William James regarded the formation of habits as one of the crucial factors in establishing the character and conduct of individuals. Habits can be good or bad. They can make life easy or hard. They can support or impede the common good. As James famously said, habit makes our nervous system either “our ally” or “our enemy” (PP 126). It also serves as “the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agency” (125). The American behaviorists who rose to prominence in the decades after James’s death in 1910 fully appreciated the power and significance of habit, and they made the learning of habits the virtual be-all and end-all of their version of psychology (e.g., see Watson 1919). Rightfully, they cited James’s Principles of Psychology as one of their key inspirations, though they accepted only one portion of it. In turning away from “the stream of thought” and attending exclusively to “the stream of conduct,” they tore one vital prong of James’s psychology from another. For James, thought – though it depends in various ways upon habit, as manifested for instance in habituated modes of perception and conception – is the great counterpoint to rote behavior. In fact, it is not too much to say that the links between habit and thought are among the more significant features of James’s inclusive and integrated psychology, as they are also key elements in his pragmatism.
In this chapter we will survey James’s views on the fundamental connections between reflexes, instincts, and habits; examine his treatment of habit in relation to neurology, on the one hand, and character formation, on the other; discuss his ideas on the role of habit in the domain of thought, contrasting this role to the role of personal interest; explore his analysis of the processes of discrimination, comparison, and association that underlie basic thought; and briefly introduce his treatment of higher-level reasoning, leaving more to be said about this topic in the chapter on “Cognition and Emotion.”
One of the refreshing things about The Principles of Psychology is James’s manner of defining terms and discussing topics in his own way, avoiding any unwarranted precision that could retard the advance of knowledge. A certain degree of vagueness is appropriate, he believed, whenever we do not possess adequate evidence for greater specificity. At such times a certain generality, with attendant indeterminateness of definition, is “what best consists with fertility” (PP 19). In contrast, sharply delineated terminology and discussions, based more on conceptual than empirical grounds, convey an unjustified sense of certainty, which can mislead and reduce the motivation to seek further clarification and revision (193–194). This avoidance of precipitate precision is apparent in James’s treatment of the overlapping phenomena associated with reflexes, instincts, and habits – and in his comments on their relation to basic forms of intelligence.
For James, “the fundamental conception of modern nerve-physiology” is “the reflex.” In reflexes of whatever sort, some kind of sensory stimulation leads automatically to some kind of motor response (35). This baseline process supports both instinctual and habitual action, James argued, and it also underlies the formation of memories, association of ideas, and voluntary behavior (35).
The structure of the nervous system, James underscored in his chapter on “The Functions of the Brain” (Ch. 2), assures the one-directional connection between incoming “impressions” and outgoing “movements” (41). This connection is mediated through “lines” or “paths” that are conjoined in the spinal cord or brain. This simple scheme of reflex action is the physiological basis for all mental functioning, not just physical functioning, according to James.
With this in mind, James took up the matter of instinct, though he did so later in Principles than might be expected. His treatment comes after his discussion of “The Production of Movement” in Chapter 23. (Each of the three following chapters – on “Instinct,” “Emotion,” and “Will” – focuses on a different means of producing movement.) At the start of his treatment, James wrote that instinct involves “acting in such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the performance” (1004). “All instinctive performances,” he observed, “are reflex acts” (1002), which is to say, they “conform to the general reflex type; they are called forth by determinate sensory stimuli in contact with the animal’s body, or at a distance in his environment.” In other words, each instinctive behavior results from the “preorganized” tendency of an animal’s nervous system to respond to “a particular sensation or perception or image” (1005).
An interesting aspect of James’s subsequent discussion is his contention that instincts can develop beyond their original automatic stage, so that they are no longer blind or invariable: “No matter how well endowed an animal may originally be in the way of instincts, his resultant actions will be much modified if the instincts combine with experience,” that is, “if in addition to impulses he have memories, associations, inferences, and expectations, on any considerable scale” (1011). This is true even in lower animals, James pointed out, using the example of chicks learning to follow something other than their mother when exposed to an alternative during a particular period of development (1017–1018), a phenomenon described decades later by Niko Tinbergen (1951) and Konrad Lorenz (1965), albeit with different species. (James’s discussion of the “transitoriness” of instincts paralleled their later discussions of critical learning periods.)
