numerical 
 statement of phenomena or to the "pure form of difference," the 
 closer we come to a perfectly free and universal substitutability of 
 similars. 
 
 According to the numerical formulation of value, interest must 
 become purely extrinsic and quantitative in character, value mean- 
 ing amount — the more the better. The most ultimate logical prob- 
 lem was phrased by the Greeks as the relation of the Many to the 
 One. As I conceive it, the " One " is the thing, fact, or subject to be 
 valuated, and the " Many " is the sum of the parts or determinations 
 of the fact which constitute its significance or meaning. Each one in 
 this many may be the central one which has value only as it implies 
 all the other ones, so that, while the thing valuated is one, the value 
 of it is always in numbers — in the many. Now, from such a view- 
 point as this, the value sometimes called intrinsic becomes a con- 
 sideration of mere prejudice, whim, or chance, and choice finds its 
 reason or ground wholly outside the object of choice. Thus, if the 
 necessity arises of choosing between two things which are exactly 
 
1 6 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 equal (a supposition which is possible only from this mathematical 
 standpoint), there being no ground for a real preference, we should 
 say that the outcome was blind or fortuitous. But we must remem- 
 ber that, although there may be no intrinsic worth in the one object 
 above the other, yet there is an intrinsic necessity in the situation 
 for a choice of some sort. Consciousness must be selective in order 
 to preserve its integrity; we must decide — must make or force a 
 choice for the sake of having any unity, and so any value at all. 
 Logically, then, the function of choice is not the selection of any 
 object by reason of its peculiar character, but it is rather the 
 actualizing of the relation of the many in one : choice serves to give 
 a locus for the one, or to evolve the relation of many in one out of 
 a situation not previously susceptible of numerical expression. 
 
 We may illustrate the point by showing the result of a change 
 in emphasis in such a sentence as this: "The snow is white." If 
 we regard the subject and predicate of any proposition as having 
 the relation of species and genus, then it is apparent that what 
 takes place in every act of predication is an analysis of the subject 
 and its classification under some more comprehensive category. 
 The subject is the substance of our thought ; it is the given matrix ; 
 and the predicate is a mode of conceiving that substance; it is a 
 conceptual phase of it, or a separation out of an element or attribute. 
 By a series of predications about an object we build up a meaning 
 for it, so that finally the unanalyzed lump called substance becomes 
 an articulated object stated in terms of its functions and attributes. 
 Let us first say, now, that " the snow is white/' Here the emphasis 
 is on the "white," which is the one attribute we are thinking about, 
 and the snow is conceived as the subject or substance of our judg- 
 ment, which embraces many other attributes. Suppose, however, 
 that we say : " The snow is white ; " we then regard the snow as 
 one, as a single thing among others which are white ; but the white 
 is now the virtual subject of our reflection; it is a class which in- 
 cludes many members. Thus, according to our choice or emphasis, 
 the snow may be considered as either the one or the many. 
 
 The subjective appreciation of logical validity we call conviction 
 or certainty, and the process of inference from this view-point is the 
 means whereby we assure ourselves of a proposed conclusion. It 
 has become common to believe that conclusions are reached, not by 
 two different modes of reasoning — the deductive and the inductive 
 
INTRODUCTION 1 7 
 
 — but by a single process within which we may distinguish two such 
 phases. No one could pretend that either the deductive or the 
 inductive syllogism is more than an artificial and schematic expres- 
 sion. In the deductive syllogism we have the major premise stand- 
 ing first, but in actual reasoning we never start in that way. We do 
 not burst forth suddenly with general propositions and then find 
 ourselves confronted with some novel conclusion. Our actual pro- 
 cedure is literally a logical inquiry; our first question is: "What 
 is that?" which is to ask: "Under which concept is this special 
 percept to be mustered ? " Our next question proposes an hypothesis : 
 " Can A be Cf" Can A be conceived of as C and substituted for it? 
 Thus the first step is to formulate some conclusion in the inter- 
 rogative. The final step is to say: "Yes, this is true, because so- 
 and-so." By virtue of some common or mediating term we bridge 
 over our doubt. The value of this logical conclusion and the mean- 
 ing of the subjective feeling of certainty rest upon the office of the 
 middle ierm — it mediates the conclusion. In the case of inductive 
 inference, on the other hand, we never start with a mere collection 
 of particular instances ; there is always something first to suggest 
 to us to get that special kind of particulars. These would not, in- 
 deed, be particulars at all unless we had some purpose in collecting 
 them, some tentative classification to guide our selection of material. 
 So that here again we begin with an inquiry whether such and such 
 a thing is true ; and our middle term or mediating concept this time 
 is constituted by the sum of all the evidences we can amass. The 
 ground of our inference is this array of instances. 
 
 Now, the sufficiency of any reason, or the adequacy of any ground 
 to give us certainty, is measured by the degree of inward satisfaction 
 which it occasions. As Sigwart has said : the criterion of objective 
 necessity is the inward feeling of certainty.^^ " Belief in the truth of 
 this feeling and in its trustworthiness is the last anchorage of all 
 certainty." The relation of this feeling of certainty as the criterion 
 of validity and the view which makes value rest in numbers is just 
 this ; the feeling is the cumulative effect of the many pieces of evi- 
 dence. In the deductive syllogism we may seem at first sight to be 
 basing our faith upon the force of a single reflection ; i. e., the office 
 of the middle term ; but we must remember that our trust in the con- 
 clusion rests really upon the sureness of our major and minor 
 
 premise, each of which must have been verified by many observations ^^,^- o * ^ -• 
 
 ^^Z \ 8 " " " y 
 "Logic, Introduction, p. 15. /^ or thf. 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 or 
 
1 8 OAT THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 in the past. Moreover, although we may assent to a conclusion by 
 reason of only one consideration, yet it is undeniable that, if we can 
 find other reasons for the conclusion, our certainty is thereby rein- 
 forced; and if the issue is vital, we are never loath to make assur- 
 ance double sure. With the inductive syllogism we have clearly a 
 case in which the safety of the conclusion rests in the amount of the 
 evidence. 
 
 We have said that the function of judgment is definition, explica- 
 tion, or the development of the relation of the many in one ; and, 
 further, that the subjective criterion of successful definition is cer- 
 tainty or conviction, and the conception which completes the har- 
 mony of these two is the objective necessity or truth of the judg- 
 ment — the correspondence in it of the ideal and the real. In answer 
 to the question as to how we know when we have a correspondence 
 of idea to fact, Ueberweg says^^ (in substance) that in "external 
 perception" we never can have absolute material truth, because we 
 can only compare our own conceptions with our own conceptions, 
 and never our conceptions of reality with reality itself; whereas 
 in " internal perception,'' or the perception of our own psychical 
 states, we may have absolute material truth, since we have the 
 reality of these perceptions within ourselves. This is a distinction, 
 however, which is hard to maintain; since in the comparison of 
 psychical states we either have two things in consciousness simul- 
 taneously, in which case there can be, properly speaking, no com- 
 parison, but only an immediate awareness of something which we 
 may later analyze into two things ; or else, if the two originals are 
 not present in the mind at the same time, one of them must appear 
 as the result (whether that be in the form of an image or not we 
 need not say) of past experience, the original of which is quite as 
 inaccessible as any fact of an external world. We shall, I think, 
 be doing justice to Ueberweg's conception of the remoteness of 
 external reality by saying that the "object" which we are trying to 
 arrive at never is given to reflection, but it is the very nature of 
 reflective thought that it is trying to reach the object. This deter- 
 mination of activity by a purpose is the construction of the object 
 or the defining of the ideal until it becomes the real. We know that 
 things are true because we make them true. It is still possible, of 
 course, in this functional view of the judgment to express the 
 
 '^System of Logic, par. 40, pp. 86, 87. 
 
INTRODUCTION 19 
 
 attainment of the object in equational form; i. e., the real = the 
 ideal. 
 
 Just here it seems not inappropriate to draw a line between the 
 mathematical and the properly logical statement of the nature of 
 judgment. In mathematics, for example, we may very well say 
 that the real is equal to the ideal, but for consciousness such a con- 
 ception would carry with it the necessity for the entire cessation 
 of thought. I would suggest as one criterion of difference between 
 logic and mathematics that the things which we may treat in mathe- 
 matics as equals must be conceived of in logic as merely equivalents. 
 In mathematics we may have, and frequently must have, perfect 
 qualitative identity with quantitative diversity; but in any science 
 which takes cognizance of the knowing subject we should have to 
 face the fact that a perfect qualitative identity in two modifications 
 of consciousness is a perfect fusion into but one modification. In 
 any activity whatsoever, when we use our symbols, use one thing 
 for another, we are using things which are " as good as " the others 
 for which they stand, have equal effect or valence — are equivalents, 
 but never equals. To illustrate the two standpoints we may take 
 the situation of seeing a dog run. Mathematically expressed: 
 "The dog is running;" or, "The dog z= one thing running." 
 There are the dog, the running, and the existence of the dog 
 running ; i. e., we have the existence of the situation expressed apart 
 from the differences in content. Logically, on the other hand, we 
 must say : " The dog runs." We have here a situation which, if 
 our purpose be merely to name it, we may call either a dog or a 
 case of running — the two are equivalent for our purpose. In a 
 word, then, we call things equal when we think of them as uncon- 
 ditionally identical, or the same in themselves; but we call those 
 things equivalent which are identical only for some given purpose. 
 Or, in the science of consciousness there can be no quantitative 
 alteration which leaves qualities wholly unchanged. 
 
 Our final formulation of logical value is this (each of these 
 statements implying the others) : Only that modification of con- 
 sciousness has much meaning which is objectively determined, which 
 in its nature may approach a numerical precision of expression, 
 which is supported by a mass of evidence or is the nucleus of richly 
 varied detail, and which involves a feeling of conviction. 
 
 It needs but a few sentences to show that the logical statement 
 
20 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 of value holds good also in ethical theory. In ethical doctrine the 
 characteristic guise of value is the ideal, the end, or the Good. The 
 attempts to answer the question, "What constitutes the Good?" 
 group themselves into two chief lines of inquiry. The extreme 
 cases are, respectively, the view w^hich holds that the good is the 
 pure content of desire, defined as the sensation of pleasure — i. e., 
 hedonism; and the view which defines the good as good-will or 
 the pure form of desire. Although hedonism in its cruder forms 
 no longer finds numerous supporters, yet it survives in the type 
 of theory which would regard the connection between means and 
 end as an extraneous relation. Necessity (which rernains unex- 
 plained in this theory) compels the use of certain means to certain 
 ends. The means and efforts which we must use are entered on the 
 debit side of the account; they must be subtracted from the total 
 sum of satisfactions. Inhibition is elimination or avoidance, rather 
 than subordination. The good is exclusive ; it takes in this experi- 
 ence, but not that one. We must, of course, see a certain truth in 
 reckoning the labor and cost of things as loss, but this loss is essen- 
 tial to our appreciation of gain. *' The light dove, piercing in her 
 easy flight the air and perceiving its resistance, imagines that flight 
 could be easier still in empty space." ^^ 
 
 The case which emphasizes the other extreme, that of pure form, 
 is illustrated by the stray remark of Stevenson — that "to journey 
 hopefully is better than to arrive." But between these two there 
 stands a type of theorist who would say that the distinction of means 
 and end is a difference within the good. The good is the form or 
 particular aspect of experience which is realized at any moment by 
 the harmonizing of all the impulses of the previous moment. Prog- 
 ress is a succession of forms, plans, or adjustments, each more 
 comprehensive than the last. The good is "the whole of life in a 
 new rhythm." That conduct is right which best unifies all our 
 impulses, or which brings the greatest number of them into line; 
 that end is good which answers most completely our desire, or 
 which represents the greatest number of them. Thus in hedonism 
 we get our unity in the qualitative homogeneity of the end and our 
 variety in the concept of amount of pleasure or the number of 
 pleasures — a mechanical statement; and on the rationaHstic side 
 we find the One in the projected purpose, and the Many in the 
 
 ^Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (Muller's translation). 
 

 INTRODUCTION 23 
 
 oncerned with the attainment of certainty through reason or judg- 
 lent. There have been those who would say that truth is the goal 
 Df the logician, but persuasion or conviction the aim of the orator 
 md rhetorician. To this we should say that the object of the orator 
 or rhetorician is not a state of mind at all, but is rather some special 
 •eaction ; public leaders wish to persuade men to do things, and 
 .vould be just as well satisfied if that action were a pure reflex ; but 
 the logician does aim to induce a mental state of assurance, certitude, 
 or the secure apprehension of a thing as true. When we are speak- 
 ing exactly, we do not say that ''truth exists," but that "some 
 things are true for some people ; " and the object of the reasoner is 
 better expressed, not as "the truth," but as the attainment of cer- 
 tainty, or a frame of mind which may be described as a felt satisfac- 
 tion in the outcome of reason. We " rest assured " or " feel con- 
 vinced." In ethics we may say that the " practice " of virtue has as 
 its end the building of character, or the forming of a characteristic 
 or habitual reaction which, when perfected, we call conscience. And, 
 in aesthetics, the last term in the appreciation of the beautiful is 
 the appeal to taste, the problem of the aesthetic consciousness being 
 to show how taste can guide the particular appreciation, and how 
 this, in turn, can modify taste. Thus the object of discursive thought 
 is to attain to intuitive certainty ; of moral effort, to secure the more 
 facile guidance of conscience ; and of attention to the artistic, to 
 enjoy immediate and unreasoned appreciation. The problems of the 
 normative sciences may, then, be generically formulated in the rela- 
 tion of feeling to thought. Thought is the concept, on the one hand, 
 which stands for judgment, conduct, and appreciation; and feeling 
 is, on the other, the best expression for the gratifications of intuition, 
 conscience, and taste. 
 
 This question of ultimate formulation is identical with the ques- 
 tion of philosophic method. The application of a philosophic method 
 I conceive to be this, that one takes some general statement, ready- 
 made so to speak, or categorical, and uses it as a mode of con- 
 ceiving particular cases, to the end that he may see the particular 
 in new phases and gain by this fitting on of the concept some 
 suggestions as to the nature of the particular. If, then, it can be 
 shown that the statement of the metaphysical problem as a relation of 
 feeling to thought performs the same function that statements in 
 other categories do — i. e., if it presents our difficulties in an equally 
 suggestive light — then the characterization of the universe as an 
 
24 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 interaction of thought and feehng may stand as the expression of a 
 legitimate philosophic method. 
 
 Can the ultimate interpretation of experience be as well formu- 
 lated in categories of feeling and thought as it has been in other and 
 approved categories, like substance and attribute, possibility and 
 actuality, nature and freedom? Let us first review the significance 
 of what we should now call the physical concept of substance. In 
 early Greek speculation, as well as in our common thought today, 
 the word "substance" calls up the idea of extended matter, or 
 corporeality ; it is that which we see, feel, and lift. For the Greeks 
 their external objects had a sufficient ground of being apart from 
 any subject ; they were there in space, and the mind came to know 
 them by merely bumping into them. The idea was an impression 
 or indentation, so to speak, of the real object upon the mind. The 
 various attempts to introduce harmony into the conception of a 
 world bristling with these independent substances finally culminated 
 in the method of Democritus, which said that all objects were made 
 up of atoms of the same sort, and that, substance being a single 
 quality, all apparent differences were differences in quantity. The 
 atomism of Leucippus and Democritus has practically held good, in 
 its descriptive outline, up to the present day. The physical sciences 
 of our own time state the world as matter and motion ; the atom or 
 substance as an exceedingly minute particle, such that it could never 
 become a part of our immediate perceptual experience ; and the 
 phenomena of the sensible world as various dispositions of these 
 atoms, or motions of the substance. Substance, as Locke puts it, is 
 the substratum or ground of connection between the qualities of an 
 object. It may be called either the support of these qualities or the 
 limit of differentiation; for the atom, defined as indivisible, limits 
 the divisibility of matter, and so expresses the stopping-place of 
 physical analysis. The conception of substance is now recognized 
 as a methodological assumption, as a symbol which is useful in 
 stating certain facts about the visible, tangible substances of every- 
 day experience. Just here we may mention the recent attempts of 
 physicists to reduce matter itself to terms of motion. It seems 
 impossible to conceive the physical world as a complex of vibrations 
 of different periods without assuming that there is something there 
 vibrating; and if we agree to this as' necessary for thought, we 
 must give the same sort of reality to the thing as to its motion. 
 These vibratory motions of the physicist are never any more imme- 
 
INTRODUCTION 25 
 
 diately given in experience, are no more descriptive of the actual 
 impressions we get of things, than is the case with the atoms. There 
 appears no reason, therefore, why the scientist should not either 
 grant to matter as real an existence as he does to motion, or else 
 recognize that both matter and motion are, as he conceives them, 
 convenient symbols, the imagery for which comes from certain actual 
 experiences with gross masses and motions. 
 
