Movement and Mental Imagery
Chapter 10: Imageless Processes
Margaret Floy Washburn
"IF," said the philosopher Hume, "you cannot point out any such impression, you may be certain you are mistaken, when you imagine you have any such idea" (54, page 65). For a long time this principle virtually ruled psychology, and an idea that was vague and obscure, and could not trace its origin directly to sensations, was dismissed as no proper object of scientific study. It was James who, in a chapter familiar to every student of psychology, declared his wish for a "reinstatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life" (57, Volume I, page 254). For it is evident to any one who carefully observes his own conscious experience that much of our thinking and feeling cannot be adequately described as made up of the colors and brightnesses which the eye supplies, the many tones and noises that the ear gives, the four taste qualities, the possibly nine smell qualities, the four qualities from the skin. The inner life of the mind, all that varied and eventful complex of processes which may occur when, lying in a silent and darkened room, we review the experiences of a day and decide on a course of action for the morrow, is not recognizably describable as a kaleidoscopic pattern of colors, tones, smells, tastes, and skin sensations, centrally excited. James has enumerated for us some of the parts of our conscious experience which especially, he thinks, refuse to be identified with sensations from the old five senses. He divides them into 'transitive states,' or relational feelings, and 'feelings of tendency.' In discussing 'transitive states' he says: "There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought." "We
(186) ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold." Under the head of 'feelings of tendency,' he enumerates such experiences as the feelings occasioned by the words 'wait,' 'hark,' 'look'; the vague consciousness that represents a forgotten name, a consciousness sufficiently positive to reject a wrong substitute; the experience of recognizing a thing as familiar without being able to 'place' it; the feelings corresponding to 'naught but,' 'either one or the other,' 'although it is, nevertheless,' 'it is an excluded middle, there is no tertium quid,' 'who?' 'when?' 'where?' 'no,' 'never,' 'not yet'; "that first instantaneous glimpse of another person's meaning which we have when in vulgar phrase we say we 'twig' it"; "one's intention of saying a thing before he has said it"; "that shadowy scheme of the 'form' of an opera, play, or book, which remains in our mind and on which we pass judgment when the actual thing is done"; "the awareness that our definite thought has come to a stop" and the 'entirely different' "awareness that our thought is definitively completed"; finally, the awareness "that we are using such a word as man in a general and not an individual sense." This list was no doubt intended by James to be merely illustrative and not exhaustive. Every one will recognize these experiences as being highly important, and as not obviously, at least, analyzable into colors, sounds, tastes, smells, and skin sensations.
Many psychologists, some following James's lead, others independently, have contended for the existence of non-sensational or imageless conscious processes.
Stout (133), for example, says: "Professor James dwells only on the part played by psychic fringes in higher cognitive states. He fails to bring out its importance for sense perception also. But a little consideration shows that complex sensible objects do not appear to the percipient in all their sensible detail. When I look at a house, what is actually seen together with what is mentally pictured constitutes only a small part of the object as it is perceived.... An imageless representation
( 187) of the whole is conjoined with the sensible appearance.... At the most, only the last two or three notes of a melody are perceived at its close, and yet the musically gifted are aware of it as a whole.... All perception of a series of changes as forming a whole involves imageless apprehension." The imageless processes in which Stout is most interested are the feelings of tendency in thinking, involving "not only consciousness of whither our thought is going, but backward reference to what it has already achieved."
Spencer (131) divided conscious processes into two classes, which he called 'feelings' and 'relations between feelings.' By feelings he meant sensations, peripherally or centrally excited. James's feelings of 'if' and 'but' would evidently be classed by Spencer as relations between feelings. The differences between feelings and relations between feelings, according to Spencer, are, first, that the latter have no duration, "occupy no appreciable part of consciousness"; they are "momentary feelings accompanying the transition from one conspicuous feeling to another"; and secondly, that as a result of their fleeting character they are unanalyzable: "whereas a relational feeling is a portion of consciousness inseparable into parts, a feeling ordinarily so-called is a portion of consciousness that admits imaginary division into like parts which are related to one another in sequence or co-existence."
In 1901 Calkins (20), accepting the doctrine of James and adopting the term 'relational element' from Spencer's 'relational feeling,' gave as an enumeration, admittedly incomplete, of such non-sensational components in our experience, the following list: feelings of one and many, of 'and' and 'but' (connection and opposition), of like and different, of more and less, of generality, or that which, added to a percept or image, makes it a general notion; of clearness (which feeling constitutes the process of attention: an attended-to percept is the percept plus the feeling of clearness); a feeling of the combination of elements in a percept; the feeling of familiarity (which is really a fusion of two relational elements, namely, the feelings of
( 188) sameness and pastness); and the feeling of wholeness (which is a distinguishing feature of the process of judgment). Most of these feelings are not further described, and Calkins, like James, emphasizes the great difficulty of observing them introspectively: the feeling of pastness, however, is depicted as "the consciousness of an irrevocable fact, linked in two directions with other facts."
