To connect a presented material with its proper adjuncts or belongings is pre-eminently to clothe it with represented concomitants.

Retentiveness has been assigned a fundamental importance in the systems of some psychologists, as Beneke in Germany and Dr. Bain in this country. The latter regards it as one of the three primary attributes of intellect co-ordinate with Discrimination and Assimilation. It is however to be observed that in its most comprehensive form retention is not confined to the phenomena of intellect, but underlies the processes of feeling and willing as well. Every feeling we experience, every action we carry out, bears traces of past feelings or actions, and so illustrates retentiveness. Not only so, even in its specialised intellectual form of representation it does not fill quite the same place as the primary intellectual functions. The rise of a representation in consciousness differs no doubt from the presentation of a sense-impression in that it involves a peculiar activity of mind (reproduction). At the same time such a representation is, just like a sense-impression, nothing but material for the process of intellection. Knowing or cognition only begins when the representation is attended to, and so brought into relation to other representations (or presentations). Further, this revival of past impressions takes place, as we shall see, according to certain Laws of Association, which laws will be found to be closely connected with, and indeed to govern, the processes of Assimilation and Integration.

(b) Elementary Form of Feeling. Having analysed roughly at least the process of intellection, let us examine the processes which fall under the head of Feeling. The term feeling is one of considerable ambiguity. It is first of all the name of a particular group of sensations, viz., those of touch (cf. German, fühlen, Gefühl). Again, it is often used as a generic term for all varieties of mental states, and more particularly the raw materials of consciousness before they are elaborated by processes of intellection. Used in this signification it includes all sense-impressions. Lastly, in a stricter sense it is confined to those modes of consciousness which are in a peculiar sense affections of the subject, and which do not, in the same direct way as our thoughts and volitions, involve a clear reference to to objects, such as joy and sorrow.2

1 See The Senses and the Intellect, Introduction, chap. i.

2 On the different meanings of the term Feeling, see Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics, ii. p. 417, and following. The above mode of marking off the feelings as subjective states par excellence is not recognised by all. Thus, Brentano, who regards feeling under the form of love and its opposite, considers that all feeling has, like presentation, its objective aspect (Psychologie, i. p. 115). As we shall see by-andby, the higher feelings or emotions, as moral approval, æsthetic admiration, have their

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This last is the meaning which the psychologist attaches to the word when he erects feeling into one of the three primary phases of mind. Joy, grief, love, etc., constitute in a special manner subjective experiences. In many cases our feelings are unaccompanied by any distinct presentations or representations, the whole psychical process being vague or confused. This applies to many forms of fear, as dim presentiment, of selfcontent and discontent, and so forth. Our states of feeling lack, too, the active directive element which appears in intellection as voluntary attention or control of the thoughts. They are thus passive phenomena, and so opposed to the active processes of volition, and the semi-active processes of intellection.

Feelings are of very different grades of complexity. At the one extreme we have such simple feelings as hunger, skinirritation, which are the mere effect of a stimulation of the nerves of sense, and at the other extreme highly composite and many-sided emotions or emotive processes, as the humane feelings, æsthetic admiration, and so forth. If now we inquire into the constant and essential element in all these states, we appear to find this in a tendency to a distinctly agreeable or disagreeable mode of consciousness. Whenever we are consciously affected, that is, experience an appreciable modification of our inner or subjective state, whether as the result of physical change or of some process of intellection, we can by reflexion discern that it is in the direction either of pleasure or agreeable consciousness, or of pain or disagreeable consciousness. When the process of feeling is fully developed and rises into distinct consciousness, it assumes the form of a realisation of our subjective state as bettered or worsened, that is, as happier or less happy. We may thus say that the elementary or root-function in feeling is sensibility to pleasure and pain.

object; but this objective reference is best regarded as appertaining to the presentative factor in these emotional states. It may be observed, finally, that in speaking of the feelings as subjective states we do not mean that self-consciousness is a constant concomitant of feeling, but merely that, when reflected upon, our feelings come in a peculiar manner to be referred to the subject as its affections or changes of condition.

That the terms pleasure and pain used in their most extended meaning cover the larger part of the phenomena of feeling seems to be allowed. There is however a question as to whether there are not some modes of mental excitation, as surprise, properly described as feeling, which are neutral or indifferent as regards pleasure and pain. This point may be conveniently postponed till we take up the special consideration of the feelings.

