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• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "While sitting at my desk this A. M. reading a circular of the Loyal Legion a very curious thing happened to me, such as I have never experienced. It was perfectly real, so real that it took some minutes to recover from. It seems to me like a direct intromission into some other world. I never had anything approaching it before sale when dreaming at night. I was wide awake, of course. But this was the feeling. I had only just sat down and become interested in the circular, when I seemed to love myself for a minute and then found myself in the top story of a high building very white and shining and clean, with a noble window immediately at the right of where I sat. Through this window I looked out upon a marvelous reach of landscape entirely new. I never had before such a sense of infinity in nature, such superb stretches of light and color and cleanness. I know that for the space of three minutes I was entirely lost, for when I began to come to, so to speak,—sitting in that other world, I debated for three or four minutes more as to which was dream and which was reality. Sitting there I forgot a faint sense of C.... [the town in which the writer was][131], away off and dim at first. Then I remember thinking 'Why, I used to live in C....; perhaps I am going back.' Slowly C.... did come back, and I found myself at my desk again. For a few minutes the process of determining where I was very funny. But the whole experience was perfectly delightful, there was such a sense of brilliancy and clearness and lightness about it. I suppose it lasted in all about seven minutes or ten minutes." The hallucinations of fever-delirium are a mixture of pseudo-hallucination, true hallucination, and illusion. Those of opium, hasheesh, and belladonna resemble them in this respect. The following vivid account of a fit of hasheesh-delirium has been given me by a friend:

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The tympanic membrane is furthermore able to render sensible differences in the pressure of the external atmosphere, too slight to be, felt either as noise or in this more violent way. If the reader will sit with closed eyes and let a friend approximate some solid object, like a large book, noiselessly to his face, he min immediately become aware of the object's presence and position—likewise of its departure. A friend of the writer, making the experiment for the first time, discriminated unhesitatingly between the three degrees of solidity of a board, a lattice-frame, and a sieve, held close to his ear. Now as this sensation is never used by ordinary persons as a means of perception, we may fairly assume that its felt quality, in those whose attention is called to it for the first time, belongs to it quâ sensation, and owes nothing to educational suggestions. But this felt quality is most distinctly and unmistakably one of vague spatial vastness in three dimensions—quite as much so as is the felt quality of the retinal sensation when we lie on our back and fin the entire held of vision with the empty blue sky. When an object is brought near the ear we immediately feel shut in, contracted; when the object is removed, we suddenly feel as if a transparency, clearness, openness, had been made outside of us. And the feeling will, by any one who will take the pains to observe it, be acknowledged to involve the third dimension in a vague, unmeasured state.[156]

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  as sees it, etc. Instances of summation might be multiplied indefinitely, but it is hardly worth while to forestall subsequent chapters. Those on Instinct, the Stream of Thought, Attention, Discrimination, Association, Memory, Æsthetics, and Will, will contain numerous exemplifications of the reach of the principle in the purely psychological field. REACTION-TIME. One of the lines of experimental investigation most diligently followed of late years is that of the ascertainment of the time occupied by nervous events . Helmholtz led off by discovering the rapidity of the current in the sciatic nerve of the frog. But the methods he used were soon applied to the sensory nerves and the centres, and the results caused much popular scientific admiration when described as measurements of the 'velocity of thought.' The phrase 'quick as thought' had from time immemorial signified all that was wonderful and elusive of determination in the line of speed; and the way in which Science laid her doomful hand upon this mystery reminded people of the day when Franklin first 'eripuit cœlo fulmen ,' foreshadowing the region of a newer and colder race of gods. We shall take up the various operations measured, each in the chapter to which it more naturally pertains. I may say, however, immediately, that the phrase 'velocity of thought ' is misleading, for it is by no means clear in any of the cases what particular act of thought occurs during the time which is measured. 'Velocity of nerve-action' is liable to the same criticism, for in most cases we do not know what particular nerve-processes occur. What the times in question really represent is the total duration of certain reactions upon stimuli . Certain of the conditions of the reaction are prepared beforehand; they consist in the assumption of those motor and sensory tensions which we name the expectant state. Just what happens during the actual time occupied by the reaction (in other words, just what is added to the pre-existent tensions to produce the actual discharge) is not made out at present, either from the neural or from the mental point of view. [image file=Image00019.jpg] The method is essentially the same is all these investigations. A signal of some sort is communicated to the subject, and at the same instant records itself on a time-registering apparatus. The subject then makes a muscular movement of some sort, which is the 'reaction,' and which also records itself automatically. The time found to have elapsed between the two records is the total time of that observation. The time-registering instruments are of various types. One type is that of the revolving drum covered with smoked paper, on which one electric pen traces a line which the signal breaks and the 'reaction' draws again; whilst another electric pen (connected with a pendulum or a rod of metal vibrating at a known rate) traces alongside of the former line a 'time-line' of which each undulation or link stands for a certain fraction of a second, and against which the

