The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)James, William
Philosophy
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
[232] Mozart describes thus his manner of composing: First bits and
crumbs of the piece come and gradually join together in his mind;
then the soul getting warmed to the work, the thing grows more and
more, "and I spread it out broader and clearer, and at last it gets
almost finished in my head, even when it is a long piece, so that I
can see the whole of it at a single glance in my mind, as if it were
a beautiful painting or a handsome human being; in which way I do not
hear it in my imagination at all as a succession--the way it must
come later--but all at once, as it were. If is a rare feast! All the
inventing and making goes on in me as in a beautiful strong dream. But
the best of all is the _hearing of it all at once_."
[233] Mental Physiology, § 236. Dr. Carpenter's explanation differs
materially from that given in the text.
[234] Cf. also S. Stricker: Vorlesungen über allg. u. exp. Pathologie
(1879), pp. 462-3, 501, 547; Romanes: Origin of Human Faculty, p.
82. It is so hard to make one's self clear that I may advert to a
misunderstanding of my views by the late Prof. Thos. Maguire of Dublin
(Lectures on Philosophy, 1885). This author considers that by the
'fringe' I mean some sort of psychic material by which sensations in
themselves separate are made to cohere together, and wittily says that
I ought to "see that uniting sensations by their 'fringes' is more
vague than to construct the universe out of oysters by platting their
beards" (p. 211). But the fringe, as I use the word, means nothing like
this; it is part of the _object cognized_,--substantive _qualities_
and _things_ appearing to the mind in a _fringe of relations_.
Some parts--the transitive parts--of our stream of thought cognize
the relations rather than the things; but both the transitive and
the substantive parts form one continuous stream, with no discrete
'sensations' in it such as Prof. Maguire supposes, and supposes me to
suppose, to be there.
[235] George Campbell: Philosophy of Rhetoric, book ii, chap. vii.
[236] Substantialism or Philosophy of Knowledge, by 'Jean Story' (1879).
[237] M. G. Tarde, quoting (in Delbœuf, Le Sommeil et les Rêves (1885),
p. 226) some nonsense-verses from a dream, says they show "how prosodic
forms may subsist in a mind from which logical rules are effaced....
I was able, in dreaming, to preserve the faculty of finding two words
which rhymed, to appreciate the rhyme, to fill up the verse as it first
presented itself with other words which, added, gave the right number
of syllables, and yet I was ignorant of the sense of the words....
Thus we have the extraordinary fact that the words called each other
up, without calling up their sense.... Even when awake, it is more
difficult to ascend to the meaning of a word than to pass from one word
to another; or to put it otherwise, _it is harder to be a thinker than
to be a rhetorician_, and on the whole nothing is commoner than trains
of words not understood."
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