Classics in the
History of Psychology
An internet resource developed by
Christopher D. Green
ISSN
1492-3713
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By Edward H. Madden (1963)
First published as Chapter 7 of Chauncey Wright and the Foundations
of Pragmatism (pp. 128-142).
Reprinted by permission of
©1963 by
Posted March 2002
Wright's longest and
most sustained essay was his "The Evolution of Self-Consciousness,"
which appeared in the North American Review for April, 1873.· It is rather a monograph than
an article, ranging over a host of intricate philosophical and scientific
questions -- sometimes so intricate, indeed, that John Fiske complained he did
not completely understand it after numerous readings![1]
Wright wrote this essay in response to Darwin's urging that he put his
analytical powers to work on the problem of determining, in connection with the
evolution of language, when a thing can properly be said to be effected by the
will of man.[2] Wright also considered Darwin's more general problem, that
of bridging the supposed evolutionary gap between animal instinct and human
intelligence. He developed the view that there is a continuity between instinct
and intelligence by describing how the latter emerges from such already
existing mental powers as memory and attention, powers common in different
degrees to man and the lower animals.[3] Intelligence and
self-consciousness, however, he insisted, while they are extensions of already
existing mental powers, are also discontinuous [p. 129] with them, that is,
they exhibit distinctly new characteristics.
Wright called this
scientific enterprise "psychozoology," a word he used instead of
"animal psychology" since he was repelled by the anecdotal methods of
early animal psychology. From this scientific pursuit, he derived many
philosophical implications, particularly for the traditional problem of our
knowledge of the external world. His view of self-consciousness, he shows, is
directly opposed both to realism and idealism.[4] In modern terms, his own view amounts to what might
well be called a neutral monism. This view, intrinsically important, is
interestingly akin to William James's concept of pure experience, although, as
we might expect, there are important differences. Wright's psychozoological
principles also influenced James's thought in psychology, as witnessed by many
details in, and the general orientation of, The Principles of Psychology. However,
the parts of James's influential book that were most important for his later
pragmatism and for Dewey's instrumentalism are not those James owed to Wright.
On the other hand, Wright and James, along with the later functionalists Dewey
and J. R. Angell, shared a new view of the logical structure of psychology, an
awareness of which is essential for an understanding of contemporary psychology
and its development out of Wundtian origins. The functionalists, however, for
philosophical reasons, gave a teleological interpretation to this new view
which was utterly foreign to Wright's interpretation.
I
In his monograph on
self-consciousness, Wright first distinguishes scientific (reflective) thinking
from enthymematic inference. The former, which is peculiar to the minds of men
and distinguishes them from the minds of other animals, brings particular facts
under explicit general principles or major premises. The latter goes from minor
premises to conclusions, skipping major premises. In such cases the data of
experience, [p. 130] which if consciously formulated would be the major
premises, are causally effective in suggesting, more or less clearly,
conclusions from minor premises. Enthymematic reasonings are exhibited in
inference from signs and likelihoods as in prognostications of the weather and
in orientations of many animals. In enthymematic inference signs are harbingers
of events without recognition of the relation between the sign and the thing
signified; in other words, the semantical capacity of the sign is unrecognized.
