DR. CARPENTER ON UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL WORK.
DR. CARPENTER is one of the most moderate, as well as one of the most learned of the exponents of the doctrine of automatic mental work. In his interesting lectures just delivered at the London Institution, he has shown once more that he really believes in the existence of a will in man, and in the power of that will to modify essentially the efficiency of the various motives which act upon us, through its ability to concentrate attention and interest on the motive which would be otherwise the weaker. By virtue of this concentration of attention on the weaker motive, practical influence accretes to it, and makes it at least the more operative, if not abstractedly the more powerful. For instance, Dr. Carpenter believes that, by actively fixing the attention (say) on a mode- rately agreeable book which happens to be less intrinsically fasci- nating to its reader than others in which he has a more passionate interest, and which, if he would only allow them, would easily fix his attention for him, it is quite possible to make the slighter interest exercise a greater practical influence over the intellect and character than the greater interest. It may be quite impossible for any ordinary reader to persuade himself that Sir Walter Scott's novels are less fascinating than Green's popular " History of England," but by making the most of the genuine though in- ferior interests of the latter book, and keeping them before his mind, a student of history may, in any given period, subject his mind to a far greater accumulation of influences derived from the latter book, than he has ever derived from the former. This is, for Dr. Carpenter, the one stronghold against the doctrine of the automatism of the brain. But for this strong belief of his in the power of the will to vary the attention given to different classes of practical influences, so as to increase indefinitely the relative efficiency of some as compared with that of other motives, he would apparently agree with the automatists that the mind is but a high-class machine,—perhaps indeed only another name for the inside view of a class of operations which, if studied from outside, would be described as the net-work of molecular changes which take place in the nervous system and the brain.
But clear, precise, and impressive as is Dr. Carpenter's protest against the extreme automatic view, we do not think him quite so clear, precise, and impressive when he comes to make his concessions to the automatists, and to argue for
the theory of unconscious mental action. Indeed, we have never been able to gather precisely how much or how little he identifies the work of the brain—as a material structure—with the working of the mind as a thinking organ, and what it is which he supposes to happen when, as he maintains, a difficult mathematical calcula- tion is worked out in the factory of the brain without the concur- rence of conscious thought. He told his audience at the London Institution, for instance, that a student at Leyden who had been working hard over-night at a puzzling mathematical problem was seen by a fellow-student who slept in his room to get up in the middle of the night and work out something on paper, after which he returned to bed. The next morning it appeared that he had solved the problem, and solved it by a better and shorter method than the one which, in his waking hours, he had attempted. Yet no trace of the mental process by which he solved it—if such there were—was left on his mind. He had not the least memory or consciousness of what he had done, and only his own' writing proved to him that it was in any sense he who had done it. This feat Dr. Carpenter apparently classes amongst automatic achieve- ments, and he adds that .the wonderful efforts of the calcu- lating-boys are probably achieved by some similar process, since the boys are often quite unable to explain to others, or indeed to themselves, by what paths they arrive at the conclusions which, to everybody's surprise, they so instantaneously and confidently announce. But now, what we want to know is the precise significance of the word " unconscious," as applied to such feats of reason as these. Does Dr. Carpenter mean that this Dutch student's mind had no more intellectual grasp of its subject during the night-time in which he.was dealing with it than ProfessorJevons's logic-machine, or the late Mr. Babbage's calculating-machine, had of the methods by which those ingenious instruments brought out the required re- sults ? He can hardly mean this, because in these two cases the mind which made the machine was the real intellectual agent which so arranged the structure as to secure correct work. And if the Leyden student's brain were such a machine, then the premisses must have been stated in it, and its various nervous keys properly struck, so as to bring out the right conclu- sion ; and not only so, but the various brain-changes as they went on must have set in motion the student's fingers, so as to transfer to the paper a proper description of the thoughts cor- responding to those brain-changes—though it is assumed that there were in this case no such thoughts, but only the brain- changes which, in ordinary cases, would have produced, or been produced by, these thoughts. Now, is there anything whatever to justify so complicated an explanation as this, when the much simpler explanation is possible that the Leyden student did his problem by the activity of the very same faculty, though in a higher state of lucidity, with which he would have done it when awake ? No doubt it must •have been the condition of that higher state of lucidity that no attention could be given to the outside world ; and probably it was on account of this un- usual state,—which provided, of course, none of the ordinary Enka of association with external life and action,—that he had no remembrance of what he had done when he did wake. Doubtless, too, there was an almost complete quiescence of the will during this morbid excitement of the intellectual faculty, a quiescence which doubtless had much to do with the oblivion which followed it. It seems to us that the true key to such phenomena as these is the analogy to be found in cases of very intense mental excite- ment, not in those where there is no mental excitement at all. Sir Walter Scott is said to have written or dictated the whole of "The Bride of Lammermoor" in a morbid condition of body, and under so intensely concentrated an excitement of mind that he could not recall writing any part of the story as his own after- wards, and heard it as if it were all new to him. Dr. Carpenter would hardly venture the suggestion that "The Bride of Lam mermoor " was composed by a brain-machine, without the inter- vention of any conscious imaginative and dramatic faculty.
