CHAPTER XI.. The Intellectual Sentiment.

THE INTELLECTUAL SENTIMENT.

Its origin: the craving for knowledge—Its evolution—Utilitarian period: surprise, astonishment, interrogation—Disinterested period: transition forms—Classification according to intellectual states—Classification according to emotional states: dynamic forms, static forms—Period of passion: its rarity—Pathology—Simple doubt—Dramatic doubt—"Folie du doute"—Mysticism in science: deviation comes, not from the object, but from the method of research.

This name stands for the emotional states—agreeable, disagreeable, or mixed—which accompany the exercise of the intellectual operations. Intellectual emotion may be connected with images, ideas, reasoning, and the logical course of thought; in a word, with all the forms of knowledge. Except in some rare cases, which will be pointed out later on, it scarcely ever rises beyond a medium tone, especially in its higher manifestations.

After having traced it to its origin, we shall have to follow its evolution, which passes through three principal phases: the first, utilitarian and practical; the second, disinterested and scientific; in the third, which is much less frequent, it attains the power and exclusiveness of a passion.

I. This feeling, like all the others, depends on an instinct, a tendency, a craving; it expresses in consciousness its satisfaction or non-satisfaction. This primitive craving—the craving for knowledge—under its instinctive form is called curiosity. It exists in all degrees, from the animal which touches or smells an unknown object, to the all-examining, all-embracing scrutiny of a Goethe; from puerile investigation to the highest speculations; but whatever may be the differences in its object, in its point of application, in its intensity, it always remains identical with itself. Those devoid of it, such as idiots, are eunuchs in the intellectual order.

Assuming this innate craving, how is it developed during the first period?

The first stage is that of surprise. It appears early in the child; quite clearly, at latest, in the twenty-second week, according to Preyer. It is a special emotional state which cannot be traced back to any other, consisting of a shock, a disadaptation. In my opinion, its special and peculiar character lies in its being without contents, without object, save a relation. Its material is a relation, a transition between two states—a mere movement of the mind, and nothing more. The mode of expression and the physiological accompaniments of surprise are very clearly defined. The description of these will be found in Darwin (Expression of the Emotions, ch. xii.); the eyes and mouth are wide open, the eyebrows raised, the sudden shock is followed by immobility, the pulsations of the heart and the respiratory movements are accelerated, etc.

The second stage is that of wonder. I think with Bain and Sully, that the distinction between these two stages is not a vain subtlety. Surprise is momentary, wonder is stable; one is a disadaptation, the other a readaptation; one is without objective material, the other has for its material some strange or unaccustomed object. It is this second stage, no doubt, which Descartes called admiration, and which he placed among his six primary passions:—"Admiration is a sudden surprise of the soul which leads it to consider with attention the objects which appear to it rare and extraordinary." In fact, wonder is the awakening of the attention, of which it has the principal characteristics—unity of consciousness, convergence towards a single object, intensity of perception or representation, adaptation of movements. In the beginning, before wonder is accompanied by pleasure (or pain, as the case may be), it has a peculiar character approximating to what we have called the neutral state, or that of simple excitation.

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Footnote 229:

Bain, The Emotions, ch. iv. pp. 85, 86; Sully, Psychology, vol. ii. p. 126.

Footnote 230:

Descartes, Traité des Passions, Part ii., § 70.

Footnote 231:

I have given further details on this point in my Psychologie de l’attention.

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The third stage is that of interrogation, of reflections succeeding to the consternation produced by the first shock. This is the stage of curiosity properly so called, which consists in two questions, put implicitly and explicitly: What is that? What is the use of it? What is the concrete nature of this object? and what can be its utility? Primitive peoples, children, animals, incessantly put to themselves this double question; not, certainly, in clear and analytical terms, but instinctively and by their actions. The dog, brought face to face with an unknown object, looks at it, smells it, approaches, withdraws, ventures to touch it, returns, and begins again; he is pursuing this investigation after his own fashion; he is solving a double problem of nature and utility. The interrogation consists in assimilating the new object to our former perceptions or representations—classing it, in fact.

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Footnote 232:

See for facts as to the curiosity of animals, Romanes, Mental Evolution, pp. 283-351.

