(c) It is at least as correct to say that mind moves away from as toward nutrition. For, correlative with the growth of mind is restriction of feeding to specialized kinds of food, and consequent increase in the mechanical cost of getting it. The ocean brings food to an oyster; a cat must hunt for its living. Everywhere the discriminative appetite is the expensive one. (d) If we scrutinize cases in which feeding appears to be the end of conscious effort, we find, almost if not quite invariably, that the very act of consciously seeking food gives to nutrition the place of means to some experience beyond itself. The labor movement illustrates this principle on a large scale. Even if the central stimulus of this movement could be identified as hunger (which is doubtful), the conscious end of the struggle is home life, leisure, culture, the education of children, free participation in the determination of one's destiny. (e) But it may be said that mind has stabilized the food supply and produced a more even distribution of it. Civilization will soon reach a point at which famines can no longer occur. What, it may be asked, is the meaning of the present movement for agricultural instruction, and indeed for vocational training in its whole extent, if not just this, that men want enough to eat? Here, indeed, is excellent material for answering the question as to what mind is about when it seeks food. The crucial question for us is whether the direction of the mind's movement here can be defined as from hunger to repletion. Of course, food is an object of conscious desire. So is getting to Albany on time an object of desire on the part of one who is traveling from New York to Buffalo by way of the New York Central. The road to our social ends certainly takes the food-supply route. But, as in the case of the labor movement, social food-seeking that begins instinctively awakens, sooner or later, a consciousness of the social values broadly called cultural, and these it is that define the specifically mental destination or function. Turning now to the question whether reproduction should be accounted a mental function, we find the course of evolution not at all ambiguous. Reproduction is most prolific in the lowest ranges of life. Mental development is clearly correlated with decrease in the birth-rate. How many factors are involved in this decrease I will not attempt to say, but certainly mind is one of them. Herbert Spencer realized this fact,' though he did not bring out the full significance of it. John Fiske's two essays on human infancy carry us much farther. Mind individualizes the various living beings that are involved, first the offspring and then the parents. The obvious mental function is not reproduction of existing types, but the production of certain new, more specialized types. Mind does not stimulate reproduction any more than it stimulates hunger; it does not increase fertility any more than it increases assimilation. But just as mind specializes foods and increases the cost of feeding, so it individualizes living beings and increases the cost of each individual. The whole may be viewed as on the one hand an increase of inhibitions, and on the other hand a focalizing of dispersed attention. In short, the biological functions of mind can be altogether expressed as increase in the range of objects and qualities responded to, and in range of co-ordination of responses. B. Preferential functions.-Our discussion of nutrition and reproduction has already brought us face to face with conscious preferences, that is, mind defining its own direction. We may take for granted, I suppose, that satisfactions are, in general, a sign of unimpeded mental action, and that we can tell one another about our satisfactions. One may, indeed, be mistaken as to what one likes, that is, as to what it is in a complex that makes it likable, but such mistakes can be discovered and corrected, chiefly by further communication. The functions of our second main division, then, are always qualitative (implying a “better and worse"), and they are scientifically known through communication by means of language. Thus it is that many preferences have already been successfully studied, such as color preferences, the likes and dislikes of children with respect to pictures and with respect to future occupations, merit in handwriting, merit in English composition, merit as a psychologist, the comic, persuasiveness, even moral excellence.3 Such experimental studies have the effect, 1 Principles of Biology, Part VI, especially chaps. xii and xiii. 2 Reprinted under the title, The Meaning of Infancy, in the "Riverside Educational Monograph" series (Boston, 1909). 3 H. L. Hollingworth gives a list of "order of merit" researches in "Experimental Studies in Judgment," Archives of Psychology (New York, 1913), pp. 118 f. not merely of discovering preferences, but also of adding precision to preferences already recorded in the world's literature. Would that a Hollingworth might have been present throughout human evolution to record the growth of human preferences. As the case stands, we must combine experiment upon present preferences with the less precise study of life as reflected in literature, art, and institutions. Where shall we look for a basis for the systematic subdivision of preferential functions? Suppose we compare early types of reaction with late ones, say Thorndike's picture of original nature with value analyses, which represent developed interests. Let us begin with the fact that there is satisfaction in merely being conscious. To be conscious, then, we may count as the first preferential function. Note, next, that satisfaction attaches to mere movement of attention from one object to another, as