Mind, Self & Society E-Book

George Herbert Mead

• Herausgeber: heptagon
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 703

Beschreibung

George Herbert Mead taught philosophy and social psychology at the University of Chicago for almost 40 years (from 1894 until his death in 1931). During those years he published many articles and book reviews, but not a single book that contains his theories. After his death, some of his former students published his theories in four volumes. The most important volume is called 'Mind, Self & Society' and was edited by Charles W. Morris (1934). This e-book contains the text corpus from this edition, but does not contain the foreword and remarks by Morris.

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Publisher: heptagon Berlin 2013 ISBN: 978-3-934616-58-5 www.heptagon.de

The text was also published on the CD-ROM: »Sociological Classics, Berlin 2000.« The original book is: »George Herbert Mead: Mind, Self & Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist, Chicago 1934.«

PART I. THE POINT OF VIEW OF SOCIAL BEHAVIORISM

1. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND BEHAVIORISM

SOCIAL psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience. The point of approach which I wish to suggest is that of dealing with experience from the standpoint of society, at least from the standpoint of communication as essential to the social order. Social psychology, on this view, presupposes an approach to experience from the standpoint of the individual, but undertakes to determine in particular that which belongs to this experience because the individual himself belongs to a social structure, a social order.

No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology. Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member. If we abandon the conception of a substantive soul endowed with the self of the individual at birth, then we may regard the development of the individual's self, and of his self-consciousness within the field of his experience, as the social psychologist's special interest. There are, then, certain phases of psychology which are interested in studying the relation of the individual organism to the social group to which it belongs, and these phases constitute social psychology as a branch of general psychology. Thus, in the study of the experience and behavior of the individual organism or self in its dependence upon the social group to which it belongs, we find a definition of the field of social psychology.

While minds and selves are essentially social products, products or phenomena of the social side of human experience, the physiological mechanism underlying experience is far from irrelevant – indeed is indispensable – to their genesis and existence; for individual experience and behavior is, of course, physiologically basic to social experience and behavior: the processes and mechanisms of the latter (including those which are essential to the origin and existence of minds and selves) are dependent physiologically upon the processes and mechanisms of the former, and upon the social functioning of these. Individual psychology, nevertheless, definitely abstracts certain factors from the situation with which social psychology deals more nearly in its concrete totality. We shall approach this latter field from a behavioristic point of view.

The common psychological standpoint which is represented by behaviorism is found in John B. Watson. The behaviorism which we shall make use of is more adequate than that of which Watson makes use. Behaviorism in this wider sense is simply an approach to the study of the experience of the individual from the point of view of his conduct, particularly, but not exclusively, the conduct as it is observable by others. Historically, behaviorism entered psychology through the door of animal psychology. There it was found to be impossible to use what is termed introspection. One cannot appeal to the animal's introspection, but must study the animal in terms of external conduct. Earlier animal psychology added an inferential reference to consciousness, and even undertook to find the point in conduct at which consciousness appears. This inference had, perhaps, varying degrees of probability, but it was one which could not be tested experimentally. It could be then simply dropped as far as science was concerned. It was not necessary for the study of the conduct of the individual animal. Having taken that behavioristic standpoint for the lower animals, it was possible to carry it over to the human animal.

There remained, however, the field of introspection, of experiences which are private and belong to the individual himself – experiences commonly called subjective. What was to be done with these? John B. Watson's attitude was that of the Queen in Alice in Wonderland – »Off with their heads!« – there were no such things. There was no imagery, and no consciousness. The field of so-called introspection Watson explained by the use of language symbols. These symbols were not necessarily uttered loudly enough to be heard by others, and often only involved the muscles of the throat without leading to audible speech. That was all there was to thought. One thinks, but one thinks in terms of language. In this way Watson explained the whole field of inner experience in terms of external behavior. Instead of calling such behavior subjective it was regarded as the field of behavior that was accessible only to the individual himself. One could observe his own movements, his own organs of articulation, where other persons could not normally observe them. Certain fields were accessible to the individual alone, but the observation was not different in kind; the difference lay only in the degree of accessibility of others to certain observations. One could be set up in a room by himself and observe something that no one else could observe. What a man observed in the room would be his own experience. Now, in this way something goes on in the throat or the body of the individual which no one else can observe. There are, of course, scientific instruments that can be attached to the throat or the body to reveal the tendency toward movement. There are some movements that are easily observable and others which can be detected only by the individual himself, but there is no qualitative difference in the two cases. It is simply recognized that the apparatus of observation is one that has various degrees of success. That, in brief, is the point of view of Watson's behavioristic psychology. It aims to observe conduct as it takes place, and to utilize that conduct to explain the experience of the individual without bringing in the observation of an inner experience, a consciousness as such.

