“Extraordinarily interesting. . . . He is erudite and he is intelligent; he makes the courageous attempt to be at the same time scientific and psychological; and he has the great advantage of having at his disposal a knowledge of semantics. His terms are clear, useful, and conveniently few.”—The Nation.

“What he has done is to make thinking about art clearer, and about life, too. This is precisely the merit of Richards’ remarkable volume.”—Christian Science Monitor.

“The book is compact with stimulating criticism of the great critics of the ages, and with numberless original suggestions on all phases of the creation and appreciation of art.”—Springfield Republican.

“An important contribution to the rehabilitation of English criticism—perhaps, because of its sustained scientific nature, the most important yet made. . . . The principles enunciated are pursued in more particular aspects of literary criticism, always with a clear rest and consequent elucidation. Parallel applications to the arts of painting, sculpture, and music form the subjects of three chapters. Another important chapter deals with the availability of the poet’s experience.”—The Criterion, London.

“Mr. Richards is an entertaining writer, whose work avoids easily the tedium of a technical treatise.”—The British Journal of Psychology.

International Library of Psychology
Philosophy and Scientific Method

Transcriber’s Note:

This eBook was created from a 1928 edition, scans of which are available from the Internet Archive, principlesoflite0000rich_b0n0. Footnotes have been converted to endnotes, with note numbering changed to a dagger (†) for citations and an asterisk (*) for additional commentary. Tildes (~) indicate words that were set in Fraktur script in the original text.

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

PRINCIPLES OF
LITERARY
CRITICISM

BY

I. A. RICHARDS

FELLOW OF
MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

NEW YORK

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
LUND HUMPHRIES
LONDON * BRADFORD

CONTENTS

PREFACE

A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive. This book might better be compared to a loom on which it is proposed to re-weave some ravelled parts of our civilisation. What is most important about it, the interconnection of its several points of view, might have been exhibited, though not with equal clarity, in a pamphlet or in a two-volume work. Few of the separate items are original. One does not expect novel cards when playing so traditional a game; it is the hand which matters. I have chosen to present it here on the smallest scale which would allow me to fit together the various positions adopted into a whole of some firmness. The elaborations and expansions which suggest themselves have been constantly cut short at the point at which I thought that the reader would be able to see for himself how they would continue. The danger of this procedure, which otherwise has great advantages both for him and for me, is that the different parts of a connected account such as this mutually illumine one another. The writer, who has, or should have, the whole position in his mind throughout, may overlook sources of obscurity for the reader, due to the serial form of the exposition. This I have endeavoured to prevent by means of numerous cross-references, forwards and backwards.

But some further explanation of the structure of the book is due to the reader. At sundry points—notably in Chapters VI, VII, and XI-XV—its progress appears to be interrupted by lengthy excursions into theory of value, or into general psychology. These I would have omitted if it had seemed in any way possible to develop the argument of the rest strongly and clearly in their absence. Criticism, as I understand it, is the endeavour to discriminate between experiences and to evaluate them. We cannot do this without some understanding of the nature of experience, or without theories of valuation and communication. Such principles as apply in criticism must be taken from these more fundamental studies. All other critical principles are arbitrary, and the history of the subject is a record of their obstructive influence. The view of value implied throughout is one which must be held in some form by very many persons. Yet I have been unable to discover anywhere any statement of it to which I might satisfactorily refer the reader. I had to make a fairly full statement with applications and illustrations myself. And I had to put in the forefront of the book where, to the more exclusively literary reader, it will appear a dry and uninviting tract to be crossed for problematical advantages. The same remarks apply to the second theoretical expansion, the psychological chapters; they are to the value chapters, I fear, as a Sahara to a Gobi. No other choice seemed open if I did not wish my later, critical, sections to be misunderstood, than to include as a preliminary what amounts to a concise treatise on psychology. For nearly all the topics of psychology are raised at one point or another by criticism, but raised from an angle which ordinary text-books do not contemplate. These two deserts passed, the rest of the book accords, I believe, much more closely with what may be expected of an essay in criticism, although the language in which some of the more obvious remarks are couched may seem unnecessarily repellant. The explanation of much of the turgid uncouthness of its terminology is the desire to link even the commonplaces of criticism to a systematic exposition of psychology. The reader who appreciates the advantages so gained will be forgiving.

I have carefully remembered throughout that I am not writing for specialists alone. The omissions, particularly as to qualifications and reservations, which this fact entails, should in fairness to myself be mentioned.

My book, I fear, will seem to many sadly lacking in the condiments which have come to be expected in writings upon literature. Critics and even theorists in criticism currently assume that their first duty is to be moving, to excite in the mind emotions appropriate to their august subject-matter. This endeavour I have declined. I have used, I believe, few words which I could not define in the actual use which I have made of them, and necessarily such words have little or no emotive power. I have comforted myself with the reflection that there is perhaps something debilitated about a taste for speculation which requires a flavouring of the eternal and the ultimate or even of the literary spices, mystery and profundity. Mixed modes of writing which enlist the reader’s feeling as well as his thinking are becoming dangerous to the modern consciousness with its increasing awareness of the distinction. Thought and feeling are able to mislead one another at present in ways which were hardly possible six centuries ago. We need a spell of purer science and purer poetry before the two can again be mixed, if indeed this will ever become once more desirable. In the Second Edition I added a note on Mr. Eliot’s poetry which will elucidate what I mean here by purity, and some supplementary remarks upon Value; in the Third, a few minor improvements have been made.

It should be borne in mind that the knowledge which the men of a.d. 3000 will possess, if all goes well, may make all our æsthetics, all our psychology, all our modern theory of value, look pitiful. Poor indeed would be the prospect if this were not so. The thought, “What shall we do with the powers, which we are so rapidly developing, and what will happen to us if we cannot learn to guide them in time?” already marks for many people the chief interest of existence. The controversies which the world has known in the past are as nothing to those which are ahead. I would wish this book to be regarded as a contribution towards these choices of the future.

Between the possession of ideas and their application there is a gulf. Every teacher winces when he remembers this. As an attempt to attack this difficulty, I am preparing a companion volume, Practical Criticism. Extremely good and extremely bad poems were put unsigned before a large and able audience. The comments they wrote at leisure give, as it were, a stereoscopic view of the poem and of possible opinion on it. This material when systematically analysed, provides, not only an interesting commentary upon the state of contemporary culture, but a new and powerful educational instrument.

I. A. R.

Cambridge, May, 1928.

CHAPTER I
The Chaos of Critical Theories

O monstrous! but one half-pennyworth of bread to this intolerable
deal of sack!—The First Part of King Henry the Fourth.

The literature of Criticism is not small or negligible, and its chief figures, from Aristotle onwards, have often been among the first intellects of their age. Yet the modern student, surveying the field and noting the simplicity of the task attempted and the fragments of work achieved, may reasonably wonder what has been and is amiss. For the experiences with which criticism is concerned are exceptionally accessible, we have only to open the book, stand before the picture, have the music played, spread out the rug, pour out the wine, and the material upon which the critic works is presently before us. Even too abundantly, in too great fullness perhaps: “More warmth than Adam needs” the critic may complain, echoing Milton’s complaint against the climate of the Garden of Eden; but he is fortunate not to be starved of matter like the investigator of psychoplasm. And the questions which the critic seeks to answer, intricate though they are, do not seem to be extraordinarily difficult. What gives the experience of reading a certain poem its value? How is this experience better than another? Why prefer this picture to that? In which ways should we listen to music so as to receive the most valuable moments? Why is one opinion about works of art not as good as another? These are the fundamental questions which criticism is required to answer, together with such preliminary questions—What is a picture, a poem, a piece of music? How can experiences be compared? What is value?—as may be required in order to approach these questions.

But if we now turn to consider what are the results yielded by the best minds pondering these questions in the light of the eminently accessible experiences provided by the Arts, we discover an almost empty garner. A few conjectures, a supply of admonitions, many acute isolated observations, some brilliant guesses, much oratory and applied poetry, inexhaustible confusion, a sufficiency of dogma, no small stock of prejudices, whimsies and crotchets, a profusion of mysticism, a little genuine speculation, sundry stray inspirations, pregnant hints and random aperçus; of such as these, it may be said without exaggeration, is extant critical theory composed.

A few specimens of the most famous utterances of Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Boileau, Dryden, Addison, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and some more modern authors, will justify this assertion. “All men naturally receive pleasure from imitation.” “Poetry is chiefly conversant about general truth.” “It demands an enthusiasm allied to madness; transported out of ourselves we become what we imagine.” “Beautiful words are the very and peculiar light of the mind.” “Let the work be what you like, provided it has simplicity and unity.” “De Gustibus. . .” “Of writing well right thinking is the beginning and the fount.” “We must never separate ourselves from Nature.” “Delight is the chief, if not the only end; instruction can be admitted but in the second place.” “The pleasures of Fancy are more conducive to health than those of the understanding.” “The spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.” “The best words in the best order.” “The whole soul of man in activity.” “Unity in variety.” “The synthetic and magical power of the imagination.” “The eye on the object.” “The disimprisonment of the soul of fact.” “The identification of content and form.” “A criticism of Life.” “Empathy favourable to our existence.” “Significant form.” “The expression of impressions,” etc. etc.

Such are the pinnacles, the apices of critical theory, the heights gained in the past by the best thinkers in their attempt to reach explanations of the value of the arts. Some of them, many of them indeed, are profitable starting-points for reflection, but neither together, nor singly, nor in any combination do they give what is required. Above them and below them, around and about them can be found other things of value, of service for the appreciation of particular poems and works of art; comment, elucidation, appraisal, much that is fit occupation for the contemplative mind. But apart from hints such as have been cited, no explanations. The central question, What is the value of the arts, why are they worth the devotion of the keenest hours of the best minds, and what is their place in the system of human endeavours? is left almost untouched, although without some clear view it would seem that even the most judicious critic must often lose his sense of position.

But perhaps the literature of Criticism is the wrong place in which to expect such an inquiry. Philosophers, Moralists and Æstheticians are perhaps the competent authorities? There is certainly no lack of treatises upon the Good and the Beautiful, upon Value and upon the Æsthetic State, and the treasures of earnest endeavour lavished upon these topics have not been in vain. Those investigators who have relied upon Reason, upon the Select Intuition and the Ineluctable Argument, who have sat down without the necessary facts to think the matter out, have at least thoroughly discredited a method which apart from their labours would hardly have been suspected of the barrenness it has shown. And those who, following Fechner, have turned instead to the collection and analysis of concrete, particular facts and to empirical research into æsthetics have supplied a host of details to psychology. In recent years especially, much useful information upon the processes which make up the appreciation of works of art has been skilfully elicited. But it is showing no ingratitude to these investigators if we point out certain defects of almost all experimental work on æsthetics, which make their results at best of only indirect service to our wider problems.

The most obvious of these concerns their inevitable choice of experiments. Only the simplest human activities are at present amenable to laboratory methods. Æstheticians have therefore been compelled to begin with as simple forms of ‘æsthetic choice’ as can be devised. In practice, line-lengths and elementary forms, single notes and phrases, single colours and simple collocations, nonsense syllables, metronomic beats, skeleton rhythms and metres and similar simplifications have alone been open to investigation. Such more complex objects as have been examined have yielded very uncertain results, for reasons which anyone who has ever both looked at a picture or read a poem and been inside a psychological laboratory or conversed with a representative psychologist will understand.

The generalisations to be drawn from these simple experiments are, if we do not expect too much, encouraging. Some light upon obscure processes, such as empathy, and upon the intervention of muscular imagery and tendencies to action into the apprehension of shapes and of sequences of sounds which had been supposed to be apprehended by visual or auditory apparatus alone, some interesting facts about the plasticity of rhythm, some approach towards a classification of the different ways in which colours may be regarded, increased recognition of the complexity of even the simplest activities, these and similar results have been well worth the trouble expended. But more important has been the revelation of the great variety in the responses which even the simplest stimuli elicit. Even so unambiguous an object as a plain colour, it has been found, can arouse in different persons and in the same person at different times extremely different states of mind. From this result it may seem no illegitimate step to conclude that highly complex objects, such as pictures, will arouse a still greater variety of responses, a conclusion very awkward for any theory of criticism, since it would appear to decide adversely the preliminary question: “How may experiences be compared?” which any such theory must settle if the more fundamental questions of value are to be satisfactorily approached.

But just here a crucial point arises. There seems to be good reason to suppose that the more simple the object contemplated the more varied the responses will be which can be expected from it. For it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to contemplate a comparatively simple object by itself. Inevitably it is taken by the contemplator into some context, and made part of some larger whole, and under such experimental conditions as have yet been devised it seems not possible to guarantee the kind of context into which it is taken. A comparison with the case of words is instructive. A single word by itself, let us say ‘night,’ will raise almost as many different thoughts and feelings as there are persons who hear it. The range of variety with a single word is very little restricted. But put it into a sentence and the variation is narrowed; put it into the context of a whole passage, and it is still further fixed; and let it occur in such an intricate whole as a poem and the responses of competent readers may have a similarity which only its occurrence in such a whole can secure. The point will arise for discussion when the problem of corroboration for critical judgments is dealt with later (cf. pp. 166, 178, 192). It had to be mentioned here in order to explain why the theory of criticism shows no great dependence upon experimental æsthetics, useful in many respects as these investigations are.

CHAPTER II
The Phantom Æsthetic State

None of his follies will he repent, none will he wish to repeat; no
happier lot can be assigned to man.—Wilhelm Mester.

A more serious defect in æsthetics is the avoidance of considerations as to value. It is true that an ill-judged introduction of value considerations usually leads to disaster, as in Tolstoy’s case. But the fact that some of the experiences to which the arts give rise are valuable and take the form they do because of their value is not irrelevant. Whether this fact is of service in analysis will naturally depend upon the theory of value adopted. But to leave it out of account altogether is to run the risk of missing the clue to the whole matter. And the clue has in fact been missed.

All modern æsthetics rests upon an assumption which has been strangely little discussed, the assumption that there is a distinct kind of mental activity present in what are called æsthetic experiences. Ever since “the first rational word concerning beauty”[†] was spoken by Kant, the attempt to define the ‘judgment of taste’ as concerning pleasure which is disinterested, universal, unintellectual, and not to be confused with the pleasures of sense or of ordinary emotions, in short to make it a thing sui generis, has continued. Thus arises the phantom problem of the æsthetic mode or æsthetic state, a legacy from the days of abstract investigation into the Good, the Beautiful and the True.

The temptation to align this tripartite division with a similar division into Will, Feeling and Thought was irresistible. “All the faculties of the Soul, or capacities, are reducible to three, which do not admit of any further derivation from a common ground: the faculty of knowledge, the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and the faculty of desire”[†] said Kant. Legislative for each of these faculties stood Understanding, Judgment and Reason respectively. “Between the faculties of knowledge and desire stands the feeling of pleasure, just as judgment is intermediate between understanding and reason.” And he went on to discuss æsthetics as appertaining to the province of judgment, the middle one of these three, the first and last having already occupied him in his two other Critiques of Pure and Practical Reason respectively. The effect was virtually to annex æsthetics to Idealism, in which fabric it has ever since continued to serve important purposes.

This accident of formal correspondence has had an influence upon speculation which would be ridiculous if it had not been so disastrous. It is difficult even now to get out of ruts which have been seen to lead nowhere. With the identification of the provinces of Truth and Thought no quarrel arises, and the Will and the Good are, as we shall see, intimately connected, but the attempts to fit Beauty into a neat pigeon-hole with Feeling have led to calamitous distortions. It is now generally abandoned,[*] although echoes of it can be heard everywhere in critical writings. The peculiar use of ‘emotion’ by reviewers, and the prevalence of the phrase ‘æsthetic emotion’ is one of them. In view, then, of the objections to Feeling, something else, some special mode of mental activity, had to be found, to which Beauty could belong. Hence arose the æsthetic mode. Truth was the object of the inquiring activity, of the Intellectual or Theoretical part of the mind, and the Good that of the willing, desiring, practical part; what part could be found for the Beautiful? Some activity that was neither inquisitive nor practical, that did not question and did not seek to use. The result was the æsthetic, the contemplative, activity which is still defined, in most treatments[†], by these negative conditions alone, as that mode of commerce with things which is neither intellectual inquiry into their nature, nor an attempt to make them satisfy our desire. The experiences which arise in contemplating objects of art were then discovered to be describable in some such terms, and system secured a temporary triumph.

It is true that many of these experiences do present peculiarities, both in the intellectual interest which is present and in the way in which the development of desires within them takes place, and these peculiarities—detachment, impersonality, serenity and so forth—are of great interest. They will have to be carefully examined in the sequel.

We shall find that two entirely different sets of characters are involved. They arise from quite different causes but are hard to distinguish introspectively. Taken as marking off a special province for inquiry they are most unsatisfactory. They would yield for our purposes, even if they were not so ambiguous, a diagonal or slant classification. Some of the experiences which most require to be considered would be left out and many which are without importance brought in. To choose the Æsthetic State as the starting-point for an inquiry into the values of the arts is in fact somewhat like choosing ‘rectangular, and red in parts’ as a definition of a picture. We should find ourselves ultimately discussing a different collection of things from those we intended to discuss.

But the problem remains—Is there any such thing as the æsthetic state, or any æsthetic character of experiences which is sui generis? Not many explicit arguments have ever been given for one. Vernon Lee, it is true, in Beauty and Ugliness, p. 10, argues that “a relation entirely sui generis between visible and audible forms and ourselves” can be deduced from the fact “that given proportions, shapes, patterns, compositions have a tendency to recur in art.” How this can be done it is hard to divine. Arsenic tends to recur in murder cases, and tennis in the summer, but no characters or relations sui generis anywhere are thereby proved. Obviously you can only tell whether anything is like or unlike other things by examining it and them, and to notice that one case of it is like another case of it, is not helpful. It may be suspected that where the argument is so confused, the original question was not very clear.

The question is whether a certain kind of experience is or is not like other kinds of experience. Plainly it is a question as to degree of likeness. Be it granted at once, to clear the air, that there are all sorts of experiences involved in the values of the arts, and that attributions of Beauty spring from all sorts of causes. Is there among these one kind of experience as different from experiences which don’t so occur as, say envy is from remembering, or as mathematical calculation is from eating cherries? And what degree of difference would make it specific? Put this way it is plainly not an easy question to answer. These differences, none of them measurable, are of varying degree, and all are hard to estimate. Yet the vast majority of post-Kantian writers, and many before him, have unhesitatingly replied, “Yes! the æsthetic experience is peculiar and specific.” And their grounds, when not merely verbal, have usually been those of direct inspection.