 Substance has thus been viewed both as the supporter of reality 
 and constitution of all things visible and invisible, and as just a bit 
 of technical apparatus in a special field of inquiry. We must 
 imagine that the connection between these views is to be explained 
 in some such account as this. The very first distinctions of sub- 
 stance and attribute, or of the content and its function, must have 
 been for primitive man the distinction between his own body and 
 the operations of that body. His data were arms and legs, and his 
 problems specific muscular reactions — how to climb that tree, or to 
 bind up his wounded hand. The anthropomorphism of savages, as 
 shown in the physiological metaphors by which they explained or 
 expressed the natural forces about them, seem at least to point that 
 way. When, therefore, early speculators became curious as to the 
 world of things, they tried to put themselves in the place of those 
 things and to fancy how their own muscular equipment would go 
 to work to accomplish certain effects. This imaginary trying on of 
 a situation, or putting one's self in the other's place, plays an im- 
 portant role in the working out of very many explanations. We 
 find, accordingly, that in their first crude thinkings people filled the 
 air alive with personal powers. Substances were individuals, and 
 motions the working of whim or will instigated by love and hate. 
 Gradually, however, there was an awakening to the fact of certain 
 unswerving uniformities, and a change of interest took place from 
 the agent whom it seemed unnecessary to propitiate to the effects 
 or results of the agency. The powers of the air became colorless 
 and attenuated, until at length the phenomena which the savage 
 once reverenced as acts of deity became powers subject to his own 
 prevision and even control ; the external entity became entirely dis- 
 possessed, or else merely a way of labeling for himself certain 
 influences which he wielded. 
 
 The relation of substance to its attributes is one which shifts as 
 scientific investigation proceeds, but it is one which can never be 
 
26 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 wholly done away with; that is, neither of the two terms can ever 
 be wholly translated into the other. The concept of substance stands 
 for an element in thought which will always be indispensable to 
 thought. It is the content, the symbol, or the non-rational imagery, 
 the handle by which to take hold and manipulate results or perform 
 functions. In a situation expressed as substance and attributes, sub- 
 stance represents the unexplored, indeterminate part ; it stands, at 
 the outset of an inquiry, for our entire universe ; but as we discover 
 the functions of our substance and marshal more and more attributes 
 under it, there is a change of emphasis. The content of the original 
 experience becomes more and more meager, until it lapses into insig- 
 nificance, becomes a merely unrationalized point, so that, so far as 
 any single investigation is concerned, substance is completely trans- 
 lated into attributes. But we have to remember that the results of 
 one analysis become the substance of the next, that the victories of 
 yesterday only make matter for the struggle of today, and that sub- 
 stance is a point of anchorage between two periods of progression 
 — the residuum of unexplored content. 
 
 If we have £"iven a just estimate of the function of the concept 
 " substance," then it is obvious that the meaning of substance and of 
 the feeling of personal identity must be nearly related ; for the idea 
 of substance has grown out of a mode of thought — the putting of 
 one's self in place of the phenomenon to be explained — which in- 
 volves the notion of a personality as the carrier or supporter of 
 values. And, on the other hand, we can take the modern psycho- 
 logical analysis of the consciousness of self — as given in James, for 
 example — and see that it reduces to a statement of the presence of 
 certain tactual, tendinous, and muscular sensations which represent 
 the common element or invariable accompaniment of our mental 
 life — the substratum or substantial part of it. 
 
 The object of the foregoing remarks is to bring out that the 
 consciousness of self, which is an emotion or feeling, answers to the 
 description of substance as homogeneous substratum of experience, 
 and that it fulfils the functions of explanation and of the preserva- 
 tion of problems quite as adequately as the concept of the atom 
 does. Substance and feeling both stand for the unknown in experi- 
 ence, for a fusion of indefinities, or for the path of untried oppor- 
 tunities. If we could imagine mind as having an experience of pure 
 substance, we should have to think of it as a pure affection of mind 
 by external fact — the unmediated excitation of the organism. 
 
INTRODUCTION 27 
 
 Let us now turn to the categories of the possible and the actual. 
 In answer to the question, as Royce puts it, "What is a valid or a 
 determinately possible experience at the moment when it is sup- 
 posed to be only possible ? " -* we may say, briefly, that the possible 
 is an emotion as contrasted with thought, which is the actual. The 
 assertion that so and so is possible — that it may or can be — is a 
 statement which is primarily concerned with both past and future 
 time ; it is something other than present and actual. Aristotle held 
 that the possible or potential was an important but inferior sort of 
 reality ; that it lacked the full validity of the actual. Kant gave it a 
 certain real status when he said that it was the business of science 
 to explore the realm of possible experience. Science is a statement 
 of conditions of that which can happen if we essay it. In view of a 
 given problem, let us say, there are several solutions presented as 
 possible, but, in the nature of the case, they are mutually exclusive, 
 since the choice or actualization of one means the inhibition of 
 others. Choice implies the existence of two or more ways of doing 
 the thing ; but if these ways exist at the moment of choice and yet 
 are not chosen or actualized, what can be said of them? Feeling 
 is the name we have for the undeveloped realization of a thing; 
 emotion is the experience of the fusion of many incipient reactions 
 which we call the possible avenues of discharge. Feeling is the 
 potential, the repository of undefined, undetermined experience, and 
 the expression for the fact that there are alternatives to the present 
 experience and a chance for variation. It is thus identical with the 
 unformed or homogeneous, the blind, raw datum, or the stuff of 
 possibilities. 
 
 The problem at issue in discussions of nature and freedom is 
 to reconcile the conceptions of mind as being governed and as 
 governing, to explain the relation of the given to the achieved. We 
 ask how it is that we go from the natural or given, which conditions 
 us, to constructive thought, in which the forms of the subject con- 
 dition the experience. Is it not the same question if we ask how to 
 get from feeling to thought? What is this feeling, this dumb 
 unrational presence, which is there without explaining itself, and 
 which conditions us by compelling recognition; and how are we to 
 think of it as being appropriated and made over into rational experi- 
 ence? When we can answer this, we can also say how freedom is 
 possible under natural law. 
 
 "* World and Individual, first series, p. 260. 
 
28 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 Suppose, now, that we were warranted in saying that the formu- 
 lation of the ultimate metaphysical question in the antithesis of 
 thought and feeling does do justice to the historical conceptions 
 under which metaphysical speculation has flourished, what sort of 
 answer would that formulation suggest? How can feeling and 
 thought, if they stand for so fundamental a difference, ever get con- 
 nected so that they affect one another? How can thought know 
 feeling, or how can feeling feel thought? 
 
 Kant teaches that even the objects of inner perception, our own 
 mental states as presented to the psychologist, are merely phenom- 
 enal, and that behind them are the real mental objects to which we 
 cannot penetrate. In Schopenhauer the will or motive element is 
 unconditioned and independent of the forms of thought; it con- 
 stitutes by itself a separate class of objects for the subject.^^ Miin- 
 sterberg has said in "Psychological Atomism "^^ that feeling and 
 will cannot be in reality subject-matter of psychology, because 
 they cannot take the presentational form, or be submitted to the 
 laws of cognition. Such views are unavoidably skeptical in their 
 bearing ; they embody the opinion that mind can never know reality 
 or attain to material truth, because it can compare only its own 
 impressions with its own impressions, and never these impressions 
 with real objects. This opinion involves the assumption, it seems 
 to me, that things which are distinct are necessarily separated, and 
 that different things cannot be predicated of one another — a view 
 which must reduce the universe to an identical proposition. 
 
 But if feeling and thinking are related, what can we say of this 
 relation ? Every act may be defined either as a mediation of intellect 
 between two emotional states, or as the mediation of emotion be- 
 tween two intellectual states. If we suppose a continuum of pure 
 reflexes, we know that a person will never be jostled out of uncon- 
 sciousness until there comes some obstacle interfering with a habit. 
 This interruption in the customary channels of discharge is the 
 occasion for emotion. The first throb of consciousness is this felt 
 response which seems to try all the avenues of reaction at once. 
 It is a moment of wonder or surprise, connoting vaguely some such 
 question as, " What is the matter ? " and this mental content, which 
 Bain designates as a " neutral excitement," ^^ we may call undiffer- 
 
 ■'^The Fourfold Root of Principle of SuMcient Reason. 
 '^Psychological Review, Vol. VII, p. i. 
 ^''Emotions and Will, Part I, chap, i, sec. 13. 
 
INTRODUCTIOKt^^^^^^CK^'' 29 
 
 entiated response or the primitive, original emotion. This first 
 feehng soon merges into a consciousness of inadequacy of some 
 special sort, and into a desire for the filling up of the break. The 
 emotion holds in solution, so to speak, several possibilities of action, 
 and it is the selection and development of one of these which con- 
 stitutes the mediation of intelligence. Out of the affective state of 
 disquiet there follows a reflective perception and a projective con- 
 ception. 
 
 In so far as consciousness is held up and bent back, it is imme- 
 diately perceptional ; it takes an inventory of the situation and sees 
 what the trouble or what the obstacle is ; and in so far as it selects 
 from these elements in the situation — declares an identity of self 
 
 conception I . L|- 
 
 h^hit —[^.^^.^''".L^^ 
 
 ^'^' iisqucet 
 
 with one of the possibilities of reaction — it is projective and con- 
 ceptional. This identification of self with the successful reaction is 
 marked by the feeling of agreeableness or satisfaction which is the 
 final moment in the adjustment. There is, in every activity, a re- 
 versal of control between feeling and thought, or stimulus and 
 reaction; for in the first moment of the act we are stopped by an 
 obstacle of which we must take account — a submission of the sub- 
 ject to the object ; but we then choose or determine, after reflection, 
 what the final stimulus shall be — a conditioning of the object by the 
 subject. Thus we get from one state of feeling to another, from 
 the painful to the pleasant, through the mediation of intellect. It is 
 equally true, on the other side, however, that we cannot advance 
 from one intellectual occupation to another without the intervention 
 of feeling. We should be hopelessly swamped in details — could 
 never, in fact, escape from one analysis to the next — unless we had 
 some ability to lump or fuse our past analyses into a feeling for 
 things, and, with emotion as the carrier or symbol for whole trains 
 of ideas, shake ourselves free for the new object of attention. One 
 way, therefore, in which feeling and thought are related is in the 
 mutual service of means to ends. 
 
 Is there any other way in which emotion can be thought P^^'^'Tp R a^>^ 
 
 -^ OF THF. 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 ^ or ^ 
 
30 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 Definitions of emotion usually maintain that it must be regarded 
 as the conscious concomitant of complex physiological modifications. 
 The checking of an instinctive reaction provokes a confusion of 
 tendencies, and the emotion is the fusion of these organic registra- 
 tions or the simultaneous awareness of a manifold of organic move- 
 ments. The essential point is that of the many motions. Going on 
 now to a definition of movement, or motion, we should agree that it 
 is to be thought of in terms of certain relations of space and time, 
 space and time being defined in their turn by means of quantitative 
 formulae or numerical symbols. Thus thought may think its Other 
 as a manifold — number or pure difference being the most abstract 
 form of thought. Feeling, on the contrary, takes no account of space 
 or time or number ; the '' form " of feeling (unless that be a contra- 
 diction in terms) is pure quality ; whatever is felt is felt as a quality ; 
 or perhaps it is better to say that whatever is felt is a quality. At 
 the risk of seeming to set up feeling and thought as things-in- 
 themselves, we shall nevertheless try to make the above distinction 
 more explicit. Feeling taken by itself is pure quality ; i. e,, a feeling 
 is homogeneous — has na inner complexities ; but feeling as appre- 
 hended in thought is a multitude of unique entities. We cannot say 
 just how each one differs from all the rest ; but for thought they are 
 always feelings, not feeling, and each one seems to be distinctive. 
 Thought in itself is a complex or a set of distinguished parts ; but 
 thought as grasped by feeling is a mere undetermined sort of aware- 
 ness or neutral excitement. We feel thought by means of symbols 
 which themselves are purely qualitative. 
 
 What, finally, is the bearing of these preceding discussions on 
 the theory of value? According to the metaphysical view of it, 
 thought has value as it mediates feeling, and feeling has value as 
 it mediates thought. Value exists by virtue of the fact of reference. 
 A perfectly independent thing could have no value. An identical 
 proposition has no internal value, because it involves no substitution, 
 no symbolism, no reference ; it is an equation with no distinction of 
 subject and predicate. The actual has meaning only because of the 
 possibilities which it represents ; the present is significant only be- 
 cause of past and future ; and possibilities have value only as there 
 is an actuality. Quality would have no value did it not exist in 
 some quantity, and mere quantity, without quality, is nothing. 
 
 Summary. — Summarizing the various accounts of value, we say 
 
INTRODUCTION 31 
 
 (i) in economics that a commodity has worth when it is much in 
 demand, but limited in supply. Value emerges when a habit is 
 checked, or when want comes to consciousness, and is measured 
 by the ratio of what is wanted divided by what can be had. (2) In 
 logic the existence of value depends upon the various distinctions of 
 thought and its object, subject and predicate, the one and the many. 
 Thought is valid according as it has objective reference; i. e., the 
 idea is worth most which becomes best realized in the object of 
 thought. That subject is most important of which most things can 
 be predicated ; it has value in proportion to the variety of its deter- 
 minations or connections. The One has a value directly proportioned 
 to the Many from which it is distinguished. (3) In ethics the value 
 of the end is measured by the effort which we will make to attain 
 it. When we make a choice we recognize that choosing one thing 
 means inhibiting others, and the value of the good which we choose 
 is measured by the sacrifice which it entails. Such sacrifice is not, 
 of course, total negation; for the moral end must realize all the 
 impulses of the self; but in this realization the dominant element 
 which is chosen finds its significance in the other tendencies which 
 are subordmated to it. (4) in aesthetics the value of a stimulus 
 depends upon the number of old habits which it touches off; those 
 things are beautiful which have depth of emotional reference. 
 
 If we put together these various definitions of value, we may 
 say that the one word which best describes what we mean by value is 
 " agreeableness." This term is susceptible of two lines of interpreta- 
 tion, answering to the two categories of feeling and thought. On 
 the one hand, agreeableness is pure sensuous pleasure, and the 
 measure of value — if there could be any measure — the intensity of 
 this feeling. On the other hand, agreeableness may be supposed 
 to vary according to the complexity of the valued content or the 
 number of its relations. The more complex and comprehensive a 
 desire, the more we value its satisfaction. We find in it a greater 
 number of points of agreement between our wish and the reality; 
 the more complicated our activity, the more eventful is its solution, 
 and the more varied the consequent gratification. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 
 
 An intelligible statement of the psychological formulation of 
 value requires some preliminary remark on the psychological methods 
 or view-points from which it is made: value is a conception so 
 nearly concerned with the borderlands of psychology that an explicit 
 summary of those outlines becomes desirable. *' Methods," " prin- 
 ciples," "outlines," ''elements," ''points of view" — all these are 
 terms which upon scrutiny seem to be descriptive of the same group 
 of facts. A method, as before said, is the adoption of some very 
 general concept to serve as the type to which all the particulars 
 under consideration must, if possible, conform — the guise under 
 which they must all be thought. Any statement may be regarded 
 as a psychological method which explicitly assumes some one fact as 
 ultimate, and then attempts to read all conscious processes in terms 
 of that one. This is the nature of any procedure upon hypoth- 
 esis, and the suggestions and satisfactions which such a perform- 
 ance affords measure the efficiency of the method, the soundness 
 of the principle, the validity of the point of view, or the ultimateness 
 of the element. I believe that the best index to what ^ psychologist 
 really is using as his method is most frequently to be found under the 
 caption of "element," and hence that current psychological method 
 can best be got at through a consideration of what is meant by a 
 mental element. The criteria of the mental element are commonly 
 given as distinctness and unanalyzableness ; but the alleged sim- 
 plicity of elements does not prevent their being frequently assigned 
 the several attributes of intensity, extensity, and duration.^ Hence 
 the question might arise whether the space, time, and degree, as the 
 forms under which all mental content must be conceived, are not the 
 real mental elements. Since, however, this view is not subsequently 
 developed in the writers mentioned, and since the attribute or the 
 fact of quality is definitely assumed as fundamental, as in Titchener's 
 figure,^ we may conclude that the concept which they wish to 
 employ is that of a manifold of initial qualities out of which mind 
 
 ^ See WuNDT, Outlines of Psychology, p. 30 ; Titchener, Outline p. 29 ; 
 Calkins, Psychology, chap. 8, p 105. 
 ''Outline, chap. 2, p. 8. 
 
 32 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 33 
 
 is compounded. " The total number of elementary qualities " which 
 various experimentalists have reckoned up is an expression for them 
 of the outfit or the resources of the normal mind, it being presumably 
 agreed that these sensations are not to be taken as given entities, but 
 as reflective abstractions, and that the concept of a manifold of 
 qualities is a methodological assumption. The logical consequent 
 of this view is Miinsterberg's theory of psychical atoms.^ A psy- 
 chical atom, he thinks, never can be given in immediate experience, 
 and is not measured by time, space, and intensity. Each atom is 
 perfectly unique and dissimilar from every other; for, he reasons, 
 if the atoms had any resemblance one to another, they must of neces- 
 sity be composed of parts (since similarity means a partial identity). 
 This view, then, is really explicative of what is contained in the 
 preceding one : quality as quality is perfectly unique, and a multitude 
 of such points or existences is posited for explanatory purposes. 
 
 The chief criticism against this view as it stands is that there is 
 no warrant for calling this ultimate a manifold. Pure quality is for 
 consciousness a homogeneity, not a plurality. An atom cannot be 
 simple and at the same time dissimilar from a great many other 
 atoms, for a many-sided dissimilarity implies a highly differentiated 
 organization. If we had a thousand objects each different from 
 every other in the thousand, then we must have within every one 
 of those objects nine hundred and ninety-nine grounds of distinc- 
 tion. Every added point of difference is an added point in inner 
 complexity. There is only one absolutely unique thing, and that is 
 the universe. If we are looking for a psychical atom pure and 
 simple, we must abstract from our impressions of red, sweet, soft, 
 etc., and find the common element in all of them ; but what we 
 shall get is a blank, undifferentiated experience, which could be 
 called pure feeling, pure being, or the state of Nirvana — not a con- 
 geries of divers atoms. 
 