There was another attack on consciousness, that of William James in his 1904 article entitled, »Does ›Consciousness‹ Exist?« James pointed out that if a person is in a room the objects of the interior can be looked at from two standpoints. The furniture, for instance, may be considered from the standpoint of the person who bought it and used it, from the point of view of its color values which attach to it in the minds of the persons who observe them, its aesthetic value, its economic value, its traditional value. All of these we can speak of in terms of psychology; they will be put into relationship with the experience of the individual. One man puts one value upon it and another gives it another value. But the same objects can be regarded as physical parts of a physical room. What James insisted upon was that the two cases differ only in an arrangement of certain contents in different series. The furniture, the walls, the house itself, belong to one historical series. We speak of the house as having been built, of the furniture as having been made. We put the house and furniture into another series when one comes in and assesses these objects from the point of view of his own experience. He is talking about the same chair, but the chair is for him now a matter of certain contours, certain colors, taken from his own experience. It involves the experience of the individual. Now one can take a cross-section of both of these two orders so that at a certain point there is a meeting of the two series. The statement in terms of consciousness simply means the recognition that the room lies not only in the historical series but also in the experience of the individual. There has been of late in philosophy a growing recognition of the importance of James's insistence that a great deal has been placed in consciousness that must be returned to the so-called objective world.

Psychology itself cannot very well be made a study of the field of consciousness alone; it is necessarily a study of a more extensive field. It is, however, that science which does make use of introspection, in the sense that it looks within the experience of the individual for phenomena not dealt with in any other sciences – phenomena to which only the individual himself has experiential access. That which belongs (experientially) to the individual qua individual, and is accessible to him alone, is certainly included within the field of psychology, whatever else is or is not thus included. This is our best clue in attempting to isolate the field of psychology. The psychological datum is best defined, therefore, in terms of accessibility. That which is accessible, in the experience of the individual, only to the individual himself, is peculiarly psychological.

I want to point out, however, that even when we come to the discussion of such »inner« experience, we can approach it from the point of view of the behaviorist, provided that we do not too narrowly conceive this point of view. What one must insist upon is that objectively observable behavior finds expression within the individual, not in the sense of being in another world, a subjective world, but in the sense of being within his organism. Something of this behavior appears in what we may term »attitudes«, the beginnings of acts. Now, if we come back to such attitudes we find them giving rise to all sorts of responses. The telescope in the hands of a novice is not a telescope in the sense that it is to those on top of Mount Wilson. If we want to trace the responses of the astronomer, we have to go back into his central nervous system, back to a whole series of neurons; and we find something there that answers to the exact way in which the astronomer approaches the instrument under certain conditions. That is the beginning of the act; it is a part of the act. The external act which we do observe is a part of the process which has started within; the values which we say the instrument has are values through the relationship of the object to the person who has that sort of attitude. If a person did not have that particular nervous system, the instrument would be of no value. It would not be a telescope.

In both versions of behaviorism certain characteristics which things have and certain experiences which individuals have can be stated as occurrences inside of an act. But part of the act lies within the organism and only comes to expression later; it is that side of behavior which I think Watson has passed over. There is a field within the act itself which is not external, but which belongs to the act, and there are characteristics of that inner organic conduct which do reveal themselves in our own attitudes, especially those connected with speech. Now, if our behavioristic point of view takes these attitudes into account we find that it can very well cover the field of psychology. In any case, this approach is one of particular importance because it is able to deal with the field of communication in a way which neither Watson nor the introspectionist can do. We want to approach language not from the standpoint of inner meanings to be expressed, but in its larger context of co-operation in the group taking place by means of signals and gestures. Meaning appears within that process. Our behaviorism is a social behaviorism.

Social psychology studies the activity or behavior of the individual as it lies within the social process; the behavior of an individual can be understood only in terms of the behavior of the whole social group of which he is a member, since his individual acts are involved in larger, social acts which go beyond himself and which implicate the other members of that group.

We are not, in social psychology, building up the behavior of the social group in terms of the behavior of the separate individuals composing it; rather, we are starting out with a given social whole of complex group activity, into which we analyze (as elements) the behavior of each of the separate individuals composing it. We attempt, that is, to explain the conduct of the individual in terms of the organized conduct of the social group, rather than to account for the organized conduct of the social group in terms of the conduct of the separate individuals belonging to it. For social psychology, the whole (society) is prior to the part (the individual), not the part to the whole; and the part is explained in terms of the whole, not the whole in terms of the part or parts. The social act is not explained by building it up out of stimulus plus response; it must be taken as a dynamic whole – as something going on – no part of which can be considered or understood by itself – a complex organic process implied by each individual stimulus and response involved in it.

In social psychology we get at the social process from the inside as well as from the outside. Social psychology is behavioristic in the sense of starting off with an observable activity – the dynamic, ongoing social process, and the social acts which are its component elements – to be studied and analyzed scientifically. But it is not behavioristic in the sense of ignoring the inner experience of the individual – the inner phase of that process or activity. On the contrary, it is particularly concerned with the rise of such experience within the process as a whole. It simply works from the outside to the inside instead of from the inside to the outside, so to speak, in its endeavor to determine how such experience does arise within the process. The act, then, and not the tract, is the fundamental datum in both social and individual psychology when behavioristically conceived, and it has both an inner and an outer phase, an internal and an external aspect.

