§4. The Triad in Psychology

380. There are grave objections to making a whole third of the mind of the will alone. One great psychologist has said that the will is nothing but the strongest desire. I cannot grant that; it seems to me to overlook that fact which of all that we observe is quite the most obtrusive, namely, the difference between dreaming and doing. This is not a question of defining, but of noticing what we experience; and surely he who can confound desiring with doing must be a day-dreamer. The evidence, however, seems to be pretty strong that the consciousness of willing does not differ, at least not very much, from a sensation. The sense of hitting and of getting hit are nearly the same, and should be classed together. The common element is the sense of an actual occurrence, of actual action and reaction. There is an intense reality about this kind of experience, a sharp sundering of subject and object. While I am seated calmly in the dark, the lights are suddenly turned on, and at that instant I am conscious, not of a process of change, but yet of something more than can be contained in an instant. I have a sense of a saltus, of there being two sides to that instant. A consciousness of polarity would be a tolerably good phrase to describe what occurs. For will, then, as one of the great types of consciousness, we ought to substitute the polar sense.

381. But by far the most confused of the three members of the division, in its ordinary statement, is Cognition. In the first place every kind of consciousness enters into cognition. Feelings, in the sense in which alone they can be admitted as a great branch of mental phenomena, form the warp and woof of cognition, and even in the objectionable sense of pleasure and pain, they are constituents of cognition. The will, in the form of attention, constantly enters, and the sense of reality or objectivity, which is what we have found ought to take the place of will, in the division of consciousness, is even more essential yet, if possible. But that element of cognition which is neither feeling nor the polar sense, is the consciousness of a process, and this in the form of the sense of learning, of acquiring, of mental growth is eminently characteristic of cognition. This is a kind of consciousness which cannot be immediate, because it covers a time, and that not merely because it continues through every instant of that time, but because it cannot be contracted into an instant. It differs from immediate consciousness, as a melody does from one prolonged note. Neither can the consciousness of the two sides of an instant, of a sudden occurrence, in its individual reality, possibly embrace the consciousness of a process. This is the consciousness that binds our life together. It is the consciousness of synthesis.

382. Here then, we have indubitably three radically different elements of consciousness, these and no more. And they are evidently connected with the ideas of one-two-three. Immediate feeling is the consciousness of the first; the polar sense is the consciousness of the second; and synthetical consciousness is the consciousness of a third or medium.

383. Note, too, that just as we have seen that there are two orders of Secondness, so the polar sense splits into two, and that in two ways, for first, there is an active and a passive kind, or will and sense, and second, there are external will and sense, in opposition to internal will (self-control, inhibitory will) and internal sense (introspection). In like manner, just as there are three orders of Thirdness, so there are three kinds of synthetical consciousness. The undegenerate and really typical form has not been made so familiar to us as the others, which have been more completely studied by psychologists; I shall therefore mention that last. Synthetical consciousness degenerate in the first degree, corresponding to accidental Thirdness, is where there is an external compulsion upon us to think things together. Association by contiguity is an instance of this; but a still better instance is that in our first apprehension of our experiences, we cannot choose how we will arrange our ideas in reference to time and space, but are compelled to think certain things as nearer together than others. It would be putting the cart before the horse to say that we are compelled to think certain things together because they are together in time and space; the true way of stating it is that there is an exterior compulsion upon us to put them together in our construction of time and space, in our perspective. Synthetical consciousness, degenerate in the second degree, corresponding to intermediate thirds, is where we think different feelings to be alike or different, which, since feelings in themselves cannot be compared and therefore cannot be alike, so that to say they are alike is merely to say that the synthetical consciousness regards them so, comes to this, that we are internally compelled to synthesize them or to sunder them. This kind of synthesis appears in a secondary form in association by resemblance. But the highest kind of synthesis is what the mind is compelled to make neither by the inward attractions of the feelings or representations themselves, nor by a transcendental force of necessity, but in the interest of intelligibility that is, in the interest of the synthesizing »I think« itself; and this it does by introducing an idea not contained in the data, which gives connections which they would not otherwise have had. This kind of synthesis has not been sufficiently studied, and especially the intimate relationship of its different varieties has not been duly considered. The work of the poet or novelist is not so utterly different from that of the scientific man. The artist introduces a fiction; but it is not an arbitrary one; it exhibits affinities to which the mind accords a certain approval in pronouncing them beautiful, which if it is not exactly the same as saying that the synthesis is true, is something of the same general kind. The geometer draws a diagram, which if not exactly a fiction, is at least a creation, and by means of observation of that diagram he is able to synthesize and show relations between elements which before seemed to have no necessary connection. The realities compel us to put some things into very close relation and others less so, in a highly complicated, and in the [to?] sense itself unintelligible manner; but it is the genius of the mind, that takes up all these hints of sense, adds immensely to them, makes them precise, and shows them in intelligible form in the intuitions of space and time. Intuition is the regarding of the abstract in a concrete form, by the realistic hypostatization of relations; that is the one sole method of valuable thought. Very shallow is the prevalent notion that this is something to be avoided. You might as well say at once that reasoning is to be avoided because it has led to so much error; quite in the same philistine line of thought would that be; and so well in accord with the spirit of nominalism that I wonder some one does not put it forward. The true precept is not to abstain from hypostatization, but to do it intelligently. . . .¹⁾

384. Kant gives the erroneous view that ideas are presented separated and then thought together by the mind. This is his doctrine that a mental synthesis precedes every analysis. What really happens is that something is presented which in itself has no parts, but which nevertheless is analyzed by the mind, that is to say, its having parts consists in this, that the mind afterward recognizes those parts in it. Those partial ideas are really not in the first idea, in itself, though they are separated out from it. It is a case of destructive distillation. When, having thus separated them, we think over them, we are carried in spite of ourselves from one thought to another, and therein lies the first real synthesis. An earlier synthesis than that is a fiction. The whole conception of time belongs to genuine synthesis and is not to be considered under this head.