Page images
PDF
EPUB

CHAPTER VII.

PROCESS OF ELABORATION (CONTINUED): DIFFERENTIATION AND INTEGRATION.

§ 1. Factors in Mental Elaboration. The process of attention considered in the previous chapter prepares the way for the proper work of elaboration of the psychical elements. By this is meant the carrying out of certain processes into which the sensational elements enter as materials or constituents. Thus we may say that the visual sensations of colour, etc., are elaborated when they are distinguished one from another and combined in certain groups, as the total visual appearance of a

pansy.

If now we ask what these processes are, we find that they are only another aspect of the elementary processes already spoken of as constituting what we call intellection, that is to say, Discrimination, or as it may be also called Differentiation (ie., Differencing), Assimilation, and Association, the two last forming together Integration (or "wholing"). Our mental life unfolds by help of the renewal of these elementary functional activities. Thus, just as we know a thing by distinguishing it, so the contents of mind become more numerous by successive differencings of what was before confused. In like manner, assimilation at once enters into every process of knowing, as in recognising a taste, and aids in the longer process of mental development by producing new permanent modes of grouping of psychical elements, as in the classification of like objects by help of a general name. The same thing holds good of association. Not only is the interpretation of this, that, and the other sensation-complex, e.g., the succession of creaky sounds of a person walking up stairs, an illustration of association (suggestion), the process of associative combination is a main factor in

development, resulting in a progressive elaboration of what is relatively simple into more and more complex products, e.g., our whole highly-composite idea of a particular man, or locality, into which each new year's experience incorporates additional associated elements.

It is evident that, in speaking of discrimination, etc., at once as intellective functions and as factors in the process of developmental elaboration, we are distinguishing between a temporary and a permanent result of a process. Thus the discrimination of one taste from another and allied taste issues immediately in a cognition of this particular fruit, wine, etc., but has a further and more important lasting result, viz., the possession of two distinct ideas of taste for after-use.

(a) DIFFERENTIATION (DISCRIMINATION).

§ 2. Biological and Psychical Differentiation. By the term differentiation the biologist means the gradual emergence or appearance of difference (heterogeneity) between one tissue and one organ and another, as the development of an organism proceeds. The process of development, we are told, begins with a relatively simple or homogeneous structure, and the organism takes on more and more distinctness and speciality of parts as the development advances.1 Applying this idea to mind, we can speak of differentiation as the emergence in consciousness of distinctness or speciality. Thus the infant's colour-sense, though, if a normal one, potentially including all nuances of colour-quality, realises as yet but few, if any, qualitative varieties. The progress of sense-development means primarily the substitution of a more and more varied order of sensations, or of a larger and larger number of different impressions. And it will be found that the whole development of the intelligence consists in part in the advance of such differentiation.

It has already been pointed out that attention is in its general nature selectively isolating. When an infant first fixates an object, as a bright light, it virtually differentiates

1 This may be illustrated by the process of segmentation or the self-division into segments which marks the development of the ovum.

PSYCHICAL DIFFERENTIATION.

171

the impression from those of surrounding objects.1 In other words, by this process of adjustment a separate and distinctive impression is secured. The peculiar character (quality, strength) of the impression begins to make itself known: definiteness of impression begins to be experienced. In a wide sense, then, all attention, as selective, isolative and defining, is a process of differentiation.

Still it has been contended, e.g., by Lotze, that a vague differentiation must precede such special isolating adjustment. If the light did not differentially stimulate a particular area of the retina, and so differentially affect consciousness, there would be no special direction of the attention with its reflex motor adjustment. And this contention is forcible, and refutes the idea that the mind puts a difference, so to speak, into a wholly undifferentiated mass of sensation. It seems reasonable to suppose that just as a sub-conscious stage of the sensation precedes and determines the reaction of attention on this sensation, so a vague impression of two different sensations precedes attention to them as different. At the same time, it is evident that such a vague awareness of different sensations is not to be confounded with the clear consciousness of them as different which follows on a direction of the attention.2

It follows that the physiological substratum of differentiation may be defined as consisting in unlike functional activities (either of the same or of different nervous elements) together with the isolating process of attention. Thus a distinct impression of a particular variety of colour or pitch of tone has for its nervous conditions a particular mode of optical or acoustical nerve-excitation, and the reinforcement of this by the adjustive process of attention. It must be added that while we may thus define the nervous conditions of two different sensations we cannot hope to find a nervous process answering to the further psychical activity to be spoken of presently, viz., the apprehension of a relation of difference.

Confining ourselves for the present to sensations or presentative elements, we may trace this process of differentiation or differential definition in various directions. At the beginning of life we may suppose that sensational consciousness as a

1 It is important to note that this impression, as indeed every visual impression produced by an object, is really complex. But this fact of complexity need not yet be considered.

