Part 17 (1/2)

How is it with the animal--with the being which possesses sensibility, or feeling? This question recurs. In feeling there is a reaction, just as in the plant. This reaction is, however, in an ideal form--the reproduction of the external without a.s.similation of it--and especially is this the case in the sense of _sight_, though it is true of all forms of sensation to a less degree.

But all forms of sensibility are limited and special; they refer only to the _present_, in its forms of _here_ and _now_. The animal cannot feel what is not here and now. Even seeing is limited to what is present before it. When we reflect upon the significance of this limitation of sense-perception, we shall find that we need some higher form of self-activity still before we can realize the species in the individual, _i.e._, before we can obtain the true individual--the permanent individuality.

The defect in plant life was, that there was neither ident.i.ty of individuality in s.p.a.ce nor identify in time. The growth of the plant destroyed the individuality of the seed with which we began, so that it was evanescent in time; it served only as the starting-point for new individualities, which likewise, in turn, served again the same purpose; and so its growth in s.p.a.ce was a departure from itself as individual.

The animal is a preservation of individuality as regards s.p.a.ce. He returns into himself in the form of _feeling_ or _sensibility_; but as regards time, it is not so--feeling being limited to the present.

Without a higher activity than feeling, there is no continuity of individuality in the animal any more than in the plant. Each new moment is a new beginning to a being that has feeling, but not memory.

Thus the individuality of mere feeling, although a far more perfect realization of individuality than that found in plant life, is yet, after all, not a continuous individuality for itself, but only for the species.

In spite of the ideal self-activity which appertains to feeling, even in sense-perception, only the species lives in the animal and the individual dies, unless there be higher forms of activity.

IV.

Representation is the next form above sense-perception.

The lowest phase of representation is recollection, which simply repeats for itself a former sense-perception or series of sense-perceptions; in representation the mind is free as regards external impressions; it does not require the presence of the object, but recalls it without its own time and place; fancy and imagination are next higher than recollection, because the mind not only recalls images, but makes new combinations of them, or creates them altogether; attention is the appearance of the will in the intellect; with attention begins the separation of the transient from the variable in perception; memory is the highest form of representation; memory deals with general forms--not mere images of experience, but general types of objects of perception; memory, in this sense, is productive as well as reproductive; with memory arises language.

Here we pa.s.s over to the consideration of higher forms of intellect and will.

While mere sensation, as such, acts only in the presence of the object--reproducing (ideally), it is true, the external object, the faculty of representation is a higher form of self-activity (or of reaction against surrounding conditions), because it can recall, at its own pleasure, the ideal object. Here is the beginning of emanc.i.p.ation from the limitations of time.

The self-activity of representation can summon before it the object that is no longer present to it. Hence its activity is now a double one, for it can seize not only what is now and here immediately before it, but it can compare this present object with the past, and identify or distinguish between the two. Thus recollection or representation may become _memory_.

As memory, the mind achieves a form of activity far above that of sense-perception or mere recollection. It must be noted carefully that mere recollection or representation, although it holds fast the perception in time (making it permanent), does not necessarily const.i.tute an activity completely emanc.i.p.ated from time, nor indeed very far advanced towards it. It is only the beginning of such emanc.i.p.ation.

For mere recollection stands in the presence of the special object of sense-perception; although the object is no longer present to the senses (or to mere feeling), yet the image is present to the representative perception, and is just as much a particular here and now as the object of sense-perception. There intervenes a new activity on the part of the soul before it arrives at memory. Recollection is not memory, but it is the activity which grows into it by the aid of the activity of attention.

The special characteristics of objects of the senses are allowed to drop away, in so far as they are unessential and merely circ.u.mstantial, and gradually there arises in the mind the type--the _general form_--of the object perceived. This general form is the object of memory. Memory deals therefore with what is general, and a type, rather than with what is directly recollected or perceived.

The activity by which the mind ascends from sense-perception to memory is the activity of attention. Here we have the appearance of the will in intellectual activity. Attention is the control of perception by means of the will. The senses shall no longer pa.s.sively receive and report what is before them, but they shall choose some definite point of observation, and neglect all the rest.

Here, in the act of attention we find _abstraction_, and the greater attainment of freedom by the mind. The mind abstracts its view from the many things before it, and concentrates on one point.

Educators have for many ages noted that the habit of attention is the first step in intellectual education. With it we have found the point of separation between the animal intellect and the human. Not attention simply--like that with which the cat watches by the hole of a mouse--but attention which arrives at results of abstraction, is the distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic of educative beings.

Attention abstracts from some things before it and concentrates on others. Through attention grows the capacity to discriminate between the special, particular object and its general type. Generalization arises, but not what is usually called generalization--only a more elementary form of it. Memory, as the highest form of representation--distinguis.h.i.+ng it from mere recollection, which reproduces only what has been perceived--such memory deals with the general forms of objects, their continuity in time. Such activity of memory, therefore, does not reproduce mere images, but only the concepts or general ideas of things, and therefore it belongs to the stage of mind that uses language.

V.

Language marks the arrival at the stage of thought--at the stage of the perception of universals--hence at the possibility of education; language fixes the general types which the productive memory forms; each one of these types, indicated by a word, stands for a possible infinite of sense-perceptions or recollections; the word _tree_ stands for all the trees that exist, and for all that have existed or will exist. Animals do not create for themselves a new world of general types, but deal only with the first world of particular objects; hence they are lost in the variety and multiplicity of continuous succession and difference. Man's sense-perception is with memory; hence always a recognition of the object as not wholly new, but only as an example of what he is mostly familiar with. Intellectual education has for its object the cultivation of reflection; reflection is the Platonic ”Reminiscence,” which retraces the unconscious processes of thought

Language is the means of distinguis.h.i.+ng between the brute and the human--between the animal soul, which has continuity only in the species (which pervades its being in the form of _instinct_), and the _human_, soul, which is immortal, and possessed of a capacity to be educated.

There is no language until the mind can perceive general types of existence; mere proper names nor mere exclamations or cries do not const.i.tute language. All words that belong to language are significative--they ”_express_” or ”_mean_” something--hence they are conventional symbols, and not mere individual designations. Language arises only through common consent, and is not an invention of one individual. It is a product of individuals acting together as a community, and hence implies the ascent of the individual into the species. Unless an individual could ascend into the species he could not _understand_ language. To know words and their meaning is an activity of divine significance; it denotes the formation of universals in the mind--the ascent above the here and now of the senses, and above the representation of mere images, to the activity which grasps together the general conception of objects, and thus reaches beyond what is transient and variable.

Doubtless the n.o.bler species of animals possess not only sense-perception, but a considerable degree of the power of representation. They are not only able to recollect, but to imagine or fancy to some extent, as is evidenced by their dreams. But that animals do not generalize sufficiently to form for themselves a new objective world of types and general concepts, we have a sufficient evidence in the fact that they do not use words, or invent conventional symbols.

With the activity of the symbol-making form of representation, which we have named Memory, and whose evidence is the invention and use of language, the true form of individuality is attained, and each individual human being, as mind, may be said to be the entire species.

Inasmuch as he can form universals in his mind, he can realize the most abstract thought; and he is conscious. Consciousness begins when one can seize the pure universal in the presence of immediate objects here and now.