Woodworth (137) in 1906, as a result of experiments where the observers were asked to go through certain simple thought processes, reached this conclusion: "In addition to sensorial elements, thought contains elements which are wholly irreducible to sensory terms. Each such element is sui generis, being nothing else than the particular feeling of the thought in question.... There is a specific and unanalyzable conscious quale for every individual and general notion, for every judgment and supposition. An image may call up a meaning, and a meaning may equally well call up an image. The two classes of mental contents differ in quality as red differs from cold, or anger from middle C." Non-sensational processes were discovered in another direction by Mach (74) in 1886, when he posited, coordinate with colors, tones, and the other ordinary sense qualities, space and time sensations. A visual object like a house, he maintained, gives us, besides color sensations, space sensations of a certain size and form. The perception of a melody involves, over and above the tone sensations, a sensation of its temporal form. This general position was later greatly developed by Ehrenfels (31), Meinong (78), Cornelius (24), and Witasek (152): the opinion which they all have in common is that when sensations occur in a group, a new conscious element is produced which represents the togetherness of the elements, the form and character of their combination. Thus, a melody played in different keys has all its tonal elements quite different, but the form quality is identical and is recognized as such.
Still another development of the notion of conscious processes which are not reducible to sensations as elements was
( 189) suggested by Mayer and Orth (76) in 1901. They made an introspective study of the processes that intervene between the giving of a stimulus word to an observer and the pronouncing by the latter of some word suggested to him by the stimulus word. These processes they classified as ideas (made up of centrally excited sensations), will processes, and what they termed, at the suggestion of Professor Marbe, 'Beiousstseinslagen,' 'consciousness attitudes,' or, more briefly translated, 'conscious attitudes.' They defined these merely negatively, as being neither ideas nor volitional processes. In his later work, "Gefühl and Bewusstseinslage," Orth (102) says of the conscious attitudes that they are unanalyzable. They fall, he holds, into two groups: first, those of which introspection can only declare the existence without characterizing them further, and second, those whose significance for the psychic process can in some degree be determined. As an example of the first, the indescribable class, he cites the following introspection. The observer (no less skilled an introspector than Professor hülpe) was given the task of subtracting 217 from 1000. He reported: "Distinct visual images of 1000 and 217, the latter written under the former. They elicited the spoken word 'seven hundred,' and after a little pause the words 'eighty-three.' The pause was filled with a peculiar conscious attitude. not further to be described." To the second class belong such states as doubt, certainty, uncertainty, contrast, agreement. Conscious attitudes are "something quite peculiar, which I find in my consciousness, without being able to call them feeling, sensation, or idea, because they are entirely unlike these psychic processes." They are obscure, ungraspable. They have more to do with knowledge than with feeling. To the suggestion that they are only ideas in an obscure state, Orth replies that even so, since they are unique for introspection and since an idea as such cannot be obscure, they have a right to a special name. He would include under conscious attitudes the feeling of familiarity or knownness; he describes doubt as a conscious attitude accompanied by organic and kinaesthetic sensations,
(190) and mentions also conscious attitudes of remembering, knowing, effort, belief, uncertainty. Some of these remind us strikingly of those "ideas of reflection" which Locke posited, in addition to sensations, as fundamental materials of our experience: "by reflection," he said, he meant, "that notice which the mind takes of its own operations." [1]
Messer (80) in 1906 gives a very long list of conscious attitudes. He suggests that they are of two kinds. The first kind includes those which are connected with words and represent the meaning of the words. He gives as illustrations the attitudes of understanding. ambiguity, and synonymity: one would say that these represent rather the relation of a word to its meaning than the meaning itself. Messer's second class comprises the attitudes which occur when words are lacking, but one knows what one is going to say: here one may go to logic for the kinds of attitude concerned. Some examples are attitudes of reality, spatial properties, temporal properties, causal connection, relations such as identity, difference, similarity, 'belonging together,' 'lacking connection,' coördination, subordination, supraordination, 'more general,' 'more concrete,' whole and part. These all represent relations between the objects of thought. There are also attitudes which represent the relations between the object of thought and the subject, that is, the thinker: such are the attitudes of knownness, strangeness, and positive or negative value. Again, there are attitudes which represent the relation of one's ideas to the problem one is thinking on; such as the attitudes of 'suitable' or 'not-suitable," meaningful' or 'meaningless," correct," wrong,' 'inadequate.' Finally, there are attitudes representing states connected with the process of problem solution itself : seeking, questioning, deliberation, doubt, certainty, uncertainty, difficulty, ease, compulsion, 'ought' and 'ought not,' readiness, possibility and impossibility, success and failure, fullness and emptiness of ideas, puzzle and confusion. As a cross-principle
(191) running through all the classes of conscious attitudes, Messer suggests that they may be divided into the more intellectual and the more emotional or affective.
