The Routledge Guidebook to James’s Principles of Psychology

PERCEPTION AND CONCEPTION

As an empiricist, William James believed, along with John Locke and other empiricists, that sensory experience is the ultimate source of knowledge – or, even more broadly, that “sensations are first things in the way of consciousness” (PP 656). But James was not an old-fashioned empiricist. He was what he later called a radical empiricist. That meant, in psychology, that he looked more closely at experience than others had in the past. (One might say for appropriate emphasis, though it is technically redundant since experience and consciousness are the same for James, that he scrutinized the experience of consciousness more closely than anyone before.) That led him to discover a more complicated situation than the one described – and taken for granted – by Locke, Hume, Mill, Bain, and Spencer. In opposition to their assumptions, James came to realize that physical sensations do not lead in a simple direct way, nor at all, to mental duplicates identifiable as either “ideas” or “feelings.” Ideas and feelings do not mirror or re-present the physical referents of sensations in a one-to-one manner. Nor do they constitute the only consequential results of sensory experience. Rather, physical stimuli, impinging upon sensory organs, provoke both physiological and mental processes that eventuate in a wide range of phenomena. These include the reinforcement, modification, and connection of neural pathways, the creation and alteration of perceptions and conceptions, and the establishment of relations and tendencies that invest meaning in ensembles of mental phenomena rather than in individual ideas and feelings.

After so dramatically revising old categories and formulas for understanding basic mental dynamics, James went on (as we shall see in future chapters) to construct innovative accounts of thinking, feeling, and behaving, fully utilizing the more diversified, interactive, and interdependent features that he had proposed regarding neural mechanics and psychological experience. This chapter will explore some of the fundamental matters underlying our cognitive and behavioral life, according to James.

James believed that the various sensory processes, up to the level of brain activity associated with mental awareness, are topics for purely physiological investigation. Rather than review basic information about these processes, he referred readers of The Principles of Psychology to standard texts on anatomy and physiology (89). Subsequently, in the abbreviated version of Principles, he responded to requests from teachers and provided information regarding each of the senses (PBC Chs. 3–6), but in Principles he devoted only one chapter (Ch. 17) to “Sensation” in general, focusing solely on those aspects of sensation and their perceptual consequences that seemed to warrant the attention of psychologists. Nevertheless, sensation comes up in many other places throughout Principles, and no careful reader can doubt James’s unqualified commitment to sensationalism (as opposed to an intellectualism that identifies mind itself as the ultimate source of ideas). Along with his references to the body and more particularly to the nervous system, James’s scattered comments on sensation underscore his conviction that everything psychological starts with the physiological. Indeed, it not only starts there but generally ends there, as physiological and mental processes lead to physical action, which typically results in the stimulation of new sensations and the start of another sensory-motor cycle.

James’s chapter on “Sensation” begins with a section on the difference between sensation and perception. James refused to make a sharp distinction between them. As he put it:

The words Sensation and Perception do not carry very definitely discriminated meanings in popular speech, and in Psychology also their meanings run into each other. Both of them name processes in which we cognize [i.e., have knowing contact with] an objective world; both (under normal conditions) need the stimulation of incoming nerves ere they can occur; Perception always involves Sensation as a portion of itself; and Sensation in turn never takes place in adult life without Perception also being there. They are therefore names for different cognitive functions, not for different sorts of mental fact. The nearer the object cognized comes to being a simple quality like ‘hot,’ ‘cold,’ ‘red,’ ‘noise,’ ‘pain’…the more the state of mind approaches pure sensation. The fuller of relations…the object is…the more unreservedly do we call the state of mind a perception.

(651)

Sensation, in other words, “differs from Perception only in the extreme simplicity of its object or content. Its function is that of mere acquaintance with a fact.” Perception’s function, meanwhile, is more expansive; it involves “knowledge about a fact” (652).

When James said that perceptions are “fuller of relations” and are “about a fact,” he meant that they are produced not only by sensations themselves but also by the “associative or reproductive processes” that are aroused “in the cortex” by sensory stimulation (653). These associations relate a sensed “object” to other objects, including images derived from past experience. This produces the form of cognitive awareness known as perception. As James put it in a later chapter on “The Perception of ‘Things’” (Ch. 29), “perception…differs from sensation by the consciousness of farther facts associated with the object of the sensation” (723). In short, perception involves more than a simple replication of an individual sensation. It is based on “the present sensation…plus a lot of images from the past, all ‘integrated’ together” (725). Relating this to the “chief cerebral conditions of perception,” James said that perception results from “the paths of association irradiating [throughout the cerebral hemispheres] from the sense-impression” (727), so that “whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part), always comes…out of our own head” (747). Thus, “in no regard” are sensation and perception “identical states of mind” (727).

Parts of James’s explication seem to be at odds with his earlier contention that consciousness begins with holistic experience. The resolution of the seeming contradiction regarding his treatment of sensation, with its “associative and reproductive processes,” could come from assuming that the unification of sensory stimuli and their connection with the brain-traces of images occur neurally before consciousness enters the picture. One must admit, however, that James’s talk of the “farther facts” involved in perception, as compared to presumably prior sensations, muddies the situation. More consistent with his premises would have been an argument that the awareness of these “farther facts” is dependent upon a process of discrimination of sensory stimuli out of the original stream of consciousness. At any rate, regarding how neural processes are connected to mental phenomena – how “brains” give rise to “a knowing consciousness” – James threw up his hands, calling it a “mystery” (647). “The nature and hidden causes of ideas,” he averred, “will never be unraveled until the nexus between the brain and consciousness is cleared up” (656), presumably by additional empirical research and subsequent metaphysical reflection.