It requires some audacity to run counter to such a tradition, and I do not do so without reflection. Yet, after all, the matter is one of classification, and when so many other divisions in psychology are being questioned and re-organised, this also may be re-examined.

The case for a distinct æsthetic species of experience can take two forms. It may be held that there is some unique kind of mental element which enters into æsthetic experiences and into no others. Thus Mr Clive Bell used to maintain the existence of an unique emotion ‘æsthetic emotion’ as the differentia. But psychology has no place for such an entity. What other will be suggested? Empathy, for example, as Vernon Lee herself insists, enters into innumerable other experiences as well as into æsthetic experiences. I do not think any will be proposed.

Alternatively, the æsthetic experience may contain no unique constituent, and be of the usual stuff but with a special form. This is what it is commonly supposed to be. Now the special form as it is usually described—in terms of disinterestedness, detachment, distance, impersonality, subjective universality, and so forth—this form, I shall try to show later, is sometimes no more than a consequence of the incidence of the experience, a condition or an effect of communication. But sometimes a structure which can be described in the same terms is an essential feature of the experience, the feature in fact upon which its value depends. In other words, at least two different sets of characters, due to different causes, are, in current usage, ambiguously covered by the term ‘æsthetic.’ It is very necessary to distinguish the sense in which merely putting something in a frame or writing it in verse gives it an ‘æsthetic character,’ from a sense in which value is implied. This confusion, together with other confusions,[*] has made the term nearly useless.

The æsthetic mode is generally supposed to be a peculiar way of regarding things which can be exercised, whether the resulting experiences are valuable, disvaluable or indifferent. It is intended to cover the experience of ugliness as well as that of beauty, and also intermediate experiences. What I wish to maintain is that there is no such mode, that the experience of ugliness has nothing in common with that of beauty, which both do not share with innumerable other experiences no one (except Croce; but this qualification is often required) would dream of calling æsthetic. But a narrower sense of æsthetic is also found in which it is confined to experiences of beauty and does imply value. And with regard to this, while admitting that such experiences can be distinguished, I shall be at pains to show that they are closely similar to many other experiences, that they differ chiefly in the connections between their constituents, and that they are only a further development, a finer organisation of ordinary experiences, and not in the least a new and different kind of thing. When we look at a picture, or read a poem, or listen to music, we are not doing something quite unlike what we were doing on our way to the Gallery or when we dressed in the morning. The fashion in which the experience is caused in us is different, and as a rule the experience is more complex and, if we are successful, more unified. But our activity is not of a fundamentally different kind. To assume that it is, puts difficulties in the way of describing and explaining it, which are unnecessary and which no one has yet succeeded in overcoming.

The point here raised, and particularly the distinction between the two quite different sets of characters, on the ground of which an experience may be described as æsthetic or impersonal and disinterested, will become clearer at a later stage.[*]

A further objection to the assumption of a peculiar æsthetic attitude is that it makes smooth the way for the idea of a peculiar æsthetic value, a pure art value. Postulate a peculiar kind: of experience, æsthetic experience, and it is an easy step to the postulation of a peculiar unique value, different in kind and cut off from the other values of ordinary experiences. “To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions.”[†] So runs a recent extreme statement of the Æsthetic Hypothesis, which has had much success. To quote another example less drastic but also carrying with it the implication that æsthetic experiences are sui generis, and their value not of the same kind as other values. “Its nature is to be not a part, nor yet a copy, of the real world (as we commonly understand that phrase), but a world in itself independent, complete, autonomous.”[†]

This view of the arts as providing a private heaven for æsthetes is, as will appear later, a great impediment to the investigation of their value. The effects upon the general attitudes of those who accept it uncritically are also often regrettable; while the effects upon literature and the arts have been noticeable, in a narrowing and restriction of the interests active, in preciousness, artificiality and spurious aloofness.

envisaged as a mystic, ineffable virtue is a close relative of the ‘æsthetic mood’, and may easily be pernicious in its effects, through the habits of mind which, as an idea, it fosters, and to which, as a mystery, it appeals.

CHAPTER III
The Language of Criticism

. . . . I too have seen

My vision of the rainbow Aureoled face
Of her whom men name Beauty: proud, austere:
Divinely fugitive, that haunts the world. . . .

The Dominion of Dreams.

Whatever the disadvantages of modern æsthetics as a basis for a theory of Criticism, the great advance made upon prescientific speculation into the nature of Beauty must also be recognised. That paralysing apparition Beauty, the ineffable, ultimate, unanalysable, simple Idea, has at least been dismissed and with her have departed or will soon depart a flock of equally bogus entities. Poetry and inspiration together, it is true, still dignify respectable quarters with their presence.

“Poetry, like life, is one thing. . . . Essentially a continuous substance or energy, poetry is historically a connected movement, a series of successive integrated manifestations. Each poet, from Homer or the predecessors of Homer to our own day, has been, to some degree and at some point, the voice of the movement and energy of poetry; in him, poetry has for the moment become visible, audible, incarnate; and his extant poems are the record left of that partial and transitory incarnation. . . . The progress of poetry, with its vast power and exalted function, is immortal.”[†]

A diligent search will still find many other Mystic Beings, for the most part of a less august nature, sheltering in verbal thickets. Construction, Design, Form, Rhythm, Expression . . . are more often than not mere vacua in discourse, for which a theory of criticism should provide explainable substitutes.

While current attitudes to language persist, this difficulty of the linguistic phantom must still continue. It has to be recognised that all our natural turns of speech are misleading, especially those we use in discussing works of art. We become so accustomed to them that even when we are aware that they are ellipses, it is easy to forget the fact. And it has been extremely difficult in many cases to discover that any ellipsis is present. We are accustomed to say that a picture is beautiful, instead of saying that it causes an experience in us which is valuable in certain ways.[*] The discovery that the remark, “This is beautiful”, must be turned round and expanded in this way before it is anything but a mere noise signalling the fact that we approve of the picture, was a great and difficult achievement. Even to-day, such is the insidious power of grammatical forms, the belief that there is such a quality or attribute, namely Beauty, which attaches to the things which we rightly call beautiful, is probably inevitable for all reflective persons at a certain stage of their mental development.

Even among those who have escaped from this delusion and are well aware that we continually talk as though things possess qualities, when what we ought to say is that they cause effects in us of one kind or another, the fallacy of ‘projecting’ the effect and making it a quality of its cause tends to recur. When it does so it gives a peculiar obliquity to thought and although few competent persons are nowadays so deluded as actually to hold the mystical view that there is a quality Beauty which inheres or attaches to external objects, yet throughout all the discussion of works of art the drag exercised by language towards this view can be felt. It perceptibly increases the difficulty of innumerable problems and we shall have constantly to allow for it. Such terms as ‘construction’, ‘form’, ‘balance’, ‘composition’, ‘design’, ‘unity’, ‘expression’, for all the arts; as ‘depth’, ‘movement’, ‘texture’, ‘solidity’, in the criticism of painting; as ‘rhythm’, ‘stress’, ‘plot’, ‘character’, in literary criticism; as ‘harmony’, ‘atmosphere’, ‘development’, in music, are instances. All these terms are currently used as though they stood for qualities inherent in things outside the mind, as a painting, in the sense of an assemblage of pigments, is undoubtedly outside the mind. Even the difficulty of discovering, in the case of poetry, what thing other than print and paper is there for these alleged qualities to belong to, has not checked the tendency.

But indeed language has succeeded until recently in hiding from us almost all the things we talk about. Whether we are discussing music, poetry, painting, sculpture or architecture, we are forced to speak as though certain physical objects—vibrations of strings and of columns of air, marks printed on paper, canvasses and pigments, masses of marble, fabrics of freestone, are what we are talking about. And yet the remarks we make as critics do not apply to such objects but to states of mind, to experiences.

A certain strangeness about this view is often felt but diminishes with reflection. If anyone says that ‘The May Queen’ is sentimental, it is not difficult to agree that he is referring to a state of mind. But if he declares that the masses in a Giotto exactly balance one another, this is less apparent, and, if he goes on to discuss time in music, form in visual art, plot in drama, the fact that he is all the while talking about mental happenings becomes concealed. The verbal apparatus comes between us and the things with which we are really dealing. Words which are useful, indeed invaluable, as handy stop-gaps and makeshifts in conversation, but which need elaborate expansions before they can be used with precision, are treated as simply as people’s proper names. So it becomes natural to seek for the things these words appear to stand for, and thus arise innumerable subtle investigations, doomed ab initio as regards their main intent to failure.

We must be prepared then to translate, into phrases pedantic and uncouth, all the too simple utterances which the conversational decencies exact. We shall find later, in their peculiar emotive power the main reason why, in spite of all manner of confusions and inconveniences, these current ways of speaking are retained. For emotive purposes they are indispensable, but for clarity, for the examination of what is actually happening, translations are equally a necessity.

Most critical remarks state in an abbreviated form that an object causes certain experiences, and as a rule the form of the statement is such as to suggest that the object has been said to possess certain qualities. But often the critic goes further and affirms that the effect in his mind is due to special particular features of the object. In this case he is pointing out something about the object in addition to its effect upon him, and this fuller kind of criticism is what we desire. Before his insight can greatly benefit, however, a very clear demarcation between the object, with its features, and his experience, which is the effect of contemplating it, is necessary. The bulk of critical literature is unfortunately made up of examples of their confusion.

It will be convenient at this point to introduce two definitions. In a full critical statement which states not only that an experience is valuable in certain ways, but also that it is caused by certain features in a contemplated object, the part which describes the value of the experience we shall call the critical part. That which describes the object we shall call the technical part. Thus to say that we feel differently towards wooden crosses and stone crosses is a technical remark. And to say that metre is more suited to the tender passion than is prose would be, as it stands, a technical remark, but here it is evident that a critical part might easily be also present. All remarks as to the ways and means by which experiences arise or are brought about are technical, but critical remarks are about the values of experiences and the reasons for regarding them as valuable, or not valuable. We shall endeavor in what follows to show that critical remarks are merely a branch of psychological remarks, and that no special ethical or metaphysical ideas need be introduced to explain value.

The distinction between technical and critical remarks is of real importance. Confusion here is responsible for some most curious passages in the histories of the arts. A certain technique in certain cases produces admirable results; the obvious features of this technique come to be regarded at first as sure signs of excellence, and later as the excellence itself. For a while nothing, however admirable, which does not show these superficial marks, gets fair consideration. Thomas Rymer’s denigration of Shakespeare, Dr Johnson’s view of Milton’s pauses, the aftermath of the triumph of Pope, archaistic sculpture, the Greek poses in the compositions of David, the imitations of Cézanne, are famous instances; they could be multiplied indefinitely. The converse case is equally common. An obvious technical blemish in a special case is recognised. It may be too many S’s in a particular line, or the irregularity and rimelessness of a ‘Pindaric’ Ode; henceforth any line superficially similar,

The lustre of the long convolvulusses,

any unrhymed lyric, is regarded as defective. This trick of judging the whole by the detail, instead of the other way about, of mistaking the means for the end, the technique for the value, is in fact much the most successful of the snares which waylay the critic. Only the teacher knows (and sometimes he is guilty himself) how great is the number of readers who think, for example, that a defective rime—bough’s house, bush thrush, blood good—is sufficient ground for condemning a poem in the neglect of all other considerations. Such sticklers, like those with a scansion obsession (due as a rule to Exercises in Latin Verse), have little understanding of poetry. We pay attention to externals when we do not know what else to do with a poem.

CHAPTER IV
Communication and the Artist

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest
and best minds.—The Defence of Poetry.

The two pillars upon which a theory of criticism must rest are an account of value and an account of communication. We do not sufficiently realise how great a part of our experience takes the form it does, because we are social beings and accustomed to communication from infancy. That we acquire many of our ways of thinking and feeling from parents and others is, of course, a commonplace.

But the effects of communication go much deeper than this. The very structure of our minds largely determined by the fact that man has been engaged in communicating for so many hundreds of thousands of years, throughout the course of his human development and beyond even that. A large part of the distinctive features of the mind are due to its being an instrument for communication. An experience has to be formed, no doubt, before it is communicated, but it takes the form it does largely because it may have to be communicated. The emphasis which natural selection has put upon communicative ability is overwhelming.

There are very many problems of psychology, from those with which some of the exponents of Gestalt theorie are grappling to those by which psycho-analysts are bewildered, for which this neglected, this almost overlooked aspect of the mind may provide a key, but it is pre-eminently in regard to the arts that it is of service. For the arts are the supreme form of the communicative activity. As we shall see, most of the difficult and obscure points about the structures of the arts, for example the priority of formal elements to content,[*] or the impersonality and detachment so much stressed by æstheticians, become easily intelligible as soon as we consider them from this angle. But a possible misunderstanding must be guarded against. Although it is as a communicator that it is most profitable to consider the artist, it is by no means true that he commonly looks upon himself in this light. In the course of his work he is not as a rule deliberately and consciously engaged in a communicative endeavour. When asked, he is more likely than not to reply that communication is an irrelevant or at best a minor issue, and that what he is making is something which is beautiful in itself, or satisfying to him personally, or something expressive, in a more or less vague sense, of his emotions, or of himself, something personal and individual. That other people are going to study it, and to receive experiences from it may seem to him a merely accidental, inessential circumstance. More modestly still, he may say that when he works he is merely amusing himself.

That the artist is not as a mule consciously concerned with communication, but with getting the work, the poem or play or statue or painting or whatever it is, ‘right’, apparently regardless of its communicative efficacy, is easily explained. To make the work ‘embody’, accord with, and represent the precise experience upon which its value depends is his major preoccupation, in difficult cases an overmastering preoccupation, and the dissipation of attention which would be involved if he considered the communicative side as a separate issue would be fatal in most serious work. He cannot stop to consider how the public or even how especially well qualified sections of the public may like it or respond to it. He is wise, therefore, to keep all such considerations out of mind altogether. Those artists and poets who can be suspected of close separate attention to the communicative aspect tend (there are exceptions to this, of which Shakespeare might be one) to fall into a subordinate rank.

But this conscious neglect of communication does not in the least diminish the importance of the communicative aspect. It would only do so if we were prepared to admit that only our conscious activities matter. The very process of getting the work ‘right’ has itself, so far as the artist is normal,[*] immense communicative consequences. Apart from certain special cases, to be discussed later, it will, when ‘right’, have much greater communicative power than it would have had if ‘wrong’. The degree to which it accords with the relevant experience of the artist is a measure of the degree to which it will arouse similar experiences in others.

But more narrowly the reluctance of the artist to consider communication as one of his main aims, and his denial that he is at all influenced in his’ work by a desire to affect other people, is no evidence that communication is not actually his principal object. On a simple view of psychology, which overlooked unconscious motives, it would be, but not on any view of human behaviour which is in the least adequate. When we find the artist constantly struggling towards impersonality, towards a structure for his work which excludes his private, eccentric, momentary idiosyncrasies, and using always as its basis those elements which are most uniform in their effects upon impulses; when we find private works of art, works which satisfy the artist,[*] but are incomprehensible to everybody else, so rare, and the publicity of the work so constantly and so intimately bound up with its appeal to the artist himself, it is difficult to believe that efficacy for communication is not a main part of the ‘rightness’[*] which the artist may suppose to be something quite different.

How far desire actually to communicate, as distinguished from desire to produce something with communicative efficacy (however disguised), is an ‘unconscious motive’ in the artist is a question to which we need not hazard an answer. Doubtless individual artists vary enormously. To some the lure of ‘immortality’ of enduring fame, of a permanent place in the influences which govern the human mind, appears to be very strong. To others it is often negligible. The degree to which such notions are avowed certainly varies with current social and intellectual fashions. At present the appeal to posterity, the ‘nurslings of immortality’ attitude to works of art appears to be much out of favour. “How do we know what posterity will be like? They may be awful people!” a contemporary is likely to remark, thus confusing the issue. For the appeal is not to posterity merely as living at a certain date, but as especially qualified to judge, a qualification most posterities have lacked.

What concerns criticism is not the avowed or unavowed motives of the artist, however interesting these may be to psychology, but the fact that his procedure does, in the majority of instances, make the communicative efficacy of his work correspond with his own satisfaction and sense of its rightness. This may be due merely to his normality, or it may be due to unavowed motives. The first suggestion is the more plausible. In any case it is certain that no mere careful study of communicative possibilities, together with any desire to communicate, however intense, is ever sufficient without close natural correspondence between the poet’s impulses and possible impulses in his reader. All supremely successful communication involves this correspondence, and no planning can take its place. Nor is the deliberate conscious attempt directed to communication so successful as the unconscious indirect method.

Thus the artist is entirely justified in his apparent neglect of the main purpose of his work. And when in what follows he is alluded to without qualification as being primarily concerned with communication, the reservations here made should be recalled.

Since the poet’s unconscious motives have been alluded to, it may be well at this point to make a few additional remarks. Whatever psycho-analysts may aver, the mental processes of the poet are not a very profitable field for investigation. They offer far too happy a hunting-ground for uncontrollable conjecture. Much that goes to produce a poem is, of course, unconscious. Very likely the unconscious processes are more important than the conscious, but even if we knew far more than we do about how the mind works, the attempt to display the inner working of the artist’s mind by the evidence of his work alone must be subject to the gravest dangers. And to judge by the published work of Freud upon Leonardo da Vinci or of Jung upon Goethe (e.g. The Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 305), psycho-analysts tend to be peculiarly inept as critics.

The difficulty is that nearly all speculations as to what went on in the artist’s mind are unverifiable, even more unverifiable than the similar speculations as to the dreamer’s mind. The most plausible explanations are apt to depend upon features whose actual causation is otherwise. I do not know whether anyone but Mr Graves has attempted to analyse Kubla Khan, a poem which by its mode of composition and by its subject suggests itself as well fitted for analysis. The reader acquainted with current methods of analysis can imagine the results of a thoroughgoing Freudian onslaught.

If he will then open Paradise Lost, Book IV at line 223, and read onwards: for sixty lines, he will encounter the actual sources of not a few of the images and phrases of the poem. In spite of—

Southward through Eden went a River large,
Nor changed his course, but through the shaggie hill
Pass’d underneath ingulft . . .

in spite of—

Rose a fresh Fountain, and with many a rill
Waterd the Garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the neather Flood . . .

in spite of—

Rowling on Orient Pearl and sands of Gold
With mazie error under pendant shades
Ran Nectar . . .

in spite of—

Meanwhile murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, disperst . . .

his doubts may still linger until he reaches

Nor where Abassin Kings thir issue Guard,
Mount Amara.

and one of the most cryptic points in Coleridge’s poem, the Abyssinian maid, singing of Mount Abora, finds its simple explanation. The closing line of the poem perhaps hardly needs this kind of derivation.

