Note 11 — DIVISION A—NORMATIVE SCIENCE (continued 6)

The difference between the two points of view can be made clearer by an illustration. The case that we shall analyze is the dread of coming into contact with fire. The psychological analysis of this case has to make clear the mental content of the dread and its causes. Such dread becomes possible only when we are aware of the burning that results from contact with fire. We could have learned to be aware of this either immediately through our own experience, or mediately through the communication of others' experience. In both cases it is a matter of one or repeated experiences. In all cases the effects of earlier experiences equal association and recall, which, in turn, result in recognition. The recognition explaining the case under discussion arises thus. The present stimuli of visual perception arouse the retained impressions of previous visual perceptions of fire and give rise to the present perception (apperception) by fusing with them. By a process of interweaving, associations are joined to this perception. The apperceptively revived elements which lie at the basis of the content of the perception are interwoven by association with memory elements that retain the additional contents of previous perceptions of fire, viz., the burning, or, again, are interwoven with the memory elements of the communications regarding such burning. By means of this interweaving, the stimulation of the apperceptive element transmits itself to the remaining elements of the association complex. The character of the association is different under different conditions. If it be founded only upon one experience, then there can arise a memory or a recall, in the wider sense, of the foregoing content of the perception and feeling at the time of the burning, or, again, there can arise a revival wherein the stimulated elements of retention remain unconscious. Again, the words of the mother tongue that denote the previous mental content, and which likewise belong to the association complex (the apperceiving mass, in the wider sense), can be excited in one of these three forms and in addition as abstract verbal ideas. Each one of these forms of verbal discharge can lead to the innervations of the muscles involved in speech, which bring about some sort of oral expression of judgment. Each of these verbal reproductions can be connected with each of the foregoing sensory (sachlichen) revivals. Secondly, if the association be founded upon repeated perceptions on the part of the person himself, then all the afore-mentioned possibilities of reproduction become more complicated, and, in addition, the mental revivals contain, more or less, only the common elements of the previous perceptions, i. e., reappear in the form of abstract ideas or their corresponding unconscious modifications. In the third case the association is founded upon a communication of others' experience. For the sake of simplicity, let this case be confined to the following instance. The communication consisted in the assertion: "All fire will burn upon contact." Moreover, this judgment was expressed upon occasion of imminent danger of burning. There can then arise, as is perhaps evident, all the possibilities mentioned in the second case, only that here there will be a stronger tendency toward verbal reproduction and the sensory reproduction will be less fixed.

In the first two cases there was connected with the perception of the burning an intense feeling of pain. In the third the idea of such pain added itself to the visual perception of the moment. The associated elements of the earlier mental contents belong likewise to the apperceiving mass excited at the moment, in fact to that part of it excited by means of association processes, or, as we can again say, depending upon the point from which we take our view, the associative or apperceptive completion of the content of present perception. If these pain elements are revived as memories, i. e., as elements in consciousness, they give rise to a new disagreeable feeling, which is referred to the possible coming sensation of burning. If the mental modifications corresponding to these pain elements remain unconscious, as is often possible, there arises none the less the same result as regards our feeling, only with less intensity. This feeling tone we call the dread.

As a result of the sum total of the revivals actual and possible, there is finally produced, according to the particular circumstances, either a motor reaction or an inhibitant of such reaction. Both innervations can take place involuntarily or voluntarily.

The critical analysis of the fact that we dread contact with fire, even has another purpose and accordingly proceeds on other lines. It must make clear under what presuppositions the foresight that lies at the basis of such dread is valid for future experience. It must then formulate the actual process of revival that constitutes the foundation of this feeling as a series of judgments, from which the meaning and interconnection of the several judgments will become clear. Thus the critical analysis must give a logical presentation of the apperceptive and associative processes of revival.

For this purpose the three cases of the psychological analysis reduce themselves to two: viz., first, to the case in which an immediate experience forms the basis, and secondly, to that in which a variety of similar mediately or immediately communicated experiences form such basis.

In the first of these logically differentiated cases, the transformation into the speech of formulated thought leads to the following inference from analogy:

In the second case there arises a syllogism of some such form as:

Both premises of this syllogism are inductive inferences, whose implicit meaning becomes clear when we formulate as follows:

The first syllogism goes from the particular to the particular. The second proves itself to be (contrary to the analysis of Stuart Mill) an inference that leads from the general to the particular. For the conclusion is the particular of the second parts of the major and minor premises; and these second parts of the premises are inferred from their first parts in the two possible ways of inductive inference. The latter do not contain the case referred to in the conclusion, but set forth the conditions of carrying a result of previous experience over to a new case with inductive probability, in other words, the conditions of making past experience a means of foreseeing future experience. It would be superfluous to give here the symbols of the two forms of inductive inference.

We remain within the bounds of logical analysis, if we state under what conditions conclusions follow necessarily from their premises, viz., the conclusions of arguments from analogy and of syllogisms in the narrower sense, as well as those of the foregoing inductive arguments. For the inference from analogy and the two forms of inductive inference, these conditions are the presuppositions already set forth in the text of the present paper, that in the as yet unobserved portion of reality the like causes will be found and they will give rise to like effects. For the syllogism they are the thought that the predicate of a predicate is the (mediate) predicate of the subject. Only the further analysis of these presuppositions, which is undertaken in the text, leads to critical considerations in the narrower sense.