In the meantime perception involves a synthetic process of the kind often called “apperception” (e.g., by Wilhelm Wundt and others) in James’s time. James himself opposed all but non-technical uses of this term since it had been used in so many different ways. He suggested, instead, that G. H. Lewes’s term “assimilation” was “the most helpful one yet” (751). Only the first sensory experiences of infants are innocent of such accruements from previous experience (657–658). Those of older persons are shaped by their experiential history. Stated otherwise, all but the very youngest of infants have built up associative grids in the course of experience, which predispose them to filter and comprehend their subsequent experience in more or less habitual ways, thus leading them – or rather, all of us non-infants – to anticipate what we are likely to notice and then to cognize what we notice in particular ways. Borrowing another term from G. H. Lewes, and referring to individuals who have concepts for what they are experiencing, James observed (as we have noted before) that “the only things which we commonly see are those which we preperceive, and the only things we preperceive are those which have been labeled for us, and the labels stamped into our mind.” As a result, “if we lost our stock of labels” (i.e., concepts) – and, we can add, the images and memories associated with them – “we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the world” (420).

Counteracting this tendency toward the habituation of perception through conceptualization (which we shall discuss in the next section of this chapter) is the ever-present possibility of novel perceptions due to the mental activity of selective attention. This selectivity, to be discussed in more detail in another chapter, is one of the key characteristics of consciousness in James’s estimation. For him, the mind is not a passive recipient of sensory stimulation. Just as the sense organs themselves select only a narrow range of the physical stimuli present in the ambient environment, so too does the perceptual process select only a narrow range of sensory stimulation for mental awareness. While it is true, as underscored in the prior paragraph, that this selectivity often becomes routinized in this or that way (because a given mode of perception has served a person’s past needs and interests), the possibility of fresh perceptions, based on other needs and interests, always exists. These other needs and interests can direct attention to unfamiliar aspects of the stimulus-array provided by the senses (see 273–276).

This mental selectivity, even when shaped by habit, plays a significant and previously neglected role in association, according to James. Spencer and other empiricists had assumed that physical stimuli have a one-to-one effect upon perception. In their view, repetition of the same stimulation necessarily makes a deeper and deeper impression upon the mind, thus automatically reinforcing the associations being forged among contiguously experienced ideas and feelings. For James, however, mental life starts with consciousness; consciousness is the primordial given, first and foremost experienced as a continuous, integrated stream from which the individual subsequently selects out portions that suit his or her needs and interests, whether these be old or new. These portions, having been selected from the stream, are then liable to being associated with other portions abstracted in the same manner in the past. The important difference in James’s approach is that it is not necessarily frequent repetition that determines what is registered and maintained in the mind of a person, and therefore what is available for association. Some interesting or relevant aspects of the stream may be relatively rare yet draw attention, spur associations, and become more memorable and consequential. This personally determined selectivity, largely ignored by traditional empiricists, can give a uniquely individualized character to a person’s perceptual experience. And thus it is that several individuals, though in contemporaneous contact with the same physical environment, may well perceive it in somewhat different ways (274–277).

Does this mean that perception for James is purely relative or subjective? No. Personal needs or interests typically direct, focus, and sharpen rather than dull or distort discrimination (487). In fact, James stood in emphatic opposition to the philosophical traditions, both empiricist and idealist, that treated perceptions as reconstituting or even displacing the objective physical world. James, instead, was a direct realist. He believed that we can and do perceive things in an immediate manner, not simply indirectly through their re-presentation as ideas in the mind. But he was not a naïve realist. He realized and accounted for the fact that everyone perceives things, and the world in general, in a more or less personalized way.

Fittingly enough, this very insight, like many of his observations about perception, was influenced by his own personal experience as an artist, or artist’s apprentice, in the 1860s. (For a discussion of the influence of art on James’s thought, see Leary 1992.) As a painter James knew that people see things in somewhat varying ways; but he also knew that there are important forms of perceptual invariance with regard to the objective world, forms of invariance that occur despite the fact that sensory stimuli are constantly changing, whether in and of themselves, in relation to selective attention, or against the background in which they appear. He first reflected upon this phenomenon in the mid-1870s when he was struck by a remarkable discovery reported in Hermann von Helmholtz’s magisterial Handbook of Physiological Optics (1876), namely, that retinal sensations produce “exact and constant results” in what is seen by an observer even though they are “to the last degree fluctuating and inconsistent.” This led James to conclude that physiological sensations are “overlooked” by the mind so that “things” can be seen and become the actual “matter of knowledge” (ML 1876–1877, 128). As he put it in Principles, we do not typically attend to sensations as “subjective facts”; instead, we use them “as stepping-stones to pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal.” Thus,

the grass out of the window now looks to me of the same green in the sun as in the shade, and yet [as he knew from his own experience] a painter would have to paint one part of it dark brown, another part bright yellow, to give its real sensational effect…The sameness of the things is what we are concerned to ascertain.

(225–226)

Perception, in other words, puts us in direct contact with the world, regardless of any variation of sensory experience due to situational or personal factors. It is neither purely mechanical nor purely subjective. It is, as later phenomenologists would say, an intentional achievement of a mind that is in immediate relation with its environment (see Husserl 1931): a mind, notably, that is always already embodied and embedded within the world (see Merleau-Ponty 1962). In saying these things, later thinkers were echoing what James had said before them. (For the historical and conceptual connections between James and twentieth-century phenomenologists, see Edie 1987, Ch. 2; Herzog 1995; Linschoten 1968, Ch. 3; and Wilshire 1968, Ch. 7.)

If perception is the first fruit of sensory experience, conception is the second. And just as perception is more stable than sensation, conception in turn provides an even more durable (and more useful) form of cognition than perception. This observation led James, in comparing conception to perception, to rely on the same terminology he used to relate perception to sensation. Perception, he had said, provides more knowledge about an object than does mere sensory acquaintance with it. Now he asserted that conception provides more knowledge about that object than does mere perceptual acquaintance with it. At each cognitive level, more is known about the cognitive object so that earlier forms of knowledge about it come to be seen as mere acquaintance with it in relation to later forms. In other words, James noted, knowledge-by-acquaintance and knowledge-about are “relative terms,” which explains why

the same thought of a thing [i.e., a perception of it] may be called knowledge-about it in comparison with a simpler thought [i.e., a sensation], or [it may be called] acquaintance with it in comparison with a thought of it [i.e., a conception] that is more articulate and explicit.