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  These are the moral, intellectual, and æsthetic feelings. Concords of sounds, of colors, of lines, logical consistencies, teleological fitnesses, affect us with a pleasure that seems ingrained in the very form of the representation itself, and to borrow nothing from any reverberation surging up from the parts below the brain. The Herbartian psychologists have distinguished feelings due to the form in which ideas may be arranged. A mathematical demonstration may be as 'pretty,' and an act of justice as 'neat,' as a drawing or a tune, although the prettiness and neatness seem to have nothing to do with sensation. We have, then, or some of us seem to have, genuinely cerebral forms of pleasure and displeasure, apparently not agreeing in their mode of production with the 'coarser ' emotions we have been analyzing. And it is certain that readers whom our reasons have hitherto failed to convince will now start up at this admission, and consider that by it we give up our whole case. Since musical perceptions, since logical ideas, can immediately arouse a form of emotional feeling, they will say, is it not more natural to suppose that in the case of the so-called 'coarser' emotions, prompted by other kinds of objects, the emotional feeling is equally immediate, and the bodily expression something that comes later and is added on? In reply to this we must immediately insist that æsthetic emotion, pure and simple, the pleasure given us by certain lines and masses, and combinations of colors and sounds, is an absolutely sensational experience, an optical or auricular feeling that is primary, and not due to the repercussion backwards of other sensations elsewhere consecutively aroused. To this simple primary and immediate pleasure in certain pure sensations and harmonious combinations of them, there may, it is true, be added secondary pleasures; and in the practical enjoyment of works of art by the masses of mankind these secondary pleasures play a great part. The more classic one's taste is, however, the less relatively important are the secondary pleasures felt to be in comparison with those of the primary sensation as it comes in.[433] Classicism and romanticism have their battles over this point. Complex suggestiveness, the awakening of vistas of memory and association, and the stirring of our flesh with picturesque mystery and gloom, make a work of art romantic. The classic taste brands these effects as coarse and tawdry, and prefers the naked beauty of the optical and auditory sensations, unadorned with frippery or foliage. To the romantic mind, on the contrary, the immediate beauty of these sensations seems dry and thin. I am of course not discussing which view is right, but only showing that the discrimination between the primary feeling of beauty, as a pure incoming sensible quality, and the secondary emotions which are grafted thereupon, is one that must be made.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential these relations are, but only for our purpose, the other relations being just as real and present as they; and our purpose is to conceive simply and to foresee. Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends, pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call science; and the miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling. It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to many of our æsthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends." Cf. also Hodgson: Philos. of Refl., ch. V; Lotze: Logik, §§342-351; Sigwart: Logik, §§60-63, 105.[549] In an article entitled 'Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment,' published in the Atlantic Monthly for October 1880, the reader will find some ampler illustrations of these remarks. I have there tried to show that both mental and social evolution are to be conceived after the Darwinian fashion, and that the function of the environment properly so called is much more that of selecting forms, produced by invisible forces, than producing of such forms,—producing being the only function thought of by the pre-Darwinian evolutionists, and the only one on which stress is laid by such contemporary ones as Mr. Spencer and Mr. Allen.[550] "It is perfectly true that our world of experience begins with such associations as lead us to expect that what has happened to us will happen again. These associations lead the babe to look for milk from its nurse and not from its father, the child to believe that the apple he sees will taste good; and whilst they make him wish for it, they make him fear the bottle which contains his bitter medicine. But whereas a part of these associations grows confirmed by frequent repetition, another part is destroyed by contradictory experiences; and the world becomes divided for us into two provinces, one in which we are at home and anticipate with confidence always the same sequences; another filled with alternating, variable, accidental occurrences.". . . Accident is, in a wide sphere, such an every-day matter that we need not be surprised if it sometimes invades the territory where order is the rule. And one personification or another of the capricious power of chance easily helps us over the difficulties which further reflection might find in the exceptions. Yes, indeed, Exception has a peculiar fascination; it is a subject of astonishment, a ˜±Í¼±, and the credulity with which in this first stage of pure association we adopt our supposed rules is matched by the equal credulity with which we adopt the miracles that interfere with them.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  or the excitement of haschish would be necessary to give them a chance of revival. On the other hand, there are sensations with a force of revival which nothing destroys or decreases. Though, as a rule, time weakens and impairs our strongest sensations, these reappear entire and intense, without having lost a particle of their detail, or any degree of their force. M. Brierre de Boismont, having suffered when a child from a disease of the scalp, asserts that 'after fifty-five years have elapsed he can still feel his hair pulled out under the treatment of the skull-cap .'