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Is primitive man curious? Herbert Spencer alleges a large number of facts in proof of his distaste for novelty. However, the craving for knowledge seems to be very unequally distributed among the various races; the only universal fact appearing to be that primitive curiosity is limited to very simple things, all of which have, or seem to have, some practical utility. Curiosity and the emotional state which accompanies it have no other end than the preservation of the individual—just as we have seen with regard to the tendency to live in communities, or to revere the gods, in this same initial period of evolution. To be wide awake, to make inquiries as to what will help or harm one, in a word, knowledge in the practical order, is a powerful weapon in the struggle for life; a cause of selection in favour of the curious, and at the expense of the incurious. It is the survival of this entirely utilitarian curiosity which explains why, at the present day, uncultured and even semi-civilised peoples object to the entrance into their country of travellers from a distance for the purpose of geological or other scientific explorations; they are always suspicious of a search for treasure, of espionage, or of some unknown ill deed on the part of the strangers.

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Footnote 233:

Principles of Sociology, i. pp. 98, 99.

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II. How did the transition to the disinterested period come about? We may admit, with Sully, that this took place through the natural, innate inclination of the human intellect towards the extraordinary, the strange, the marvellous. The same tendency which, under its creative form, engenders religious, poetical, social myths, attempts under the form of research to discover instead of imagining causes.

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Footnote 234:

Psychology, vol. ii. p. 131.

Footnote 235:

In the following, reported by a traveller, we have an instance of this spontaneous transition to disinterested curiosity, in the case of an intelligent Basuto. “Twelve years ago” [the man himself is speaking] “I went to feed my flocks. The weather was hazy. I sat down upon a rock and asked myself sorrowful questions; yes, sorrowful, because I was unable to answer them. Who has touched the stars with his hands? On what pillars do they rest? I asked myself. The waters are never weary; they know no other law than to flow without ceasing,—from morning till night, and from night till morning; but where do they stop? and who makes them flow thus? The clouds also come and go, and burst in water over the earth. Whence come they? Who sends them? The diviners certainly do not give us rain; for how could they do it? and why do I not see them with my own eyes, when they go up to heaven to fetch it? ... I cannot see the wind; but what is it? Who brings it, makes it blow? ... Then I buried my face in both my hands.”—Quoted by Vignoli, Mito e Scienza, p. 63. This passage is from The Basutos, by the French missionary Casalis (p. 239).

We are here at the point of junction between the æsthetic and the intellectual sentiments, which will presently bifurcate, and pursue each its own course. This inquiry is only half disinterested, however, for if man tries to penetrate the mystery of things it is in the hope of profiting thereby.

For the rest, however this transition may have come about, it took place when the struggle for existence became less keen, and it was possible to cultivate disinterested research for its own sake. Next, curiosity became scientific emotion, and gradually extended itself to every kind of investigation: the intellectual sentiment was formed in all its fulness.

It has been studied with a certain favour by psychologists, especially those of the school of Herbart, or those who have felt his influence, under the name of “feelings of relation,” "feelings connected with the cause of representations." I do not intend to follow them through their tedious and uninstructive task of divisions, subdivisions, and distinctions worthy of the schoolmen of the fourteenth century. Besides, the alleged classification of the intellectual feelings varies from one writer to another—one giving fifteen, another sixty. It is an artificial method, a labyrinth, a source, not of clearness, but of obscurity. I defy the subtlest psychologist to note and fix the delicate gradations of feeling which, ex hypothesi, should answer to this endless enumeration. But its most serious defect lies in its including only the intellectual and not the emotional states.

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Footnote 236:

I give a specimen, choosing a classification which is neither one of the longest nor one of the shortest: (1) Emotions arising from logical relations (reasonable, unreasonable, contradictory, logical satisfaction, ignorance, the unknown, the hypothetical; possibility or impossibility of coming to a conclusion). (2) Emotions arising from relations of time (present, past, future, anticipation, hope, presentiment; feeling of the irremediable, of opportunity, of routine, etc.). (3) Emotions arising from relations of space (size, nearness, distance, etc.). (4) Emotions arising from relations of coexistence and non-existence, quantity, identity, etc. This is a much abridged catalogue; there are thirty-two subdivisions in all.

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I can only admit one division, which has the advantage of simplicity, and, more especially, of being based on the very nature of the emotional process. This is, into the pleasures and pains accompanying research or the acquisition of knowledge, and those which are attached to its possession, or the state of being without it. The former are dynamic, the second static.