From one source or another almost all the matter of Kubla Khan came to Coleridge in a similar fashion. I do not know whether this particular indebtedness has been remarked before, but Purchas his Pilgrimage, Bartram’s Travels in North and South Carolina, and Maurice’s History of Hindostan are well-known sources, some of them indicated by Coleridge himself.

This very representative instance of the unconscious working of a poet’s mind may serve as a not inapposite warning against one kind at least of possible applications of psychology in criticism.

The extent to which the arts and their place in the whole scheme of human affairs have been misunderstood, by Critics, Moralists, Educators, Æstheticians . . . is somewhat difficult to explain. Often those who most misunderstood have been perfect in their taste and ability to respond, Ruskin for example. Those who both knew what to do with a work of art and also understood what they were doing, have been for the most part artists and little inclined for, or capable of, the rather special task of explaining. It may have seemed to them too obvious to need explanation. Those who have tried have as a rule been foiled by language. For the difficulty which has always prevented the arts from being explained as well as ‘enjoyed’ (to use an inadequate word in default of an adequate) is language.

“Happy who can
Appease this virtuous enemy of man!”

It was perhaps never so necessary as now that we should know why the arts are important and avoid inadequate answers. It will probably become increasingly more important in the future. Remarks such as these, it is true, are often uttered by enthusiastic persons, and are apt to be greeted with the same smile as the assertion that the future of England is bound up with Hunting. Yet their full substantiation will be found to involve issues which are nowhere lightly regarded.

The arts are our storehouse of recorded values. They spring from and perpetuate hours in the lives of exceptional people, when their control and command of experience is at its highest, hours when the varying possibilities of existence are most clearly seen and the different activities which may arise are most exquisitely reconciled, hours when habitual narrowness of interests or confused bewilderment are replaced by an intricately wrought composure. Both in the genesis of a work of art, in the creative moment, and in its aspect as a vehicle of communication, reasons can be found for giving to the arts a very important place in the theory of Value. They record the most important judgments we possess as to the values of experience. They form a body of evidence which, for lack of a serviceable psychology by which to interpret it, and through the desiccating influence of abstract Ethics, has been left almost untouched by professed students of value. An odd omission, for without the assistance of the arts we could compare very few of our experiences, and without such comparison we could hardly hope to agree as to which are to be preferred. Very simple experiences—a cold bath in an enamelled tin, or running for a train—may to some extent be compared without elaborate vehicles; and friends exceptionally well acquainted with one another may manage some rough comparisons in ordinary conversation. But subtle or recondite experiences are for most men incommunicable and indescribable, though social conventions or terror of the loneliness of the human situation may make us pretend the contrary. In the arts we find the record in the only form in which these things can be recorded of the experiences which have seemed worth having to the most sensitive and discriminating persons. Through the obscure perception of this fact the poet has been regarded as a seer and the artist as a priest, suffering from usurpations. The arts, if rightly approached, supply the best data available for deciding what experiences are more valuable than others. The qualifying clause is all-important however. Happily there is no lack of glaring examples to remind us of the difficulty of approaching them rightly.

CHAPTER V
The Critics’ Concern with Value

What hinders? Are you beam-blind, yet to a fault
In a neighbour deft-handed? Are you that liar?
And cast by conscience out, spendsavour salt?

Gerard Hopkins.

Between the general inquiry into the nature of the good and the appreciation of particular works of art, there may seem to be a wide gap, and the discussion upon which we are about to embark may appear a roundabout way of approaching our subject. Morals have often been treated, especially in recent times, as a side-issue for criticism, from which the special concern of the critic must be carefully separated. His business, so it has been said, is with the work of art in itself, not with any consequences which lie outside it. These may be left, it has been supposed, to others for attention, to the clergy perhaps or to the police.

That these authorities are sadly incompetent is a minor disadvantage. Their blunderings are as a rule so ridiculous that the effects are brief. They often serve a useful purpose in calling attention to work which might be overlooked. What is more serious is that these indiscretions, vulgarities and absurdities encourage the view that morals have little or nothing to do with the arts, and the even more unfortunate opinion that the arts have no connection with morality. The ineptitudes of censors, their choice of censorable objects, ignoble blasphemy, such as that which declared Esther Waters an impure book, displays of such intelligence as considered Madame Bovary an apology for adulterous wrong, innumerable comic, stupefying, enraging interferences fully explain this attitude, but they do not justify it.

The common avoidance of all discussion of the wider social and moral aspects of the arts by people of steady judgment and strong heads is a misfortune, for it leaves the field free for folly, and cramps the scope of good critics unduly. So loath have they been to be thought at large with the wild asses that they have virtually shut themselves up in a paddock. If the competent are to refrain because of the antics of the unqualified, an evil and a loss which are neither temporary nor trivial increase continually. It is as though medical men were all to retire because of the impudence of quacks. For the critic is as closely occupied with the health of the mind as the doctor with the health of the body. In a different way, it is true, and with a wider and subtler definition of health, by which the healthiest mind is that capable of securing the greatest amount of value.

The critic cannot possibly avoid using some ideas about value. His whole occupation is an application and exercise of his ideas on the subject, and an avoidance of moral preoccupations on his part can only be either an abdication or a rejection under the title of ‘morality’ of what he considers to be mistaken or dishonest ideas and methods. The term has a dubious odour, it has been handled by many objectionable as well as admirable people, and we may agree to avoid it. But the errors exemplified by censorship exploits are too common, and misconceptions as to the nature of value too easy to fall into and too widespread, for useful criticism to remain without a general theory and an explicit set of principles.

What is needed is a defensible position for those who believe that the arts are of value. Only a general theory of value which will show the place and function of the arts in the whole system of values will provide such a stronghold. At the same time we need weapons with which to repel and overthrow misconceptions. With the increase of population the problem presented by the gulf between what is preferred by the majority and what is accepted as excellent by the most qualified opinion has become infinitely more serious and appears likely to become threatening in the near future. For many reasons standards are much more in need of defence than they used to be. It is perhaps premature to envisage a collapse of values, a transvaluation by which popular taste replaces trained discrimination. Yet commercialism has done stranger things: we have not yet fathomed the more sinister potentialities of the cinema and the loud-speaker, and there is some evidence, uncertain and slight no doubt, that such things as ‘best-sellers’ (compare Tarzan with She), magazine verses, mantelpiece pottery, Academy pictures, Music Hall songs, County Council buildings, War Memorials . . . are decreasing in merit. Notable exceptions, in which the multitude are better advised than the experts, of course occur sometimes, but not often.

To bridge the gulf, to bring the level of popular appreciation nearer to the consensus of best qualified opinion, and to defend this opinion against damaging attacks (Tolstoy’s is a typical example), a much clearer account than has yet been produced, of why this opinion is right, is essential. These attacks are dangerous, because they appeal to a natural instinct, hatred of ‘superior persons’. The expert in-matters of taste is in an awkward position when he differs from the majority. He is forced to say in effect, “I am better than you. My taste is more refined, my nature more cultured, you will do well to become more like me than you are.” It is not his fault that he has to be so arrogant. He may, and usually does, disguise the fact as far as possible, but his claim to be heard as an expert depends upon the truth of these assumptions. He ought then to be ready with reasons of a clear and convincing kind as to why his preferences are worth attention, and until these reasons are forthcoming, the accusations that he is a charlatan and a prig are embarrassing. He may indeed point to years of preoccupation with his subject, he may remark like the wiseacre Longinus, sixteen hundred years ago, “The judgment of literature is the final outcome of much endeavour,” but with him are many Professors to prove that years of endeavour may lead to nothing very remarkable in the end.

To habilitate the critic, to defend accepted standards against Tolstoyan attacks, to narrow the interval between these standards and popular taste, to protect the arts against the crude moralities of Puritans and perverts, a general theory of value, which will not leave the statement “This is good, that bad,” either vague or arbitrary, must be provided. There is no alternative open. Nor is it such an excursus from the inquiry into the nature of the arts as may be supposed. For if a well-grounded theory of value is a necessity for criticism, it is no less true that an understanding of what happens in the arts is needed for the theory. The two problems “What is good?” and “What are the arts?” reflect light upon one another. Neither in fact can be fully answered without the other.

To the unravelling of the first we may now proceed.

CHAPTER VI
Value as an Ultimate Idea

Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.—Aire and Angels.

It has always been found far more easy to divide experiences[*] into good and bad, valuable and the reverse, than to discover what we are doing when we make the division. The history of opinions as to what constitutes value, as to why and when anything is rightly called good, shows a bewildering variety. But in modern times the controversy narrows itself down to two questions. The first of these is whether the difference between experiences which are valuable and those which are not can be fully described in psychological terms; whether some additional distinctive ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’ idea of a non-psychological nature is or is not required. The second question concerns the exact psychological analysis needed in order to explain value if no further ‘ethical’ idea is shown to be necessary.

The first question will not detain us long. It has been ably maintained[*] and widely accepted that when we say that an experience is good we are simply saying that it is endowed with a certain ethical property or attribute not to be reduced to any psychological properties or attributes such as being desired or approved, and that no further elucidation of this special ethical property by way of analysis is possible. ‘Good’ on this view is in no way a shorthand term for some more explicit account. The things which are good, it is held, are just good, possess a property which can be recognised by immediate intuition, and here, since good is unanalysable, the matter must rest. All that the study of value can do is to point out the things which possess this property, classify them, and remove certain confusions between ends which are good in themselves and means which are only called good, because they are instrumental in the attainment of intrinsically good ends. Usually those who maintain this view also hold that the only things which are good for their own sakes and not merely as a means are certain conscious experiences, for example, knowledge, admiring contemplation of beauty, and feelings of affection and veneration under some circumstances. Other things, such as mountains, books, railways, courageous actions, are good instrumentally because, and in so far as, they cause or make possible states of mind which are valuable intrinsically. Thus the occurrence of states of mind which are recognised as good is regarded as an isolated fact of experience, not capable of being accounted for, or linked up with the rest of human peculiarities as a product of development in the way made familiar by the biological sciences.

The plausibility of this view derives principally from the metaphysical assumption that there are properties, in the sense of subsistent entities, which attach to existent particulars, but which might without absurdity be supposed to attach to nothing.

These metaphysical entities, variously named Ideas, Notions, Concepts or Universals, may be divided into two kinds, sensuous and supersensuous.[†] The sensuous are those which may be apprehended by the senses, such as ‘red’, ‘cold’, ‘round’, ‘swift’, ‘painful’, and the supersensuous, those apprehended not in sensuous perception but otherwise. Logical relations, ‘necessity’ or ‘impossibility,’ and such ideas as ‘willing’, ‘end’, ‘cause’, and ‘being three in number’, have in this way been supposed to be directly apprehensible by the mind. Amongst these supersensuous Ideas good is to be found.

Nothing could be simpler than such a view, and to many people the subsistence of such a property of goodness appears not surprising. But to others the suggestion seems merely a curious survival of abstractionism, if such a term may be defended by its close parallel with obstructionism. A blind man in a dark room chasing a black cat which is not there would seem to them well employed in comparison with a philosopher apprehending such ‘Concepts’. While ready for convenience of discourse to talk and even to think as though Concepts and Particulars were separable and distinct kinds of entities, they refuse to believe that the structure of the world actually contains such a cleavage. The point is perhaps undiscussable, and is probably unimportant, except in so far as the habit of regarding the world as actually so cloven is a fruitful source of bogus entities, usually hypostatised words. The temptation to introduce premature ultimates—Beauty in Æsthetics, the Mind and its faculties in psychology, Life in physiology, are representative examples—is especially great for believers in Abstract Entities. The objection to such Ultimates is that they bring an investigation to a dead end too suddenly. An ultimate Good is, in this instance, just such an arbitrary full stop.

It will be agreed that a less cryptic account of good, if one can be given, which is in accordance with verifiable facts, would be preferable, even though no means were available for refuting the simpler theory. Upholders of this theory, however, have produced certain arguments to show that no other view of good is possible, and these must first be briefly examined. They provide, in addition, an excellent example of the misuse of psychological assumptions in research, for although a psychological approach is often of the utmost service, it can also be a source of obscurantism and over-confidence. The arguments against any naturalistic account depend upon the alleged results of directly inspecting what is before our minds when we judge that anything is good. If we substitute, it is maintained, any account of good whatever for ‘good’ in the assertion, ‘This is good’—for example, ‘This is desired’ or ‘This is approved’—we can detect that what is substituted is different from ‘good’, and that we are not then making the same judgment. This result, it is claimed, is confirmed by the fact that we can always ask, “Is what is desired, or what is approved, good?” however we may elaborate the account provided, and that this is always a genuine question which would be impossible were the substituted account actually the analysis of good.

The persuasiveness of this refutation is found to vary enormously from individual to individual, for the results of the experiments upon which it relies differ. Those who have accustomed themselves to the belief that good is a supersensuous simple Idea readily discover the fraudulent character of any offered substitute, while those who hold some psychological theory of value, with equal ease identify their account with ‘good’. The further question, “When and under what conditions can judgments be distinguished?” arises, a question so difficult to answer that any argument becomes suspect which depends upon assuming that they can be infallibly recognised as different. If for any reason we wish to distinguish two judgments, we can persuade ourselves, in any case in which they are differently formulated, that they are different. Thus it has been thought that ‘a exceeds b’ and ‘a is greater than b’ are distinguishable, the first being supposed to state simply that a has the relation ‘exceeds’ to b, while the second is supposed to state that a has the relation ‘is’ to greater which again has the relation ‘than’ to b.[*] The conclusion to be drawn from the application of such methods to the problem of the meaning of Good would seem to be that they are not competent to decide anything about it—by no means a valueless result.

Since nothing can be concluded from a comparison of ‘This is good’ with, let us say, ‘This is sought by an impulse belonging to a dominant group’, let us see whether light can be gained by considering analogous instances in which special distinct ideas have for a time been thought indispensable only to yield later to analysis and substitution. The case of Beauty is perhaps too closely related to that of Good for our purpose. Those who can persuade themselves that Good is an unique irreducible entity might believe the same of Beauty. An episode in the theory of the tides is more instructive. It was once thought that the moon must have a peculiar Affinity with water: When the moon is full the tides are higher. Clearly the seas swell in sympathy with the increase of the moon. The history of science is full of mysterious unique entities which have gradually evaporated as explanation advanced.

The struggles of economists with ‘utility’, of mathematical philosophers with ‘points’ and ‘instants’, of biologists with ‘entelechies’, and the adventures of psycho-analysts with ‘the libido’ and ‘the collective unconscious’ are instances in point. At present theoretical psychology in particular is largely made up of the manipulation of similar suspects. The Act of Judgment, the relation of Presentation, Immediate Awareness, Direct Inspection, the Will, Feeling, Assumption, Acceptance, are only a few of the provisional ultimates introduced for convenience of discussion. Some of them may in the end prove to be indispensable, but meanwhile they are not, to prudent people, more than symbolic conveniences; theories dependent upon them must not be allowed to shut off from investigation fields which may be fruitful.

CHAPTER VII
A Psychological Theory of Value

Hands that can grasp, eyes

that can dilate, hair that can rise

if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them, but because they are

useful.—Marianne Moore.

The method then by which any attempt to analyse ‘good’ has been condemned is itself objectionable, and yields no sound reason why a purely psychological account of the differences between good, bad, and indifferent experiences should not be given. The data for the inquiry are in part supplied by anthropology. It has become clear that the disparity among the states of mind recognised as good by persons of different races, habits and civilisations is overwhelming. Any observant child, it is true, might discover in the home circle how widely people disagree, but the effect of education is to suppress these scientific efforts. It has needed the vast accumulations of anthropological evidence now available to establish the fact that as the organisation of life and affairs alters very different experiences are perceived to be good or bad, are favoured or condemned. The Bakairi of Central Brazil and the Tahitians, among others, are reported, for example, to look upon eating with the same feelings which we reserve for quite different physiological performances, and to regard the public consumption of food as a grave breach of decency. In many parts of the world feelings of forgiveness towards enemies, for example, are looked upon as low and ignoble. The experiences which one person values are thought vicious by another. We must allow, it is true, for widespread confusion between intrinsic and instrumental values, and for the difficulty of identifying experiences. Many states of mind in other people which we judge to be bad or indifferent are no doubt unlike what we imagine them to be, or contain elements which we overlook, so that with fuller knowledge we might discover them to be good. In this manner it may be possible to reduce the reported disparity of value intuitions, but few people acquainted with the varying moral judgments of mankind will doubt that circumstances and necessities, present and past, explain our approval and disapproval. We start, then, with a hearty scepticism of all immediate intuitions, and inquire how it is that individuals in different conditions, and at different stages of their development, esteem things so differently.

With the exception of some parents and nursemaids we have lately all been aghast at revelations of the value judgments of infants. Their impulses, their desires, their preferences, the things which they esteem, as displayed by the psycho-analysts, strike even those whose attitude towards humanity is not idealistic with some dismay. Even when the stories are duly discounted, enough which is verifiable remains for infans polypervers to present a truly impressive figure dominating all future psychological inquiry into value.

There is no need here to examine in detail how these early impulses are diverted and disguised by social pressures. The rough outlines are familiar of the ways in which by growth, by the appearance of fresh instinctive tendencies, by increase of knowledge and of command over the world, under the control of custom, magical beliefs, public opinion, inculcation and example, the primitive new-born animal may be gradually transformed into a bishop. At every stage in the astonishing metamorphosis, the impulses, desires, and propensities of the individual take on a new form, or, it may be, a further degree of systematisation. This systematisation is never complete. Always some impulse, or set of impulses, can be found which in one way or another interferes, or conflicts, with others. It may do so in two ways, directly or indirectly. Some impulses are in themselves psychologically incompatible, some are incompatible only indirectly, through producing contrary effects in the world outside. The difficulty some people have in smoking and writing at the same time is a typical instance of the first kind of incompatibility; the two activities get in each other’s way by a psychological accident as it were. Interference of this kind can be overcome by practice to an unexpected degree, as the feats of jugglers show; some, however, are insurmountable; and these incompatibilities are often, as we shall see, of supreme consequence in moral development. Indirect incompatibilities arising through the consequences of our acts are more easy to find. Our whole existence is one long study of them, from the infant’s first choice whether he shall use his mouth for screaming or for sucking, to the last codicil to his Will.

These are simple instances, but the conduct of life is throughout an attempt to organise impulses so that success is obtained for the greater number or mass of them, for the most important and the weightiest set. And here we come face to face again with the problem of value. How shall we decide which among these are more important than: others, and how shall we distinguish different organisations as yielding more or less value one than another? At this point we need to be on our guard not to smuggle in any peculiar ethical, non-psychological, idea under some disguise, under ‘important’ or ‘fundamental’, for example.