Another interesting aspect of James’s treatment of instincts is his criticism of the common notion “that Man differs from lower creatures by the almost total absence of instincts” (1010). In contradiction, he argued that if we take a less restrictive view of instincts, considering them simply as natural impulses to action, we will see that humans have “a far greater variety of impulses than any lower animal.” Combining this fact with humans’ greater “memory, power of reflection, and power of inference,” he said, it is easy to understand why humans display a wider range of actions than any other species. Every time anyone acts upon an impulse, the results of that action are recorded in memory, thus enhancing that person’s “foresight.” Later, reflecting upon and making inferences from this memory allows him or her to act, or not act, or act differently when the impulse occurs again (1010). In short, the cognitive consequences of past behavior expand the possibilities of future behavior.
James’s description of instinctual behavior melding into consciously purposeful action is relevant to James’s discussion of habit, since he emphasized that instincts facilitate habit-formation as readily as reflexes facilitate instincts. On the one hand, instinctual behavior provides the foundation for many habits; on the other, habits, once formed, direct and narrow the trajectory of instincts. It seems, in fact, that “most instincts are implanted for the sake of giving rise to habits, and that, this purpose once accomplished, the instincts themselves, as such, have no raison d’être in the psychical economy, and consequently fade away” (1022). James provided many examples of what he called “the law of inhibition of instincts by habits”:
The selection of a particular hole to live in, of a particular mate, of a particular feeding-ground, a particular variety of diet, a particular anything, in short, out of a possible multitude, is a very wide-spread tendency among animals, even those low down in the scale…But each of these preferences carries with it an insensibility to other opportunities and occasions – an insensibility which can only be described physiologically as an inhibition of new impulses by the habit of old ones already formed.
(1014–1015)
James went on to give examples of this melding of instinctual tendencies into habits in the case of humans:
The possession of homes and wives of our own makes us strangely insensible to the charms of those of other people. Few of us are adventurous in the matter of food; in fact, most of us think there is something disgusting in a bill of fare to which we are unused. Strangers, we are apt to think, cannot be worth knowing, especially if they come from distant cities, etc. The original impulse which got us homes, wives, dietaries, and friends at all, seems to exhaust itself in its first achievements and to leave no surplus energy for reacting on new cases. And so it comes about that, witnessing this torpor, an observer of mankind might say that no instinctive propensity towards certain objects existed at all. It existed, but it existed miscellaneously, or as an instinct pure and simple, only before habit was formed. A habit, once grafted on an instinctive tendency, restricts the range of the tendency itself, and keeps us from reacting on any but the habitual object, although other objects might just as well have been chosen had they been the first-comers.
(1015)
James was speaking, of course, of what was later referred to as the canalization of instincts, a term that mirrored his own tendency to use metaphors of currents, streams, and the deepening of river beds when speaking about the reinforcement of neurological as well as psychological phenomena.
James went on to discuss some thirty or so “special human instincts” (1022–1057), so many in fact that he was subsequently ridiculed for producing such a long list. But with the emergence of evolutionary psychology over the past quarter-century, with its emphasis on “regulatory variables,” James’s catalog of inborn tendencies seems less foreign (see Cosmides and Tooby 2013). It is also relevant to note that at a time when many supported Lamarckian and Spencerian views on the inheritance of acquired habits, James concluded that the slower process of Darwinian natural selection accounted more effectively for the data regarding behavioral as well as biological evolution. “To my mind, the facts all point that way,” he said (1276), noting that the recent research of August Weismann also pointed in this direction (1278). History, of course, has proven him right.
It is significant that the first chapter after James’s preliminary discussions of “The Functions of the Brain” (Ch. 2) and “On Some General Conditions of Brain-Activity” (Ch. 3) is his chapter on “Habit.” James begins this chapter with the observation that “living creatures,” at least “from an outward point of view,” are “bundles of habits” (109). Rejecting any sharp separation between instinct, habit, and thought, he proffered that “the habits to which there is an innate tendency are called instincts; some of those due to education would by most persons be called acts of reason. It thus appears that habit covers a very large part of life” (109). Such a large and important part, in fact, that James treated this topic near the start of Principles, even before he covered some additional methodological and conceptual issues in Chapters 5 to 8. It was only in Chapter 9 on “The Stream of Thought” that he finally introduced the fundamental notions of the more explicitly mentalistic aspect of his psychology.