In scientific inference, however, signs themselves are objects of reflective
attention, and a sign "is recognized in its general relations to what it
signifies, and to what it has signified in the past, and will signify in the
future."[5]
Internal images as
well as outward perceptions, Wright thinks, are operative as signs in
inference, and the recognition of them is the crucial step in achieving
scientific knowledge. Internal images, he says, are "representative
imaginations" that represent all the particular objects or relations of a
kind, like the visual imaginations called up by such general names of objects
as "dog," "tree," etc. These images are vague and feeble in
intensity but effective as signs or directive elements in thought. The image of
men" as a sign of mortality leads one from the sign of this man's human
nature to the expectation that he will die; but in enthymematic inference the
internal image "men," because of its weak nature, falls out of
consciousness and the present sign leads on directly to the anticipation of
mortality. The internal sign is lost sight of in the onrush of attention to the
thing signified. However, with an extension of the range of memory power
together with a corresponding increase in the vividness of its impressions
(variations useful in other directions and so likely to be secured by natural selection), a person is able to
fix attention on both internal and present signs and so become aware not only
of the functioning of internal signs as major premises, but of a simultaneous
internal and external suggestion of the same thing; for example, the
realization that the internal image "men" and the perception of
"this man" both signify "mortality. [p. 131]
...And the contrast
of thoughts [memory images] and things [present perceptions], at least in their
power of suggesting that of which they may be coincident signs, could, for the
first time, be perceptible. This
would plant the germ of the distinctively human form of self-consciousness.[6]
This germ of
self-consciousness depends for its extension on the use of language: "it
must still be largely aided by the voluntary character of outward signs, --
vocal, gestural, and graphic, -- by which all signs are brought under the
control of the will...."[7]
Wright educes a
number of metaphysical implications from this account of the origin of
self-consciousness. One is that the distinction of subject and object is a
classification through observation and analysis and not, therefore, as the
metaphysicians believe, an intuitive distinction. While the classification may
be intuitive in the sense of unlearned or instinctive, this meaning, he says,
is not the metaphysician's sense of the word. The metaphysician's doctrine that
the distinction between subject and
object is intuitive "implies
that the cognition is absolute; independent not only of the individual's
experiences, but of all possible previous experience, and has a certainty,
reality, and cogency that no amount of experience could give to an empirical
classification."[8] Wright claims, however, that only
lexical or logical statements are necessary or certain and that this necessity stems from their nature as
identity statements, or tautologies. He also concludes that phenomena, before
being empirically classified into subject and object, do not belong to either the mental or the physical
world; they are neutral phenomena. And the categories of subjective and
objective, after they arise, are functional, not substantive, distinctions.
Wright's position,
essentially a neutral monism, emerges particularly clearly in his criticism of
natural realism and idealism. Natural realism "holds that both the subject
and object are absolutely, immediately, and equally known through their
essential attributes in perception."[9] Wright, however,
objects to an unqualified "immediately known." An unattributed
phenomenon, he says, if not referred to its cause or classified as sensation or
[p. 132] emotion, belongs to neither world exclusively. While Wright recognizes
that there may be no such unattributed phenomena in present experience, he
claims that the classification into subject and object is not independent of
all experience. It is, in part at least, instinctive and probably naturally
selected from our progenitors. If the natural realist does not make such a
concession to empiricism and fallibilism but remains an absolute intuitionist,
then he renders the facts of illusion inexplicable. And, while Wright agrees
that both subjective and objective phenomena are, in present experience,
immediately apprehended, he does not subscribe to the attribution of them to
mental and physical substances. He devotes a large portion of the philosophical
part of his essay to showing that the concept of substance arises from
misleading metaphors in the syntax of language. This analysis is highly
interesting and rewards careful study.
Idealism, unlike
realism, Wright says, claims that the conscious subject is immediately known
and its phenomena are known intuitively to belong to it, whereas objects are
known only mediately by their effects on us. He thinks that idealism confuses physiological or genetic
subjectivity with phenomenal subjectivity.
