for them, and something must 'determine' the laws.And when one seriously sits down to consider what sort of a thing one means when one asks for a 'reason,' one is led so far afield, so far away from popular science and its scholasticism, as to see that even such a fact as the existence or non-existence in the universe of 'the idea of a beefsteak' may not be wholly indifferent to other facts in the same universe, and in particular may have something to do with determining the distance at which two molecules in that universe shall lie apart.If this is so, then common-sense, though the intimate nature of causality and of the connection of things in the universe lies beyond her pitifully bounded horizon, has the root and gist of the truth in her hands when she obstinately holds to it that feelings and ideas are causes.However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it.As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure.But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only, as the automatists do, and to say that that causation is unintelligible, whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.One cannot thus blow hot and cold.One must be impartially naif or impartially critical.If the latter, the reconstruction must be thorough-going or 'metaphysical,' and will probably preserve the common-sense view that ideas are forces, in some translated form.But Psychology is a mere natural science, accepting certain terms uncritically as her data, and stopping short of metaphysical reconstruction.Like physics, she must be naïve ; and if she finds that in her very peculiar field of study ideas seem to be causes, she had better continue to talk of them as such.She gains absolutely nothing by a breach with common-sense in this matter, and she loses, to say the least, all naturalness of speech.If feelings are causes, of course their effects must be furtherances and checkings of internal cerebral motions, of which in themselves we are entirely without knowledge.It is probable that for years to come we shall have to infer what happens in the brain either from our feelings or from motor effects which we observe.The organ will be for us a sort of vat in which feelings and motions somehow go on stewing together, and in which innumerable things happen of which we catch but the statistical result.Why, under these circumstances, we should be asked to forswear the language of our childhood I cannot well imagine, especially as it is perfectly compatible with the language of physiology.The feelings can produce nothing absolutely new, they can only reinforce and inhibit reflex currents, and the original organization by physiological forces of these in paths must always be the ground-work of the psychological scheme.
My conclusion is that to urge the automaton-theory upon us, as it is now urged, on purely a priori and quasi -metaphysical grounds, is an unwarrantable impertinence in the present state of psychology.REASONS AGAINST THE THEORY.
But there are much more positive reasons than this why we ought to continue to talk in psychology as if consciousness had causal efficacy.The particulars of the distribution of consciousness, so far as we know them, point to its being efficacious.Let us trace some of them.
It is very generally admitted, though the point would be hard to prove, that consciousness grows the more complex and intense the higher we rise in the animal kingdom.That of a man must exceed that of an oyster.From this point of view it seems an organ, superadded to the other organs which maintain the animal in the struggle for existence; and the presumption of course is that is helps him in some way in the struggle, just as they do.But it cannot help him without being in some way efficacious and influencing the course of his bodily history.If now it could be shown in what way consciousness might help him, and if, moreover, the defects of his other organs (where consciousness is most developed) are such as to make them need just the kind of help that consciousness would bring provided it were efficacious; why, then the plausible infer- ence would be that it came just because of its efficacy - in other words, its efficacy would be inductively proved.
Now the study of the phenomena of consciousness which we shall make throughout the rest of this book will show us that consciousness is at all times primarily a selecting agency. Whether we take it in the lowest sphere of sense, or in the highest of intellection, we find it always doing one thing, choosing one out of several of the materials so presented to its notice, emphasizing and accentuating that and suppressing as far as possible all the rest.The item emphasized is always in close connection with some interest felt by consciousness to be paramount at the time.