Another type of imageless or non-sensational process was postulated by Ach (1) as a result of experiments on reaction time. The observers were shown white or colored cards, and received varying instructions : they were to press an electric key sometimes as soon as they had apprehended the character of the stimulus, sometimes as soon as they were aware of any stimulus at all: sometimes they were shown cards with two letters on them and told to choose either one as their stimulus, reacting to one with one finger and to the other, if they chose it, with the thumb. The observers reported the occurrence, in the interval between the instructions and the stimulus, of certain imageless processes to which Ach gave the name ' awarenesses.' They were, he says, complex experiences, in which no ' anschaulich' elements, such as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic sensations, or memory images of such sensations, could be demonstrated as determining the quality of the experience (L2, page 210).
Awarenesses, Ach maintains. are a "function of the excitation of reproductive tendencies." He groups them into four classes: awarenesses of meaning, that is. the awareness of the meaning of a word without its being present in the fears of images; awarenesses of relation, whether an idea is tie right one, that is, is in harmony with what we meant to think; awarenesses of determination, the awareness that an act is in harmony with what we meant to do; and awarenesses of tendency, the awareness that there is something more to be done. It would appear that awarenesses of meaning and tendency are, so to speak, forward-looking awarenesses, concerned in the one case with what we are going to think and in the other case with what we are going to do; while awarenesses of relation and determination are backward-looking awarenesses, concerned in the one case with what we originally resolved to think and in the other case with what we originally resolved to do.
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Perhaps the most difficult and obscure discussion of imageless processes is that of Bühler (18). With the aid of two experts in introspection, Külpe and Dürr, as observers, Bühler carried out at the University of Würzburg some experiments on the nature of the process of thinking. In the first set of experiments, the observers were given questions to answer, such as, "Did the Middle Ages know the Pythagorean doctrine?" or aphorisms to understand: they then recalled and described all the processes which passed through consciousness in the interval between question and answer. In a later set of experiments the process of recalling thoughts was studied: the observers were given two related ideas and asked to establish in their own minds the connection: subsequently one idea was presented and the observers had to recall the other and to describe the process of recall. Or a sentence was given which required completion by another clause, which the observer had mentally to supply; later the completing clause was furnished and the original sentence called for; or two complete thoughts were presented, the observer having to find an analogy between them, and later, on the basis of this analogy, to supply one when the other was presented; or, finally, a series of thoughts was given in short sentences, and subsequently catchwords from the sentences were supplied, to recall the entire thoughts. On the basis of the introspective results, Bühler concludes that thought involves, first, ideas made up of sensations; secondly, feelings and conscious attitudes; and thirdly, thoughts. These last are simple, unanalyzable conscious processes, having no sense quality or intensity, but possessing clearness and vividness. Of these thought elements there are three types : first, " the consciousness of a rule," of a method of solving problems; second, consciousness of relation, either of the parts of a thought (intra-thought relations), or of whole thoughts to each other (inter-thought relations); thirdly, consciousness of meanings.