* On Lotze's view of the relation of sub-conscious differentiation to differentiation by the aid of attention, see Med. Psychologie, p. 267 ff. He elsewhere contends that sensational difference is present from the first, and that the idea of a primitive blur of sentience, in which no difference impresses the infant eye or ear, is an unjustified assumption. (Microcosmus, Eng. trans., i. p. 209 f.)

3 Ward appears to find a further physiological condition of differentiation in that restriction' of the nervous current which characterises the action of the special senses, loc. cit., p. 46.

whole is a confused mass in which differences are only vaguely emergent. Among the first distinctions to appear would be the broad generic ones between sensations of different classes, as a taste, a smell, etc.1 The process of differentiation or psychical segmentation would reach a more advanced stage when distinctions within the same class of sensations began to present themselves, as different tastes, different colours, etc.

Along with these distinctions of qualitative character, those of intensity and of volume or extensity, and of local character, would gradually come to be noted. Thus, for example, direrent degrees of pressure, different extents of colour, and touches of different local character (at this, that, and the other point) would be separately attended to.

This process of differentiation progresses gradually. Just as tastes are first differentiated from other classes of sensations before one taste is differentiated from another, so within the limits of the same special sense the process advances from broad to finer and finer distinctions. Thus we know from the way in which the colour-vocabulary grows in the case both of the individual and of the race that a red is distinguished as such before a particular shade of red, as scarlet or crimson, is distinctively noted.2

The course taken by this progressive movement of differentiation is modified by the forces which act upon and determine the directions of the attention. Hence it is far from being perfectly regular, and probably varies considerably in the case of man and other animals, as well as in that of different men. Superior strength and vivacity of impression count for much here. This is illustrated in the fact that the brightest and most stimulating colours (reds and yellows) are the first to be singled out and recognised. Much depends, too, on the value of the particular sensation as bearing on the special interests of the species or individual. Thus the dog first selects and particularises among smells that of his food, his master, etc.;

1 We are referring here only to presentative elements. As already suggested, both in the zoological series and in the human individual, the affective contrast, pleasure and pain, would stand out from the first.

2 This process of differentiation only advances a little way in the case of the organic sensations. (Cf. above, p. 84.)

PROGRESS OF DIFFERENTIATION.

173

the horse singles out among colours that answering to wholesome herbage, and so forth.

The progress of differentiation is not so simple as is here represented. As already suggested, sensations or presentative elements do not occur apart, but in groups or complexes. The animal and the child mark off colour as a constituent of a complex of impressions answering to a particular coloured form, as clover, an orange. No doubt this marking off of complexes involves a certain apprehension of the peculiar character of the several constituents. But such apprehension is very vague. Clear differentiation implies the isolation by attention of the constituent sensation itself. But this follows later. The child sees the apple and the orange some time before it is capable of an abstract attention to its colour.

Mr. Ward describes the process of differentiation as the breaking up of a presentative continuum into discrete presentations. The term continuum seems so far appropriate here that it indicates the fact that sensation is given at first, not as a system of distinct atoms, but as a continuous whole, and that distinction is only introduced by the emergence of latent difference. It is evident, however, that the idea of a continuum as the presentation of difference in a scale of perfectly gradual change in the same direction only partially applies to sensation as a whole. Thus there is a continuous scale of intensity as well as of volume or extensity. As regards quality, it is wanting altogether in the case of disparate classes of sensation. We cannot pass from tastes to smells by any series of intermediate gradations. Nor, even within the limits of one and the same sense, does it apply universally. Thus though there is a continuum of colour and tone-sensation there is not a continuum of tastes and smells.1

§ 3. Differentiation and Discrimination. We have thus far considered differentiation merely as a process of distinctively marking off or defining particular varieties of sensation. Here, through special adjustments of attention, particular sensations of colour, taste, and so forth come to be distinguished as this, that, and the other. Such differentiation or particularisation of sensational character does not, however, amount to a full consciousness or mental grasp of a relation of difference between one sensation and another. Still less does it include a clear apprehension of the precise feature, e.g., intensity, quality, in which two sensations differ, or the extent of this difference. Such a clear apprehension or grasp of difference, as distinguished from a singling out of, and attending to, different or distinct. sensations is best described as an act of conscious Discrimination.2 Differentiation, in the first sense, precedes discrimination

1 Cf. above, p. 101 f. For Ward's views, see loc. cit., p. 45 f. "Discrimination is often used in the wider sense of differentiation, but as we require a term to indicate the complete process of 'relationing,' or apprehen ing relation, it seems best to select discrimination for this purpose.

« PreviousContinue »