 In this connection some attention should be given to the attempt 
 to classify conscious elements in the two co-ordinate groups — sensa- 
 tion and affection ; or even the three — sensation, affection, and 
 conation. When we say that there is a distinction between know- 
 ing, feeling, and willing, is that any warrant for saying that we mean 
 three co-ordinate classes of elements waiting to be combined into 
 concrete experiences? Indeed, to conceive these three mental states 
 
 ^Psychological Review, Vol. VII, p. i. 
 
34 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 as built up analogously, each from its own pile of material, is to do 
 violence to all our ideas of the nature of the relations between these 
 states and of their function in the whole conscious economy. A 
 " sensational element " is no more akin to thought than an affectional 
 or conative element is. This division into three co-ordinate classes 
 is, then, no index to the relation between thinking, feeling, and 
 willing; nor, on the other hand, can we find any justification in the 
 nature of the elements themselves for such a division. As present 
 experience red and blue are just as different from one another as are 
 yellow and pain. What inner connection puts pleasure and pain into 
 one class and purple and sour into another? In a word, our experi- 
 ence as elementary is not classified. 
 
 The view which would make the psychical element — or, as I 
 prefer to call it, the psychological ultimate — some sort of homo- 
 geneous, qualitative existence finds implicit support in some of the 
 guesses which have been made concerning the genesis of our psy- 
 chical processes. James's conception of the infant's consciousness 
 as a blooming, buzzing confusion, which contains potentially all 
 future differentiations ; Stanley's position,* that primitive conscious- 
 ness is an inarticulate stimulation, called for convenience pure pain ; 
 Horwicz's surmise,^ that the original psychic life of children and 
 animals may have been but an oscillation between pleasure and pain 
 — such statements as these are what might be called consistent 
 sensational theories, in which the element is the last point of analysis ; 
 a pure abstraction conceived, not as a matter of experience, but as a 
 principle of explanation ; a given something to start with, out of 
 which all later psychical manipulations are developed. If, now, it be 
 assumed that such a development out of a continuum of feeling is 
 just what takes place, not only in passing from child-consciousness 
 to adult consciousness, but also in every conscious act whatsoever, 
 then we should have a theory or method which would be the legiti- 
 mate outcome of the assumption of sensation (or affection) as 
 elementary. This theory, though not expressly subscribed to by 
 those who use the idea of elemental sensation, seems to be the only 
 tenable formulation of their views. The many sensations are, as we 
 said, posited for the sake of explanation; but it seems possible to 
 make less assumption and more explanation if we agree that, instead 
 of a given manifold, there is one given stuff of which we at first 
 
 ^Philosophical Review, Vol. I, p. 433. 
 ^Psychologische Analysen, Book XIV, p. 351. 
 
\ P R >l' 
 or Tw 
 
 or 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 35 
 
 posit nothing further ; but we recognize that we shall later see in it 
 the nucleus of all psychical modifications. The question of how those 
 modifications arise is still untouched, but an activity drawn out of a 
 feeling continuum is certainly a no darker saying than an activity 
 made by the addition of parts together. 
 
 Granting that the assumption of feeling as the element, and the 
 explanation of conscious process in terms of feeling, is a conceivable 
 and even defensible position in some respects, it still seems possible 
 to find a better one, some more adequate expression for the funda- 
 mental psychical fact. 
 
 In order to show the grounds upon which volition may be 
 accepted as such a fact, let us revert briefly to the status and function 
 of metaphysics, and to its connection with psychology. Metaphysics 
 is essentially a question, not an answer ; it propounds the categories 
 which the sciences weave together into systems of their own. It is 
 quite thinkable, therefore, that there should be in some minds a 
 presumption always in favor of a dualistic or a pluralistic meta- 
 physics, because such a dualism contains an expression of doubt, and 
 does not, like some specious monisms, silence inquiry where it can- 
 not answer questions. The function of metaphysics is to generalize 
 our questions, and its legitimate province is the realm of suggestion. 
 To the questions of metaphysics skepticism says there is no answer, 
 but the sciences postulate a point of view. The only really meta- 
 physical answer we ever get is the assertion of an unknown absolute 
 which is the solvent of all antitheses. This, however, is never what 
 we are actually after ; it is not metaphysical certainty, but practical 
 satisfactions, which we work for ; and hence it is to science, which is 
 engaged in working out practical controls, that we must look for 
 systematic and unified answers. In metaphysics, for example, the 
 antithesis between thought and feeling presents involved situations 
 to which we have only practical, non-metaphysical answers. How, 
 theoretically, can pleasure ever compensate for pain ? Schopenhauer 
 maintains that no amount of pleasure can ever make up to us for 
 having suffered pain. Yet, practically, we do balance pleasure and 
 pain, and count one as offsetting the other. Again, what guarantee 
 is there, theoretically, in even our most ardent desire that we are 
 going to get what we want ? But, practically, we are convinced that 
 if we only want a thing badly enough, and try for it hard enough, 
 we are sure to get it. From one point of view it seems impossible 
 
36 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 to Speak of self-control ; for how can anything either resist itself or 
 control itself? Constraint must come from the outside, and experi- 
 ence as a succession of resistances and controls must be the result 
 of two independent centers of influence. Yet we do hold to the con- 
 ception of self-regulation. Metaphysics, then, is an inquiry, and 
 science is a positive answer or practical conclusion. If metaphysics 
 proposes as its basal antithesis the difference between thought and 
 feeling, then the answer to its question, in metaphysical language — 
 i. e., the concept which contains the two — is something, pure being 
 perhaps, which is neither thought nor feeling, and of which we have 
 no grasp; but for the science of psychology there is a solution of 
 the question in the concept of will or self-control. 
 
 In favor of the adoption of the activity concept as the first datum 
 of psychology the following points may be urged. In the first place, 
 there is a constantly growing recognition of the motor character of 
 all ideas, and the essentially purposive nature of every slightest con- 
 scious experience. This tendency is apparent in statements which 
 declare that the very existence of an element depends upon a point 
 of view. Again, if we assume that the object of all the sciences — 
 which is also their limiting concept — is control of one sort or 
 another — as in physics the object is mechanical explanation and 
 mechanical control, or in biology the object is the explanation and 
 control of living organisms — then how can the object of psycho- 
 logical science be more fitly named than by calling it self-explanation, 
 self-possession, or self-control? This final practical object of a 
 science is just the whole concrete experience which gives the founda- 
 tion and warrant for the science and is its limiting concept. We may 
 bring out the relation between this sort of an ultimate and our 
 ordinary conception of the element by adverting to the criterion by 
 which such an element is selected. It is customary to speak of an 
 element as that which cannot be further analyzed ; but if our theory 
 of the analytic-synthetic character of judgment be correct, it ought 
 to be quite as appropriate to say that an element is that which 
 cannot be further synthesized; and with this aspect of the case in 
 mind the idea of a concrete control or activity seems peculiarly 
 suited to answer the purpose of an ultimate formula. If we wish to 
 express the act as the limit of analysis, we may put it in this way ; 
 tKat this most familiar, tangible, and concrete aspect of our experi- 
 ence, the act, is the very thing which seems complete in itself and 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 37 
 
 defies resolution into anything more final. Is not action our most 
 ultimate answer to any situation or question? What can we further 
 than to do something about it? The psychical element, then, can 
 justly be described either as the point where analysis ends and 
 synthesis may begin, or equally well also as the point where synthe- 
 sis ends and analysis may begin. It seems, therefore, an appropriate 
 characterization of the element to say that it is the ultimate or funda- 
 mental psychical fact and the chief explanatory concept of psy- 
 chology. For psychological theory, habit and attention, reason and 
 passion, thought and feeling, will all appear under the form of 
 volition or as some phase of self-control. 
 
 A rough and ready preliminary statement of such control may be 
 made as follows. If we were attempting a history of our idea of 
 control, we should have to recognize that self-control, as we now 
 think it, is the product of a long process of civilization. Government 
 has proceeded from the external and highly despotic to the internal 
 and democratic. The savage chief ruled by virtue of his war-club ; 
 but, although his tribe yielded him a physical compliance, their 
 obedience was relatively meager, contingent, and irksome; and for 
 his part he must have had but little — merely a momentary sub- 
 jection — to enrich his feeling of governorship and control. In con- 
 trast with the primitive chief stands the president of a democracy, 
 who finds himself ruling through the choice of those whom he rules. 
 His claims to obedience rest upon firm rational grounds, and he 
 feels himself a part and an expression of the internal, subjective life 
 of those about him. The people, on their side, obey him as naturally 
 as their own idea, and, far from finding civic obligations contingent, 
 impertinent, and irksome, they frequently feel them to be richly 
 interesting and convincing. There comes, thus, to be a gradual 
 internalizing of government and an identification of the governing 
 with the governed. This is just what takes place in every act of 
 our conscious adjustments. When our occupation is interrupted by 
 some extraneous stimulus, this disquiet seems like an absolute and 
 despotic summons to break with what we are doing, and we have to 
 yield to the authority of the external fact. This submission consists 
 in attention to the fact or stimulus, in tracing its lineaments, copying 
 it, or conforming our minds to it in a detailed way, until the first 
 blind turning becomes a cognition of the situation. As this grap- 
 pling of the mental process or of the subject with the fact con- 
 
38 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 tinues, the control of that process or that self undergoes a change; 
 the train of thought which was interrupted fades into the back- 
 ground, and this new train of thought comes to occupy the mind so 
 completely that the content of the' self becomes identical with the 
 thing to which it was conforming, and there takes place an identifica- 
 tion of the self with the controlling factor. This reversal of the 
 situation, or regained ascendancy of the self, is the completed act 
 of self-control or possession. This practical outcome of all activity, 
 then, the representation and redefinition of the stimulus, which we 
 call control, will be the starting-point and the check upon our con- 
 siderations of psychological method. 
 
 So general a category, however, is not more than a starting- 
 point, and we must look for some more special conceptions which 
 shall be both comprehensive and apposite in their presentation of 
 the facts, and at the same time susceptible of this general interpre- 
 tation. There are, in my judgment, four such psychological methods 
 in the field. These four are not mutually exclusive or antagonistic — 
 being four presentations of the same truth — nor need that number 
 exhaust the possible methods ; but in the present outlook upon psy- 
 chological science they seem pre-eminent. These views each char- 
 acterize in their own way the fundamental aspect of the conscious 
 process, and according to those characterizations may be named the 
 Volitional, the Representational, the Discriminative, and the Experi- 
 mental. We shall go on, then, to outline these four methods, and to 
 make a statement of value or meaning in the language of each of 
 them. 
 
I. MEANING FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF ACTIVITY 
 
 In electing as a psychological method the conception of activity, 
 we are bound, as we said, to a certain attitude toward the concept. 
 We must regard it as the final word of explanation, as that from 
 which as concrete and unrationalized we start out, and as that to 
 which we come back in our most generalized statement — the ulti- 
 mate being. We treat it as that which, if given, we can get the rest 
 out of. All psychic phenomena, then, must find their order and 
 significance within an act — all conscious process being a kind of 
 striving. The category of activity is commonly found discussed 
 under the name of will, desire, attention, and conation or effort; 
 but belief in its applicability to all forms of conscious life is sup- 
 ported by the fact that in these discussions interest seems to focus 
 in the most highly generalized aspects of the mental process, and 
 that the characteristics most dwelt upon under desire, attention, and 
 so on, can with reason be alleged of all conscious experience whatso- 
 ever. This is evidenced in the following cases. 
 
 First let it be said that in the contemporary psychological treat- 
 ment of activity there appears to be a dawning uniformity in the 
 direction of identifying the problem of will with the problem of 
 attention. Among those who do this are Wundt, James, Dewey, 
 Kiilpe, and Miinsterberg. The two terms, " Will " and " Attention," 
 therefore, will be used interchangeably to the extent that citations 
 concerning each of them will be considered relevant to the other. 
 
 I. The anticipatory nature of volition, the forward reference of 
 will, is one of the facts which most frequently solicit notice. Thus in 
 effort there is always some object ahead, in desire some image of a 
 coming gratification. Miinsterberg in the Willenshandlung takes 
 "anticipatory idea" for text; and James discusses attention in 
 terms of ideational accommodations or preparatory excitement of the 
 centers. Stout also dwells upon the expectant attitude in all atten- 
 tion.® Concerning the anticipatory character of consciousness in 
 general there is a most explicit statement in Miss Hitchcock's 
 " Psychology of Expectation." All consciousness, she believes, is 
 tinged with expectancy. It is presumed also that the forward refer- 
 
 ^Manual of Psychology, p. 247. 
 
 39 
 
40 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 ence of conscious process (the anticipatory) is even more funda- 
 mental than the backward reference (the memorial), thus: "The 
 conclusion is pressed upon us that expectation is a more primitive 
 form of ideation than memory"^ (adding, however, that "a prece- 
 dence of this kind is limited only to the lowest and most primitive 
 stages of consciousness"). Her concluding sentence reads also: 
 " We are thus justified, not only in saying that all complete knowl- 
 edge involves anticipation, but also in affirming that all rational 
 expectation is knowledge." Professor Royce is on the verge of, if 
 not completely over into, a similar position where he says : " By 
 the word ' idea ' .... I shall mean .... any state of conscious- 
 ness, whether simple or complex, which, when present, is then and 
 there viewed as at least the partial expression or embodiment of a 
 single conscious purpose."^ Professor Dewey's remark that "a 
 certain conceived state of the self is the object of desire " * is a sort 
 of corollary to the above views. Those views say that all conscious- 
 ness is essentially anticipatory ; this view, that anticipation involves 
 all of consciousness, that the object of desire is the whole self, and 
 that the process of volition is a completion of this identification: 
 "What the child concretely desires is himself in possession of the 
 apple." ^*^ To sum up in a word the above characterizations of 
 mental process, we may say that all consciousness is primarily pro- 
 spective or anticipatory, that it always starts out face first. 
 
 2. A second specification about desire (not very different from 
 the first) may also be predicated of consciousness at large ; namely, 
 the fact of objective reference. On the one hand, Baldwin differ- 
 entiates desire from other centrally initiated process by the reference 
 of the former to a representation or a pictured object.^^ "The 
 objective reference is what distinguishes desire from other centrally 
 initiated reactions. When this outward tendency (restlessness) is 
 chained down to a single outlet clearly pictured in consciousness 
 we have desire." On the other hand, we have in Brentano's prin- 
 ciple of division among the conscious processes an adoption of " ob- 
 jective reference " as the characteristic of all psychic manifestations. 
 It is true that Brentano himself considers desire as merely one sort 
 
 ''Psychological Review (monograph), January, 1903, p. 30. 
 ^World and Individual, first series, p. 22. 
 ^Psychology, chap. 18, div. i, "Desire," p. 362. ^"Ibid. 
 
 ^^Mental Development, on "Sanction of Desire," pp. 372-92. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 41 
 
 of reference, and does not therefore recognize its presence in every 
 conscious state, but by dividing his data according to the " mode in 
 which consciousness refers to an object " he impHes that the objective 
 reference is fundamental to all. 
 
 3. Once more, in the experience of effort we seem to get the 
 inner kernel of the attentive process, the most voluntary part of 
 volition ; and yet it is just these strains and tensions, this sense of 
 motor and organic presences, which is the most invariable sub- 
 strate of our every psychic moment. There is no consciousness, 
 however "passive," which has not in it some thread of tension, 
 some faint hovering sense of personality in its awareness. (Periph- 
 eral excitations there may be and cortical vibrations, or the physio- 
 logical presence of things which we afterward " recall " and suppose 
 that we must have been conscious of; but I cannot imagine any 
 actual awareness which is wholly unaware of itself.) The same 
 psychic content appears in the experience of self as in the experience 
 of effort — reduced by some writers to strains in the chest, head and 
 neck. To borrow from James's phrases, the effort we make seems 
 to be a thing peculiarly our own, and in the dull heave of the will it 
 is ourselves which we seem to be throwing into the scale. This per- 
 sonal tang and sense of effort — they may be ever so vague and 
 unobtrusive — are discernible in all mental states. 
 
 In the opinions thus far cited there appears to be possible an 
 agreement with the conception of activity as a method ; that is, these 
 views, without explicitly adopting it, lend themselves to such an 
 amplification. There are not wanting, however, theories which 
 definitely support this view. In the ethics of Aristotle the moral 
 act is designated as the mean between excess and defect — the 
 excellence, the idea or the characteristic of a man being the fulfilment 
 of all his abilities. Activity (in this case called moral activity), con- 
 ceived as the mean, involves the conception of the functioning of 
 all the limits ; i. e., the middle course is an expression of both 
 extremes, and the conscious phenomenon which is the mean involves 
 the arrangement of all the other aspects of consciousness. In con- 
 temporary thought the essentially active nature of consciousness is 
 voiced in that whole point of view which regards mind as developed 
 out of the response of the organism to critical situations, and which 
 points out the essential significance of mind in the adaptive or ad- 
 justive function whereby it enables the organism with which it is 
 
42 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 associated to maintain itself in face of its environment. Apart from 
 certain implications contained in this statement relative to the con- 
 nection between mind and body, it is a good expression of the thought 
 that every minor process finds its value within some larger purpose, 
 until even consciousness itself as a whole finds its significance in 
 being the means to a purpose beyond itself. According to Wundt, 
 apperception, the sole original act of will, is the indispensable factor 
 in all intellectual and affective differentiation. In the following pas- 
 sages ^^ he seems to elevate activity to what we have described as the 
 position of a method : 
 
 Feelings are parts of emotions and emotions are to be considered as 
 
 components of volitional processes All these affective processes may, 
 
 accordingly, be subsumed under the general concept volitional process. 
 
