asked, how a 'but-feeling' can be one of content, I would reply: by association. Professor James has left entirely out of account in his discussion the very important process which we may call 'reproduction of the general.' We sense two impressions as different in quality or intensity, before we are able to definitise that difference; we find two pressure-points to be two, before we can say in what direction the straight line connecting them would lie. So the 'but' impression calls up a general trend or attitude of consciousness, before the concrete objection, which it introduces, is urged: and this general conscious attitude is the soi-disant 'feeling of relation.'[1]
I do not think that more words will make the matter clearer. Professor James' schematic neurology tells for my position as much as or even more than it does for his own; and what he has said above of the 'feeling of relation' applies, with but slight change, to the 'feeling of tendency.'[2] One has no wish to blink facts; but neither does one desire to introduce the 'judgments' and 'relations' of Logic into Psychology.
Modern Psychology and Theories of Knowledge.
The above analysis—with which I fully agree—seems to me to deal with a particular example of a confusion which still very generally exists between the standpoint of psychology and that of logic or epistemology. This confusion is one for which language is mainly responsible, and to which it largely contributes. For not only is the term 'idea' ambiguous, but the other synonyms in current use, 'mental life,' 'states of consciousness,' 'facts of experience,' etc., are sometimes used to denote the mental processes as existing, and at another time for the ideas as significant.[3] But, thanks
- ↑ This attitude,—plus, again, perhaps, the late-formed idea of the relation, in the sense previously employed.
- ↑ I am not at all sure that Professor James is not, throughout, the victim of his terminology. The phrases 'feeling of relation,' 'but' and 'if' feelings, are terribly ambiguous; and may well lead to vacillation between the psychological or logical aspects of the processes considered. But, though I may be fighting the air, as regards the author's meaning in the Principles, the position attacked in the text is distinctly defended in the review of Dr. Schrader's Die bewusste Beziehung already referred to.—Of course, I recognize that the phrase 'content-feeling' is in itself as 'logical,' and as much the result of abstraction, as the phrase 'feeling of relation.'
- ↑ I quite agree with Professor A. Seth's suggestion in Mind, No. 9, that it would be an advantage to use the word 'idea' exclusively for the meaning and employ some other expression to denote the "Heraclitean flux of mental events."