(217)

This iteration of terminology, with shifting points of reference along the cognitive spectrum, underscored James’s insistence upon treating sensation, perception, and conception as varying degrees of cognitive attainment, though we shall see that conception departs from perception in some significant ways. It also illustrated his resistance to multiplying terminology beyond what is required by the current state of understanding.

Our knowledge about cognitive objects increases and becomes more personalized as some of our sensations become perceptions and then as some of those perceptions become conceptions. Facilitating this increase in knowledge, at each step of the way, is mental selectivity and association, according to James. To understand the process leading to conceptualization we need to recall that consciousness, for James, comes in a continuous, unified stream, originating from sensory processes, from which our minds extract these or those aspects through selective attention. As we have already seen, it is precisely in this “cutting out” of features – and in associating them with other features – that perceptions are created, and in a continuation of selectivity our minds then choose certain perceptions, including their relevant associations, for more formal stipulation. In James’s own words, “each act of conception results from our attention singling out some one part of the mass of matter-for-thought which the world presents, and holding fast to it” (437). This holding fast, or conceptual grasping, is achieved by “calling it ‘this’ or ‘that,’” by attaching a name, label, or sign to this portion of our experience (437). (To complicate matters a bit, James realized that things, events, or qualities that are only imagined can also be conceptualized, but as we shall see in the next chapter, he argued that imagination – even in the form of fantasy – is an offshoot of perceptual experience, so the process of conceptualizing fanciful creations proceeds in the same basic manner.)

Thus, sensation, perception, and conception fall along a continuum of progressive selection, association, and specification. Despite the ever-ongoing nature of this process, there is an obvious difference between the cognitive import of ever-changing only-vaguely-identifiable sensations at one end of the spectrum and invariant specifically-designated conceptions at the other. Through their application, James emphasized, conceptions add to sensory experience and to perceptual acquaintance a much greater “sense of sameness” over time (434). This greater sense of sameness (and be sure to note that he is speaking here of a psychological sense of sameness) is the source of the enhanced stability that the process of conception confers upon our overall cognitive experience. This conceptualized sameness, James asserted, is very significant. In fact, it is the “backbone of our thinking” (434), “the most important of all the features of our mental structure,” without which our experience would be chaotic, without order, pattern, or recognition (435). For although “the principle of constancy in the mind’s meanings” (as James put it) also pertains, in lesser degrees, to prior levels of “acquaintance” and “knowledge about,” it is through the process of conception that constancy or invariability receives its fullest realization. As he wrote in his chapter on “Conception” (Ch. 12), it is only by means of the “conceiving state of mind” that we “identify a numerically distinct and permanent subject of discourse” (436). Whether that singular subject be our own individual self (see 314–324 on self-identity) or something else, it is through the overt process of conceptual “denotation,” James said, that it is most articulately and explicitly present to us. This is true not only with regard to our conceptualizing of such “extra-mental realities” as steam-engines, but also such “fictions” as mermaids and such “mere entia rationis” as the abstract concepts of difference or nonentity (436).

James’s reference to the “conceiving state of mind” rather than “concepts” in his functional definition of conception was not accidental. He was adamant in his determination to avoid what he called “the psychologist’s fallacy,” namely, the substitution of the psychologist’s way of understanding and labeling some aspect of a psychological process for the process itself (see 195). He realized, in other words, that the concept of a “concept” is itself but a slice – a static picture – of a particular moment in an ever-ongoing process of trying to make sense of the flux of experience. Although concepts have their own form of stability, theirs is not the constancy that James had in mind when he defined conceptualization as the means of enhancing the sense of sameness. It is not the sameness of concepts that concerned him. For James, concepts are the vehicles rather than objects of thought. They express what we think about our experienced world: how we expect it to be as we continue to interact with it. They provide a functional link between the knower and the known, facilitating the sense of invariance that James attributed to the “meanings” or “intentions” of our conceiving state of mind. As he put it, conception is “the function by which a state of mind means to think the same whereof it thought on a former occasion” (442). The word “means” in this sentence is equivalent to “intends,” as James made clear when he wrote that “the mind can always intend, and know when it intends, to think of the Same” (434). This notion of meaning as intentionality underlies and clarifies James’s “principle of the constancy in the mind’s meanings,” which is a distinctive and vital feature of his psychology, premised on the functional relation between the mind and its cognitive objects. As he had stated in the Preface to Principles, the fundamental data of his psychology are “(1) thoughts and feelings, and (2) a physical world in time and space with which they co-exist and which (3) they know” (6). This cognitive or knowing relation between the mind and its world, this intentional connection between consciousness and its experienced environment, was the enabling assumption underlying his psychology as well as the root of its influence upon later phenomenologists, as has already been mentioned in our discussion of lower levels of cognition.

To underscore the fact that cognition puts us in touch with objects, and that it is these objects that we assume to have a stable identity, James would have us note that different concepts may help us understand the same object of thought. Each concept is only a single cut or slice of known reality, however simple (e.g., the concept of “blue”) or complicated (e.g., the concept of “concert hall”). It is the object’s purported identity that concerned him, not the endurance of conceptions, though he acknowledged that concepts endure. As he said, when a piece of paper is burnt and becomes “black” rather than “white,” our notions of black or white do not change. Concepts remain ever the same as does our awareness of the objects to which they refer. So while features of our cognitive objects may change, thus calling for the use of different concepts, the “things intended to be thought about,” like the individual concepts used at different times to do the thinking, stand “stiff and immutable” in and of themselves, despite those changes (437). The sameness that concerned James most was not in any particular concept (though he believed that each concept remains the same over time) but in the knower’s sense of the reality being conceptualized. In fact, it is through the “multiplicity of objective appearances” of an object, James said, that we come to believe in its existence “outside of thought.” Right from the start, consciousness – sensory, then perceptual, and finally conceptual – points to “objects independent of itself” (262). James, in short, was a realist who believed in direct cognitive contact with reality, rooted in sensory-perceptual experience, though he was far from being the kind of naïve realist who overlooks the different ways that reality can appear to any particular observer much less to other observers, now and in the future.