(c) Elementary Function in Willing. As the third primary phase of the mental life we have active impulse, which in its higher form becomes willing or conation. This aspect of consciousness is clearly marked off from each of the two others. We are in a different state of mind when we are doing something, e.g., lifting a weight, copying a picture, from that in which we find ourselves when we are affected by pleasure or pain, or when we are following a train of ideas. This specific form of consciousness can only be distinguished as active in a special sense. Whenever we do a thing or try or resolve to do a thing we are consciously active, or energising. In all planned, deliberate action, moreover, we are energising in a definite direction, i.e., towards the attainment of some object of desire. In the fully-developed form of this volitional process we experience a new form of self-consciousness, viz., a consciousness of ourselves as agents or as realising certain active powers.

This movement of active impulse or conscious exertion follows one of two main directions. The first of these has already been touched on in connexion with the processes of intellection, viz., that of attention to the presentations and representations. that arise in consciousness. This direction of active impulse is, as we shall see presently, as comprehensive as the contents of mind itself. By the voluntary fixing and concentrating of the attention we actively change, modify, and control the whole field of consciousness. More particularly it is by this channel. of activity that we are able to bring definiteness into the flow of impressions and ideas, and so to render possible the specific processes of intellection. The other main direction of active impulse is seen in the initiation and general control of bodily

1 The reader must note the double employment of the expression mental activity, now comprehensively and somewhat loosely to include all manifestations of mind, and now more strictly to mark off a distinctly active phase of mind.

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movement. This is best marked off as Motor Action or Voluntary Movement.

These two directions of conation are not, however, ultimately distinct, but may be reduced to the same elementary constituents. As we shall see later on, all attention involves muscular adjustment, and the "effort" of attention is determined by this muscular element. On the other hand, a voluntary movement on its psychical or conscious side is the direction. of attention to a particular kind of idea, viz., a motor representation. We set our muscles going by fixing in consciousness certain ideas of movement. All voluntary action or conation is thus a process of attention to presentative elements, which process again receives its characteristic colouring from the psychical concomitant of muscular action. In what we call "attending" the muscular constituent is less prominent, and the intensification of some presentative element is the most striking feature of the process. In voluntary movement, on the other hand, as in lifting a weight or in running, the sensation accompanying the muscular process (sense of strain, of exertion, of movement) is the predominant element.1

§ 4. Relation of the three Functions one to another. Our analytic investigation of the three modes of psychical functioning, feeling, knowing, and willing, leads us to view them as primordial distinctions. We cannot reduce them to any common elementary form, nor can we resolve any one of the three processes into the others. The innermost and essential process in each variety of operation is something perfectly simple and unique. Hence we may say that knowing, feeling, and willing are the three primary functions of mind. Our explanation of mind must consequently set out with these as equally primordial functional capacities or dispositions."

(a) Apparent Separateness of Action of the Functions. A further question remains: Do these functions which we can thus logically distinguish one from another act separately and independently one of another?

At first sight this might seem to be the case. If we compare our mental states at different times we find, as already

1 On the historical development of the present triple division of psychical function, see below, Appendix B.

hinted, marked differences in respect of the preponderance of feeling, intellection, and willing. It has been pointed out by more than one psychologist that feeling and the activities constituting intellection (discrimination, etc.) tend to exclude one another.1 We cannot at the same moment be emotionally excited and nicely discriminative. When, for example, we are suffering from the pangs of toothache, intellectual consciousness appears to be suppressed and our mental state to be reduced to one of pure feeling. Again, in following a demonstration of Euclid, we seem to approach the state of pure passionless intellection imagined by the Greek philosophers as the ideal and divine form of existence.

If, again, we follow the course of mental development in the individual, and in sentient creatures collectively, we find apparently that certain functions come into play before others. In the infant consciousness, and in the lowest forms of animal consciousness, feeling appears to be paramount and hardly to leave any place for the processes of intellection.

(b) Uniform Co-operation of Functions. Such variations in the proportionate manifestation of the three functions must not however mislead us into supposing that they ever act singly, that is, in perfect isolation. If we closely examine an instance of what seems pure feeling or pure intellection we shall always find that the other functions are co-operating though in a less conspicuous manner. Thus a state of physical suffering is always attended by some degree of intellection, if only the reference of the pain to a part of the body, and is immediately provocative of active impulse (willing). Similarly in following a chain of reasoning the mind is always affected in some degree, agreeably or disagreeably, according as the demonstration is clear and easily followed or seems intricate and perplexing.

If, once more, we scrutinise as closely as the circumstances allow the consciousness of the infant during the first weeks of post-natal life, and of the lower animal types, we appear to detect along with a preponderance of feeling a germ of the cognitive function. The dim life of sentience, in which the bodily

1 On the opposition between Knowing and Feeling, see Sir W. Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics, ii. 98, following.