—For my own part, after thirty years, I remember feature for feature the appearance of the theatre to which I was taken for the first time. From the third row of boxes, the body of the theatre appeared to me an immense well, red and flaming, swarming with heads; below, on the right, on a narrow floor, two men and a woman entered, went out, and re-entered, made gestures, and seemed to me like lively dwarfs: to my great surprise, one of these dwarfs fell on his knees, kissed the lady's hand, then hid behind a screen; the other, who was coming in, seemed angry, and raised his arm. I was then seven, I could understand nothing of what was going on; but the well of crimson velvet was so crowded, gilded, and bright, that after a quarter of an hour I was, as it were, intoxicated, and fell asleep. "Every one of us may find similar recollections in his memory, and may distinguish in them a common character. The primitive impression has been accompanied by an extraordinary degree of attention , either as being horrible or delightful, or as being new, surprising, and out of proportion to the ordinary run of our life; this it is we express by saying that we have been strongly impressed; that we were absorbed, that we could not think of anything else; that our other sensations were effaced; that we were pursued all the next day by the resulting image; that it beset us, that we could not drive it away; that all distractions were feeble beside it. It is by force of this disproportion that impressions of childhood are so persistent; the mind being quite fresh, ordinary objects and events are surprising. At present, after seeing so many large halls and full theatres, it is impossible for me, when I enter one, to feel swallowed up, engulfed, and, as it were, lost in a huge dazzling well. The medical man of sixty, who has experienced much suffering, both personally and in imagination, would be less upset now by a surgical operation than when he was a child. "Whatever may be the kind of attention, voluntary or involuntary, it always acts alike; the image of an object or event is capable of revival, and of complete revival, in proportion to the degree of attention with which we have considered the object or event. We put

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  one of them to save the other. The nominalists 'settle the hash' of the thing known by denying it to be ever a genuine universal; the conceptualists despatch the knower by denying it to be a state of mind, in the sense of being a perishing segment of thoughts' stream, consubstantial with other facts of sensibility. They invent, instead of it, as the vehicle of the knowledge of universals, an actus purus intellectûs , or an Ego, whose function is treated as quasi-miraculous and nothing if not awe-inspiring, and which it is a sort of blasphemy to approach with the intent to explain and make common, or reduce to lower terms. Invoked in the first instance as a vehicle for the knowledge of universals, the higher principle presently is made the indispensible vehicle of all thinking whatever, for, it is contended, "a universal element is present in every thought." The nominalists meanwhile, who dislike actus puros and awe-inspiring principles and despise the reverential mood, content themselves with saying that we are mistaken in supposing we ever get sight of the face of an universal; and that what deludes us is nothing but the swarm of 'individual ideas' which may at any time be awakened by the hearing of a name. If we open the pages of either school, we find it impossible to tell, in all the whirl about universal and particular, when the author is talking about universals in the mind, and when about objective universals, so strangely are the two mixed together. James Ferrier, for example, is the most brilliant of anti-nominalist writers. But who is nimble-witted enough to count, in the following sentences from him, the number of times he steps from the known to the knower, and attributes to both whatever properties he finds in either one? "To think is to pass from the singular or particular to the idea [concept] or universal. . . . Ideas are necessary because no thinking can take place without them. They are universal, inasmuch as they are completely divested of the particularity which characterizes all the phenomena of mere sensation. To grasp the nature of this universality is not easy. Perhaps the best means by which this end may be compassed is by contrasting it with the particular. It is not difficult to understand that a sensation, a phenomenon of sense, is never more than the particular which it is. As such, that is, in its strict particularity, it is absolutely unthinkable. In the very act of being thought, something more than it emerges, and this something more cannot be again the particular. . . . Ten particulars per se cannot be thought of any more than one particular can be thought of; . . . there always emerges in thought an additional something, which is the possibility of other particulars to an indefinite extent. . . . .The indefinite additional something which they are instances of is a universal. . . . The idea or universal cannot possibly

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  At first this view astounds us by the enormous number of special adjustments it supposes animals to possess ready-made in anticipation of the outer things among which they are to dwell. Can mutual dependence be so intricate and go so far? Is each thing born fitted to particular other things, and to them exclusively, as locks are fitted to their keys? Undoubtedly this must be believed to be so. Each nook and cranny of creation, down to our very skin and entrails, has its living inhabitants, with organs suited to the place, to devour and digest the food it harbors and to meet the dangers it conceals; and the minuteness of adaptation thus shown in the way of structure knows no bounds. Even so are there no bounds to the minuteness of adaptation in the way of conduct which the several inhabitants display. The older writings on instinct are ineffectual wastes of words, because their authors never came down to this definite and simple point of view, but smothered everything in vague wonder at the clairvoyant and prophetic power of the animals—so superior to anything in man—and at the beneficence of God in endowing them with such a gift. But God's beneficence endows them, first of all, with a nervous system; and, turning our attention to this, makes instinct immediately appear neither more nor less wonderful than all the other facts of life. Every instinct is an impulse. Whether we shall call such impulses as blushing, sneezing, coughing, smiling, or dodging, or keeping time to music, instincts or not, is a mere matter of terminology. The process is the same