Another way to clarify James’s distinctive approach to this significant matter of sameness is to cite his distinction between the ontological, logical, and psychological principles of identity. In pointing to this distinction, he explicitly insisted that he was not asserting either of the first two principles: not claiming “that every real thing is what it is, that a is a, and b, b” or that “what is once true of the subject of a judgment is always true of that subject.” Rather he was simply claiming that we come to expect the world to conform structurally, we might say, to our concepts – to our cognitive sense of it. We might be wrong about specific attributes, and eventually learn that we are mistaken, but when we drop old concepts and assume new ones, our sense of the persisting existence of the objects under consideration remains undisrupted. (In the next section of this chapter, we will review James’s views on the process of cognitive correction and change, which had important implications for his later pragmatic views on knowledge and truth.) What matters here is that, in speaking about the sameness conferred through conceptualization, James was “speaking of the sense of sameness from the point of view of the mind’s structure alone, and not from the point of view of the universe.” In other words, he was “psychologizing, not philosophizing” (435). “Our principle,” as he said,

only lays it down that the mind makes continual use of the notion of sameness…The principle that the mind can mean the Same is true of its meanings, but not necessarily of aught besides. The mind must conceive as possible that the Same should be before it, for our experience to be the sort of [organized] thing it is.

(435)

This would be true, James said, even if the world were, in fact, “a place in which the same thing never did and never will come twice” (435). Our minds would still attach the notion of sameness – it would still identify – certain things, events, and qualities as “this” or “that,” as aspects of experience that can be labeled and recognized as having been experienced and as being possible objects of future experience (437). In thus conceptualizing certain aspects of what we perceive, we confer a considerable degree of stability and order upon our experience.

Several questions deserve our attention: First, how does meaning accrue to our concepts? And second, why and how do some concepts come to be replaced by others?

The matter of meaning was a fundamental concern for James. In his view, the meaning of concepts does not come solely from post hoc associations as claimed by empiricists nor solely from rational operations involving innate forms of sensibility and pre-established categories of understanding, as claimed by idealists. Rather, meaning comes primarily from relations embedded immediately (already, originally) within experience, even before it is conceptualized, which are subsequently selected for attention and enriched by associations with other aspects of past and present experience. Thus, for James, experience arrives with some inchoate structure or connections, which the mind then illuminates and expands through its selective and associative activity. Later experience, allowing further selectivity and association, might reveal other connections within the stream of consciousness, thereby creating the conditions for conceptual change.

To start at the beginning, “the sense of our meaning,” James argued in his inimitable style,

is an entirely peculiar element of the thought [i.e., concept]. It is one of those evanescent and ‘transitive’ facts of mind which introspection cannot turn round upon, and isolate and hold up for examination, as an entomologist passes round an insect on a pin. In the (somewhat clumsy) terminology I have used, it pertains to the ‘fringe’ of the subjective state, and is a ‘feeling of tendency,’ whose neural counterpart is undoubtedly a lot of dawning and dying [brain] processes too faint and complex to be traced.

(446)

In speaking of “evanescent and ‘transitive’ facts of mind,” James was referring to one of the two fundamental aspects of the stream of thought, which he famously described in his classic chapter on that topic (Ch. 9). The stream of thought, he said there, moves along at varying rates. At a slower pace “we are aware of the object of our thought in a comparatively restful and stable way,” while at a more rapid pace “we are aware of a passage, a relation, a transition from it, or between it and something else.” James characterized the slower and faster aspects of thought or consciousness with one of his best known metaphors: “Like a bird’s life,” thought or consciousness “seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings,” the resting-places being the “substantive parts” and the flights being the “transitive parts” (236). The transitive parts, connecting the substantive parts, are difficult to catch on the fly, so to speak. Our attention is naturally drawn toward the more enduring and stable perchings – that from which and that to which our ever-changing consciousness is constantly moving. These moments of relative stasis are more readily conceptualized or labeled and are typically articulated as nouns. They are the objects of our thought, while the connecting transitions, and all the other connections associated with cognitive objects, are more readily likened to subjective feelings than to objectified thoughts. We tend not to notice or linger upon them; hence, they are rarely, and only with purposeful effort, at the focus of our attention. All the same, if we want to provide a fully accurate description of the stream of consciousness,

we ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone.

(238)

More will be said about the “perchings” and “flights” of consciousness in a later chapter. Here our concern is how the substantive aspects of thought (in the form of concepts) are invested with meaning. James argued that this investment is due to the transitive aspects of thought – the “feelings of relation” located in what he called the “fringe” of consciousness. These feelings of relation, or “feelings of tendency” (when pointing toward expected objects), tie a given concept to its full complex of defining conditions. However clearly defined and singular it may seem, no concept stands alone for James; each has its distinctive, multiple affiliations, given in sensory and perceptual experience, elaborated through mental activity, and projected into the future. The meaning of each concept is the sum-effect of these relations, often known experientially through acquaintance with sensations, perceptions, words, and their uses rather than formal articulation. Such meaning, as we have noted, is intended; it follows the onward trajectory of thought, as exemplified when we search our minds to remember what we meant to say – e.g., someone’s name – and feel it just beyond our grasp. In this case there is a palpable sense of a “gap” in what we were saying and in our memory, but as James noted, it is “no mere gap.” It is “intensely active” (243), even achingly so (250). That person’s name – and perhaps the person himself or herself – becomes the object of our search. We have a sense of what and who we intend, as shown by our immediate recognition of wrong guesses, and we continue to search until we come up with the name, or more often, until the name comes up on its own, filling the gap in a way that fulfills our expectations (243).

Different “states of mind” have very specific referents. As James wrote, “the important thing about a train of thought is its conclusion. That is the meaning, or, as we say, the topic of the thought” (250). The felt relations of words or concepts, the tendencies in sentences or streams of thought, define their meanings. How else, James asked, could we reflect upon, utter, or read a sentence properly as it unfolds, unless we sense where it is going and what it intends to say?