These general remarks have had to do with our point of approach. It is behavioristic, but unlike Watsonian behaviorism it recognizes the parts of the act which do not come to external observation, and it emphasizes the act of the human individual in its natural social situation.

2. THE BEHAVIORISTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF ATTITUDES

The problem that presents itself as crucial for human psychology concerns the field that is opened up by introspection; this field apparently could not be dealt with by a purely objective psychology which only studied conduct as it takes place for the observer. In order that this field could be brought within the range of objective psychology, the behaviorist, such as Watson, did what he could to cut down the field itself, to deny certain phenomena supposed to lie only in that field, such as »consciousness« as distinct from conduct without consciousness. The animal psychologist studied conduct without taking up the question as to whether it was conscious conduct or not. But when we reach the field of human conduct we are in fact able to distinguish reflexes which take place without consciousness. There seems, then, to be a field which the behavioristic psychology cannot reach. The Watsonian behaviorist simply did what he could to minimize this difference.

The field of investigation of the behaviorist has been quite largely that of the young infant, where the methods employed are just the methods of animal psychology. He has endeavored to find out what the processes of behavior are, and to see how the activities of the infant may be used to explain the activities of the adult. It is here that the psychologist brings in the conditioned reflexes. He shows that by a mere association of certain stimuli he can get results which would not follow from these secondary stimuli alone. This conditioning of reflexes can be carried over into other fields, such as those of terror on the part of an infant. He can be made to fear something by associating the object with others producing terror. The same process can be used for explaining more elaborate conduct in which we associate elements with certain events which are not directly connected with them, and by elaborating this conditioning we can, it is believed, explain the more extended processes of reasoning and inference. In this way a method which belongs to objective psychology is carried over into the field which is dealt with ordinarily in terms of introspection. That is, instead of saying we have certain ideas when we have certain experiences, and that these ideas imply something else, we say that a certain experience has taken place at the same time that the first experience has taken place, so that now this secondary experience arouses the response which belongs to the primary experience.

There remain contents, such as those of imagery, which are more resistant to such analysis. What shall we say of responses that do not answer to any given experience? We can say, of course, that they are the results of past experiences. But take the contents themselves, the actual visual imagery that one has: it has outline; it has color; it has values; and other characters which are isolated with more difficulty. Such experience is one which plays a part, and a very large part, in our perception, our conduct; and yet it is an experience which can be revealed only by introspection. The behaviorist has to make a detour about this type of experience if he is going to stick to the Watsonian type of behavioristic psychology.

Such a behaviorist desires to analyze the act, whether individual or social, without any specific reference to consciousness whatever and without any attempt to locate it either within the field of organic behavior or within the larger field of reality in general. He wishes, in short, to deny its existence as such altogether. Watson insists that objectively observable behavior completely and exclusively constitutes the field of scientific psychology, individual and social. He pushes aside as erroneous the idea of »mind« or »consciousness«, and attempts to reduce all »mental« phenomena to conditioned reflexes and similar physiological mechanisms – in short, to purely behavioristic terms. This attempt, of course, is misguided and unsuccessful, for the existence as such of mind or consciousness, in some sense or other, must be admitted – the denial of it leads inevitably to obvious absurdities. But though it is impossible to reduce mind or consciousness to purely behavioristic terms – in the sense of thus explaining it away and denying its existence as such entirely – yet it is not impossible to explain it in these terms, and to do so without explaining it away, or denying its existence as such, in the least. Watson apparently assumes that to deny the existence of mind or consciousness as a psychical stuff, substance, or entity is to deny its existence altogether, and that a naturalistic or behavioristic account of it as such is out of the question. But, on the contrary, we may deny its existence as a psychical entity without denying its existence in some other sense at all; and if we then conceive it functionally, and as a natural rather than a transcendental phenomenon, it becomes possible to deal with it in behavioristic terms. In short, it is not possible to deny the existence of mind or consciousness or mental phenomena, nor is it desirable to do so; but it is possible to account for them or deal with them in behavioristic terms which are precisely similar to those which Watson employs in dealing with non-mental psychological phenomena (phenomena which, according to his definition of the field of psychology, are all the psychological phenomena there are). Mental behavior is not reducible to non-mental behavior. But mental behavior or phenomena can be explained in terms of non-mental behavior or phenomena, as arising out of, and as resulting from complications in, the latter.

If we are going to use behavioristic psychology to explain conscious behavior we have to be much more thoroughgoing in our statement of the act than Watson was. We have to take into account not merely the complete or social act, but what goes on in the central nervous system as the beginning of the individual's act and as the organization of the act. Of course, that takes us beyond the field of our direct observation. It takes us beyond that field because we cannot get at the process itself. It is a field that is more or less shut off, seemingly because of the difficulty of the country itself that has to be investigated. The central nervous system is only partly explored. Present results, however, suggest the organization of the act in terms of attitudes. There is an organization of the various parts of the nervous system that are going to be responsible for acts, an organization which represents not only that which is immediately taking place, but also the later stages that are to take place. If one approaches a distant object he approaches it with reference to what he is going to do when he arrives there. If one is approaching a hammer he is muscularly all ready to seize the handle of the hammer. The later stages of the act are present in the early stages – not simply in the sense that they are all ready to go off, but in the sense that they serve to control the process itself. They determine how we are going to approach the object, and the steps in our early manipulation of it. We can recognize, then, that the innervation of certain groups of cells in the central nervous system can already initiate in advance the later stages of the act. The act as a whole can be there determining the process.