through-out. In his delightfully fresh and interesting work, Der Thierische Wille, Herr G. H. Schneider subdivides impulses (Triebe) into sensation-impulses, perception-impulses, and idea-impulses. To crouch from cold is a sensation-impulse; to turn and follow, if we see people running one way, is a perception-impulse; to cast about for cover, if it begins to blow and rain, is an imagination-impulse. A single complex instinctive action may involve successively the awakening of impulses of all three classes. Thus a hungry lion starts to seek prey by the awakening in him of imagination coupled with desire; he begins to stalk it when, on eye, ear, or nostril, he gets an impression of its presence at a certain distance; he springs upon it, either when the booty takes alarm and sees, or when the distance is sufficiently reduced; he proceeds to tear and devour it the moment he gets a sensation of its contact with his claws and fangs. Seeking, stalking, springing, and devouring are just so many different kinds of muscular contraction, and neither kind is called forth by the stimulus appropriate to the other. Schneider says of the hamster, which stores corn in its hole:

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  this rule in practice at every moment in ordinary life. If we are applying ourselves to a book or are in lively conversation, while an air is being sung in the adjoining room, we do not retain it; we know vaguely that there is singing going on, and that is all. We then stop our reading or conversation, we lay aside all internal preoccupations and external sensations which our mind or the outer world can throw in our way; we close our eyes, we cause a silence within and about us, and, if the air is repeated, we listen. We say then that we have listened with all our ears, that we have applied our whole minds. If the air is a fine one, and has touched us deeply, we add that we have been transported, uplifted, ravished, that we have forgotten the world and ourselves; that for some minutes our soul was dead to all but sounds. . . . "This exclusive momentary ascendency of one of our states of mind explains the greater durability of its aptitude for revival and for more complete revival. As the sensation revives in the image, the image reappears with a force proportioned to that of the sensation. What we meet with in the first state is also to be met with in the second, since the second is but a revival of the first. So, in the struggle for life, in which all our images are constantly engaged, the one furnished at the outset with most force retains in each conflict, by the very law of repetition which gives it being, the capacity of treading down its adversaries; this is why it revives, incessantly at first, then frequently, until at last the laws of progressive decay, and the continual accession of new impressions bake away its preponderance, and its competitors, finding a clear field, are able to develop in their turn. "A second cause of prolonged revivals is repetition itself. Every one knows that to learn a thing we must not only consider it attentively, but consider it repeatedly. We say as to this in ordinary language, that an impression many times renewed is imprinted more deeply and exactly on the memory. This is how we contrive to retain a language, airs of music, passages of verse or prose, the technical terms and propositions of a science, and still more so the ordinary facts by which our conduct is regulated. When, from the form and color of a currant-jelly, we think of its taste, or, when tasting it with our eyes shut, we imagine its red tint and the brilliancy of a quivering slice, the images in our mind are brightened by repetition. Whenever we eat, or drink, or walk, or avail ourselves of any of our senses, or commence or continue any action whatever, the same thing happens. Every man and every animal thus possesses at every moment of life a certain stock of clear and easily reviving images, which had

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Our 'scientific' ways of thinking the outer reality are highly abstract ways. The essence of things for science is not to be what they seem, but to be atoms and molecules moving to and from each other according to strange laws. Nowhere does the account of inner relations produced by outer ones in proportion to the frequency with which the latter have been met, more egregiously break down than in the case of scientific conceptions. The order of scientific thought is quite incongruent either with the way in which reality exists or with the way in which it comes before us. Scientific thought goes by selection and emphasis exclusively. We break the solid plenitude of fact into separate essences, conceive generally what only exists particularly, and by our classifications leave nothing in its natural neighborhood, but separate the contiguous, and join what the poles divorce. The reality exists as a plenum. All its parts are contemporaneous, each is as real as any other, and each as essential for making the whole just what it is and nothing else. But we can neither experience nor think this plenum. What we experience, what comes before us, is a chaos of fragmentary impressions interrupting each other;[547] what we think is an abstract system of hypothetical data and laws.[548] This sort of scientific algebra, little as it immediately resembles the reality given to us, turns out (strangely enough) applicable to it. That is, it yields expressions which, at given places and times, can be translated into real values, or interpreted as definite portions of the chaos that falls upon our sense. It becomes thus a practical guide to our expectations as well as a theoretic delight. But I do not see how any one with a sense for the facts can possibly call our systems immediate results of 'experience' in the ordinary sense. Every scientific conception is in the first instance a 'spontaneous variation' in some one's brain.[549] For one that proves useful and applicable there are a thousand that perish through their worthlessness. Their genesis is strictly akin to that of the flashes of poetry and sallies of wit to which the instable brain-paths equally give rise. But whereas the poetry and wit (like the science of the ancients) are their 'own excuse for being,' and have to run the gauntlet of no farther test, the 'scientific' conceptions must prove their worth by being 'verified.' This test, however, is the cause of their preservation, not that of their production; and one might as well account for the origin of Artemus Ward's jokes by the 'cohesion' of subjects with predicates in proportion to the 'persistence of the outer relations' to which they 'correspond' as to treat the genesis of scientific conceptions in the same ponderously unreal way.