Has the reader never asked himself what kind of a mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said it?…The intention to-say-so-and-so is the only name it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate. How comes it about that a man reading something aloud for the first time is able immediately to emphasize all his words aright, unless from the very first he have a sense of at least the form of the sentence yet to come, which sense is fused with his consciousness of the present word, and modifies its emphasis in his mind so as to make him give the proper accent as he utters it?

(245)

Feelings of tendency of this kind are “often so vague that we are unable to name them at all,” yet they govern much of our mental life. Indeed, “great thinkers” are precisely those who have “vast premonitory glimpses of schemes of relations between terms,” being more aware than the rest of us of “whither our thought is going.” This is true for non-verbal as well as verbal thought. Mozart, James reminded his readers, was renowned for composing musical pieces with their conclusions already in mind (247).

One final way of explaining the accrual of meaning to concepts might be helpful: Switching metaphors, James sometimes used center/periphery and light/dark distinctions to characterize the perchings and flights of consciousness, describing the substantive objects perched (and conceptualized) at the center (in the spotlight) of thought in contrast to all the transitive feelings in the periphery, fringe, or shadows surrounding it. It is these feelings – the relations or connections between what is in the spotlight now, what was in it just a moment earlier, and what is about to enter it – that determine the meaning of each of these conceptualized objects. To illustrate his point, James observed that

when I use the word man in two different sentences, I may have both times exactly the same sound upon my lips and the same picture in my mental eye, but I may mean, and at the very moment of uttering the word and imagining the picture know that I mean, two entirely different things. Thus when I say: “What a wonderful man Jones is!” I am perfectly aware that I mean by man to exclude Napoleon Bonaparte or Smith. But when I say, “What a wonderful thing Man is!” I am equally well aware that I mean to include not only Jones, but Napoleon and Smith as well. This added consciousness is an absolutely positive sort of feeling, transforming what would otherwise be mere noise or vision into something understood; and determining the sequel of my thinking, the later words and images, in a perfectly definite way.

(446)

Meaning, then, has to do with the relation of any given concept, word, or image to the context in which it appears before the spotlight of consciousness. This context is comprised of “feelings of relation” to other concepts, words, or images as well as “feelings of tendency” toward what lies ahead in the trajectory of thought. Different contexts of feelings, relations, and tendencies produce different meanings.

As regards the replacing of some concepts by others in our attempts to understand our experience, it is important to recall that what we sense, perceive, and conceive is only a small fraction of what is actually contained within our experience. In selecting and associating certain aspects of experience, we barely tap the many possibilities that we confront. Upon exposure to new experiences, the pressure of different needs, the prompting of shifting interests, or the instruction of others, we can come to notice and conceive different aspects of things and to comprehend old aspects from new perspectives, within different sets of relations. “The facts are unquestionable,” as James asserted:

Our knowledge does grow and change by rational and inward processes, as well as by empirical discoveries. Where the discoveries are empirical [based upon new experiences], no one pretends that the propulsive agency, the force that makes the knowledge develop, is mere conception. All admit it to be our continued exposure to the thing, with its power to impress our senses. Thus strychnine, which tastes bitter, we find will also kill, etc. Now I say that where the new knowledge merely comes from thinking, the facts are essentially the same, and that to talk of self-development on the part of our conceptions is a very bad way of stating the case. Not new sensations, as in the empirical instance, but new conceptions, are the indispensable conditions of advance.

(439)

James denied, however, that any particular concept is modified or changed. Instead, as necessary, old concepts are simply replaced by new concepts, each one of which “is of something which our attention originally tore out of the continuum of felt experience, and provisionally isolated so as to make of it an individual topic of discourse” (439). But even here, James maintained the principle of relation, arguing that when two ways of conceiving are considered, “their relation may come to consciousness, and form matter for a third [new] conception” (440).

A new concept can begin, too, as a virtual conjecture: “a ‘spontaneous variation’ in someone’s brain,” as James put it (1232). But even when the tie to its initiating sensory basis is relatively loose, “a conception, to prevail, must terminate in the world of orderly sensible experience” (929) – it must refer or lead to something that is sensibly tangible – since “no object of conception shall be believed which sooner or later has not some permanent and vivid object of sensation for its term” (930). Of course, the “sooner or later” in this statement acknowledges the fact that some individuals are able to hold onto inadequate, even false conceptions for a good, long time because their belief in its eventual verification is sufficiently resilient. But as a general rule, as previously quoted,

conceptual systems which neither began nor left off in sensations would be like bridges without piers. Systems about fact must plunge themselves into sensation as bridges plunge their piers into the rock. Sensations are the stable rock, the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of thought.

(656–657)

With this claim James came full circle, identifying himself again, as at the start, as a committed empiricist. Just as, in science, “only when you deduce a possible sensation for me from your theory, and give it [the sensory experience] to me when and where the theory requires, do I begin to be sure that your thought has anything to do with truth” (657), so too with regard to concepts assumed to be about reality, others will expect to see how they relate to tangible aspects of experience.

Still, although sensation anchors thought to reality, only conceptualization facilitates the fullest possible means of understanding (i.e., knowing about) reality. For “our mind may simply be aware of a thing’s existence” on a sensory or perceptual level, “and yet neither attend to it nor discriminate it, neither locate nor count nor compare nor like nor dislike nor deduce it, nor recognize it articulately as having been met with before” (455). In short, we can be acquainted with something but neglect to articulate that acquaintance any further. James compared this situation to having “a bit of wood” (a perception) and “a knife” (the mental capacity to operate upon it), “and yet do naught with either” (455). Alternatively, however,

we may rally our activity in a moment, and locate, class, compare, count, and judge it [the perceived object]…The result of the thoughts’ operating on the data given to sense is to transform the order in which experience comes into an entirely different order, that of the conceived world…The conceptual scheme [that we have in mind] is a sort of sieve in which we try to gather up the world’s contents. Most facts and relations fall through its meshes, being either too subtle or insignificant [relative to our interests and purposes] to be fixed in any conception. But whenever a physical reality is caught and identified as the same with something already conceived, it remains on the sieve…Thus comes to pass…the translation of the perceptual into the conceptual order of the world.