We can also recognize in such a general attitude toward an object an attitude that represents alternative responses, such as are involved when we talk about our ideas of an object. A person who is familiar with a horse approaches it as one who is going to ride it. He moves toward the proper side and is ready to swing himself into the saddle. His approach determines the success of the whole process. But the horse is not simply something that must be ridden. It is an animal that must eat, that belongs to somebody. It has certain economic values. The individual is ready to do a whole series of things with reference to the horse, and that readiness is involved in any one of the many phases of the various acts. It is a horse that he is going to mount; it is a biological animal; it is an economic animal. Those characters are involved in the ideas of a horse. If we seek this ideal character of a horse in the central nervous system we would have to find it in all those different parts of the initiated acts. One would have to think of each as associated with the other processes in which he uses the horse, so that no matter what the specific act is, there is a readiness to act in these different ways with reference to the horse. We can find in that sense in the beginning of the act just those characters which we assign to »horse« as an idea, or if you like, as a concept.

If we are going to look for this idea in a central nervous system we have to look for it in the neurons, particularly in the connection between the neurons. There are whole sets of connections there which are of such a character that we are able to act in a number of ways, and these possible actions have their effect on the way in which we do act. For example, if the horse belongs to the rider, the rider acts in a different way than if it belongs to someone else. These other processes involved determine the immediate action itself and particularly the later stages of the act, so that the temporal organization of the act may be present in the immediate process. We do not know how that temporal organization takes place in the central nervous system. In some sense these later processes which are going to take place, and are in some sense started, are worked into the immediate process. A behavioristic treatment, if it is made broad enough, if it makes use of the almost indefinite complexities existing in the nervous system, can adjust itself to many fields which were supposed to be confined to an introspective attack. Of course, a great deal of this must be hypothetical. We learn more day by day of what the connections are, but they are largely hypothetical. However, they can at least be stated in a behavioristic form. We can, therefore, in principle, state behavioristically what we mean by an idea.

3. THE BEHAVIORISTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF GESTURES

The behaviorist of the Watsonian type has been prone to carry his principle of conditioning over into the field of language. By a conditioning of reflexes the horse has become associated with the word »horse«, and this in turn releases the set of responses. We use the word, and the response may be that of mounting, buying, selling, or trading. We are ready to do all these different things. This statement, however, lacks the recognition that these different processes which the behaviorist says are identified with the word »horse« must be worked into the act itself, or the group of acts, which gather about the horse. They go to make up that object in our experience, and the function of the word is a function which has its place in that organization; but it is not, however, the whole process. We find that same sort of organization seemingly extended in the conduct of animals lower than man: those processes which go to make up our objects must be present in the animals themselves who have not the use of language. It is, of course, the great value, or one of the great values, of language that it does give us control over this organization of the act. That is a point we will have to consider in detail later, but it is important to recognize that that to which the word refers is something that can lie in the experience of the individual without the use of language itself. Language does pick out and organize this content in experience. It is an implement for that purpose.

Language is a part of social behavior. There are an indefinite number of signs or symbols which may serve the purpose of what we term »language«. We are reading the meaning of the conduct of other people when, perhaps, they are not aware of it. There is something that reveals to us what the purpose is – just the glance of an eye, the attitude of the body which leads to the response. The communication set up in this way between individuals may be very perfect. Conversation in gestures may be carried on which cannot be translated into articulate speech. This is also true of the lower animals. Dogs approaching each other in hostile attitude carry on such a language of gestures. They walk around each other, growling and snapping, and waiting for the opportunity to attack. Here is a process out of which language might arise, that is, a certain attitude of one individual that calls out a response in the other, which in turn calls out a different approach and a different response, and so on indefinitely. In fact, as we shall see, language does arise in just such a process as that. We are too prone, however, to approach language as the philologist does, from the standpoint of the symbol that is used. We analyze that symbol and find out what is the intent in the mind of the individual in using that symbol, and then attempt to discover whether this symbol calls out this intent in the mind of the other. We assume that there are sets of ideas in persons' minds and that these individuals make use of certain arbitrary symbols which answer to the intent which the individuals had. But if we are going to broaden the concept of language in the sense I have spoken of, so that it takes in the underlying attitudes, we can see that the so-called intent, the idea we are talking about, is one that is involved in the gesture or attitudes which we are using. The offering of a chair to a person who comes into the room is in itself a courteous act. We do not have to assume that a person says to himself that this person wants a chair. The offering of a chair by a person of good manners is something which is almost instinctive. This is the very attitude of the individual. From the point of view of the observer it is a gesture. Such early stages of social acts precede the symbol proper, and deliberate communication.