Among those who reject any metaphysical view of value it has become usual to define value as capacity for satisfying feeling and desire in various intricate ways.[*] For the purpose of tracing in detail the very subtle and varied modes in which people actually value things, a highly intricate treatment is indispensable, but here a simpler definition will suffice.

We may start from the fact that impulses may be divided into appetencies and aversions, and begin by saying that anything is valuable which satisfies an appetency or ‘seeking after.’ The term ‘desire’ would do as well if we could avoid the implication of accompanying conscious beliefs as to what is sought and a further restriction to felt and recognised longings. The term ‘want’ used so much by economists has the same disadvantages. Appetencies may be, and for the most part are, unconscious, and to leave out those which we cannot discover by introspection would involve extensive errors. For the same reason it is wiser not to start from feeling. Appetencies then, rather than felt appetencies or desires, shall be our starting-point.

The next step is to agree that apart from consequences anyone will actually prefer to satisfy a greater number of equal appetencies rather than a less. Observation of people’s behaviour, including our own, is probably sufficient to establish this agreement. If now we look to see what consequences can intervene to upset this simple principle, we shall find that only interferences, immediate or remote, direct: or indirect, with other appetencies, need to be considered. The only psychological restraints upon appetencies are other appetencies.[*]

We can now extend our definition. Anything is valuable which will satisfy an appetency without involving the frustration of some equal or more important appetency; in other words, the only reason which can be given for not satisfying a desire is that more important desires will thereby be thwarted. Thus morals become purely prudential, and ethical codes merely the expression of the mast general scheme of expediency[*] to which an individual or a race has attained. But we have still to say what ‘important’ stands for in this formulation. (Cf. p. 51).

There are certain evident priorities among impulses, some of which have been studied in various ways by economists under the headings of primary wants and secondary wants. Some needs or impulses must be satisfied in order that others may be possible. We must eat, drink, sleep, breathe, protect ourselves and carry on an immense physiological business as a condition for any further activities. Some of these impulses, breathing, for example, can be satisfied directly, but most of them involve us in complicated cycles of instrumental labour. Man for the most part must exert himself half his life to satisfy even the primitive needs, and these activities, failing other means of reaching the same ends, share their priority. In their turn they involve as conditions a group of impulses, whose satisfaction becomes only second in importance to physiological necessities, those, namely, upon which communication and the ability to co-operate depend. But these, since man is a social creature, also become more directly necessary to his well-being.

The very impulses which enable him to co-operate in gaining his dinner would themselves, if not satisfied, wreck by their mere frustration all his activities. This happens all through the hierarchy. Impulses, whose exercise may have been originally only important as means, and which might once have been replaced by quite different sets, become in time necessary conditions for innumerable quite different performances. Objects, again, originally valued because they satisfy one need, are found later to be also capable of satisfying others. Dress, for example, appears to have originated in magical, ‘life-giving,’ ornaments[†], but so many other interests derive satisfaction from it that controversy can still arise as to its primitive uses.

The instances of priorities given must only be taken as examples. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that for a civilised man, activities originally valuable as means only, often become so important through their connections with the rest of his activities, that life without them is regarded as intolerable. Thus acts which will debar him from his normal relations with his fellows are often avoided, even at the cost of death. Total cessation of all activities is preferred to the dreadful thwarting and privation which would ensue. The case of the soldier, or of the conscientious objector, is thus no exception to the principle. Life deprived of all but the barest physiological necessities, for example, prison life, is for many people worse than non-existence. Those who even so incur it in defence of some ‘moral ideal’ do so because they are so organised, either permanently or temporarily, that only in this way can their dominant impulses secure satisfaction. The self-regarding impulses form only a part of the total activities of social man, and the impulse of the martyr to bear witness at any cost to what he regards as truth, is only one extreme instance of the degree to which other impulses often assume supremacy.

For another reason any priorities mentioned must be taken only as illustrations. We do not know enough yet about the precedences, the hierarchies, the modes of systematisation, actual and possible, in that unimaginable organisation, the mind, to say what order in any case actually exists, or between what the order holds. We only know that a growing order is the principle of the mind, that its function is to co-ordinate, and we can detect that in some of its forms the precedence is different from that in others. This we could do by observation, by comparing the drunken man with the sober, but from our own experience of our own activity we can go much further. We can feel differences between clear coherent thinking and confusion or stupidity, between free, controlled emotional response and dull or clogged impassivity, between moments when we do with our bodies more delicate and dexterous things than seem possible, and moments of clumsiness, when we are ‘all thumbs’, have no ‘balance’ or ‘timing’, and nothing ‘comes off’. These differences are differences in momentary organisation, differences in precedence between rival possible systematisations. The more permanent and more specifically ‘moral’ differences between individuals grow out of differences such as these and correspond to similar precedences between larger systems.

The complications possible in the systematisation of impulses might be illustrated indefinitely. The plasticity of special appetencies and activities varies enormously. Some impulses can be diverted more easily than others. Sex has a wider range of satisfactions than hunger, for example; some are weaker than others; some (not the same necessarily) can be suppressed in the long run with less difficulty. Some can be modified; some obey the ‘all or none’ rule—they must either be satisfied specifically or completely inhibited—well-established habits may have this peculiarity. In judging the importance of any impulse all these considerations must be taken into account. The affiliations of impulses, at present often inexplicable, need especially to be considered. Within the whole partially systematised organisation, numerous sub-systems can be found, and what would be expected to be quite trivial impulses are often discovered to be important, because they belong to powerful groups. Thus there are reasonable persons who, without a high polish on their shoes, are almost incapacitated.

The importance of an impulse, it will be seen, can be defined for our purposes as the extent of the disturbance of other impulses in the individual’s activities which the thwarting of the impulse involves. A vague definition, it is true, but therefore suitable to our at present incomplete and hazy knowledge of how impulses are related. It will be observed that no special ethical idea is introduced. We can now take our next step forward and inquire into the relative merits of different systematisations.

No individual can live one minute without a very intricate and, so far as it goes, very perfect co-ordination of impulses. It is only when we pass from the activities which from second to second maintain life to those which from hour to hour determine what kind of life it shall be, that we find wide differences. Fortunately for psychology we can each find wide enough differences in ourselves from hour to hour. Most people in the same day are Bonaparte and Oblomov by turns. Before breakfast Diogenes, after dinner Petronius or Bishop Usher. But throughout these mutations certain dispositions usually remain much the same, those which govern public behaviour in a limited number of affairs varying very greatly from one society or civilisation to another. Every systematisation in the degree to which it is stable involves a degree of sacrifice, but for some the price to be paid in opportunities foregone is greater than for others. By the extent of the loss, the range of impulses thwarted or starved, and their degree of importance, the merit of a systematisation is judged. That organisation which is least wasteful of human possibilities is, in short, the best. Some individuals, hag-ridden by their vices, or their virtues, to a point at which the law of diminishing returns has deprived even these of their appropriate satisfactions, are still unable to reorganise; they go through life incapacitated for most of its possible enjoyments.[*] Others, paralysed with their conflicts, are unable to do anything freely; whatever they attempt some implicated but baffled impulse is still fitfully and fretfully stirring. The debauchee and the victim of conscience alike have achieved organisations whose price in sacrifice is excessive. Both their individual satisfactions, and those for which they are dependent upon sympathetic relations with their fellows, an almost equal group, are unduly restricted. Upon grounds of prudence alone they have been injudicious, and they may be condemned without any appeal to peculiarly ‘ethical’ standards. The muddle in which they are forced to live is itself sufficient ground for reprobation.

At the other extreme are those fortunate people who have achieved an ordered life, whose systems have developed clearing-houses by which the varying claims of different impulses are adjusted. Their free, untrammelled activity gains for them a maximum of varied satisfactions and involves a minimum of suppression and sacrifice. Particularly is this so with regard to those satisfactions which require humane, sympathetic, and friendly relations between individuals. The charge of egoism, or selfishness, can be brought against a naturalistic or utilitarian morality such as this only by overlooking the importance of these satisfactions in any well-balanced life. Unfair or aggressive behaviour, and preoccupation with self-regarding interests to the exclusion of due sensitiveness to the reciprocal claims of human intercourse, lead to a form of organisation which deprives the person so organised of whole ranges of important values. No mere loss of social pleasures is in question, but a twist or restriction of impulses, whose normal satisfaction is involved in almost all the greatest goods of life. The two senses in which a man may ‘take advantage’ of his fellows can be observed in practice to conflict. Swindling and bullying, whether in business matters or in personal relations, have their cost; which the best judges agree to be excessive. And the greater part of the cost lies of in the consequences of being found out, in the loss of social esteem and so forth, but in actual systematic disability to attain important values.

Although the person who habitually disregards the claims of his fellows to fair treatment and sympathetic understanding may be condemned, in most cases, upon the ground of his own actual loss of values in such behaviour, this of course is not the reason for the steps which may have to be taken against him. It may very well be the case that a person’s own interests are such that, if he understood them, were well organised in other words, he would be a useful and charming member of his community; but, so long as people are about who are not well organised, communities must protect themselves. They can defend their action on the ground that the general loss of value which would follow if they did not protect themselves far outweighs such losses as are incurred by the people whom they suppress or deport.

To extend this individual morality to communal affairs is not difficult. Probably the best brief statement upon the point is the following note by Bentham, if we interpret ‘happiness’ in his formula not as pleasure but as the satisfaction of impulses.

June 29, 1827.

1. Constantly actual end of action on the part of every individual at the moment of action, his greatest happiness, according to his view of it at that moment.

2. Constantly proper end of action on the part of every individual at the moment of action, his real greatest happiness from that moment to the end of life.

3. Constantly proper end of action on the part of every individual considered as trustee for the community, of which he is considered as a member, the greatest happiness of that same community, in so far as it depends upon the interest which forms the bond of union between its members.[†]

But communities, as is well known, tend to behave in the same way to people who are better organised as well as to people who are worse organised than the standard of the group. They deal with Socrates or Bruno as severely as with Turpin or Bottomley. Thus mere interference with ordinary activities is not by itself a sufficient justification for excluding from the group people who are different and therefore nuisances. The precise nature of the difference must be considered, and whether and to what degree it is the group, not the exceptional member, which ought to be condemned. The extent to which alteration is practicable is also relevant, and the problem in particular cases becomes very intricate.

But the final court of appeal concerns itself in such cases with questions, not of the wishes of majorities, but of the actual range and degree of satisfaction which different possible systematisations of impulse yield. Resentment at interference and gratitude for support and assistance are to be distinguished from disapproval and approval. The esteem and respect accorded to persons with the social[*] virtues well developed is only in a small degree due to the use which we find we can make of them. It is much more a sense that their lives are rich and full.

When any desire is denied for the sake of another, the approved and accepted activity takes on additional value; it is coveted and pursued all the more for what it has cost. Thus the spectacle of other people enjoying both activities without difficulty, thanks to some not very obvious adjustment, is peculiarly distressing, and such people are usually regarded as especially depraved. In different circumstances this view may or may not be justified. The element of sacrifice exacted by any stable system explains to a large extent the tenacity with which custom is clung to, the intolerance directed sea innovations, the fanaticism of converts, the hypocrisy of teachers, and many other lamentable phenomena of the moral attitudes. However much an individual may privately find his personality varying from hour to hour, he is compelled to join in maintaining a public facade of some rigidity and buttressed with every contrivance which can be invented. The Wills of Gods, the Conscience, the Catechism, Taboos, Immediate Intuitions, Penal Laws, Public Opinion, Good Form, are all more or less ingenious and efficient devices with the same aim—to secure the uniformity which social life requires. By their means and by Custom, Convention, and Superstition, the underlying basis of morality, the effort to attain maximum satisfaction through coherent systematisation, is a veiled and disguised to an extraordinary degree. Whence arise great difficulties and many disasters. It is so necessary and so difficult to secure a stable and general system of public behaviour that any means whatever are justifiable, failing the discovery of better. All societies hitherto achieved, however, involve waste and misery of appalling extent.

Any public code of behaviour must, it is generally agreed, represent a cruder and more costly systematisation than those attained to by many of the individuals who live under the code, a point obviously to be remembered in connection with censorship problems. Customs change more slowly than conditions, and every change in conditions brings with it new possibilities of systematisation. None of the afflictions of humanity are worse than its obsolete moral principles. Consider the effects of the obsolete virtues of nationalism under modern conditions, or the absurdity of the religious attitude to birth control. The present lack of plasticity in such things involves a growing danger. Human conditions and possibilities have altered more in a hundred years than they had in the previous ten thousand, and the next fifty may overwhelm us, unless we can devise a more adaptable morality. The view that what we need in this tempestuous turmoil of change is a Rock to shelter under or to cling to, pane than an efficient aeroplane in which to ride it, is comprehensible but mistaken.

To guard against a possible misunderstanding it may be added that the organisation and systematisation of which I have been speaking in this chapter are not primarily an affair of conscious planning or arrangement, as this is understood, for example, by a great business house or by a railway. (Cf. p. 202.) We pass as a rule from a chaotic to a better organised state by ways which we know nothing about. Typically through the influence of other minds. Literature and the arts are the chief means by which these influences are diffused. It should be unnecessary to insist upon the degree to which high civilisation, in other words, free, varied and unwasteful life, depends upon them in a numerous society.

CHAPTER VIII
Art and Morals

Com, no more,
This is meer moral babble, and direct
Against the canon laws of our foundation.—Comus.

From this excursus let us return to our proper task, the attempt to outline a morality which will change its values as circumstances alter, a morality free from occultism, absolutes and arbitrariness, a morality which will explain, as no morality has yet explained, the place and value of the arts in human affairs. What is good or valuable, we have said, is the exercise of impulses and the satisfaction of their appetencies. When we say that anything is good we mean that it satisfies, and by a good experience we mean one in which the impulses which make it are fulfilled and successful, adding as the necessary qualification that their exercise and satisfaction shall not interfere in any way with more important impulses. Importance we have seen to be a complicated matter, and which impulses are by an extensive inquiry into what actually happens. The problem of morality then, the problem of how we are to obtain the greatest possible value from life, becomes a problem of organisation, both in the individual life and in the adjustment of individual lives to one another, and is delivered from all non-psychological ideas, from absolute goods and immediate convictions, which incidentally help greatly to give unnecessary stiffness and fixity to obsolescent codes. Without system, needless to say, value vanishes, since in a state of chaos important and trivial impulses alike are frustrated.

A minor problem may occur here to the reader. It concerns the choice between a ‘crowded hour’ and an age without a name, and the place of the time factor in valuation. There are many very valuable states which cannot last very long in the nature of the case, and some of these seem to have disabling consequences. But, to take merely the most interesting instance, if we knew more about the nervous constitution of genius we might discover that the instability from which so many people suffer who are at times best able to actualise the possibilities of life is merely a consequence of their plasticity; not in the least a price which they pay for such ‘high moments,’ but rather a result in systems of great delicacy of wear and tear at lower levels of adjustment. It is generally those who have the least refined views of value who most readily believe that highly valuable hours must be paid for afterwards. Their conception of a ‘hectic time’ as the summit of human possibilities explains the opinion. For those who find that the most valuable experiences are those which are also most fruitful of further valuable experiences no problem arises. To the query whether they prefer a long life to a joyous one, they will reply that they find very satisfactory a life which is both.

The most valuable states of mind then are those which involve the widest and most comprehensive co-ordination of activities and the least curtailment, conflict, starvation and restriction. States of mind in general are valuable in the degree in which they tend to reduce waste and frustration. We must be careful in considering this formulation to remember how varied human activities are and avoid, for example, undue admiration for practical efficient persons whose emotional life is suppressed. But, thanks to the psycho-analysts, we are hardly likely at the moment to overlook the consequences of suppressions.

It is plain that no one systematisation can claim a supreme position. Men are naturally different and in any society specialisation is inevitable. There are evidently a great number of good systematisations and what is good for one person will not be good for another. A sailor, a doctor, a mathematician and a poet can hardly have the same organisation throughout. With different conditions different values necessarily arise. Doubtless conditions may be, and too often are, such that no life of high value is possible. With a naturalistic morality the reasons for altering them and the way to do so both become clearer. But even with our present resources and command over nature, it is universally agreed that intelligence and goodwill could contrive that no man should be so situated as to be deprived of all the generally accessible values. The clearing away from moral questions of all ethical lumber and superstitious interpolations is a step long overdue in this undertaking. But until it has been carried further, so it is often thought, to be busied with such apparently ‘unpractical’ activities as art or criticism is to behave too much like a passenger on a short-handed ship. This is true enough doubtless of some who so busy themselves. But it is not true that criticism is a luxury trade. The rear-guard of society cannot be extricated until the vanguard has gone further. Goodwill and intelligence are still too little available. The critic, we have said, is as much concerned with the health of the mind as any doctor with the health of the body. To set up as a critic is to set up as a judge of values. What are the other qualifications required we shall see later. For the arts are inevitably and quite apart from any intentions of the artist an appraisal of existence. Matthew Arnold when he said that poetry is a criticism of life was saying something so obvious that it is constantly overlooked. The artist is concerned with the record and perpetuation of the experiences which seem to him most worth having. For reasons which we shall consider in Chapter XXII, he is also the man who is most likely to have experiences of value to record. He is the point at which the growth of the mind shows itself. His experiences those at least which give value to his work, represent conciliations of impulses which in most minds are still confused, intertrammelled and conflicting. His work is the ordering of what in most minds is disordered. That his failures to bring order out of chaos are often more conspicuous than those of other men is due in part at least to his greater audacity; it is a penalty of ambition and a consequence of his greater plasticity. But when he succeeds, the value of what he has accomplished is found always in a more perfect organisation which makes more of the possibilities of response and activity available.

What value is and which experiences are most valuable will never be understood so long as we think in terms of those large abstractions, the virtues and the vices. “You do invert the covenants of her trust,” said Comus, that disreputable advocate of Utilitarianism, to the Lady, that enemy of Nature. Instead of recognising that value lies in the ‘minute particulars’ of response and attitude, we have tried to find it in conformity to abstract prescriptions and general rules of conduct. The artist is an expert in the ‘minute particulars’ and qua artist pays little or no attention to generalisations which he finds in actual: practice are too crude to discriminate between what is valuable and the reverse. For this reason the moralist has always tended to distrust or to ignore him. Yet since the fine conduct of life springs only from fine ordering of responses far too subtle to be touched by any general ethical maxims, this neglect of art by the moralist has been tantamount to a disqualification. The basis of morality, as Shelley insisted, is laid not by preachers but by poets. Bad taste and crude responses are not mere flaws in an otherwise admirable person. They are actually a root evil from which other defects follow. No life can be excellent in which the elementary responses are disorganised and confused.