Intellectual emotion, under its dynamic form, depends on the quantity of energy expended. In fact, it is only a particular case of the emotional state accompanying every form of activity directed towards an end compatible with success or failure; it is only one form of self-feeling, differing only in its object, not in its nature, from the feeling of the explorer or the hunter. The search for knowledge is a hunt like any other, truth being the game, and just as many sportsmen find more charm in the vicissitudes of their expedition than in their spoils, so many truth-seekers will accept as their own, Lessing’s well-known saying: “If I were offered the choice between already ascertained truth and the pleasure of finding it out, I would choose the second.”

Under its static form, intellectual emotion is still a particular case of self-feeling, whose principal manifestation is the sense of power, or its opposite. It is one form of this sense, by the same right as the pleasure of physical strength, the pleasure of riches, or their opposites. It approximates especially to the feeling inspired by possession or property; it is felt, under its positive form as augmentation, under its negative as diminution and poverty; ignorance is a retrenchment, a limit.

To sum up, intellectual emotion is simple enough; it is only the transfer of the emotional manifestations already known to us, to a group of mental operations. There is no need, therefore, to insist further on the matter.

III. We have still to follow it into a third stage, which it rarely attains, because pure ideas have little attraction for average human beings—viz., the cases in which it becomes a passion. It is evident that the intellectual passion cannot exist outside the dynamic group, possession being, in the nature of things, a calm pleasure, or, as the ancients said, a pleasure at rest.

We might find numberless instances in the biographies of scientific men and philosophers. Some names suggest themselves at once: Kepler, Spinoza, and many others who devoted their lives strictly and exclusively to the pursuit of truth. It may be objected, however, that, in certain cases and with certain men, nothing proves that the intellectual passion has not been fed or sustained by foreign elements; that the love of learning, though the principal motive, has been the only one; that it has not been adulterated with others—e.g., desire for position, influence, riches, fame, glory, in short, ambition under its manifold aspects. It is not easy to find absolutely pure cases; for, besides the rarity of the intellectual passion, the terms in which the demand is framed are almost contradictory, since the men we want to find must be unknown to fame. The following instance, however, seems to me to answer perfectly to all the conditions. Descuret, in his Médécine des Passions, gives a brief biographical sketch of a Hungarian named Mentelli, a philologist and mathematician, who, without a definite end in view, simply for the pleasure of learning and to satisfy his intellectual cravings, consecrated his whole life to study, having apparently no other want. “Living at Paris, in a filthy lodging, the use of which was allowed him out of charity, he had cut off from his expenditure all that was not absolutely necessary to sustain life. His outlay—apart from the purchase of books—amounted to seven sous a day, three of which went for food and four for light; for he worked twenty hours a day, without intermission, except on one day in the week, when he gave lessons in mathematics, on the fees received for which he subsisted. All he needed was water, which he fetched for himself, potatoes which he cooked over his lamp, oil to feed the latter, and coarse brown bread. He slept in a large packing-case, into which, during the day, he used to put his feet wrapped in a blanket or a little hay. An old arm-chair, a table, a jug, a tin pot, and a piece of tin roughly bent into a convex shape, and serving as a lamp, formed the rest of his furniture. Mentelli saved the price of washing by wearing no linen. A soldier’s coat bought at the barracks and only replaced in the last extremity, a pair of nankeen trousers, a fur cap, and huge sabots composed his entire costume. In 1814 the cannon-balls of the allies fell all round the lodging he was then occupying, but failed to disturb him.... During the first epidemic of cholera at Paris, it was necessary to employ armed force to compel this scientific anchorite to interrupt his studies, so as to clean out his pestilential cell. He lived thus, uncomplainingly, and indeed happily, for thirty years, without a day’s illness. At last (on December 22nd, 1836), at the age of sixty, having gone as usual to fetch water from the Seine, his foot slipped, he fell into the river, then in flood, and was drowned. Mentelli left no work behind him, in fact there remains no trace of his long researches.”

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Footnote 237:

Quoted by Letourneau, Physiologie des Passions, p. 23.

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Other instances might be quoted, but they would appear trifling by comparison with this. Great anonymous collaborations, like those of the Benedictines, have certainly enlisted the services of enthusiasts of this kind; thus Dom Mabillon was the type of a worker animated with passionate fervour, modest, unknown, punctually fulfilling his religious duties, and when free from these, travelling about the world on foot to collect historical documents.