One of the important documents in the history of modern psychology, particularly for the psychology of language, is Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Here Darwin carried over his theory of evolution into the field of what we call »conscious experience«. What Darwin did was to show that there was a whole series of acts or beginnings of acts which called out certain responses that do express emotions. If one animal attacks another, or is on the point of attacking, or of taking the bone of another dog, that action calls out violent responses which express the anger of the second dog. There we have a set of attitudes which express the emotional attitude of dogs; and we can carry this analysis into the human expression of emotion.

The part of our organism that most vividly and readily expresses the emotions is the face, and Darwin studied the face from this point of view. He took, naturally, the actor, the man whose business it is to express the emotions by the movements of the countenance, and studied the muscles themselves; and in studying them he undertook to show what the value of these changes of the face might be in the actual act. We speak of such expressions as those of anger, and note the way in which the blood may suffuse the face at one stage and then leave it at another. Darwin studied the blood flow in fear and in terror. In these emotions one can find changes taking place in the blood flow itself. These changes have their value. They represent, of course, changes in the circulation of blood in the acts. These actions are generally actions which are rapid and can only take place if the blood is flowing rapidly. There must be a change in the rhythm of circulation and this generally registers itself in the countenance.

Many of our acts of hostility exhibit themselves in attitudes of the face similar to animals which attack with their teeth. The attitude, or in a more generalized term, the gesture, has been preserved after the value of the act has disappeared. The title of Darwin's work indicates his point of approach. He was dealing with these gestures, these attitudes, as expressive of emotions and assuming at the time that the gesture has this function of expressing the emotions. That attitude has been preserved, on this view, after the value of the act has disappeared. This gesture seems to remain for the purpose of expressing emotions. One naturally assumed there an attitude in the experience of animals which answers in some sense to those of the human animal. One could apply the doctrine of the survival of the fittest here also. The implication in this particular case was that these gestures or attitudes had lost the value which they had in the original acts, and yet had survived. The indication was that they had survived because they served certain valuable functions, and the suggestion was that this was the expression of the emotions. That attitude on Darwin's part is reflected in the work of other psychologists, men who were interested, as Darwin was, in the study of the act, in the information that is conveyed by one individual to another by his attitude. They assume that these acts had a reason for existence because they expressed something in the mind of the individual. It is an approach like that of the philologist. They assume that language existed for the purpose of conveying certain ideas, certain feelings.

If one considers, he realizes that this is a false approach. It is quite impossible to assume that animals do undertake to express their emotions. They certainly do not undertake to express them for the benefit of other animals. The most that can be said is that the »expressions« did set free a certain emotion in the individual, an escape valve, so to speak, an emotional attitude which the animal needed, in some sense, to get rid of. They certainly could not exist in these lower animals as means of expressing emotions; we cannot approach them from the point of view of expressing a content in the mind of the individual. We can, of course, see how, for the actor, they may become definitely a language. An actor, for example, may undertake to express his rage, and he may do it by an expression of the countenance, and so convey to the audience the emotion he intended. However, he is not expressing his own emotion but simply conveying to the audience the evidence of anger, and if he is successful he may do it more effectively, as far as the audience is concerned, than a person who is in reality angered. There we have these gestures serving the purpose of expression of the emotions, but we cannot conceive that they arose as such a language in order to express emotion. Language, then, has to be studied from the point of view of the gestural type of conduct within which it existed without being as such a definite language. And we have to see how the communicative function could have arisen out of that prior sort of conduct.

The psychology of Darwin assumed that emotion was a psychological state, a state of consciousness, and that this state could not itself be formulated in terms of the attitude or the behavior of the form. It was assumed that the emotion is there and that certain movements might give evidence of it. The evidence would be received and acted upon by other forms that were fashioned like itself. That is, it presupposed the conscious state over against the biological organism. The conscious state was that which was to be expressed in the gesture or the attitude. It was to be expressed in behavior and to be recognized in some fashion as existent in the consciousness of the other form through this medium of expression. Such was the general psychological attitude which Darwin accepted.

Contrary to Darwin, however, we find no evidence for the prior existence of consciousness as something which brings about behavior on the part of one organism that is of such a sort as to call forth an adjustive response on the part of another organism, without itself being dependent on such behavior. We are rather forced to conclude that consciousness is an emergent from such behavior; that so far from being a precondition of the social act, the social act is the precondition of it. The mechanism of the social act can be traced out without introducing into it the conception of consciousness as a separable element within that act; hence the social act, in its more elementary stages or forms, is possible without, or apart from, some form of consciousness.

4. RISE OF PARALLELISM IN PSYCHOLOGY

The psychology which stresses parallelism has to be distinguished from the psychology which regards certain states of consciousness as existing in the mind of the individual, and succeeding each other in accordance with their own laws of association. The whole doctrine of the psychology which follows Hume was predominantly associationistic. Given certain states of consciousness they were supposed to be held together by other similar elements. Among these elements were those of pleasure and pain. Connected with this atomism of associated conscious states was a psychology of action grounded on the association of pleasure and pain with certain other sensations and experiences. The doctrine of association was the dominant psychological doctrine; it dealt with static rather than dynamic experience.

