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little or no experience of its satisfaction—mistakes are to be
expected, and do in fact very often occur. The practice of
inhibiting impulses, which is to a great extent necessary to
civilized life, makes mistakes easier, by preventing experience
of the actions to which a desire would otherwise lead, and by
often causing the inhibited impulses themselves to be unnoticed
or quickly forgotten. The perfectly natural mistakes which thus
arise constitute a large proportion of what is, mistakenly in
part, called self-deception, and attributed by Freud to the
“censor.”
But there is a further point which needs emphasizing, namely,
that a belief that something is desired has often a tendency to
cause the very desire that is believed in. It is this fact that
makes the effect of “consciousness” on desire so complicated.
When we believe that we desire a certain state of affairs, that
often tends to cause a real desire for it. This is due partly to
the influence of words upon our emotions, in rhetoric for
example, and partly to the general fact that discomfort normally
belongs to the belief that we desire such-and-such a thing that
we do not possess. Thus what was originally a false opinion as to
the object of a desire acquires a certain truth: the false
opinion generates a secondary subsidiary desire, which
nevertheless becomes real. Let us take an illustration. Suppose
you have been jilted in a way which wounds your vanity. Your
natural impulsive desire will be of the sort expressed in Donne’s
poem:
When by thy scorn, O Murderess, I am dead,
in which he explains how he will haunt the poor lady as a ghost,
and prevent her from enjoying a moment’s peace. But two things
stand in the way of your expressing yourself so naturally: on the
one hand, your vanity, which will not acknowledge how hard you
are hit; on the other hand, your conviction that you are a
civilized and humane person, who could not possibly indulge so
crude a desire as revenge. You will therefore experience a
restlessness which will at first seem quite aimless, but will
finally resolve itself in a conscious desire to change your
profession, or go round the world, or conceal your identity and
live in Putney, like Arnold Bennett’s hero. Although the prime
cause of this desire is a false judgment as to your previous
unconscious desire, yet the new conscious desire has its own
derivative genuineness, and may influence your actions to the
extent of sending you round the world. The initial mistake,
however, will have effects of two kinds. First, in uncontrolled
moments, under the influence of sleepiness or drink or delirium,
you will say things calculated to injure the faithless deceiver.
Secondly, you will find travel disappointing, and the East less
fascinating than you had hoped—unless, some day, you hear that
the wicked one has in turn been jilted. If this happens, you will
believe that you feel sincere sympathy, but you will suddenly be
much more delighted than before with the beauties of tropical
islands or the wonders of Chinese art. A secondary desire,
derived from a false judgment as to a primary desire, has its own
power of influencing action, and is therefore a real desire
according to our definition. But it has not the same power as a
primary desire of bringing thorough satisfaction when it is
realized; so long as the primary desire remains unsatisfied,
restlessness continues in spite of the secondary desire’s
success. Hence arises a belief in the vanity of human wishes: the
vain wishes are those that are secondary, but mistaken beliefs
prevent us from realizing that they are secondary.
What may, with some propriety, be called self-deception arises
through the operation of desires for beliefs. We desire many
things which it is not in our power to achieve: that we should be
universally popular and admired, that our work should be the
wonder of the age, and that the universe should be so ordered as
to bring ultimate happiness to all, though not to our enemies
until they have repented and been purified by suffering. Such
desires are too large to be achieved through our own efforts. But
it is found that a considerable portion of the satisfaction which
these things would bring us if they were realized is to be
achieved by the much easier operation of believing that they are
or will be realized. This desire for beliefs, as opposed to
desire for the actual facts, is a particular case of secondary
desire, and, like all secondary desire its satisfaction does not
lead to a complete cessation of the initial discomfort.
Nevertheless, desire for beliefs, as opposed to desire for facts,
is exceedingly potent both individually and socially. According
to the form of belief desired, it is called vanity, optimism, or
religion. Those who have sufficient power usually imprison or put
to death any one who tries to shake their faith in their own
excellence or in that of the universe; it is for this reason that
seditious libel and blasphemy have always been, and still are,
criminal offences.
It is very largely through desires for beliefs that the primitive
nature of desire has become so hidden, and that the part played
by consciousness has been so confusing and so exaggerated.
We may now summarize our analysis of desire and feeling.
A mental occurrence of any kind—sensation, image, belief, or
emotion—may be a cause of a series of actions, continuing,
unless interrupted, until some more or less definite state of
affairs is realized. Such a series of actions we call a
“behaviour-cycle.” The degree of definiteness may vary greatly:
hunger requires only food in general, whereas the sight of a
particular piece of food raises a desire which requires the
eating of that piece of food. The property of causing such a
cycle of occurrences is called “discomfort”; the property of the
mental occurrences in which the cycle ends is called ” pleasure.”