... It [is] evident
that perception, and even sensation, are fully determined or realized in the
brain only through other parts of the bodily apparatus, and through outward
forces and movements like those of pressure and vibration. That the perception,
or sensation, is experienced, or is seated, in the brain, was a natural and
proper conclusion. That the apparent object of perception is not only distant
from what thus appeared to be the seat of the perception, but that a long
series of usually unknown, or unnoticed, movements intervenes between it and
this apparent seat, -- these facts gave great plausibility to a confused
interpretation of the phenomena, namely, that the perception is first realized
as a state of the conscious ego, and, afterwards, is referred to the outward
world through the associations of general experience, as an effect produced
upon us by an otherwise unknown outward cause. On similar grounds a similar
misinterpretation was made of the phenomena of volition, namely, that a
movement in ourselves, originally and intuitively known to be ours, produces
an effect in the outward world at a distance from us, through the intervention
of a series of usually unknown (or only indirectly known) agencies. Remote
effects of the outer world on us, and our actions in producing remote effects
on it, appeared to be the first or intuitive elements in our knowledge of these
phenomena, all the rest being derived or inferential. This was to confound the
seat of sensation or perception in the brain with its proper subjectivity, or
the reference of it to the subject.[10]
Again, he asserts
that originally, in the experience of our progenitors, phenomena were
unclassified or unattributed. Consequently, about subjective phenomena he
writes, "Instead of being, as the theories of idealism hold, first known
as a phenomenon of the subject ego ... its first unattributed condition
would be, by our view, one of neutrality between the two worlds."[11]
James's notion of
"pure experience," expounded in Essays in Radical Empiricism,[12] is basically
similar to Wright's epistemological view that phenomena are originally neutral,
belonging neither to the mental nor to the physical world. James denies the
substantial existence of consciousness and claims that the only
"stuff" in the world of which everything else is composed is
"pure experience," i.e., experience unclassified into "subjective"
or "objective," or phenomena unreferred to thought or things.
Unclassified experience becomes subjective or objective by entering into
different sets of relations. One's percept of a room, for example, enters into
the biography of the perceiver and the history of the house:
As a room, the
experience has occupied that spot and had that environment for thirty years. As
your field of consciousness it may never have existed until now.... In the real
world, fire will consume it. In your mind, you can let fire play over it without
effect. As an outer object, you must pay so much a month to inhabit it. As an
inner content, you may occupy it for any length of time rent-free.[13]
Subject and object,
or consciousness and content, then, are not isolable components within any
experience but are larger experiences in which pure experience is taken twice
over, in two relationships. There is no self-splitting of pure experience
…into consciousness
and what the consciousness is "of." Its subjectivity and objectivity
are functional attributes solely, realized only [p. 134] when the experience is
"taken," i.e., talked-of, twice, considered along with its two
differing contexts respectively, by a new retrospective experience, of which
that whole past complication now forms the fresh content.[14]
What is true of
percepts is also true, lames thinks, of concepts. Conceptions or memories are
not subjective but are composed of pure experience, or unclassified phenomena,
which, like percepts, become classified into subjective and objective ones by
attention to the different relationships into which they enter.
While Wright and
James shared a neutral monism, there is no trace of James's relational analysis
of consciousness in Wright's essay. Further, while subjective-objective is a
functional and not a metaphysical division for both of them, Wright thought
that the distinction is always present in an individual's experience as an
instinctive classification or division, whereas James thought it is a classification
arising within experience itself. Finally, James claimed that the
classification, according to different sets of relations, holds both for
percepts and for their remembered images, whereas Wright thought that the
classification implies an awareness of the difference of memory images and
their signification from present percepts and their same signification.
Apparently, then,
the similarities between Wright and James on this problem are orientational and
programmatic, not a matter of detail. They both denied that consciousness is a
substance and that "objective" and "subjective" are
irreducible characteristics of phenomena, and they agreed that the basic
reality is neutral or pure phenomena. However, there is nothing unusual in
their sharing this view, for many of the empiricists of the time -- Grote,
Renouvier, and others -- also held a neutral monism; and this position, as call
Kennedy has pointed out, was already involved in J. S. Mill's empiricism and
phenomenalism.[15] On this particular issue, I think, the
historical relation is a three-way affair with Wright mediating between Mill
and James. Wright skillfully brought to bear on the young James the English
empirical tradition, particularly J. S. Mill, and the seed he planted [p. 135]
bore fruit long after Wright was dead and after James had spent the fury of his
reaction against Wright's agnosticism and unemotional philosophy in his
will-to-believe and tychism.