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  On the other hand, nothing is more congenial, from babyhood to the end of life, than to be able to assimilate the new to the old, to meet each threatening violator or burster of our well-known series of concepts, as it comes in, see through its unwontedness, and ticket it off as an old friend in disguise. This victorious assimilation of the new is in fact the type of all intellectual pleasure. The lust for it is curiosity. The relation of the new to the old, before the assimilation is performed, is wonder. We feel neither curiosity nor wonder concerning things so far beyond us that we have no concepts to refer them to or standards by which to measure them.[122] The Fuegians, in Darwin's voyage, wondered at the small boats, but took the big ship as a 'matter of course.' Only what we partly know already inspires us with a desire to know more. The more elaborate textile fabrics, the vaster works in metal, to most of us are like the air, the water, and the ground, absolute existences which awaken no ideas. It is a matter of course that an engraving or a copper-plate inscription should possess that degree of beauty. But if we are shown a pen-drawing of equal perfection, our personal sympathy with the difficulty of the task makes us immediately wonder at the skill. The old lady admiring the Academician's picture, says to him: "And is it really all done by hand?" IS PERCEPTION UNCONSCIOUS INFERENCE? A widely-spread opinion (which has been held by such men as Schopenhauer, Spencer, Hartmann, Wundt, Helmholtz, and lately interestingly pleaded for by M. Binet[123]) will have it that perception should be called a sort of reasoning operation, more or less unconsciously and automatically performed. The question seems at first a verbal one, depending on how broadly the term reasoning is to be taken. If, every time a present sign suggests an absent reality to our mind, we make an inference; and if every time we make an inference we reason ; then perception is indubitably reasoning. Only one sees no room in it for any unconscious part. Both associates, the present sign and the contiguous things which it suggests, are above-board, and no intermediary ideas are required. Most of those who have upheld the thesis in question have, however, made a more complex supposition. What they have meant is that perception is a mediate inference, end that the middle term is unconscious. When the sensation which I have called' this ' (p. 83, supra) is felt, they think that some process like the following runs through the mind: 'This' is M; but M is A; therefore 'this' is A[124]

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  which no external object corresponds is found also in the analysis of compound sensations which correspond to a single object. Of this sort are many of our sensations of sound. When the sound of a violin, no matter how often we hear it, excites over and over again in our ear the same sum of partial tones, the result is that our feeling of this sum of tones ends by becoming for our mind a mere sign for the voice of the violin. Another combination of partial tones becomes the sensible sign of the voice of a clarionet, etc. And the oftener any such combination is heard, the more accustomed we grow to perceiving it as an integral total, and the harder it becomes to analyze it by immediate observation. I believe that this is one of the principal reasons why the analysis of the notes of the human voice in singing is relatively so difficult. Such fusions of many sensations into what, to conscious perception, seems a simple whole, abound in all our senses. "Physiological optics affords other interesting examples. The perception of the bodily form of a near object comes about through the combination of two diverse pictures which the eyes severally receive from it, and whose diversity is due to the different position of each eye, altering the perspective view of what is before it. Before the invention of the stereoscope this explanation could only be assumed hypothetically; but it can now be proved at any moment by the use of the instrument. Into the stereoscope we insert two flat drawings, representing the two perspective views of the two eyes, in such a manner that each eye sees its own view in the proper place; and we obtain, in consequence, the perception of a single extended solid, as complete and vivid as if we had the real object before us. "Now we can, it is true, by shutting one eye after the other and attending to the point, recognize the difference in the pictures—at least when it is not too small. But, for the stereoscopic perception of solidity, pictures suffice whose difference is so extraordinarily slight as hardly to be recognized by the most careful comparison; and it is certain that, in our ordinary careless observing of bodily objects, we never dream that the perception is due to two perspective views fused into one, because it is an entirely different kind of perception from that of either flat perspective view by itself. It is certain, therefore, that two different sensations of our two eyes fuse into a third perception entirely different from either. Just as partial tones fuse into the perception of a certain instrument's voice; and just as we learn to separate the partial tones of a vibrating string by pinching a nodal point and letting them sound in isolation; so we learn to separate the images of the two eyes by opening and closing them alternately. "There are other much more complex instances of the

