Movement and Mental Imagery
Chapter 9: The Formation of New Movement Systems Under the Influence of Problems
Margaret Floy Washburn
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Is this chapter we shall attempt very briefly to sketch an account of the way in which movement systems become broken up and new ones constituted out of old ones under the influence of purposes. That is, we shall consider the processes of thinking. And it is not primarily with the conscious accompaniments of such breaking up of old systems and formation of new ones that we shall be concerned. These conscious accompaniments will be discussed in the chapter that follows. It is rather with the mechanism of thinking than with the way it feels to think, that we have just now to deal.
The logician says that an act of reasoning is a complex act of judgment, consisting in fact of three judgments, which he calls respectively the minor premise, the major premise, and the conclusion. Thus if I reason that the weather must be cold this morning because I see steam rising from the nostrils of horses, my process of thought may be resolved into the minor premise that steam is rising from the horses' nostrils, the major premise that whenever steam thus rises the weather is cold, and the conclusion that the weather is cold to-day. It would certainly appear that the process of judgment, by which we make the assertion that a thing is something else, that A is B, must be fundamental to processes of reasoning which can thus be reduced to series of judgments.
What, then, is the essential nature of a process of judgment? We are, as has just been said, not concerned just now with the question as to the nature of the conscious processes that accompany judgment. Marbe [1] wrote a monograph whose conclusion is that there are no conscious processes which
( 175) especially characterize judgment. Our present point of attack is this: how are movement systems related and constituted when, instead of applying the verbal formula 'A suggests B,' we use the formula, 'A is B'?
When A suggests B, either the two movement systems, A and B, form part of one and the same system, so that there exist associative dispositions between them as wholes, or some movement or smaller movement system contained in A is identical with a movement or smaller movement system contained in B. In the language of the older psychology, either A and B are linked by contiguity, as having been once experienced together, or they are linked by similarity, as having a part in common. The sight of one person may suggest another with whom he is frequently met, or it may suggest some one whom he has never seen but who has a likeness to him. We get the typical cases of 'A suggests B' in unguided revery, and it may be noted that when A has suggested B its influence generally stops. Gazing at a chandelier in a hotel lobby, I find myself thinking of Galileo; the chandelier has ceased to concern me and my attention has flown to ideas connected with the beginnings of modern science.