James had prepared the way for his discussion of habit in his chapter on the brain, when he noted that “the brain is essentially a place of [electrophysiological] currents, which run in organized paths” (78). These pre-established paths, as we have seen, account for simple reflexes and more complicated instincts, according to James. Habits represent the reinforcement of some of these established paths and the development of new ones. “One of the purposes for which [the cerebral cortex] actually exists,” James argued, “is the production of [these] new paths.” This depends upon the “plasticity” of the cortex, which is to say, upon the fact that the “organic materials” of which it is composed are “weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once” (110). Given this relative pliability, “the normal paths [that currents follow in the cortex] are only paths of least resistance. If they get blocked or cut, paths formerly more resistant become the least resistant paths under the changed conditions” (79). James realized that he was speaking metaphorically, but he did so intentionally in deference to the fact that the precise nature of neurological pathways was still under investigation, even as he wrote. He was nonetheless confident – and eventually shown to be right – in his generic description of the neurological foundation of habit-formation (see Leary 2014).
James refrained from defining habit beyond saying that the disposition to act in certain ways is the natural consequence of neurology. Indeed, he suggested that “the aptitude of the brain for acquiring habits” is the “feature of general brain-physiology” that “for psychological purposes” is “the most important feature of all” (108). Even “the infinitely attenuated currents that pour in” through “the blood” or “sensory nerve-roots,” once in the nervous system, “must find a way out. In getting out they leave their traces in the paths which they take. The only thing they can do, in short, is to deepen old paths or to make new ones” (112). Each new path, “if traversed repeatedly, would become the beginning of a new reflex arc” (114). In this context, James argued that “a simple habit” is, “mechanically, nothing but a reflex discharge” and, further, that “the most complex habits” are “nothing but concatenated discharges in the nerve-centres, due to the presence there of systems of reflex paths,” which are “so organized as to wake each other up successively – the impression produced by one muscular contraction serving as a stimulus to provoke the next, until a final impression inhibits the process and closes the chain” (112). In this description, James set the scene for John Dewey’s famous (1896) treatment of the reflex arc.
Some habits are formed without conscious intention, James allowed, while others are based on voluntary action. The assumption regarding the latter case, which James extracted from William B. Carpenter’s (1874) work, is that “every state of ideational consciousness which is either very strong or is habitually repeated, leaves an organic impression on the Cerebrum; in virtue of which that same state may be reproduced at any future time,” even after consciousness and volition have “faded-out” (quoted in PP 116–117).
Having argued that repeated actions leave physiological “traces” that are effectively “branded” into the brain, James proceeded to discuss the significant pedagogical and moral consequences of habit-formation, which he referred to as “the ethical implications of the law of habit” (124). This discussion, later amplified in his Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1899), is what made this chapter – separately published in the years after Principles – so popular among parents, educators, ministers, and doctors of various sorts. It is in this part of the chapter that he designated habit “the enormous fly-wheel of society,” which “keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance” (125), and talked about the need to make our nervous system “our ally” (126). Arguing that change comes easiest to the young, in whom habits have not yet been carved so deeply into the brain – and in whom corresponding character traits have not yet been “set like plaster” (126) – James urged that “we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us” (126). Drawing upon Alexander Bain’s treatment of “The Moral Habits” (1875), he summarized “two great maxims”: (1) “In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible” (127). He translated this maxim into several practical suggestions: to look for opportunities to act in the right way; to put oneself in situations that facilitate right action; and to make a public pledge, if appropriate. “In short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know” (127). Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, frequently paid tribute to James for such suggestions. (2) “Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.” James likened every lapse to “the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again” (127). Addressing how to abandon “such habits as drink and opium-indulgence,” James admitted that experts differed “within certain limits” about the wisdom of “tapering-off,” but he concluded that “in the main” it seems that “the abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best way, if there be a real possibility of carrying it out.” However, “we must be careful not to give the will so stiff a task as to insure its defeat at the very outset” (128).