(455)

In thus summing up his approach to conception, James underscored its connection to the interests and purposes of the individual knower: “This whole function of conceiving, of fixing, and holding fast to meanings, has no significance apart from the fact that the conceiver is a creature with partial purposes and private ends” (456). We have already seen how discrimination, comparison, and association are involved in the pursuit of those same purposes and ends. In the next chapter we will see how the pursuit is also aided by our imagination and memory.

James’s views on perception and conception raise and address a number of philosophical issues. In this section, I will briefly discuss a few of the more salient ones.

First, anyone who knows about James’s later pragmatism will have noticed the close affinity between his views on conception and his subsequent claims about the pragmatic nature of human knowledge (see PR and MT). Concepts are simply tools to purchase a hold on reality, according to James: useful to the extent that they allow us to behave more effectively in relation to reality and truthful to the extent that they put us in touch with verifiable aspects of it. But no concept can be useful or truthful in every respect, according to James, and every concept is replaceable in the course of experience. Reality is too complex, fecund, and responsive (though not indefinitely responsive) to human purposes and ends. In drawing out the pragmatic consequences of his views on basic cognition and on the relations between thought and reality, James’s later philosophical views developed rather than deviatedfrom his earlier work in psychology (for a further discussion of this matter, see Leary forthcoming).

Second, it is worth underscoring James’s conviction that states of mind, however similar they might be to one another, are never and can never be entirely identical. A conception aroused at one moment, with all the felt relations of that particular moment, can never be precisely the same as a seemingly identical conception aroused at another time, with a necessarily different complement of felt relations. As James put it, “nothing can be conceived twice over without being conceived in…different states of mind” (453). In fact,

the thoughts by which we know that we mean the same thing are apt to be very different indeed from each other. We think the thing now in one context, now in another; now in a definite image, now in a symbol. Sometimes our sense of its identity pertains to the mere fringe, sometimes it involves the nucleus, of our thought. We never can break the thought asunder and tell just which one of its bits is the part that lets us know which subject is referred to; but nevertheless we always do know.

(454)

Somehow, in thinking, we can intend the same cognitive objects, even when we use different concepts to mean them. As noted earlier, concepts are simply the vehicles of thought; they should not be confused with the objects thought about, lest one fall into the psychologist’s fallacy. In asserting that we know objects, not concepts, and that we know them despite variability in conceptualization, James revealed himself to be a realist, though he was a “direct realist” only with regard to perception, which maintains immediate acquaintance with the sensed world. Concepts, as we have seen, are built out – are extrapolations – from some aspect of perception, augmented by ad hoc associations. If intended to be realistic, they rely upon a return-connection to the sensory-perceptual level of cognition for their post hoc verification (i.e., their certification as indicators of some aspect of reality). Sensory-perceptual verification is all the more necessary since concepts can refer to unreal, imaginary objects – to legendary beasts or perpetual-motion machines – as James knew. These fanciful objects, though related in some way(s) to perceptual experience, have never been, and cannot be, objects of direct perception (e.g., see 438, 564).

Third, James was convinced that our knowledge can never encompass, describe, or explain all that we experience, much less all of reality beyond our personal experience. He argued that each of us has a distinctive relation to reality and enjoys the capacity for novel relations with it in the future. Yet he was adamant that there is a reality with which we are in contact. So while he insisted that each person has a more or less unique view of reality, with distinctive emotional as well as cognitive features, he stood firmly against any exaggerated form of relativism. When our concepts are not in tune with the way things are, reality has a way of letting us know. Some concepts, some opinions, some ways of thinking are better than others, and more likely to compel belief, while others are simply wrong. (We will consider these matters in Chapters 13 and 14 of this book.)

Fourth, James’s “conceptualism,” as he labeled his approach to conception, was both innovative and distinctive. As is true of other aspects of his thought, it presented a position somewhere between those held at opposite ends of the spectrum by traditional empiricists and traditional idealists. In arguing that the ever-changing context of fringed relations imbues each conceptualizing moment with a meaning unlike any other, James affirmed the empiricists’ nominalistic claim that each particular concept is unique and individual. But in arguing that the context of relations can create abstract or universal concepts, and in holding that every concept taken in its larger significance as an entire “state of mind” (see 265, 436) is not only one-of-a-kind but cannot itself change into any future state of mind, he granted to the idealists that “the world of conceptions, or things to be thought about, stands stiff and immutable, like Plato’s Realm of Ideas” (437). This attempt to have it both ways hasn’t satisfied every sympathetic supporter of James’s psychology. The philosopher Hilary Putnam, for instance, lauded the dynamic, direct realism of James’s theory of perception, noting its revolutionary character vis-à-vis centuries of indirect representationalism, but he felt that James was wrong to uphold a static, non-direct view of conceptualization (see Putnam 1990 and 1997, which refer specifically to James’s ERE, but make points equally pertinent to PP). It is nonetheless true that James’s views on conception as well as perception pointed to a range of issues that are still important and still debated by philosophers (see Hatfield 2009, which reviews historical contexts as well as contemporary contentions, and Searle 2015, which surveys current debates on perceptual realism and intentionality).

Fifth, I should clarify James’s thoughts about essences, especially after quoting his comment about Plato’s Realm of Ideas. For James, as opposed to Plato and later idealists, no one concept or definition can capture, once and for all, the absolute, ultimate, or fundamental nature of any particular object. As a Darwinian, he was a pluralist and did not believe in species or universal essences, even with regard to non-organic nature. Individual things, in this regard, are like individual concepts: They can be similar but never identical. They vary, both in comparison with one another and over time. It is only on an abstract level that one can identify properties or qualities that seem to be constant among things of a certain kind, and even then, the abstraction is related to particular ways of seeing, selecting, and using them, according to James. We name things, he argued, according to our purposes, but

reality overflows these purposes at every pore. Our usual purpose with it, our commonest title for it, and the properties which this title suggests, have in reality nothing sacramental. They characterize us more than they characterize the thing…The only meaning of essence is teleological [having to do with our goals]…Classification and conception are purely teleological weapons of the mind. The essence of a thing is that one of its properties which is so important for my interests that in comparison with it I may neglect the rest…Whilst so classing, naming, and conceiving it, all other truths about it become to me as naught. The properties which are important vary from man to man and from hour to hour.

