A HISTORY AND A DEFENSE OF ANIMISM A HISTORY AND A DEFENSE OF ANIMISM BY WILLIAM McDOUGALL FORMERLY FELLOW OF ST JOHn’s COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE reader in MEKTAL PHILOSOPHY XN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD WITH THIRTEEN DIAGRAMS Beacon Press Boston First published in 1911 by Methuen & Co., Ltd., London First published as a Beacon Paperback in 1961 by arrange- ment with the original publisher Preface to the Beacon Press Edition copyright © 1961 by Jerome S. Bruner Printed in the United States of America “Philosophy may assure us that the account of body and mind given by materialism is neither consistent nor intelligible. Yet body remains the most fundamental and all-pervading fact with which mind has got to deal, the one from which it can least easily shake itself free, the one that most complacently lends Itself to every theory destructive of high endeavour.’’ A. J. Balfour “ Even the contrast between corporeal and mental existence may not be final and irreconcilable — but our present life is passed in a world where it has not yet been resolved, but yawning underlies all the relations of our thinking and acting. And, even as it will always be indispensable to life, it is, at present at least, indispensable to science. Things that appear to us incompatible, we must first establish separately each on its own foundation. If we have made ourselves acquainted with the natural growth and the ramification of each one of the groups of phenomena which we have thus discriminated, we may afterwards find it possible to speak of their common root. To try prematurely to unite them would only mean to obscure the survey of them, and to lower the value which every distinction possesses even when it may be done away with ” R. H. Lotze “ Quant a I’idde que le corps vivant pourrait ^tre soumis par quelque calculateur surhumain au meme traitement mathd- matique que notre syst^me solaire, elle est sortie peu a peu d’une certaine metaphysique qui a pris une forme plus precise depuis les d^couvertes physiques de Galilee, mais qui fut toujours la metaphysique naturelle de I’esprit humain. Sa clart6 appar- ente, notre impatient d6sir de la trouver vraie, I’empressement avec laquelle tant d’excellents esprits I’acceptent sans preuve, toutes les seductions enfin qu’elle exerce sur notre pensee devraient nous mettre en garde centre elle.” H. Bergson PREFACE TO THE BEACON PRESS EDITION William McDougall was a child of the nineteenth century. But like William James, whom he deeply admired, he was a rebellious child. McDougalFs rebellion was more insistently systematic, less genially humane than James, though both directed their efforts at the same dragons : the scientific dogmas of the age. Body and Mind is vintage McDougall, a beautifully learned and systematic example of his approach to the study of man. It is alive with his opposition to reducing that study to terms of simple materialism. Nineteenth century science traded on three great assumptions, the first of which was, of course, materialism: the conviction that nature, including the life data of biology, was ultimately explicable in physical terms. Materialism became a doctrine of mind as well. Consciousness would one day be reduced to the laws of physics and would eventually be contained in a periodic table of its own by some future Mendeleev. Physiology, and particularly sensory physiology, McDougall’s first field, was dominated in the last quarter of the century by the thoroughgoing physicalism of such “greats” as Helmholtz, Monakow, and Briicke — a junta of materialistic purists. They had brought sensory processes into the realm of physical measure. German experimental psychology was consolidating the gains. McDougall in the 1890’s, publishing his first papers on visual sensation, found himself unable to follow. How was one to give a proper place to the role of attention without a concept of mind? A second dogma of McDougalFs youth was extreme Darwinism: all evolution was based on the adaptation of a species to the demands of habitat, the process being governed by random variation in genetic characteristics which are selectively “chosen” for their fitness. Mc- Dougall, arguing from the scanty data of human evolution, found him- self espousing the view that mental evolution could not be treated adequately by the simple formula of adaptation. Like James, he held that function shapes organs and not vice versa. Insofar as function derives from the purposive activities of organisms, then purposive striving must have a part in the shaping of evolution. A physicalistic, genetically locked theory of evolution could not, he held with Lloyd vii viii Body and Mind Morgan, account for the evolution of mind. He urged, at the turn of the century, a new look at Lamarck. Finally," the turn of the century witnessed a strong reversal of the tide from nativism to empiricism — a reversal that begins with John Locke's philosophy of experience. The issue, in brief, was whether to understand behavior in terms of instincts and innate dispositions (the nativist option, stemming principally from continental philosophy and particularly from Leibnizs) , or whether to understand it in terms of the effects of past experience and the results of adaptation (the empiricist view, most usually associated with British associationism and American pragmatism). The nativist view steadily lost ground during the century and by its close, with the emergence of Pavlov and American radical behaviorism, it was rejected out of hand by a large section of the Anglo- American psychological world. Nativism was somehow regarded as a limb of mentalism and instincts as a manifestation of mind stuff. By the end of the first decade of the new century, the word teleology, implying that behavior was somehow directed toward ultimate goals, had become an epithet. If McDougall had been unable to accept the mechanical causality of materialism and the fixed genetics of pure Darwinism, it was plain that the compoundings of conditioned reflexes and associations would be unpalatable to him as an explanation of man's mind. Like another self-styled '‘purposive behaviorist" of the generation after his, Edward Chace Tolman, he felt too strongly that Mind "reeked with purpose" to be thus reduced to the passive effects of experience. A believer in Mind, a Lamarckian, and an instinctivist ! What baggage for a young scientist at the dawn of our centur)?-! It would be in the epic style to record that McDougall was right. But such is not the case. The true case is perhaps more interesting. What is true is that he was more often interestingly wrong, suggestive in his dissent, and startlingly contemporary in the problems that he posed. The queries that led him to his view on the interaction of mind and body are the same ones that produced our contemporary concern with psycho- somatic medicine. The flavor of his Lamarckianism (stripped of his rather bizarre ideas about genetics), is interesting not only in the light of cultural evolution, but also for its empirical suggestiveness. As for his well conceived theory of instinct, much of what he had to say is again relevant — thanks to the beautiful studies of animal behavior of the past t}vo decades. The work of Tinbergen, Lorenz, Beach, and others suggest that McDougall may be correct in many respects, particularly in his insistence upon a perceptual or "releaser" aspect in instinctive behavior. Preface to the Beacon Press Edition ix William McDougall was an Englishman, a man of scholarly tastes and wide ranging interests, a product of that power conscious, sceptical, and socially-apart class of wealthy northern manufacturers — the textile masters, ironmongers, chemical manufacturers whose leaders were Bright, Cobden, and Gladstone. He was born just as the nineteenth century was entering its last quarter. His family, though very much a part of the pattern of vigorous industrial enterprise, was of an intel- lectually venturesome cast of mind. Indeed, the origin of the family fortune is not without some bearing. His paternal grandfather was the proprietor and headmaster of an old-fashioned boarding school for boys in the North. Interested in chemistry, he studied with Dalton, the author of the atomic theory; and became an intimate friend of Angus Smith, the pioneer in applied chemistry; and of Sir James Simpson, the Edinburgh surgeon who first used chloroform as an anesthetic. He ended by building a chemical factory on the site next to his school and, with the aid of his five sons, soon turned the enterprise into a world-wide business. McDougall writes in his The History of Psychology in Auto- biography (edited by Carl Murchison; Worcester, Clark University Press, 1930), “I remember my grandfather as a stern and very pious old gentleman whose hobby was the writing of articles to show that the Bible miracles were compatible with the teaching of science. I remember that, even as a young boy, I regarded this as a somewhat futile labor.” Yet, a half century later, McDougall was to write of his own “incapacity to be content with one kind of truth in science, another in philosophy or religion.” McDougall’s father had what seems a happy restlessness of mind. Having become chiefly responsible for the very successful chemical busi- ness, he plowed its considerable profits back into new industrial ventures — an iron foundry, and then a paper pulp factory — to manufacture some of his own adventures. “He was successively a member of most of the leading Christian sects ; and in his later life adhered to none . . . He was benevolent and affectionate, with a strong taste for poetry and music; as in his business, so also in religion, art, and domestic affairs, he was masterful, erratic, unpredictable, and always naive.” The young William was precocious, and having finished school in Manchester at fourteen, he was sent with his older brother to study at the Real-Gymnasium in Weimar where he learned German and de- veloped a taste for music and the theatre. Upon his return to Manches- ter, he entered the newly founded University there at the rather tender age of fifteen, living at home, and pursuing scientific studies principally in biology and geology. The great controversies between religion and X Body and Mind evolution were raging and the young man, deep in LyelFs Principles of Geology and the excitement of Darwin and Spencer, “was delighted with Huxley’s smashing attacks on Gladstone and all the orthodoxies.” Graduated at nineteen, ill content with his provincial university, he overrode his father’s suspicions of Tory strongholds and went off to Cambridge where, at St. John’s College, he read for the Natural Sci- ence Tripos, striding out across the flat Cambridgeshire country whose fields and marshes he found ravishing after the grimy cityscapes of Manchester. He excelled as a student: quick, thorough, competitive, and arrogant. He ended with highest honors and a university scholarship to study medicine at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. His interests were in science ; but he felt that medicine was the route to a career in science and, besides, he could not be sure that the family fortune would remain intact under his father’s imaginatively erratic ministry. There would be no harm in a profession to fall back on. Indeed, save for the period of the Great War, when he directed a hospital for soldiers with nervous and mental disease, he never practiced his profession. For upon com- pleting his internship, he joined the Cambridge Anthropological Expe- dition to the Torres Straits under Haddon and Rivers, two of his former teachers, one of them a fellow Johnian. His task was to help Rivers study the senses of the natives of the islands. The century was just turning. He stayed on in the Torres Straits Islands for half a year, then accepted the invitation of Dr. Charles Hose to help put together a study of the head-hunting people to whom Hose administered in the province of the Rajah of Sarawak in Borneo. It was not anthropology but psychology and physiology that Mc- Dougall wanted. He had read James’ Principles of Psychology in medi- cal school and worked in the laboratory of the young Sherington. Borneo and the period with Rivers had not swayed him, though he had been tempted by the exotic appeal. “Characteristically arrogant, I said That field is too easy for me!’ ” Returned to England, he put in for a Fel- lowship at St. John’s, his old college, submitting two essays : one on the physiology of muscle, the other on the psychophysical problem, a fore- shadowing of this book. His career was set. He had cast his lot with psychology. He read Wundt, the emerging leader of the new experi- mental psychology in Germany and found him dusty. But he determined to add the German methods to his tool kit, and so in 1900 he spent a year at Gottingen with Muller. After that came his first post: at Uni- versity College in London to teach experimental psychology. His work soon attracted attention — studies of vision, of attention, theoretical papers on nerve transmission and the neurophysiology of mind. He par- Preface to the Beacon Press Edition xi ticipated vigorously in the scientific life of London, and by 1904 he was elected to the Wilde Readership in Mental Philosophy at Oxford. The founder of the Readership, an old manufacturer and a disciple of John Locke, upon hearing that the new incumbent was involved in experi- mentation, tried to dislodge him: the mind was nothing to be studied experimentally. McDougall prevailed, work flourished in his laboratory and students came. William James came to visit in 1908. They argued pragmatism; James prevailed. McDougalPs interest in psychical re- search was strengthened, so too his conviction that to understand the secrets of human nature one needed not only the approach of the physi- ologist, but the analysis of the evanescent stuff of direct experience. The decade at Oxford before the war was a fruitful one. The Social Psychology appeared in 1907, setting forth a theory of sentiments based on the doctrine of instincts and, though it went unnoticed at first, it eventually became the single most influential book in the field and is still regarded as social psychology's ^‘founding book” that set the pattern for what was later to be the study of attitudes. In 1912 the sacrosanct F.R.S. was bestowed. That same year he published a little book setting forth the outline of his general theory, Psychology, the Study of Be- havior, It sold close to 100,000 copies. I have said nothing of Body and Mind, also of this period — 1911. But let me return to it later. The war came, a period of intense clinical work directing a hos- pital for shell shock cases and filling notebooks with case materials which he eventually turned into a further extension of his views in the Outline of Abnormal Psychology. Each war experience added to his conviction that human functioning involved the patterning of instinctive energies into systems of sentiments held together by higher order striving. What the war taught him was the effect of stress in producing dissociation in this system. McDougall’s most notable achievement immediately after the war was a striking and contentious book on The Group Mind. “The title was unfortunate, for it antagonized many; but the thought I tried to express in this title was sound ; namely, that a highly organized enduring group such as a true nation, possesses an organization which, in the main is mental; an organization that resides not in any one individual but rather ... is what would now be called a configuration or Gestalt, an organized system of interacting energies.” Perhaps McDougall was tired of the struggle to establish psychology in the antagonistic environment of Oxford. Perhaps he was flattered to be asked to the University where James had been. Perhaps he was finding the donnish life of post-war England without sufficient excite- xii Body and Mind merit or recompense. In any case, in 1924, he accepted a professorship at Harvard. The decision was an interesting one. McDougalFs work was greatly admired. His books went through new editions yearly. The principal opposition to his point of view was in America, by then the colossus in psychology. He was stormily received. He was the target of the behaviorists who, if they read him, understood little of what he was trying to say. To them he was a mentalist and teleologist and, like Sigmund Freud, an embarrassment to the academic psychologist who wished to seem scientifically aseptic to his colleagues in the natural sci- ences. But on the other side, Freud had preempted much of the interest that might have been aroused by McDougalFs dynamic, instinctivist views. He was virtually without students at Harvard. Yet the half dozen or so years that he spent there were the years in which he pro- duced two of the most systematic and important works of his career: the Outline of Abnormal Psychology and the Outline of Psychology, The latter book, ignored for years, has begun to find its small army of devotees who find in it excellent discussions on the relation of motiva- tion and attention, on the selectivity of perception and attention, and on the thought processes. McDougall, fond though he was of Harvard, Cambridge, and New England, found his position in psychology there confining and irksome. If he had felt unappreciated at Oxford, he found himself far more so at Harvard. He was active in psychical research and found himself involved in investigating — some say gullibly — the famous medium Margery. Psychologists, still eager for the cachet of scientific respectability, were scandalized. The legend goes that he received a letter from the President of the newly constituted Duke University late in the 20^s asking him to recommend a new professor and head of De- partment for the new University, his answer to which was, '1 accept.’’ And so, approaching his sixties, McDougall began another chapter in his career, in Durham, North Carolina, where his principal research was the continuation of his Lamarckian experiments on the evolution of discriminative intelligence in successive generations of rats. He brought J. B. Rhine to Duke to start the parapsychology laboratory and the experiments on telepathy. And for the first time he had a Depart- ment of his own choosing, a brilliant group of younger investigators reflecting a wide range of interests — from child development to Pav- lovian conditioning. There he died in 1939. It was as an undergraduate at Duke that I first knew McDougall. I had been attracted there, as many others had, by the distinguished faculty that had been ‘"raided” away from other, better established uni- Preface to the Beacon Press Edition xiii versities. McDougall was very much of a figure. Strongly and squarely built and with the sure movement of an athlete, he was an artistocratically handsome and reserved looking man, fond of walking the college paths in all weather. As a lecturer, he was matter of fact, without histrionics but clear and concise. As a polemicist and critic, he was a masterful debater, as his opponents learned. His lectures were carefully prepared. His seminars were wide ranging and vigorous: it was in one of them as a senior that I first became acquainted with the work of Whitehead and Haldane, the experimental embryologists who were creating so much excitement on the subject of ^^organizers.^^ Withal, McDougalFs reserve was not something one could easily get through. He was a presence; he suffered fools poorly. His partial deafness in later years was such that one had to raise one’s voice to be heard. It led us to formulate our points more concisely. Foolishness in a loud voice some- how seemed the more foolish. My most intimate conversation with him was on the occasion of leaving Duke to come to Harvard for graduate work. He had me to tea. *Wou will find, Mr. Bruner, that Harvard will tempt you with easy answers. The behaviorist creed is well en- trenched, along with a taste for mechanistic explanations. It is a seductive invitation to anybody starting off on the wearisome business of making sense out of psychology. I hope you will not succumb.” About the book itself. Body and Mind, its purpose was quite clear in the author’s mind at the time of writing it and we find him in later years writing postscripts to it in articles and addresses. McDougall felt that the unity of experience, the oneness of the human ego, defied an- alysis in terms of the multiplicity of brain processes that constitute organic functioning. Some unitary principle, he felt it necessary to argue (and here he allied himself with Leibniz), was the foundation of this unity. The principle was Mind. Having argued this far, he had explicitly argued himself out of the materialistic monism of the physical extremists and, implicitly, out of the two more conventional positions that pre- vailed at the turn of the century: the epiphenomenalism of Herbert Spencer that held consciousness and mind to be the mere squeak of the organic wheel of brain processes, and the parallelism of the German ex- perimental psychologists which postulated a quite independent and parallel course for mind and body. Parallelism had to be rejected, for one could not find a parallel unity in organic functioning to the unity of consciousness since brain action comprises the compounded activities of discrete neurons. The rejection of epiphenomenalism, delegating experience and mind to the status of a * ‘phosphorescent glow produced by neural discharge,” xiv Body and Mind rests on a much deeper base. Fundamentally, McDougall held, as we have seen, that the most important characteristic of life was purpose — purpose in all its manifestations: wanting, being driven, aspiring, hoping, planning, expecting. It was this fundamental belief that made him begin his account of mental life with a doctrine of instincts or en- ergies for achieving certain ends. McDougall implicitly believed, as William James had, that a pure instinct occurs only once, after which it is modified by experience and is better called a sentiment. The har- monious blending of sentiments and wants into a unified concert of striving represented the growth of character (or, as we should call it today, personality.) In his Social Psychology and in a series of papers before the Great War, McDougall detailed the manner in which senti- ments serve a triple function: a conative one that impels behavior toward goals, a cognitive one that organizes experience selectively in terms of striving enterprises, and an affective one that gives the signa ture of emotion to our various strivings. The system of plans for know- ing and doing that constitute each sentiment are then organized by a '^metaplan’' or ruling sentiment closely related to a “sentiment of self- regard,” With this much of an apparatus of Mind, it was not likely that McDougall would embrace an epiphenomenalism that relegated Mind to the category of by-product. But how could he, a man intimately ac- quainted with and deeply engaged in research on neurophysiology, hold a view of interactionism, that mind affected body, and vice versa? And how was he able to hold to his view of the unity of personality and experience in the light of Freud^s work on the bifurcation of conscious intention and unconscious impulse, not to mention the dramatic cases of Morton Prince on “split personality”? With respect to the first issue, the intervention of Mind in the intricate affairs of the nervous system, McDougall was hard put. He published a paper in 1901 in Brain ^ “On the seat of the psycho-physical processes, in which it was plain that Mind acted not as a capricious organ of intervention but in a highly systematic way to set and alter the passage of neural impulses in the synapses of the central nervous sys- tem. His argument is anatomical (that it is in the synapses between neurones that any shunting or selectivity of conduction must be de- termined), physiological (that the evidence of sensory adaptation and contrast and other sensory phenomena required a selective interaction in the brain), and psychological (that attention particularly required a theory of synaptic shunting) . The paper is exquisitely argued and docu- mented, and while it contains some bad guesses about eventual mech- XV Preface to the Beacon Press Edition anisms of nerve transmission, the general outcome is still interesting. For what he is saying, to put it in ultramodern dress, is that if Body is the machine, Mind is the program that determines how the machine will process its data and one cannot equate the machine and the pro- gram. The series of three papers on such sensory phenomena as inhi- bition, facilitation, and contrast in visual sensation published in Mind in the 1890’s make