James added two more maxims to the ones he drew from Bain’s work: (3) “Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.” Showing his Darwinian sensitivity to the significance of consequences, he went on to underscore that “it is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects [i.e., actions], that resolves and aspirations communicate the new ‘set’ to the brain” (128). This passage was a point of inspiration for Edward Thorndike’s (1927) articulation of “the law of effect,” which in turn served as a precedent for B. F. Skinner’s (1938) approach to the “shaping” of behavior. In contrast to Skinner’s approach, however, James’s final maxim pointed toward his own later chapter on the will: (4) “Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.” In other words, do something “for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.” He averred that
asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin.
(130)
After reviewing these maxims, James concluded that “the physiological study of mental conditions” is “the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics.” “Could the young but realize how soon they will become merely walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.” Every single day “we are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone” (130–131). In his more optimistic moments, he would have insisted that we have a chance of changing, even at later times in our lives, but it is clearly harder then since “nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out” (131). Realizing this – and realizing that “this has its good side as well as its bad one” – James insisted on the crucial importance of forming good habits in one’s childhood and youth.
According to James, habit affects thought as well as behavior. At the most basic level of cognition, the level of perception, habit leads to the anticipation of future experience, so that “preperception” allows us to notice and identify things more quickly, while also making it less likely that we will notice and identify other aspects of our experience:
Men have no eyes but for those aspects of things which they have already been taught to discern…In short, the only things which we commonly see are those which we preperceive, and the only things which we preperceive are those which have been labeled for us, and the labels stamped into our minds. If we lost our stock of labels we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the world.
(415)
Thus, not only our habituated perceptual process but also our conventionalized use of linguistic terminology (and associated concepts) render us less likely to experience in new and different ways. As we have seen and will see again, it often takes a special person, with distinctive cognitive skills, to help us see what we are missing.
Habit also accounts for portions of our basic cognitive processing that have come to take place unconsciously or without any form of cognition at all. Thus, “standing, walking, buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking, even saying one’s prayers,” each of which depended upon conscious thought and effort at an earlier point in time, “may grow so automatic by dint of habit” that they are “done when the mind is absorbed in other things” (19).
Although this can have unfortunate consequences at times, it is also liberating – it frees the mind to do other things. Specifically, behaving habitually allows the mind to attend to problematic issues, which it is particularly well suited and adapted to do. So while James lauded habit for simplifying matters and thereby reducing wasted effort and fatigue (117), he was even more interested in the fact that “habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed” (119), leaving us the “intellectual means” to “hesitate, compare, choose, revoke, reject, etc.,” when such behaviors are appropriate (121). As he put it, “the more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work” (126). This is a result, he said, of “a general principle in Psychology that consciousness deserts all processes where it can no longer be of use” (1107). This was an important principle for James, a significant result of evolution, which allows the mind to fulfill its basic function of determining future ends and choosing the means of achieving them (21). Explicating the point a bit more fully, he wrote that
Consciousness…is only intense when nerve-processes are hesitant. In rapid, automatic, habitual action it sinks to a minimum. Nothing could be more fitting than this, if consciousness have the teleological function we suppose; nothing more meaningless, if not. Habitual actions are certain, and being in no danger of going astray from their end, need no extraneous help. In hesitant action, there seem many alternative possibilities of final nervous discharge…Where indecision is great, as before a dangerous leap, consciousness is agonizingly intense.
(145)
Consciousness, in other words, has evolved to deal with the uncertain, the unexpected, and the unprepared-for as well as the dangerous and the desired. As we shall see, it begins with awareness, leads to discrimination and association, and results (at times) in decision and willful action. Habit, in this scheme, facilitates the assignment of attention to matters of greatest import. We will note the positive consequences of this phenomenon when we consider the central role of attention in James’s psychology, both later in this chapter and in a later chapter.