 Also this : 
 
 Thus, volition proves to be the fundamental fact from which all those 
 processes arise which are made up of feelings. Then, too, in the process of 
 apperception^ which is found through psychological analysis to have all the 
 characteristics of a volitional act, we have a direct relation between this 
 fundamental fact and the ideational contents of experience which arise from 
 the spatial arrangements of sensations. Now, volitional processes are appre- 
 hended as unitary processes and as being uniform in character in the midst 
 of all the variations in their components, etc. 
 
 Pre-eminently identified with the activity theory stands Pro- 
 fessor Dewey in the conception of will as the mediation of impulse, 
 and as the co-ordinative or unifying aspect of all conscious dis- 
 tinctions whatsoever.^^ 
 
 Believing that activity and desire are characteristic of all con- 
 scious phenomena, and that all desires as such are operative in much 
 the same manner, we should then look for our first classifications in 
 some general ground of cleavage running through the contents or 
 objects of desire. In looking from the outside at the fulfilment of 
 some intricate purpose, it becomes at once apparent that the object 
 of endeavor is a thing which shifts from moment to moment within 
 that purpose ; each item of the elaboration becomes itself for a space 
 the object of desire, so that a cross-section of such an activity would 
 display differences in these "substantive" states according to the 
 
 ^^Outlines of Psychology, sees. 15, 10, and 11. 
 
 ^'See especially Syllabus of Ethics, sec. xii ; "Theory of Emotion," Psycho- 
 logical Review, Vol. I, p. 553 ; Vol. II, p. 13 ; and "The Reflex Arc Concept," 
 ibid., Vol. Ill, p. 357. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 
 
 43 
 
 level at which it was made. The greatest difference, or at least 
 the most highly generalized distinction, among the objects of desire 
 is the difference between stimulation and pacification. We desire 
 in general, that is to say, either to be stimulated or to escape from 
 stimulation. Another way of putting it is to say that it is a difference 
 between greatest and least excitation. If we might picture a con- 
 scious adjustment as a weaving together or merging of independent 
 strands, then we could say that the cross-section which exhibited the 
 greatest number of independently grasped threads — i, e., the point 
 of maximum distinction — was also the point of highest stimulation ; 
 or, again, that stimulation was the consciousness of the material, 
 and pacification the consciousness of coalescence. The widest di- 
 vergence in the psychic level is the difference between the crest and 
 the trough of the wave, the maximum of excitement and the com- 
 pletion of allayment. The relation of the two kinds of desire within 
 a single act will be apparent in a reconsideration of the account 
 given above. Following upon the emotion of surprise occasioned 
 by the injection of an obstacle — a clash of habits — we have a- 
 reflective-perceptive state of mind in which we have spread out 
 before us all the elements in the situation. These are then eventually 
 gathered up and put away in our choice or reaction. 
 
 obst 
 
 dcle 
 
 
 In the diagram the object of a is the cross-section at b, the maxi- 
 mum of distinction, and the object of h is the point c, or perfect 
 pacification. It is common enough to observe that every act in its 
 very nature aims at its own cessation^ strives to accomplish its own 
 end ; but it is equally obvious that every act in its inception registers 
 a preliminary desire for a heightened stimulation. The rational 
 ground for such a desire would be the fact that in cases of inter- 
 
 
44 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 rupted habit some additional shove is necessary to the final discharge 
 of the motor apparatus. When the first surprise comes to us, we 
 literally " want to know " what the difficulty is ; we wish a developed 
 and detailed excitation instead of the elementary, inarticulate one. 
 The desire for excitement is the desire for the auxiliary means 
 which will precipitate the act. Much of our aimless craving for 
 excitement and the pleasure which we often find in mere stimulation 
 as such, is really a craving for and a pleasure in the idea of our 
 own heightened efi:ectiveness, is a desire to feel that we can do some- 
 thing. Within a given activity, then, we find things which please by 
 reason of their exciting qualities, and because they are consonant 
 with the high tide of the active pursuit, and things which please in 
 their soothing character because they are contributory or agreeable 
 to the conclusion of the act. 
 
 The practical pertinency of the above division of desires is illus- 
 trated in the following particulars. " Writers upon color, decoration, 
 ornamentation," says Titchener, "recognize two types of color 
 scheme: the dominant and the contrasted;"^* and this is descrip- 
 tive of a difference which can be observed in other circumstances of 
 enjoyment. We take a pleasure in the contrast of stimuli, which 
 gives a certain vivacity, spirit, or brilliancy to the experience, and 
 pleasure in the easy blending of stimuli, which affords an alluring 
 sense of smoothness. Again, the rhythms or periods which invade 
 our every occupation from the least to the greatest are a further 
 index to the same fact that what we need and what we strive for is 
 now motion or strain and now rest. 
 
 The intimate nature of will — will in the narrowest sense, or 
 activity most active — is conceded to manifest itself in the experience 
 of effort. Indeed, an analysis of effort seems to promise for psy- 
 chological method a description of the most typical and the most 
 schematic case of self-control. Although, as we said above, effort 
 is, strictly speaking, coextensive with consciousness and with desire, 
 yet we shall choose to regard it as more manifest in the desire for 
 stimulation than in the complementary desire for pacification. 
 Effort, that is, is most apparent in just that point in a conscious ad- 
 justment where conflict is at its height and most distressful, and 
 where characteristic muscular* and organic reactions are most dis- 
 tinctly present. An experience of effort, such as the case of extreme 
 
 ^*Outline of Psychology, chap. 13, sec. 88. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 45 
 
 physical exertion would illustrate, gives us the following situation: 
 first there is a consciousness of incoming sensations from the 
 motor apparatus directly relevant to the proposed reaction; and 
 then, as with continued resistance a bigger levy is laid on the organ- 
 ism, there come pouring in sensations from the whole executive 
 mechanism, so that, whereas a well-practiced reaction is run off with 
 facility and precision, the difficult adjustment is accomplished with 
 pain, and accompanied by many superfluous irrelevant movements. 
 Following Titchener's analysis,^** we should agree that the conscious- 
 ness of self as most intimately active — the experience of effectua- 
 tion — reduces to just these terms of muscle, joint, and tendon sensa- 
 tions. A piece of confirmatory evidence for this position appears in 
 a rather curious sort of experience which some persons have ob- 
 served in themselves. Thinking of something wholly removed from 
 his present physical condition, one may suddenly become aware of 
 the involuntary twitching of some muscle or group of muscles 
 ordinarily within his control. The twitching certainly has not been 
 anticipated and perhaps cannot be stopped at will, but all at once 
 that movement may seem to the person to be his very own, may 
 take on all the warmth and closeness of his most personally directed 
 action, feel exactly like the expression of his own voluntary com- 
 mand. He may exclaim to himself : " Why, Fm doing this." The 
 same thing has been remarked in the case of some movements 
 which can be electrically stimulated. The conclusion to be drawn 
 is that the mere awareness of movement is in some cases equivalent 
 to the fullest consciousness of effectuation. 
 
 An explanation of the experience of effort or conation has first 
 of all these two questions to answer: What is the rational basis 
 of the desire for stimulation? and, What is the special significance 
 of the various sensations, muscular, tendinous, organic, and so on, 
 which distinguish the experience? In answer to the first question 
 we should begin by saying that in effort we come to the most 
 poignant consciousness which we ever have of the meaning of causal 
 connection ; we realize then most vividly that one thing is essential 
 to another, that in order to do one thing we must do this other. 
 The appreciation of means as such is very distinct. Will is an 
 appreciation of this fact of prerequisition. To explain this further, 
 we may describe will as involving always a certain reversal of 
 
 ^Ibid., sec. 36. 
 
46 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 brain processes. In the idea of the anticipatory nature of action we 
 have implied the secondary character of all voluntary movement; 
 i. e., no movement can be made voluntarily which has not, at some 
 previous time, been made involuntarily. We may, therefore, say 
 that will (and, indeed, all intellection) depends, on the neural side, 
 upon the reversibility of the processes of association. Suppose that 
 some movement produces regularly some result — that there is a 
 current which passes from a to h. Now, if this current is never 
 checked back in its course, but continues to travel the same road in 
 the same direction, we should never take any cognizance of the 
 connection between a and h; but the emergence of the case into 
 consciousness depends upon the stimulation of the h end of the 
 line first, and the subsequent filling in of the a end ; i. e., upon there 
 being first a vague consciousness of the result, and then a con- 
 sciousness of the execution, or the attempted execution, of the move- 
 ment. Unless a current can flow or press backward to some extent 
 in its path — unless, in other words, it can open up the road and 
 help from in front, and not merely push along from behind — we 
 shall get no conscious notice in the situation. (The condition of 
 such a stimulation from the b end is plainly the interference in the 
 habitual mechanism of some second impulse — a conflict of habits.) 
 Our object in the conscious struggle is, therefore, to fill in the 
 intermediate steps between our present status and the limit set by 
 this interruption of habit, to get the a end of the process sufficiently 
 active so that the motor discharge can take place in the proper 
 direction. In psychical terms, our effort is directed toward the 
 development of the stimulus. Gaining control over a situation or an 
 object consists in arranging an articulate scheme of stimuli which 
 will touch off the discharge into that object. Consciousness in this 
 way absorbs, we might say, the function of the environment. The 
 inadequacy of the original shove is mirrored in consciousness by 
 the evolution of the series of ideational contents ; for in the new 
 adjustment we must link together various partial reactions, and 
 each one of these hitherto mutually independent bits of mechanism 
 has to have its own cue in consciousness. Planning for a future 
 event, then, is a setting up of some system of cues, and the voluntary 
 act is, so to speak, a "put-up job" on the physical organism. It is, 
 then, the prerequisite or the preliminary stimulation which we are 
 practically striving for ; in our search for happiness what we actually 
 work for is not happiness, but the things which bring happiness. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 47 
 
 That is what we mean in saying that in effort we have a desire for 
 more stimulation. 
 
 Ordinarily we say in cases where the struggle has not become 
 extreme that this desire is a striving for more stimulation of a par- 
 ticular kind ; but I think that in cases of extreme effort it also comes 
 out clearly that a desire emerges for more excitation of any kind 
 whatsoever. Not only is irritation of the motor tracts proper to 
 the attainment of the object called for, but irritation of any and 
 every executive in the body. Introspectively, we seem in the case 
 of desperate effort to be trying to throw our whole selves into the 
 performance of the act in question. On the physiological side this 
 tendency would mean a heightening of the general cortical irritabil- 
 ity, and a pervasive excitement of the whole organism. Whether or 
 not we could be justified in holding that such general excitation 
 could be translated or appropriated to some slight degree into a 
 special excitation — i. e., whether it could drain off in any sense from 
 the whole cortex into this specially excited path — is still a question. 
 But it does seem plausible to say that this general irritability tends 
 to shake loose any latent capacity already present in the special motor 
 tract under discussion. In other words, stimulation at large may 
 conceivably add some drop of effectiveness to the special reaction. 
 In support of this view, or at least as lending themselves to this 
 interpretation, we may cite: 
 
 a) The analogous explanation in cases of sense-perception ; i. e., 
 in the experiment with a tuning-fork and a subliminal color stimulus ; 
 when the fork is struck the color flashes into consciousness, and 
 this result is accounted for on the ground that the sound stimulus 
 raises the general cortical excitability. 
 
 h) The therapeutic value of great excitement, apparently of any 
 kind whatsoever ; even a painful shock, in certain cases of insanity. 
 
 c) The fact that athletes always take occasion to work up their 
 general explosiveness before they attempt any special feat. 
 
 d) The craving for any kind of excitement which takes hold of 
 a person when he has undertaken some work too big for him. 
 
 According to this view, then, the presence of irrelevant move- 
 ments and organic disturbances is the record of our attempt to 
 touch off all the motor cues in our power, or to put our whole selves 
 into the solution of our problem. It indicates that, as plan after 
 plan of action has failed and every effort been baffled, our reaction 
 finds itself on the road to become a mere futile emotional convulsion. 
 
48 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 The maximum of stimulation is reached in that act which is hard 
 enough to stir our best effort, and yet not so hard that it balks every 
 special attempt at its accomplishment until the current, dammed 
 back, becomes degenerated and diffused in mere general irritation. 
 In looking about for the particular expression which the lan- 
 guage of effort gives to our conception of value, we naturally enough 
 take to the term " meaning," in the sense of intention, as embodying 
 or standing for that prospective stimulation of which we have been 
 speaking. The thing which we strive toward, our proposal or plan, 
 that which we mean — in a word, our intent — is the exponent of our 
 values. That act is felt as most important which, in the furtherance 
 of a single purpose, necessarily points forward to the richest com- 
 plex of ideational processes or the greatest number of points of 
 stimulation. The meaning of a conscious process is measured by the 
 elaboration of the intention or the proposed system of stimuli which 
 it embodies. That life is most worth while which has the greatest 
 investment in future interests, and which has for its object an 
 amply diversified program. 
 
II. MEANING IN TERMS OF DISCRIMINATION 
 
 In contrast with the voluntaristic method just discussed, we may 
 call the method next to be considered one sort of intellectualistic 
 conception — the sort which pronounces the discriminative-asso- 
 ciative character of thought to be its most ultimate aspect. This 
 method, the outcome of the old associationism, finds ample indorse- 
 ment also in more recent theory. Bain : 
 
 The primary, or fundamental attributes of Thought, or Intelligence, have 
 been already stated to be, Consciousness of Difference, Consciousness of 
 Agreement^ and Retentiveness. 
 
 Also: 
 
 The first and most fundamental property is the Consciousness of Differ- 
 ence or Discrimination. To be distinctly affected by two or more successive 
 impressions is the most general fact of consciousness. We are never con- 
 scious at all without experiencing transition or change. (This has been 
 called the law of Relativity.)" 
 
 Sully: 
 
 This discernment of difference is the most fundamental and constant 
 element in all intellection. It is known as Discrimination." 
 
 Spencer : 
 
 From the most complex and most abstract inferences down to the most 
 rudimentary intuitions all intelligence proceeds by the establishment of 
 relations of likeness and unlikeness}^ 
 
 The relation of unlikeness is the primordial one — is the relation involved 
 in every other relation; and can itself be described in no other way than 
 as a change in consciousness." 
 
 The ultimate relation, therefore, is nothing more than a change in the 
 state of consciousness ; and we call it either a relation if unlikeness or a 
 relation of sequence according as we think of the contrast [distrimination]. 
 between the antecedent and consequent states, or of their order [association]." 
 
 Ward says : 
 
 Of the very beginning of this continuum [i. e., the field of consciousness] 
 '^'^The Senses and the Intellect, 3d ed., p. 321. 
 '^''The Human Mind, Vol. I, chap. 4, sec. 3, p. 62. 
 ^^Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, chap. 24, sec. 371. 
 ^Vbid., sec. 373. ^Ibid., chap. 25, sec. 374. 
 
 49 
 
50 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 we can say nothing; absolute beginnings are beyond the pale of science. 
 Actual presentation consists in the continuum being differentiated; and 
 every differentiation constitutes a new presentation. Hence the common- 
 place of psychologists: We are only conscious as we are conscious of 
 change.^ 
 
 Concerning what takes place in the process of discrimination 
 most writers have been content to say that there is an analysis 
 or singling out of parts in a whole: discrimination, which is used 
 as synonymous with comparison and is understood to imply its 
 complementary aspect association, is said to be a discernment of 
 likeness and difference, a detection of variety in unity and unity in 
 variety. There have, however, been attempts to treat this elementary 
 process in a more elaborate way. Sully, for example, tries to separate 
 discrimination from differentiation in this way: He sets down 
 differentiation as the preparatory stage to discrimination, and would 
 have us suppose that in the merely differentiated phase certain ele- 
 ments have somehow shouldered themselves up into consciousness 
 and are waiting to be known as different. He says : 
 
 A and B must be presented and noted as two distinct impressions before 
 we become conscious of the relation A — B. [And in the footnote:] This 
 applies to all intellection as a relational and relating process. The mental 
 apprehension of a relation of difference, likeness, or succession in time must 
 be carefully distinguished from the experience of having two unlike, like or 
 successive impressions.^^ 
 
 The same thought appears in Wundt: 
 
 The erroneous view still finds frequent acceptance that the existence of 
 psychical elements and compounds is the same as their apperceptive com- 
 parison. The two are to be held completely apart. Of course, there must be 
 agreements and differences in our psychical processes themselves, or we could 
 not perceive them; still the comparing activity by which we perceive is 
 different from the agreements and differences themselves, and additional to 
 them.=^ 
 
 I am inclined to add one more acceptance to the "erroneous view." 
 Surely in psychology, if anywhere, the "being" of a thing is its 
 "being perceived." I cannot imagine what a change in conscious- 
 ness could be which was not also a consciousness of change. The 
 addition of higher processes of comparison simply pushes the ques- 
 
 ''^Art. "Psychology" in Encyclopcedia Britannica, p. 45. 
 ^The Human Mind, Vol. I, chap. 7, sec. 3. 
 ^Outline of Psychology, Part III, sec. 17, par. 6. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 51 
 
 tion back to what we mean by the first primary differentiations, and 
 how the rudimentary agreements and differences got there ; it seems 
 really to be involving the expression of the problem without making 
 any advance toward its solution. As Kiilpe says of sensible dis- 
 crimination : 
 
 The phrase "sensible discrimination" must not be taken to denote a 
 faculty of comparison, in the sense of a peculiar conscious process existing 
 alongside of the various contents. It merely expresses, in the first instance, 
 the general fact that we have different experiences and experience them 
 differently; in other words, it covers the introspection of different contents 
 and the report of their difference." 
 