It seems to us, then, that the explanation to be found for the Leyden student's solution and the explanation to be found for such illustrations of mere habit as Dr. Carpenter also cites, are quite opposite ones. He insists, very justly as we think, that the man who, on going up to dress for an evening party, got into bed in- stead—perhaps, after all, he only feigned to be an automaton in the matter, and was really exercising a very wise discretion— or the men who wind up their watches by the mere force o; habit when they take them off, though only dressing for dinner, —a feat which we suppose almost all of us have caught our- selves performing, at one time or another,—are not using their minds in that operation at all, but are really the creatures, not so much of their moral habits, as of the habits of their physical
organisation. There can be no doubt that even plants have habits, habits of growing out towards the sunlight, for instance, and climbing-plants, again, habits of catching at all the support offered them by a trellis-work, so that it is impossible to deny that habits may exist in an organisation completely without consciousness. But what we cannot understand is the tendency of some of our best psychologists and physiologists to explain in the same fashion phenomena which seem to us to be separated from these by almost the whole diameter of being,—to identify phenomena indicating mental life of exceptional intensity, and phenomena indicating hardly any mental life at all, though embodying, it may be, the results of very active mental life of some former period ; and this on the very insufficient ground that they have one element in common, the forgetfulness which follows
them. We submit that all acts of memory depend on what we may call a distributed consciousness, which cannot exist without a
certain wakefulness of the will, and which is inconsistent with that absolute, intellectual absorption in a subject which verges on trance. A man remembers well when he has been attending closely, and yet not attending so closely but that there were plenty of links between the subject in his mind and his ordinary life. The subjects of true reverie, of " brown studies," as they are called, vanish from out of the memory, just because the mind is so deeply lost in them that it does not even strain at them, and also does not hook them on to the incidents of the external world. And therefore, of course, there are no links with the external world by which these subjects of meditation can be brought back again into consciousness. Thus either too absolute a concentration in the subject of thought, or no concentration at all, is very apt to be followed by an act of oblivion. You cannot remember the most vivid of dreams unless it included something which you are always seeing and which recalls it, because otherwise it is insulated from your ordinary life, in a sort of supersensual solitude.
You cannot remember whether or not you wound up your watch, for a very different reason, because, though there were plenty of other facts with which to associate it, your attention was fixed so much more on those other facts, and so little on the winding-up of the watch, that the thing to be remembered was itself hardly in consciousness at all. Yet just because the automatic explanation of the latter forgetfulness is the the right one, the automatic explanation of the forgetfulness which often follows moods of in- tense absorption is certainly the wrong one. We should say the same of the feats of the calculating-boys. It is quite true that they cannot analyse the process by which they calculate, but neither can the great painter in the least analyse the process by which he paints, or the great musician the process by which he composes. Yet neither of them would deny that it is a moment of intense, and intensely conscious life, in which they achieve their greatest feats. And so of the calculating-boys. They only carry the apercu of common arithmetical intelligence much further than ordinary mortals, but that affords us no pretence for supposing that that apercu is a function of the brain, exclusive of the conscious- ness. If it were the brain which does the sum, and not the mind, then to these boys' apprehension the answer would leap forth from the machine in which it is completed, like a lot from a
lottery. wheel, without any conviction that it is the result of a calculation at all, but only a uniform experience that
of oracles so delivered the accuracy has almost always been subsequently established. It is certain that none of these calculating-boys do look upon their own answers as guesses which somehow turn out true. They know that they have done the sum, though they can no more analyse the mode in which they reasoned than we can often analyse the mode in which we discover a man's dishonesty or his sincerity by his manner. Such acts of calculation are acts of intense consciousness, not of no consciousness. They are not automatic acts, but the very op- posite of automatic acts ; though it does not on that account in the least follow that the calculator can unravel the thread of his own reasoning.
In short, it seems to us that Dr. Carpenter would correct an error in his criticism, while in no way diminishing the great ser- vices he has rendered to psychology by his most valuable classi- fication of the phenomena of unremembered purpose, if he kept wide apart those cases in which great feats of intellect have been achieved, though afterwards forgotten, and those cases in which actions have been forgotten owing to the exceedingly small draft on the conscious life which they involved. We cannot believe in the possibility of reasoning without thinking ; nor do we find that any of Dr. Carpenter's facts really go to establish that very anomalous theory of their origin.
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