II
The commentators on
Wright have felt that he clearly influenced James on psychological issues also;
and it is true, for example, that James's chapter on reasoning in his Principles
of Psychology has the unmistakable flavor of Wright's essay on
self-consciousness. Still the task remains of deciding in detail how Wright
contributed to James's thought.
Like Wright, James
distinguished two kinds of inference, and he used the same criteria of
classification.[16] In "unconscious" inference,
signs are followed so continuously by things signified that they are not
discriminated as separate entities, while in reasoning the two are linked by
intermediate steps articulately denoted and expressly analyzed. James, like
Wright, believed that the essential causes of unconscious inference and
reasoning are association by contiguity and similarity, respectively. Wright
had offered these explanations, not in the essay on self-consciousness but in
the "Conflict of Studies,"[17] the only essay on
education he ever wrote. Wright himself was perhaps simply following the
younger Mill in reintroducing the importance of similarity as a basic law of
association after it had been reduced to contiguity by James Mill.[18]
James, again following
Wright, thought that animal behaviour could be explained, for the most part, by
contiguous associations. The brute never recognizes himself as a thinker
because he has never separated the operation of thought from the thing thought
of; the former is fused with the latter. The dissociation of these elements,
like the dissociation of sign and thing signified, is the origin of
self-consciousness. This description of self-consciousness and semantics is the
same as Wright's, and, indeed, at this point James refers the reader to
Wright's essay.[19] But James's brief explanation of how
thoughts themselves become an object [p. 136] of attention is quite different
from and simpler than Wright's view of increased memory power and increased
vividness of images. James thought that similar experiences' of perceptual
error draw man's attention to error per se, "and from the notion of his
error or wrong thought to that of his thought in general the transition is
easy."[20] This view is not suggested in Wright's
essay.
James, then, in his
views on reasoning, was influenced by Wright in certain details though these
details were not the ones most serviceable to him in his later philosophical work.
The part of James's chapter that is philosophically most significant is his
teleological interpretation of reasoning. James illustrates reflective thinking
by a man's refusing to buy a rug because "it looks as if it will
fade." If the man is basing his conclusion on previous experience with
rugs that looked similar and had faded, his judgment is purely empirical. But
if he extracts from the total rug (S)
some element, a certain dye (M),
one of whose attributes (P) he
knows is chemical instability, then the judgment is reasoned. Success in
reasoning depends upon the sagacity with which one analyzes a thing (S) into an essential property (M). James argues, however,
that a property of S is
essential" only relative to individual interests and purposes. There are
thus many "essential" ways of conceiving a thing, none of which is
truer than others but some of which are more serviceable. Reasoning consists in finding that property
which, related to another property, leads to the one conclusion that it is the
reasoner's temporary interest to attain. And thinking is first and last and
always for the sake of doing.
It is this
characterization of reasoning as a teleological instrument of action that
particularly influenced the instrumentalists.[21] It is the
most original part of James's chapter and that for which there is no
counterpart in Wright's essay. The only discussion at all similar is Wright's
insistence on the working-hypothesis nature of scientific principles.[22] Wright, of course, would agree that reflective behavior has
adaptive value; it is naturally selected just because it has utility; but this
is not saying anything [p. 137]
unique or special about it, for the same is true of any other behavior that has
survived.
III
While Wright and
James did not share those specific views on reasoning which were so important
to James's later pragmatism and Dewey's instrumentalism, nevertheless they
shared the same new revolutionary attitude toward the logic of psychology which
was the death knell of Wundt's structural psychology soon after it was born.[23] This new attitude reached its culmination in American
functionalism in the works of Dewey and Angell. However, as we shall see, the
functionalists, for philosophical reasons, gave a teleological interpretation
to this view which was utterly foreign to Wright's interpretation. Let us
examine this new attitude in some detail, for it not only throws light on
Wright's relations to his contemporaries and subsequent philosophers but also
helps clarify the logic of contemporary psychology and its development from
Wundtian origins.