it quite clear that he is groping toward such a formulation. Mind, in short, uses the nervous system. To describe the nervous system, then, does not constitute a description or analysis of mind any more than the description of the use to which a man puts a hoe represented a description of the nervous system or the mind of the man that uses it. Mind, in effect, is the realm of purposes, plans, in- tentionality. He wished to get Mind as Program into Body as Machine. The misplaced concreteness of his solution is startling. The problem is real, and can be stated better today. No surprise, then, his antagonism to the “dogma of Mechanistic Psychology” and his impatience with physiologists who felt that an elucidation of neural processes should suffice for psychology. In the early 1920’s, John B. Watson, the apostle of Behaviorism, invited McDougall to lecture to his class in psychology at the New School. The lecture was subsequently published. It is devastating — perhaps even more so than McDougalFs merciless but unavailing debate with Watson in 1924 at the Washington meeting of the American Psychological As- sociation. At the New School he uses the intellectual biography of Miinsterberg, his predecessor at Harvard, as his text for attacking a behaviorism based on the compounding of reflexes. Miinsterberg had started his career by embracing such a view; had then moved for a decade into a brilliant career of applying psychology to many practical fields; and then returned to write a new book in which he set forth a purposive psychology whose object was to aid in predicting and con- trolling human behavior. In the later book, Miinsterberg avers a dual allegiance to both mechanistic and purposive psychology, insisting how- ever that the older mechanistic view cannot be used to understand human behavior since it misses the essential nature of its purposeful- ness. Watson too, having himself had a period in applied psychology, may now, McDougall hoped, pass to a second phase. To Watson’s class, his last words were, “If then you must be behaviorists, I beg that you will be purposive behaviorists.” Regarding the issue of the unity of consciousness and how it might be reconciled with the conscious-unconscious dichotomy of Freud and the multiple personalities reported by Morton Prince and Janet, Me- XVI Body and Mind Dougall made rather a good thing of the challenge. The occasion was his Presidential Address to the Society for Psychical Research in London in July 1920. He saw the multiple streams of activity as the internal organization of personality, a unity deriving from the 'complex monad” that is the mind. He raised speculatively the possibility that perhaps the various sub-identities that are part of the organized personality are the result of a kind of "budding off” process whereby some original unitary source of energy differentiates into various instinctive forms. Perhaps the complex unity achieved by man provides the more reason to view Mind as a separate and unique realm of activity. McDougall, once convinced of these issues, wrote, as he put it "this arrogant book” and, as if to underline his arrogance, called it a "history and defense of animism.” The book is a handsome and im- passioned piece of scholarship, for McDougall was not only learned but passionate in his advocacy. Yet, it presents the issues dispassionately for its time. I went back to the book with a certain trepidation, not having read it for many years and having been under the spell of the writer’s personality at the time. Since it had appeared, I and my generation had been hardened in the scepticism that had been the mark of what Morton White has called the "age of analysis.” There had been Gilbert Ryle’s impeccable attack on dualism and the metaphysical quarrels that take the issue of monism and dualism seriously. Not only Ryle’s Concept of Mind, with its attack on Mind as a "category error” — "I see the cricket players, but where is the team spirit” — but the effects of Wittgenstein and Carnap and Ayer had had the effect of mak- ing us flippantly cautious about doctrines like "mind,” "instinct,” and "purpose” for the linguistic booby traps they concealed. Yet in reading Body and Mind again, a quarter century after my first reading as an undergraduate, I was pleased at how little ashamed I had to feel for one of my early intellectual parents. To be sure, there are places where the argument swirls in a confusion of "category errors.” But on the whole, the book is a superb example of what, in a very early paper on attention, McDougall called, "the method of residues.” Having ex- plained as much as he could of the nature of man by the workings of the nervous system, McDougall is forced to explain what is left — Mind, its unity and planfullness and directionality of purpose. If there is a bias in the book that you, the reader, must beware, it is that McDougall wields a beautifully honed analytic broadsword at materialistic and parallelistic theories of the relation of mind and body — quite rightly. But somehow his onslaughts are less sustained and brilliant when it comes to taking apart the monadologies and the Preface to the Beacon Press Edition xvii Cartesian interaction theories. For all that, the book is as good an introduction as I know to the psychosomatic dilemma and its history. Whoever has talked loosely about a ‘^psychosomatic’’ headache or cold, whoever practices medicine and has puzzled about the subtle physical reverberations of mental stress does well to read these pages carefully. Let him then, if the diet here seems overly rich in speculation, go back to Ryle’s astringent classic and see whether our modern Occam can make the psychosomatic problem disappear completely. Jerome S, Bruner Harvard University February 1961 PREFACE I N writing this volume my primary aim has been to provide for students of psychology and philosophy, within a moderate compass, a critical survey of modern opinion and discussion upon the psycho-physical problem, the problem of the relation between body and mind. But I have tried to present my material in a manner not too dry and technical for the general reader who is prepared to grapple with a difficult subject For I hold that men of science ought to make intelligible to the general public the course and issue of scientific discussions upon the wider questions to which their re- searches are directed, and that this obligation is especially strong in respect of the subject dealt with in these pages. Among the great questions debated by philosophers in every age the psycho- physical problem occupies a special position, in that it is one in which no thoughtful person can fail to be interested ; for any answer to this question must have some bearing upon the funda- mental doctrines of religion and upon our estimate of man’s position and destiny in the world. And that interest in this question is widespread among the English-reading public, is shown by the dense stream of popular books upon it which continues to issue from the press both of this country and of the United States. The greater part of this book is, then, occupied with a survey of modern discussions and modern theories of the psycho-physical relation ; but without some knowledge of the course of develop- ment of speculation upon this topic it is impossible to understand the present state of opinion. I have written, therefore, in the earlier chapters a very brief history of the thought of preceding ages. This historical sketch makes no pretence of being a work of original research ; in putting it together I have relied largely upon the standard histories of philosophy and science, especially xix XX BODY AND MIND the histories of philosophy of Ueberweg, Lewes, and Hoffding, F. A. Lange*s History of Materialism,” Erwin Rhode’s “ Psyche,” Sir Michael Foster’s History of Physiology,” the History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century ” of Dr T. Merz, and the “ Vitalismus als Geschichte und Lehre ” of Dr Hans Driesch. The history of thought upon the psycho-physical problem is in the main the history of the way in which Animism, the oldest and, in all previous ages, the most generally accepted answer to it, has been attacked and put more and more upon the defensive in succeeding centuries, until towards the end of the nineteenth century it was generally regarded in academic circles as finally driven from the field. I have therefore given to the historical chapters the form of a history of Animism. The sub-title describes this book as a defence, as well as a history, of Animism. I hasten to offer some explanation of this description, lest the mere title of the book should repel a con- siderable number of possible readers. The word Animism is frequently used by contemporary writers to denote what is more properly called primitive Animism, or primitive Anthropomorphism, namely, the belief that all natural objects which seem to exert any power or influence are moved or animated by “ spirits,” or intelligent purposive beings. It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that the Animism I defend is not of this primitive type. But this is only one variety of Animism, one which seems to have been reached by extending the essential animistic notion far beyond its original and proper sphere of application. The modern currency and usage of the word derives chiefly from Prof. Tylor’s “ Primitive Culture,” and I use it with the general connotation given it in that celebrated treatise. The essential notion, which forms the common foundation of all varieties of Animism, is that all, or some, of those manifestations of life and mind which distinguish the living man from the corpse and from inorganic bodies are due to the operation within him of something which is of a nature different from that of the body, an animating principle generally, but not necessarily or always, conceived as an immaterial and individual being or soul. “ Primitive Animism ” seems to have grown up by extension of PREFACE XXI this notion to the explanation of all the more striking phenomena of nature. And the Animism of civilized men, which has been and is the foundation of every religious system, except the more rigid Pantheisms, is historically continuous with the primitive doctrine. But, while religion, superstition, and the hope of a life beyond the grave, have kept alive amongst us a variety of animistic beliefs, ranging in degree of refinement and subtlety from primitive Animism to that taught by Plato, Leibnitz, Lotze, William James, or Henri Bergson, modern science and philosophy have turned their backs upon Animism of every kind with constantly increasing decision ; and the efforts of modern philosophy have been largely directed towards the excogitation of a view of man and of the world which shall hold fast to the primacy and efficiency of mind or spirit, while rejecting the animistic conception of human personality. My prolonged puzzling over the psycho- physical problem has inclined me to believe that these attempts cannot be successfully carried through, and that we must accept without reserve Professor TyloPs dictum that Animism “ embodies the very essence of spiritualistic, as opposed to materialistic, philosophy,” ^ and that the deepest of all schisms is that which divides Animism from Materialism.^ The main body of this volume is therefore occupied with the presentation and examination of the reasonings which have led the great majority of philosophers and men of science to reject Animism, and of the modern attempts to render an intelligible account of the nature of man which, in spite of the rejection of Animism, shall escape Materialism. This survey leads to the con- clusion that these reasonings are inconclusive and these attempts unsuccessful, and that we are therefore compelled to choose between Animism and Materialism ; and, since the logical necessity of preferring the animistic horn of this dilemma cannot be in doubt, my survey constitutes a defence and justification of Animism. I have chosen to use the word Animism rather than any other, not only because it clearly marks the historical continuity of the modern with the ancient conception, but also because no other term indicates precisely all those theories of human personality 1 Primitive Culture,” vol. i. p. 415. ^ Op. ctt.^ p. 502. xxii BODY AND MIND which have in common the notion which, as I believe, provides the only alternative to Materialism. The word “ Spiritualism ” as used in philosophy is ambiguous, and it has been spoilt for scientific purposes by its current usage to denote that popular belief which is more properly called Spiritism. Nor is all Animism spiritualistic ; during long ages the dominant form of it was a materialistic Dualism. The term psycho-physical dualism ” accurately expresses the essential animistic notion ; but it is cumbrous, and the word Dualism is apt to be taken to imply metaphysical Dualism, an implication which I am anxious to avoid ; for Animism does not necessarily imply metaphysical Dualism, or indeed any metaphysical or ontological doctrine, and may logically be held in conjunction with a monistic metaphysic, or indeed with any metaphysical doctrine, Solipsism alone ex- cepted. The expression “ psycho-physical interactionism ” will not serve my purpose, because (as we see in the philosophy of Leibnitz, and in that modification of the Cartesian system known as Occasionalism) Animism may be combined with the denial of psycho-physical interaction. Again, the term “ soul-theory ” does not cover all varieties of Animism, in illustration of which state- ment I may remind the reader that the late Prof. James advocated a distinctly animistic view of numan personality, which he called the “ transmission theory, but explicitly rejected the conception of the soul as a unitary and individual being. The reader may perhaps be helped to grasp the long argu- ment of the book, if I make here a summary statement of its course. The first six chapters trace in outline through the European culture-tradition, from primitive ages to the present time, the history of Animism and of the attacks upon it from the sides of metaphysic, epistemology, and the natural sciences, and they indicate the principal doctrines proposed as alternatives to it. Chapters VII., VIII., IX., and X. display the grounds on which at the present day the rejection of Animism is generally founded. It is shown that, although in former ages the psycho-physical problem has generally been regarded as one to be solved by metaphysic, it is now widely recognized that the issue must be decided by the methods of empirical science ; and it is shown how PREFACE xxiii the modern rejection of Animism finds its principal ground in the claim of the physical sciences that their mechanical principles of explanation must hold exclusive sway throughout the universe, a claim which I venture to characterize as “ the mechanistic dogma.” Chapters XL and XII. state, examine, and display the special difficulties of, the more important of the monistic doctrines proposed as substitutes for Animism. The least un- satisfactory of these are closely allied, and in accordance with current usage are classed together under the head of psycho- physical Parallelism. In Chapter XIII. it is shown that the choice of Parallelism or Animism is a dilemma from which we cannot escape, unless indeed we are prepared to adopt all the absurdities of thoroughgoing Materialism or of Solipsism. Chapters XIV., XV., and XVI. examine the modern arguments against Animism, and show that no one of them, nor all of them together, logically necessitate its rejection. Chapters XVII. to XXIV. exhibit the inadequacy of the mechanical principles to the explanation of the facts of general physiology, of biological evolution, of human and animal behaviour, and of psychology, and bring forward certain positive arguments in favour of Animism. Chapter XXV. states my attitude towards the work of the Society for Psychical Research, and shows how, as it seems to me, the results hitherto achieved by that line of investigation strengthen the case against the “ mechanistic dogma.” In the last chapter I have tried to draw together the threads of the argument, and regarding the “ mechanistic dogma ” (the only serious objection to Animism) as discredited, I have weighed the claims of the principal varieties of Animism in a discussion which results in favour of the hypothesis of the soul. Finally, I have endeavoured to indicate a view of the nature of the soul which shall be in harmony with all the facts established by empirical science. I am aware that to many minds it must appear nothing short of a scandal that anyone occupying a position in an academy of learning, other than a Roman Catholic seminary, should in this twentieth century defend the old-world notion of the soul of man. xxiv BODY AND MIND For it is matter of common knowledge that “ Science ” has given its verdict against the soul, has declared that the conception of the soul as a thing, or being, or substance, or mode of existence or activity, different from, distinguishable from, or in any sense or degree independent of, the body is a mere survival from primitive culture, one of the many relics of savage superstition that obstinately persist among us in defiance of the clear teachings of modern science. The greater part of the philosophic world also, mainly owing to the influence of the natural sciences, has arrived at the same conclusion. In short, it cannot be denied that, as William James told us at Oxford three years ago, “ souls are out of fashion.” But I am aware also that not one in a hundred of those scientists and philosophers who confidently and even scornfully reject the notion has made any impartial and thorough attempt to think out the psycho-physical problem in the light of all the relevant data now available and of the history of previous thought on the question. And 1 am young enough to believe that there is amongst us a considerable number of persons who prefer the dispassionate pursuit of truth to the interests of any system, and to hope that some of them may find my book acceptable as an honest attempt to grapple once more with this central problem. And I am fortified by the knowledge that a few influential contemporary philosophers adhere to the animistic conception of human personality, or at least regard the psycho-physical question as still open, as also by certain indications that the “ mechanistic dogma ” no longer holds the scientific world in so close a grip as during the later part of the nineteenth century. ^‘Animism,” writes Professor Tylor, «is, in fact, the ground- work of the Philosophy of Religion, from that of savages up to that of civilized men.”i And, though modern Pantheisms have generally rejected Animism, the statement remains substantially correct And it must be admitted that most of those who have defended Animism in the modern period have been openly or secretly moved by the desire to support religious doctrines ^ " Primitive Culture, i. p. 426. PREFACE XXV which they have accepted on other than scientific grounds. It follows that anyone who undertakes to defend the theory is liable to be suspected of a bias of this kind. These considerations are my apology for setting down here a personal confession, which may aid the reader in judging of the nature and degree of any bias that may have affected my presentation of the arguments for and against Animism. I believe that the future of religion is intimately bound up with the fate of Animism ; and especially I believe that, if science should continue to maintain the mechanistic dogma, and consequently to repudiate Animism, the belief in any form of life after the death of the body will continue rapidly to decline among all civilized peoples, and will, before many genera- tions have passed away, become a negligible quantity. Never- theless, I claim that the discussions of the following pages are conducted with as much impartiality as is possible for one to whom the argument seems to point strongly towards one of the rival hypotheses. For I can lay claim to no religious convictions ; I am not aware of any strong desire for any continuance of my person- ality after death ; and 1 could accept with equanimity a thorough- going Materialism, if that seemed to me the inevitable outcome of a dispassionate and critical reflection. Nevertheless, I am in sympathy with the religious attitude towards life ; and I should welcome the establishment of sure empirical founda- tions for the belief that human personality is not wholly de- stroyed by death. For, as was said above, I judge that this belief can only be kept alive if a proof of it, or at least a presumption in favour of it, can be furnished by the methods of empirical science. And it seems to me highly probable that the passing away of this belief would be calamitous for our civilization. For every vigorous nation seems to have possessed this belief, and the loss of it has accompanied the decay of national vigour in many instances. Apart from any hope of rewards or fear of punishment after death, the belief must have, it seems to me, a moralizing influence upon our thought and conduct that we can ill afford to dispense with. The admirable Stoic attitude of a Marcus Aurelius or a xxvi BODY AND MIND Huxley may suffice for those who rise to it in the moral environ- ment created by civilizations based upon a belief in a future life and upon other positive religious beliefs ; but I gravely doubt whether whole nations could rise to the level of an austere morality, or even maintain a decent working standard of conduct, after losing those beliefs. A proof that our life does not end with death, even though we knew nothing of the nature of the life beyond the grave, would justify the belief that we have our share in a larger scheme of things than the universe described by physical science ; and this conviction must add dignity, seriousness, and significance to our lives, and must thus throw a great weight into the scale against the dangers that threaten every advanced civilization. While, then, I should prefer for myself a confident anticipation of total extinction at death to a belief that I must venture anew upon a life of whose nature and conditions we have no knowledge, I desire, on impersonal grounds, to see the world-old belief in a future life established on a scientific founda- tion. To that extent, and to that extent only, I think, my inquiry is biassed. Finally, I wish to state emphatically that my inquiry is not conceived as a search for metaphysical truth, but that it is rather conducted by the methods and with the aims of all empirical science; that is to say, it aims at discovering the hypotheses which will enable us best to co-ordinate the chaotic data of immediate experience by means of a conceptual system as con- sistent as may be, while recognizing that such conceptions must always be subject to revision with the progress of science. Of course, if the term metaphysic be taken in the older sense as implying an inquiry into that which is not physical, the theme of this work is metaphysical ; but that is a usage which is no longer accepted ; metaphysic is now distinguished from empirical science by its aims and methods rather than by its subject-matter. I claim, then, for the conception of the soul, advocated in the last chapter of this book, no more than that it is an hypothesis which is indispensable to science at the present time. CONTENTS CHAPTER I ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD Primitive Animism or Anthropomorphism — The ghost-soul — Burial customs — Origin of ghost-soul — Ghost-soul not immaterial — Extension of original idea of soul — Survivals of ghost-soul — Hebrew Animism — Homeric Animism — The Ionian physicists — Post-Homei ic Animism — Greek Materialism — Plato — Aristotle — Stoicism and Scepticism .... CHAPTER II ANIMISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES Pneuma — Materialistic Animism of early Fathers — Spiritualisation of the soul — Neoplatonism — The Schoolmen — Averroism — Roman Materialism CHAPTER III ANIMISM AT THE TIME OF THE RENASCENCE OF LEARNING Pomponazzi — Vives — Telesio — Bruno — Physiology founded — Vesalius and Va n Helmont ... ...... CHAPTER IV ANIMISM IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Rise of modern Materialism — Descartes — Occasionalism — Leibnitz— Spinoza — Hobbes ... . . CHAPTER V ANIMISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The attack on ‘ ‘ Substance ” — Locke leads the attack — His dualism — The Deists — Bishop Berkeley’s idealism — Hume’s scepticism — ^The Wollf^an rationalism dominant on the Continent — French materialism of the “Enlightenment” — Kant’s reconciliation of Spiritualism with Materialism — The Vitalists CHAPTER VI ANIMISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The romantic speculation — Reaction against it — The modern phase of psycho- physical discussion introduced by Fechner — Modern defenders of Animism m Germany, France, Great Britain, and America .... I'AGES 1-27 28-38 39-45 46-60 61-78 79-86 XXVll xxviii BODY AND MIND CHAPTER VII MODERN DEVELOPMENTS OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE ADVERSE TO ANIMISM PAGES Solipsism unacceptable — The psycho-physical problem to be dealt with by methods of empincal science — Kinetic mechanism — The law of the conservation of energy 27-93 CHAPTER VIII THE RISE OF THE MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY AND OF THE “ PSYCHOLOGY WITHOUT A SOUL ” Hylozoism of the “ Enlightment Vitalists — Mechanical explanations of vital pro- cesses confidently assumed — The search for the seat of the soul fails — The doctrine of the reflex type of all nervous process — Unconscious cerebration — The association-psychology and the law of habit— The dependence of thought on integrity of brain-functions — The law of psycho-neural correlation — The composite nature of the mind ....... 