in "love of sensory life for its own sake." May we not say that a second preferential function of mind is to multiply its objects? A third appears in the preference for experiences that include control of objects. A fourth is closely related thereto, namely, the arrangement of objects in systems-it is a function of mind to unify its objects. This is seen all up and down the scale from the spontaneous perception of spatial figures in the starry sky to the ordering of an argument. These four preferential functions appear to be fundamental, that is, not further analyzable. If we turn, in the next place, to the usual value categories to see whether we may not find further unanalyzable functions, we come upon the interesting, not to say strange, fact that ethical, noetic, religious, and even economic values presuppose a function that they do not name. Each of these types of value depends upon the existence of a society of intercommunicating individuals, yet it seems not to have occurred to anyone to include a social category-simply and specifically social-in discussions of either functions or values. Should not the fifth preferential function in our list, then, be the function of being social, of having something in common with another mind, in short, of communicating? The justification, not to say necessity, for recognizing a simply social function of mind exists, not alone in the social presupposition of several recognized values, but also in a long series of genetic studies which, from one angle after another, have revealed the fundamentally social nature of consciousness.1 There remains for consideration our aesthetic experience. Doubtless it involves functions already named, particularly the functions of unification and communication. But it seems to contain also an attitude somewhat different from those already named, the attitude of contemplation-the taking of satisfaction in objects merely as there, without regard to anything further that may happen to or with them. Hence I add contemplation to the list. The preferential functions, then, are these: 2. To multiply objects of consciousness. 3. To control objects, one's self included. 4. To unify objects, one's self included. 5. To communicate, that is, have in common. Some omissions from this list require explanation. Play is omitted because it involves a complex of 1 and 2, generally 3, also sometimes all six, and because it is fully exhausted therein. Truth is omitted because, as far as it is not an abstraction from actual intellectual functioning, I hold it to be analyzable without remainder into functions already named, especially 4 and 5.2 No ethical function appears because the three objectives that it includes control, unification, socialization-already have appropriate recognition in the list.3 As to economic value, it seems to be exhausted in the notion of control within a social medium. It is true that these are commonly studies of content rather than of function, and that "I". and “thou” appear therein as "idea of I” and "idea of thou." For the purposes of merely structural analysis this is doubtless sufficient. That is, structural analysis as such has no place at all for the experience of communication. On the other hand, communication will loom large in any adequate general analysis of mental functions. 2 Cf. A. W. Moore, "Truth Value," Journal of Philosophy, V (1908), 429-36. 3 Cf. J. H. Tufts, "Ethical Value," ibid., 517-22. Finally, religion is without a place in the list because it offers no particular value of its own. Religion is not co-ordinate with other interests, but is rather a movement of reinforcement, unification, and revaluation of values as a whole, particularly in social terms.1 It will be asked, no doubt, whether the functions of mind can be named without any direct reference to instinctive desires. In addition to what has already been said concerning nutrition and reproduction—that they are, so to say, constants that find a supply at every level of mentality—it may now be added, as a general truth, that mental activity exercised upon the objects of instinctive desire does not satisfy the desire in its initial form, but modifies the desire itself. For example, what has at first only a derived interest as means to something else may acquire an interest of its own, and become an end. This is surely the way that science has come into being, and very likely art also. The evolution of parental and of conjugal relations offers abundant examples of the truth that the distinctive work of mind with our desires is to differentiate and recreate them. Our list of mental functions, accordingly, does not specify particular instincts, but only the primary ways in which mind works among them. A question may arise, also, as to whether higher desires or ideal values ought not to appear in the list. Is not the most distinctive achievement of mind in the realm of desires, it may be said, the mastery of certain ones in the interest of others? I agree that "the desires of the self-conscious" must be recognized as having a character of their own,2 and that a list of mental functions must do justice to them. "The valuation of persons as persons constitutes a relatively independent type, one which presupposes a differentiation of object and attitude." The list as it stands, however, will be found to do justice to this differentiation. Here are self-control, self-unification, self-socialization, with the implication that all this applies to any and every self, both actualized selves and ideal selves. I 1 G. A. Coe, "Religious Value," ibid., 253–56. 2 A. O. Lovejoy, "The Desires of the Self-Conscious," ibid., (1907), 29-39. IV 3 W. M. Urban, Valuation, Its Nature and Laws, (London, 1909), p. 282; see also p. 269. |