The actions constituting the cycle must not be purely mechanical,
i.e. they must be bodily movements in whose causation the special
properties of nervous tissue are involved. The cycle ends in a
condition of quiescence, or of such action as tends only to
preserve the status quo. The state of affairs in which this
condition of quiescence is achieved is called the “purpose” of
the cycle, and the initial mental occurrence involving discomfort
is called a “desire” for the state of affairs that brings
quiescence. A desire is called “conscious” when it is accompanied
by a true belief as to the state of affairs that will bring
quiescence; otherwise it is called “unconscious.” All primitive
desire is unconscious, and in human beings beliefs as to the
purposes of desires are often mistaken. These mistaken beliefs
generate secondary desires, which cause various interesting
complications in the psychology of human desire, without
fundamentally altering the character which it shares with animal
desire.
LECTURE IV. INFLUENCE OF PAST HISTORY ON PRESENT OCCURRENCES IN
LIVING ORGANISMS
In this lecture we shall be concerned with a very general
characteristic which broadly, though not absolutely,
distinguishes the behaviour of living organisms from that of dead
matter. The characteristic in question is this:
The response of an organism to a given stimulus is very often
dependent upon the past history of the organism, and not merely
upon the stimulus and the HITHERTO DISCOVERABLE present state of
the organism.
This characteristic is embodied in the saying “a burnt child
fears the fire.” The burn may have left no visible traces, yet it
modifies the reaction of the child in the presence of fire. It is
customary to assume that, in such cases, the past operates by
modifying the structure of the brain, not directly. I have no
wish to suggest that this hypothesis is false; I wish only to
point out that it is a hypothesis. At the end of the present
lecture I shall examine the grounds in its favour. If we confine
ourselves to facts which have been actually observed, we must say
that past occurrences, in addition to the present stimulus and
the present ascertainable condition of the organism, enter into
the causation of the response.
The characteristic is not wholly confined to living organisms.
For example, magnetized steel looks just like steel which has not
been magnetized, but its behaviour is in some ways different. In
the case of dead matter, however, such phenomena are less
frequent and important than in the case of living organisms, and
it is far less difficult to invent satisfactory hypotheses as to
the microscopic changes of structure which mediate between the
past occurrence and the present changed response. In the case of
living organisms, practically everything that is distinctive both
of their physical and of their mental behaviour is bound up with
this persistent influence of the past. Further, speaking broadly,
the change in response is usually of a kind that is biologically
advantageous to the organism.
Following a suggestion derived from Semon (“Die Mneme,” Leipzig,
1904; 2nd edition, 1908, English translation, Allen & Unwin,
1921; “Die mnemischen Empfindungen,” Leipzig, l909), we will give
the name of “mnemic phenomena” to those responses of an organism
which, so far as hitherto observed facts are concerned, can only
be brought under causal laws by including past occurrences in the
history of the organism as part of the causes of the present
response. I do not mean merely—what would always be the
case—that past occurrences are part of a CHAIN of causes leading
to the present event. I mean that, in attempting to state the
PROXIMATE cause of the present event, some past event or events
must be included, unless we take refuge in hypothetical
modifications of brain structure.) For example: you smell
peat-smoke, and you recall some occasion when you smelt it
before. The cause of your recollection, so far as hitherto observ
able phenomena are concerned, consists both of the peat smoke
(present stimulus) and of the former occasion (past experience).
The same stimulus will not produce the same recollection in
another man who did not share your former experience, although
the former experience left no OBSERVABLE traces in the structure
of the brain. According to the maxim “same cause, same effect,”
we cannot therefore regard the peat-smoke alone as the cause of
your recollection, since it does not have the same effect in
other cases. The cause of your recollection must be both the
peat-smoke and the past occurrence. Accordingly your recollection
is an instance of what we are calling “mnemic phenomena.”
Before going further, it will be well to give illustrations of
different classes of mnemic phenomena.
(a) ACQUIRED HABITS.—In Lecture II we saw how animals can learn
by experience how to get out of cages or mazes, or perform other
actions which are useful to them but not provided for by their
instincts alone. A cat which is put into a cage of which it has
had experience behaves differently from the way in which it
behaved at first. We can easily invent hypotheses, which are
quite likely to be true, as to connections in the brain caused by
past experience, and themselves causing the different response.
But the observable fact is that the stimulus of being in the cage
produces differing results with repetition, and that the
ascertainable cause of the cat’s behaviour is not merely the cage
and its own ascertainable organization, but also its past history
in regard to the cage. From our present point of view, the matter
is independent of the question whether the cat’s behaviour is due
to some mental fact called “knowledge,” or displays a merely
bodily habit. Our habitual knowledge is not always in our minds,
but is called up by the appropriate stimuli. If we are asked
“What is the capital of
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