 Probably the two most notable expositions treating avowedly 
 of the fundamental nature of the discriminative process are those of 
 John Stuart Mill and Professor James. In Mill's experimental 
 methods for the selection of the cause of a given effect we have 
 offered four or five different forms or groups of circumstances in 
 which the same principle may exhibit itself. The selection of the 
 " sole invariable antecedent " is the problem. But when we are told 
 to regard as the cause of a phenomenon that which is always present 
 when the effect is present (and absent when it is absent), we must 
 suppose an already highly analyzed and formulated series of ante- 
 cedents in the situation. We presuppose a definite and recognizable 
 " that which " — some known thing which we are to decide about as 
 being present or absent ; i. e., we must have some pretty definite pre- 
 conception of the possible causes or antecedents before we could 
 know if any one were always present or not. Mill's directions would 
 apply very well in case of a formulated disjunctive question ; i. e., if 
 we knew that the cause were either 5 or C or D, then we could 
 proceed to our observation as to whether B or C or D were the sole 
 invariable antecedent. In many cases, however, the question is left 
 indefinite; it is, "What is the cause of Af not, "Is the cause 
 j5 or C or Df And the experimental methods do not answer how 
 we are to get a definite somewhat out of this indefinite what. 
 
 James attacks the question in the two complementary aspects of 
 "dissociation by varying concomitants " and " association by similar- 
 ity or partial identity." Each of these formulas, in spite of its 
 value from a descriptive point of view, seems inadequate as an 
 explanation, since it is expressed in terms of that which it purports 
 to explain. In the "varying concomitants" the discriminations are 
 
 ^Outline of Psychology, Part I, chap, i, div. 5. 
 
52 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 already given which we wish to know about, the variation is the 
 whole question, and in the association by " partial identity " it is just 
 the nature of that partition and that identity which is the object of 
 our inquiry. 
 
 All statements of discrimination, it seems to me, must be finally 
 forced back to the conclusion that on the psychical side this activity 
 is primarily a consciousness of difference or of change, and that 
 further investigation concerning it must begin with an inquiry about 
 the meaning of the physiological substratum of discrimination. The 
 process which psychically is a consciousness of shift finds its occasion 
 in the almost infinitely varied field of nervous modification, and any 
 profitable account of the discrimination of the normal mind must 
 make some allusion to the genesis and purpose of the differentiation 
 of the sense-organs. This is, of course, merely an iteration of the 
 fact that all psychical process is correlative with nervous process, 
 and that it must find at least a part of its significance in that con- 
 nection. Historically the associative-discriminative aspect of con- 
 sciousness has been the one worked out in a physiological interest, 
 and it is the place, therefore, where the body-mind discussion seems 
 most appropriately to come in. The law of association, as worked 
 out by the old school, particularly in the case of Hartley, Priestly, 
 Lamettrie, and Condillac, was almost completely physiological in its 
 statement. At the present day nearly all psychological accounts of 
 association and habit are carried on frankly in physiological con- 
 ceptions, and in many cases — e. g., explanations of color-contrast — 
 our tendency seems to be to work away, when possible, from the psy- 
 chical to the physiological formulations. It seems peculiarly satis- 
 factory to us when we can definitely locate some mental function — 
 find, say, the occasion for a discrimination in the conformation of 
 an end-organ ; for that seems to be a guarantee of the accessibility of 
 that function to control. As psychologists, then, it is becoming not 
 to reject or neglect the physiological explanations which are of such 
 unquestioned service, but to interpret what from the psychological 
 standpoint we mean by physiology or by the relation of mind and 
 body. 
 
 It seems to me that from the point of view of the experiencing 
 individual his body is nothing more nor less to him than the residu- 
 ary of the habits which are not within the range of present attention. 
 His body is the substance of his possibilities — a name or symbol for 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 53 
 
 certain interests, powers, or perfected techniques. In the Psychology 
 of Aristotle we find: 
 
 The soul .... is the manifestation of the inner meaning of ... . 
 
 a body If, for example, the eye were possessed of life, vision would 
 
 be its soul : because vision is the reality which expresses the idea of the eye. 
 The eye itself, on the other hand, is merely the material substratum for 
 vision; and when this power of vision fails, it no longer remains an eye.^ 
 
 A similar thought is expressed in an article by Professor Bawden: 
 The function of an organ is the meaning of that organ as expressed in 
 
 its activity If I want to understand the meaning of any structure I 
 
 ask how it functions. Function in biology is another word for meaning or 
 significance. It is in this way that the psychical is related to the physical. 
 Matter, so to speak, is the structure of which mind is the function, and the 
 meaning or significance of matter comes out only in its activity, only as it 
 functions.^' 
 
 As Aristotle says, then, the soul is the idea of the body — it is the 
 actualization of that which is potential in the body ; and, as Profes- 
 sor Bawden rephrases it, the psychical is related to the physical as 
 meaning is to fact. Agreeing with this, we may argue also for the 
 corollary, that it is body which gives meaning to mind. Nothing, 
 certainly, is more patent to us than our own mental state, and yet 
 as such, as mere fact, of what use is it? Evolutionists would say 
 that the sole function or purpose of consciousness is to effect an 
 adjustment between the physical organism and its surroundings — 
 that the disturbance of the balance is the only excuse of consciousness 
 for existing. All our educational struggles seem to be directed 
 toward the implanting — i. e., rendering automatic or as purely 
 physiological as possible — certain habits. Our aim is to modify 
 neural structure. Schopenhauer's phrase is apropos when he speaks 
 of the body as the " objectification of the will." 
 
 On such an hypothesis {i. e., that the body is just the support of 
 the technical element in experience) the investigations of phys- 
 iological psychology become an abstraction from the more general 
 study of habit. In the psychical distinction between attention and 
 habit we are wont to call habit the mechanical and attention the 
 purposive aspect of mental life. In our actual living the two are 
 
 ^Wallace's translation, p. 63. 
 
 ""^Journal of Comparative Neurology, March, 1901 ; cf. McDougall, "A Con- 
 tribution toward an Improvement in Psychological Method ; " Mtnd, N. S., 
 Vol. VII. 
 
54 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 forever interlaced, but the physiological standpoint is, to the psy- 
 chical individual, an abstraction which takes the mechanical side as 
 fundamental. As a thing retreats toward the fringe of consciousness, 
 it tends to become immersed in the vague medium of common feeling 
 or to be submerged into mere somatic disposition. Physiology is a 
 statement of that part of the individual experience which has become 
 most submerged and mechanized — a statement about the experience 
 which has ceased to be immediate, and hence has passed out of the 
 field of psychology proper ; it is a science which accepts the mechan- 
 ical point of view as final, and which formulates the mechanical 
 control toward which psychology as a whole is directed. 
 
 If the above view can hope to be explanatory of anything, it 
 is in this way, that it considers the relation of the "physical" 
 stimulus to the "psychical " sensation to be precisely the same as the 
 relation of habit to attention, and it suggests that stimulus versus 
 sensation is but another group of terms expressive of the fact that 
 consciousness is mechanical versus purposive, sensational versus in- 
 tellectual, emotional versus rational, etc. A stimulus is not something 
 which, starting in the physiological mechanism and itself remaining 
 physical, finally hits against a psychical something ; but, just as we 
 say of habit, it does start as physical, but itself becomes psychical ; 
 i. e.; it starts as a possibility and becomes an actuality. The quality 
 of the stimulus corresponds to the content of the habit — the habit 
 content is unknown save as a second habit conflicts with the first, and 
 the stimulus quality is unappreciated except as the stimulus is dis- 
 criminated from others. 
 
 It is of the very first importance, in any discussion of association 
 as fundamental psychic fact, that we should examine what we mean 
 by a psychic bond of union (an association) or by an experience 
 of change or transition (a discrimination). In other words, the 
 problem of conscious continuity seems to be the most suggestive 
 way of reshaping the question of the nature of discrimination- 
 association. Among the many doctrines directly or indirectly ex- 
 pressive of the general fact of the continuity of psychical states we 
 may mention some of the most notable. Leibnitz proposed the theory 
 of the p elites perceptions, which are to be defined as the obscure 
 substratum out of which apperception comes as final issue, or (in the 
 plural) as the weak and in themselves unconscious impulses which, 
 when summed together, give a conscious presentation. The impulse 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 55 
 
 of the monad, Windelband ^^ explains, is directed toward passing 
 from obscure to clear representations. 
 
 To this above-mentioned intensity of the representation Leibnitz applies 
 the mechanical principle of infinitely small impulses : he calls these infinitely 
 small constituent parts of the representative life of the monads petites per- 
 ceptions, .... In the language of today the petites perceptions would be 
 unconscious mental states. 
 
 A very similar conception is that introduced by Fechner in his 
 interpretation of the Weber law, when he says that every least dis- 
 cernible difference within a given situation is equal to every other, 
 or is capable of being a unit of psychic measurement. It should be 
 observed in this connection that the assumption of any sort of 
 measurability among psychic phenomena is, by the nature of measur- 
 ability, an assumption of some sort of psychic constancy. The like- 
 ness of Fechner's conception to that of Leibnitz lies, of course, in 
 the idea that an intense sensation is composed of a number of weak 
 sensations added together. Not very far removed in its implications 
 is the already quoted atomic theory of Miinsterberg, in which the 
 psychic presentation is supposed to be compounded out of forever 
 unknowable atoms or unconscious parts. The conception of uncon- 
 scious ideation rises to a position of great importance in von Hart- 
 mann's Philosophy of the Unconscious, His proposal there, de- 
 veloped gradually throughout the work, of a supportative back- 
 ground of unconscious will and idea as the residuum of all conscious 
 process not immediately in play gives, as Leibnitz had done, a psy- 
 chological name and status to that which others have called either 
 a merely physiological condition or a metaphysical assumption ; but 
 von Hartmann differs from his predecessors by giving to the 
 Unconscious {i. e., to his idea of continuity) an importance equal to 
 that of any clearly differentiated conscious content. Other and per- 
 haps better expressions for the idea of continuity are the phrases 
 "psychic disposition," "temperamental coloring," "stream of con- 
 sciousness," "personal equation," "the self;" all these are phrases 
 meant to be indicative of the shadowy influences which permeate our 
 experience and set in relief the bolder lines of action. 
 
 Conscious continuity, I should say, is consciousness in its emo- 
 tional aspect, and the reasons for characterizing this indefinite sup- 
 portative background as emotional are as follows : 
 
 I. Emotion is conceded to be the conscious concomitant of com- 
 
 " History of Philosophy, Part IV, chap. 2, sec. 11. 
 
56 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 plicated physiological disturbance ; its intimate connection with 
 instinctive and habitual reactions (however that connection is ex- 
 plained) is attested by all theories of emotion. Emotion is the 
 psychic registration of the somatic conditions as a whole; in dis- 
 tinction from ideation, it may be said to be the simultaneous con- 
 sciousness of many different things, and hence to reduce to a 
 homogeneous indeterminate. Spencer's distinction between the 
 physical and the psychical we may appropriate as a distinction 
 between emotion and ideation: 
 
 The two great classes of vital actions called Physiology and Psychology 
 are broadly distinguished in this, that while the one includes both simul- 
 taneous and successive changes the other includes successive changes only. 
 The phenomena forming the subject-matter of Physiology present themselves 
 as an immense number of different series bound up together. Those forming 
 the subject-matter of Psychology present themselves as but a single series." 
 
 The correspondence between emotional capacity and the equip- 
 ment of habit is partly indicated in these points : (a) On the intro- 
 spective side, the consciousness of a well-working habit seems to us 
 to be appropriately designated as a feeling. When a piano player sits 
 down to perform a long and intricate composition, he is conscious 
 to a certain extent of the habit or practiced reactions which will 
 carry him through, but in that consciousness there is no detailed 
 appreciation of the separate finger movements or wrist and arm ten- 
 sions, no recollection of the exact way in which he has played it 
 before, nor of the number of times ; his confidence comes rather 
 from a pure inward conviction; he "feels" that he can do it. 
 (b) The variety and intensity of emotional reactions vary directly 
 with the number and strength of the habits in our mental outfit. In 
 reading a novel or watching a drama we find that those characters 
 most engage our interest and enlist our sympathy and appreciation 
 whose ways and tastes are most like our own ways and tastes, who 
 suggest to us our own habits. In contrasting human beings with 
 the lower animals we are struck by the fact that the animal which 
 has fewer and simpler instincts and reflexes is also more narrowly 
 restricted in the range of his emotions. In adult life, with its more 
 complicated adjustments, emotion finds more frequent occasion than 
 in childhood, and displays finer and more numerous shadings and 
 shif tings, (c) In the most violent emotions those parts of the 
 organism are shaken which perform its most fundamental functions. 
 
 ^^ Spencer, Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Part IV, sec. 177, p. 395. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 57 
 
 In Other words, those structures which represent in the history of 
 the race the first-formed habits — the digestive, circulatory, respira- 
 tory, locomotive organs — are the ones which fill out the "reson- 
 ances ' in our stronger emotions; whereas in the more evanescent 
 flitting emotions only certain nicely balanced individual movements 
 take place. For instance, in cases of unusual effort or extreme 
 anger the breathing, the circulation, the digestive tracts, and the 
 larger muscles all seem to be involved, so that there survives after 
 the emotion in both cases a distinct experience of muscular exhaus- 
 tion and of nausea. On the other hand, many a momentary feeling 
 is recorded only by some nearly unnoticed facial twitch or delicate 
 trilling of the fingers. In this connection we notice that the words 
 in common speech by which we define emotions are derived from 
 the names of the most elemental and earliest-evolved sense-organs ; 
 e. g., from touch, pressure, smell, taste, we get " feeling," " taste," 
 " bitter," " sweet," " disgust," " depression," " exaltation," " elation." 
 In the case of intellectual terms, on the other hand, we find the words 
 used which point to the later-developed habits; e. g., we "see," 
 " perceive," " imagine." Ribot implies that a more prominent part 
 is played in emotion by the " lower " than by the " higher " senses, in 
 his grouping of the lower sensations with emotion : ^® 
 
 The impressions of smell and taste, our visceral sensations, our pleasant, 
 or painful, states, our emotions and passions, like the perceptions of sight 
 and hearing, can leave memories behind them. 
 
 {d) It is pre-eminently in emotion that the tensions which constitute 
 the content of self-feeling come into prominence. 
 
 Emotion, then, as correlative with the substratum of habitual 
 tendency, is the index of conscious possibility. It includes the 
 function of consciousness of self as the residuum of undeveloped 
 intentions and as the guarantee of our identity or continuity in 
 consciousness. It is, therefore, qualified to do duty as the Uncon- 
 scious, the psychic disposition, the fringe of consciousness. 
 
 2. The second reason for identifying continuity with emotion 
 has already been touched on : it is that the idea of continuity is, or 
 involves the idea of, something persistent or homogeneous in all 
 conscious process, something common in all psychic states, and that 
 feeling or the emotional element fits such a description. Feeling is 
 internally homogeneous, and it is present in every conscious process 
 
 ^The Psychology of the Emotions, chap. 11, p. 141. 
 
58 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 from the most convulsive outbreak of passion to the serenest intel- 
 lectual contemplation. 
 
 3. Once more, introspectively, our experience of continuous 
 transition is a feeling. Spencer says : 
 
 It is true that, under an ultimate analysis, what we call a relation proves 
 to be itself a kind of feeling — ^the momentary feeling accompanying the transi- 
 tion from one conspicuous feeling to an adjacent conspicuous feeling.^ 
 
 And James: 
 
 We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but and 
 a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of 
 cold.'' 
 
 Assuming, then, an emotional connotation for the idea of psy- 
 chic continuity, let us proceed to a statement of the act of discrim- 
 ination as a ground-work for the formulation of meaning. The 
 process of discrimination may be described as the passage of con- 
 sciousness between two points which form the limits of a continuum 
 or a gradual shading from the one to the other. Every point in the 
 continuum is to be regarded as a resultant of the two limits, and as 
 itself a possible limit of some other continuum. The two termini are 
 the intellectual phase of the experience, and the intervening con- 
 tinuum is the emotional part. Thus between blue and green there 
 is a possible series of colors merging gradually from the one to the 
 other, and at any point between the two there is a color which is 
 neither blue nor green, and yet which is both — a color which, homo- 
 geneous in itself, may still be analyzed into blue and green. In this 
 particular experience of discriminating blue from green this middle 
 point is the place of neutral excitement — the " sensation of differ- 
 ence " of which James speaks — or an emotion which is indifferently 
 either blue or green ; it is the common element between them. But 
 this experience may itself become the limit of a discrimination or one 
 term (terminus) of an association. In the case of the blue-green 
 there is possible a long series of fine shadings, but there are other 
 experiences in which it is difficult to suppose any such series ; e. g., 
 in discriminating a tone from a color. Even here, however, we must 
 assume at least one common element, one point between the two 
 experiences which contains something of each of them in order 
 
 ^Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, sec. 65, p. 164. 
 