CHAPTER IX
Actual and Possible Misapprehensions

Who
Saith that? It is not written so on high!—Cain.

Every true view, perhaps, has its crude analogues, due sometimes to a confused perception of the real state of affairs, sometimes to faulty statement. Often these clumsy or mistaken offshoots are responsible for the difficulty with which the true view gains acceptance. Like shadows, reflections, or echoes, they obscure and baffle apprehension. Nowhere are they more inconvenient than in the problem of the moral function of art. A consideration of some instances will help to make clearer what has been said, to distinguish the view recommended from its disreputable relatives and to remove possible misapprehensions.

Allusion has several times been made to Tolstoy, and nothing in the recent history of æsthetic opinion is so remarkable as the onslaught made by that great artist against all the arts. No better example could be found of how not to introduce moral preoccupations into the judgment of values. Blinded by the light of a retarded conversion, knowing, as an artist, the extreme importance of the arts, but forgetting in the fierceness of his new convictions all the experience that had in earlier years made up his own creations, he flung himself, a Principle in each hand, upon the whole host of European masterpieces and left as he believed hardly a survivor standing.

He begins by emphasising the enormous output of energy which is devoted to Art in civilised countries. He then very rightly asserts that it is of great importance to know what this activity is about; and he devotes thirty pages to the various definitions which have been attempted of Art and Beauty. He concludes, after ransacking the somewhat uncritical compilations of Schasler and Knight, that æsthetics have been hitherto an idle amalgam of reverie and phantasy, from which no definition of Art emerges. Partly he traces this result to the use in æsthetics of notions of beauty; partly to an anxiety in the critics to justify the existent forms of Art. They are, he insists, less concerned to discover what Art is, than to show that those things which are currently termed Art must in fact be Art. To these sections of What is Art? assent may be accorded. He then sets out his own definition. “To evoke in oneself a sensation which one has experienced before, and having evoked it in oneself, to communicate this sensation in such a way that others may experience the same sensation . . . so that other men are infected by these sensations and pass through them; in this does the activity of Art consist.”[†] So far excellent; if we translate ‘sensation’, the current æsthetico-psychological jargon of the art schools in Tolstoy’s day, by some more general term such as experience. But this is only a first stage of the definition; there are additions to be made. Any Art which is infective, as he uses that word in the quotation above, is pure Art as opposed to modern or adulterated Art; but in deciding the full value of any work of Art we have to consider the nature of its contents, the nature, that is, of the experiences communicated. The value of art contents is judged, according to Tolstoy, by the religious consciousness of the age. For Tolstoy the religious consciousness is the higher comprehension of the meaning of life, and this, according to him, is the universal union of men with God and with one another.

When Tolstoy applies his criterion to the judgment of particular works of art, he is able to deduce striking results: “Christian Art, that is, the Art of our time, must be catholic in the direct sense of that word—that is, universal—and so must unite all men. There are but two kinds of sensations which unite all men—the sensations which arise from the recognition of man’s filial relation to God and of the brotherhood of men, and the simplest vital sensations which are accessible to all men without exception, such as the sensations of joy, meekness of spirit, alacrity, calm, etc. It is only these two kinds of sensations that form the subject of the Art of our time, which is good according to its contents.” Tolstoy in fact denied the value of all human endeavours except those which tend directly to the union of men. It may be suspected that his religious enthusiasm was due to his belief that Religion had this tendency. He distinguished, it will be remembered, very sharply between Religion and religions; a distinction with which many besides Tolstoy have consoled themselves. But his essential aim, his single value, was the union of men. All other things are of value only in so far as they tend to promote this, and art shares the general subordination. Even a joke, for Tolstoy, is only a joke so long as all men may share in it, a truly revolutionary amendment. The sharing is more important than the merriment. On these principles he surveys European Art and Literature. With magnificent defiance of accepted values, and the hardness of heart of a supreme doctrinaire, one after another of the unassailables is toppled from its eminence. Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, etc., are rejected; Wagner in especial is the object of a critical tour de force. In their place are set A Tale of Two Cities, The Chimes, Adam Bede, Les Miserables (almost the only thing in French literature of which Tolstoy could approve), and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.[†] All art which does not directly urge the union of men, or whose appeal is suspected to be limited to cultured and aristocratic circles, is condemned. “All who are not hand in hand with me are against me,” thought Tolstoy, under the urgency of his sense of human misery. Any diversion of art from a single narrow channel seemed to him an irreparable waste. Remembering no doubt how deeply he had been affected and influenced in the past by the things which he now deplored, he came in the end to assign unlimited powers to art when rightly directed. But, if we think of the other things which he also invoked to the same end, there is a ring of despair in his final cry: “Art must remove violence, only Art can do this.”

We may compare with this a famous utterance of another aristocrat, equally a supreme artist, equally in rebellion against the whole fabric of conventional civilisation, whose “passion for reforming the world” was not less than Tolstoy’s, but who differed from him in the possession of a wider and more complete sense of values and a mind not riven and distorted by a late conversion.

“The whole objection of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive and subjugate one another.

“But poetry acts in a diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. It exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed.”

It is curious how the insertion of particular names here seems to weaken the argument. The world, we feel fairly certain, would be on the whole much the same even if there had been no Boccaccio and no Lord Bacon. Things would not be very different, some people will think, even if none of these authors had ever bestirred themselves to write. Shakespeare, as so often, would perhaps be counted an exception. But this sense that there are, after all, very few poets who individually make much difference is not in the least an objection to Shelley’s main thesis. We could bale a vast amount of water out of the sea without making any apparent difference to it, but this would not prove that it does not consist of water. Even if the removal of the influence of all the poets whose names we know made no appreciable difference in human affairs, it would still be true that the enlargement of the mind, the widening of the sphere of human sensibility, is brought about through poetry.

A too narrow view of values, or a too simple conception of morality is usually the cause of these misunderstandings of the arts. The agelong controversy as to whether the business of poetry is to please or to instruct shows this well. “Poets wish either to instruct or to delight or to combine solid and useful with the agreeable.” “It is only for the purpose of being useful that Poetry ought to be agreeable; pleasure is only a means which she uses for the end of profit.” So thought Boileau and Rapin. Dryden, modest and penetrating in his fashion, was “satisfied if it cause delight: for delight is the chief, if not the only, end of poetry: instruction can be admitted but in the second place; for poesy only instructs as it delights.” But he does not further specify the nature of the delight or the instruction, an omission in which most critics except Shelley agree. Our view on the point entirely depends upon this. If we set the sugarcoated-pill view aside as beneath serious consideration, there still remains a problem. A reviewer of the recent performance of the Cenci will state it excellently for us.

“It had been better had Shelley’s Cenci remained for ever banned. It represents three hours of unrelieved, agonising misery. . . . What excuse is there for the depicting of horrors such as these? There must be some, for a house packed with literary celebrities fiercely applauded. If the function of the theatre is to amuse, then in the presentation of the Cenci it has missed its aim. If it is to instruct, what moral can be pointed for the better conduct of our lives by a tragedy such as this? If Art be the answer, then Art may well be sacrificed.”

No doubt the literary celebrities, with their applause, were to blame, in part, for this. Our relic of the Age of Good Sense made a just reaction. He accurately registered the effect to which bad acting and inept production[*] gave rise. But it is with his argument not with his reaction that we are concerned. The celebrities, if they had not been too busy giving vent (though in a mistaken form) to their loyalty to the memory of Shelley, and to their sense of triumph over the Censor, might have told him that neither amusement nor instruction is what the judicious seek from Tragedy, and referred him to Aristotle. Neither term, unless we wrench it right out of its usual setting, is appropriate to the greater forms of art. The experiences which they occasion are too full, too varied, too whole, too subtly balanced upon opposing impulses, whether of pity and terror or of joy and despair, to be so easily described. Tragedy—

beneath whose sable roof
Of boughs as if for festal purpose decked
With unrejoicing berries—ghostly shapes
May meet at noontide; Fear and Trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight, Death the Skeleton
And Time the Shadow,

is still the form under which the mind may most clearly and freely contemplate the human situation, its issues unclouded, its possibilities revealed. To this its value is due and the supreme position among the arts which it has occupied in historical times and still occupies; what will happen in the future we can only conjecture. Tragedy is too great an exercise of the spirit to be classed among amusements or even delights, or to be regarded as a vehicle for the inculcation of such crude valuations as may be codified in a moral. But the fuller discussion of Tragedy we must defer.

These remarks seemed necessary in order to avoid the impression, which our theory of value might have given, that the arts are merely concerned with happy solutions and ingenious reconciliations of diverse gratifications, “a box where sweets compacted lie.” It is not so. Only a crude psychology, as we shall see, would identify the satisfaction of an impulse with a pleasure. No hedonic theory of value will fit the facts over even a small part of the field, since it must take what is a concomitant merely of a phase in the process of satisfaction as the mainspring of the whole. Pleasure, however, has its place in the whole account of values, and an important place, as we shall see later. But it must not be allowed to encroach on ground to which it has no right.

CHAPTER X
Poetry for Poetry’s Sake

On passe plus facilement d’un extrême à un autre
que d’une nuance à une autre nuance.

Attirance de la Mort.

Another possible misapprehension which cannot be left unmentioned arises in connection with the doctrine ‘Art for Art’s sake’, a doctrine definitely and detrimentally dated; it concerns the place of what are called ulterior effects in the valuing of a work of art. It has been very fashionable to turn up the nose at any attempt to apply, as it is said, ‘external canons’ to art. But it may be recalled that of all the great critical doctrines, the ‘moral’, theory of art (it would be better to call it the ‘Ordinary values’ theory) has the most great minds behind it. Until Whistler came to start the critical movements of the last half-century, few poets, artists or critics had ever doubted that the value of art experiences was to be judged as other values are. Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Dante, Spenser, Milton, the Eighteenth Century, Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold and Pater, to name only the most prominent, all with varying degrees of refinement, held the same view.[*] The last is a somewhat unexpected adherent.

“Given the conditions I have tried to explain as constituting good art, then if it be devoted further to the increase of men’s happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or to the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new and old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may fortify us in our sojourn here . . . it will also be great art; if, over and above those qualities which I have summed up . . . it has something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its architectural place, in the great structure of human life.”[†] No better brief emotive account of the conditions under which an experience has value could be desired.

Against all these weighty opinions, the view—supported largely by a distinction between Form and Content, Subject and Handling, which will be examined elsewhere,[*] and relying upon the doctrine of intrinsic, supersensible, ultimate Goods discussed above—that the values of art are unique, or capable of being considered in isolation from all others, has held sway for some thirty years in many most reputable quarters. The reasons for this attempted severance have already been touched upon; they are of all sorts. Partly it may be due to the influence of Whistler and Pater, and of those still more influential disciples who spread their doctrines. Partly it may be due to a massed reaction against Ruskin. Partly again we may suspect the influence, rather suddenly encountered, of Continental and German æsthetics upon the English mind. Almost from the beginning of scientific æsthetics, the insistence on the æsthetic experience as an experience, peculiar, complete, and capable of being studied in isolation, has received prominence. Often it is no more than an extension into this considering, whenever possible, one thing at a time. When critics in England, not very long ago, heard that there was something connected with art and poetry—namely, the æsthetic experience—which could be considered and examined in isolation by the methods of introspection, they not unnaturally leapt to the conclusion that its value also could be isolated and described without reference to other things. In some hands the further conclusions drawn were too queer to outlive their hour of fashion. They amounted often to the postulation of a ‘specific thrill’ yielded by works of art and nothing else, unlike and unconnected with all other experiences. “No queerer,” it was said, “than anything else in this incredibly queer universe.”[†] But the queerness of the universe is of a different and a more interesting sort. It may be a curiosity shop but it nowhere seems to be a chaos.

For our present purposes we need only consider the view as it is put forward by its ablest exponent, a critic who by his own explanations of this formula goes very far towards meeting the objection we urge.

“What then does the formula ‘Poetry for Poetry’s sake’ tell us about this experience? It says, as I understand it, these things. First, this experience is an end in itself, is worth having on ifs own account, has an intrinsic value. Next, its poetic value is this intrinsic worth alone. Poetry may have also have an ulterior value as a means to culture or religion; because it conveys instruction or softens the passions, or furthers a good cause; because it brings the poet fame, or money, or a quiet conscience. So much the better: let it be valued for these reasons too. But its ulterior worth neither is nor can directly determine its poetic worth as a satisfying imaginative experience; and this is to be judged entirely from within. . . . The consideration of ulterior ends whether by the poet in the act of composing or by the reader in the act of experiencing, tends to lower poetic value. It does so because it tends to change the nature of poetry by taking it out of its own atmosphere. For its nature is to be not a part, nor yet a copy of the real world (as we commonly understand that phrase) but to be a world by itself, independent, complete, autonomous[†].”

There seem four points well worth close consideration here. The first is that the things mentioned as possible ulterior values in Dr Bradley’s list—culture, religion, instruction, softening of the passions, furtherance of good causes, the poet’s fame, or money, or quiet conscience—these things are plainly upon quite different levels. He says of all of them that they cannot possibly determine the poetic worth of an æsthetic experience; that whether or no any poetic experience is poetically valuable cannot depend upon any of these ulterior values. But it is certain that some of these stand in a quite different relation to the poetic experience than do others. Culture, religion, instruction in some special senses, softening of the passions, and the furtherance of good causes may be directly concerned in our judgments of the poetic values of experiences. Otherwise, as we shall see, the word ‘poetic’ becomes a useless sound. On the other hand, the poet’s fame, his reward, or his conscience, seem plainly to be irrelevant. That is the first point.

The second point is that what Dr Bradley says as to the imaginative experience—that it is to be judged entirely from within—is misleading. In most cases we do not judge it from within. Our judgment as to its value is no part of it. In rare instances such a judgment may be part of it, but this is exceptional. As a rule we have to come out of it in order to judge it, and we judge it by memory or by other residual effects which we learn to be good indices to its value. If by judging it in the experience we mean merely while these residual effects are fresh, we may agree. In so judging it, however, it’s “place in the great structure of human life” cannot possibly be ignored. The value which it has is dependent upon this, and we cannot judge that value without taking this place, and with it innumerable ulterior worths, into account. It is not that we shall evaluate it wrongly if we neglect them, but that evaluation is just this taking account of everything, and of the way things hang together.

The third point arises with regard to Dr Bradley’s third position, that the consideration of ulterior ends, whether by the poet in the act of composing, or by the reader in the act of experiencing, tends to lower poetic value. Here all depends upon which are the ulterior ends in question, and what the kind of poetry. It will not be denied that for some kinds of poetry the intrusion of certain ulterior ends may, and often does, lower their value; but there seem plainly to be other kinds of poetry in which its value as poetry definitely and directly depends upon the ulterior ends involved. Consider the Psalms, Isaiah, the New Testament, Dante, the Pilgrim’s Progress, Rabelais, any really universal satire, Swift, Voltaire, Byron.

In all these cases the consideration of ulterior ends has been certainly essential to the act of composing. That needs no arguing; but, equally, this consideration of the ulterior ends involved is inevitable to the reader.

Dr Bradley puts this third position forward in a tentative form; he says that the ulterior tends to lower poetic value, an important reservation, but it would be better to distinguish two kinds of poetry, one to which his doctrine applies and one to which it does not. As illustrations of the cases in which his doctrine does apply, The Ancient Mariner and Hartleap Well may be mentioned. Here in both cases the experiences are of a kind into which no ulterior ends enter in any important degree. Thus when Coleridge and Wordsworth introduce moral considerations, the effect is undeniably one of intrusion. As Mrs Meynell comically remarks, “The Ancient Mariner offends upon a deliberate plan. It denies the natural function of observation when it invents sanctions for the protection of a wild bird’s life, and for the punishment of its slaughter. Coleridge intends to enforce a lesson by telling us that 200 mariners died of thirst because they had—with the superstition pardonable in their state of education—supposed an albatross to be the bringer of foggy weather, and had approved its slaughter, as almost all men implicitly approve the daily slaughter of innocent beast and bird.” But this charge against Coleridge is only reasonable if we make of this ulterior end, this ‘lesson’ against cruelty to animals, a vital part of the poem. Mrs Meynell, we may think, takes Coleridge’s moral too seriously. It may be this possibility which Coleridge had in mind when he said, long afterwards, that The Ancient Mariner did not contain enough of the moral. As the poem stands, it is of a kind into which ulterior ends do not enter. If we are to take this alien element, this lesson, into account in our judgment, we shall have deliberately to misread the poem, with Mrs Meynell. The same considerations apply to Hartleap Well; and so far as Dr Bradley is merely enforcing this point, we may agree; but he fails to notice—it is only fair to say that few critics seem ever to notice it—that poetry is of more than one kind, and that the different kinds are to be judged by different principles. There is a kind of poetry into the judgment of which ulterior ends directly and essentially enter; a kind part of whose value is directly derivable from the value of the ends with which it is associated. There are other kinds, into which ulterior ends do not enter in any degree, and there are yet other kinds whose value may be lowered by the intrusion of ends relatively trivial in value. Dr Bradley is misled by the usual delusion that there is in this respect only one kind of poetry, into saying far more than the facts of poetic experience will justify.

The fourth point is of more general importance perhaps than these three. It is in fact the real point of disagreement between the view we are upholding and the doctrine which Dr Bradley, together with the vast majority of modern critics, wishes to maintain. It is stated in the concluding sentence of the paragraph which I have quoted. He says of poetry that “its nature is to be, not a part nor yet a copy of the real world, as we commonly understand that phrase, but to be a world by itself, independent, complete, autonomous. To possess it fully, you must enter that world, conform to its laws, and ignore, for the time being, the beliefs, aims, and particular conditions which belong to you in the other world of reality.” This doctrine insists: upon a severance between poetry and what, in opposition, may be called life; a complete severance, allowing however, as Dr Bradley goes on to insist—an ‘underground’ connection. But this ‘underground’ connection is all-important. Whatever there is in the poetic experience has come through it. The world of poetry has in no sense any different reality from the rest of the world and it has no special laws and no other-worldly peculiarities. It is made up of experiences of exactly the same kinds as those that come to us in other ways. Every poem however is a strictly limited piece of experience, a piece which breaks up more or less easily if alien elements intrude. It is more highly and more delicately organised than ordinary experiences of the street or of the hillside; it is fragile. Further it is communicable. It may be experienced by many different minds with only slight variations. That this should be possible is one of the conditions of its organisation. It differs from many other experiences, whose value is very similar, in this very communicability. For these reasons when we experience it, or attempt to, we must preserve it from contamination, from the irruptions of personal particularities. We must keep the poem undisturbed by these or we fail to read it and have some other experience instead. For these reasons we establish a severance, we draw a boundary between the poem and what is not the poem in our experience. But this is no severance between unlike things but between different systems of the same activities. The gulf between them is no greater than that between the impulses which direct the pen and those which conduct the pipe of a man who is smoking and writing at once, and the ‘disassociation’ or severance of the poetic experience is merely a freeing of it from extraneous ingredients and influences. The myth of a ‘transmutation’ or ‘poetisation’ of experience and that other myth of the ‘contemplative’ or ‘æsthetic’ attitude, are in part due to talking about Poetry and the ‘poetic’ instead of thinking about the concrete experiences which are poems.