It is perhaps appropriate to observe here that James was particularly sensitive to and appreciative of the role of habit in simplifying and organizing one’s life. For a number of years, especially in his twenties, he suffered from indecision about his career and hence about which of his interests to pursue, which talent to develop, and what to do with his time. Combined with poor health and concerns about possible congenital weaknesses, he suffered through years of debilitating depression and obsessive self-consciousness. In short, he was all too conscious of his health, moods, and lack of forward progress in his life. He became convinced that what he needed was something to strive toward and a set of daily routines – habits – that would turn his mind from internal reflection to appropriate external action. He needed to reduce his self-consciousness and increase his purposeful activity. His personal struggles continued, though somewhat abated by his decision to pursue a career in “mental science,” until they were reduced even further when he married in his later thirties. From his richly detailed memory of this period in his own life, he selected and shared various observations in Principles. For instance, “there is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision” (126), and “there is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed” (129). He made these comments to underscore the need for good habits. Clearly, important psychological insights can come from personal experience as well as from laboratory experiments and the clinical observation of others. (See Richardson 2006 for the relevant biographical details of James’s life, and Leary 2013 for a discussion of the relation between his life and his views on habit.)
Habit is involved, too, in many other areas of thought. Rote memory is a notorious instance of habit-formation. It relies, like all forms of memory, upon the same neurological “plasticity” that facilitates the more general phenomenon of habit. Better than rote memory, James emphasized, is the establishment of longer-lasting memory through the crafting of multiple associations (620–622), but even in this latter case habit reigns supreme as associations are strengthened through repeated connections. In fact, James asserted that “the machinery of recall,” which is “the same as the machinery of association,” is “nothing but the elementary law of habit in the nerve-centres” (615–616). Indeed, even short-term memory should be called “elementary habit” rather than “elementary memory,” according to James (608).
Similar references to habit are made throughout Principles. For instance, James argued that habit is implicated in the experience of spatial dimensions (799) and in the perception of illusions (889). But its preeminence in psychology is due primarily to its just-mentioned role in the process of association, which itself underlies a vast array of psychological phenomena in James’s estimation, ranging from perception and memory to fancy, belief, judgment, and reasoning in the cognitive realm, and from benevolence and conscientiousness to ambition, fear, and love in the social realm (563–564).
Habit, however, is not the only key to phenomena in the cognitive and social realm. If habit accounts for the continuities in experience – the sense of the typical or normal that reaches back into the past – then interest directs our attention toward the less typical and more personal aspects of experience that are relevant to the present and future. Habit in its simplest forms can be described as “mechanical” and “automatic,” while the “mental spontaneity” aroused by personal interests can be seen as cutting and even jumping across such continuities, pausing upon literally attractive aspects of experience, thus allowing new connections and unforeseen possibilities. It is interest that thus breaks the sovereignty of the habitual, mechanical, and automatic; it is interest that directs attention to the personally pertinent and prompts individualized volition. If “there is no other elementary law of association than the law of neural habit” (533), which (as we shall see) enables “association by contiguity,” then the activity of “interested attention,” which is particularly relevant in “association by similarity,” is “the point at which an anti-mechanical psychology must, if anywhere, make its stand” (559). Personal interests can not only change the course of one’s thinking, even initiating “voluntary thought” (549), it can also, thereby, facilitate novel courses of action, including “voluntary acts” (1104), sometimes involving moral action. In many ways, James’s psychology, like James himself, was suspended between the regularity or stasis represented by habit and the relative freedom or dynamism inspired by interest. All but perfunctory thought and random action relies upon both. (Interest will be discussed further, as a vital characteristic of consciousness and a crucial driver of attention, in Chapters 10 and 11 of this book.)
James repeatedly insisted that the experience of consciousness comes to us as a unified “stream of thought” from which we can subsequently discriminate – which is to say, select or abstract out – a wide array of perceptions, conceptions, feelings, and the like. We have already encountered this fundamental tenet of James’s psychology, and it will be discussed at greater length in the chapter on “Consciousness and Subconsciousness.” The important point in the present context is that, according to James, experience or consciousness is not composed from more basic elements – not from perceptions, conceptions, or feelings, and certainly not from the generic “ideas” that did so much work in the earlier empirical psychologies of John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and their successors. (Their approaches picked up on a tradition of thought reaching all the way back to Aristotle.) For James as a radical empiricist (as he later dubbed himself), consciousness is not the result of a combination of elements or what was traditionally called “association of ideas.” Consciousness is simply THERE at and as the beginning. Nonetheless some of the processes covered by the traditional term “association of ideas” play major roles in James’s psychology, though they occur only after preceding processes break down the initial holistic experience of consciousness.