The pushing of the psychological side further and further into the central nervous system revealed that there were whole series of experiences which might be called sensations and yet were very different from those which could be regarded as static, such as sound, odor, taste, and color. Association belonged to this static world. It was increasingly recognized that there was a large part of our experience which was dynamic. The form of actual doing was present in some of the sensations which answered to the innervation of sensory nerves. There was also the study of those tracts which went down to the viscera, and these certainly were aligned with the emotional experiences. The whole process of the circulation of the blood had been opened up, and the action which involved the sudden change of the circulation of the blood. Fear, hostility, anger, which called for sudden movement, or terror, which deprived the individual of the ability to move, reflected themselves in the visceral conditions; and also had their sensory aspects connected with the central nervous system. There was, then, a type of experience which did not fall into place in a static world. Wilhelm Wundt approached his problem from the standpoint of this sort of physiology which offered a clew by means of which one could follow out these various dynamic experiences into the mechanism of the organism itself.

The treatment which had been given to the central nervous system and its motor and sensory nerves had been that of bringing a nerve current to a central nervous system which was then in turn responsible for a sensation that happened in »consciousness«. To get a complete statement of what we call the act one had to follow up the sensory side and then follow out the motor results that took place because of what happened in consciousness. The physiology to which I have referred in a certain sense separated itself from the field of consciousness. It was difficult to carry over such a mechanism as this into the lower animals. That, at least, took the psychologist out of the field of animal experience. Darwin regarded the animal as that out of which human conduct evolves, as well as the human form, and if this is true then it must be that in some sense consciousness evolves.

The resulting approach is from the point of view of conduct itself, and here the principle of parallelism is brought in. What takes place in consciousness runs parallel with what takes place in the central nervous system. It is necessary to study the content of the form as physiological and also as psychological. The center of consciousness, within which is registered that which affects the sensory nerves and out of which springs the conduct due to sensation and memory images, is to be taken out of the physiological mechanism; and yet one must find a parallel in what takes place in the nervous system for what the physiologist had placed in consciousness as such. What I have referred to in the matter of the emotions seemed to present a physiological counterpart for what takes place in consciousness, a field that seemed to belong peculiarly to the mental side of life. Hate, love, anger – these are seemingly states of mind. How could they be stated in physiological terms? The study of the acts themselves from an evolutionary standpoint, and also the study of the changes that take place in the organism itself when it is under the influence of what we call an emotion, present analogues to these emotional states. One could find something there that definitely answered to the emotions.

The further development of this lead occurred in James's theory of the emotions. Because we run away when we are afraid, and strike when we are angry, we can find something in the physiological organism that answers to fear and to anger. It is an attitude in the organism which answers to these emotional states, especially these visceral conditions to which I have referred, and the sudden changes in the circulation which are found associated with emotions. It becomes possible to relate the psychical conditions with physiological ones. The result was that one could make a much more complete statement of the conduct of the individual in physiological terms, could find a parallel for that which is stated in terms of consciousness in the mechanism of the body and in the operation of that mechanism. Such a psychology was called, naturally enough, a physiological psychology. It was a statement in terms of what went on in the organism of the content with which the psychologist had been dealing. What is there in the act of the animal which answers to these different so-called psychological categories? What is there that answers to the sensations, to the motor responses? When these questions were answered physiologically, they, of course, involved mechanisms located inside of the act, for all that takes place in the body is action. It may be delayed action, but there is nothing there that is itself simply a state, a physiological state that could be compared with a static state. We come then to the sensations and undertake to state them in terms of complete reflex action. We deal with the sensation from the standpoint of the stimulus, and when we come to deal with the various emotional states we deal with them in terms of the preparation for action and the act itself as it is going on. That is, it becomes now essential to relate a set of psychical states with the different phases of the act. Parallelism, then, is an attempt to find analogues between action and experienced contents.

The inevitable result of this analysis was to carry psychology from a static to a dynamic form. It was not simply a question of relating what was found in introspection with what is found in the organism; it became a question of relating together those things which were found in introspection in the dynamic way in which the physiological elements were related to the life of the organism. Psychology became in turn associational, motor, functional, and finally behavioristic.

The historical transformation of psychology was a process which took place gradually. Consciousness was something which could not be simply dispensed with. In early psychology there was a crude attempt to account for consciousness as a certain secretion in the brain, but this was only a ridiculous phase of the transformation. Consciousness was something that was there, but it was something that could be brought into closer and closer relationship with what went on in the body. What went on there had a certain definite order. Everything that took place in the body was part of an act. The earlier conception of the central nervous system assumed that one could locate certain faculties of the mind in certain parts of the brain, but a study of the central nervous system did not reveal any such correlation. It became evident that there were nothing but paths in the central nervous system. The cells of the brain were seen to be parts of the nervous paths provided with material for carrying on the system, but nothing was found there to carry on the preservation of an idea as such. There was nothing in the central nervous system which would enable one to locate a tract given over to abstractions. There was a time when the frontal lobe was regarded as the locus of thought-processes – but the frontal lobe also represents nothing but paths. The paths make very complicated conduct possible, they complicate the act enormously through the mechanism of the brain; but they do not set up any structure which functionally answers to ideas. So the study of consciousness from the standpoint of the organism inevitably led men to look at consciousness itself from the point of view of action.