(961)

So, to sum up his thought in this regard, a conception reveals “a partial aspect of a thing, which for our purpose we regard as its essential aspect, as the representative of the entire thing” while we ignore “other properties and qualities the thing may have” as “unimportant accidents.” In short, “the essence, the ground of conception, varies with the end we have in view” (961–962). James went on to give an example of what he meant:

A substance like oil has as many different essences as it has uses to different individuals. One man conceives it as a combustible, another as a lubricator, another as a food; the chemist thinks of it as a hydro-carbon; the furniture-maker as a darkener of wood; the speculator as a commodity whose market price to-day is this and to-morrow that. The soap-boiler, the physicist, the clothes-scourer severally ascribe to it other essences in relation to their needs.

(962)

Thus it is that things can not only be sensed and perceived in different ways; even their “essential” character can be conceived differently.

Clearly, this is a distinctive way to think about “essences” within what James later called “a pluralistic universe.” Though derivative in certain respects from his study of Locke and Hume, it went much further in drawing out the implications of their thought (Seigfried 1990, 111). And beyond pointing toward his own kind of radical empiricism and pragmatism, this way of thinking about both perception and conceptualization, supplemented by James’s reflections on the “many worlds” and “sub-universes” in which we live (in Ch. 21 of PP), led by multiple routes to theories like those laid out in Stephen C. Pepper’s World Hypotheses (1942) and presaged subsequent works like Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978). It also influenced the development of process-oriented philosophy as advocated by Alfred North Whitehead (1929), Charles Hartshorne (1937), and others. And, as Ross Posnock (2016) has recently shown, James’s critical approach to conceptualization, as being forever inadequate to the full range of specificities in individual, ongoing experience, helped to inspire a generational “abandonment” of faith in conceptual knowledge by a whole host of “writers, philosophers, and artists.” This “renunciation” of naïve realism, associated with a fundamental distrust of the sufficiency of language, accounts for a wide range of attempts at non-conceptual knowledge in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as Posnock has discussed at length. James, he argued, has served “as a kind of nexus threading together various authors and movements” (31). This had made him “the uncannily ubiquitous American intellectual – influencing philosophers, writers, and scientists in Russia, Japan, Germany, France, and Italy” as well as the United States and Britain (32). Some of this influence, to be sure, came from James’s later philosophical works, in which he emphasized the contrast between “immediate experience” and the “conceptual decomposition of life” (68), but the basis of those works is clearly infused throughout his Principles of Psychology. Over and over, in any case, wherever one looks, James “is one of those rare ‘through lines’ in intellectual history – anywhere you look he is on his way back [to present concerns], as was said [in earlier times] of Plato” (7).

Finally, there are some special phenomena – time and space perception as well as size and shape constancy – that deserve at least brief mention before some concluding comments on the impact and fate of James’s ideas on perception and conception within the discipline of psychology.

Contrary to the common notion that human knowledge moves from the subjective to the objective, James held that initial perceptions put us in direct contact with the objective world and that it is only with further experience and cognitive development that we subjectivize or personalize our world, for aesthetic and practical purposes, through our distinctive discriminations, comparisons, associations, memories, and conceptualizations (PP 586, 603, 679, and 806). Among the things included within our original experience of the objective world, James claimed, is an inchoate (or vague) sense of time and space. This original sense – or rather, these original senses – are neither imposed nor inferred, in the first instance, by the structures or through functions of the mind, as argued by idealists and empiricists both before and after James’s time. Instead, sensations themselves are more or less “durable” and more or less “voluminous,” James asserted, which is to say, our sensory-perceptual experience includes both feelings of “duration” (573–575) and feelings of “extensity” (776–777). In addition, many other relations inherent within the stream of consciousness involve implicit temporal and spatial dimensions that can be extracted post factum by selective attention and then articulated more specifically through conceptualization. Having argued his case by citing and analyzing a great deal of empirical (including experimental) evidence in his lengthy chapters on “The Perception of Time” (Ch. 15) and “The Perception of Space” (Ch. 20), James famously concluded that the postulation of a mental capacity to produce time and space de novo, and then impose them upon our perceptual experience, is entirely “mythological” (603, 905). Even though mental operations can and do enhance our sense of time and space, turning what is vague into something more explicit, there is, he asserted, “no call to disparage the powers of poor sensation” to provide the initial inkling of these dimensions (905).

James’s densely argued analyses of time and space, explicated with typically memorable passages about the “saddle-back” of time (574), “the specious moment” (603), “spatial order” (789), and “the Kantian machine shop” of the mind (905), underscored his originality vis-à-vis his peers, both those like Hermann von Helmholtz who assigned a productive role to unconscious inference, and those like Wilhelm Wundt who spoke of psychic synthesis as the source of temporal and spatial coordinates. If one measure of historical importance is the amount of research prompted by particular proposals, then James’s views on time and space – especially his exquisite descriptions of temporal and spatial phenomena – have been immensely successful. However, it is also the case that the majority of theoretical explanations of time and space now differ from the specifics of James’s theories, even when they accord more generally with his emphasis upon the interaction of world, senses, and mind. In this latter regard, James has had the best of many of his contemporaries, as researchers like Georg Northoff (2003) point to the intrinsic relations between environment, body, and brain, touting “embeddedness” and “embodiment” as crucial factors in our senses of time and space. In all, an interlocking set of physical, biological, and cognitive processes seem necessary, in our time, to account for the wide range of temporal and spatial phenomena that James reviewed in Principles. One specific tradition that picked up James’s direct realism culminated in James J. Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). (Regarding James’s influence on ecological psychology, see Heft 2001.) But even those who accept the role of ecological factors in perception no longer adhere to a strictly Gibsonian approach.