James devoted an entire chapter to these preceding processes, “Discrimination and Comparison” (Ch. 13). In it he made his oft-quoted remark about an infant’s experience being “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (462). It is important to understand, as many have not, that he was referring in this passage to a hypothetical – or at least singular – moment in the life of an infant who had no prior experience. (We need not speculate on what James might or might not have thought about prenatal experience.) Since time and experience do not stand still, this idealized moment is but an instant, more a conceptual than actual baseline from which to analyze ongoing experience. James’s argument, in any case, is that this initial experience, coming through however many sensory channels, would be a totally undifferentiated “thing” – not a “confusion” in the sense of a jumble, as James’s phrase has been typically misconstrued, but a “con-fusion” in the etymological sense of a “fusing together,” with each aspect “blooming” and “buzzing” in a way that calls for equal attention. Only with another moment of consciousness would it become possible for the infant to begin to discriminate, to tease out this or that varying aspect of experience. It is only the experience of difference that allows the recognition of differentiated consciousness (465), and the awareness of difference depends upon a comparison of more than one experience. In essence, James argued, the first act of consciousness, after an infant’s first experience of it, is dissociation rather than association.
James discussed comparison and discrimination in considerable depth (463–480) before noting that discrimination can be improved by practice, especially when it is motivated by “personal or practical interest,” which “makes one’s wits amazingly sharp” (481). Such interest, he noted, “probably acts through [increasing and focusing] attention” (487). He illustrated his views by discussing how one learns to distinguish claret from burgundy (483), but the bulk of his chapter is devoted to discussing experimental evidence and logical arguments about “discriminative sensibilities,” a discussion that included an extended assessment of Gustav Theodor Fechner’s (1860) psychophysics (503–518).
“After discrimination, association!” (519) – thus did James begin his chapter on “Association” (Ch. 14). Other terms for discrimination and association, he indicated, are analysis and synthesis. Consciousness is constantly being analyzed – indeed, analyzing itself – into various aspects, and some of those aspects are constantly being re-synthesized into new constellations that include aspects abstracted from other experiences. The manifestations of these complementary activities, melded into ever-ongoing experience, often seem “magical” and “imponderable” to us, James acknowledged, with “trains of imagery and consideration” following one another, with “the restless flight of one idea before the next,” and with “transitions” being made “between things wide as the poles asun der” – transitions that sometimes “startle us by their abruptness.” In the midst of such complex phenomena, James opined, we can only hope “to banish something of the mystery by formulating the process in simpler terms” (520–521). And that is what he set out to do, admitting from the start that his goal was to identify a few “principles of connection” rather than account empirically for each and every “movement of thought” (547). Habit, he suggested, can explain some connections, namely, those based on past experience, and reason (which we will discuss later) can account for others; but reason, he insisted, thus complicating matters even more dramatically, “is only one out of a thousand possibilities in the thinking of each of us.” “Who,” after all,
can count all the silly fancies, the grotesque suppositions, the utterly irrelevant reflections he makes in the course of a day? Who can swear that his prejudices and irrational beliefs constitute a less bulky part of his mental furniture than his clarified opinions?
(521)
Whatever “principles” or “laws” we posit, James said, must account for both “the good and the bad” of our cognitive life. In this regard, he contrasted his own approach with that of Locke and “more recent Continental psychologists” who invoked “a mechanical process to account for the aberrations of thought” while leaving reason itself untouched (521–522). Instead, James insisted that all thought depends upon the same principles, “which, to say the least, determine the order in which is presented the content or material for her [thought’s] comparisons, selections, and decisions” (521).
Despite his criticism of past philosopher-psychologists, James accepted their terminology by calling his sought-for principles “laws of association,” and he treated these “laws” under two familiar banners, “association by contiguity” and “association by similarity.” (He rejected a third traditional category – association by contrast – saying that it is “easily explained on our [other] principles” [558].) Under the first banner he grouped and treated phenomena in ways that largely mirrored the approaches of his predecessors. Under the second, however, he provided unique arguments that clarified how this form of association (in his estimation) helps to make human thought so distinctive and powerful, and how – through the operation of “interested attention” – it helps to make human thought less dependent on its physiological foundation.