 '^^Psychology, Vol. I ; Calkins, Introduction to Psychology, chap. 10, p. 136, 
 distinguishes a " relational " element in experience, separate, however, not only 
 from sensational elements, but from affective elements as well. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 
 
 UNfVCRSITY j 
 
 /f 
 
 that we ever get from one to the other, or that they may be modifica- 
 tions of the same consciousness. The postulate of continuity in 
 consciousness is this, that the conception of the continuum or the 
 presence of an indifference point between extremes shall hold good 
 of every conscious act whatsoever; that, on the one hand, no 
 two things can exist in consciousness so totally different but that 
 some common ground may be found between them, and, on the other 
 hand, that, even in ^he case of a least discernible difference, no two 
 impressions can be so nearly alike, so close together, but that we 
 can imagine some point between them which shall partake of the 
 nature of each. Supporting this view, we have the common experi- 
 ence in the laboratory of being able to distinguish the fact of 
 difference before v-^ can tell the direction or the sort of difference. 
 We can tell that two tones or weights or colors are different, but 
 cannot tell which is which ; and it is out of this consciousness that 
 the discrimination of the two termini follows. On this general topic 
 of psychic continuity we have also this from Ward : 
 
 At any given moment we have a certain whole of presentations, a "field 
 of consciousness" psychologically one and continuous; at the next we have 
 not an entirely new field, but a partial change within this field.*^ 
 
 And from Stout: 
 
 We have not merely A and then B, but also the passage of A into B; 
 and this passage as such is a modification of consciousness.^ 
 
 We can, if we wish, distinguish emotion as concrete or abstract 
 according to the limits between which it stretches, but this distinc- 
 tion is made from some external point of view, not from that of the 
 process in which the emotion occurs. Thus, in the discrimination of 
 blue from green the feeling involved is the emotion of the blue-green 
 series ; but in comparing a statue with a flower the grounds of 
 likeness and the emotions concerned are much more general. The 
 anger of a civilized man is from this point of view more highly 
 generalized than the anger of the savage ; because in the case of the 
 savage the emotion mediates merely between being hit and hitting 
 back; i. e,, the reaction is well fixed and the series of movements 
 more readily recognized as continuous ; but with the man who checks 
 his first physical responses the emotion of anger may have to mediate 
 between the stimulus and some long-deferred revenge, and, since 
 
 ^^Art. "Psychology" in Encyclopedia Britannica, p. 45. 
 ^Manual of Psychology, Book I, chap. 2, sec. 2. 
 
6o ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 the terms of the retaHation may be greatly varied, the emotion may 
 have to be the sign of any one of a number of possible modes of 
 response. 
 
 If, now, value emerges with the fact of reference, then, in 
 terms of the above discussion, value must arise in the process of 
 
 discrimination, a x b. The meaning of a lies 
 
 in its reference to b — it must be read off in terms of that from 
 which it is discriminated. In perceiving a difference between a and 
 b, in saying that the meaning of a is b, we seem to be conscious in 
 some way or other of two things at the same time. According to the 
 accepted theory of attention, however, only one thing at a time can be 
 within the focus of consciousness, and therefore, although the 
 meaning of a lies in b, and the meaning is felt to be immediately 
 apprehended, yet b cannot be present in its fullest intellectual 
 character. For if the consciousness of value were constituted 
 by b itself, then b and not a would be our mental content; e. g,, 
 we value pleasure the more by reason of contrast with pain, but 
 if our consciousness of this reference to pain were made up of 
 the actual experience of pain, then we should not have pleasure 
 at all, but pain. We may say that this consciousness of meaning 
 is mediated by the intervening neutral state, that the feeling con- 
 tinuum which fringes or borders directly upon a is the symbol 
 of value, or the sign of the other thought which is being referred 
 to in the discrimination. Value is constituted by the act of com- 
 parison, but it is experienced as feeling. 
 
 Let a-b-c-d represent the centers of attention in a train of 
 thought, and 1-2-y^ the feeling substrate. (The ordinates i, 2, 3, 4 
 may vary in their length, but never quite become zero.) In the 
 successive foci of the conscious process a-b-c-d, the meaning of b, 
 say, is constituted by its relation to the train of thought a-c, but 
 in a cross-section view of consciousness at b the content of a is 
 present only as the feeling 2 into which a has subsided. The mean- 
 ing of b, then, is to be measured by the number of trains of thought 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 6i 
 
 to which it refers, or by the richness and variety of its emotional 
 accompaniment. 
 
 The difference between this view of the function of feeling and 
 certain other views may be brought out by turning to the question 
 of the generalization of feeling or emotion. Thus far we have 
 given no definition of the terms " feeling," " emotion," " mood," or 
 "sentiment," but we have been all the while moving toward the 
 idea that any one of these terms (for our present purpose they are 
 not theoretically distinguishable) is the general aspect, or the class 
 mark, of any and every conscious content with which it may be 
 developed. The question is definitely raised by W. Urban ^* and 
 by T. Elsenhans ^^ as to whether there is a process of generalization 
 or abstraction among emotions as there is in case of cognitions: 
 is there a "logic of the emotions," or are there feeling-concepts as 
 there are thought-concepts ? Both answer in the affirmative. Urban 
 alludes to Wundt's "conceptual feeling" and cites Meinong and 
 Ehrenfels as follows : 
 
 Both Meinong and Ehrenfels have pointed out with considerable subtlety 
 that the phenomena of transference of sentiment and its expansion cannot be 
 explained by mere association of ideas. There is an element of judgment 
 in the process which makes it of the nature of a subsumption.*" 
 
 There is this also from Ribot: 
 
 Intellectual complexity involves emotional complexity. If we compare 
 the primary emotions to the simplest perception of sight and hearing, 
 the complex emotions will correspond to the perception of an extensive 
 landscape or a symphony." 
 
 Titchener develops this idea when he says: 
 
 The feeling stands on the same level of mental development as the per- 
 ception or idea.** 
 
 The emotion stands upon the same level of mental development as the 
 simultaneous association of ideas.^ 
 
 The mood stands upon the same level of mental development as the train 
 of ideas." 
 
 '^Psychological Review, Vol. VIII, p. 262, "The Problem of a Logic of the 
 Emotions." 
 
 ^Ueber Verallgemeinerung der GefUhle, noted in Psychological Review, Vol. 
 VIII, p. 310. 
 
 *'0/>. cit., p. 265. 
 
 '^''Psychology of the Emotions, sec. 3. chap. 7. ^Ibid., p. 219- 
 
 ^An Outline of Psychology, chap, 9, p. 214. *^Ibid., p. 233. 
 
62 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 The objection I raise to all these formulations is this, that they 
 seem to treat the emotional processes as co-ordinate with and analo- 
 gous to the cognitive, whereas, feeling and thought being highly anti- 
 thetical, it is against all experience to expect them to behave in like 
 ways. It seems to me that the truth, which such discussions as 
 these referred to have brought out, may be as fully covered and 
 better explained by saying, not that we have abstract emotions like 
 concepts, but that the abstract or conceptual element of any psy- 
 chosis is an emotion. Now, if we wish a differential statement for 
 feeling, emotion, mood, sentiment, we may name them concrete or 
 abstract, simple or complex, according to the cognitive status of the 
 two extremes between which they mediate. Thus a feeling is the 
 continuum between two simple sense-qualities like blue and green, 
 but a mood or sentiment the continuum between, say, the color of 
 the sky and the poem which we have been reading. But, as above 
 stated, that difference in feeling emotion, sentiment, and what not 
 is not at all indicative of any difference in their function or essential 
 nature ; it may be used merely as a descriptive convenience. 
 
 To bring out more clearly the emotional nature of the concept: 
 A concept, we may say, is an image which functions for more than 
 one situation, or it is the principle of identity between two or more 
 different things — it is generic. As a concept becomes more gener- 
 alized and abstract — i. e., as it increases in extension — its image 
 becomes more purely symbolical, and the number of qualities for 
 which it stands grows less. The number of qualities decreases, but 
 not the fact of quality, so that, as we approach nearer and nearer 
 to the supreme genus, the conceptual content is coming nearer and 
 nearer to a single pure quality — a quality with the minimum of 
 differentiation, but with a maximum of extension or denotation ; a 
 simple quality which has a strength of designation or " thereness ; " 
 a vivid insistence that something exists without any suggestion as 
 to what it is. And this we recognize as the precise character of 
 feeling or emotion. The conceptual consciousness, then, would be 
 quite a different thing from the perceptual or attentive conscious- 
 ness. If the criterion of attention be clearness of mental content, 
 and if we define clearness as "amount of objective detail," then 
 it is obvious that the conceptual consciousness is more germane to 
 the emotional than to the intellectual aspect of psychic activity. Our 
 apprehension by concept is an implicit apprehension ; when we say 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 63 
 
 "animal,'' we are not aware of every animal we ever saw, but we 
 have a feeling of possibilities which could find adequate expression 
 only in a long series of images. As Angell puts it : 
 
 There is often present, as a highly important accompaniment, a definite 
 (quasi-affective) attitude of familiarity with the word, and a feeling of placid 
 conviction that at any moment the explicit associates which give it meaning 
 could, if necessary, be summoned before us.*^ 
 
 What we immediately have is an emotional state — an apprecia- 
 tion without perfect discrimination. The concept is, in terms of the 
 
 former discussion, a x b, the midpoint in the 
 
 continuum between a and h; it is the common ground or the 
 abstraction of the generic element in them.*^ 
 
 Coming now to our restatement of value from the standpoint 
 of discrimination, we must say that the condition of the emergence 
 of meaning and of our apprehension of it is the continuity of con- 
 sciousness. We cannot have two foci of thought at the same time, 
 but an emotion and a thought, the focus and its fringe, can be in 
 the mind at the same time. It is this fact, and the fact that the emo- 
 tion represents or functions vicariously for other absent thoughts, 
 which make possible all substitution or symbolism. Meaning de- 
 pends upon the possibility of making one thing, an emotion, stand 
 for other things, thoughts, i. e., on the possibility of using symbols. 
 We are accustomed to recognize that progress or improved self- 
 control is conditioned by our ability to use symbols for experience — 
 by our ability to condense past experiences into meanings which 
 are carried along in consciousness as feelings, and ability to speculate 
 
 "^Philosophical Review, Vol. VI, p. 649. 
 
 *^This view of the concept as emotional is not unlike the logical status 
 accorded the concept by J. H. Muirhead in "The Place of the Concept in Logical 
 Doctrine," Mind, N. S., Vol. V, pp. SiS, 521. He says: "We say we have a 
 'notion' of a thing though we cannot describe it, that it is undescribable or (after 
 we have heard it described) that we have a better notion of it than before. 
 .... What popular language calls notions, I should propose, following Hegel, to 
 caH'concept.' .... According to the traditional use the concept is the group 
 of predicates by which we have defined a thing. The concept of gold is hard, 
 yellow, bright, untarnishable metal. According to the use here suggested, it is 
 just the opposite ; it is the element in our consciousness of the thing which is 
 not yet defined by any predicates but remains over after we have done our best, 
 as an unmanageable surd." And further: "The concept for which I contend is 
 a region of experience into which identity and difference (and therefore judg- 
 ment) have not yet penetrated." 
 
64 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 by signs upon future events. The anticipatory excitement which 
 we call volition is constituted by our preconceptions of what our 
 experience is going to be, and this foresight of the " sort " of jexperi- 
 ence we are to have is a conceptual readiness for it, largely emotional 
 in its nature. Or, to put the same thing in another way, the final act 
 of choice in a complex situation is obviously the final merging of 
 all efforts into one particular possibility of action ; it is a classifica- 
 tion of our experience under one genus — a kind of handing it over 
 to some one symbol which is to represent it all. 
 
 A practical illustration of this vicarious functioning of the 
 emotion is to be found in the superior effectiveness of the so-called 
 intuitional method of arriving at conclusions. The "emotional 
 method" of approaching a subject is like the artist's procedure in 
 painting his picture. He does not begin on some one detail, finish 
 that, and then go on to another, but he blocks out the whole picture 
 with rough masses of color and then elaborates the ground-work 
 into the finished product. In a like manner, the apprehension of a 
 situation takes first the form of vague masses of feeling, which, if 
 we persist, may become a finished perception of details. Emotional 
 proficiency consists in a sensibility to fine shades of experience, 
 together with a propensity for translating all situations into emo- 
 tional terms; it means, in other words, a rapid tendency toward 
 assimilation and toward automatisms. This is the type of response 
 which Professor James, with unintended gallantry, calls the " femi- 
 nine method of direct intuition." *^ If it be true that women are more 
 deeply and more delicately emotional than men, then it must be al- 
 lowed that the woman has one immense advantage in intellectual 
 equipment. Her emotional responsiveness means that she is quicker 
 in perception and more rapid in adjustment, just because she is a 
 readier symbolist — willing to take a vague impression as final, if it 
 will serv^e the purpose. Professor James approves of intuition as 
 a social and domestic convenience, but he appears to believe that if 
 the woman would be truly intellectual, she must resort to the lum- 
 bersome ponderosity of the " masculine method " : " Behemoth 
 prescribing rules of locomotion to the swan ! " 
 
 The fact is that the ability to deal with a situation in emotional 
 terms is not limited by sex nor is it a thing which functions only 
 occasionally and in a few special circumstances; but it is rather 
 
 *^Psychology, Vol. II, pp. 368, 369. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 65 
 
 the type of response which all intelligence must aim at, and must 
 attain if there is to be such a thing as progress. As James says in 
 his next paragraph: "The first effect on the mind of growing 
 cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed by a 
 single act."" 
 
 **Ibid., p. 369. 
 
III. MEANING AS DEVELOPED IN REPRESENTATION 
 
 Directly in line with the last point made — namely, that self- 
 control or conscious progress depends upon ability to use symbols — 
 comes the conception that the fundamental nature of consciousness 
 is exemplified in its imitative or iterative function, in its aspect as 
 self -representative series or system. Imitation is defined as "any 
 
 repetition in thought, action, or both, which reinstates a copy 
 
 It includes what is called ' self-imitation,' or repetition of what is in 
 
 one's own mind This usage is that of Tarde, James, Royce, 
 
 Baldwin."*^ The basal importance of this concept to Professor 
 Baldwin's mind is signalized by the position given it in Mental 
 Development in the Child and in the Race. As further indicative 
 of the fundamental character of imitation we may quote Professor 
 Royce's words: 
 
 An imitative act appears to me to be not so much an act that, in Pro- 
 fessor Baldwin's phrase, tends to repeat its own stimulus, as an act that tends 
 to reinforce, emphasize, signalize, clarify its complex stimulus by adding 
 thereto other and parallel series of internal or organic stimuli, which by their 
 similarity as a series shall support, while by their differences they shall in 
 general supplement, the stimulus in question. .... Imitation and model are 
 contrasted series of presentations whose relation keeps them apart. And 
 hence it is that, as I myself suppose imitation is, psychologically speaking, 
 the one source of our whole series of conscious distinctions between sub- 
 ject and object, thought and truth, deed and ideal, impulse and conscience, 
 inner world and external world — in short, of all those familiar and funda-, 
 mental rational distinctions which psychology has hitherto found so baffling." 
 
 "The effect of imitation," says Baldwin, "is to make the brain 
 a ' repeating organ,' and the muscular system is the expression and 
 evidence of this fact." *^ But the difficulty with insisting too strongly 
 upon the merely iterative aspect of imitation, with taking it too 
 literally as a circular activity or a reinstatement of a copy, is just 
 this, that, taking imitation as a fundamental act, we shall get into 
 a vortex of perpetual motion ; we must conceive ourselves as repeat- 
 ing our responses and exercising our muscular system forevermore. 
 
 ^Dictionary of Philosophy, "Imitation," definition (2). 
 *^Psychological Review, Vol. II, pp. 229, 230. 
 "Mind, N. S., Vol. Ill, p. 26. 
 
 66 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 67 
 
 In Other words, if it is enough for the imitative act that it imitates, 
 we have then no statement of the incentive nor of the check to 
 activity, nothing to start or to stop the process. The same point 
 obtains against Professor Royce's attempt (to be noticed later) to 
 develop an *' infinite multitude out of the expression of a single pur- 
 pose." It is perfectly true that many of our purposes do seem to 
 involve an indefinite number of imitative reinstatements. The desire 
 to play a musical composition well means a long series of practice 
 performances ; the wish to remember every detail of a picture in- 
 volves many renewals and repetitions of the stimulus ; and the pur- 
 pose of accurate measurement calls for the performance of the act of 
 measurement to be done over and over again ; the probability being 
 that the greater the number of such results there are averaged 
 together, the nearer true the last result will be. Our formula for 
 reassuring ourselves or other people of the correctness of our 
 information is : "I know that I know." In all these cases, however, 
 if we assume that our purpose is to get absolute knowledge, perfect 
 certainty, or complete accuracy, we shall become involved in an 
 infinite series ; we must go on saying, '' I know that I know that 
 I know " ad infinitum; must keep on forever with our verifications 
 and take measurements to all eternity. The problem is to find 
 something in the self-representative process which shall check the 
 infinite series and permit practical activities. 
 