As regards size and shape constancy, we all know that the retinal image of a horse 100 yards away is much smaller than that of a horse 5 yards away. Similarly, the details that are sensed at 100 yards are fewer and less precise than those sensed at 5 yards. Yet, so long as we have discerned that an object is a horse, at whatever distance, our perceptions are much more similar than their sensory foundations. We see a horse in both instances, and we have a similar sense of its basic features, whatever the difference in retinal images may be. How is this so? How can we know the approximate size and shape of the horse in both situations? The answer, James argued, is that we have learned to select one particular image of a horse to represent its identity or sameness, while other images of it, inevitably different due to distance and perspective, are treated as mere signs that suggest that ideal image. Selection, in other words, plays a crucial role here as in other situations. In short, we look beyond multiple possible images of a horse, ranging from far-away to close-up and from clear and detailed to vague and distorted, and rely instead upon its unchanging concept.

I overlook the fact that the farther plates and glasses feel so much smaller than my own, for I know that they are all equal in size; and the feeling of them, which is a present sensation, is eclipsed in the glare of the knowledge which is a merely imagined one.

(817–818)

“The objective spatial attributes ‘signified’ are simply and solely,” he said, “certain other optical sensations now absent, but which the present sensations suggest” (869–870).

What we take to be the “true shape” of a thing, James pointed out, is revealed only when it is positioned in a particular idealized way – not so far from nor so close to the observer as to obscure key features, and at an angle relative to the eye that yields its simplest and most symmetrical form. (James actually presented more precise specifications, but this captures the essence of what he said. Note how the idealized form is revealed, in this rendition, by an action very similar to an artist-apprentice’s close, walk-about scrutiny of an object. On 896 he acknowledged that artistic training can improve the mind’s “abstracting power” in relation to perspective.) “No other point of view,” James averred, “offers so many aesthetic and practical advantages. Here we believe we see the object as it is; elsewhere, only as it seems.” In thus reducing the multiplicity of actual sensory experiences to a single idealized form, “we do but obey the law of economy and simplification which dominates our whole psychic life” (871). This process of reduction is equivalent to “when we abandon mental images, with all their fluctuating characters, for the definite and unchangeable names which they suggest.”

The selection of ‘normal’ appearances from out of the jungle of our optical experiences, to serve as the real sights of which we shall think, is psychologically a parallel phenomenon to the habit of thinking in words, and has a like use. Both are substitutions of terms few and fixed for terms manifold and vague.

(872)

The mechanism that leads from random images to the idealized image “suggested” by them is, for James, association acting as a form of memory (890).

By explaining size and shape constancy in this way, James avoided the more common approaches, which involved some form of Helmholtzian “unconscious inference” from learned cues. We will review James’s objection to the notion of unconscious thinking or reasoning in a later chapter. Here we simply note that interest, selection, and practical advantage, supplemented by substitution-by-association, offered what James considered an alternate and sufficient means of explaining some of the more prominent features of our perceptual experience. In the decades after James, associative learning continued to play a major role in psychology, but with the rise of cognitive psychology in the 1960s and 1970s, with its ever-increasing use of computer models, new versions of unconscious inference came to the fore, where they remain to this day. It is possible that James would have abandoned his preference for associative or habituated processes in light of the new kinds of experimental evidence for what amounts to unconscious inference, but if so, it seems likely that he would have come up with different ways to label and discuss these findings. This matter will be broached again, with reasons why he might have maintained a version of his prior views, in the chapter on “Consciousness and Subconsciousness.”

James discussed many other topics bearing upon sensation, perception, and conception, including color-contrast, space-perception by the blind, dizziness in deaf-mutes, experiences of amputees, hysterical blindness, perceptual susceptibilities in hypnotic trance, drug-induced alterations in sensation, changes in sensibility associated with interruptions in the sense of self, and distinctive sensations that accompany depression; and he reviewed a wide range of visual illusions to demonstrate, to his own satisfaction, that they involve clashes between our perception of the “real” thing, as discussed above, and its differently “imaged” or “imagined” representation (896). His latter discussion, with copious visual illustrations, was particularly notable for its influence upon Pablo Picasso by means of conversations with James’s student, the writer Gertrude Stein (Teuber 1997). In light of this influence, one can conjecture that Cubist art, among other things, was an attempt to portray concepts rather than precepts – what we know about “real” things as conceived as opposed to what we merely perceive at a particular moment: so that a painting of a man might include, say, the back or side of his head that one knows is there even though it is not included within the immediate frame of perception.

William N. Dember (1990), after reviewing James’s chapters on sensation and perception, concluded that they bear re-reading because “they are filled with insights and examples both from ‘real life’ and from the laboratory that at the very least can help students and researchers locate their narrow, parochial problems in a richer, broader psychological/philosophical context,” and further, that “we might see in James’ dual emphases on association and functionalism harbingers of two of the most prominent and promising current approaches to learning and perception,” namely, “connectionism” and “ecological psychology.” Then, nodding toward James’s unique ability to combine previously opposed theories and approaches, he ended his review expressing his hope for “a new William James” who could synthesize these two “powerful, but seemingly disparate points of view” (166). Various research developments since 1990 have in fact moved in this direction, though a new James has yet to appear.

It is noteworthy that “Perception and Conception” is among the longer chapters in this book. As an empiricist, James based his psychology upon experience as rooted in sensation and perception, and the conceptions that follow from them. Every chapter in his Principles of Psychology assumes these topics. Indeed, even if one uses a very strict standard, six chapters in Principles (Chs. 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, and 20) are fundamental to understanding James’s views on perception and conception. These chapters constitute more than a quarter of Principles. And with only a slightly more liberal standard, six more (Chs. 9, 14, 16, 21, 22, and 28) could be included among the sources on these same matters. That so much revolved around these topics is partially due to the fact that most of the empirical and experimental evidence available in the late nineteenth century came from studies related to sensation, perception, and conception, but more importantly it also reflects James’s conviction that a scientific psychology needs to be grounded as firmly as possible in the kinds of fact, theory, and argument reviewed in this chapter.