It is a discouraging field to survey, this of the non-sensational conscious processes. At least, one can hardly doubt, with such
(193) an array of authorities before one, that events do happen in our mental life which cannot be directly traced to any of the external senses; which are not made up of remembered sights, sounds, smells, touches, or tastes. The psychologists who still believe, however, that sensation qualities are the only raw material of our experience, have usually had recourse to one or both of two ways out of their difficulty. Some of the so-called imageless processes, they argue, are just ordinary ideas, that is, images, in a state of indistinctness or vagueness. Thus the conscious attitude of familiarity may be merely a vague, indistinct recall of the circumstances under which we last met the object recognized: awareness of the meaning of a word like 'city' may be a vague, unanalyzable jumble of the images which the word is capable of suggesting. So Müller (89) urges that some of Orth's conscious attitudes are nothing but indistinct ideas; as when he speaks of a conscious attitude representing "the memory of a similarly smelling substance used for toothache." Orth himself, as we have seen, does not deny that his conscious attitudes may be only ideas in a state of vagueness, but holds that they ought to have a name of their own. Further, Müller says of Ach's awarenesses that they are nothing but indistinct ideas. For instance. Ach calls the feeling that a name is just on the tip of our tongue. an awareness of tendency: it is simply, Müller argues. a very indistinct kinaesthetic image of the name. Or take the awareness that our task is not yet completed, that we have something yet to do, we know not what: here also there is simply an indistinct idea. Unless, Müller maintains, the presence of indistinct ideas can be excluded, it is unscientific to bring in anything new and mysterious like an awareness: it is also much too easy. Bühler himself considered and rejected the notion that his thought elements are indistinct ideas, under two aspects: one of these he calls the condensation theory, according to which thoughts are condensed, abbreviated series of images. This is untrue, he thinks, for surely such a condensation would not make the ideas lose all the characters of ideas, such as recognizable sensation qualities. (Pre-
(194) -cisely such an effect, as we shall see, might be expected in an abbreviated and condensed series of images.) The other form of the 'indistinct idea' theory Bühler rejects under the name of the 'possibility theory': thoughts are not subconscious images, for thoughts are perfectly clear and distinct. Evidently when Bühler says that imageless thoughts are distinct and Müller says that all imageless processes are indistinct images, they must each mean a different thing by 'distinct.'
another promising opening for a sensational explanation of these imagéless processes which so many psychologists discover, is to say that they are made up of kinaesthetic and organic senssations, either peripherally or centrally excited. An obvious, though fortunately not the only or the best, reason for choosing these modalities of sensation as the material for (apparently) non-sensational processes is that we are so little in the habit of attending to them and analyzing their combinations that they may really be the components of almost any experience not evidently derived from other sources. Titchener (137) is strongly inclined to the opinion that " the imageless thoughts, the awarenesses, the Bewusstseinslagen of meaning and the rest" are "attitudinal feels," describable "in the rough" without difficulty as visceral pressures, distributions of tonicity in the muscles of back and legs, difference in the sensed play of facial expression, and other kinesthetic and organic sensations; and that "under experimental conditions, description would be possible in detail." Feelings of relation he is sure are in his own mind kinaesthetic, and moreover roughly localizable and analyzable.
There are still other ways of disposing of alleged non-sensational processes besides those of identifying them as obscure sensory images or as kinaesthetic and organic sensations. Münsterberg (95) classifies some of these processes as properties of sensations; that is, he includes the spatial and temporal orders of sensations under the head of 'form qualities' of sensation, while some, at least, of the conscious attitudes and relational elements fall in the class of 'value properties' of sensation:
(195) thus, the difference between the idea of a past event and the idea of an expected event is a difference in 'value quality.' Wundt (160) has a convenient scheme for dealing with all nonsensational processes: he recognizes besides sensational elements simple feelings of many qualities, capable of entering into a great variety of combinations. This body of elementary feelings may be grouped into three classes, feelings of pleasantness or unpleasantness, feelings of strain and relaxation, and feelings of excitement or depression. It is an easy matter to explain any mysterious imageless process as due to the presence of a special feeling quality or combination of feeling qualities.
In attempting to deal with non-sensational or imageless processes on the basis of our general theory regarding the nervous substrate of conscious processes, we shall avail ourselves of both the 'kinesthetic' theory and the 'condensed image' theory. To begin with, let us ask whether there is not some significance in the fact that certain of the imageless processes which have been enumerated by various writers can be readily named, while others cannot. Thus, some of them are clearly designated by being called 'likeness,' 'the feeling of but.' 'expectation,' 'louder than.' and so forth. On the other hand, Orth says of some of the conscious attitudes that they cannot be described or named: they can only be recognized: while Woodworth speaks of certain processes as being "nothing else than the particular feeling of the thought in question."
Now, the process of naming is a motor response: an experience is named when it calls forth a special reaction of the articulatory organs. When we get the experience that two ideas are opposed to each other the word 'but' springs to our lips without hesitation; when we recognize that one experience is like another, the word 'like' is instantly forth-coming; when we get a certain conscious attitude we describe it without delay as one of doubt. On the other hand, we do not adequately describe the inkling of a forgotten name that haunts us by calling it an 'inkling': it is not like any other inkling, and we have no word to express its differentiating character.
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If two processes (in our terminology, two movement systems) are associated with the same motor response, the great probability is that they are so associated by virtue of being essentially alike. We call many individual animals by the name 'dog,' but we do so because of certain features that are identical in them all. It would therefore seem probable that if we promptly and unhesitatingly use the word 'but' when two conscious processes are in a relation of opposition, no matter what the nature of the processes thus related may be, whether they are two colors or two theories of the universe, the butness is due to a nervous process essentially the same in both cases.