 Royce's definition of imitation, as quoted above, seems to promise 
 such a check in so far as it permits the response to vary the stimulus ; 
 but this variation is not developed by Royce as a definite limit to the 
 process ; its inhibitory significance is not dwelt upon. The concep- 
 tion of imitation as a reaction which *' reinforces, emphasizes, signal- 
 izes, and clarifies " its stimulus makes that process cover any case of 
 attentive or accommodatory response whatsoever; the imitative act 
 bcomes the acknowledgment and acceptance of a stimulus. But here 
 the question rephrases itself : Is there to be a non-selective imitation 
 of anything that offers, an indiscriminate acceptance of every stimu- 
 lus ? This is the doubtful point in presentational theories of knowl- 
 edge : if the validity of our idea rests upon its literal portrayal of an 
 outside reality ; if the imitation is to be of such a sort that we should 
 always prefer the original if we could get it ; if, in short, the criterion 
 lies outside the subject, then one model is as good as another for 
 that subject, and it is perfectly comprehensible that one should go 
 
68 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 on copying one model or reiterating one idea without end. An 
 external criterion affords no internal limits. The conception to be 
 avoided is that everything given is necessarily accepted. If we take 
 the object of representation or reinstatement to be a literal qualitative 
 reproduction, we are ignoring the fact that in many cases the 
 response to a stimulus is the effort to avert it, and that we desire 
 anything but a reinstatement. We may even say that in practically 
 all cases the response involves a wish for some change in the stimu- 
 lus. If this were not so — if the stimulus as present were agreeable 
 enough — why respond? When we wish for a thing that has been 
 given and then withdrawn, it is the withdrawal which is the irritant 
 to action. I should say that in most, if not all, cases it is the 
 dissatisfaction with the stimulus which is the occasion of the reaction 
 and upon which depends the emergence of representation and value. 
 The tendency toward pure repetition of one's stimulus implies that 
 mere self-maintenance or self-consciousness as such is desirable, that 
 all stimulation is agreeable; it is not self-consciousness of any sort 
 that we are usually seeking, but self-consciousness controlled. Self- 
 control demands that there be a vigorous want of some kind (in 
 practical life those people are most unmanageable whose wants are 
 hardest to discover), and value depends in large measure upon 
 aversion. It is only when a mental content is discriminated away 
 from something else, when it stands in place of something different, 
 when it permits us to change or avoid something in the original 
 situation, that the content has any point or meaning as a repre- 
 sentation. 
 
 To bring this out we may consider as possible two conceptions 
 of representation, or two types of substitution. In the first instance, 
 one may be supposed to aim at a perfect identity in the contents of 
 the model and the copy — a case which might occur, if anywhere, in 
 respect to pure pleasure. The form of substitution here would be 
 the form which could obtain between the different "parts" of a 
 homogeneous whole. Jevons gives *^ the example of a small bit of 
 cloth being used as a sample of the whole piece. One part is as 
 good as any other part for immediate experience. The logical 
 expression for the entire system of internal relations is just the law 
 of identity A = A. With such an interpretation representation 
 amounts to nothing but a vain repetition, or rather to a continuous 
 
 *^Principles of Science, chap, i, p. 9. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 69 
 
 affective state, an approach to hypnotic trance, a quaHtatively iden- 
 tical content in which the possibiHty of repetition or variation is 
 purely nominal — an external and arbitrary numerical difference. 
 In the other type of representation we substitute one thing in place 
 of another which may be quite different for immediate experience — 
 as when a red light signifies danger. It is this kind of representation 
 which is apparent in all practical activities: in artistic production 
 it is the ability to present old material in new forms which makes 
 the picture of any worth ; in the economic world it is the possibility 
 of using alternatives — of getting different machinery, using other 
 lands or commodities, employing labor under different contracts — 
 which breaks up the rigidity of industrial methods and allows prog- 
 ress ; in all inventive or constructive thought the mode of working 
 is precisely this testing of alternatives. In this second type of 
 representation we are concerned to find, not simple identities, but 
 the statement of equivalencies in which identities appear amid ever- 
 widening diversities. The representative must be not a sample, but 
 a symbol. The possibility of such vicarious functioning rests upon 
 the fact that one has some end in view ; one thing can be used for 
 another only in certain respects, is as good as another only for 
 specific purposes. Speaking generally, the greater the discrepancy 
 between sign and the thing signified, the more special and limited 
 does the purpose appear to be. To say that glass is equal to wood 
 is quite unintelligible apart from the purpose of some mechanical 
 construction in which the one may perform the same function as 
 the other ; the glass is a symbol of a certain thing to be done. This 
 second kind of representation may be called functional, in contrast 
 with the first which was a structural or sensorial kind of reinstate- 
 ment. The second kind, which aims merely to continue the effect of 
 the stimulus, includes, therefore, all the desirable types of response to 
 the stimulus. Among these we may mention three important cases 
 to which the accurate structural reinstatement does not do justice: 
 ( I ) It is frequently desired to reproduce the stimulus in an enlarged 
 and embellished form, and here the imitator wishes to include 
 everythmg in the original situation, but also to add to it. (2) It is 
 sometimes convenient to reinstate the stimulus only in brief; we 
 wish the essentials, but we must have them in telegraphic form. 
 (3) Finally we have the case in which we take note of the stimulus 
 only to guard against it, and here our object is to prevent any 
 
70 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 Structural imitation at all, but we represent the stimulus in the series 
 of averting movements which it determines. 
 
 In Professor Royce's example of a thought which develops its 
 own diversity we find the conception of '' the development of an 
 Infinite Multitude out of the Expression of a Single Purpose."*® 
 We are told in the example to imagine someone drawing a perfect 
 map of England upon English soil : 
 
 One who, with absolute exactness of perception, looked down upon the 
 ideal map thus constructed, would see lying upon the surface of England, and 
 at a definite place thereon, a representation of England on as large or as 
 small a scale as you please. This representation would agree in content 
 with the real England, but at a place within this map of England, there would 
 appear, upon a small scale, a new representation, which would repeat in the 
 outer portions the details of the former, but upon a smaller space, would be 
 seen to contain yet another England, and this another, and so on without 
 limit. 
 
 Without attempting to say anything about the logical or meta- 
 physical merits of the case, let us see what the psychological impli- 
 cations must be in such an expression of a purpose. The conception 
 of representation as a statement of equivalencies — not of pure 
 identities — in the fulfilment of a purpose ought to be the check 
 which will prevent such representation from becoming an infinite 
 series. As Royce says : '' This series, if real, is inexhaustible by 
 anv process of successive procedure, whereby one passes from one 
 member to the next." ^^ But this must be just the standpoint which 
 psychology takes, namely, that for the experiencing individual the 
 fulfilment of a purpose is a '* process of successive procedure, 
 whereby one passes from one member to the next." The very nature 
 of purpose is of something being completed in time. If we con- 
 ceive of the infinite series of maps as being complete all at the same 
 instant, then there is no room for the idea of progress or of purpose 
 — it is all there, with nothing to be done. If, however, we suppose 
 one map to be made after another, then the process must continue 
 forever; and in this case we should have no progress at all in 
 representation, inasmuch as there would never be any completed 
 copy to represent ; i. e., the first map would not be perfect until the 
 last one was done, and besides every stroke of the pencil would leave 
 as much more thereby to be copied as itself had just succeeded in 
 
 *^The World and the Individual, Supplementary Essay, pp. 502 ff. 
 "^Ibid., p. 581. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 71 
 
 copying, and we should not be approaching an end at all. A pur- 
 pose, in other words, presupposes a diminishing task ahead of it. 
 Our ability to inhibit this infinite process, to get a purpose finally 
 expressed, or to stop somewhere is conditioned by the existence of 
 some counter-impulse, by the fact that we already have some object 
 or last term in view. Psychologically, therefore, we never should 
 have a purpose expressed as in Royce's illustration. In the example 
 as given we have one unique member in the infinite series — the 
 first one; every member of the series has the double character of 
 imitation and model, of copying and being copied ; but the first one 
 is unique in that it does not copy a copy, but represents England 
 itself — copies a " reality." But in any real purpose we must have, 
 not only a unique beginning, but also a unique end ; we demand a 
 second limit, or a term which shall be only a copy and not itself 
 a model. To put it in a different way, nobody would ever start out 
 to make a " perfect " map without knowing what it was to be perfect 
 for. We never seek undiflFerentiated perfection. Value could never 
 emerge in the course of the infinite series, because the whole of life 
 would be given in that process, and the end of action must be 
 thought of as eternally attained or as eternally unattainable, and 
 never in actual process of attainment. 
 
 The only infinite aspect of a conscious purpose is the infinite 
 possibility of differentiation, the unlimited variety of choice of 
 means, which is suggested in the emotional stage prior to the articu- 
 lation of the judgment or purpose. The apprehension of infinity is 
 (to the mind innocent of mathematics) an experience m which the 
 consciousness of quality is uppermost. Infinity is for consciousness 
 another name for continuity ; it means infinite possibilities, but not 
 actualities. The only way, then, in which thought can develop its 
 own diversity is not by trying to continue the infinite multitude, but 
 by checking it. In one sense the infinite multitude, or the relational 
 continuum, is given in feeling, and it is the trick of thought to find 
 out the terms of the relation and to limit by one actual performance 
 the infinite possibilities of performance. 
 
 To define representation once more, then, we may quote agam 
 from Royce: 
 
 A thinking process of the type here in question [a recurrent operation of 
 thought] recreates, although in a new instance, the very kind of ideal object 
 that, by means of its process, it proposed to alter into some more acceptable 
 form.'^ 
 
 ^^World and Individual, p. 495. 
 
72 OAT THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 And on a previous page : 
 
 Necessary to the relations of correspondence is only this, that you shall 
 be able to view the two corresponding objects together, in a one-to-one 
 relation, or in some other definite way, and, with some single purpose in 
 mind, shall then be able in some one perhaps very limited aspect to affirm 
 of one of them the same that you at the same time and in the same limited 
 sense, affirm of the other. In consequence, with reference to this one affirma- 
 tion, you could in some specified wise substitute one of them for the other, 
 whole for whole, part for part, element for element." 
 
 It is its character as substitute which constitutes for a conscious 
 content its objective reference and its meaning. The phrase "ob- 
 jective reference" may appear to be susceptible of two different 
 interpretations corresponding to the two above-mentioned types of 
 imitation. In the Lockian type of theory, knowledge seems to be a 
 faint copying of some outside system of real things, the mind is 
 " impressed " by its environment, and the validity of its ideas is 
 conditioned by their close delineation, their point-for-point appeal 
 to those real things, by their success in importing something external 
 into the knowledge-process. The other sort of theory would say 
 that the " objective reference " of a mental content is its facilitation 
 of a purpose, every point in the image being the stimulus to some 
 part of the total activity. The more strenuous our desires, the more 
 complicated and inclusive our purpose, the more distinctly valuable 
 is each representative, each symbol, which keeps that interest 
 summed up and presented before us. These two views appear to be 
 different, for the reason that the former has usually been held to 
 imply that the object is prior to experience, whereas in the latter 
 view the object is regarded as in no wise given to experience, but as 
 the thing to be attained by it. But the two modes of expression seem 
 to be reconciled when we recognize that the faithful mirroring of 
 anything need not mean that we see something beyond our own 
 consciousness ; but it may mean that we steadily contemplate a 
 situation with a future reference in mind, that certain impression.'* 
 dominate our thoughts, but that their objective or control value lies 
 in the fact that they are possible parts of our future experience. The 
 difference in the two views is expressed by Professor Moore as 
 follows : 
 
 But now comes the question with which passive empiricism, sensational 
 and rational, has so much difficulty; viz., the question of a standard for this 
 
 '^^Ibid., p. 302. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 73 
 
 completeness. If further sensation keeps on giving more reality and this 
 stimulates further reconstruction of ideas, at what point is verification 
 reached P*^ 
 
 This question is answered by the theory which says that 
 the ideal construction is not called upon to copy or even represent something 
 given in sensation, because nothing is here given in sensation but the demand 
 for re-coordination. The new ideal construction is trying to "agree with 
 sensation," not in the sense of reproducing something appearing in it, but 
 in the sense of responding to the demand for reorganization. Hence the 
 idea runs no risk in advance of being false to the reality which -^ appears in 
 sensation, because the only reality appearing there is this demand for 
 reorganization.** 
 
 A mental content, then, has objective reference, it is representative 
 or has meaning, because it comes as the fulfilment of desire, it pre- 
 supposes a need — a limit from which — and is itself the limit 
 toward which we move — it answers a demand. 
 
 ^The Functional versus the Representational Theories of Knowledge in 
 Locke's Essay, p. 53. 
 '*rbid., p. 57- 
 
IV. MEANING UNDER THE EXPERIMENTAL METHOD 
 
 I wish to make two points in this discussion : first, that experi- 
 mental procedure is an expression of all which is essential in any 
 form of thinking, and that the experiment is therefore the one pre- 
 eminent method of psychology ; and, second, that the conduct of the 
 experiment gives us the final and most explicit setting for such a 
 statement of value as that indicated in the preceding pages. 
 
 ''Experiment'' Wundt says, "is observation connected with an 
 intentional interference on the part of the observer, in the rise and 
 course of the phenomena observed." ^^ A broader conception is 
 formulated by Professor Cattell : " Common usage,'' he says, 
 " would call an observation made under artificial conditions, as wnth 
 instruments, an experiment." ^^ And he accordingly defines experi- 
 ment as " the alteration of phenomena or of the methods of observing 
 phenomena, in order to obtain knowledge regarding them." If we 
 agree, then, that the experiment is observation under conditions of 
 control, or is experience artificially varied, let us ask what is the 
 range of application to pjychic phenomena which this generally 
 accepted definition allows. It is time to protest, I think, against 
 the narrow limits and the insignificant role which are frequently 
 assigned to the experiment in the development of psychological 
 concepts and explanations. As against Sigwart, who says that 
 "the experimental methods, however much they may contribute to 
 accurac}^ and precision, can yet have only a subordinate importance 
 in this department {i. e., Psychology). They can never give us 
 
 more than fragments " ^^ — Mill and others concurring — I 
 
 should say that, as Wundt maintains, there is no psychic process, 
 however complex, to which it is not applicable, and that all acquire- 
 ment of knowledge is bound to come by a process which may with 
 reason be described as an essentially experimental process. Illus- 
 trative of an indifference toward psychological method in general 
 we find in Ladd: 
 
 In spite of much debate over psychological method, we cannot consider 
 
 ^Outlines of Psychology, Introduction, par. 3, p. 19. 
 
 ^Philosophical Dictionary , art. "Experiment." 
 
 ^'^ Logic (Dendy), Vol. II, p. 406. 
 
 74 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 75 
 
 this question as worthy of detailed consideration. Indeed, we can scarcely 
 speak with propriety of the method in psychology. All means to a more 
 accurate and complete description of conscious states, and to the fuller and 
 more precise knowledge of their external conditions and their intercon- 
 nections, belong to legitimate psychological method.''* 
 
 This is, of course, very true, only what we want to know is not 
 so much whether we are at Hberty to use " all means " in our power, 
 as whether we can discover in those means anything which is essen- 
 tial and common to them all or anything relevant to psychology 
 itself. It is sometimes said that it is not the business of a science to 
 criticise its tools or to investigate the assumptions on which it 
 starts ; but it seems to me that in a sense that may be said to be the 
 whole business of a science. It must start somewhere, and it is 
 this particular " where " which characterizes the science ; the use 
 to which it can put those tools, or the whole superstructure upon 
 the original subsumption is the immanent criticism of the original, 
 accepted categories or tools. What the most general concept of 
 psychology is, or what its principal method of explanation, are 
 identical questions with. What is our one great avenue of psycho- 
 logical information ? It seems to me that there is some community 
 among the various psychological methods, and that the concept of the 
 experiment is the general form of it; and, further, that in psycho- 
 logical treatises the question of the ultimate psychological concept 
 ought to be no mere preliminary flourish, but a matter quite worthy 
 of detailed consideration. 
 
 Under the definition of experiment, as given above, we may con- 
 ceive that in every moment of self-awareness, however vague, there 
 is implicit the germ of experimental procedure. It has become com- 
 mon to recommend to our notice the blindness and fatuity of those 
 who suppose that they shall be able to see without hypotheses and 
 preconceptions to see with, and to point to the ineptitude, or indeed 
 the impossibility, of random, unorganized observation. This is 
 equal to the acknowledgment that in all observation (for psycho- 
 logical science this means introspection or internal observation) there 
 is some degree of preparation or of supervision. Jevons says : " It 
 may readily be seen that we pass upward by insensible gradations 
 from pure observation to determinate experiment." ^® That is to 
 say, we pass from introspection — the most uncontrolled, capricious, 
 
 '^^Outlines of Descriptive Psychology, chap, i, p. 10. 
 ^^Principles of Science, p. 400. 
 
76 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 subjective — to experiment, the most determined and precisely 
 checked source of information. We have said in another connection 
 that all consciousness is, to some extent, self-consciousness, and we 
 may say here that all consciousness is, to some extent, controlled; 
 no mental state is absolutely devoid of the strictures of self-aware- 
 ness and of preparatory tensions. Introspection, which is another 
 name for self-consciousness or internal observation, is said to modify 
 profoundly the conscious contents of which it purposes to give an 
 unbiased report; but I should deny that any such contents exist 
 until they are known, and should say that the only distortion which 
 introspection performs is to raise the subconscious into conscious 
 states. A similar answer, also, may be made to the precisely analo- 
 gous criticism often raised against the psychological experiment, 
 namely, that the experiment shows in a highly artificial light that 
 which it purports to illuminate, inasmuch as laboratory conditions 
 are not normal conditions and the process isolated in the experiment 
 is found normally involved in very complex relations. Scripture 
 says : 
 
 In general, we may say that the act of observing introduces a change in 
 the sum total of experience; the more intentionally and systematically we 
 observe, or the more carefully we experiment and measure, the greater the 
 distortion and change produced.** 
 
 We should certainly agree that the experiment is a distortion in 
 the sense that it is not an exact copy of anything, but should deny 
 that that is an objection. There has been a change in experience, 
 of course, but that was exactly what we were aiming at; it is a, 
 change from the vague to the analyzed, the implicit to the explicit. 
 The object of all reflection, introspection, or scientific endeavor is 
 to isolate and abstract, to analyze the phenomenon under question. 
 The experimentalist does not say that what is true of a phenomenon 
 in isolation is true of it in complication with all other phenomena, 
 but what he attempts to do is to lift the confused complications of 
 everyday life into clearly differentiated complications, taking up 
 one phase at a time, in the hope to get finally a statement of all the 
 "valid possibilities of experience" connected with the problem he 
 has chosen. The experiment is experience, then, in "definite, 
 coherent, heterogeneous " form. The difference between introspec- 
 tion and experimental method is like the difference between savagery 
 and civilization. Eighteenth-century writers were prone to think 
 '^The New Psychology, p. ii. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 77 
 
 that civilization consisted in the presence of a multitude of external 
 contrivances and mechanisms which wasted man's energies without 
 giving him any real rewards — a condition to which the noble 
 simplicity of man's aboriginal estate seemed highly preferable. But 
 we have come to believe that, although the difference between the 
 savage and civilized community may be symbolized by this wealth 
 of external paraphernalia, these media are but the outward and 
 visible signs which point to the inward and spiritual grace of many 
 a precise and delicate adjustment. The watches and chronoscopes, 
 the railroads and telegraphs, stand for an increase in the possibilities 
 of regularity and exactness, and hence of diversity and of advance- 
 ment. The experiment intelligently planned is not an inconsequen- 
 tial plaything, giving at best a few trivial measurements which are 
 of merely passing and curious value ; but it is the expression best 
 available of all the conditions of an adequate observation. The 
 experiment is clarified experience. The criterion of the experiment 
 is not the amount of physical mechanism which it involves (although 
 I should hesitate to say that there could be any control which was 
 perfectly free of reference to physical media), but it is the degree of 
 foresight and of provision made for the outcome. 
 
