The Nature of Thought

Volume I

Brand Blanshard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317851868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 2002. This is Volume I of seventeen in the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology series. Written in 1939, this is volume II of the Nature of Thought and includes the movement of reflection, invention, truth, and the goal of thought.

BOOK TWO

THE THEORY OF THE IDEA

CHAPTER VII

THE IDEA AS IMAGE

1. The attainment of free ideas marks our escape from the mind of the animal. We have seen that the animal mind does break through at times into thought of the absent, but this achievement is so uncontrollable, rare, and wavering, as hardly to affect the rule. The animal lives in a world of perception; its thought on the whole is sense-bound; it expressly recalls no past and expressly anticipates no future. Its senses may be refined in the extreme, and its emotions strong and various; its confinement to the perceptive world is quite compatible, as we have seen, with a kind of judgement, desire, and inference. Yet its constant preoccupation is with what is given at the moment in sense, and these processes are only a fringe to that. Even when a dog pines away in his master’s absence, it is apparently the present absence rather than the absent presence that affects him. It is not churlishness that makes us say this, but merely the requirement of a consistent view of him, since if his mind could really play upon the absent, he would be able to scheme and plan in a way that he never does. We are forced to believe that his world is of far smaller dimensions than ours. Our thought, with all its weaknesses, can at least range afield in space and time; his thought remains tethered to sense.

With the coming of the free idea, then, we reach the upper air. What is meant by such an idea? If what is wanted here is examples, the question is easy. If what is wanted is a true account of the nature of such thought, the question is treacherous and difficult in the extreme; and unfortunately it is this last question that we have to face. But let us take the easier one first.

We are using a free idea whenever we think explicitly of what is not at the moment given us in sense. Merely to have a sensation is not to think. To perceive is to think, for it is to lay hold on truth or falsity. It is to grasp a sense quality as this rather than that, or as belonging to some thing. And plainly in such thinking there may be already a reference to what is absent. When I perceive a house, I take what I sense as continuous with what is beyond, and this reference to what is beyond belongs to the heart of the perception. But it is not a free idea, since it is, in the first place, tied to sense. It comes as the completion of what is given, and forms an unbroken whole with this, so that in perceiving a house I seem to be merely seeing it and not thinking at all. And secondly, the reference is commonly implicit. Though I certainly take the house to be more than the side I see, I do not think of the other sides explicitly. The status of this unexplicit reference we examined as best we could in studying perceptual meaning, reserving the study of explicit reference for Book II. Now it is just this explicit reference that we mean by a free idea. While the reference in perception is the reference of a divided mind, engaged partly with sensible quality and partly with its unpresented complement, in the free idea the reference to the absent is normally dominant and explicit. And it is no longer tied to sense. I can think of the house with my eyes shut or when I am miles away from it; and with the house standing there before me I can ignore it and think instead of Fujiyama or of an event long ago at Marathon. A free idea is an explicit thought which is independent of what is given at the time in sense.¹

What is the nature of such thought? Since the answer we are to offer has been reached by a dialectic process, involving the consideration and rejection of important alternative views, we shall follow this procedure here. We shall take up, chapter by chapter, the theories that hold the field, accepting from each what we can and leaving the rest. And first for theories that make of the idea an image. There is a variety of these, but let us begin with the one that is nearest to common sense. This we must examine pretty fully, not because it is accepted as a whole by any present-day school of thinkers, but partly because, with common sense behind it, it exerts a strong continuous pressure on the thought of everyone, even the experts, and partly because it is important historically.

2. To common sense, an idea of anything is an image that copies it. Statements about what ‘common sense’ thinks, or ‘science’ thinks, or ‘religion’ or ‘philosophy’ thinks, are perhaps generally false, and certainly as a rule to be avoided; but here we are fairly safe. For common sense, the idea of anything is clearly not the thing itself, nor is it a bare, featureless act of mind. It is an ideal representation of the thing. And this representation is thought of as reproducing in a mental medium the features of the thing itself. Our natural terms in describing it are ‘faithful’ and ‘accurate’ or ‘distorted’, ‘vivid’ or ‘faint’, ‘clear’ or ‘foggy’, ‘fragmentary’ or ‘full’ and ‘detailed’. Implicit in all these expressions is the notion of a copy and its original. And when this notion is dragged to light and made into a theory of the idea, it appeals at once to the plain man as the natural and sensible view. When the great exponent of common sense in philosophy, Locke, sought an account of the idea, it was this theory that he seized upon. If we look at the sun, he would say, we have sensations of various qualities; when we turn away and think of it, we are only experiencing these same qualities in the form of images, which are fainter copies of the qualities we sensed.¹ Berkeley and Hume laid down the same theory as ‘evident’ in the first sentences of their chief works. Ideas, said Berkeley, are ‘formed by help of memory and imagination—either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived directly’;¹ ‘by ideas’, said Hume, ‘I mean the faint images’ of ‘impressions’ gained at first hand.² This is a simple and attractive view. As we go about with eyes and ears open, things make impressions upon our mind, or as we should probably say nowadays, supply us with sense data. From them we form copies or images, and then when we want to think of the things later, the images are ready to hand. These images are our ideas. Is this not the most reasonable account we can give?