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  'awe' which we should feel at having such a principle to take final charge of our perplexities. Others would rejoice that the finite and separatist view of things with which we started had at last developed its contradictions, and was about to lead us dialectically upwards to some 'higher synthesis' in which inconsistencies cease from troubling and logic is at rest. It may be a constitutional infirmity, but I can take no comfort in such devices for making a luxury of intellectual defeat. They are but spiritual chloroform. Better live on the ragged edge, better gnaw the file forever! THE MATERIAL—MONAD THEORY. The most rational thing to do is to suspect that there may be a third possibility, an alternative supposition which we have not considered. Now there is an alternative supposition—a supposition moreover which has been frequently made in the history of philosophy, and which is freer from logical objections than either of the views we have ourselves discussed. It may be called the theory of polyzoism or multiple monadism ; and it conceives the matter thus: Every brain-cell has its own individual consciousness, which no other cell knows anything about, all individual consciousness being 'ejective' to each other. There is, however, among the cells one central or pontifical one to which our consciousness is attached. But the events of all the other cells physically influence this arch-cell; and through producing their joint effects on it, these other cells may be said to 'combine.' The arch-cell is, in fact, one of those 'external media' without which we saw that no fusion or integration of a number of things can occur. The physical modifications of the arch-cell thus form a sequence of results in the production whereof every other cell has a share, so that, as one might say, every other cell is represented therein. And similarly, the conscious correlates to these physical modifications form a sequence of thoughts or feelings, each one of which is, as to its substantive being, an integral and uncompounded psychic thing, but each one of which may (in the exercise of its cognitive function) be aware of things many and complicated in proportion to the number of other cells that have helped to modify the central cell. By a conception of this sort, one incurs neither of the internal contradictions which we found to beset the other two theories. One has no unintelligible self-combining of psychic units to account for on the one hand; and on the other hand, one need not treat as the physical counterpart of the stream of consciousness under observation, a 'total brain-activity' which is non-existent as a genuinely physiological fact. But, to offset these advantages, one has physiological difficulties and improbabilities. There is no cell or group of cells in the brain of such anatomical or functional pre-eminence as to appear to be the keystone or centre of gravity of the whole system. And even if there were such a cell, the theory of multiple monadism would, in strictness

• From Story of O (1954)

  This remark was occasioned by O, who, without stopping to think, had sat down somewhat hastily in her presence, and obliquely in front of her, on the arm of a big leather easy chair, and in so doing had lifted her skirt. The tall girl had glimpsed a flash of naked thigh above the rolled stocking, which covered the knee but stopped just above it. O had seen her smile, so strangely that she wondered what the girl had been thinking at the time, or perhaps what she had understood. She adjusted her stockings, one at a time, pulling them up to tighten them, for it was not as easy to keep them tight this way as it was when the stockings ended at mid-thigh and were fastened to a garter belt, and answered Jacqueline, as though to justify herself: "It's practical." "Practical for what?" Jacqueline wanted to know. "I dislike garter belts," O replied. But Jacqueline was not listening to her and was looking at the iron ring. During the next few days, O took some fifty photographs of Jacqueline. They were like nothing she had ever taken before. Never, perhaps, had she had such a model. Anyway, never before had she been able to extract such meaning and emotion from a face or body. And yet all she was aiming for was to make the silks, the furs, and the laces more beautiful by that sudden beauty of an elfin creature surprised by her reflection in the mirror, which Jacqueline became in the simplest blouse, as she did in the most elegant mink. She had short, thick, blond hair, only slightly curly, and at the least excuse she would cock her head slightly toward her left shoulder and nestle her cheek against the upturned collar of her fur, if she were wearing fur. O caught her once in this position, tender and smiling, her hair gently blown as though by a soft wind, and her smooth, hard cheekbone snuggled against the gray mink, soft and gray as the freshly fallen ashes of a wood fire. Her lips were slightly parted, and her eyes half-closed. Beneath the gleaming, liquid gloss of the photograph she looked like some blissful girl who had drowned, she was pale, so pale. O had the picture printed with as little contrast as possible. She had taken another picture of Jacqueline with she found even more stunning: back lighted, it portrayed her bare-shouldered, with her delicate head, and her face as well, enveloped in a large-meshed black veil surmounted by an absurd double aigrette whose impalpable tufts crowned her like wisps of smoke; she was wearing an enormous robe of heavy brocaded silk, red like the dress of a bride in the Middle Ages, which came down to below her ankles, flared at the hips and tight at the waist, and the

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  11 Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality CHAPTER NINETEEN When Girls Go Wild Female Copulatory Vocalization Here’s a question we ask the audience every time we give a public presentation: If you’ve ever heard a heterosexual couple having sex (and who hasn’t?), which partner was louder? The answer we get every time, every place—from men, women, straight, gay, American, French, Japanese, and Brazilians—is always the same. Hands down. No question about it. Not even close. We don’t have to tell you because you already know, don’t you? Yes, the “meek,” “demure,” “coy” sex is the source of the high-decibel moaning, groaning, and calling out to the good Lord above, neighbors be damned. But why? Within the framework of the standard narrative of human sexuality, what scientists call female copulatory vocalization (FCV) is a major conundrum. You’ll recall Steven Pinker’s claim that “[i]n all societies, sex is at least somewhat ‘dirty.’ It is conducted in private….” 1 Why would the female of such a species risk attracting all that attention? Why is it that from the Lower East Side to the upper reaches of the Amazon, women are far more likely than men to loudly announce their sexual pleasure for all to hear? And why is the sound of a woman having an orgasm so difficult for heterosexual men to ignore? 