Wright's new
attitude toward psychology originated in Darwinian principles.[24]
In his work in biology
Wright was similarly
oriented in his efforts to account for the occurrence of a particular naturally
selected reaction, self-consciousness. As we have seen, he was interested in
tracing out genetically the development of certain mental powers, memory and
imagination, and in this undertaking he dealt both with signs (stimuli) --
either external stimulation, including verbal stimulation, or internal images
that have their origin in external stimulation [p. 138] -- and the reactions
(responses) of the organism to such signs. It should be noted that in talking
about Darwin I have used "stimulus" to refer to the physical
environment, but the term as used here, as in the case of Wright, is not
restricted to this meaning. It may refer to physical environment and/or phenomenal
experience. The stimulus, then, is characterized simply as that to which the
organism is responding.
Wright's
stimulus-response orientation becomes all the more significant if we note that
at the same time he was developing his psychozoological principles the
associationists (J. S. Mill and Alexander Bain) and the Wundtians were engaged
in building their psychologies in terms of a single variable, mental contents
(sensations, feelings, ideas, etc.).[25] In contrast, the
American psychologists who came after Wright -- William James, James Mark
Baldwin, and James McKeen Cattell, and the functionalists -- showed the
stimulus-response orientation.[26] The functionalists,
however, as we shall see, differed from Wright in giving a teleological
interpretation to the relation between the variables in order to avoid a
dualistic metaphysics of psychology. Wright also avoided dualism but without
characterizing the stimulus-response relationship teleologically.
Let us turn from the
matter of variables to the coordinate matter of lawfulness. In the matter of
lawfulness Wright does not indulge in methodological analysis of what he is
doing although he does explicitly characterize the distinctively human form of
knowledge as scientific, and in the description of what constitutes scientific
knowledge he shows it to be, for one thing, a seeking after what we would now
call process laws.[27] A process law consists of a general
statement of regularity between variables as a function of time. Given such a
law and the statement of present conditions, the prediction of subsequent
conditions can be made. (In contrast, the Wundtians or the structuralists, as
they came to be known in this country, sought syndromatic laws, which have the
form: if x is present, then other specifiable sensory elements y and
z coexist with x.) There [p. 139] are process laws of
varying degrees of generality, from the simple "If A then B" to a complicated mathematical
formula. It was the "If A then B" formulation that Wright was after when he tried to find
the conditions under which certain responses will occur and so to account for
the evolution of self-consciousness.
The British
associationists sought for historical laws, which are a form of process law.
The structure of the process law as it occurs in associationistic psychology
is, for example: If idea A has been followed n times by idea B (contiguity) under conditions C (such "secondary laws" as set,
interest, and so forth), and if A occurs now under conditions C, then B will occur again. The conditions are established historically;
that is, the information concerning the past experience of the organism plays a
part in the description of present conditions. A law with this historical
feature is still in principle a process law if past experience is assumed to be
a matter of present conditions by virtue of the presence in the organism of the
physiological traces of the past experience.[28]
Although Wright was
interested in the same kind of laws as the associationists, he departed from
them in the matter of variables. The associationists dealt with variables of
only one kind, namely, the "impressions" or "ideas" that
become united into complex perception according to such laws as contiguity,
similarity, and so forth. Wright's important function, then, was to apply
Having considered
Wright's psychozoology primarily in relation to the ideas of his
contemporaries, let us turn to a detailed comparison of Wright with the later
American psychologists who became known as the functionalists. Of primary
importance here is the matter of variables.
The functionalists
were, like Wright, oriented toward two variables, stimulus and response; but,
unlike Wright, they conceived the variables as standing in a teleological or
mutually dependent relation to one another. For example, James Rowland Angell
in his systematic paper on functionalism speaks of the "accommodatory service"
which the response bears to the stimulating conditions.[29]
And Dewey, in an earlier paper on functionalism, had developed this position in
his criticism of the reflex-arc concept.[30] Dewey
formulated the teleological relation between stimulus and response as a kind of
"coordination." Functionally the stimulus was conceived to be that
part of a coordination or adaptation which characterizes the problematic
situation which the response (as functionally distinguished) is designed to
resolve successfully. Furthermore, the stimulus is not mere sensation but is
constituted by various orientation movements. There is no datum per se for
Dewey, but a datum is always to be discovered and finally understood as requiring,
being for, some
response. In short, stimulus and response are meaningfully related; one does
not exist without the other.