What, for example, is our experience that answers to clenching of the fist? Physiological psychology followed the action out through the nerves that came from the muscles of the arm and hand. The experience of the act would then be the sensation of what was going on; in consciousness as such there is an awareness of what the organ was doing; there is a parallelism between what goes on in the organ and what takes place in consciousness. This parallelism is, of course, not a complete parallelism. There seems to be consciousness corresponding only to the sensory nerves. We are conscious of some things and not conscious of others, and attention seems to play a very great part in determining which is the case. The parallelism which we carry over does not seem to be complete, but one which occurs only at various points. The thing that is interesting here is that it is the organism that now provides the clew for the analysis. Only portions of the response appear in consciousness as such. The organism has assumed the primary place. Experimental psychology started off from what it could get hold of in the physiological system, and then undertook to find out what in consciousness seemed to answer to it. The scientist felt that he had the same assurance that the physiologist had in identifying these facts in the nervous system, and given those facts he could look into consciousness. It was simpler to start off with the neurosis and then register what was found in the psychosis. Thus, the acceptance of some sort of a parallelism between the contents of consciousness and the physiological processes of the central nervous system led to a conception of those contents dynamically, in terms of acts, instead of statically, in terms of states. In this way the contents of consciousness were approached from below (that is, naturalistically) rather than from above (that is, transcendentally), by a study of the physiological processes of the central nervous system to determine what in the mind answers to the activities of the physiological organism.

There was a question as to the directive centers for unified action. We are apt to think of the central nervous system from the point of view of the telephone board, with calls coming in and responses going out. Certain centers come to be conceived as principal centers. If you go back to the base of the brain, to that portion which is the essence of the central nervous system of lower forms, you do find an organization there which controls in its activity other activities; but when you come to conduct in the human form, you fail to find any such system in which there is a single directive center or group of centers. One can see that the various processes which are involved in running away from danger can be processes which are so interrelated with other activities that the control comes in the organization. One sees the tree as a possible place of escape if a bull is after him; and in general, one sees things which will enable the ongoing activity to be carried out. A varying group of centers may be the determining factor in the whole activity of the individual. That is the concept which has also been carried over into the field of growth. Certain parts of the embryo start growing, and control the action of growth until some other process comes into control. In the cortex, that organ which in some sense answers to human intelligence, we fail to find any exclusive and unvarying control, that is, any evidence of it in the structure of the form itself. In some way we can assume that the cortex acts as a whole, but we cannot come back to certain centers and say that this is where the mind is lodged in thinking and in action. There are an indefinite number of cells connected with each other, and their innervation in some sense leads to a unitary action, but what that unity is in terms of the central nervous system it is almost impossible to state. All the different parts of the cortex seem to be involved in everything that happens. All the stimuli that reach the brain are reflected into all parts of the brain, and yet we do get a unitary action. There remains, then, a problem which is by no means definitely solved: the unity of the action of the central nervous system. Wundt undertook to find certain centers which would be responsible for this sort of unity, but there is nothing in the structure of the brain itself which isolated any parts of the brain as those which direct conduct as a whole. The unity is a unity of integration, though just how this integration takes place in detail we cannot say.

What I wanted to bring out is that the approach to psychological theory from the standpoint of the organism must inevitably be through an emphasis upon conduct, upon the dynamic rather than the static. It is, of course, possible to work in the other direction, that is, to look at experience from the point of view of the psychologist and to draw conclusions as to what must go on in the central nervous system. It is possible to recognize, for example, that we are not simply at the mercy of the different stimuli that play in the central nervous system – the natural view of the physiologist. We can see these organs adjust themselves to different types of stimuli. When air waves come in they affect the particular organs of the ear; when tastes and odors come in the stimuli get to tracts in the proper organs that respond. There may seem to be merely a response of the organism to the stimuli. This position is taken over into the psychology of Spencer, who accepted the Darwinian principle of evolution. The influence of environment is exercised over the form, and the adaptation of the form results from the influences of the environment on it. Spencer conceived of the central nervous system as being continually played upon by stimuli which set up certain paths, so that it was the environment which was fashioning the form.

The phenomena of attention, however, give a different picture of conduct. The human animal is an attentive animal, and his attention may be given to stimuli that are relatively faint. One can pick out sounds at a distance. Our whole intelligent process seems to lie in the attention which is selective of certain types of stimuli. Other stimuli which are bombarding the system are in some fashion shunted off. We give our attention to one particular thing. Not only do we open the door to certain stimuli and close it to others, but our attention is an organizing process as well as a selective process. When giving attention to what we are going to do we are picking out the whole group of stimuli which represent successive activity. Our attention enables us to organize the field in which we are going to act. Here we have the organism as acting and determining its environment. It is not simply a set of passive senses played upon by the stimuli that come from without. The organism goes out and determines what it is going to respond to, and organizes that world. One organism picks out one thing and another picks out a different one, since it is going to act in a different way. Such is an approach to what goes on in the central nervous system which comes to the physiologist from the psychologist.