Thus we find cases where the love of knowledge alone, untarnished by other motives, has all the characteristics of a fixed and tenacious passion, filling the whole of life, and expressing the whole nature of a man.

II.

The intellectual feeling also has its pathology, in connection with which I have to point out two principal cases: the extreme forms of doubt, and the introduction of mysticism into science.

1. Doubt is a state of unstable equilibrium in which successive contradictory representations neither mutually exclude nor conciliate each other. I distinguish simple doubt, dramatic doubt, and the insanity of doubt.

In simple or limited doubt, intellectual indecision has as its emotional accompaniment a slight uneasiness, a state of discomfort resulting from an unsatisfied desire, a tendency which comes to nothing. Under this form doubt is normal, legitimate, and even necessary; it becomes morbid when it takes a chronic, permanent, and aggressive form, when it produces a violent shock and a long reaction.

This is the doubt which I call dramatic, because it is an internal convulsion, a crisis which often lasts a long time and repeats itself. It precedes great conversions and then subsides, but sometimes lasts through life, as with Pascal. There is nothing surprising in its violence, since it is, in the intellectual order, the equivalent of an intense, incurable, and hopeless love; in the two cases the situation and effects are identical.

The insanity of doubt takes us further into the intricacies of pathology. It is “a chronic disease of the mind, characterised by constant uneasiness.” It presents numerous varieties, which have been classified by alienists. Some do not pass beyond the region of every-day trivialities, as the man who will return twenty times to see whether he has really locked his door. Others exhaust themselves in abstruse and insoluble questions, never able to satisfy themselves or stop, like an ever-turning wheel. Others, the timid, lose themselves in endless scruples and puerilities. But, whatever be the matter to which the mind applies itself, the psychological process remains the same. It is a questioning without pause or limit, accompanied by distress, constriction of the head, epigastric oppression, vaso-motor troubles, etc. There is the ardent desire to find a fixed state for thought without the ability to do so.

Under its gravest form it is “the complete loss of all notion and feeling of reality.” It is absolute scepticism, not theoretic and speculative, after the manner of the Pyrrhonians, but practical, bearing not only on ideas, abstract conceptions, memories, reasonings, but even on perceptions and actions; the exercise of the intellect is not accompanied by any belief—i.e., any state of mind which presupposes a reality. “I exist,” says one of these patients, “but outside real life and in despite of myself ...; something which does not seem to be in my body impels me to act as I formerly did, but I cannot succeed in believing that my actions are real. I do everything mechanically and unconsciously. My individuality has completely disappeared; the way in which I see things makes me incapable of realising them, of feeling that they exist.... Even when I see and touch, the world appears to me like a phantom, a gigantic hallucination.... I eat, but it is a shadow of food entering the shadow of a stomach; my pulse is only the shadow of a pulse.... I am perfectly conscious of the absurdity of these ideas, but cannot overcome them.” This state belongs, in fact, to the category of conscious madness.

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Footnote 238:

See Hack Tuke’s Dictionary of Psych. Medicine, article, “Insanity of Doubt.” Analogous cases have been reported by various authors, Griesinger, Clouston, etc.

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But it is not essentially a disease of the understanding: the intellectual element is secondary; this perpetual doubt, these endless questionings are merely the effects; the cause lies in a weakening of the emotional life and the will, rendering them incapable of arriving at a belief—i.e., an affirmation—and, more deeply still, in a disturbance of the organic life, as demonstrated by sensory perversions, motor enfeeblement, and the melancholic state of the patient with its physiological accompaniments, and lowering of the vital functions.

2. The introduction of mysticism into science, though particularly prevalent just now, is an intellectual disease incident to all ages. In the beginning, scientific research had no clear consciousness either of its method or its object.

The earliest Greek philosophers speculated at once on first causes, second causes, and practical applications, without drawing any hard and fast distinction between these subjects. Thales constructed a cosmology and calculated eclipses; Pythagoras reduced the universe to numbers, but he also greatly advanced the study of mathematics, and founded a communistic society on his own principles. By slow degrees the proper domain of science became recognised: the determination of second causes, of natural laws. At the Renaissance, alchemy, astrology, and the occult sciences were discredited, in spite of their provisional services, and some positive discoveries due to them. At present, the methods are fixed, in their main lines; a fact which permits us to determine the anomalies and deviations of the intellectual sentiment.