What, if any, are
the implications of this teleological view of variables for lawfulness? Dewey's
and Angell's particular interpretation of stimulus-response variables is such
that a response could not be predicted from given physical conditions as seen
through the eyes of the experimenter. Rather one would have to know how a
stimulus is "seen" or "understood" -- what it means"
to the responding organism -- before one could know what the stimulus actually
is.[31] In other words, a response would have to occur
before the stimulus could be constituted as meaningful.[p. 141] Such a
requirement does not mean that the discovery of process laws is not possible,
but it does mean that a functionalist has a basis for prediction different from
the physical environment as seen through the eyes of the experimenter. It means
that in the actual scientific situation the conditions for prediction would be
found in the perceptual response of the subject (that which determines the
stimulus), and this perceptual response, in turn, would constitute the
conditions from which a subsequent response could be predicted.[32]
There must be prediction of one response of the subject from another response.
This sort of procedure would be required of the functionalists if they were in
actual practice to be consistent with their theory.
However, Dewey, in
particular, was not interested primarily in the nature of psychological laws
but wanted to provide a teleological interpretation of the variables that would
avoid a metaphysical dualism, with its attendant difficulties for psychology of
how such different substances as mind and matter could ever stand together in a
causal relationship.[33] Wright also avoided dualism but at
the same time also avoided a teleological view of variables.
In his reflex-arc
paper Dewey attacked the notions of a mental stimulus (sensation) and a
physical response as the reintroduction of dualism into philosophy and
psychology. Dewey claimed that the stimulus-response relation, a coordination,
is a single process that can be described in either of two ways, physically or
phenomenally. The series of events from stimulus to response can be described
in terms of physical energies impinging upon receptors and continuing in the
physical activity of motor nerves and muscles. As Dewey says, it is one
uninterrupted continuous redistribution of mass and motion. Or the same series
of events can be described purely from the psychical side: "It is now all
sensation, all sensory quale; the motion, as psychically described, is just as
much sensation as is sound or light or bum."[34] The
avoidance of the mental-physical dichotomy is the main point of Dewey's effort
to characterize the stimulus-response variables as a coordinate unity. [p. 142]
Wright also
attempted to eliminate dualism and the attendant problem of how the two realms
affect each other, but without committing himself to a teleological view of
variables. His method, as we have seen, was to show that the distinction
between thought and things, the mental and physical, is not an ontological distinction, i.e., a
distinction between ultimately real constituents of the world, but one that is
superimposed on the world by experience, by learning. And Wright believed that
he eliminated the ontological dualism by giving a genetic account of the
occurrence of dualism within the framework of phenomenal experience.
According to Wright,
the distinction between thought and things results only when representative
images are attended to and intensified so that outward signs may be recognized
as substitutes for them, thereby enabling one to be conscious of the
simultaneous internal and external suggestion of the things signified. In
prereflective sign reasoning, instead of anything's being "first known as
a phenomenon of the subject ego, or as an effect upon us of an
hypothetical outward world, its first unattributed condition would be, by our
view, one of neutrality between the two worlds."[35]
Wright believed that his analysis of self-consciousness throws doubt on all
metaphysical dualisms: "The [whole] distinction of subject and object
becomes ... a classification through observation and analysis, instead of the
intuitive distinction it is supposed to be by most metaphysicians."[36] Wright, thus, would not have agreed with Dewey's
teleological analysis of the reflex-arc as a way to avoid dualism any more than
he would have agreed with his denial of the self-containedness of an empirical
"given." Wright, to be sure, was not much like any later philosopher;
he did philosophy with a flair and style all his own, and the results are not
likely to be confused with those of anyone else.