The physiology of attention is a field which is still a dark continent. The organism itself fits itself to certain types of conduct, and this is of considerable importance in determining what the animal will do. There also lie back in the organism responses, such as those of escape from danger, that represent a peculiar sensitivity. A sound in some other direction would not have the same effect. The eye is very sensitive to motions that lie outside of the field of central vision, even though this area of the retina of the eye is not so sensitive to form and distinctions of color. You look for a book in a library and you carry a sort of mental image of the back of the book; you render yourself sensitive to a certain image of a friend you are going to meet. We can sensitize ourselves to certain types of stimuli and we can build up the sort of action we are going to take. In a chain set of responses the form carries out one instinctive response and then finds itself in the presence of another stimulus, and so forth; but as intelligent beings we build up such organized reactions ourselves. The field of attention is one in which there must be a mechanism in which we can organize the different stimuli with reference to others so that certain responses can take place. The description of this is something we can reach through a study of our own conduct, and at present that is the most that we can say.

Parallelism in psychology was very largely under the control of the study of the central nervous system, and that led on inevitably to functional, motor, voluntaristic, and finally behavioristic psychology. The more one could state of the processes of the individual in terms of the central nervous system, the more one would use the pattern which one found in the central nervous system to interpret conduct. What I am insisting upon is that the patterns which one finds in the central nervous system are patterns of action – not of contemplation, not of appreciation as such, but patterns of action. On the other hand I want to point out that one is able to approach the central nervous system from the psychologist's point of view and set certain problems to the physiologist. How is the physiologist to explain attention? When the physiologist attempts that he is bound to do so in terms of the various paths. If he is going to explain why one path is selected rather than another he must go back to these terms of paths and actions. You cannot set up in the central nervous system a selective principle which can be generally applied throughout; you cannot say there is a specific something in the central nervous system that is related to attention; you cannot say that there is a general power of attention. You have to state it specifically, so that even when you are directing your study of the central nervous system from the point of view of psychology, the type of explanation that you are going to get will have to be in terms of paths which represent action.

Such, in brief, is the history of the appearance of physiological psychology in its parallelistic form, a psychology which had moved to the next stage beyond that of associationalism. Attention is ordinarily stressed in tracing this transition, but the emphasis on attention is one which is derived largely from the study of the organism as such, and it accordingly should be seen in the larger context we have presented.

5. PARALLELISM AND THE AMBIGUITY OF »CONSCIOUSNESS«

»Consciousness« is a very ambiguous term. One often identifies consciousness with a certain something that is there under certain conditions and is not there under other conditions. One approaches this most naturally by assuming that it is something that happens under certain conditions of the organism, something, then, that can be conceived of as running parallel with certain phenomena in the nervous system, but not parallel with others. There seems to be no consciousness that answers to the motor processes as such; the consciousness we have of our action is that which is sensory in type and which answers to the current which comes from the sensory nerves which are affected by the contraction of the muscles. We are not conscious of the actual motor pocesses, but we have a sensory process that runs parallel to it. This is the situation out of which parallelistic psychology arises. It implies on the one side an organism which is a going concern, that seemingly can run without consciousness. A person continues to live when he is under a general anesthetic. Consciousness leaves and consciousness returns, but the organism itself runs on. And the more completely one is able to state the psychological processes in terms of the central nervous system the less important does this consciousness become.

The extreme statement of that sort was given by Hugo Münsterberg. He assumed the organism itself simply ran on, but that answering to certain nervous changes there were conscious states. If one said that he did something, what that amounted to was a consciousness of the movement of the muscles of his body in doing it; the consciousness of the beginning of the act is that which he interpreted as his own volition to act. There is only a consciousness of certain processes that are going on. Parallelism in this extreme form, however, left out of account just such processes as those of attention and the selective character of consciousness. If the physiologist had been able to point out the mechanism of the central nervous system by which we organize our action, there might be still dominant such a statement in terms of this extreme parallelism which would regard the individual as simply conscious of the selection which the organism made. But the process of selection itself is so complex that it becomes almost impossible to state it, especially in such terms. Consciousness as such is peculiarly selective, and the processes of selection, of sensitizing the organ to stimuli, are something very difficult to isolate in the central nervous system. William James points out that the amount of difference which you have to give to a certain stimulus to make it dominant is very slight, and he could conceive of an act of volition which holds on to a certain stimulus, and just gives it a little more emphasis than it otherwise would have. Wundt tried to make parallelism possible by assuming the possibility of certain centers which could perform this selective function. But there was no satisfactory statement of the way in which one could get this interaction between an organism and a consciousness, of the way in which consciousness could act upon a central nervous system. So that we get at this stage of the development of psychology parallelism rather than interactionism.

The parallelistic phase of psychology reveals itself not simply as one of the passing forms which has appeared in psychological investigation, but as one which has served a very evident purpose and met a very evident need.