The separation of poetic experience from its place in life and its ulterior worths, involves a definite lop-sidedness, narrowness, and incompleteness in those who preach it sincerely. No one, of course, would bring such charges against the author of Shakespearean Tragedy; his is that welcome and not unfamiliar case of the critic whose practice is a refutation of his principles. When genuinely held the view leads to an attempted splitting up of the experiencing reader into a number of distinct faculties or departments which have no real existence. It is impossible to divide a reader into so many men—an æsthetic man, a moral man, a practical man, a political man, an intellectual man, and so on. It cannot be done. In any genuine experience all these elements inevitably enter. But if it could be done, as many critics pretend, the result would be fatal to the wholeness and sanction of the critical judgment. We cannot e.g. read Shelley adequately while believing that all his views are moonshine—read Prometheus Unbound while holding that ‘the perfectibility of man is an undesirable ideal’ and that ‘hangmen are excellent things.’ To say that there is a purely æsthetic or poetic approach to, let us say, the Sermon on the Mount, by which no consideration of the intention or ulterior end of the poem enters, would appear to be merely mental timidity, the shrinking remark of a person who finds essential literature too much for him. Into an adequate reading of the greater kinds of poetry everything not private and peculiar to the individual reader must come in. The reader must be required to wear no blinkers, to overlook nothing which is relevant, to shut off no part of himself from participation. If he attempts to assume the peculiar attitude of disregarding all but some hypothetically-named æsthetic elements, he joins Henry James’ Osmond in his tower, he joins Blake’s Kings and Priests in their High Castles and Spires.

CHAPTER XI
A Sketch for a Psychology

“Wot’s wot?” repeated one of the buccaneers in a deep growl. “Ah,
he’d be a lucky one as knowed that!”—Treasure Island.

M. Jules Romains recently observed[†] that psychology hitherto has merely contrived to say laboriously and obscurely, and with less precision, what we all know without its aid already. This is regrettably difficult to deny; any particular remark of a psychologist, if true, is unlikely to be startling. But at certain points new light has none the less crept in. Incoherences and flaws have been found in the common-sense picture, adumbration rather, of the mind; connections between bits of our behaviour, which common-sense had missed, have been noted; and, still more important, a general outline of the kind of thing a mind is has begun to take shape. The next age but two, if an oncoming Age of Relativity is to be followed as Mr Haldane supposes[†] by an Age of Biology, will be introduced by a recognition on the part of many minds of their own nature, a recognition which is certain to change their behaviour and their outlook considerably. We are still far removed from such an age. None the less enough is known for an analysis of the mental events which make up the reading of a poem to be attempted. And such an analysis is a primary necessity for criticism. The psychological distinctions which have hitherto served the critic are too few and his use of them in most cases too unsystematic, too vague, and too uncertain, for his insight to yield its full advantages.

The view put forward here is in many respects heterodox, a disadvantage in a sketch. But so many difficulties attend any exposition of psychology, however orthodox and however full, that the dangers of misunderstanding are outweighed by the advantages of a fresh point of view. It is the general outline and in particular the insistence upon an account of knowledge in terms merely of the causation of our thoughts which is contrary to received opinion. The detail of the analysis of poetic experience, the account of imagery, of emotion, of pleasure, of incipient action and so forth, although, so far as I am aware, no similar analysis has before been explicitly set out, may be taken as comparatively orthodox.

For our immediate purpose, for a clearer understanding of values and for the avoidance of unnecessary confusions in criticism, it is necessary to break away from the set of ideas by which popular and academic psychology alike attempt to describe the mind. We naturally tend to conceive it as a thing of a peculiar spiritual kind, fairly: persistent though variable, endowed with attributes, three in number, its capacities namely for knowing, willing and feeling, three irreducible modes of being aware of or concerned with objects. A violent shock to this entity comes when we are forced by a closer examination of the facts to conceive it as doing all these three unconsciously as well as consciously. An unconscious mind is a fairly evident fiction, useful though it may be, and goings on in the nervous system are readily accepted as a satisfactory substitute. From this to the recognition of the conscious mind as a similar fiction is no great step, although one which many people find difficult. Some of this difficulty is due to habit. It wears off as we notice how many of the things which we believed true of the fiction can be stated in terms of the less fictitious substitute. But much of the difficulty is emotive, non-intellectual, more specifically religious, in origin.[*] It is due to desire, to fear, or to exaltation as the case may be, to emotion masquerading as thought, and is a difficulty not so easily removed.

That the mind is the nervous system, or rather a part of its activity, has long been evident, although the prevalence among psychologists of persons with philosophic antecedents has delayed the recognition of the fact in an extraordinary fashion. With every advance of neurology—and a decided advance here was perhaps the only good legacy left by the War[†]—the evidence becomes more overwhelming. It is true that as our knowledge of the nervous system stands at present much of the detail of the identification is impenetrably obscure, and the account which we give must frankly be admitted to be only a degree less fictitious than one in terms of spiritual happenings. But the kind of account which is likely to be substantiated by future research has become clear, largely through the work of Behaviourists and Psycho-analysts, the assumptions and results of both needing to be corrected however in ways which the recent experimental and theoretical investigations of the ‘Gestalt’ School are indicating.

The view that we are our bodies, more especially our nervous systems, more especially still the higher or more central co-ordinating parts of it, and that the mind is a system of impulses should not be described as Materialism. It might equally well be called Idealism. Neither term in this connection has any scientific, any strictly symbolic meaning or reference. Neither stands for any separable, observable group of things, or character in things. Each is primarily an emotive term used to incite or support certain emotional attitudes. Like all terms used in the vain attempt (vain because the question is nonsensical) to say what things are, instead of to say how they behave, they state nothing. Like all such terms they change in different hands from banners to bludgeons, being each for some people an emotive agent round which attitudes, aspirations, values are rallied, and for other people a weapon of offence by which persons supposed adverse to these attitudes, aspirations and values may, it is hoped, be discomfited. That the Materialist and the Idealist believe themselves to be holding views which are incompatible with one another is but an instance of a very widespread confusion between scientific statement and emotive appeal, with which we shall in later chapters be much concerned. The Mind-Body problem is strictly speaking no problem; it is an imbroglio due to failure to settle a real problem, namely, as to when we are making a statement and when merely inciting an attitude. A problem simpler here than in many cases, since the alleged statement is of an impossible form[*], but complicated on both sides of the controversy by misunderstanding of the attitudes which the other side is concerned to maintain. For if mental events are recognised as identical with certain neural events, neither the attitudes which ensue towards them nor the attitudes they themselves will warrantably take up, are changed so much as either Idealists or Materialists have commonly supposed. To call anything mental or spiritual, as opposed to material, or to call anything material as opposed to mental, is only to point out a difference between the two kinds. The differences which can actually be detected between a mental event, such as a toothache, and a non-mental event, such as a sunspot, remain when we have identified the mental event with a neural change. So recognised, it loses none of its observable peculiarities, only certain alleged unstatable and ineffable attributes are removed. It remains unlike any event which is not mental; it is as unparalleled as before. It retains its privileges as the most interesting of all events, and our relations to one another and to the world remain essentially as they were before the recognition. The extreme ecstasies of the mystic, like the attitudes of the engineer towards a successful contrivance, remain just as much and just as little appropriate with regard to the humblest or the proudest of our acts. Thus the identification of the mind with a part of the working of the nervous system, need involve, theology apart, no disturbance of anyone’s attitude to the world, his fellow-men, or to himself. Theology, however, is still more implicit in current attitudes than traditional sceptics suspect.

The nervous system is the means by which stimuli from the environment, or from within the body, result in appropriate behaviour. All mental events occur in the course of processes of adaptation, somewhere between a stimulus and a response. Thus every mental event has an origin in stimulation, a character, and consequences, in action or adjustment for action. Its character is sometimes accessible to introspection. What it feels like, in those cases in which it feels or is felt at all, is consciousness, but in many cases nothing is felt, the mental event is unconscious. Why some events are conscious but not others is at present a mystery; no one has yet succeeded in bringing the various hints which neurology may offer into connection with one another. In some important respects conscious and unconscious mental events must differ, but what these are no one can as yet safely conjecture. On the other hand there are many respects in which they are similar, and these are the respects which are at present most open to investigation.

The process in the course of which a mental event may occur, a process apparently beginning in a stimulus and ending in an act, is what we have called an impulse. In actual experience single impulses of course never occur. Even the simplest human reflexes are very intricate bundles of mutually dependent impulses, and in any actual human behaviour the number of simultaneous and connected impulses occurring is beyond estimation. The simple impulse in fact is a limit, and the only impulses psychology is concerned with are complex. It is often convenient to speak as though simple impulses were in question, as when we speak of an impulse of hunger, or an impulse to laugh, but we must not forget how intricate all our activities are.

To take the stimulus as a starting-point is in some ways misleading. Of the possible stimuli which we might at any moment receive, only a few actually take effect. Which are received and which impulses ensue depends upon which of our interests is active, upon the general set, that is, of our activities. This is conditioned in a large degree by the state, of satisfaction or unrest, of the recurrent and persistent needs of the body. When hungry and when replete we respond differently to the stimulus of a smell of cooking. A change in the wind unnoticed by the passengers causes the captain to reduce sail. Social needs in this respect are often as important as individual. Thus some people walking in a Gallery with friends before whom they wish to shine will actually receive far more stimulus from the pictures than they would if by themselves.

A stimulus then must not be conceived as an alien intruder which thrusts itself upon us and, after worming a devious way through our organism as through a piece of cheese, emerges at the other end as an act. Stimuli are only received if they serve some need of the organism and the form which the response to them takes depends only in part upon the nature of the stimulus, and much more upon what the organism ‘wants’, i.e. the state of equilibrium of its multifarious activities.

Thus experience has two sources which in different cases have very different importance. So far as we are thinking about or referring to certain definite things our behaviour in all probability will only be appropriate (i.e. our thoughts true) in so far as it is determined by the nature of the present and past stimuli we have received from those things and things like them. So far as we are satisfying our needs and desires a much less strict connection between stimulus and response is sufficient. A baby howls at first in much the same way, whatever the cause of his unrest, and older persons behave not unlike him. Any occasion may be sufficient for taking exercise, or for a quarrel, for falling in love or having a drink. To this partial independence of behaviour (from stimulus) is due the sometimes distressing fact that views, opinions and beliefs vary so much with our differing moods. Such variation shows that the view, belief or opinion is not a purely intellectual product, is not due to thinking in the narrower sense, of response that is governed by stimuli, present or past, but is an attitude adopted to satisfy some desire, temporary or lasting. Thought in the strictest sense varies only with evidence: but attitudes and feelings change for all manner of reasons.

The threefold division between the causes, character and consequences of a mental event, conscious or unconscious, corresponds, with certain qualifications, to the usual division in traditional psychology of thought (or cognition), feeling, and will (or conation). To be cognisant of anything, to know it, is to be influenced by it; to desire, to seek, to will anything is to act towards it. In between these two are the conscious accompaniments, if any, of the whole process. These last, the conscious characters of the mental event, include evidently both sensations and feelings. (Cf. Chapter XVL, pp. 125-128.)

The correspondence is not by any means simple. Many things are included under knowing, for example, which on this reconstruction of psychology would have to be counted as willing.[*] Expectation, usually described as a cognitive attitude, becomes a peculiar form of action, getting ready, namely, to receive certain kinds of stimuli rather than others. The opposite case is equally common. Hunger, a typical desire on the usual account, would become knowledge, giving us, when genuine hunger, obscure awareness of a lack of nourishment, when habit-hunger, awareness of a certain phase in a cyclic visceral process. These illustrations bring out clearly what is everywhere recognised, that the customary cognition-feeling-conation classification of mental goings on is not a pigeon-holing of exclusive processes. Every mental event has, in varying degrees, all three characteristics. Thus expectation as a preparation for certain stimuli may lower the threshold for them, and sometimes makes their reception more and sometimes less discriminating; hunger also is characteristically accompanied by a search for food.

The advantage of substituting the causation, the character and the consequences of a mental event as its fundamental aspects in place of its knowing, feeling, and willing aspects is that instead of a trio of incomprehensible ultimates we have a set of aspects which not only mental events but all events share. We have, of course, to introduce qualifications. Stimuli, as we have mentioned above, are not the only causes of mental events. The nervous system is specialised to receive impressions through the organs of sense, but its state at any moment is also determined by a host of other factors. The condition of the blood and the position of the head are typical instances. Only that part of the cause of a mental event which takes effect through incoming (sensory) impulses or through effects of past sensory impulses can be said to be thereby known. The reservation no doubt involves complications. But any plausible account of what knowledge is and how it happens is bound to be complicated.

Similarly, not all the effects of a mental event are to be counted as what that event wills or seeks after; apoplectic strokes, for example, can be ruled out. Only those movements which the nervous system is specialised to incite, which take place through motor impulses, should be included.

On all other accounts the relation between an awareness and what it is aware of is a mystery. We can name the relation as we please, apprehension, presentation, cognition or knowledge, but there we have to leave the matter. On this account we make use of the fact that an awareness, say of a variety of black marks on this page, is caused in a certain peculiar way, namely through impressions on a part of the brain (the retina) and various complicated connected goings on in other parts of the brain. To say that the mental (neural) event so caused is aware of the black marks is to say that it is caused by them, and here ‘aware of’ = ‘caused by’. The two statements are merely alternative formulations.

In extending this account to more complicated situations where we know or, less ambiguously, refer to things which are past or future we have to make use of the fact that impressions are commonly signs, have effects which depend not on themselves alone but upon the other impressions which have co-operated with them in the past.

A sign[*] is something which has once been a member of a context or configuration that worked in the mind as a whole. When it reappears its effects are as though the rest of the context were present. In analysing complex events of referring we have to break them up artificially into the simpler sign-situations out of which they arise; not forgetting meanwhile how interdependent the parts of any interpretation of a complex sign are.

The detail of this procedure is most easily studied in connection with the use of words. We shall deal with it therefore in Chapter XVI, where the reading of a poem is discussed. Here only the general principle matters that to know anything is to be influenced by it, directly when we sense it, indirectly when the effects of past conjunctions of impressions come into play. More will be added later, in connection with the process of reading, about the receptive, the knowledge aspect of mental events. The other two aspects need less explanation. They are also more generally important for the understanding of poetic, musical and other experiences. For a theory of knowledge is needed only at one point, the point at which we wish to decide whether a poem, for example, is true, or reveals reality, and if so in what sense; admittedly a very important question. Whereas a theory of feeling, of emotion, of attitudes and desires, of the affective-volitional aspect of mental activity, is required at all points of our analysis.

CHAPTER XII
Pleasure

The poor benefit of a bewitching minute.—The Revenger’s Tragedy.

Sensation, imagery, feeling, emotion, together with pleasure, unpleasure and pain are names for the conscious characteristics of impulses: How they may best be sorted out is a problem whose difficulty is much aggravated by the shortcomings of language at this point. We speak, for instance, of pleasures and pains in the same fashion, as though they were of the same order, but, strictly, although pains as single self-sufficing modifications of consciousness are easily enough obtainable, pleasures by themselves do not seem to occur. Pleasure seems to be a way in which something happens, rather than an independent happening which can occur by itself in a mind. We have, not pleasures, but experiences of one kind or another, visual, auditory, organic, motor, and so forth, which are pleasant. Similarly we have experiences which are unpleasant. If, however, we call them painful we give rise to an ambiguity. We may be saying that they are unpleasant or we may be saying that they are accompanied by pains, which is a different matter. The use of the term pleasure, as though like pain it was itself a complete experience, instead of being something which attaches to or follows along with or after other experiences, has led to a number of confusions; especially in those critical theses, to which objection has already been taken in Chapter IX, which identify value with pleasure.

The twenty or more distinct kinds of sensations, into which modern psychology has elaborated the old five senses, can be observed to differ very widely in the degree to which they are susceptible of and accompanied by pleasantness and unpleasantness. The higher senses, sight and hearing, in most persons seem to yield sensations which vary much less from neutrality or indifference than the others. We must be careful to understand this difference correctly however. An arrangement of colours and shapes, a sequence of notes or a musical phrase may, of course, in suitable people, be as intensely toned, pleasantly or unpleasantly, as any organic or taste sensations, for example. But even this is not usual. The right experiment is to compare a single colour, say, or a single note, with such a sensation as a uniform touch or temperature gives rise to, a bath for example, or with a simple uniform taste or smell, or with hunger, or nausea. Fair comparison is difficult, equivalent levels of simplicity and uniformity being impossible to discover, but few will doubt that the degree of pleasure-unpleasure aroused by tastes, for example, far exceeds that which auditory or visual sensations excite by themselves. We must of course be careful here to avoid confusing the intrinsic pleasure-unpleasure of the sensations with that which arises through memory, through the effects of other sensations, pleasant or unpleasant, which may have accompanied them in the past, and through expectations agreeable or disagreeable.

To speak of the intrinsic pleasure-unpleasure of a sensation is perhaps misleading. The pleasantness of a sensation as we know is a highly variable thing. It may alter completely while the strictly sensory characteristics of the sensation remain as before. The difference in the same smell of liquor, before and after an alcoholic excess is a striking example. A sound which is pleasant for a while may become very unpleasant if it continues and does not lapse from consciousness. And yet indisputably it may remain qua sensation the same. A sound-sensation may remain unchanged in tone, volume and intensity yet vary widely in pleasure-unpleasure. This difference is important. It is one of the chief reasons which have caused feeling (pleasure-unpleasure) to be distinguished from sensation as altogether of a different nature. Tone, volume and intensity are features in the sound closely dependent upon the stimulus, pleasantness is dependent not on external stimulus but upon factors, very obscure at present, in us. All here is conjecture. The close connection of stimulus with sensation we know because it happens to be comparatively accessible to experiment. And introspection of sensations of external origin is for that reason much more easy than introspection of most visceral or organic sensations. We can practise it freely and repeat it and so control our results. To a lesser extent those sensations of internal origin which we can in part consciously control, those due to voluntary movements, share this double accessibility. But all the rest of the multifarious conscious goings on in the nervous system remain obscure. One broad fact, however, is important. The effects in the body of almost all stimuli of whatever nature are extraordinarily numerous and varied. “You cannot show the observer a wall-paper pattern without by that very fact disturbing his respiration and circulation.”[†] And no man knows what other disturbances do not join in. The whole body resounds in what would seem to be a fairly systematic way. Whether the outpouring of this tide of disturbance makes up a part of, gives a tone to consciousness, or whether only the incoming reports of the results can be conscious is a question upon which no conclusive evidence would seem to be yet available. The incoming reports of some at least of these disturbances certainly can become conscious. A lump in the throat, a yearning of the bowels, horripilation, breathlessness, these are their coarser and more obvious forms. Usually, they are less salient and fuse with the whole mass of internal sensations to form the cœnesthesia, the whole bodily consciousness, tinging it, altering its general character in some one of perhaps a thousand different ways.

