The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Pierce - The Law of Mind
The tendency to regard continuity as an idea of prime importance in philosophy may be conveniently termed synechism. What synechism is and what it leads to, may be brought out by comment on the formula of mental action. Logical analysis applied to mental phenomena shows that there is but one law of mind; namely, that ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of effectibility. The value of this law becomes apparent in view of the difficulties presented by the common theory of association of ideas. We are accustomed to speak of ideas as reproduced, as passed from mind to mind, as similar or dissimilar to one another. But taking the word 'idea' in the sense of an event in an individual consciousness, it is clear that an idea once past is gone forever, and any supposed recurrence of it is another idea. These two ideas are not present in the same state of consciousness, and therefore cannot be compared. All relation, being between ideas, can exist only in some consciousness; now that past idea was in no consciousness but that past consciousness that alone contained it; and that did not embrace the vicarious idea. Then, since we may not jump to the conclusion that a past idea cannot in any sense be present, the conviction comes that it must be present by direct perception. We are thus brought to the conclusion that the present is connected with the past by a series of real infinitesimal steps. The suggestion that consciousness necessarily embraces an interval of time is not tenable, if a finite time be meant. For if the sensation that precedes the present by half a second were still immediately before me, then, on the same principle, the sensation preceding that would be immediately present, and so on ad infinitum. All that is requisite is that we should be immediately conscious through an infinitesimal interval of time. In this infinitesimal interval we directly perceive the temporal sequence of beginning, middle, and end. Now, upon this interval follows another, whose beginning is the middle of the former and whose middle is the end of the former. From the immediate perception of these two intervals we gain a mediate, or inferential, perception of the relation of all four instants. Now let there be not only an indefinite succession of these inferential acts of comparative perception, but a continuous flow of inference through a finite time, and the result will be a mediate consciousness of the whole time in the last moment.
One of the most marked features about the law of mind is that it gives time a definite direction of flow from past to future, so that the relation of past to future is different from the relation of future to past. The flow of time consists in the fact that, in reference to any individual state of feeling, all others are of two classes, those which affect this one and those which do not. The present is affectible by the past, but not by the future. Time involves a continuity of qualities which undergo a change continuous in time. The development of the human mind has practically extinguished all feelings except a few sporadic kinds. But originally all feelings may have been connected in a way indicated by the tridimensional spread of feelings in the case of colors. And the presumption is that the number of dimensions was endless, for development essentially involves a limitation of possibilities.
Feeling has also a subjective, or substantial, spatial extension. This is a difficult idea to seize, for the reason that it is a subjective, not an objective extension. It is not that we have a feeling of bigness; it is that the feeling, as a subject of inhesion, is big. Since space is continuous, it follows that there must be an immediate community of feeling between parts of mind infinitesimally near together. Without this it would have been impossible for minds external to one another ever to become coordinated, and equally impossible for any coordination to be established in the action of the nerve-matter of one brain. In considering the affection of one idea by another, we encounter three elements: the intrinsic quality of the idea as a feeling; the energy with which it affects other ideas; the tendency of an idea to bring along other ideas with it. As an idea spreads, the first element remains nearly unchanged, the second gets rapidly reduced, the third increases. Now a finite interval of time generally contains an innumerable series of feelings, and when these become welded together in association, the result is a general idea. The first character of an idea resulting from this continuous spreading and generalization is that it is a living feeling. A continuance of this feeling, infinitesimal in duration, but still embracing innumerable parts, and also, though infinitesimal, entirely unlimited, is immediately present. And in its absence of boundedness a vague possibility of more than is present is directly felt.
The mental law follows the forms of logic. By induction, a number of sensations followed by one reaction become united under one general idea followed by the same reaction; by the hypothetical process, a number of reactions called for by one occasion get united in a general idea which is called out by the same occasion; by deduction, the habit fulfils its function of calling out certain reactions on certain occasions. But no mental action seems to be necessary or invariable in its character. The mind is not subject to 'law' in the same rigid sense that matter is. There always remains a certain amount of arbitrary spontaneity in its action without which it would be dead. When we consider that, according to the principle which we are tracing out, a connection between ideas is itself a general idea, and that a general idea is a living feeling, we have taken one step toward the understanding of personality. Personality is some kind of coordination of ideas, and coordination implies a teleological harmony which is more than a mere purposive pursuit of a predeterminate end. A general idea, living and conscious now, it is already determinative of acts in the future to an extent to which it is not now conscious.