94-118 CHAPTER IX THE INFLUENCE OF THE DARWINIAN THEORY Lamarckism — Neo-Darwinism — Organic adaptations mechanically explained — No need for teleology— Continuity of evolution — Interment of Animism by Tyndall ..... . . . 119-121 CHAPTER X CURRENT PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST ANIMISM Inconceivability of psycho-physical interaction — Variants of the inconceivability argument — Immediate knowledge of consciousness, but not of the soul — Rapprochement of science and philosophy on basis of Monism . 122-125 CHAPTER XI THE AUTOMATON THEORIES Epiphenomenalism— Its “ energetic ” variant— Psycho-physical Parallelism proper— Phenomenalistic Parallelism— Psychical Monism as expounded by Paulsen, Strong, Clifford, and Fechner— Fechner’s “proof” of the sub-conscious— Fechner’s “ day-view " of nature— Continuity of evolution — Psychical Monism compatible with scientific Materialism— Its many advantages , CONTENTS xxix CHAPTER XII EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON-THEORIES AND OF THE SPECIAL ARGUMENTS IN THEIR FAVOUR PAGES Epiphenomenalism combines the difficulties of materialism and of interaction — Parallelism proper must go on to accept the identity hypothesis in one or other of its two forms — The ' ‘ two-aspect doctrine ” meaningless — Therefore Psychical Monism ” the only form of Parallelism deserving of serious con- sideration — The difficulty of doing without "things” — My self is not my consciousness, but rather the sum of enduring conditions which we call the structure of the mind — Difficulties of the compounding of consciousnesses — Difficulties common to all forms of Parallelism — Universal consciousness — It necessitates assumption of unconscious consciousness — Parallelism of mechanical sequences with the logical and teleological . . . 149-178 CHAPTER XIII IS THERE ANY WAY OF ESCAPE FROM THE DILEMMA — ANIMISM OR PARALLELISM ? The acceptance of "idealism” does not absolve us from the psycho-physical problem — Kant neither resolved nor dissolved the problem — Three attitudes towards it of Post-Kantians, represented by Parallelism of Paulsen, the ambiguity of Lange, and the transubjective Idealism of Ward — The last implies Animism as hypothesis necessary to natural science . . 179-188 CHAPTER XIV ARGUMENTA AD HOMINEM Proposed dualism of science and philosophy — A calculable universe— -Animism does not necessarily imply metaphysical Dualism or Pluralism — Parallelism admits only pantheistic leligion — Parallelism incompatible with belief in any continu- ance of personality after death — Fechner, Kant, and Paulsen fail to reconcile the mechanistic dogma with human immortality — High authorities for and against Animism ......... 189-205 CHAPTER XV EXAMINATION OF THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST ANIMISM FROM EPISTEMOLOGY, “INCONCEIVABILITY,” AND THE LAW OF CONSERVATION OF ENERGY Necessity of giving all scientific explanation the mechanical form not proved — Guidance without work — Various possibilities — Argument from conservation of energy describes a circle — Difficulty of defining the " physical ” — Immediate awareness not the highest type of knowledge . . . 206-223 CHAPTER XVI EXAMINATION OF THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST ANIMISM DRAWN FROM PHYSIOLOGY AND GENERAL BIOLOGY Inadequate conceptions of intei action alone give plausibility to arguments from cerebral physiology — Continuity of evolution a postulate — But, if accepted, not fatal to Animism — Statistics and teleology — Abiogenesis . . . 224-234 XXX BODY AND MIND CHAPTER XVII THE INADEQUACY OF MECHANICAL CONCEPTIONS IN PHYSIOLOGY ^ Last half-century has done nothing to justify physiological materialism— The impossibility of mechanistic explanation of morphogenesis and heredity — Experimental embryology, restitution, and regeneration — Orp:anisms and machines — Organisms and the degradation of energy . . . • 235-245 CHAPTER XVIII INADEQUACY OF MECHANICAL PRINCIPLES TO EXPLAIN ORGANIC EVOLUTION Neo-Darwinism based on mechanistic assumption in regard to heredity — Natural selection implies the struggle for existence — Difficulties of Neo-Darwinism — Diminished by “ organic selection ’’—But this is a teleological principle— Muta- tions not fortuitous— Regeneration not explicable on Darwinian principles — Resuscitation of Vitalism— Appendix on organic selection . . . 246-257 CHAPTER XIX INADEQUACY OF MECHANICAL CONCEPTIONS TO EXPLAIN ANIMAL AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR The " total reactions” of animalcules are not tropisms — Persistence and “trial and error ’* among the lowest animals— Purely instinctive actions initiated by per- ceptions which involve mental synthesis — Instinctive actions co-operating with intelligence imply more extensive synthesis — Meaning and purpose as factors in instinctive behaviour — Human instincts — “Meaning” is an essential link between sense-impression and reaction — ^Values . . . 258-271 CHAPTER XX THE ARGUMENT TO PSYCHO-PHYSICAL INTERACTION FROM THE “DISTRIBUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS” Darwinism implies the usefulness of consciousness — And not merely of infra-con- sciousness, but of integrated personal consciousness — True consciousness accompanies not all nervous processes, but only those which result m modifi- cation .... ... 272-280 CHAPTER XXI THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS Two lines of argument — The metaphysical (Lotze) valid, but not capable of con- vincing — The physiological — The sensortum commune^ variously conceived — All these conceptions untenable— No physical medium of composition of effects of sense-stimuli— Some medium demanded by our intellect — Why refuse to trust it?— Fechner’s doctrine of the threshold and of psycho-physical con- tinuity— The facts of sensory "fusion ” incompatible with Parallelism, however stated — Multiple personality ...... 281-300 CONTENTS XXXI CHAPTER XXII THE PSYCHO-PHYSICS OF “MEANING” The association-psychology ignored “meaning” — But without meaning “ideas” are meaningless — The doctrine of the “psychic fringe” — Spatial meanings are not identical with clusters of kinaesthetic sensations— Sensations are merely cues to meanings — And meanings are relatively independent of sensa- tions and have no physical parallels ...... CHAPTER XXIII PLEASURE, PAIN, AND CONATION The facts of feeling-tqne — Feeling has no immediate correlate among the brain- processes — Yet feeling determines the trend of thought and action — Feeling and the establishment of associations — Feeling and evolution — The peculiarities of conative process have no physical analogues . CHAPTER XXIV MEMORY Parallelism implies that all mental retention can be described in terms of brain- structure — The fantastic ‘ ‘ memory-cell”— Motor-habit the type of all retention founded in brain-structure — But true memory cannot be identified with habit — The law of neural association as generally stated is false — All remembering involves co-operation of two factors, habit and true memory — Suggestion towards a theory of memory ... ... CHAPTER XXV THE BEARING OF THE RESULTS OF “PSYCHICAL RESEARCH” ON THE PSYCHO- PHYSICAL PROBLEM The search for empirical evidence of survival — Telepathy seems to be established — Hypernormal control of bodily by mental processes — Post-hypnotic apprecia- tion of time ......... CHAPTER XXVI CONCLUSION Animism preferable to Parallelism — Four varieties of Animism — The animistic “actuelle Seele” — The transmission theory of James and Bergson — The objections to the soul-theory flimsy, if psycho-physical interaction is accepted — The contentless soul — The soul a developing system of psychical disposi- tions — Multiple personalities are of two kinds, both consistent with the soul- theory— The vegetative functions of the soul — The soul-theory and organic evolution .......... PAGES 301-311 312-329 330*346 347-354 3S5-379 Index . . 381-384 BODY AND MIND CHAPTER I ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD I T would seem that from a very remote period men of almost all races have entertained the belief that the living man differs from the corpse in that his body contains some more subtle thing or principle which determines its purposive movements, its growth and self-repair, and to which is due his capacity for sensation, thought, and feeling. For the belief in some such animating principle, or soul, is held by almost every existing race of men, no matter how lowly their grade of culture nor how limited their mental powers ; and we find evidences of a similar belief among the earliest human records. Among the more highly civilized peoples, the soul has generally been regarded by the more cultured members of each community as an immaterial being or agency ; but the distinction between material and immaterial things was only achieved after long ages of discussion and by many steps of refinement of the conception of the soul The belief most widely current among the peoples of lower culture is that each man consists, not only of the body which is constantly present among his fellows, but also of a shadowy vapour-like duplicate of his body ; this shadow-like image, the animating principle of the living organism, is thought to be capable of leaving the body, of transporting itself rapidly, if not instantaneously, from place to place, and of manifesting in those places all or most of the powers that it exerts in the body during waking life. Sleep is regarded as due to its temporary withdrawal from the body ; trance, coma, and other serious illness, as due to longer absence ; and death is thought to imply its final departure to some distant place. That this belief is a very real one among many peoples, is shown by their careful observance of customs in which it finds 1 2 BODY AND MIND expression. Thus, among some of the peoples who entertain this belief, it is customary to avoid wakening a sleeper, lest his wander- ing soul should not return to him ; and, if it becomes absolutely necessary to waken him, it is done as gradually as possible, in order that his soul may have time to find its way back to the body. Or again, the friends of a sick person will procure a medicine-man, who, falling into trance, will send his soul after the retreating soul, to arrest it if possible on its journey toward the land of the dead, and to lead it back to the body of the patient. And after death the friends or relatives will take all possible measures to aid the departing soul on its journey, and to promote its welfare m the land of shades, where it is believed to lead a life very much like that of its embodied state in this world.^ The burial customs of many peoples afford the best evidence that the disembodied soul is conceived as like in all essential respects to the living whole of soul and body. The widespread custom of killing slaves or wives on the death of a man of some importance is an expression of the belief that the souls of the victims will accompany his soul and will continue to serve it as they served him before death. And the even more widely spread custom of burying or burning with the body of the dead man his most valued possessions, especially weapons and ornaments, is due to the belief that even these things have their shadowy duplicates or ghost-souls, which can be carried away by the departing soul and used by it as the real objects were used by the living man. Professor E. B. Tylor first clearly expounded this primitive conception of the ghost-soul, showed its wide distribution in space and time, and illustrated with a wealth of detail its many varia- tions, in his celebrated chapters on Animism ; ^ and there can be no reasonable doubt that he has given the true account of its origin, in attributing it in the main to reflection upon the experi- ences of dreams and visions, in conjunction with the objectively observed facts of sleep, trance, and death. In sleep, while the body lies at rest, the sleeper remains unconscious of the surround- ings of his body ; he seems to himself to visit other scenes, to meet and converse with other persons, and to have the use in these dream-adventures of his dress and weapons. In visions and ^ Among the Kayans of Borneo, for example, it is the custom for an elderly person learned in such matters to sit beside the corpse, where the soul is sup- posed to hover for some days after death, and to impart to the latter minute directions for its journey to the land of the dead. 2 Primitive Culture,” first edition, London, 1871 ; especially chap. xi. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 3 in dreams he sees, too, the shadowy forms of dead friends. Since, then, most savages regard their dream-experiences as equally real with those of waking life, they naturally and inevitably arrive at the theory that the ghost-self, which in dreams can appear in distant places, leaving the deserted body in death-like stillness, is identical with the animating principle. It is sometimes said that primitive man conceives the ghost- soul as material ; while Professor Tylor describes it as a spiritual- istic conception. But to describe the primitive ghost-soul as either matter or spirit is misleading ; if these terms are to be applied to it, we must describe it as a material spirit This is, of course, a contradiction in terms, which we can only resolve by recognizing that the peoples who believe in the ghost-soul have not achieved the comparatively modern distinction between material and immaterial or spiritual existents. It is clear that the ghost-soul is generally conceived as having many of the pro- perties of matter, and as having the same needs as the embodied soul, as subject to the pains of cold and heat, of hunger and thirst, and as being bound, though less strictly than the body, by con- ditions of space and matter. This quasi-materiality of the ghost-soul is well illustrated by the custom, observed among many peoples, of making a hole in the roof or wall of the death- chamber for the exit of the departing soul, or by that of sinking a bamboo tube through the earth above the buried corpse in order to allow the soul to revisit it Two things seem chiefly to have determined the form of the primitive belief as to the substance of the ghost-soul, namely,* the shadow and the breath. Each man’s shadow is an impalpable something which has a certain likeness to the man, and which accompanies him when actively employed, but which disappears when he lies down in sleep or death. And the breath that comes and goes from his nostrils seems bound up with his life, and dis- appears at death. In some regions the new-born babe is held to the mouth of a dying person, in order to receive his escaping soul or breath. And language clearly shows the important part played by the ideas of the shadow and of the breath in such words as manes and shade, spirit, spiritus^ anima^ animus^ pneumUy and in similar words of many other languages. The conception of the ghost-soul cannot be better defined than in the following words of Professor Tylor, from whose classical account the foregoing brief description has been con- BODY AND MIND 4 densed. He writes : “ It is a thin, unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of vapour, film, or shadow ; the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates ; independently possess- ing the personal consciousness and volition of its corporeal owner, past or present ; capable of leaving the body far behind, to flash swiftly from place to place ; mostly impalpable and invisible, yet also manifesting physical power, and especially appearing to men waking or asleep as a phantasm separate from the body of which it bears the likeness ; continuing to exist and appear to men after the death of that body ; able to enter into, possess, and act in the bodies of other men, of animals, and even of things.” ^ Since the publication of ‘‘Primitive Culture,” the origin of Animism has been the subject of much discussion and con- troversy ; but in their main outlines Dr Tylor’s account of the ghost-soul, and his theory of the genesis of the idea, seem to remain unshaken. Mr Andrew Lang has urged that waking hallucinations or apparitions (in , common phrase, the seeing of ghosts) may have played an important part in developing the idea. Mr R. R. Marett ^ and others have attempted to describe a pre-animistic conception, which attributed an ill-defined power or virtue to all things that evoked awe in the mind of primitive man ; it is suggested that this notion was the common matrix from which ideas of the souls of men, animals, and plants, anthropo- morphic conceptions of natural forces, the ideas of gods and demons, in fact, all ideas of spiritual existences, have been differentiated. These are interesting suggestions which, in so far as they are accepted (and to me a strong case seems to be made out for both views), are to be regarded as supplementing Dr Tylor s doctrine, rather than as conflicting with it ^ ^ Primitive Culture,” third edition, vol. i p 429... 2 The Threshold of Religion,” London, 1908. 2 More recently Mr A. E. Crawley has published a work (” The Idea of the Soul ”) in which he claims to have completely refuted Dr Tylor’s theory of the origin of the ghost -soul, and to have established a rival. To my mind the weight of the arguments brought forward against Dr Tyior’s view is a negligible quantity, and the hjqiothesis proposed as an alternative seems highly improbable. Mr Crawley maintains that the visual images of waking life are the source from which primitive man derived his ideas of the souls of men and things. Though this view cannot be seriously entertained as a sub- stitute for Dr Tylor’s theory, it may, I think, be regarded as supplementing it, by drawing attention to a factor which may have played some considerable part in the genesis of the ghost-soul, and which, perhaps, has not been sufficiently taken into account. The tendency to visualize our dead friends, when we think ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 5 The ascription by primitive men of ghost-souls to animals, plants, and inert objects, is probably regarded as an extension of the theory first arrived at by reflection on the problem of human life. Such extension was rendered almost inevitable by the fact that persons met in dreams and visions, as well as the dreamer himself, seem to have about them their dogs, their weapons, their dress, and other material objects. It seems probable also that the ghost-soul of man was the first definite conception of personal intelligent powers, living and working in detachment from ordinary solid matter and all the narrow limitations of embodied existence. If so, the developments of ideas of other powers of a similar, but non-human, nature, demons, gods, spirits good and evil of all sorts, must have been in large degree merely extensions and differentiations of this fundamental notion of the human ghost-soul.^ In various ages and places many variants of this primitive conception of the ghost-soul have been held ; some savages, for example, agree with certain philosophers of classical antiquity in assigning to each man two, three, or even four souls of different functions. But the diversities of the opinions of uncultured peoples on this great subject are far less striking than the uniformities ; and the theory of the ghost-soul is so widely distributed throughout all regions of the world, and gives so natural and satisfactory explanations of so many facts that force themselves upon the attention of men of every grade of culture, that we may suppose it to have been independently reached by many peoples. So concordant is it with the way of thinking of unsophisticated mankind, that it has lived on up to the present day in the popularly accepted traditions of almost all the peoples of the world ; and every feature of the primitive conception is illustrated by practices and beliefs still current among the most highly civilized peoples of Europe. Even the belief in the materiality of the soul still finds expression in the custom of opening the door or window of the death-chamber to give free egress to the departing soul,^ and in the German superstition ^ of them, is strong in most of ns, and perhaps stronger in the men of primitive culture than in others. And this tendency may well have facilitated the develop- ment of the notion of the ghost-soul by reflection upon the facts of sleep, dream, trance, and death. ^ This is the view forcibly defended by Prof. W. Wundt in his Volher-psycho- logte (second edition, vol. iv. part i.), Leipzig, 1910. * Primitive Culture,” vol. i. p. 454. ® Ihid., vol. i. p. 455. 6 BODY AND MIND that the ghost-soul of a mother who dies in child-birth will return to suckle the infant and will leave the impress of its weight upon the bed. The history of Animism throughout the course of the develop- ment of European civilization affords one of the most striking illustrations of the law that, in every civilized community, two streams of tradition, two strata of belief and custom, persist side by side, influencing one another, but never fusing : namely, the stream of popular tradition and the literary tradition of the cultured few. Throughout the development of European civilization, popular beliefs regarding the nature and destiny of the human soul have remained vague, diversified, and fluctuating. Although, amid all changes, the primitive conception of the ghost -soul has persisted in the popular mind, for just the same reasons as have led to its independent adoption by so many savage peoples ; it has been modified in various ways, and partially overlaid and obscured, by the teachings of the leaders of religious, philoso- phical, and scientific thought. The elements taken up by the popular tradition from these sources have been for the most part logically incompatible with the theory of the ghost-soul ; and this incompatibility has no doubt played a principal part in preventing, within the stream of popular tradition, the formation of any definite and generally accepted notion, and in maintaining in every age among large numbers of the people a sceptical or negative attitude towards the doctrine of a future life. The further civilization has progressed, the more chaotic has the state of popular opinion upon this great question become ; until, at the present time, there is current among us almost every variety of opinion and belief that the foregoing generations have excogitated. To attempt to trace the devious and many-branched course of the muddy stream of popular tradition would be a hopeless task. In the following pages I am concerned only with the history of Animism in the culture-tradition. I have to attempt to show how, starting with primitive Animism, the culture- tradition has successively modified it and refined it ; until at the present day the venerable doctrine seems to be on the point of being finally dismissed to the anthropologists’ museum of curiosities. The principal influences that differentiated the Animism of ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 7 the culture-tradition from primitive Animism, and set it upon its long and troubled course, were: (i) the teachings of the Hebrew prophets ; (2) the speculations of the theologians and philosophers of ancient Greece; and (3) the efforts of the Christian fathers, influenced by the culture-tradition of the ancient Greek world as well as by that of the Hebrews, to set up a consistent and generally acceptable doctrine of the soul among the dogmas of the Church. The operation of these influences will be briefly traced in the present and in the following chapter. The primitive Hebrew conception of the soul was essentially the same as the ghost-soul of so many other peoples. As the Rev. Prof. Charles points out,^ we must distinguish the earlier from the later view expressed in the Old Testament. According to the earlier view, “man consists of two elements, spirit or soul and body ” ; “ the soul is the seat of feeling and desire, and, in a secondary degree, of the intelligence, and is identified with the personality ; the soul leaves the body at death (though, as by so many other peoples, it was thought of as hovering in its neighbourhood for some time after death) to pass to the dark underworld of the souls of the dead, Sheol. “ The relations and customs of earth were reproduced in Sheol. Thus the prophet was distinguished by his mantle, kings by their crowns and thrones, the uncircumcised by his foreskin. Each nation also preserved its individuality, and no doubt its national garb and customs. . . . Indeed the departed were regarded as reproducing exactly the same features as marked them at the moment of death.” And the ghost-souls of ancestors were believed to have knowledge of their descendants and to benefit from their ministrations Under the teaching of the prophets and the development of Monotheism, the spirit began to be dis- tinguished from the soul ; and, while the soul remained as the vital principle of the body and as the seat of all the mental activities, it was not conceived as surviving the death of the body — “ in death the soul is extinguished and only the spirit survives. But since the spirit is only the impersonal force of life common to men and brutes, it returns to the Fount of all life, and thus all personal existence ceases at death.” “ In the above threefold division of man’s personality the spirit and soul are distinct alike 1 A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, in Judaism, and in Christianity,” by R. H. Charles, D.D. 8 BODY AND MIND in essence and origin. The former is the impersonal basis of life coming from God, and returning on death to God. The latter, which is the personal factor in man, is simply the supreme function of the quickened body, and perishes on the withdrawal of the spirit.'’ Hence, according to this later view, the soul is annihilated at the death of the body, and Sheol, the abode of the souls, became a synonym of Abaddon or destruction.” But, says Prof. Charles, “this doctrine never succeeded in dispossessing the older and rival doctrine ; their conflicting views of soul and spirit were current together ” ^ ; that is to say, the primitive con- ception of the ghost-soul lived on among the Hebrews alongside the later developed and, doubtless, less popular, because more difficult, conception. Just as among the Hebrews the notion of the ghost-soul continued to be widely entertained, in spite of the teaching by the prophets of a more difficult conception of human personality ; so also among the Greeks the ghost-soul retained its place in popular belief, while the philosophers developed a literary tradition in which the conception of the soul underwent many changes, and in which almost every phase of later speculation upon this topic was either foreshadowed or definitely taught. The pages of Homer show clearly enough that the Greeks of the Homeric age believed in the ghost-soul. But their conception differed markedly in certain respects from the typical ghost-soul of primitive Animism and of so many savage and barbarous peoples in all ages. The typical ghost-soul enjoys all the powers, both bodily and mental, of the living man, and differs from the man chiefly in being less substantial and less strictly subject to limitations of time and space ; but the ghost-soul of the Homeric Greeks, the eidolon {ilhcaXov) or psyche was not conceived as the bearer of the mental faculties, or at least not as enjoying the whole of the mental faculties of the living man. It was rather a shadowy image merely, which leaves the body of the dying man by way of the mouth or gaping wound ; and this shadow or shade, descending to Hades, enjoyed but the shadow of its former life and powers. The strength and will, the intellect and mental powers in general, were supposed to reside in the region of the diaphragm and to be dissolved or annihilated at the death of the body. Disembodied minds were unknown to ^ Op. cttf p. 44. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 9 the Greeks of this age ; even their gods lived upon the earth, and were fully incarnate in bodies which differed from those of men only in that they were subject to neither disease nor death. The shades, once banished to Hades, were strictly imprisoned there ; and thus the Homeric world was freed from the terror of ghosts that has haunted, and still haunts, almost all other peoples. And the cult of the dead had no recognized place in that world ; for the dead were incapable of influencing the living for good or ill. It is clear, then, that the Homeric Greeks had departed widely from primitive Animism ; that they had modified it in a way natural to their vigorous, joyous, and but little religious dis- position, in a period of national expansion and victorious self- assertion. There is no reason to doubt that at an earlier period Animism of the more usual kind had been current among them ; traces of this, and of the cult of the dead appropriate to it, survive in the story of Achilles and Patroclus and of the funeral sacrifices of wine, sheep, oxen, horses, and Trojan youths. These seem to have been but ceremonial survivals of a cult of souls that had prevailed in an earlier age, when souls were dreaded for their active powers of intervention in human life.^ There appears in the Homeric writings a foretaste of that tendency to the reification of abstractions which was to play so great a part in the philosophy of later ages. The psyche is sometimes identified with life ; and the mental powers, regarded as resident in the region of the diaphragm, are sometimes attri- buted to the or /SouXjJ, entities which, though belonging to the body, are not identified with any bodily organs. The continuance of the ghost-soul in Hades did not constitute a survival of personality ; for to the Greeks of this age the body was an essential part of personality. Nevertheless there appears in Homer, possibly as a late addition, the belief in the immortality of a favoured few. This immortality was not an immortality of the soul alone, but rather of the whole person, who was conceived as transported bodily by the favour of some divinity to ‘‘ the isles of the blest,” or to “ the Elysian fields,” a distant region of the earth which might yet be discovered by the daring voyager. This notion, probably a poetic invention, was given a permanent place in popular belief by its embodiment in the Homeric poems ; ^ In this brief account of the Homeric and post-Homeric beliefs I follow Hrwin Rhode’s “ Psyche,” second edition, Leipzig, 1906. 10 BODY AND MIND it was a natural supplement to the peculiar form that Greek Animism had assumed. The Homeric beliefs continued to be generally held up to the sixth century B.C. ; but a new class of immortals arose, men who, like the dwellers in the Happy Isles, had not known death, but who, by the power of some god, were engulfed in some deep chasm or cave, swallowed by earthquake, or struck but not killed by the bolt of Zeus ; and these heroes became in many cases the centres of local cults. It was probably under the influence of this belief and of these cults that the pre-Homeric belief in the survival of the personality after death was revived. Hesiod’s doctrine of the Golden Age seems to have played a considerable part in restoring this belief For he taught that, though the men of the Golden Age had died, their souls were raised by the will of Zeus to a life even fuller and richer than that they had enjoyed in the body ; and these souls, partaking of the immortal nature of the gods, and known like them as Daemons, were regarded by him as wandering invisible among men, seeing their good and their evil deeds. There can be little doubt that these influences played a con- siderable part in bringing into prominence in the religious life of post- Homeric Greece a new cult of the dead. Not all men were held to survive the death of the body, but only great leaders, men who in life had bulked large in the eyes of their fellows. At this time earth-burial had replaced the funeral pyre of the Homeric age, and the soul of the dead hero was believed to hover in the neighbourhood of the tomb where his bones were laid. Since these surviving souls were held to be capable of affecting the welfare of men, especially of their own descendants, they became the objects of local and family cults and of propitiatory rites. Wine, honey, oil, and burnt sheep were offered to the dead hero ; and the whole cult implied the belief that the dead man lived on among his people but little changed by death. This survival did not imply immortality of the soul ; rather the con- tinuance of the soul depended upon the maintenance of the cult by the friends, especially the family, of the dead hero. The hero attained this life after death by the favour of some god, generally announced by the Delphic oracle ; but the process became easier and more frequent, and the heroes multiplied rapidly, until it was customary to regard as surviving in this way all that fell in glorious battle. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD li A still wider gate to the life after death was opened by the Eleusinian Mysteries. These were derived from the cult of Demeter and Persephone of Eleusis, the local divinities of the underworld. The cult was adopted by Athens, and became ever more widely open ; until even slaves were admitted to initiation. Those initiated to participation in this cult were held to be assured of a future life less shadowy and unreal than the life of the dim underworld of shades, which still was all that the uninitiated could look forward to. Thus the hope of a future life became possible to all men ; but still there was no general acceptance of a belief in the immortality of the soul. This first appeared in Greece with the Dionysiac cult, whose central feature was a mystic union of the worshipper with the god. In the original form of the cult as practised in Thrace, the wor- shippers gave themselves up to a wild dance. In the excitement of the dance they attained an ecstatic exaltation which they believed to imply their possession by the bull-god ; the soul of the ecstatic was supposed to depart from his body and to wander in distant scenes, holding communion with gods and daemons. From Thrace this cult spread throughout all Greece, fusing with the cult of Apollo. Under its influence the populace became familiar with the notion that the soul, with all the mental faculties, is separable from the body ; and under the same influence there sprang up the belief that the soul is formed for a higher destiny than its life in the body, that it is clogged and held down by its association with the body, and that it must be freed from this degrading influence by purificatory and ascetic rites. In the Orphic cult these ideas were further developed, until the soul was regarded as having its true life among the gods, its life in the body being a temporary banishment from this true or higher life. The soul at death goes to judgment in the under- world. Thence it returns to be reincarnated again and again, until it is wholly purified ; when it is set free to live for ever with the gods. In fact, under the influence of the Dionysiac and Orphic cults, the soul came to be regarded as a god imprisoned in the body.^ But immortality had always been the most funda- mental attribute of the gods, and thus the human soul, by assimilation to the gods, became immortal. While Animism was developing towards the theory of human ^ Rhode, op. cit., II. S. 133. 12 BODY AND MIND immortality of the Orphic theologians, the philosophers known as the Ionian physicists initiated, in the sixth century B.C., that pro- longed effort to learn by pure unprejudiced reasoning the ultimate nature of things which we call European philosophy. It was their principal aim to exhibit the whole world as the manifestation of some fundamental and primary mode of being. And this aim led them to reject from the outset both the Animism of popular opinion and that of the theologians. For them the soul of man was but one mode of manifestation of the power which moves and works in all things, without which the world would be dead and motionless and unchanging. The psyche of these philosophers had nothing in common with the psyche of the Homeric traditions. The word was used by them to denote the powers of thinking, feeling, willing (and the untranslatable which, according to the Homeric tradition, were bodily functions resident about the diaphragm. Nor was their psyche an individual immortal being like that of the Animism of the Orphic priesthood. The question as to personal immortality seemed meaningless to these philo- sophers ; nevertheless, since the soul is the working in man of the power that moves all things, the universal life itself, it is, in a sense, imperishable and immortal. So conceived, “ the soul acquired a new dignity; in another sense than that of the mystics and the theologians, it could be claimed as divine ; in the sense, namely, that it is a partial manifestation of the one power which builds and guides the universe. Not a single daemon is it, but the divine power itself.” ^ The principal Ionian physicists adopted different views of the nature of that which they sought as the foundation and origin of all things. Thales (B.c. 636), the first of them, held that the fundamental element is water ; Anaximenes, that it is the universal air, “Diogenes adopted the tenet of Anaximenes respecting Air as the origin of things ; but he gave a wider and deeper significance to the tenet by pointing out the analogy of air with the soul (or life). . . . The air is a soul ; therefore it is living and intelligent. But this Force of Intelligence is a higher thing than the air through which it manifests itself; it must con- sequently be prior in point of time ; it must be the philosophers have sought. The Universe is a living being, spontaneously evolving itself, deriving its transformations from its own vitality.” ^ Thus air was for Diogenes but the symbol of mind. Rhode, op, cit.y II. S. 143. ^ Lewes’ “History of Philosophy,” vol. i. p. ii. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 13 Heraclitus (503 B.C.), who belongs to this group of thinkers, elaborated this type of speculation on the basis of the assump- tion that fire is the principle of life and action which works in the perpetual fiux of things. ‘‘Whatever in the manifold of phenomena partakes of the nature of the divine fire is for Heraclitus soul, and soul is fire. Fire and soul are interchange- able notions, and so the soul of man also is fire, a part of the universal vital fire which envelops it, and through the inbreathing of which the soul maintains itself alive, a part of the universal reason, by participation in which the soul itself is reasonable. In man lives the god. Not that, as in the doctrine of the theo- logians, he descends as a closed individuality into the form of a single human being ; but, as a unity, he envelops mankind, per- meating men as with tongues of fire. A part of the all-wisdom lives in the soul of man ; . . . the soul is such a part of the universal fire which, absorbed into the flux of existing forms, is bound up and interwoven with the bodily functions.’’ ^ The fire which is the soul perpetually converts itself into the water and earth of which the body is composed, and thus builds up the body ; while it renews itself by drafts from the universal fire. The soul, being thus constantly in process of conversion into the lower elements and constantly renewed, is no enduring self-identical entity. “ So long as the soul renews itself from the enveloping world-fire, the individual lives. Separation from the source of all life, the universal fire, would be death. Now and then, in sleep and dreams, the individual soul loses its life-giving connexion with the universal fire and is for a time shut up in its own world, and this is a partial death. . . . There comes a moment at which the soul of man can no longer make good what it loses in the process of metabolism, and then comes death.” Thus the individual dies, but the universal fire is eternal, “ The question as to individual immortality, or even the continuance of the individual soul, has scarcely any meaning for Heraclitus. . . . The indi- vidual as a separate being has no value and significance ; the perpetuation of this separate existence (if it were possible) would seem to him an absurdity. For him only the fire as a whole is eternal ; not its separate manifestations in individuals, but only the universal energy which transmutes itself into all things and reabsorbs all things into itself.” ^ ^ Rhode, op. ctt.. II. S. 146, * Op. cit., II., S. 154. u BODY AND MIND For the Ionian philosophers of nature, the soul was, then, a part of nature, and psychology a part of natural science. There was for them no distinction between the physical and the psychical ; rather, all things, including life and mind, were manifestations of one universal energy.^ Though philosophy had thus begun its course by the rejection of Animism, it was not long before the popular doctrine found a powerful defender among the philosophers. Pythagoras founded his school and acquired a great influence, hardly a generation after Thales appeared as the first of the philosophers. The Ionian philosophy, contemplating the whole of nature, had wellnigh over- looked man, regarding him as but an insignificant fragment of the whole. Pythagoras restored man and the problems of human nature to their position of prime and central importance, giving the soul of man a central position in his doctrine. The human soul was conceived as in the Animism then current in the dominant religious sect, namely, as the double of the visible body and as a daemon, i.e. a godlike and immortal being fallen from the divine heights in which is its true home, and shut up in the body for punishment The soul was distinguished from the body as something opposed to nature, rather than a part of it. Even during its sojourn in the body it has no organic relation to it, but maintains uncontaminated its peculiar nature. It does not constitute the personality of the man, for any soul may inhabit any body ; and after death it tarries in Hades, whence it returns again and again to earth, seeking each time a new body for its abode. So it wanders during long ages, inhabiting in turn many human and animal bodies ; its fate at each incarnation being deter- mined by its actions during its preceding periods of embodied life. But it is immortal, and in its essence an unchanging individual being. Its ultimate destiny is to be freed from the bonds of the natural life of the body, and to return to dwell for ever in the supernatural realm of pure souls whence it came. The practical aspect and ultimate aim of the Pythagorean philosophy was to learn how to hasten this return of the soul to its divine home by means of ascetic and purificatory rites. ^ The conception of energy current at the present day was of course unknown to the ancients ; but if, in the teachings of Herachtus, we substitute energy for fire, we shall realize that he was striving after the modern conception, and that he foreshadowed the modern doctrine of the conservation of energy and the view, upheld at the present time by some distinguished physicists, according to which both mind and matter are but manifestations of the universal energy. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 15 Thus, at the very dawn of philosophy, we find the leading thinkers arrayed in the opposed camps of naturalistic Monism and animistic Pluralism. Another very influential philosopher, Empedocles (b.c. 444), gave to the soul a position very similar to that which it occu- pied in the Pythagorean doctrine. His teaching differed from the latter in that he attempted the impossible task of combining a wide-ranging Animism, similar to the Pythagorean, with a thoroughgoing Hylozoism like that of the Ionian school. The soul was for him “ of a divine order, too noble for this visible world, only on release from which it will attain its full and true life. Banished to the body, it leads there its separate existence ; not everyday perception and feeling is its part, nor even reasoning, which is the function of the heart’s blood ; but in the ' higher ’ modes of thought and in ecstatic ‘ exaltation ’ only is it active ; to it belongs the philosophical insight which, penetrating beyond the apprehension of the narrow range of sensory experience, knows the totality of the world’s being according to its true nature.” ^ About the same time that Empedocles thus formulated anew the animistic philosophy, Anaxagoras and Democritus took up again the way of thought of the Ionian school, and the latter especially carried it to a more definite issue than had been reached by any of his predecessors. Anaxagoras occupies a middle position between the animists and the naturalists For him the universal power that moves and orders all things is Reason (voDg). Wherever in the world life and movement appear, there this universal power is active. Its activity within an animated being constitutes the soul of that being. At death, therefore, the individual soul ceases to exist, but the supreme power remains. Yet so uncertain still was the distinction between matter and spirit that, according to Lewes, the supreme energy “ was only the abstract form of the vital principle animating animals and plants,” and ‘‘ was simply one among the numerous agents, material like the rest, and only differing from them in being pure ” ; and Grote says of it that it is one substance or form of matter among the rest, but thinner than all of them, thinner even than fire or air.” Democritus (B.c. 460) gave the speculations of the Ionian school a more modern and definitely materialistic form by reducing all things to material atoms and their movements. ^ Rhode, op, cit., II. S. 185. BODY AND MIND l6 The atom was an indivisible unit constantly in motion, and by impact with others constantly imparting and receiving motion. The soul, that which animates living beings, consists also of atoms, w'hich are peculiar only in being finer, smoother, more rounded, and therefore more mobile, than any others ; these finest atoms permeate the whole body and produce the phenomena of life. These soul atoms are drawn in with the breath, and, when they are no longer breathed in, death ensues. Democritus is assigned by Rhode the distinction of being the first Greek thinker explicitly to deny that the individual may in any sense survive the death of the body. Democritus’ conception of the soul was thus very different from the primitive ghost-soul ; nevertheless this latter conception seems to have been familiar to him and to have been used by him in a novel manner ; he first proposed a theory of percep- tion, teaching that, when we see solid objects, it is because these objects throw off shadow-like images of themselves (j’JhwXa,) which enter the eye and pass through it into the soul. As Professor Tylor^ has pointed out, there is good reason to believe that these itboiXa were the ghost-souls of popular belief adapted to serve a new purpose ; in this changed capacity the ghost-soul survived for long ages in the literary tradition. Protagoras, the pupil of Democritus, developed into a thoroughgoing sensationalism his master’s doctrine that thought and sensation are identical, and thus provided the mental atomism which has always been the necessary supplement of metaphysical materialism. The pre-Socratic philosophy thus culminated in a thorough- going Materialism. The doctrine of the Ionian philosophers was not properly Materialism, for the distinction between matter and spirit had not yet been clearly drawn. It is impossible to say that their universal principles {e.g, the air of Diogenes, the fire of Heraclitus) were more nearly allied to the spiritual or to the physical, as conceived by later thought Nor did the conception of the soul entertained by the animistic philosophers imply any clear distinction between the material or physical and the spiritual or mental, such as has been commonly maintained in later ages. For them it seems to have retained something of the nature of the daemon of the theologians from which it derived, and this in turn was but the ghost-soul of primitive Animism, glorified by ^ “ Primitive Culture," vol. i p. 497. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 17 assimilation to the nature of the gods, but still, like them, incompletely dematerialized. That the distinction was not clearly drawn by the Pythago- reans appears from the fact that they saw in the motes, which dance in the sunbeam with apparently spontaneous movement, discarnate souls seeking new bodies, in which to take up again their earth- life. And that Empedocles also failed to achieve this distinction is shown by his assigning to the body all the mental functions, save only those which he regarded as of the most exalted kind and alone worthy of the soul, namely, processes of ecstatic vision and philosophic intuition. Democritus, by giving greater definition to the notion of matter and by describing the universe as composed wholly of atoms of matter in motion, sharpened the issue between Materialism and Animism, and prepared the way for the clearer distinction between matter and spirit which Plato established in the literary tradition of Europe, and to the abolition of which the efforts of modern philosophers have been so largely directed. Plato's teaching in regard to the soul and its relation to the body is scattered through a number of the dialogues, which were written at considerable intervals of time ; and during the long course of his philosophic activity his views seem to have under- gone considerable changes. Partly for this reason, and partly because much of what he wrote of the soul took the form of symbolism in the myths, whose aim was moral and aesthetic rather than strictly scientific, it is impossible to summarize his doctrine in any clear-cut and entirely consistent statement. The view of the soul expressed in the earlier dialogues is part of an ontological scheme whose nature was largely determined by ethical considerations. Two realms of being are distinguished ; on the one hand the realm of intelligible and true Being, consisting of the timeless unchanging Ideas ; on the other hand the realm of Becoming, to which belong all objects of sense-perception (including, of course, the human body). Souls are existences of a third class, whose function it is to mediate between these two realms. Their position in this ontological scheme is peculiar. They belong in a sense to both realms, for they are active in both. Souls have affinity to or kinship with the Ideas, and it is in virtue only of their kinship 1 8 BODY AND MIND that they are able to contemplate and know the Ideas. Like the Ideas, they are wholly immaterial and wholly real ; yet they are necessarily different from them, if only because they know them, and because they are subject to change in their intercourse with the realm of becoming. But the soul differs still more widely from the body, with whose nature it has nothing in common. The soul’s activities are of two principal kinds, knowing and moving or causing movement The cognitive activity is exercised in two very different ways : on the one hand, by immediate contemplation of the Ideas the soul attains true knowledge ; on the other hand, by the aid of the bodily faculties, it becomes aware of the objects of the sensible world ; and these stir up within it imperfect reminiscences of the Ideas of which they are the symbols or shadows. These two modes of cognitive activity, distinguished as Reason (vovg) and Sense and sometimes referred to by Plato as functions of different parts of the soul, were regarded as yielding two kinds of knowledge of very different value, true knowledge and mere opinion respectively. In regard to the soul’s function as a principle of movement, it is to be noted that, whereas earlier philosophers had generally regarded the soul (or soul-atoms) as moving spontaneously in space and as capable of imparting its motion to other things, Plato regarded the soul, not as itself in movement, but as that which initiates or generates all movement. This at least seems to be his meaning, if we consider his remarks on this head in the light of the rest of his teaching ; though Aristotle attributes to him the older view, and undertakes an elaborate refutation of it. This position of the soul intermediate between the two realms of existence, that of the Ideas and that of sensible things, is so unsatisfactory that some interpreters ^ have main- tained that in this earlier period Plato, starting with the two realms of existence, had failed to grasp, or at anyrate to offer, any satisfactory solution of the problem of the soul’s position in his ontological scheme ; and they hold that his later doctrine of the soul involved a fundamental change of position. The soul of man, instead of appearing as an appendage to the ontological scheme, added by an afterthought, acquires a 1 Thus e g. Mr B J. Roberts, in his article, Plato’s View of the Soul,” Mind N.S., voL xiv. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 19 position of primary importance ; it, or the world-soul from which it was said to derive its being, becomes the supreme reality on which the Ideas are dependent. So far did this change go that some recent interpreters have forcibly argued that the Ideas were for Plato, not, as most others, following Aristotle, have maintained, separate things or realities subsisting independently of mind, but the logical concepts of the mind, by aid of which it brings order and intelligibility into the chaos of sense-experience, and that this was Plato’s meaning throughout the earlier as well as the later Dialogues.^ Whatever may be the truth as to Plato’s view of the relation of the soul to the Ideas, his teaching as to the purely immaterial and immortal nature of the soul is clear enough. The soul of man, though it is in some sense derived from the world- soul, is not merely a ray of the universal energy, life, or mind, as it appears in the systems of the Ionian philosophers. It is a self-contained individual being, the ground of personality ; as such it exists in the realm of pure Being before incarnation ; from that realm it brings the knowledge of the Ideas manifested in reminiscence ; and as such it endures through all the vicissitudes of its successive re-incarnations. Apart from its temporary association with this or that bodily organism, its activity is purely the exercise of reason and the willing of that which the reason comprehends. But, when drawn from its pure spiritual existence into the realm of matter and associated with a bodily organism, the soul exercises, in conjunction with the body, certain lower functions, namely, the higher emotions and the bodily appetites. These three modes of its activity are attributed to different parts of the soul ; and in one dialogue, the Timaeus^ they are even assigned to three distinct souls — the rational soul seated in the head, the spiritual soul in the chest, and the appetitive soul in the abdomen. But it seems clear that this statement was not meant to be taken literally. Although Plato sometimes speaks of the two lower functions as belonging to a mortal soul, and leaves it an open question how far these lower functions belong to the soul when it is freed from the body ; the ‘‘ three parts of the soul ” should, perhaps, be regarded, not as the activities of distinct souls or even distinct faculties, but rather as three levels of mental function , the highest only being exercised apart from the body. ^ Especially Prof. J. A. Stewart in his ** Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas,” 1909, and Prof. Natorp, * Plato’s Ideenlehre ” (1903). 20 BODY AND MIND Reason controls the lower functions, but not always with com- plete success ; and when the lower faculties, in their contam- inating intimacy with the body, get out of control, the soul suffers a debasement, which must be expiated by future incar- nation in lower bodily forms, even animal forms. From this recurring cycle of incarnations the soul can free itself only by overcoming completely the evil incitations that come to it from the body ; and only when this is accomplished, does it return to its true home, the realm of eternal untroubled Being. There can be little doubt that Plato’s doctrine of the soul and of its transmigrations was largely drawn from the teachings of the Orphic theologians. His teaching and prestige raised the religious belief in the immortality of the soul (which was widely but not generally entertained at the time he began his work) to the level of a philosophic theory and secured it a wider acceptance. In fact, Plato’s doctrine may be regarded as the culminating re- finement of the stream of Greek Animism, of which the Dionysiac and Orphic cults were the popular aspect. Plato purified the conception of the soul of the last remnants of the dualistic materialism of primitive Animism, which still lingered in the Orphic doctrine, and, insisting upon the fundamental difference of nature between soul and body, clearly formulated for the first time the theory of psycho-physical dualism with reciprocal action between soul and body. In spite of the great name of Plato, his psycho-physical dualism did not find many supporters among the thinkers of the immediately succeeding period. It seemed for a time almost completely submerged ; the dominant philosophical trend re- turned to the line of physical speculation initiated by the Ionian School : the immortality of the soul was but little discussed, and Animism was at a low ebb in the philosophic world. In short, the period was, like the present time, one in which “ souls were out of fashion.” At the opening of this period stands the great figure of Aristotle. Aristotle approached psychology from the point of view of biology, and by him soul (4'^%??) was ascribed to all material things that manifest powers of spontaneous movement and growth, that is to say, to all living organisms ; in fact, he dis- tinguished them from the inorganic world (ra a-^Pvx^) by the expression the animate or the besouled (rd e/(^'^pvx<x) The word ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 21 as used by him, would therefore be more correctly trans- lated by our English term life, or vital principle, rather than soul. The psyche is, in short, the vital principle, the possession of which distinguishes the living organism from inorganic things, and by that word all the peculiarities of living things, including the mental processes, are denoted ; or perhaps Aristotle's conception would be more correctly expressed in modern language by saying that the soul is the sum of the vital functions. Among the vital activities, or psychic powers, of organisms, Aristotle distinguishes five principal kinds, namely: (i) the vegetative processes of nutrition, growth, and reproduction ; (2) appetite, impulse, or desire, or, as we should now say, conation ; (3) sensation ; (4) power of spontaneous movement in space ; (5) rational thought. Of these the plants enjoy only the first. The animals enjoy also the second, third, and fourth, which naturally go together and presuppose the first. Man alone enjoys all these powers ; reason is his alone. These activities are not the functions of distinct souls, or of distinct parts of the soul ; for the soul is unitary. Every living thing is in a sense a combination of soul and body ; yet soul and body are not distinct things in the sense that they can or do exist apart from each other. They can only be separated in thought. (This at least seems to be Aristotle’s most explicit teaching, but his utterances on this point are not consistent.) The soul is not to be regarded as material, yet it is inseparable from matter. The body is the “ material cause ” of the organism ; the soul is its “ efficient cause,” for it produces its movements ; it is also its “ formal cause,” for it determines the form of the individual organism ; and it is its “ final cause,” for it is the end for the sake of which the body exists. The dictum which has been generally held to express most concisely Aristotle’s notion of the psycho-physical rela- tion is that the soul is the form of the body. This expression conveys no definite meaning to the modern mind, unless it is familiar with Aristotelian thought. The reader may find himself helped to grasp Aristotle’s notion by a collection of the most significant passages. Among these are the following : — The soul is the principle by which, in an ultimate sense, we live and feel and think ; it is a sort of idea and form, not matter and substrate.” ^ “ Soul is the primary actuality of a natural body en- ^ “ De Anima,” Bk. II. chap. li. 22 BODY AND MIND dowed with the capacity of life. ... It is, therefore, unnecessary to ask whether body and soul are one, as one would not ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one, or, in general, whether the matter of a particular thing and the thing composed of it are one.” ^ After likening the relation between soul and body to that between vision and the eye, he adds : “ It is, there- fore, clear that the soul cannot be separated from the body.” Yet in the following paragraph he goes on: “Yet it is uncertain whether the soul may not be the actuality of the body, as the sailor is of the ship.” ^ This uncertainty as regards the separability of the soul applies only to its reasoning part ; and it arises from the fact that, whereas the other psychical functions are the actualities or realizations of certain bodily organs, as vision is the realization or notional essence of the eye, reason is not the real- ization of any bodily organ. And so his opinion fluctuates : “ In regard to reason and the speculative faculty there is no certain evidence, but it seems to be a generically distinct kind of soul, and it alone is capable of separation from the body, as that which is eternal from that which is perishable. But the other parts of the soul are, in view of the foregoing considerations, evidently inseparable.” ^ Again, he wrote : “ A difficulty presents itself in regard to the affections of the soul, namely, whether all its affections are common to the soul and to the body which contains it, or whether there is something that belongs to the soul alone. It is necessary, though hard, to solve this difficulty. In most cases the soul apparently acts, or is acted on, only in conjunction with the body ; for example, in the feelings of anger, courage, desire and, in general, in sense-perception. Thought, if anything, would seem to be peculiar to the soul. Yet, if thought is a sort of representation in terms of a sense-image, or is impos- sible without it (which he affirms in another place ^), then even thought could not exist independently of the body. If, then, there were any function or affections of the soul that were peculiar to it, it would be possible for the soul to exist separate and apart from the body. If, however, there is nothing which belongs to it exclusively, it cannot exist apart,” ® ^ “ De Anima,” Bk. 11 . chap. i. 2 Ib%d. ® Op. cit.y Bk. II. chap. 11. * The soul, therefore, never thinks without the use of images” (”De Anima,” Bk. III. chap. vii.). ® ” De Anima,” Bk. I. chap. i. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 23 In this passage it is clearly laid down that the question of the separability of the soul, and therefore of the possibility of its continued existence after the death of the body, is one to be decided by empirical research into the extent and nature of the participation of bodily processes in mental life. Aristotle’s uncertainty as to the separability of any part or function of the soul applies only to that which he distinguishes as the creative reason {voui ^otrirmo^) from the passive reason. To the latter belong the powers of imagination or sensory representation. Reason is passive in so far as it receives its content through sense-perception ; but thought is more than the coexistence and succession of sensations, perceptions, and images of imagination and memory. These are but the matter of thought ; that which gives them form is the active or creative reason. This highest function of the soul it is which converts the perceptually acquired contact of the mind to a system of logically ordered thought, and thus in a sense creates reality by giving it a rational form. This is the function which seems to Aristotle to have no bodily organ, to be the realization of no part of the body ; and it is this to which he refers when he says that “In its separated state alone reason is its true self, immortal and eternal ” ; ^ that potential knowledge pre-exists in the individual ; that reason is of such a nature that on the one hand it becomes all things, and on the other hand creates all things ; and that “ it is separate, not passive, unmixed and in its essential nature an energizing force.” 2 But it seems clear that the immortality tentatively as- cribed by Aristotle to the creative reason involves no personal immortality, no survival of the individual soul ; but rather holds good only of the universal reason. And, since Aristotle explicitly affirms that “the passive reason is perishable and without it there can be no thought,” 2 it follows that the immortal reason is potential only, that it actually operates only in conjunction with the body, which through the senses supplies it with the matter of thought. Aristotle’s few, hesitating, and ambiguous remarks on the separability and immortality of the creative reason have given rise to an immense amount of controversy among the reverent interpreters and commentators. By some modern interpreters this part of his doctrine is regarded as an element foreign to and ^ “ De Anima,” Bk. III. chap. v. * Ibid. 24 BODY AND MIND incompatible with the main body of it. These look upon it as derived through Plato from the Orphic theologians, and as evidence merely that Aristotle did not completely succeed in shaking off the influence of his great teacher. But this explanation of Aristotle’s attitude on this question is hardly required. Aristotle showed himself generally inclined to take up a very critical attitude towards Plato’s teaching, and ready to accentuate the differences between his own views and those of his great master. His attitude on this question was thoroughly scientific, and just such as was demanded by an impartial consideration of the facts. His interpreters have generally attempted to show either that he taught the immortality of the soul or of the active reason, or that he denied it. We shall be wiser if we recognize the plain implication of his words, namely, that he held it impossible to return a decisive answer to this great question without further empirical knowledge of the bodily processes involved in mental activities ; and we shall see in later chapters that, in spite of many centuries of heated controversy, the question still remains just where Aristotle left it, with this difference only — that we are beginning to acquire that understanding of the nature and extent of the bodily processes involved in mental activity, the lack of which necessitated suspension of judgment in the truly scientific mind of Aristotle. Whatever degree of truth there may be in the view that Aristotle’s indecision in the face of this question was due to Plato’s influence, it is clear that his doctrine of the creative reason has none of the practical and ethical significance of Plato’s doctrine of immortality. As regards the relation of the soul to the parts of the body, Aristotle called attention to a number of facts which seemed to him to indicate that such psychical powers as the plants and lower animals enjoy are exercised equally in or by all parts of the body. But he held that in the higher animals the psychical functions are concentrated in, or more especially exercised by, certain parts of the body ; and, rejecting the brain as the principal seat of the soul, and assigning to it merely the function of cooling the blood, he taught that the heart is the principal centre of vitality or soul life. The heart is the sensorium commune, or seat of the common sense, by which the common sensibiles (i.e. those properties of things later distinguished by Locke as the primary ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 25 qualities), are perceived “The dominating^ organ of sensation in all sanguineous animals is found in the heart, for the ‘ common sense’ that serves all the special senses must be situated there. There are two senses, taste and touch, whose channels lead manifestly to the heart, and what is true of these must be true of the other senses. Movement in the other sense-organs may be transmitted to the heart, but with the upper parts of the body these two senses do not communicate in any way. Apart from these considerations, if the principle of life of all animals is seated in the heart, the sensory principle must evidently be there also.” ^ These and other passages make it clear that Aristotle knew nothing of the functions of the nerves and nervous system. It is of interest to note that Aristotle foreshadowed our modern notions of the dependence of all life on combustion or oxydation, asserting the dependence of the psychical functions (i.e. of life) on fire or heat. “ Since every living thing has a soul, and the soul, as we have said, cannot subsist without natural heat, we find that in plants adequate provision has been made for the preservation of natural heat through nutriment and the surrounding air.” ^ “ It was said above that life and the possession of soul are accompanied by a certain degree of heat. For even the process of concoction, by which food is made ready for animal life, is not accomplished without soul and heat ; and all this is effected by fire. . . . And other functions of the soul cannot be performed independently of the nutritive principle, and this in turn cannot subsist without natural heat.” ^ “ Birth is the original suffusion of the nutritive soul with heat, and life is the maintenance of this heat. Youth is the period of the growth of the organ of cooling, old age that of the wasting of this organ, and the prime of life is the middle period between the two. Death and violent destruction mean respectively the exhaustion and extinction of the vital heat.”^ It is curious that while thus correctly, though vaguely, conceiving the fundamental importance of combustion for the maintenance of life, .^ristotle attributed old age and death, not to failure of the pro- cesses of combustion, but rather to exhaustion, due to inadequacy of the cooling arrangements by which (according to his view) the processes of combustion are normally kept in check. The foregoing brief statement of Aristotle’s teaching in regard to the soul suffices to show that it has more affinity with the ^ “ De Juvent.,*^ ckap. iii. ® “ De Juvent.,’* chap. vi. ® De Respirat.,” chap. vii. ^ ** De Respirat.,** chap. xvih. 26 BODY AND MIND Hylozoism of the Ionian philosophers and the Materialism of Democritus and his successors than with the materialistic Animism of popular thought or the spiritualistic Animism of Plato. The notion of a radical difference of nature between soul and body, between spirit and matter, which Plato established in the culture-tradition of Europe, has never passed wholly away ; but the great age of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was followed by one of which the principal features were Scepticism and a material- istic reaction against the spiritualistic dualism of Plato. Epicurus, adopting the Atomism of Democritus, taught that “ the soul is a fine substance distributed through the whole mass of the body, and most resembles the air with an infusion of warmth that it is an organ of the body by means of which the body shares in sensation, and that it is dissolved with the body. At death the soul-atoms are dispersed in the air. He distinguished two parts, or modes of manifestation, of the soul, namely, the reasonless part or vital force which permeates all parts of the body, and the reasonable part which resides in the breast and is the organ of understanding and volition : a distinction which reappears in the teaching of Lucretius. In his ethical and psychological hedonism, Epicurus provided a further supplement to the materialism of Democritus, a supple- ment which in later ages also has usually gone hand in hand with mental atomism or sensationalism and with metaphysical materialism. The teachings of the early Stoics, although so opposed to Epicurus in respect to ethical doctrines, resembled his in follow- ing the materialism of Democritus ; but, whereas the matter of Democritus had only the attributes of extension, hardness, mass, and capacity of movement, the matter of the Stoics was endowed with many forces. By them the life-principle was generally designated the pneuma, and this was regarded as a material principle composed of air and fire, which pervades the whole body, presides over its growth and movements, and is also the principle of intellectual life. Some of the Stoics held that death is the end of life ; others suspended judgment on this problem ; others again, adopting a materialistic Pantheism taught, not without some inconsistency, that the soul of the wise man maintains itself after death according to the degree of his ethical development; but that it eventually loses its individu- ^ A. Lange, of Materialism,” vol. i. p. io6. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 27 ality and, being consumed in fire, is reabsorbed in the divine Being. “ The human soul is a part of the Deity, or an emanation from the same ; the soul and its source act and react upon each other. The soul is the warm breath within us. Although it outlives the body, it is yet perishable, and can only endure, at the longest, till the termination of the world period in which it exists.” ^ Scepticism and Stoicism remained the dominant modes of thought from the time of Aristotle till the opening of the Christian era ; when the contact of the two lines of literary tradition from which that of modern Europe descends, namely, the Hebrew and the Greek, gave birth to two philosophies, the Neoplatonic and the Christian, each of which developed its distinctive theory of the soul. These developments will be traced in the following chapter. ^ Ueberweg’s History of Philosophy,” CHAPTER II ANIMISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES ‘"/TT^HE greatest merit of the Middle Ages/' writes Professor I Hoffding,^ lies in its absorption in the inner world of the life of the soul. Classical antiquity had paused at the harmonious relation between the inner and the outer, and its interest in the inner life was limited to its relation to outer life in Nature and the State. To the faith of the Middle Ages the eternal fate of the personality was determined by the events of the inner life. . . . No wonder that a fine and deep sense of the inner life developed. The self-absorption of the mystic was as important for the development of the psychological sense as the distinctions and argumentations of the schoolmen for that of the logical sense. It dawned upon men that the spiritual world is just as much a reality as the material world, and that in the former is Man’s true home. The way was prepared for a more thorough investigation of the great problem of spirit and matter than was possible to antiquity.” We have seen that the Stoics gave currency to a new designation of the animating principle, namely, pneuma'} With the introduction of the pneuma began ^ that trichotomy of human personality into body, soul, and spirit which has figured promi- nently in the speculations of theologians ; it continues to pervade the popular thought of Christendom to the present day, though the relation between psyche and pneuma^ soul and spirit, has fluctuated widely and has never been clearly defined. The pneuma, which was conceived by the Stoics as a material vital principle, continued to play an important part in the physio- logical speculations of physicians and natural philosophers ; in the hands of Christian theologians, on the other hand, it became ^ " History of Modern Philosophy,” Eng. trans., vol. i. p. 5. ® It would perhaps be more correct to say that pneuma stood for a theory of the vital processes, the sum of ■which was denoted by the word 8 ggg p ^ view of Dr Charles that a similar trichotomy pervades the later eschatology of the Old Testament. 28 ANIMISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES 29 transformed into a purely spiritual immaterial soul. In this way, through the inevitable specialization of learning, the con- ception of the psyche or soul, which through all the Greek philosophy had covered both the animating principle of all living things and the intellectual or mental principle of man, became differentiated into two conceptions, which long continued to figure in the European culture-tradition more or less inde- pendently of one another, namely, on the one hand the vital force of the physiologists, and on the other hand the spirit or immaterial soul of man. The latter conception was not taken over by the Fathers of the Church directly from Plato ; it descended to them indirectly by way of the Neoplatonists, in whose hands it was developed under the influence of Eastern mysticism and Hebrew theology. We have seen that among the Greek philosophers the domi- nant conception of the soul was that of a material substance, very thin and mobile, and having the power of spontaneous movement. The early Fathers, who shaped the doctrines of the Christian Church up to the fifth century, continued to hold this view of the soul. They were not materialists in the modern sense of the word, as applied to those who deny the existence of soul or spirit. But they were dualistic materialists ; for, while they regarded man as made up of soul and body, they held both soul and body to be material. It was even held to be heretical to deny the material nature of the soul ; for only material substance, it was thought, could be susceptible of physical pains and pleasures ; therefore a material soul was required by the doctrine of retribution after death. A passage from Tertullian, one of the greatest of the early Fathers,^ may serve to illustrate this doctrine. He wrote, “All that is real is body. The corporeality of God does not detract from His sublimity, nor that of the s6ul from its im- mortality. Everything that is, is body after its kind. What is not body is nothing. Who shall deny that God is body, though He is a spirit ? A spirit is a body of its own kind, in its own form. The soul has the human form, the same as its body, only it is delicate, clear, and ethereal. Unless it were corporeal, how could it be affected by the body?'' And St Jerome argued, “ If the dead be not raised with flesh and bones, how can the damned after judgment gnash their teeth in hell?” These passages show how the teaching of the Fathers, according to which both 1 He wrote about the end of the second century of our era. 30 BODY AND MIND God and the soul are corporeal, involved a return very nearly to the primitive theory of the ghost-soul, the vapour-like duplicate of the body. It was the same undifferentiated materialistic dualism. The spiritualization of the soul seems to have been achieved by way of the refinement of the conception of God. This refining process consisted in successively denying Him all the distinctive attributes of matter, until the conception of an immaterial spirit was reached. And then the conception of the human soul was assimilated to this more refined conception of God. Thus man, having created God in his own likeness in the course of his first speculative efforts, reversed the order of procedure at a later stage and shaped his idea of himself on the model of his more refined idea of God. It was probably through the influence of the Neoplatonists that this refinement was effected. Neoplatonism represents the culmination of a reaction against the quasi-materialism of the Stoics and a revival of the influence of Plato. In Alexandria the men and the thoughts of many races and peoples came into contact, and Philo the Jew, a forerunner of the Neoplatonic school, attempted to combine Hebrew theology with Greek philosophy. He identified the pneuma of the Stoics with the breath of the Hebrew God and with the reason of both Plato and Aristotle. The Hebrews, like so many other peoples, had conceived the soul as air, wind, breath. But this air was breathed into man by God ; ^ and therefore, as the conception of God was dematerialized, so also the pneuma emanating from him to become the soul of man became an immaterial substance. But in Philo's doctrine the process of dematerialization is not completed ; the animal soul of man is generated with and destroyed with the body, and the pneuma, which is the rational soul breathed into him by God, is the last sublimation of the physical principle of the Stoics.^ ^ See p. 7. ® St Paul’s doctrine of human personality, departing in this respect from the teachings of the other parts of the New Testament, in which soul and spirit are not distinguished, involved a similar trichotomy, body, soul, and spirit. Accord- ing to Prof. Charles, the Apostle adopted the later doctrine of the Old Testament which regarded the soul as the supreme function of the body quickened by the spirit. So conceived it naturally perishes on the withdrawal of the latter. Jt has, therefore, no existence in the next Hfe. And such, in fact, appears to be the view of the Apostle. The soul, he holds, is the vital principle of the flesh (cra/)t). Hence the epithets ‘fleshly’ {(rapKtKos) and ‘souhsh’ over ANIMISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES 31 Plotinus, the most prominent figure among the Neoplatonists, insisted that life and thought are not to be explained by means of any physical principle, such as the pnemna of the Stoics, no matter how thin or refined it may be ; he seems to have been the first to describe the soul as an immaterial substance. In his doctrine, abstraction and the negation of attributes to God are carried so far that God becomes the One. This One sends forth Nous, the universal mind, of which in turn the human soul is an emanation. “ The soul is the image and product of ihe Nous, just as the Nous is of the One. As being only the image of the Nous, the soul is necessarily of inferior rank and character, though none the less really divine and endowed with generative force. . . . The soul is an immaterial substance, not a body, nor the harmony, nor the entelechy of the body and inseparable from the latter, since not only the Nous, but also memory, and even the faculty of perception, and the psychical force which moulds the body, are separable from the body. There exists a real plurality of souls ; the highest of all is the soul of the world ; but the rest are not mere parts of the world-soul. The soul permeates the body as fire permeates air. It is more correct to say that the body is in the soul than that the soul is in the body ; there is, therefore, a portion of the soul in which there is no body, a portion to whose functions the co-operation of the body is unnecessary. But neither are the sensuous faculties lodged in the body, whether in its individual parts or in the body as a whole : they are only present with the body, the soul lending to each bodily organ the force necessary for the execution of its functions. Thus the soul is present not only in the individual parts of the body, but in the whole body, and present everywhere in its entirety, not divided among the different parts of the body ; it is entirely in the whole body, and entirely in every part. . . . The soul resembles God by its unity and by its possession of a centre and against ‘spiritual’ are taken to be synonymous.” The pnsuma or spirit comes directly from God, but, since it alone is the immortal part of man, it IS not reabsorbed into the Godhead on the death of the body, as in the later Hebrew conception, and is the basis of personal immortality. But, as Prof. Charles remarks, “ the Pauhne doctrine of the spirit is beset with difficulties ” {op. cit., p. J.11) , that is to say, the Apostle does not carry through clearly and consistently his trichotomous doctrine, does not succeed in combining in one consistent doctrine of personal immortality the conception of the soul as a function of the body that perishes with it and that of the pneuma as an emanation from God. BODY AND MIND 32 hence arises the possibility of its communion with the One ” ; ^ a communion which involves apprehension of a unique kind and is achieved only during rare moments of ecstasy. In the later part of the fourth century Gregory of Nyssa argued for the immateriality of the soul and also for its immor- tality. Against those who, like the early Fathers, maintained that the soul is material, he urged that the spiritual nature of God, which cannot be denied, proves the possibility of immaterial existence. “We may with the same right conclude from the phenomena of the human microcosm to the actual existence of an immaterial soul, as from the phenomena of the world as a whole to the reality of God's existence. The soul is defined by Gregory as a created being, having life, the power of thought, and, so long as it is provided with the proper organs, the power of sensuous perception. As being simple and uncompounded the soul survives the dissolution of the composite body, whose scattered elements it continues and will continue to accompany, as if watching over its property, until the resurrection, when it will clothe itself in them anew.” ^ The expression “ immaterial substance ” does not seem to have been used by the Fathers until the fifth century, when Augustine applied it to define the nature of the soul of man. He is known to have been greatly influenced by the Neoplatonists, especially by Plotinus, and it is probable that he derived the notion and the expression from them, Augustine seems also to have been the first to make extension the distinctive attribute of matter, and the lack of it the distinctive attribute of soul. Nevertheless, he taught that the soul is present at each moment in every part of the body ; he wrote, “ when there is any pain in the foot, the eye looks, the tongue speaks, the hand moves, and this would not occur unless what of the soul is in those parts felt also in the foot ; nor, if not present in the foot, could it feel what has there happened.” And yet the soul was not to be regarded as having extension. Augustine also laid down the dictum that whatever is not matter and yet has real existence is properly termed spirit. He thus clearly distinguished two classes of real existents, the material and the spiritual, a distinction destined to be so widely accepted for long ages. And then, having conceived the soul as an immaterial substance, Augustine seems to have felt the difficulty of the question so often raised in later ages, namely, How can 1 Ueberweg^s '' History of Philosophy.” * Ueberweg’s History.” ANIMISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES 33 two things so unlike as material body and immaterial soul influence one another? And in order to mitigate this difficulty he postulated a third substance intermediate in nature between matter and spirit, matter of a very subtle kind which should serve as the medium of interaction. Augustine of course maintained the survival of the soul after death of the body, and claimed for it immortality, subject to the will of God, by which alone it could be annihilated. No considerable change in the Church’s teaching as regards the nature of the soul was effected until about the end of the twelfth century, when the diffusion of translations of the works of Aristotle and the invasion of Southern Europe by the Mohamedan commentators set the schoolmen upon the attempt to reconcile the teaching of Aristotle with the tenets of the Christian Church. The earlier schoolmen made of the three fundamental psychical powers distinguished by Aristotle, the vegetative, the sensitive, and the intellectual, three distinct and almost com- pletely independent souls, anima vegetativa, anima sensitiva, anima rationalis ; the last of these only was regarded by them as immortal. But this strange doctrine was destined soon to be swept away by the greatest of the schoolmen. Thomas Aquinas taught in the later part of the thirteenth century a philosophy and a psychology which were the culmination of the scholastic efforts, and which have remained with comparatively little change the accepted doctrines of the Roman Church. His psychological writings and those of his immediate predecessor, Albertus Magnus, were largely provoked by the rapid spread of Arabian heresies in the schools of Europe, and they were mainly directed towards the refutation of Averroism. Averroes, who flourished in the later part of the twelfth century, was the most influential of the Arab philosophers. His doctrines, which claimed to be the inevitable developments of Aristotle’s teaching, were widely accepted both in Spain and Italy ; but they were regarded by the more orthodox schoolmen as involving heretical perversions. A central topic of discussion throughout the. three hundred years of the flourishing of the Arab philosophy was the relation of the creative reason of Aristotle to the soul of man. The master himself had, as we have seen, expressed himself incapable of forming a decided opinion on the question of the relation of the creative reason to the bodily organism. Alexander of Aphrodisias, 34 BODY AND MIND a Greek writer of the end of the second century, had given wide currency to a theological development of Aristotle’s uncertain utterances. According to this doctrine, which was propounded as a protest against the Materialism of the Stoics and a return to Aristotle, the creative reason belongs to God alone. The human soul was regarded as possessing only the passive reason, a capacity or disposition for rational thought, which remains, however, a mere potentiality until realized or brought into actuality by the ‘‘ assistance ” of the Divine Reason.^ The doctrine of “ Divine Assistance” played some part in the development of Neo- platonism, and, partly through that system and in part directly, brought into prominence in the Arabian philosophy the question of the possibility of the mode of “union” or “conjunction” of the human soul with the one creative reason. The latter came to be regarded in the Arab schools as a universal superior principle that mediates between God and man After three centuries of controversy over this problem, Averroes went back to the doctrine of Alexander, and improved upon it by denying to the human soul the passive reason or intellect as well as the active reason ; for, he argued, this mere potentiality of reason is nothing. Thus it might seem that in this doctrine the soul of man was stripped of all that in Aristotle’s view distinguishes it from that of animals ; but memory and the power of sensory representation and a quasi-intelligence, which went by the name vis cogitativa, in fact all but the capacity to form a pure abstract notion, were allowed it. Reason or intelligence was then a metaphysical entity, whose relation to individual human souls was purely external and accidental and temporary. The doctrine involved the denial to the human soul of immortality and of any existence apart from the body ; and this implication was explicitly taught by Averroes, though it was not accepted by all who professed them- selves his disciples. It was to the refutation of this doctrine that Aquinas addressed himself in one of his principal treatises,^ insisting that wc cannot be content to explain the thought of man by the aid of a principle which is neither a part of the con- stitution of man, nor one in which man participates. He returned to the psychological method, and, instead of making an absolute distinction between thought and sense-presentation, he ^ “ Pietro Pomponazzi,” by A. H. Douglas, Cambridge, 1910, p 26. 2 ‘‘ De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas.” ANIMISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES 35 traced the play of intelligence through the lower mental functions, exhibiting their continuity with the higher modes of intellection. Like his predecessors in the schools, Aquinas claimed to have returned to the true Aristotelian doctrine, and he taught that the soul is the form of the body. But he denied the separability or separateness of the active reason and insisted that the soul is a unitary being ; consistent adherence to Aristotle’s principles would then have led him to the denial of immortality. This, of course, was impossible to him ; therefore, instead of binding fast the reason in the body together with the nutritive and sensitive faculties, he rather set free all alike from the body and declared the whole unitary soul to be immortal : the soul is the form of the body, but it is the form in a new sense, for it is a “ separable form.” In this new doctrine of the soul as a separable form, Aquinas attempted to combine the teaching of Aristotle with the Neo- platonic notion of a spiritual substance. The leading features of his psychology, and the nature of the arguments on which he relied for the proof of human immortality, have been concisely stated by a Roman Catholic writer in the following passage : “ The keynote to Thomistic metaphysical psychology is the essential distinction between a lower or sensuous, and a higher or rational, grade of consciousness. The essential irreducibility of attention, abstrac- tion, comparison, reasoning, self-consciousness, and free will to organic processes, such as those of the external senses, the imagination and the sensuous memory, is the ground of spirituality and immortality. The latter phenomena are accounted for by admitting the co-operation of the soul or vital principle with the organic co-factor ; the former demand intrinsic independence of the organism for their display, and hence point to an inorganic principle as their exclusive subject. Thought is not a passive transformation of sensations ; an inner attentive energy of the mind (intellectus agens) disengages at first the essentials of the sensuous presentation {abstrahit essentiain)^ and then the mind itself {intellectus passivus\ out of this prepared datum, proceeds to generate the pure forms of thought {exprimere intelligendd). This was an application of the Aristotelic theory of the ‘ active and passive intellect ’ to the problem of the bridge between sensation and conception. The intellect is acknowledged to be objectively dependent on sense for the acquisition of the materials of its know- ledge ; it is subjectively independent of the organism, however, in BODY AND MIND 36 the display of its irreducible activities of thought and volition. This intrinsic independence of the organism which the soul shows (even while united with the body and conditioned by the health or disease of the imagination and memory) by the very fact of its being the exclusive subject of its own higher functions, is the proof of spirituality and the pledge of immortality. This view of St Thomas does not imply an ' anima separata' but an ' anhna separabilis' There is only one specific substance in man — the compound self or ego. The soul was not a mere thinking machine, but the life-giving principle of the body as well, discharging the several functions of thought, feeling, and volition, either by itself or conjointly with the organism ” ^ There was here a distinct advance towards the attitude adopted by those moderns who defend the conception of the soul. Although Aquinas attributed immortality to the whole of the human soul, including the vegetative and sensitive powers, he maintained that the souls of animals are inseparable from their bodies and that they perish with them. Like Augustine and other Fathers, he denied the Platonic doctrine of the pre- existence of the soul, maintaining that each soul is created at the moment the body is ready for its operation. During the long period between the great age of Greek philosophy and the Renascence of European learning, the conception of the soul was thus refined and developed under the influence of theological speculation, until it became set over against matter as a purely spiritual principle of a radically different nature, an immortal being temporarily associated with the body and intervening in its material processes with intelligent purposive activity. But during the same period there were not wanting speculations on the lines of the Pre-Socratic materialistic philosophers of Greece, made under the influence of natural science, rather than of theology. In the last century B.C. the Roman poet, Lucretius, gave a complete exposition of Epicurean Materialism in the famous poem “De Rerum Natura” ; and at the same time developed the theory in certain respects. His fundamental argument against the separability of the soul was one which has been reproduced and relied upon by materialists of all later ages ; “ the soul is born ^ Article, St Thomas,” in Baldwin^s “ Dictionary of Philosophy and Psy- chology.” ^ ANIMISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES 37 with the body, it grows and decays with the body, therefore it perishes with the body.” He embodied the notion, first suggested by Empedocles, “ that all the adaptation to be found in the uni- verse, and especially in organic life, is merely a special case of the infinite possibilities of mechanical events ” ; ^ a suggestion of great importance for the materialistic scheme, since it remained as the only materialistic explanation of the apparently teleo- logical facts of nature, until in the nineteenth century Darwinism supplied a less inadequate one. Lucretius found himself compelled by the observation of animal behaviour to make at least one assumption not strictly compatible with the pure materialistic atomism of Democritus and Epicurus ; namely, he assumed that the atoms move not always in straight lines, but have the power of deviating sponta- neously from the straight path. He recognized two forms of soul, or soul and spirit {anima and animus) ; nevertheless both are corporeal and are composed of the smallest, roundest and most mobile atoms.” ^ Lucretius, like Epicurus, seems to have felt the difficulty of boldly asserting that the motion of atoms is sensa- tion, and sought to mitigate it by dwelling on the exceeding fine- ness of the soul-atoms. Galen, the celebrated Greek philosopher and anatomist who practised surgery in Rome in the later part of the second century of our era, studied the structure and functions of the body by means of dissection. He established the connexion of the nerves with the central nervous system, and showed that the brain is somehow intimately concerned in our mental life. He taught that the brain is the seat of the soul and the medium through which the sensations are produced.