2 They say women can hear a baby crying from a great distance, but gentlemen, we ask you, is there any sound easier to pick out of the cacophony of an apartment block—and harder to ignore—than that of a woman lost in passion? If you’re one of the ten or fifteen people alive who have never seen Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally, go watch it now (it’s easily accessible online). It’s one of the best-known scenes in all of modern cinema, but if the roles were reversed, the scene wouldn’t be funny—it wouldn’t even make sense. Imagine: Billy Crystal sits at the restaurant table, he starts breathing harder, maybe his eyes bug out a bit, he grunts a few times, takes a few bites of his sandwich, and falls asleep. No big laughs. Nobody in the deli even notices. If male orgasm is a muffled crash of cymbals, female orgasm is full-on opera. Full of screaming, shouting, singing people standing around with spears, and table pounding sure to quiet even the noisiest New York deli. 3 Female cries of ecstasy aren’t a modern phenomenon. The Kama Sutra contains ancient advice on female copulatory vocalization in terms of erotic technique, categorizing an aviary of ecstatic expression a woman might choose from: “As a major part of moaning, she may use, according to her imagination, the cries of the dove, cuckoo, green pigeon, parrot, bee, nightingale, goose, duck and partridge.”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  It’s not surprising that conservative evolutionary psychologists have found foragers’ insistence on sharing to be one of their most difficult nuts to crack. Given the iconic status of Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene and the popularized, status-quo protective notion of the all-against-all struggle for survival, the quest to explain why foraging people are so maddeningly generous to one another has occupied dozens of authors. In The Origins of Virtue, science writer Matt Ridley summarizes the inherent contradiction they face: “Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.” 19 One must walk a tightrope to insist that selfishness is (and has always been) the principal engine of human evolution even in the face of copious data demonstrating that human social organization was founded upon an impulse for sharing for many millennia. Of course, this conflict would evaporate if proponents of the always-selfish theory of human nature accepted contextual limits to their argument. In other words, in a zero-sum context (like that of modern capitalist societies where we live among strangers), it makes sense, on some levels, for individuals to look out for themselves. But in other contexts human behavior is characterized by an equal instinct toward generosity and justice. 20 Even if many of his followers prefer to ignore the subtleties of his arguments, Dawkins himself appreciates them fully, writing, “Much of animal nature is indeed altruistic, cooperative and even attended by benevolent subjective emotions…. Altruism at the level of the individual organism can be a means by which the underlying genes maximize their self-interest.” 21 Despite famously inventing the concept of the “selfish gene,” Dawkins sees group cooperation as a way to advance an individual’s agenda (thereby advancing each individual’s genetic interests). Why, then, are so many of his admirers unwilling to entertain the notion that cooperation among human beings and other animals may be every bit as natural and effective as short-sighted selfishness? Nonhuman primates offer intriguing evidence of the “soft power of peace”—and not just horny bonobos, either. Frans de Waal and Denise Johanowicz devised an experiment to see what would happen when two different macaque species were placed together for five months. Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) are aggressive and violent, while stump-tails (Macaca arctoides) are known for their more chilled-out approach to life. The stump-tails, for example, make up after conflict by gripping each other’s hips, whereas reconciliations are rarely witnessed among rhesus monkeys. Once the two species were placed together, however, the scientists saw that the more peaceful, conciliatory behavior of the stump-tails dominated the more aggressive rhesus attitudes.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Ryan and Jethá’s central contention is that human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors show how far from human nature monogamy really is. Human beings everywhere and in every era have confronted the same familiar, intimate situations in surprisingly different ways. The authors expose the ancient roots of human sexuality while pointing toward a more optimistic future illuminated by our innate capacities for love, cooperation, and generosity. With intelligence, humor, and wonder, Ryan and Jethá show how our promiscuous past haunts our struggles over monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. They explore why long-term fidelity can be so difficult for so many; why sexual passion tends to fade even as love deepens; why many middle-aged men risk everything for transient affairs with younger women; why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic; and what the human body reveals about the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality. In the tradition of the best historical and scientific writing, Sex at Dawn unapologetically upends unwarranted assumptions and unfounded conclusions while offering a revolutionary understanding of why we live and love as we do. Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality About the Authors Christopher Ryan, PhD , is a research psychologist. Cacilda Jethá, MD , is a practicing psychiatrist. They live in Barcelona, Spain. Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author. Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality Copyright SEX AT DAWN. Copyright © 2010 by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-00293-8 FIRST EDITION Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ryan, Christopher Sex at dawn: the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality/Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá.—1st ed. p. cm. Summary: “A controversial, idea-driven book that challenges everything you know about sex, marriage, family, and society.”—Provided by publisher Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-06-170780-3 (hardback) 1. Sex. 2. Sex—History. 3. Sex customs. 