Although James talked a good deal about a variety of enabling and limiting factors, it is fairly easy to summarize what he had to say about the “law of contiguity.” This law, simply stated, is that “objects once experienced together,” whether as co-existent or sequential in time and space, “tend to become associated in the imagination, so that when any one of them is thought of, the others are likely to be thought of also, in the same order of sequence or coexistence as before.” The connections thus forged – as between, say, greenness and lawns, the smell of pine needles and the mountains, or hot stoves and pain – are “a result of the laws of habit in the nervous system.” In other words, their relations are mediated through conjoined neurological paths of innervation (530). Though basically habitual in nature, however, associations of this kind can be strengthened, James noted, by such additional qualities of experience as recency, vividness, and emotional tone (543). Interest can also play a part (539), though the more significant impact of interest occurs (as we shall see) in association by similarity.
James called this first, basic, habit-reliant form of thought “prosaic” (952). That doesn’t mean that he believed it is unimportant. Many prosaic connections, based upon contiguity, are worth knowing since they can be helpful in the conduct of everyday life. Indeed, other animal species function very well within their customary environments on the basis of this kind of association in conjunction with whatever reflexes, instincts, and other habits they might have. But there is clearly a limit to what knowledge based upon mere contiguities can do for any particular person or animal, especially if that person or animal should experience a change in circumstances.
By contrast, association by similarity, at which humans are vastly superior to other animals (970), gets us away from the merely contiguous connections between things, events, or properties. Here the connections are not the result of habit – similar things or properties might never have been experienced together – but recognition of their similarity can lead to significant insight and make their association more valuable than common-sense associations (though only further experience will prove if any given insight is truly useful). Rather than being prosaic, connections according to similarity can be “fanciful, poetic, or witty” (953), offering fresh perspectives from unusual (one might say conceptual rather than physical) points of view. Sometimes these connections can even serve the cause of philosophy or science, especially when they are extrapolated into full-blown analogies, as when Newton noted a similarity between the falling of an object on earth and the orbit of the moon in the sky or when Darwin saw a parallel between the techniques of animal breeding and the processes of natural speciation (969). The significance of such similarities must still be reasoned out if one wants them to contribute to philosophy or science, but this reasoning would never occur without prior recognition of a similarity that warranted further articulation.
According to James, association by similarity occurs when some aspect of experience receives “interested attention,” which results in its being held longer in the mind, thus expanding the time for associations with other, similar aspects of past experience that have been lying “pre-potent” in memory because of their own status as “interesting” to the person involved (539, 544). (In a different context, James said that “selective attention,” driven by interest, provides “accentuation and emphasis” [273].) Admitting that he could not give an explanation for how this happens physiologically (546), though “possibly a minuter insight into the laws of neural action will someday clear the matter up” (547), James argued that empirical observation nonetheless makes it clear that association by similarity across widely separated experiences does occur and that a greater ability to associate in this way “is what separates the man of genius from the prosaic creature of habit and routine thinking” (549). (James had already quoted Alexander Bain to the effect that “a native talent for perceiving analogies is…the leading fact in genius of every order” [500].) Elsewhere in Principles, he distinguished two different kinds of genius, “abstract reasoners” who can explain the similarity they have noticed (984) and “men of intuition” who notice a similarity but cannot explain it (986). The former tend to be philosophers and scientists, like Newton and Darwin, while the latter are likely to be artists or poets, like Shakespeare, who can represent human experience in brilliant and innovative ways without knowing or describing how they reached their insights. Surely interests of pertinent kinds prompted each of them, Shakespeare as much as Newton or Darwin, to make distinctive associations that led beyond habitual, prosaic understanding. By thinking in terms of previously unremarked similarities or analogies, all three individuals managed to escape the associations that had been drummed into them by past experience and education. Association by similarity brought them, as it can bring us, to the door of higher-level thinking. As James put it, “man’s superior association by similarity has much to do with those discriminations of character on which his higher flights of reasoning are based” (970).
This is not the chapter in which to discuss “higher flights of reasoning,” but a few words about reasoning will round out our consideration of habit and thought, and provide a context for the coming chapters.