How does it deviate from the normal track? It is needless to remark that it is not by seeking the unknown, since this is its fundamental task, for every day and for all time. Is it by pursuing the unknowable? This view is scarcely tenable, for how can we determine where the unknowable begins? Let us admit, for the sake of argument, and in order to simplify matters, that this word covers the whole region of first causes, taken as inaccessible; but, having eliminated these, only by an arbitrary act can it be decided that this or that thing is unknowable. The history of science supplies us with proofs in abundance. To give but one example, which is closely connected with psychology: one of the greatest physiologists of the century, J. Müller, declared that the time necessary for perceiving a sensation is not measurable and can never be determined; this, however, did not prevent Helmholtz from measuring it some years later, and it is well known what successful experiments have since been made in that direction.

It is not so much in the object pursued as in the method employed that the love of science may go astray. Scientific mysticism consists in replacing regular methods by intuition and divination; in expecting everything from an inward revelation, a supernatural illumination; in substituting the subjective for the objective, belief for demonstration and verification, individual for universal validity. True, it would be a great mistake to assert that intuition and divination have not played an important part in the discoveries of scientists; they lie at the origin of nearly all, and there is a certain point where the psychological conditions of scientific and of artistic creation coincide; but no scientist worthy of the name will confound the vision of a truth with its demonstration. He does not allow it to rank as scientific till he has furnished his proofs. Mysticism is the reintegration, in science, of the love of the marvellous, and the illusory desire of acting on nature without preliminary research, work, or trouble.

Intellectual emotion, therefore, has two principal morbid forms: doubt, which, at the last extremity, ends in dissolution; and mysticism, which is only a deviation, and whose essence consists in substituting imagination for logical methods.

Footnote 239:

Two American psychologists, without mentioning the principal forms we have just studied, reckon among contemporary aberrations of the intellectual feeling some tendencies which appear to me to be very slight infirmities by comparison: (1) “A more subtle form is that distinctively nineteenth-century disease, the love of culture, as such. When the feeling is directed, not towards objects, but towards the state of mind induced by the knowledge of the objects, there originates a love of knowing for the sake of the development of the mind itself. The knowledge is acquired because it widens and expands self. Culture of our mental powers is made an end in itself, and knowledge of the universe of objects is subordinated to this. The intellectual feelings are separated from their proper place as functions of the integral life, and are given an independent place in consciousness. Here, as in all such cases, the attempt defeats itself. The only way to develop self is to make it become objective; the only way to accomplish this is to surrender the interests of the personal self. Self-culture reverses the process and attempts to employ self-objectification or knowledge as a mere means to the satisfaction of these personal interests. The result is that the individual never truly gets outside of himself” (Dewey, Psychology, pp. 305, 306). This criticism is just. We might say, more simply, that the pursuit of intellectual emotion for its own sake borders on scientific dilettantism—i.e., a superficial disposition and a tendency of the mind to run in every direction without going very deeply into anything. But we cannot reckon as morbid the love of abstract and purely speculative research; for in this the intellectual feeling remains faithful to its nature, i.e. curiosity, and its mission, i.e. the pursuit of truth. Besides, the speculations which in appearance are the most useless and merely theoretical, may some day show themselves in results susceptible of practical application. (2) Ladd, Psychology Descriptive and Explanatory, pp. 566 et seq., considers as a morbid form of the intellectual sentiment the personification of Science, which is so popular at the present day (in my opinion, it is rather a disease of thought, an instance of the incurable tendency of the human mind to realise abstractions and bow the knee before idols of its own fabrication), and also criticises the growing love of minutiæ and the obstinate pursuit of small facts. It must be acknowledged that this tendency sometimes becomes a nuisance in sciences founded on observation, experiment, or documents, and that those whose attention has been confined to this kind of work have a natural disposition to exaggerate its importance; but it is nevertheless necessary, and is the price paid for all progress in science. Each individual contributes in his degree and according to his strength; there is no architecture without labourers.

To sum up, the intellectual emotion moves between two poles: one, where it involves a confused knowledge and plays a preponderant part under that instinctive form which may be called flair, or intuition; the other, where it is only the pale shadow of the exercise of abstract thought. Under this last form it is the type to which all other emotions approximate, when the affective element is impoverished—viz., moral emotion in rationalistic theorists (the Stoics, Kant), æsthetic emotion in critics, and religious emotion in metaphysicians and dogmatic theologians.