Footnotes
1.
John Fiske, Darwinism and Other Essays (rev. ed.;
2. Francis Darwin (ed.), Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols.;
3. Cf. Chauncey Wright, Philosophical
Discussions, edited by Charles Eliot Norton (New York: Henry Holt and Co.,
1877), pp. 205-29. Wright defends the same naturalistic thesis of continuity in
an early unpublished paper on brute and human intellect. Toward the end of it
he emphasizes the origin of human intellect in capacities already existing in
lower animals, while in the beginning he argues for the other half of the
thesis of continuity, viz., that the instinctive reactions of animals have some
counterparts in the mental life of man.
Wright's essay goes as follows:
Whether the faculties of Brutes differ from those of men in kind or in
degree only? [Harvard College Library, the Norton Collection, bMS Am 1088.5
(misc. 6),
The evidence we
have of the existence of mind anywhere but in ourselves is only that of
analogy, and as philosophers have differed in respect to what phenomena should
be considered the effects of mental causes, some have regarded all the actions
of Brutes as the effects of mere mechanism, and from this extreme there has
been every possible variety of opinion even to the greatest absurdities in the
other extreme.
But I think
that if we properly examine this kind of evidence we shall come to the
conclusion that Brutes not only have minds, but that all their original mental
faculties are like ours.
By the law of
parsimony, the first rule of philosophizing, we have no right to assign new
causes to phenomena which can be satisfactorily explained by causes already
known. If then we can find nothing in the actions of Animals, which cannot be
the effect of faculties like ours this certainly will decide the question.
The method in which mental faculties are classified is apt to lead to
many misconceptions. From the separate study of our faculties we are apt to
regard them as distinct and coordinate while in many instances they are but
different developments of one original faculty or the combination of two or
more.
If then we find that Brutes possess those original faculties which if
modified and combined can under similar circumstances be developed into all the
faculties which we possess, their faculties differ from ours only in degree.
And if we can show that the instinct which is of so peculiar a nature in many
animals is only the combination of faculties, which we possess in different
forms and different degrees, then we shall have shown that it is not a distinct
faculty differing in kind from anything which we have.
"Instinct
is an agent which blindly performs a work of intelligence," and there is a
very plausible doubt whether men's actions ever sufficiently exhibit these
characteristics, to be considered instinctive. Were it not that these acts must
result in something definite and useful, they would resemble those acts in
children and even in older persons which are themselves their only object: the
child exercises its body because the mere exercise pleases it: the bee employs
itself in making cells and honey because this employment pleases it, -- because
its feelings impel it.
This
characteristic of instinct then we possess. The active powers of men and of all
animals are very little capable of change: they are originally established in
the constitution of every individual fitting him to become a member of the
communities of his species and are modified to suit the life which he is
intended to lead.
Now with men as well as with all animals certain external forms and
appearances are fitted by his nature to excite certain feelings in him,
for instance the various forms of the human features which can inspire us with
almost every emotion; in short all kinds of natural language belong to that
department of our constitution which joins us with our species. These natural
predispositions are very curious and inexplicable but are always found fitted
for some definite object.
Now as we descend in the scale of animals we find not only this
principle but we also find it more extensive and conjoined with the actions of
brutes, and this is instinct the object of which it is easy to see is to
carry out those complicated schemes of society to which the intellectual
capacities of the lower animals are wholly inadequate.
The bee chooses
a cell with beauty regularity and fitness to an end, somewhat as we
prefer a pleasant agreeable face to a sour and ugly one; both these acts are
misterious[sic] and
unaccountable.
But it is
evident that in the life of some higher animals, which is simpler but more
varied than that of insects, there must be contingent circumstances which if
they come under the jurisdiction of Instinct must render it much more
unaccountable than it is necessary otherwise to suppose it.