Further, if to every word that readily occurs to us as a name for an 'imageless' process there corresponds a single characteristic nervous process; if all cases of 'ifness,' 'butness,' likeness, difference, 'greaterness,' 'lessness' (we have not always the proper abstract noun), and so on depend, each class, on a single and always similar nervous process, which accompanies the various sensory excitations, visual, auditory, and so on, then there is good antecedent probability that these common factors are kinaesthetic in character. There is no other kind of sensation that so regularly accompanies other kinds as do the sensations produced by our own movements. Colors are not regularly accompanied by sounds, nor do smell, taste, or temperature sensations constantly accompany all other modalities of sensation: but we continually make movements of the eyes, the organs of speech, the fingers, or other parts of the body in connection with sensations of sight, hearing, taste, and so on, and these movements give rise to kinaesthetic excitations. As Beaunis (9) has said: "Muscular sensations enter not only into our sensations, but into perceptions, ideas, sentiments, emotions, in a word, into the whole psychic life; and from this point of view it may be said with truth that the sense of movement is the simplest and the most universal of psychic elements." This fact, which is apparent to every one, is one of the bases of our theory, according to which the whole play of conscious processes depends on the interaction of movement systems, and the
(197) connections between ideas are based on the connections between kinaesthetic pathways and motor pathways.
Let us suppose, then, that the more readily namable an imageless process is, the more it tends to have a kinaesthetic basis: the less readily namable it is, the more it involves processes of other modalities, less constant factors in experience.
If, then, some of the imageless processes are kinesthetic in their origin, why should they be thought of by so many psychologists as non-sensational? Just what does the term 'nonsensational' mean?
A kinesthetic process is recognized and identified by introspection as a sensation when it is referred to a definite point in the body; this reference involving, of course, the excitation of certain motor responses appropriate to the particular locality concerned. Now, as we have seen, individuals differ a good deal in their habits of reacting to their own kinesthetic excitations: some persons, Stricker and Titchener, for example, with skill in attending to the sensations from their own movements, might therefore be expected to call certain processes kinaesthetic sensations when other persons were unable to localize the processes in question. Further, many of the kinesthetic processes which occur in the organism none of is have formed the habit of localizing, because R e have not needed to do so. Whether we form the habit of attending to the location of an excitation or to some other characteristic of it depends on practical considerations. In the case of the large majority of kinesthetic excitations, attention has been directed, not so much on the location of the muscles involved, as on other characteristics of the excitations: for instance, their duration, whether they involve a change from a previously existing attitude, whether they are mutually inhibitory, and so on. Since it is only when we localize a kinaesthetic process that we call it a sensation, and since we have seldom been interested in localizing our kinaesthetic processes, it is not surprising that many processes which are based on kinaesthetic excitations do not reveal themselves to consciousness as sensational (145).
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Further, it would seem natural to suppose that two conditions notably influence the readiness with which a combination of kinaesthetic excitations can produce conscious effects that are analyzable by introspection. Or, to put the matter in simpler language, there are two conditions which, when a number of muscular contractions occur at the same time, make it harder for us to locate the exact muscles that are concerned. The first of these is the frequency with which the muscles in question have acted together in the past. If two motor responses invariably accompany each other, we naturally cannot attend to then: separately. And if their invariable cooperation is secured I) innate connections between their motor pathways, if, tot is, their movements form an innate system, we cannot hope to discover by introspection the complexity of the system.
Secondly, since the analysis of a kinesthetic fusion means the reference of the various kinesthetic excitations that make it up to different points in space, the more varied the actual spatial position of the muscles involved, the more hope there is of such analysis. This means that a movement system which is widely diffused through the body will stand a better chance of being analyzed than one that is limited to a smaller local range.
Now, there are certain imageless or relational processes which seem, if sufficient time is allowed them to develop, to pass over naturally into processes that involve a rather wide and general bodily disturbance. It is concerning the analyzability of these processes that the introspective testimony of different authorities most diverges. Examples are the 'feeling of but,' which develops into the unpleasant 'conscious attitude' of confusion or contradiction; and the 'feeling of unexpectedness,' which passes over into the emotion of surprise. Whether these experiences are regarded as simple and unanalyzable, or as the reverse, depends on whether one is thinking of them in their contracted or in their expanded form. Thus, when Titchener says of the feeling of 'but,' "I do roughly localize it and I can roughly analyze it into constituents" (137, page 187), one may surmise that it
(199) is not the momentary 'feeling of but' which he has in mind so much as the conscious attitude of bafflement or confusion into which the 'feeling of but' may develop. This is a diffused motor attitude, and being diffused, stands a better chance of having its component excitations localized.