Unfortunately it is all but worthless. In certain special cases, as we shall see, the image does supply the stuff of thought, but the theory that would identify them generally is riddled with confusions and difficulties. We can only list rapidly a few of the major objections. If the thought of a thing were the image of it, the characters of the one should vary with the characters of the other. But in fact their variations do not even remotely correspond, (I) The thought often grows better as the image dies away, and (2) when the image is most perfect, the thought may be most inadequate. Both points are easy to illustrate.

3. (I) That thought is not impaired by the dying away of images may be shown either (i) by comparing different times in the history of the same man, or (ii) by comparing the thought of different men. (i) It often happens that the same man is in youth very free in his use of imagery while as years go on he resorts to it less and less. But if his thought is confined to imagining, then as he approaches maturity his thought grows thinner and poorer, and when he has reached the period when by every popular and scientific standard his mind is most mature and competent, it is all but empty of ideas. This is absurd. Dr. W. H. R. Rivers described himself as ‘one of those persons whose normal waking life is almost wholly free from sensory imagery, either visual, auditory, tactile, or of any other kind. … It is clear to me that if it were not for my special knowledge and interest I should be wholly ignorant of its existence… (But) I have concluded, and I think I am justified in doing so, that before the age of five my visual imagery was far more definite than it became later… ’¹ Dr. Rivers was thus deficient in imagery of all kinds; he was, also, while thus deficient, a thinker of some distinction. If thought were imagery, these things could not both be true.

(ii) There are also enormous differences in imagery between one mind and another. This has been shown by many careful studies,² but never more strikingly than in the work which started the series, Francis Galton’s Inquiries. His method was to send a letter to a great many different persons, many of them scientists of repute, asking each to call to mind his breakfast-table of that morning, and to answer some simple questions about the brightness, clearness, and colouring, of the image. ‘The earliest results of my inquiry’, he writes, ‘amazed me. … I found that the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words “mental imagery” really expressed what I believed everybody supposed them to mean. They had no more notion of its true nature than a colour-blind man, who has not discovered his defect, has of the nature of colour.’ But there were also persons who reported images ‘ quite as bright as an actual scene’ and ‘all the objects well defined’. ‘One statesman has assured me that a certain hesitation in utterance which he has at times is due to his being plagued by the image of his manuscript speech with its original erasures and corrections. He cannot lay the ghost, and he puzzles in trying to decipher it.’¹ Here were various minds, equally proficient in the use of ideas, some of which were profuse in imagery while others scarcely knew what imagery meant. Thought and imagery bore no relation to each other, or if there was one, it was vaguely negative; among philosophers whom he questioned Galton reported the visualizing faculty ‘starved by disuse’! Here again, if thought is imagery, we should have something like self-contradiction.²

It may be said that this proves nothing. Galton was assuming that to use imagery was to use pictures. But later inquiries have brought to light a host of new kinds of imagery, of which one sort may be dominant in one mind, another in another, or which may be so united in the same mind that a ‘subject who uses visual-object imagery almost wholly in one class of tests may be equally wedded to auditory-motor word imagery in another type’.³ Hence Galton’s scientists may have been as lacking in visual pictures as he believed, and still have carried on their thinking with the help of images of a different order. We must agree that this is true. Nevertheless, it is fatal to the contention it seeks to prove. Let us suppose that scientist A, having breakfasted with scientist B, tries to recall their breakfast menu, and does so through vivid pictures. Let us suppose that B also recalls it, but through auditory-motor images connected with the use of words. Their images are as wide apart as two images can be. Their thoughts are of the same thing. If an idea must be an image that copies its object, the two thoughts could not possibly be of the same thing, whereas they obviously are.

4. (2) We have seen that thought may be improving while imagery is fading out. The converse is true; imagery is often at its best when thought is feeble. ‘In general’, wrote Macaulay, ‘the development of the fancy is to the development of the judgement what the growth of a girl is to the growth of a boy. The fancy attains at an earlier period to the perfection of its beauty, its power, and its fruitfulness; and as it is first to ripen, it is also first to fade’.¹ Children may be far richer in vivid imagery than they ever are in later years. ‘It seems to be a hard lesson’, Galton remarks, ‘for an imaginative child to distinguish between the real and visionary world.’² Are we therefore to say of these children that their thoughts also are then clearest and fullest? On the contrary, such imagery may stand in the way of thought proper.³ One’s thought of man, as distinct from animal, will remain poor and crippled so long as it is tied to the stake of imagery and can only revolve the circle of particular specimens. There have been many painters like Blake and Turner whose images of faces and scenes were such that they could paint from them almost as from life; and no doubt in the work of reproducing, this gave them an advantage. But one would feel it a paradox to say that their thought of nature or human nature was therefore at the acme of richness and clearness. At this rate the palm for mastery would have to be yielded to the insane.⁴

5. (3) Ideas are not to be reduced to images for the further reason that we can think of things of which no image or copy is possible. When I reflect, for example, that religious fears have often been the cause of unsettling the mind, I may call up certain images, but to say that I am thinking of nothing but what my images resemble is clearly mistaken, since there is no possible image of figures in flight, or ghosts walking, or hammers striking nails, that could cover what I mean by ‘fears’, ‘mind’, ‘cause’. Indeed, in its dealings with the three kinds of idea involved here, (i) th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Book I Thought in Perception
• Book II The Theory of the Idea