That some of
the laws of our thoughts operate also in the minds of animals is evident. They
certainly have memory to a certain degree and many of their actions imply
judgements or else some unknown and altogether unaccountable faculty. Nor is it
unreasonable to suppose that their judgements are grounded on principles
similar to ours, for we must bear in mind that first principles are developed
only as they are required. Hence it is not strange that the reason of animals
exhibit none of the first principles of morality, for it is evident that they
cannot distinguish their acts into right and wrong ones until they have
reflected upon them simply as acts. They probably regard their actions always
in conjunction with the objects which they had, since by their strong instincts
these objects ale made paramount.
Whether their
judgements return to them by memory or are even reflected on they can never
come alone, but always in connection with simpler thoughts which immediately
interest the feelings and which would alone be expressed if brutes had
language.
Thus I think we can see how the minds of brutes may be fundamentally
like our own and yet in their developments greatly differ.
This essay bears no date. "Wright" is written on the outside
of the folded pages. The initials "C.E.N." and the note "to be
returned to Mr. Norton" also appear on the outside. Since the style of the
essay is that of an undergraduate, I think
it is likely that Wright wrote it around 1852
on assignment from Dr. James Walker, then professor of philosophy at
Heretofore it has
been assumed that Wright, being convinced of the truth of
In the early essay
Wright not only adumbrated the general continuity thesis of his later essay
but, in the last paragraphs, prefigured a particular point in it. He wrote that
it is evident that brutes "cannot distinguish their acts into right and
wrong ones until they have reflected upon them simply as acts. They probably
regard their actions always in conjunction with the objects which they had,
since by their strong instincts these objects [of acts] are made
paramount." In his later essay Wright characterized the sign reasoning of
animals and men in a manner similar to this description of the actions of
brutes. The attention of the organism, he said, is carried away from the sign
to the thing signified, and thus the sign by itself is never attended to.
Organisms react to outward objects and events as harbingers of future events
without recognition of the nature or function of the sign in this relation.
Reflective thought, on the other hand, is the recognition of signs in their
capacity as signs.
4. Wright, Philosophical Discussions, pp.
230-39·
12. Cf. the first essay, "Does
'Consciousness' Exist?" in William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (New
York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912).
13. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, p.
14.
15. Gail Kennedy, "The Pragmatic
Naturalism of Chauncey Wright," in Studies in the History of Ideas, Vol.
III, edited by the Department of Philosophy, Columbia University (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1935).·
16. William James, The Principles of
Psychology (2 vols.;
17. Wright, Philosophical Discussions, pp.
267-95.
18. Cf. James Mill, Analysis of the
Phenomena of the Human Mind, ed. J. S. Mill et al. (London:
Longman's, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1869), I, III ff. and notes.
19. James, The Principles of Psychology, II,
359·
21. Cf. John Dewey, "The Development of
American Pragmatism," in Studies in the History of Ideas,
Vol. II, edited by the Department of Philosophy, Columbia University (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1925), pp. 368 f.
22.
Wright, "The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer, "Philosophical Discussions, pp.
43-96·
23.
Cf. E. H. Madden and Marian C. Madden, "Chauncey Wright and the Logic of
Psychology, Philosophy of Science, XIX (1952), 325-32.·
24.
Wright, Philosophical Discussions, p. 252.·
25.
Madden and Madden, "Chauncey Wright and the Logic of Psychology, pp. 327,
328·
26. Ibid. Cf. J. R. Angell, 'The
Province of Functional Psychology," Psychological Review, XIV
(1907), 61-91; John Dewey, "The Reflex Are Concept in Psychology," Psychological
Review, III (1896), 357-70·
27.
Cf. Wright, Philosophical Discussions, p. 206.
28. Cf. Gustav Bergmann, The Philosophy of Science (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), pp. 124-29, reprinted in E. H. Madden, The
Structure of Scientific Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960), pp.
235-40.
31.
Cf. E. H. Madden, "The Nature of Psychological Explanation," Methodos,
IX (1957), 1-11.
33. Dewey, "The Reflex Are Concept in
Psychology."
35.
Wright, Philosophical Discussions, p. 234.·