At the beginning of his chapter on “Reasoning” (Ch. 22), James made a distinction between what he called “irresponsible thinking,” by which he meant thinking for which one is not consciously responsible since it is guided by associative processes operating more or less automatically, and “reasoning,” which is guided by purposeful comparison and manipulation of “abstractions” (952). James described the first in the following way:
Much of our thinking consists of trains of images suggested one by another, of a sort of spontaneous revery of which it seems likely enough that the higher brutes should be capable. This sort of thinking leads nevertheless to rational conclusions, both practical and theoretical.
(952)
In general, thinking of this kind involves “empirical concretes,” or “objects,” that are “coupled together” in “their entirety” (953). Thus, we hear a bell and realize it is time for dinner; detect a smell and know a skunk is nearby; see a patch of color and conclude a house is in the distance. All of these reasonable conclusions are reached by what others had called “unconscious inference,” though James would have preferred “immediate inference” since they require no mediated process of reasoning (954).
In contrast, reasoning involves thinking in terms of partial characteristics or properties abstracted out of “empirical concretes” rather than simply an association of concrete objects (such as bells, dinners, smells, skunks, colors, houses, and so on). Whereas “empirical thinking” is “only reproductive” of earlier situations, reasoning with abstract concepts allows thinking to be “productive,” helping us address “unprecedented situations…for which our associative wisdom…leaves us without resource” (956–957). Thus, through “analysis and abstraction,” we come to see the connection between aspects of things that are not experienced as contiguous in time and space. In essence, we pursue a logical syllogism: If M is P, and S is M, then S is P (958). To use a previously mentioned example, if animal husbandry involves the selection of desired characteristics, and if nature appears to operate as animal husbandry does, then perhaps nature selects for particular characteristics just as animal breeders do. Note that this hypothesis, confirmed by Darwin (1859) through a systematic review of the available phylogenetic evidence, is not based on mere contiguity.
Reasoning, then, goes beyond associations by contiguity. Depending upon a more particulate analysis of experience, it identifies features of disparate phenomena that satisfy one’s instinctive, practical, or aesthetic interests rather than simply overlap in time and space. “Man,” James noted, “by his immensely varied instincts, practical wants, and aesthetic feelings” can “dissociate vastly more characters than any other animal,” thus allowing even “the lowest savages” to “reason” – to note useful and pleasing connections – “incomparably better than the highest brutes.” This enhanced ability to select characteristics multiplies the possibility of associations by similarity at which humans exceed other animals. So it is, for instance, that an animal is likely to associate sunset with some routinely contiguous event like supper-time while a man may associate it with an analogous event like a hero’s death (977). In the latter case, it is not a concrete occurrence like the eating of a meal but rather an abstract similarity – the waning of a lifetime – that is compared to the diminishing of daylight, possibly leading to further reflection, the making of a poem, or some other product of abstract thought.
To summarize, contiguity-bound thinking can help us reach conclusions that are useful, but these conclusions have far less reach than the more “general propositions” that result from abstract thinking (963). The nature and availability of abstractions, therefore, were crucial issues for James. In the following chapters we will explore the process of abstraction in the transition from perception to conception as well as the storage of abstractions in the form of images and memories, before returning to a fuller consideration of thought in the chapter on “Cognition and Emotion.” Later, in Ch. 13 on “Belief and Reality,” we will see how selective perception and abstract reasoning allow humans to live in different worlds of experience. For if habit defines the routine actuality of the ordinary, thought brings to mind the possibility of the extra-ordinary, whether that be novel ways of understanding ourselves and the world in which we live or novel ways of imagining what we and the world might become.
Finally, it remains only to note that James’s treatments of habit and association helped to establish a very hearty tradition of research on associative learning, which has now largely spent itself, eventuating in a shift of interest and research toward the means of cognitive representation, about which James’s views on perception and conception as well as imagination and memory are still relevant (see Hilgard 1987, Ch. 6). Interestingly, the recent combination of outworn behavioristic ideas about simple stimulus-response associations with contemporary cognitive approaches has placed habit once again (as with James) “within broader models of goal-directed action” and demonstrated (as James contended) “a number of advantages to acting habitually,” particularly with regard to “human health and welfare” (Wood and Rünger 2016, 306–307). In this and other ways, current research, theories, and applications regarding automaticity and cognition have revived James’s alignment of habit and thought as well as his insistence upon their mutual relations to neurology.