 Relevant to the fundamental significance of experimental method 
 are the words of Bacon : 
 
 Nee manus nuda nee intelleetus sibi permissus multum valet; instru- 
 mentis et auxiliis res perficitur; quibus opus est non minus ad intellectum 
 quam ad manum. Atque ut instrumenta manus motum aut cient aut regunt 
 ita et instrumenta mentis intellectui aut suggerunt aut cavent.®^ 
 
 The following also from Scripture: 
 
 This principle can be summed up as a deep distrust of man's mind 
 when left to itself, but a firm belief in its reliability when working in true 
 comradeship with carefully determined facts ."^ 
 
 And finally, Wundt's standpoint, that only the experimental method 
 is applicable to the facts of individual psychology, because those 
 facts are processes and not permanent objects, and that this method 
 is feasible throughout, there being no phases of consciousness with 
 which it cannot cope.^^ 
 
 In order to insist more in detail upon the adequacy of the experi- 
 
 ^^Novum Organum, Part II, Aphorism 2. 
 
 "^Op. cit., chap. I, p. 2. 
 
 '^Outlines of Psychology, Introduction, sec. 3. 
 
78 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 ment to serve as a fundamental category, let us see whether it can 
 be made to harmonize the requirements set by the three preceding 
 conceptions of method. For the present, we will keep to the case in 
 which the experimenter is his own subject. It is obvious at once 
 that in such an instance as, say, a reaction experiment there are 
 present all the differentice of the volitional process. There is in the 
 planning and arranging of the mode of procedure an elaborate and 
 detailed anticipation of the experimenter's own reaction experience 
 (the experiment, as I take it, includes the whole process, from the 
 first inchoate projection of a plan to the complete setting up of the 
 apparatus and the final discharge or the observation for which the 
 scheme was planned). The elimination of possible interferences 
 and all the precautions which provide for the greatest concentration 
 of attention — e. g., the warning bells immediately before the stimu- 
 lus is given — assist in the ideational preparation for the act. The 
 reversal in direction, which is characteristic of the voluntary as 
 against involuntary discharge, is presented here in the fact that 
 the whole plan of the experiment has been guided by the nature of 
 the final act to be observed. That final term has been the object 
 toward which all the details have pointed, and the preparation of the 
 details and the conditions has been an elaboration of a scheme of 
 self-stimulation, a definite working out of intention, which we have 
 seen to be the essential nature of foresight. Every true experiment 
 is undertaken in answer to some definite question, takes rise in some 
 necessity; it stands, therefore, as the expression of a purpose in 
 which the reaction of the subject as an analyzed, isolated, clarified 
 expression marks the final step or the goal. Conversely, also, any 
 experiment undertaken without definite purpose or systematic fore- 
 thought runs every risk of proving futile and meaningless. 
 
 In terms of the discriminative process we should recognize that 
 the experiment is an attempt to provide for the detection of finer 
 shades of experience or narrower limits for the continuum of feeling ; 
 for instance, in discrimination within the blue-green series the 
 object of the experiment is so to arrange experience that points 
 which have hitherto been undifferentiated within that continuum 
 shall themselves become the limits. In order at this point to bring 
 the volitional and discriminative statements a little more closely 
 together, it should be pointed out that the physiological occasion of 
 every discrimination is the clash of two or more reflexes. In the 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 79 
 
 color experience, where two shades very nearly alike are presented, 
 the habit of seeing things blue and the habit of seeing things green 
 try each to appropriate the whole experience; so that we get first 
 the one-term emotional state of blue-green in which we cannot say 
 which thing is blue and which green, but in which we nevertheless 
 have the emotional nucleus of the new discriminative adjustment. 
 At length the two definite limits emerge; this one is blue and that 
 one green ; i. e., we have a complete perception of the two habits 
 adjusted in a new relation — as limiting a narrower continuum. In 
 a more complex situation we would say that every such limit is a 
 point in the rearranged plan of action — a member, element, or 
 stimulus in the intention or completed scheme of discharge. 
 
 Experimentation is representative in the sense that it is a ques- 
 tioning, an examination, or an analysis of the stimulus ; it is a rein- 
 statement of the stimulus ( i. e., of the first, inadequate, confused 
 experience) in emphasized and distiaguished form. The experiment 
 effects this reinstatement of original stimuli in that it symbolizes all 
 our feeling, conjecture, and past experience upon the matter in 
 hand. If our purpose is concerned with a tone-experience, then we 
 must bear in mind all the conditions which we have reason to sup- 
 pose are relative to tone-experience. As Jevons says : " The great 
 method of experiment consists in removing, one at a time, each of 
 those conditions which may be imagined to have an influence on 
 the result."^* In eliminating fatigue, practice, and distraction, and 
 in keeping constant the timbre, pitch, intensity, or locality of the 
 sound, as the case demands, we are effecting a functional reinstate- 
 ment of our past experience. The experiment, to be reliable, should 
 stand as a complete summary or symbol of all our information upon 
 that subject. The experiment always has an objective reference, not 
 as a literal copy, but as a symbol of ordinary experience. The per- 
 fectly equipped laboratory would present a one-to-one correspond- 
 ence with the totality of human events ; it would stand for the possi- 
 bility of reproducing in some symbolized form or other every 
 conscious process in the world. To try to imagine the actual per- 
 formance of such exhaustive experimentation, however, would be 
 to involve ourselves again in an infinite series. It could never be our 
 object to submit the whole of experience to experimental procedure, 
 any more than it could be our purpose ever to draw a map of Eng- 
 
 ^Principles of Science, p. 417. 
 
8o ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 land which should be perfect in general or absolutely perfect. The 
 experiment is significant, because it answers a definite need and is 
 undertaken for some specific, concrete purpose. 
 
 That aspect of the experiment which gives it a peculiar prestige 
 in modern estimation is the objective validity with which it invests 
 the subjective experience of an individual. It is the central achieve- 
 ment of modern, as contrasted with ancient, thought that it can give 
 to the subjective individual such an independent or objective status 
 that he may become the instrument of progress to the community. 
 Through the freedom of the individual, society becomes self- 
 regenerative, provides for its own reform. The existence of indi- 
 vidual psychology as a science, the value accorded to particular sub- 
 jective experience, is one piece of evidence to that fact. The experi- 
 ment has become for the modern world what the syllogism was for 
 ancient and mediaeval speculation — the one organ of knowledge 
 in which an almost unlimited confidence is to be placed. The attain- 
 ment, therefore, of psychology to the experimental stage is the final 
 step which gives its results a full objective cogency. It is some- 
 times felt that the comparative method in psychology and the 
 objective method (i. e., the method concerned with investigation of 
 the historic crystallizations of mind^^ in institutions, language, art, 
 religion, etc.) enjoy the special distinction of giving to psychology 
 a more impersonal standpoint and a more objective criterion of mind, 
 because they seem to deal with a more permanent and fixed subject- 
 matter. But this does not in reality distinguish them from the 
 experimental method ; they are rather an extension of that method 
 into special fields. 
 
 We used above, for the sake of simplicity, the case in which 
 the experimenter served as his own subject. I think it can be 
 shown now that the nature of the experiment is not essentially 
 different whether the operator uses himself or another person as 
 his subject, and, further, that this latter possibility — i. e., the 
 possibility of two persons co-operating in the same thought — is 
 the guarantee of the objectivity of the method. For the first point, 
 then, when the operator is laying out a plan in which he is to be his 
 own subject, he views himself in an impersonal way as a member 
 of a class any one of whom might be the subject; he treats his 
 reacting self as wholly outside his stimulating self, and the reacting 
 
 "'See Dewey, Psychology, chap, i, p. ii. 
 
OF T'A 
 
 yWiVERSli ) 
 
 or 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 8i 
 
 self responds as to another person. On the other hand, when the' 
 operator works with another person, he must interpret the actions 
 of his subject in terms of his (the operator's) own consciousness, 
 and the subject must appreciate his own reactions from the oper- 
 ator's point of viw to the extent that he really understands and 
 follows directions. The record of either of the experiments is then 
 a record valid and objective for all persons ; for it may serve both 
 to recall to one person his own former state, and to render possible 
 a like experience in another mind. Its results, in other words, are 
 communicable. If we may state the criterion of the objectivity or 
 the universal validity of a given material to be the possibility which 
 it supports of a division of labor being put upon it — that is, the 
 opportunity which it offers of several minds being consciously em- 
 ployed upon different phases of the same problem — then we may 
 say that the psychological experiment meets the requirement as fully 
 as could be desired. 
 
 In Bradley's logic a suggestive comparison is offered between 
 experiment and inference. The point is ably condensed by Bosan- 
 quet as follows: 
 
 The doctrine which Mr. Bradley founds on his rejection of the syllogism 
 is briefly and roughly this : every inference is a process of construction, fol- 
 lowed by a result in the shape of a perception, etc.*" 
 
 And: 
 
 I wish to examine the idea conveyed by this comparison of inference, or 
 of a stage in inference, to experiment. Supposal is experiment, as I under- 
 stand, because (i) it is an operation upon the real, (2) is not yet judgment, 
 but preparatory to judgment, (3) is voluntary, made for a purpose.*" 
 
 Neglecting the very interesting discussion which Bosanquet enters 
 into, I should go on to say that the experiment corresponds, not 
 to the merely preparatory stage of inference, but to the whole pro- 
 cess — the preparatory stage plus the final perception or intention. 
 The experiment is the observation made under conditions of control. 
 The experiment operates upon the real in that it involves both 
 internal and external changes, and makes intimate use of physical 
 media; it is occupied, as has been said, with construction and 
 preparation for the final judgment, and it is made for a purpose. 
 The experiment, like inference, is voluntary in that we can decide 
 what sort of inference we are going to be concerned about, or what 
 
 '"'^Knowledge and Reality, chap. 6, p. 275. "''Ibid., p. 291. 
 
82 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 type of experiment we are going to make; we can choose, that is 
 to say, the questions we are going to ask; but experiment, again 
 Hke inference, cannot choose what result it will get; the perception 
 and the conclusion are forced upon us. 
 
 In what form, now, does value emerge in a case of experimental 
 procedure? As we have already hinted, the meaning of the con- 
 scious content or modification lies in the amount of preparatory 
 labor which it can command. This preparation of the conditions is 
 the only part of the inferential or inventive process, or of the per- 
 ception of new relations, which we control. New thoughts " occur " 
 to us, inventions "come," we have flashes of insight, we suddenly 
 "find" ourselves seeing or understanding that which before we 
 had not seen or understood. The last term, final perception, seems 
 to be the given thing ; this, then, is the thing to be valuated, and it 
 finds its meaning in the attitude of the mind which receives it. This 
 attitude of readiness may be described as the having at hand 
 numerous well-disciplined habits, responsive to slight suggestions, 
 or as facility in classification. It is a mood which means a certain 
 openness to the unknown — a willingness to submit to some amount 
 of irrelevant impression, to harbor a mass of floating detail, so to 
 speak, for the sake of the chances offered — a habit of thought 
 which is literally mental speculation. This readiness for a new 
 determination when it comes may be called the excitement of the 
 apperceiving mass which is to receive the impression. Meaning, 
 within the psychological experiment, lies in the fact that the setting 
 is prepared for the final term. An experimentum crucis is defined 
 as " an experiment so arranged that its results will be final or crucial 
 in solving a problem." ^^ We may say that every complete experi- 
 ment aims to be a crucial one, and to have its final term invested 
 with all the significance which the complete solution of a problem 
 gives. The apparatus as it appears to the subject, the directions 
 which he receives from the operator, his preliminary performances, 
 are all to him the methods or means to the object ; they are the 
 content to which the new impression or the result finally gives point 
 and direction. Since in the experiment we consciously induce that 
 readiness to receive the final impression, and since we resort to 
 physical symbols with which to do it, we might call the experiment 
 an objectification of the apperceiving mass into which the new thing 
 
 "^Baldwin's Dictionary. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF VALUE 83 
 
 must sink. The experimental conditions, as the results of past 
 experience, are constitutive of the element of familiarity or con- 
 stancy which renders the new thing apprehensible, gives it back- 
 ground. Apart from a knowledge of the conditions under which 
 they are got, the results of an experiment are perfectly worthless, or 
 even untrue. The mere statement of statistics apart from their 
 setting has no more meaning than a sensation stimulus apart from 
 the apperceiving mind. 
 
 By way of conclusion to the several preceding ways of expres- 
 sing self-control and its bearing upon the problem of meaning, we 
 may reiterate the doctrine that the experimental method exhibits 
 in the most adequate and comprehensible form the phenomena of 
 self-control. Experimentation is not constituted by having machines 
 or apparatus about; but when we do find a psychological problem 
 which can be effectively expressed and governed through external, 
 tangible, physical media, we have then found a typical instance of the 
 relation of mind to matter and of how each gives meaning to the 
 other. In the pursuance of any investigation the laboratory sur- 
 roundings give to the psychic act its local habitation or its setting in 
 external reality. Those particular nails and sticks and screens are 
 part of the means or method of its production ; they are its present 
 content or meaning, just as the physical universe in general is the 
 content and meaning, the reference, of our everyday thought. That 
 is the one side, and the other is obvious, namely, that it is the 
 psychic act which gives point or significance to that peculiar aggre- 
 gate of appliances used in the experiment. The most generalized 
 expression of a completed instance of self-control may be given, in 
 the words of Stout, as "a determination of the whole self by the 
 whole self." In order to arrive at this statement, let us begin by say- 
 ing that man's greatest satisfaction, and the final end of all his effort, 
 is to give himself adequate or precise expression. When he can 
 reduce his inmost thoughts and airiest fancies to outward, tangible 
 forms, when every modulation of passion has its differential cor- 
 respondent in some particular turn of the verse, the statue, or the 
 formula (i, e., in some objective medium which in itself is to him 
 indifferent), then he has reached a goal. I say that the medium 
 must be indifferent in itself, for if this were not so, it must 
 suggest some further interest or possibility of action, which in 
 
84 ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEANING 
 
 its turn would require further expression. The highest abstractions 
 (involving the most indifferent symbols) in which men do express 
 themselves are perhaps the equations of mathematics. Hence our 
 final ideal of a completed self-control will take the form of an 
 equation of the self with the self. The self is in complete possession 
 of the self, intention is equal to fulfilment, the ideal to the real, 
 self = self, or a perfect determination of the self by the self. 
 
 In giving ourselves complete expression our procedure may be 
 called a working out of our permanent possibilities of control, or a 
 reduction of our problems to their solution in fixed reflexes or 
 habits. Of value at large let us say that we find its index in the 
 permanent guarantees of control which we find in the world about 
 us. The civil law is valid because we can rely upon it to secure 
 certain uniform results ; the roads and bridges, tables and chairs, 
 which we use have value because they stand for the control of cer- 
 tain reactions, we have well-grounded expectations concerning them. 
 These things do not as they stand constitute our values, for value 
 appears only in the active use of them, but they are our indices. In 
 psychological language the index of values is to be found in the 
 permanent possibilities of control which we call habit or character. 
 The conscious concomitant of character is the recurrent feeling or 
 the dominant emotional tone which pervades one's Avhole activity. 
 Emotion and character are signs or clues to our meanings, signs 
 which are present as well in every trivial commonplace pursuit as in 
 the great cataclysmic emotions which reflect the larger systems of 
 interest and thought running through our whole lives; but these 
 symbols find their application and reference, their meaning emerges, 
 only amid the strains and stresses of unrealized ideals and ungratified 
 wants — in the still open process of gaining self-control. 
 
! RETURN EDUO 
 TO— ► 26001 
 
 VTION- PSYCHOLOGY LIBRARY 1 
 
 rolman Hall 642-4209 
 
 LOAN PERIOD 1 
 
 2 
 
 1 QUARTER inAM 
 
 3 
 
 4 NO TELEPHONE RENEWALS 
 
 6 
 
 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 
 
 2- hour books must be renewed in person 
 
 Return to desk from which borrowed 
 
 DUE AS STAMPED BELOW 
 
 QUARTER LOAN Dl 
 
 E: 
 
 
 -^%! /Sl982 
 
 
 
 SUBIEfiT TO REQM 
 
 1 <t ai 
 
 
 AiMOoRBrr- 
 
 rAM 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 j 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY 
 FORM NO. DDIO, 5m, 3/80 BERKELEY, CA 94720 ^