It has been much disputed whether pleasure-unpleasure is a quality of general bodily or organic consciousness, of some part of it perhaps, or whether it is something quite different from any quality of any sensation or set of sensations. As we have seen, it is not a quality of an auditory sensation in the sense in which its loudness, for instance, is a quality. There seem to be similar objections to making it a quality of any sensation of any kind. A sensation is what an impulse at a certain stage in its development feels like, and its sensory qualities are characters[*] of the impulse at that stage. The pleasure-unpleasure attaching to the impulse may be no character of the impulse itself, but of its fate, its success or failure in restoring equilibrium to the system to which it belongs.

This is perhaps as good a guess at what pleasure and unpleasure are as can yet be made, pleasure being successful activity of some kind, not necessarily of a biologically useful kind, and unpleasure being frustrated, chaotic, mal-successful activity. We shall consider this theory again at a later stage (cf. Chapter XXIV). The point to be made here is that pleasure and unpleasure are complicated matters arising in the course of activities which are directed to other ends. The old controversies as to whether pleasure is the goal of all striving or whether avoidance of unpleasure the starting-point, are thus escaped. As Ribot pointed out[†] the exclusive quest of pleasure for itself, plaisir-passion, is a morbid form of activity and self-destructive. Pleasure on this view is originally an effect signifying that certain positive or negative tendencies have instinctively attained their aim and are satisfied. Later through experience it becomes a cause. Instructed by experience man and animal alike place themselves in circumstances which will arouse desire and so through satisfaction lead to pleasure. The gourmet, the libertine, the æsthete, the mystic do so alike. But when the pleasure which is the result of satisfying the tendency becomes the end pursued rather than the satisfying of the tendency itself, then an ‘inversion of the psychological mechanism’ comes about. In the one case the activity is propagated from below upwards, in the other from above downwards, from the brain to the organic functions. The result is often an exhaustion of the tendency, ‘disillusionment’ and the blasé, world-wearied attitude.

The evil results, as Ribot remarks, are largely confined to those individuals in whom the quest for pleasure has the force of an obsession. But on the view of pleasure which we have indicated above, it is clear that all those doctrines, very common in critical literature, which set up pleasure as the goal of activity, are mistaken. Every activity has its own specific goal. Pleasure very probably ensues in most cases when this goal is reached, but that is a different matter. To read a poem for the sake of the pleasure which will ensue if it is successfully read is to approach it in an inadequate attitude. Obviously it is the poem in which we should be interested, not in a by-product of having managed successfully to read it. The orientation of attention is wrong if we put the pleasure in the forefront. Such a mistake is perhaps not common among instructed persons, but to judge by many remarks which appear in reviews and dramatic notices the percentage of instructed persons among reviewers and theatre-goers does not seem high. This error, a legacy in part from the criticism of an age which had a still poorer psychological vocabulary[*] than Our own, is one reason why Tragedy, for example, is so often misapproached. It is no less absurd to suppose that a competent reader sits down to read for the sake of pleasure, than to suppose that a mathematician sets out to solve an equation with a view to the pleasure its solution will afford him. The pleasure in both cases may, of course, be very great. But the pleasure, however great it may be, is no more the aim of the activity in the course of which it arises, than, for example, the noise made by a motor-cycle—useful though it is as an indication of the way the machine is running—is the reason in the normal case for its having been started.

This very common mistake noted, the significance of pleasure and unpleasure may be insisted upon without misgiving. They are our most delicate signs of how our activities are thriving. But since even the most intense delight may indicate only a local success and the activity be generally detrimental, they are signs which need a very wary interpretation.

CHAPTER XIII
Emotion and the Cœnesthesia

They are the silent griefs that cut the heart-strings.

The Broken Heart.

In alluding to the cœnesthesia we came very near to giving an account of emotion as an ingredient of consciousness. Stimulating situations give rise to widespread ordered repercussions throughout the body, felt as clearly marked colourings of consciousness. These patterns in organic response are fear, grief, joy, anger and the other emotional states. They arise for the most part when permanent or periodical tendencies of the individual are suddenly either facilitated or frustrated. Thus they depend far less upon the nature of the external stimulus than upon the general internal circumstances of the individual’s life at the time the stimulus occurs. These emotional states, with pleasure and unpleasure, are customarily distinguished under the head of feeling[*] from sensations, which are, as we have seen, very closely dependent for their character upon their stimulus. Thus sensations are ranked together as cognitive elements, concerned, that is, with our knowledge of things rather than with our attitude or behaviour towards them, or our emotion about them. Pleasure, however, and emotion have, on our view, also a cognitive aspect. They give us knowledge; in the case of pleasure, of how our activities are going on, successfully or otherwise; in the case of emotion, knowledge primarily of our attitudes. But emotion may give us further knowledge. It is a remarkable fact that persons with exceptional colour sense apparently judge most accurately whether two colours are the same, for example, or whether they have or have not some definite harmonic relation to one another, not by attentive optical comparison or examination, but by the general emotional or organic reaction which the colours evoke when simply glanced at. This is an indirect way of becoming aware of the specific nature of the external world, but none the less a very valuable way. A similar method is probably involved in those apparently immediate judgments of the moral character of persons met with for the first time which many people make so readily and successfully. They may be quite unable to mention any definite feature of the person upon which their judgment could be based. It is none the less often extraordinarily just and discriminating. The remarkable sensitiveness to its mother’s expression which the infant shows is a striking example. The part played by this kind of judgment in all æsthetic appreciation need not be insisted upon. It is notable that artists are often pre-eminently adepts at such judgments. The topic is usually discussed under the wide and vague heading of intuition; a rubric which completely obscures and befogs the issues.

For such judgments are not a simpler and more direct way of taking cognisance of things, but a more indirect and more complex way. It is not thereby shown to be a less primitive process. On the contrary, simplified ways of thinking are commonly advanced products. The ‘intuitive’ person uses his cœnesthesia as a chemist uses his reagents or a physiologist his galvanometer. As far as the sensations which the colour stimuli excite can be optically discriminated, no difference is perceptible. But an actual yet sensorily imperceptible difference becomes apparent through the difference in organic reaction. The process is merely one of adding further and more delicate signs to the situation, it is analogous to attaching a recording lever to a barograph.

The differences between sensitive or ‘intuitive’ and more ‘rational’ and obtuse individuals may be of two kinds. It may be that the sensitive person’s organic response is more delicate. This is a difficult matter to decide. It is certain, however, that the chief difference (a derivative difference very likely) lies in the fact that the obtuse person has not learned to interpret the changes in his general bodily consciousness in any systematic fashion. The changes may occur and occur systematically, but they mean nothing definite to him.

This kind of intervention of organic sensation in perception plays a part in all the arts. Much neglected, it is probably of very great importance. What here needs to be noticed is that it is not a mode of gaining knowledge which differs in any essential way from other modes. No unique and peculiar relation of ‘feeling’ towards things needs to be introduced to explain it, any more than a unique and peculiar mode of ‘cognitively apprehending’ them needs to be introduced to explain ordinary knowing. In both instances their causes, which have to be assumed in any case, will suffice. When we sense something our sensation is caused by what we sense. When we refer to something absent, a present sensation similar to sensations which in the past have been coincident with it, is thereby a sign for it, and so on, through more and more intricate mnemic sign-situations. Here a present colour sensation gives rise to an organic response which has in the past accompanied a definite colour; the response becomes then a sign of that colour which the sensitive and discriminating person trusts, although he is optically unable to make sure whether that colour is present or merely one very like it. Other cases differ from this in complexity but not in principle. If it is objected that this account of referring or thinking in terms of causes gives us at best but a very indirect way of knowing, the reply is that the prevalence of error is itself a strong argument against a too direct theory of knowledge.

In popular parlance the term ‘emotion’ stands for those happenings in minds which accompany such exhibitions of unusual excitement as weeping, shouting, blushing, trembling, and so on. But in the usage of most critics it has taken an extended sense, thereby suffering quite needlessly in its usefulness. For them it stands for any noteworthy ‘goings on’ in the mind almost regardless of their nature. The true and profound emotions, as spoken of by critics, are often lacking in all the characteristics which govern the more refined linguistic usage of common people, and, as it happens, of psychologists also, for what may perhaps be regarded now as the standard usage in psychology, sets out from the very same bodily changes accompanying experience as were noted above.

Two main features characterise every emotional experience. One of these is a diffused reaction in the organs of the body brought about through the sympathetic systems. The other is a tendency to action of some definite kind or group of kinds. These extensive changes in the visceral and vascular systems, characteristically in respiration and in glandular secretion, commonly take place in response to situations which call some instinctive tendency into play. As a result of all these changes a tide of sensations of internal bodily origin comes into consciousness. It is generally agreed that these sensations make up at least the main part of the peculiar consciousness of an emotion. Whether they are necessary to it or not is disputed. It may perhaps be suggested that insufficient attention has been paid in the theory of emotion to images of such sensations. The fact that fear, for example, may be felt in the absence of any detectable bodily changes of the kind described (a disputed fact) may be explained by supposing images of these sensations to be taking their place.

These sensations, or images of them, are then a main ingredient of an emotional experience and account for its peculiar ‘colour’ or tone, for the voluminousness and massiveness as well as for the extreme acuteness of emotions. But of equal or greater importance are the changes in consciousness due to reactions in the nervous systems which control movement, governing muscular response to the stimulating situation. These range, in the case of fear, from the awakening of a simple tendency, an impulse to run away or hide under the table, to such elaborate readjustments as we make when we prepare to counter a threat against some favourite opinion. As a rule a process of extraordinary complexity takes place between perceiving the situation and finding a mode of meeting it. This complicated process contributes the rest of its peculiar flavour to an emotional experience.

A more detailed discussion from the same angle of the points raised in this and the surrounding chapters will be found in The Meaning of Psychology (1926) by C. K. Ogden, where the author’s view of mental activity is elaborated.

CHAPTER XIV
Memory

Within the surface of Time’s fleeting river

Its wrinkled image lies, as then it lay

Immovably unquiet, and for ever

It trembles, but it cannot pass away!

Shelley, Ode to Liberty.

So far we have alluded only casually to memory, to that apparent revival of past experience to which the richness and complexity of experience is due. Every stimulus which is ever received leaves behind it, so it is said, an imprint, a trace capable of being revived later and of contributing its quota to consciousness and to behaviour. To these effects of past experience the systematic, the organised character of our behaviour is due; the fact that they intervene is the explanation of our ability to learn by experience. It is a way peculiar to living tissue by which the past influences our present behaviour across, as it might appear, a gulf of time.

How we should conceive this influence is perhaps the most puzzling point in psychology. The old theory of a kind of Somerset House of past impressions has given place to an account in terms of facilitations of neural paths, lowered resistances in synapses, and so forth. It was natural that as the broad outlines of neural activity came to be known, psychologists should attempt to make use of them. But on close examination it is clear that their interpretations were far too crude. Fixed ‘paths’, one for every item of experience which has ever taken place, and others for every kind of connection into which the items come, however multitudinous we make them, no longer explain what can be observed in behaviour and experience. As Von Kries and, more recently, Koffka have insisted, the fact, for example, that we recognise things in cases where it is certain that quite different paths must be involved, is fatal to the scheme. And mere multiplication of the entities invoked leads to no solution. Semon even goes so far as to say that when we listen to a song for the hundredth time we hear not only the singer but a chorus of nine and ninety mnemic voices. This corollary by itself is almost a refutation of his theory.

We have to escape from the crude assumption that the only way in which what is past can be repeated is by records being kept. The old associationists supposed the records to be writ small inside separate cells. The more modern view was that they were scored large through a deepening of the channels of conduction. Neither view is adequate.

Imagine an energy system of prodigious complexity and extreme delicacy of organisation which has an indefinitely large number of stable poises. Imagine it thrown from one poise to another with great facility, each poise being the resultant of all the energies of the system. Suppose now that the partial return of a situation which has formerly caused it to assume a stable poise, throws it into an unstable condition, from which it most easily returns to equilibrium by reassuming the former poise. Such a system would exhibit the phenomena of memory; but it would keep no records though appearing to do so. The appearance would be due merely to the extreme accuracy and sensitiveness of the system and the delicacy of its balances. Its state on the later occasion would appear to be a revival of its state on the former, but this would not be the case any more than a cumulus cloud this evening is a revival of those which decorated the heavens last year.

This imaginary construction can be made more concrete by imagining a solid with a large number of facets upon any one of which it can rest. If we try to balance it upon one of its coigns or ridges it settles down upon the nearest facet. In the case of the neural system we are trying to suggest each stable poise has been determined by a definite set, or better, context of conditions. Membership of this context is what corresponds to nearness to a facet. The partial return of the context causes the system to behave as though conditions were present which are not, and this is what is essential in memory.

That this suggestion in the form here presented is unsatisfactory and incomplete is evident. It is wildly conjectural no doubt, but so are the Archival and Pathway Theories. Yet it does avoid the chief deficiencies of those theories, it does suggest why only some conjunctions of experiences become ‘associated’, those namely which yield a stable poise. And it suggests why a thing should be recognised as the same though appearing in countless different aspects; every time it appears different conditions occur which, none the less, lead to one and the same stable poise, as the polyhedron we imagined may settle down on one and the same facet from all the surrounding ridges.

One of the collateral advantages of such a view is that it removes some of the temptations to revert to animism from which psychologists, and especially literary psychologists, suffer. Dissatisfaction with current hypotheses as to the mechanism of reflex arcs is a main cause for the scientifically desperate belief in the soul. And apart from this, the special emotive factors which disturb judgment on this point are less obtrusive when this account is substituted for the usual story of the conditioned reflex, that sacrilegious contrivance of the mechanists.

There is no kind of mental activity in which memory does not intervene. We are most familiar with it in the case of images, those fugitive elusive copies of sensations with which psychology has been hitherto so much, perhaps too much, concerned. Visual images are the best known of them, but it is important to recognise that every kind of sensation may have its corresponding image. Visceral, kinæsthetic, thermal images can with a little practice be produced, even by people who have never noticed their occurrence. But individual differences as regards imagery are enormous, more in the degree to which images become conscious, however, than in their actual presence or absence on the needful occasion. Those people who, by their own report, are devoid of images, none the less behave in a way which makes it certain that the same processes are at work in them as in producers of the most flamboyant images.

CHAPTER XV
Attitudes

My Sences want their outward motion
Which now within
Reason doth win,
Redoubled by her secret notion.—John Hoskins.

The interventions of memory are not confined to sensation and emotion. They are of equal importance in our active behaviour. The acquisition of any muscular accomplishment, dancing or billiards, for example, shows this clearly. What we have already done in the past controls what we shall do in the future. If the perception of an object and the recognition that it is a tree, for example, involve a poise in the sensory system concerned, a certain completeness or ‘closure,’ to use the term employed by Kohler, so an act, as opposed to a random movement, involves a similar poise in a motor system. But sensory and motor systems are not independent; they work together; every perception probably includes a response in the form of incipient action. We constantly overlook the extent to which all the while we are making preliminary adjustments, getting ready to act in one way or another. Reading Captain Slocum’s account of the centipede which bit him on the head when alone in the middle of the Atlantic, the writer has been caused to leap right out of his chair by a leaf which fell upon his face from a tree. Only occasionally does some such accident show how extensive are the motor adjustments made in what appear to be the most unmuscular occupations.

This incipient activity stands to overt action much as an image stands to a sensation. But such ‘imaginal’ activity is, by its very nature, extraordinarily hard to detect or to experiment upon. Psychology has only dealt with fringes of the mind hitherto and the most accessible fringe is on the side of sensation. We have therefore to build up our conjectures as to the rest of mental happenings by analogy with the perhaps not entirely representative specimens which sensation supplies. This limitation has led the majority of psychologists to see in imaginal movement no more than images of the sensations from muscle, joint, and tendon, which would arise if the movement were actually made.

It is certain that before any action takes place a preliminary organisation must occur which ensures that the parts do not get in one another’s way. It appears to the writer that these preliminaries in his case make up part of consciousness, but there is a heavy weight of authority against him. The point is no doubt exceptionally hard to determine.

In any case, whether the consciousness of activity is due to sensations and images of movements alone, or whether the outgoing part of the impulse and its preparatory organisation help to make up consciousness, there is no doubt about the importance of incipient and imaginal movement in experience. The work done by Lipps, Groos and others on einfühlung, or empathy, however we may prefer to restate their results, shows that when we perceive spatial or musical form we commonly accompany our perception with closely connected motor activity. We cannot leave this activity out of our account of what happens in the experiences of the arts, although we may think that those who have built upon this fact what they have put forward as a complete æsthetic—Vernon Lee, for example—have been far from clear as to what questions they were answering.

The extent to which any activity is conscious seems to depend very largely upon how complex and how novel it is. The primitive and in a sense natural outcome of stimulus is action; the more simple the situation with which the mind is engaged, the closer is the connection between the stimulus and some overt response in action, and in general the less rich and full is the consciousness attendant. A man walking over uneven ground, for example, makes without reflection or emotion a continuous adjustment of his steps to his footing; but let the ground become precipitous and, unless he is used to such places, both reflection and emotion will appear. The increased complexity of the situation and the greater delicacy and appropriateness of the movements required for convenience and safety, call forth far more complicated goings on in the mind. Besides his perception of the nature of the ground, the thought may occur that a false move would be perilous and difficult to retrieve. This, when accompanied by emotion, is called a ‘realisation’ of his situation. The adjustment to one another of varied impulses—to go forward carefully, to lie down and grasp something with the hands, to go back, and so forth—and their co-ordination into useful behaviour alters the whole character of his experience.

Most behaviour is a reconciliation between the various acts which would satisfy the different impulses which combine to produce it; and the richness and interest of the feel of it in consciousness depends upon the variety of the impulses engaged. Any familiar activity, when set in different conditions so that the impulses which make it up have to adjust themselves to fresh streams of impulses due to the new conditions, is likely to take on increased richness and fullness in consciousness.