4. Marriage. I. Jethá, Cacilda. II. Title. HQ12.R93 2010 306.7—dc22 2009045457 10 11 12 13 14 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality About the Publisher Australia HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'And I looked out for miracles, complained that I did not see a miracle which would convince me. A material miracle would have persuaded me. And here is a miracle, the sole miracle possible, continually existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it! 'Fyodor says that Kirillov lives for his belly. That's comprehensible and rational. All of us as rational beings can't do anything else but live for our belly. And all of a sudden the same Fyodor says that one mustn't live for one's belly, but must live for truth, for God, and at a hint I understand him! And I and millions of men, men who lived ages ago and men living now—peasants, the poor in spirit and the learned, who have thought and written about it, in their obscure words saying the same thing—we are all agreed about this one thing: what we must live for and what is good. I and all men have only one firm, incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained by the reason—it is outside it, and has no causes and can have no effects. 'If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect. 'And yet I know it, and we all know it. 'What could be a greater miracle than that? 'Can I have found the solution of it all? can my sufferings be over?' thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, not noticing the heat nor his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relief from prolonged suffering. This feeling was so delicious that it seemed to him incredible. He was breathless with emotion and incapable of going farther; he turned off the road into the forest and lay down in the shade of an aspen on the uncut grass. He took his hat off his hot head and lay propped on his elbow in the lush, feathery, woodland grass. 'Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand,' he thought, looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, and following the movements of a green beetle, advancing along a blade of couch-grass and lifting up in its progress a leaf of goat-weed. 'What have I discovered?' he asked himself, bending aside the leaf of goat-weed out of the beetle's way and twisting another blade of grass above for the beetle to cross over on to it. 'What is it makes me glad? What have I discovered? 'I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  But something drew her towards it, and she could yield to it or resist it at will. She got up to rouse herself, and slipped off her plaid and the cape of her warm dress. For a moment she regained her self-possession, and realised that the thin peasant who had come in wearing a long overcoat, with buttons missing from it, was the stoveheater, that he was looking at the thermometer, that it was the wind and snow bursting in after him at the door; but then everything grew blurred again . . . That peasant with the long waist seemed to be gnawing something on the wall, the old lady began stretching her legs the whole length of the carriage, and filling it with a black cloud; then there was a fearful shrieking and banging, as though someone were being torn to pieces; then there was a blinding dazzle of red fire before her eyes and a wall seemed to rise up and hide everything. Anna felt as though she were sinking down. But it was not terrible, but delightful. The voice of a man muffled up and covered with snow shouted something in her ear. She got up and pulled herself together; she realised that they had reached a station and that this was the guard. She asked Annushka to hand her the cape she had taken off and her shawl, put them on and moved towards the door. 'Do you wish to get out?' asked Annushka. 'Yes, I want a little air. It's very hot in here.' And she opened the door. The driving snow and the wind rushed to meet her and struggled with her over the door. But she enjoyed the struggle. She opened the door and went out. The wind seemed as though lying in wait for her; with gleeful whistle it tried to snatch her up and bear her off, but she clung to the cold doorpost, and holding her skirt got down on to the platform and under the shelter of the carriages. The wind had been powerful on the steps, but on the platform, under the lee of the carriages, there was a lull. With enjoyment she drew deep breaths of the frozen, snowy air, and standing near the carriage looked about the platform and the lighted station. XXX T HE raging tempest rushed whistling between the wheels of the carriages, about the scaffolding, and round the corner of the station.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin did not remember his own mother, and his only sister was older than he was, so that it was in the Shtcherbatskys' house that he saw for the first time that inner life of an old, noble, cultivated, and honourable family of which he had been deprived by the death of his father and mother. All the members of that family, especially the feminine half, were pictured by him, as it were, wrapped about with a mysterious poetical veil, and he not only perceived no defects whatever in them, but under the poetical veil that shrouded them he assumed the existence of the loftiest sentiments and every possible perfection. Why it was the three young ladies had one day to speak French, and the next English; why it was that at certain hours they played by turns on the piano, the sounds of which were audible in their brother's room above, where the students used to work; why they were visited by those pro fessors of French literature, of music, of drawing, of dancing; why at certain hours all the three young ladies, with Mademoiselle Linon, drove in the coach to the Tversky boulevard, dressed in their satin cloaks, Dolly in a long one, Natalia in a half-long one, and Kitty in one so short that her shapely legs in tightly-drawn red stockings were visible to all beholders; why it was they had to walk about the Tversky boulevard escorted by a footman with a gold cockade in his hat – all this and much more that was done in their mysterious world he did not understand, but he was sure that everything that was done there was very good, and he was in love precisely with the mystery of the proceedings. In his student-days he had all but been in love with the eldest, Dolly, but she was soon married to Oblonsky. Then he began being in love with the second. He felt, as it were, that he had to be in love with one of the sisters, only he could not quite make out which. But Natalia, too, had hardly made her appearance in the world when she married the diplomat Lvov. Kitty was still a child when Levin left the university.