^ Galen’s teaching did much to give currency to the doctrine of animal spirits,” which figured largely in all later physiological writings until very recent times. Spirits {Sfiiritus) of many kinds played a great part in the cosmology and physiology of the Neoplatonic Scholastic philosophy ; and early in the Middle Ages, Galen’s doctrine of the animal spirits was fused with the Aristotelian psychology ; thus arose that conception of spiritus ^ A. Lange, History of Materiabsm,** vol. i. p. 138. ® Lange, op. cit.^ p. 146. 3 The honour of having first demonstrated the intimate connection of the bram with our mental life is sometimes attributed to Alcmseon of Crotona (500 b.c.). And it is said that Theophilus of Alexandria (300 b.c.) distinguished the sensory from the motor nerves. 38 BODY AND MIND aninialis distilled in the brain from the spirittis viialis of the blood, which at a later period was taken up by Descartes into his system. This conception of “spiritus,” which came into the culture tradition of the Middle Ages from so many different sources, owed its deep hold to the fact that it seemed to bridge the gulf between the sensible and the supersensible, a need which was felt as well by the Neoplatonists as by the Christian theo- logians, by Lucretius as well as by Augustine and the followers of Descartes ; for spiritus was the subtlest kind of matter.^ It is interesting to note that in the thirteenth century the philosophers whose speculations were of a naturalistic tendency, especially those of the University of Paris, adopted the ingenious subterfuge of distinguishing two forms of truth, the theological and the philosophical, in order to free scientific speculation from the restrictive influence of the Church ; a practice which is paralleled at the present day by the widely prevalent fashion of distinguishing between scientific and philosophic truth. To confound this teaching by demonstrating the harmony of all truth had been one of the principal aims of Aquinas ; but in spite of the great authority of his name and doctrine the distinction became widely accepted , and it continued to be so well recognized that it was urged by Giordano Bruno in his defence before the Inquisition in 1592. It was a symptom of the uneasiness of the spirit of inquiry under the bonds imposed upon it by the Church. By the loosening of those bonds the Renascence gave new life to the problem of the soul, and in the sixteenth century it was discussed with a new freedom and a renewed vigour. ^ In the sixteenth century the conception of spintus was brought back by Paracelsus very nearly to its original form, the ghost-soul ; for he conceived spiritus anthropomorphically, peopled all things, great and small, with innumer- able demons, and attributed to these all evidences of life and activity. CHAPTER III ANIMISM AT THE TIME OF THE RENASCENCE OF LEARNING T he philosophy of the Renascence is rightly held, says Professor Hoffding, to have been introduced by the treatise of Pietro Pomponazzi on the immortality of the soul (“ De Immortalitate Animi,’' 1516). Pomponazzi was a voluminous writer and an influential teacher in the schools of northern Italy ; he has been called, with some reason, the last of the schoolmen and the first modern psychologist. His handling of the problem of the soul is re- markable for his indifference to authority and for his agnostic attitude.^ The century that separated him from Aquinas had been filled with the controversy between Thomists and Averroists, in which the great question at issue was the relation of the soul to reason or intellect. Both parties claimed to adhere to the teaching of Aristotle, though their interpretations of that teaching were widely different. Pomponazzi approached this problem in an independent spirit and, setting aside the rival systems of interpretation, went back to Aristotle himself. Accepting Aristotle’s fundamental proposition that the soul is the form of the body, he rejected the Mono-psychism of Averroes (the doctrine that reason is one divine light which shines in upon the souls of men), not only because it seemed to him inconsistent with that proposition, but also on the grounds that embodiment is of the very nature of intelligence as known in man, and that the assumption of a universal reason leaves unsolved the problem of the reasoning power of individual men. He rejected just as positively the Thomist conception of the soul as a self-subsistent and separable form or a spiritual substance capable of existing after the death of the body ; insisting always ^ A full account of Pomponazzi and Ids teaching, based partly on material only recently brought to light, has been given by Mr A. H. Douglas The Philo- sophy and Psychology of Pietro Pomponazzi,” Cambridge, 1910). My brief account is extracted from this work. 40 BODY AND MIND on the fact that we have direct knowledge of human intelligence and activity only as it is manifested in bodily life. He thus rejected both the “ collective immortality of the Averroists and the indivi- dual immortality of the orthodox scholastics, and explicitly taught the mortality of the human soul ; this, the most distinctive feature of his teaching, naturally produced a great stirring in the schools. Yet, in spite of his denial of immortality and his assertion of the dependence of all human thought on bodily organs, Pomponazzi was not a materialist. Nor was he, of course, an idealist in the sense most usually attached to that ambiguous word ; for the notion that the material world may be purely a figment of our minds had not entered into the current of European speculation ; philosophers still accepted unquestioningly the reality and the spatial character of physical things. He believed, like most of his contemporaries, in the existence of higher intelligences whose reason operated in pure universals, abstract and general ideas that were not achieved by way of the contemplation of partic- ular or concrete objects. These pure intelligences constituted the highest part of a hierarchy of beings. “ There were according to this scheme, three orders of beings — the immaterial and im- perishable, including the Deity, and (in their essential nature and true being) the spheral Intelligences ; at the other extreme, material and mortal, all sublunary beings with the exception of man : intermediate between the two, and sharing the attributes of both, the composite nature of man.”"^ “ Belonging to the three orders of being, there were three sorts of souls.” For the superior Intelligences were also to be regarded as in a sense the informing souls of the spheres to which they belonged. Only the difference between them and the human soul was that the act of intelligence in them did not depend in any way upon the physical spheres to which they were related only as the motor is to that which is moved ; knowledge in them was a direct intuition and contemplation of abstract and immaterial objects ; whereas the soul of man is dependent for the exercise of intelligence upon matter tanquain de objecto, and the sensitive soul, or the soul of the lower animal, resides in matter tanquam de subjecto as well.” ^ He held fast to Aristotle’s teaching, that reason in man operates only with the aid of the presentation in imagination of the data of sense ; and this dependence of human reason on sense and imagery for its objects was one of his chief grounds for ^ A. H. Douglas, op, ctt,, p. 124. ^ Op cit,^ p. 125. 42 BODY AND MIND the power of matter ; human souls only are immediately created by God. In Bernardino Telesio, whose comprehensive work, “ De Rerum Natura,” was published in 1586, the tendency of the philosophy of the Renascence to appeal to Nature rather than to Aristotle or the Scriptures found a systematic and thoroughgoing exponent. His system was thoroughly hylozoistic, i.e. it was metaphysical materialism of the kind which regards matter as endowed with mental capacities ; and he saw in sense-perception the empirical basis of all knowledge. Looking on all matter as animated, he taught that human consciousness is but a development of the simple feelings of inorganic matter; he argued, in fact, in the modern fashion from the human consciousness to the feeling of inorganic matter, according to the principle of continuity. “ He maintains, that is to say, the impossibility of explaining the genesis of consciousness out of matter, unless we suppose matter to be originally endowed with consciousness.” ^ Telesio did not deny a soul to man ; but the soul was, as with the Stoics, but the subtlest form of matter. ‘‘ The spirit to which Telesio con- stantly refers as the natural soul, is thought of as wholly corporeal, a very delicate, rarefied substance, enclosed within the nervous system, and therefore eluding our senses. Its place, the seat of the soul, is chiefly the brain, but extends also to the spinal cord, the nerves, arteries, veins, and the covering membranes of the internal organs. Similar cavities to those visible in the brain {ie. the ventricles), the spinal cord and the optic nerves are present in all these organs, and it is there that the spirit is enclosed, so that it is accessible to any movement from without, and is able to transmit its own movement to these parts, and thence to the limbs. The extreme mobility of the spirit, and its continuity throughout all the nervous system, are the qualities which fit it to play the part of the soul. . . . Recognizing that the nervous system is in close connection with soul-life, he frankly acknowledged that the soul in men differs only in degree from the soul of animals.” ^ “ Corporeal, however, though the spirit be, yet it is different from the ordinary parts of the body. It is invisible, is akin to ^ Hoffding, op. cit., p. 97. * Article on Telesio by J. Lewis McIntyre, in “ British Journal of Psychology,” vol. i. ANIMISM AT THE TIME OF THE RENASCENCE 43 the nature of the sun and the sky ; hence the heaviness of a body from which the spirit has fled, for it was the upward striving soul that lightened it through life : hence also the soul that has left the body cannot return, for it flies upward towards its own element, like fire and air.”^ Telesio was so far under the influence of the orthodox teach- ings of the Church that he assumed, beside the material soul in man, a divine non -corporeal soul directly implanted by God, which unites with the material soul. He did not make clear the relations between the two souls, and it would seem that this additional and superfluous soul was added by Telesio to his scheme either as a prudent concession to the Church, or because his philosophical and his theological opinions were formed in separate “ water-tight compartments ” of his mind, while he was too honest to accept the current convention which admitted two kinds of truth, the theological and the philosophical. “ The proof or evidence of this divine soul which Telesio offers is that men do in fact inquire into supernatural matters, which have no reference to their bodily needs, that they find real happiness only in the knowledge and. pursuit of the divine ; that for these they neglect even those bodily needs which the brutes pursue without deviation. . . , The divine soul is that in man which understands, but it does so only through the natural spirit, and it can under- stand only these things, which the spirit offers to it for understanding.” ^ The greatest of the philosophers of the Renascence period, Giordano Bruno, made a remarkable attempt to unite an idealistic conception of the universe with the principles of physical Atomism. He is sometimes claimed as a link between ancient and modern Materialism, but only by those who regard one side only of his teachings. He distinguished spiritual and material substances, although he regarded them as ultimately of one single essence, an original and universal substance. Everything that exists is animated, and in everything the world-soul operates as the inner principle of a motion which is both mechanical and purposive. Nevertheless, the soul of the individual is a distinct being ; and Bruno favours the belief in transmigration of souls or metempsy- chosis. The relation of the individual soul to the world-soul remains as obscure as in all other Pantheistic systems. Physiology may be said to have been founded during the 1 Ibid, * Ibid, 44 BODY AND MIND later part of the Renascence period. It began at once to exert upon the conception of the soul an influence of the kind which in succeeding centuries, and especially in the nineteenth century, has been a principal factor in leading to the rejection of Animism by the greater part of the learned world. In the year 1543 Andreas Vesalius published his great work, “ Fabrica Humani Corporis/’ which was as important for physiology as for anatomy. He elaborated the doctrine of animal spirits which had fluttered down uncertainly from the ancients. He distinguished an inferior form of spirits, the vital spirits which are concerned in the bodily functions generally. From the vital spirits brought to the brain by the blood, and from the air, which makes its way into the brain directly by the pores of the skull, the brain elaborates the animal spirits in its ventricles. The animal spirits permeate all parts of the nervous system, just as the vital spirit is distributed through the arteries. Vesalius recognized also a third variety, the natural spirit. These three seem to have been regarded by him as three stages of elaboration of the spirit from the blood, the natural spirit being made by the liver, the vital spirit by the heart, and the animal spirit by the brain ; in the third stage it attains so high a degree of refinement that it is to be described as “ a quality rather than an actual thing.” He wrote of three corresponding souls — the natural, vital, and the chief soul ; but it seems clear that by each of these souls he meant to imply nothing more than the sum total of the spirit of the cor- responding kind. Vesalius insisted upon the essential similarity of the brains of men and animals ; he seems to have held a thoroughly materialistic view of the mind, though he cautiously abstained from maintaining doctrines that might have brought him into conflict with the Church. Van Helmont, the leading physiologist of the opening years of the seventeenth century, who thus in point of time belongs to the modern period, may be mentioned here ; for his teachings in respect to the soul belong rather to the mediaeval than the modern period. Van Helmont took up Vesalius’ doctrine of the elabora- tion of the animal spirits by successive stages, but distinguished six such stages. In addition to the animal spirits, he recognized, unlike Vesalius, a sensitive and motor soul {aniffiu ssnsitivcc motroaqMe\ This sensitive soul belongs to man alone ; for, speaking truly and thinking correctly, we must say that there is no soul residing in plants and in brute beasts. These possess ANIMISM AT THE TIME OF THE RENASCENCE 45 only a certain vital power, which we may perhaps regard as the forerunner of a soul. The sensitive soul as it exists in man takes to itself the reins of that forerunning governing vital power.” The sensitive soul is the prime agent of all the acts of the body ; and though it carries out the sensations and movements of the body by means of the brain and nerves, its actual seat is the orifice of the stomach. This sensitive soul is mortal, and co-exists in man with the immortal mind (inens immortalis), The sensitive soul is, as it were, the husk or shell of the mind, and the latter works through it.” Before the fall of Adam man possessed only the immortal mind, which discharged the functions of life. “ At the fall, God introduced into man the sensitive soul, and with it death, the immortal mind retiring within the sensitive soul and becoming, as it were, its kernel.”’- Van Helmonfs teaching as regards the soul, a strange chaotic mixture of notions derived from many sources, thus forms a link between the doctrines of Vesalius and of Descartes. ^ I have extracted these brief accounts of the teaching of Vesalius and Van Helmont respecting the soul from Sir Michael Foster’s “ History of Physiology.”' CHAPTER IV ANIMISM IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY T he historians of European thought are agreed in regarding the beginning of the seventeenth century as the date that separates the distinctively modern from the mediaeval period. Of the distinctive features of the modern period two are of predominant importance : first, the rapid and complete eman- cipation of scientific and philosophical thought from the fetters of the Church, and a complete reversal of their position of sub- ordination to theology ; secondly, the increasing definiteness of the strictly mechanical conception of nature, the continued and astonishing triumphs of this conception in its application to the explanation of one field of phenomena after another, and the consequently increasing confidence with which mechanical ex- planations were held to be applicable to all events without exception. In classical antiquity, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius had projected a mechanical scheme of the world, reducing all things to atoms in motion. But their doctrines remained fanciful speculations merely, like any others ; they had no demonstrative force ; the acceptance or rejection of them was as purely a matter of individual taste, as the preference of sherry to port, or of Wordsworth to Browning. But in the opening years of the seventeenth century, Kepler and Galileo laid the sure foundations of the splendid structure of nineteenth century Materialism, by initiating the exact quantitative study of motion ; and the work they began has been carried on by a long line of brilliant thinkers and investigators — Gassendi, Hobbes, Newton, Boyle, Kant, Laplace, Holbach, Mayer, Joule, Helmholz, Kelvin — with such striking success that, in our own day, the truth of the purely mechanical conception of nature has become a confidently held dogma of the scientific world, accepted not only by physicists and chemists, but also by the greater number of the biologists, psychologists, and philosophers, as a fundamental prin- 46 ANIMISM IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 47 ciple to which all their assumptions and conclusions must conform*. Accordingly, the labours of philosophers have been increasingly concerned with attempts to reconcile a belief in spiritual modes of action and existence with the mechanical scheme of the world, and with attempts to show that the belief in purposive or teleological determination is not merely a mythical survival from the dark ages. In this great process of the development of modern thought, which may without exaggeration be described as the reaction of the human mind on the affirmation by the natural sciences of the universal sway of mechanical laws, a central place has been occupied throughout by the problem of the relation of the mental to the physical, of mind to body. In all earlier ages men believed implicitly in the real efficiency of their wills ; they knew themselves able to imagine alternative courses of events in the physical world ; they believed they could freely choose to influence this course of events, and that, purpos- ing or desiring to see one course realized rather than another, they could by their efforts contribute to the realization of their purpose. This was the essence of the conception of animation, and, in attributing animation to beings other than themselves, men attributed to them a similar capacity for teleological determina- tion of phenomenal events. Very early in the modern period, the work of Kepler, Galileo, Gassendi, and their successors, resulted, for the majority of men of science, in the banishment of animation (in this full and original sense) from the whole realm of inorganic nature. In the course of Kepler's own intellectual development this decisive step was made : beginning with an animistic conception of nature, according to which all things, especially the planets, are moved by souls ; he ended by extruding souls entirely from his scheme and supplanting them by the conception of forces. And Galileo made the decisive step by affirming that “it is only possible to understand the qualitative changes in nature when these can be traced back to quantitative changes, which means here to motions in space.” ^ But, with few exceptions, men con- tinued to believe in the animation of organic beings ; though the Cartesians, it is true, gave up the whole organic realm, with the exception of man alone, to the sway of purely mechanical laws (an intrinsically unstable compromise which owed its career only to the influence of theology). 1 Hoff ding, op. cit.y i8i. 48 BODY AND MIND Thus the soul, especially the human soul, became the centre of interest of all the great controversies of the eighteenth century. The materialists sought to show that all the phenomena of organic life (including human actions) are mechanically explicable, and to exhibit human consciousness as entirely dependent upon matter. The defence of the conception of animation was conducted along two different lines ; on the one hand, the vitalists maintained the inadequacy of mechanical principles to explain the physiological processes of organic bodies ; on the other hand, philosophers con- tinued to demand a soul as the substrate of consciousness and the agent of the intellectual activities of man. Then in the nineteenth century the rapid progress of mechanical explanations in physi- ology and the appearance of the Darwinian principles seemed to deal a final blow at physiological Animism with its vital force ; about the same time the discovery that the whole brain is a vast and complex system of reflex nervous paths, in which prevails unbroken continuity of physical process from sense-organ to muscle, seemed to be equally fatal to psychological Animism ; while the establishment of the law of conservation of energy seemed to clinch the matter in both cases, to establish finally the universal sway of the law of mechanical causation throughout both organic and inorganic nature, and to secure the final triumph of Materialism over Animism. These results of the splendid progress of the empirical sciences have been accepted by most of the philosophers. And this acceptance was not difflcult for them ; for they had learned to believe that a thoroughgoing Materialism is not the only alterna- tive to Animism, but that it is possible to reject Animism without accepting those features of thoroughgoing Materialism which render it intellectually disreputable. Two such alternatives have gained wide acceptance among them. On the one hand, a way was found which seemed to make possible the combination of mechanical Materialism, of even the most extreme form, with Animism, and even with a return to the doctrine of universal animation, namely, by sacrificing the most essential element of Animism (the power of teleological determination) and retaining only as the connotation of animation the capacity for feeling or conscious- ness. This is the alternative of which Fechner was the principal ex- ponent. On the other hand, philosophers had learnt from Hume, Berkeley, and Kant how, while giving up Animism, to withdraw themselves to a position from which they could look down upon both ANIMISM IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 49 Materialism and Animism with indifference, namely, the subjectivist position from which matter and soul are regarded as equally unreal, as equally existing only as ideas in one’s own consciousness.