This general fact is of great importance for the arts, particularly for poetry, painting and sculpture, the representative or mimetic arts. For in these a totally new setting for what may be familiar elements is essentially involved. Instead of seeing a tree we see something in a picture which may have similar effects upon us but is not a tree. The tree impulses which are aroused have to adjust themselves to their new setting of other impulses due to our awareness that it is a picture which we are looking at. Thus an opportunity arises for those impulses to define themselves in a way in which they ordinarily do not.

This, of course, is only the most obvious and simple instance of the way in which, thanks to the unusual circumstances in which things depicted, or in literature described, come before us, the experiences that result are modified. To take another obvious example, the description or the theatrical presentation of a murder has a different effect upon us from that which would be produced by most actual murders if they took place before us. These considerations, of vast importance in the discussion of artistic form, will occupy us later (pp. 145, 237). Here it is sufficient to point out that these differences between ordinary experiences and those due to works of art are only special cases of the general difference between experiences made up of a less and of a greater number of impulses which have to be brought into co-ordination with one another. The bearing of this point upon the problem of the æsthetic mode with its detachment, impersonality, etc., discussed in the second chapter, will be apparent. (Compare Chapter XXXII, p. 249.)

The result of the co-ordination of a great number of impulses of different kinds is very often that no overt action takes place. There is a danger here of supposing that no action whatever results or that there is something incomplete or imperfect about such a state of affairs. But imaginal action and incipient action which does not go so far as actual muscular movement are more important than Overt action in the well-developed human being. Indeed the difference between the intelligent or refined, and the stupid or crass person is a difference in the extent to which overt action can be replaced by incipient and imaginal action. An intelligent man can ‘see how a thing works’ when a less intelligent man has to ‘find out by trying’. Similarly with such responses as are aroused by a work of art. The difference between ‘understanding’ it and failing to do so is, in most cases, a difference between being able to make the required responses in an imaginal or incipient degree, adjusting them to one another at that stage, and being unable to produce them or adjust them except overtly and at their fullest development. Though the kinds of activity involved are different, the analogy with the case of the mathematician is not misleading. The fact that he will not make half so many marks on paper as a schoolboy does not show that he is any less active. His activity takes place at an earlier stage in which his responses are merely incipient or imaginal. In a similar manner the absence of any overt movements or external signs of emotion in an experienced reader of poetry, or concert-goer, compared to the evident disturbances which are sometimes to be seen in the novice, is no indication of any lack of internal activity. The response required in many cases by works of art is of a kind which can only be obtained in an incipient or imaginal stage. Practical considerations often prevent their being worked out in overt form, and this is, as a rule, not in the least to be regretted. For these responses are commonly of the nature of solutions to problems, not of intellectual research, but of emotional accommodation and adjustment, and can usually be best achieved while the different impulses which have to be reconciled are still in an incipient or imaginal stage, and before the matter has become further complicated by the irrelevant accidents which attend overt responses.

These imaginal and incipient activities or tendencies to action, I shall call attitudes. When we realise how many and how different may be the tendencies awakened by a situation, and what scope there is for conflict, suppression and interplay—all contributing something to our experience—it will not appear surprising that the classification and analysis of attitudes is not yet far advanced. A thousand tendencies to actions, which do not overtly take place, may well occur in complicated adjustments. For these what evidence there is must be indirect. In fact, the only attitudes which are capable of clear and explicit analysis are those in which some simple mode of observable behaviour gives the clue to what has been taking place, and even here only a part of the reaction is open to this kind of examination.

Among the experiences which are by the nature of the case hidden from observation are found almost all those with which criticism is concerned. The outward aspect and behaviour of a man reading The Prioresses’ Tale and The Miller’s Tale may well be indistinguishable. But this should not lead us to overlook how great a part in the whole experience is taken by attitudes. Many experiences which, if examined by introspection for their actual content of sensation and imagery, differ very little, are totally diverse in the kind and degree of implicit activity present. This aspect of experiences as filled with incipient promptings, lightly stimulated tendencies to acts of one kind or another, faint preliminary preparations for doing this or that, has been constantly overlooked in criticism. Yet it is in terms of attitudes, the resolution, inter-inanimation, and balancing of impulses—Aristotle’s definition of Tragedy[*] is an instance—that all the most valuable effects of poetry must be described.

CHAPTER XVI
The Analysis of a Poem

Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute
il faut toujours recommencer.—André Gide.

The qualifications of a good critic are three. He must be an adept at experiencing, without eccentricities, the state of mind relevant to the work of art he is judging. Secondly, he must be able to distinguish experiences from one another as regards their less superficial features. Thirdly, he must be a sound judge of values.

Upon all these matters psychology, even in its present conjectural state, has a direct bearing. The critic is, throughout, judging of experiences, of states of mind; but too often he is needlessly ignorant of the general psychological form of the experiences with which he is concerned. He has no clear ideas as to the elements present or as to their relative importance. Thus, an outline or schema of the mental events which make up the experience of ‘looking at’ a picture or ‘reading’ a poem, can be of great assistance. At the very least an understanding of the probable structures of these experiences can remove certain misconceptions which tend to make the opinions of individuals of less service to other individuals than need be.

Two instances will show this. There are certain broad features in which all agree a poem of Swinburne is unlike a poem of Hardy. The use of words by the two poets is different. Their methods are dissimilar, and the proper approach for a reader differs correspondingly. An attempt to read them in the same way is unfair to one of the poets, or to both, and leads inevitably to defects in criticism which a little reflection would remove. It is absurd to read Pope as though he were Shelley, but the essential differences cannot be clearly marked out unless such an outline of the general form of a poetic experience, as is here attempted, has been provided. The psychological means employed by these poets are demonstrably different. Whether the effects are also dissimilar is a further question for which the same kind of analysis is equally required.

This separation inside the poetic experience of certain parts which are means from certain other parts which are the ends upon which the poetic value of the experience depends, leads up to our other instance. It is unquestionable that the actual experiences, which even good critics undergo when reading, as we say, the same poem, differ very widely. In spite of certain conventions, which endeavour to conceal these inevitable discrepancies for social purposes, there can be no doubt that the experiences of readers in connection with particular poems are rarely similar. This is unavoidable. Some differences are, however, much more important than others. Provided the ends, in which the value of the poem lies, are attained, differences in the means need not prevent critics from agreement or from mutual service. Those discrepancies alone are fatal which affect the fundamental features of experiences, the features upon which their value depends. But enough is now known of the ways in which minds work for superficial and fundamental parts of experiences to be distinguished. One of the greatest living critics praises the line:

The fringed curtain of thine eyes advance,

for the ‘ravishing beauty’ of the visual images excited. This common mistake of exaggerating personal accidents in the means by which a poem attains its end into the chief value of the poem is due to excessive trust in the commonplaces[*] of psychology.

In the analysis of the experience of reading a poem, a diagram, or hieroglyph, is convenient, provided that its limitations are clearly recognised. The spatial relations of the parts of the diagram, for instance, are not intended to stand for spatial relations between parts of what is represented; it is not a picture of the nervous system. Nor are temporal relations intended. Spatial metaphors, whether drawn as diagrams or merely imagined, are dangers only to the unwary. The essential service which pictures can give in abstract matters, namely, the simultaneous and compact representation of states of affairs which otherwise tend to remain indistinct and confused, is worth the slight risk of misunderstanding which they entail.

We may begin then with a diagrammatic representation of the events which take place when we read a poem. Other literary experiences will only differ from this in their greater simplicity.

The eye is depicted as reading a succession of printed words. As a result there follows a stream of reaction in which six distinct kinds of events may be distinguished.

Each of these kinds of occurrences requires some brief description and explanation.

Upon the visual sensations of the printed words all the rest depends (in the case of a reader not previously acquainted with the poem); but with most readers they have in themselves no great importance. The individual shapes of the letters, their size and spacing, have only a minor effect upon the whole reaction. No doubt readers differ greatly in this respect; with some, familiarity plays a great part. They find it unpleasant and disturbing to read a poem in any but the edition in which they first became acquainted with it. But the majority of readers are less exigent. Provided that the print is clear and legible, and allows the habitual eye-movements of reading to be easily performed, the full response arises equally well from widely differing sensations. Those for whom this is true have, in the present state of economic organisation, a decided advantage over the more fastidious. This does not show that good printing is a negligible consideration; and the primary place of calligraphy in the Chinese arts is an indication to the contrary. It shows merely that printing belongs to another branch of the arts. In the poetic experience words take effect through their associated images, and through what we are, as a rule, content to call their meaning. What meaning is and how it enters into the experience we shall consider.

Tied Images.—Visual sensations of words do not commonly occur by themselves. They have certain regular companions so closely tied to them as to be only with difficulty disconnected. The chief of these are the auditory image—the sound of the words in the mind’s ear—and the image of articulation—the feel in the lips, mouth, and throat, of what the words would be like to speak.

Auditory images of words are among the most obvious of mental happenings. Any line of verse or prose slowly read, will, for most people, sound mutely in the imagination somewhat as it would if read aloud. But the degree of correspondence between the image-sounds, and the actual sounds that the reader would produce, varies enormously. Many people are able to imagine word-sounds with greater delicacy and discrimination than they can utter them. But the reverse case is also found. What importance then is to be attached to clear, rich and delicate sound imagery in silent reading? How far must people who differ in their capacity to produce such images differ in their total reactions to poems? And what are the advantages of reading aloud? Here we reach one of the practical problems of criticism for which this analysis is required. A discussion is best postponed until the whole analysis has been given. The principal confusion which prevents a clear understanding of the point at issue does, however, concern images and may be dealt with here. It is of great importance in connection with the topic of the following section.

The sensory qualities of images, their vivacity, clearness, fullness of detail and so on, do not bear any constant relation to their effects. Images differing in these respects may have closely similar consequences. Too much importance has always been attached to the sensory qualities of images. What gives an image efficacy is less its vividness as an image than its character as a mental event peculiarly connected with sensation. Lissette way which no one yet knows how to explain, a relict of sensation and our intellectual and emotional response to it depends far more upon its being, through this fact, a representative of a sensation, than upon its sensory resemblance to one. An image may lose almost all its sensory nature to the point of becoming scarcely an image at all, a mere skeleton, and yet represent a sensation quite as adequately as if it were flaring with hallucinatory vividity. In other words, what matters is not the sensory resemblance of an image to the sensation which is its prototype, but some other relation, at present hidden from us in the jungles of neurology. (Cf. Chapter XIV.)

Care then should be taken to avoid the natural tendency to suppose that the more clear and vivid an image the greater will be its efficacy. There are trustworthy people who, according to their accounts, never experience any imagery at all. If certain views commonly expressed about the arts are true, by which vivid imagery is an all-important part of the experience, then these people are incapable of art experiences, a conclusion which is contrary to the facts. The views in question are overlooking the fact that something takes the place of vivid images in these people, and that, provided the image-substitute is efficacious, their lack of mimetic imagery is of no consequence. The efficacy required must, of course, include control over emotional as well as intellectual reactions. Needless perhaps to add that with persons of the image-producing types an increase in delicacy and vivacity in their imagery will probably be accompanied by increased subtlety in effects. Thus it is not surprising that certain great poets and critics have been remarkable for the vigour of their imagery, and dependent upon it. No one would deny the usefulness of imagery to some people; the mistake is to suppose that it is indispensable to all.

Articulatory imagery is less noticeable; yet the quality of silent speech is perhaps even more dependent upon these images than upon sound-images. Collocations of syllables which are awkward or unpleasant to utter are rarely delightful to the ear. As a rule the two sets of images are so intimately connected that it is difficult to decide which is the offender. In ‘Heaven, which man’s generation draws,’ the sound doubtless is as harsh as the movements required are cramping to the lips.

The extent to which interference with one set of images will change the other may be well seen by a simple experiment. Most people, if they attempt a silent recitation while opening the mouth to its fullest stretch or holding the tongue firmly between the teeth, will notice curious transformations in the auditory images. How the experiment should be interpreted is uncertain, but it is of use in making the presence of both kinds of verbal imagery evident to those who may have overlooked them hitherto. Images of articulation should not, however, be confused with those minimal actual movements which for some people (for all, as behaviourists maintain) accompany the silent rehearsing of words.

These two forms of tied imagery might also be called verbal images, and supply the elements of what is called the ‘formal structure’ of poetry. They differ from those to which we now proceed in being images of words, not of things words stand for, and in their very close connection with the visual sensations of printed words.

Free Imagery.—Free images, or rather one form of these, visual images, pictures in the mind’s eye, occupy a prominent place in the literature of criticism, to the neglect somewhat of other forms of imagery, since, as was remarked in a preceding chapter, for every possible kind of sensation there is a corresponding possible image.

The assumption, natural before investigation, that all attentive and sensitive readers will experience the same images, vitiates most of the historical discussions from that of Longinus to that of Lessing. Even in the present day, when there is no excuse for such ignorance, the mistake still thrives, and an altogether too crude, too hasty, and too superficial form of criticism is allowed to pass unchallenged. It cannot be too clearly recognised that individuals differ not only in the type of imagery which they employ, but still more in the particular images which they produce. In their whole reactions to a poem, or to a single line of it, their free images are the point at which two readings are most likely to differ, and the fact that they differ may very well be quite immaterial. Fifty different readers will experience not one common picture but fifty different pictures. If the value of the poem derived from the value qua picture of the visual image excited then criticism might well despair. Those who would stress this part of the poetic reaction can have but crude views on pictures.

But if the value of the visual image in the experience is not pictorial, if the image is not to be judged as a picture, how is it to be judged? It is improbable that the many critics, some of them peculiarly well qualified in the visual arts, who have insisted upon the importance of imagery, have been entirely wasting their time. It ought to be possible to give an account of the place of free imagery in the whole poetic experience which will explain this insistence. What is required will be found if we turn our attention from the sensory qualities of the imagery to the more fundamental qualities upon which its efficacy in modifying the rest of the experience depends. It has been urged above that images which are different in their sensory qualities may have the same effects. If this were not the case the absence of glaring differences between people of different image-types would be astonishing. But since images may represent sensations without resembling them, and represent them in the sense of replacing them, as far as effects in directing thought and arousing emotion go, differences in their mimetic capacity become of minor importance. As we have seen, it is natural for those whose imagery is vivid, to suppose that vivacity and clearness go together with power over thought and feeling. It is the power of an image over these that is as a rule being praised when an intelligent and sensitive critic appears merely to be praising the picture floating before his mind’s eye. To judge the image as a picture is judged, would, as we have seen, be absurd; and what is sought in poetry by those painters and others whose interest in the world is primarily visual is not pictures but records of observation, or stimuli of emotion.

Thus, provided the images (or image-substitutes for the imageless) have the due effects, deficiencies in their sensory aspect do not matter. But the proviso is important. In all forms of imagery sensory deficiencies are for many people signs and accompaniments of defective efficacy, and the habit of reading so as to allow the fullest development to imagery in its sensory aspect is likely to encourage the full development of this more essential feature, its efficacy, if the freaks and accidents of the sensory side are not taken too seriously.

Some exceptions to this general recommendation will occur to the reader. Instances in plenty may be found in which a full development of the sensory aspect of images is damaging to their effects. Meredith is a master of this peculiar kind of imagery:—

Thus piteously Love closed what he begat
The union of this ever diverse pair!
These two were rapid falcons in a snare,
Condemned to do the flitting of the bat.

The emotional as well as the intellectual effects of the various images here suggested are much impaired if we produce them vividly and distinctly.

Impulses, and References.—We have now to consider those more fundamental effects upon which stress has been laid above as the true places of the values of the experience. It will be well at this point to reconsult the diagram. The vertical lines which run capriciously downwards from the visual sensations of the words, through their tied imagery and onward to the bottom of the diagram, are intended to represent, schematically, streams of impulses flowing through in the mind.

They start in the visual sensations, but the depiction of the tied imagery is intended to show how much of their further course is due to it. The placing of the free imagery in the third division is intended to suggest that while some free images may arise from visual words alone, they take their character in a large part as a consequence of the tied imagery. Thus the great importance of the tied imagery, of the formal elements, is emphasised in the diagram.

These impulses are the weft of the experience, the warp being the pre-existing systematic structure of the mind, that organised system of possible impulses. The metaphor is of course inexact, since weft and warp here are not independent. Where these impulses run, and how they develop, depends entirely upon the condition of the mind, and this depends upon the impulses which have previously been active in it. It will be seen then that impulses—their direction, their strength, how they modify one another—are the essential and fundamental things in any experience. All else, whether intellectual or emotional, arises as a consequence of their activity. The thin trickle of stimulation which comes in through the eye finds an immense hierarchy of systems of tendencies poised in the most delicate stability. It is strong enough and rightly enough directed to disturb some of these without assistance. The literal sense of a word can be grasped on the prompting of the mere sight of it, without hearing it or mentally pronouncing it. But the effects of this stimulation are immensely increased and widened when it is reinforced by fresh stimulation from tied images, and it is through these that most of the emotional effects are produced. As the agitation proceeds new reinforcement comes with every fresh system which is excited. Thus, the paradoxical fact that so trifling an irritation as the sight of marks on paper is able to arouse the whole energies of the mind becomes explicable.

To turn now to references, the only mental happenings which are as closely connected with visual words as their tied images are those mysterious events which are usually called thoughts. Thus the arrow symbol in the hieroglyph should perhaps properly be placed near the visual impression of the word. The mere sight of any familiar word is normally followed by a thought of whatever the word may stand for. This thought is sometimes said to be the ‘meaning’, the literal or prose ‘meaning’ of the word. It is wise, however, to avoid the use of ‘meaning’ as a symbol altogether. The terms ‘thought’ and ‘idea’ are less subtle in their ambiguities, and when defined may perhaps be used without confusion.

What is essential in thought is its direction or reference to things. What is this direction or reference? How does a thought come to be ‘of’ one thing rather than another? What is the link between a thought and what it is ‘of’? The outline of one answer to these questions has been suggested in Chapter XI. A further account must here be attempted. Without a fairly clear, although, of course, incomplete view, it is impossible to avoid confusion and obscurity in discussing such topics as truth in art, the intellect-versus-emotion imbroglio, the scope of science, the nature of religion and many others with which criticism must deal.

The facts upon which speculations as to the relations between thoughts and the things which they are ‘of’ have been based, have as a rule been taken from introspection. But the facts which introspection yields are notoriously uncertain, and the special position of the observer may well preclude success. Introspection is competent, in some cases, to discover the relations between events which take place within the mind, but cannot by itself give information as to the relations of these events with the external world, and it is precisely this which we are inquiring into when we ask, What connection is there between a thought and that which it is a thought of? For an answer to this question we must look further.