^ Such, in briefest outline, is the history of the conception of the soul in the modern period. This history we have now to follow in a little more detail, in order to arrive at a clear understanding of the present state of opinion and controversy regarding the soul, I shall first describe the teachings regarding the psycho- physical problem of the principal thinkers who have dealt with it in the modern period ; and afterwards I shall trace those develop- ments of the natural sciences by which Animism has been, in the opinion of the great majority of scientists and philosophers, driven finally from the field. Although Descartes set himself to lay anew the foundations of philosophy, a large number of the notions and distinctions throwm into the European culture-stream by his predecessors were incor- porated in his system. His principal achievement was to clarify many of the distinctions and notions current in his time, and to set them in definite relations to one another in a single large scheme of things. Descartes distinguished sharply between matter and spirit, defining the former as extended substance, the latter as inex- tended thinking substance. He held that the whole material world and all its processes are to be explained mechanically by means of the conceptions of extension, divisibility, and mobility. He was the first of the moderns to attempt to give a mechanical theory of the evolution of the world, teaching that purely mechanical explanation in terms of matter and motion must apply not only to« the planetary movements and to all the realm of inorganic matter, but also to the processes of organic bodies ; physiology was to be made wholly a branch of mechanical science. His confidence in this bold assertion was greatly strengthened by Harvey’s explana- tion of the circulation of the blood, according to the mechanical principles ; for this seemed to show that the general laws of motion are valid within, as well as without, the body. He wrote : “ All the functions of the body follow naturally from the sole disposition of its organs, just in the same way that the movements of a clock ^ I am aware that many readers will regard this as an unfair description of the attitudes of anti-animistic philosophers ; but I shall attempt to justify it in later chapters. BODY AND MIND SO or other self-acting machine or automaton follow from the arrange- ment of its weights and wheels. So that there is no reason on account of its functions to conceive that there exists in the body any soul whether vegetative or sensitive, or any principle of move- ment other than the blood and its animal spirits agitated by the heat of the fire which burns continually in the heart, and which does not differ in nature from any of the other fires which are met with in inanimate bodies.’’ He devised a hypothetical scheme for the explanation of all the bodily movements of animals in a purely mechanical fashion ; and, though this was little more than a brilliant guess, it came strangely near the modern concep- tion of reflex automatism. Not content with this, he attempted to show in more or less detail how the whole human body may be adequately conceived as a machine working on purely mechanical principles, Descartes thus definitely gave up the vegetative func- tions of the soul, and taught that animals are inanimate machines having no capacity for thought.^ But man enjoys consciousness, or the power of thought ; and this fact, which cannot be ex- plained from the motions of matter, necessitates the assumption that in him the thinking substance is somehow conjoined with matter, that an immaterial soul co-operates with the material body, intervenes in its otherwise purely mechanical operations, and is in turn affected by these. The assumption of the soul in man is also necessitated, he held, by the fact that the bodily movements of men, unlike those of the animals, reveal by their complexity and their nice adjustment to an infinity of varied situations that they are guided by reason. A third line of reasoning by which he justified the conception of the soul runs as follows : “ Because I know with certitude that I exist, and because, in the meantime, I do not observe that aught necessarily belongs to my nature or essence beyond my being a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists only in my being a thinking being. And although I may, or rather, as I will shortly say, although I certainly do possess a body with which I am very closely conjoined : nevertheless, because, on the one hand, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in as far as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other ^ Descartes’ doctrine seems to imply the denial of aU psychical hfe or con- sciousness to animals ; and it has generally been interpreted in this way. But Descartes, inconsistently enough, attributed mere sensation and feeling to the animals. ® ANIMISM IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 51 hand, I possess a distinct idea of body, in as far as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that I myself am entirely and truly distinct from my body, and may exist without it”^ Again, he wrote that we “perceive clearly that neither extension nor figure nor local motion . . . pertains to our nature, and nothing save thought alone ; it then becomes plain that I am not the assemblage of members called the human body; I am not a thin and penetrating air diffused through all these members, or wind, or flame, or vapour, or breath ; for the notion we have of our mind precedes that of any corporeal thing, and is more certain, seeing that we still doubt whether there is any body in existence, while we already perceive that we think.” He argued also that the reasoning soul “ can by no means be educed from the power of matter, but must be expressly created ; it is of a nature wholly independent of the body, and consequently is not liable to die with the latter ; and, finally, because no other causes are observed capable of destroying it, we are naturally led to judge that it is immortal.” Descartes adopted the conception of animal spirits current among the physiologists of his time ; but he divested it of all animistic meaning ; for him the animal spirits were purely material. These animal spirits consist of the finest particles contained in the blood, which are filtered from the arteries through minute pores into the central cavity or ventricle of the brain. From this ventricle they pass into the nerves, and, by flowing down the motor nerves and from them into the muscles, they cause the latter to become distended laterally, and therefore to shorten and so bring about the movements of the parts of the body. According to Descartes’ scheme of the nervous system, the motor nerves open from the ventricle of the brain by valved mouths ; the sensory nerves also have their central terminations in the ventricle, each being connected with the valve of one of the motor nerves ; when, then, any impression is made on a sense- organ, the sensory nerve affected plays the part of a bell- wire, it pulls open the valve to which it is attached and so allows the animal spirits to flow down the corresponding motor nerve and to bring about the appropriate reflex movement. Descartes, having devised this mechanical scheme of reflex action, and holding that all other bodily processes also are purely mechanical, did not find it necessary to assume, as was done by Augustine and others of ^ Meditatpm VI., Veitch’s translation. 52 BODY AND MIND his predecessors, that the soul is present in every part of the body ; accordingly he assigned it a seat in the pineal gland, or rather he assumed that it acts on, and is acted on by, the body only through the medium of this part of the brain ; being led to this view by the fact of the central position of the pineal gland in close proximity to the ventricle. (This was an unfor- tunate shot in the dark ; for modern research has shown that no part of the brain is less concerned in our mental processes than the pineal gland, which seems to be a vestigial remnant of a median eye carried on the top of the cranium by a remote ancestor of the human species.) The soul, he taught, is able, by inclining the pineal gland this way or that, to direct the motion of the animal spirits of the brain towards this or that motor nerve, and to secure in this way the execution of the actions that it wills — a rude foreshadowing of the conception of guidance without work done, which in more recent times has been adduced as the probable mode of action of the soul on the bodily processes. It is noteworthy that Descartes distinguished two kinds of memory : — “ one of material things which depends on after-effects or traces of preceding excitations of the brain, and the other of mental things, depending on permanent traces in consciousness itself. Thought proper iintellectid) and imagination {imaginatio} may be distinguished from one another by this, that in thought proper the soul alone is active, while in imagination it makes use of sensuous images. Imagination, like perception and the material remembrance of the soul, only belongs to the soul in as far as it is united with the body ; but the soul in its pureness, anima pura^ can be thought without either imagination or per- ception. The difference between instinct and will similarly rests on the fact that while the former arises in the body, the will belongs to the soul itself. . . . The emotions are due to the influence of the body upon the soul ; but the inner feelings arise in the soul as a consequence of its own thoughts and judgments.’" Thus Professor Hoffding summarizes the main points of Descartes' consistently dualistic psychology.^ The teachings of Descartes exerted a far-reaching influence on subsequent science and philosophy, of which, as regards the conception of the soul, we may distinguish four principal and diverse line.s. First, his description of the soul as an immaterial ^ op. Clt.y p. 238. ANIMISM IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 53 inextended being, interacting with the body through the medium of the brain and nervous system only, gave the animistic theory a more definite and more defensible form than it had previously received. Secondly, by attributing to the soul the function of thought or of conscious activities only and denying to it the vegetative functions commonly attributed to it by his predecessors, he completed the separation of the conceptions of vitalizing principle and thinking principle which some of his predecessors had proposed ; and it is largely owing to his influence that this separation has continued to the present day, the former surviving as the vital force of the vitalistic physiologists, the latter as the thinking feeling willing soul, the ground of all individual conscious- ness. Thirdly, by his bold assertion of the purely mechanical nature of all animal behaviour and by his ingenious speculations in support of this assertion, he hastened the advent of the time when all the behaviour of men also should be asserted with equal confidence to be the product of purely mechanical factors. Fourthly, by distinguishing so sharply between the natures of soul and body respectively, he brought into clearer view the difficulty of understanding the mode of interaction of soul and body, and thus provoked attempts to find other formulations of the psycho- physical relation. Descartes’ own disciples were not slow to raise this difficulty : How can there be reciprocal action between two such wholly unlike things as body and soul ? And some of them, notably Geulincx and Malebranche, said : It is not possible ; there can be no such interaction ; the correspondence that clearly obtains between our thought and our bodily processes is maintained by the continual interposition of God, a change in one being the occasion for God to produce a corresponding change in the other. This doctrine of Occasional Causes,” or “ Occasionalism,” devised by Geulincx to meet the difficulty of conceiving psycho-physical interaction, was extended by Malebranche to the explanation of all transient action. A different answer to this problem of the correspondence of bodily and mental changes — one that has had a greater influence upon subsequent thought — was given by Leibnitz in his doctrine of pre-established harmony. This can only be understood in connexion with his metaphysical doctrine of monads. Leibnitz rejected Descartes’ distinction of thinking and extended sub- 54 BODY AND MIND stances ; he regarded extension as merely phenomenal, and sought to describe in other terms the reality which appears to us as extended matter. He conceived all things after the pattern of that of which he had the most immediate awareness, namely, the unity of his own self as a thinking conscious being. He taught that the universe created by God consists of an infinite number of real beings, each different from every other, each containing from the first the potentiality of its whole subsequent history, each indivisible and incapable of being destroyed save by an act of God. These enduring beings or substances are the monads, the elements of which all things are composed. The soul of each man and of each animal is such a monad ; but the soul of man is a monad of a higher order than all others and is properly called a mind, because its consciousness is richer and its psychical activities are of a higher order ; it knows more of the world, or as Leibnitz says, it expresses or reflects the world more fully and knows also God. We learn from our experience of sleep, dreams, states of fainting, dizziness, confusion, and coma, that the human soul passes through states of consciousness of many degrees of clearness and fullness ; and, as we may suppose the soul of any one of the higher animals to be incapable of a clearer and fuller consciousness than that of our duller half-waking states, so the soul of an animalcule must be supposed to be a monad enjoying a consciousness which is to that of the higher animal, as this is to the fully waking con- sciousness of man. But there is no lower limit to this descending scale of psychical life; and what we commonly call a mass of inert matter, is the phenomenon or appearance to us of an aggregation of monads of a still lower order than the soul of the animalcule.^ Our bodies, then, and the bodies of animals are orderly aggre- ^ In the following paragraphs of the Monadologie this scheme is expressed, perhaps more succinctly than m any other of Leibnitz’s writings : ** All simple substances or created monads may be called JEntelechies because they have in themselves a certain perfection. There is in them a sufficiency which makes them the source of their internal activities, and renders them, so to speak, in- corporeal automatons.” “ If we wish to designate as soul everything which has perceptions and desires in the general sense that I have just explained, all simple substances or created monads could be called souls. But since feeling is some- thmg more than a mere perception, I think that the general name of Monad or Entelechy should suffice for simple substances which have only perception, while we may reserve the term Soul for those whose perception is more distinct and is accompanied by memory. We experience in ourselves a state where we remember nothing and where we have no distmct perception, as in periods of fainting, or when we are overcome by a profound, dreamless sleep. In such a state the soul does not sensibly differ at all from a simple Monad. As this ANIMISM IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 55 gations or systems of monads belonging to many different levels in this scale of psychical being ; and the soul of each man or animal is but the dominant monad of one such system. Leibnitz maintained (though why he did so is not clear to my mind) that every soul exists always in association with some body, i.e. some system of lower monads.^ What, then, is the nature of the relation between soul and body, between that higher monad which is the soul of the man and that system of lower monads which is his body ? Leibnitz rejected both Descartes’ doctrine of interaction and the doctrine of occasional causes. In fact, he rejected com- pletely the conception of causal interaction between monads. The monads do not influence one another in any "way. How then does he account for the harmony of the world-order, including the cor- respondence between the changes of our bodies and the changes of our consciousness ? The temporal correspondence of changes in all monads is due to the harmony of their natures pre-established by God at the moment of their creation. This bold and original speculation cannot be more clearly expressed than in Leibnitz’s own words : Every present state of a simple substance (i.e. of a Monad) is a natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future.” ^ And again : “ The union of the soul with the body, and even the action of one sub- stance upon another, consists only in the perfect mutual accord, expressly established by the ordinance of the first creation, by virtue of which each substance following its own laws falls in with what the other requires, and thus the activities of the one follow or accompany the activities or changes of the other.” ® In seeking to make clear to others this conception, as applied to the relation of soul to body, he wrote, “ Suppose two clocks, or two watches, which perfectly keep time together. Now that may happen in three ways. The first way consists in the mutual influence of each clock upon the other ; the second, in the care of a man who state, however, is not permanent and the soul can recover from it, the soul is something more.” Again, “ But the knowledge of eternal and necessary truths is that which distinguishes us from mere animals and gives us reason and the sciences, thus raising us to a knowledge of ourselves and of God. This is what is called in us the Rational Soul or the Mind” (** Monadology,” paragraphs 18, 19, 20 and 29, Montgomery's translation), ” Neither are there souls wholly separate from bodies, or bodiless spirits. God alone is without body” f * Monadologie,” paragraph 72I ® Monadologie,” paragraph 22. ® Letter to Arnauld of March 23rd, 1690. 56 BODY AND MIND looks after them ; the third, in their own accuracy. Now, put the soul and the body in the place of the two clocks. Their agreement or sympathy will also arise in one of these three ways. The way of influence is that of common philosophy, but as we cannot conceive material particles, or immaterial species, or qualities which can pass from one of these substances into the other, we are obliged to give up this opinion. The way of assistance is that of the system of occasional causes ; but I hold that this is to introduce Deus ex machina in a natural and ordinary matter ; in which it is reasonable that God should intervene only in the way in which He supports all the other things of nature. Thus there remains only my hypothesis, that is to say, the way of the harmony pre-established by a contrivance of the Divine foresight, which has from the beginning formed each of these substances in so perfect, so regular, and accurate a manner that by merely following its own laws each substance is in harmony with the other, just as if there were a mutual influence between them.’^ Thus Leibnitz solved to his own satisfaction the problem of the relation between soul and body. His scheme raises many difficulties that he did not adequately deal with. Many of these were pointed out by his correspondent, Arnauld, especially the problems raised by the association of each soul with a succession of bodies in the course of its career from the beginning to the end of the world. This difficulty, like most others, especially every problem of causation, Leibnitz solved by the easy method of invoking the designing skill of God at the creation of the world. In thus abolishing all causation and transient action from his scheme of the created world, and reducing the relation between changes to mere temporal concomitance, Leibnitz really abolished science ; for the work of science is to discover the causal relations between events. The objection may be stated more fully in the following way. To answer, in face of any particular problem, this event takes place because God ordained it so, is no explanation ; or we may say that, like the explanation of all events offered by the extreme Occasionalists, namely, the direct interposition of God, the proposed explanation is of no value because it explains too much. Admit- ting, as Leibnitz does, the existence of souls and bodies as distinct beings, the question all the world asks is : Why do certain changes in each particular soul correspond in a regular manner ANIMISM IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 57 with certain changes in one particular body ? And Leibnitz puts us off with the answer — Because God has ordained it so. Moreover, Leibnitz*s scheme of monads does not enable him to get rid of dualism. He maintains with Descartes and Spinoza the strictly mechanical ordering of nature, yet he maintains also the teleological character of psychical activity: “Souls act in accordance with the laws of final causes, through their desires, purposes and means. Bodies act in accordance with the laws of efficient causes or of motion. The two realms, that of efficient causes and that of final causes, are in harmony, each with the other.’' ^ This parallelism of the mechanical and of the teleo- logical we shall have to notice again as a principal difficulty of all systems akin to that of Leibnitz. It is true that in the “ Th^odicde ” he gives the primacy to teleological determination, but only at the cost of inconsistency with his earlier doctrine. Further, Leibnitz finds himself driven to represent human souls as differing in several very important respects from other monads ; thus he writes : “ With regard to spirits, that is to say, substances which think and which are able to recognize God and to discover eternal truths, I hold that God governs them according to laws different from those with which He governs the rest of substances,” namely, “ according to the spiritual laws of justice,, of which the others are incapable.” ^ Again, “ Such a creation is true, I admit, only in the case of reasoning souls, and hold that all forms which do not think, were created at the same time that the world was ” ® ; and yet again, “ Intellects or souls which are capable of reflection and of knowing the eternal truths and God (i.e. human souls), have many privileges that exempt them from the transformation of bodies.” ^ It was no doubt owing to these unsatisfactory features of the doctrine of pre-established harmony that it never became generally accepted as the solution of the psycho-physical problem. Descartes’ sharpening of the psycho-physical problem pro- voked Spinoza to suggest a solution which has had, perhaps, a greater influence on subsequent thought than that of Leibnitz. Although in point of time this suggestion preceded Leibnitz’s, I have dealt with it after the latter, because Leibnitz does not 1 ** Monadologie,*' paxagrapli 79. * letter to Arnauld, October 6th, 1687. ® Ihid. * Letter to Arnauld, March 23rd, 1690. BODY AND MIND 53 mention it among the possible solutions, and because it seems to come after his scheme in the natural order of evolution of philosophical speculation. Spinoza taught that soul and body are not two distinct substances or things, and that we must regard thought and exten- sion as but two of the many attributes or aspects of the one real substance, which is God. Reverting to Leibnitz^s illustration of the two clocks that keep time, we may say that Spinoza^s suggestion would constitute a fourth way of explaining their concomitance, and would consist in saying that the two clocks are but two reflections at different angles of one real clock. Or we may alter the illustration a little, and may liken the relation of mental to bodily events in any individual to the relation between the visual and the auditory presentations of one clock ; the auditory and the visual appearances exhibit regular and orderly temporal rela- tions, but there is no direct causal relation between them : the seen movements of the hands and the sounds heard are two of many modes in which the clock might be apprehended. In Spinoza’s own words : ‘‘ The nnind and the body are one and the same thing, conceived at one time under the attribute of thought, and at another under that of extension. For this reason the order and concatenation of things is one, whether nature be con- ceived under this or that attribute, and consequently the order of the actions and passions of our body is coincident in nature with the order of the actions and passions of the mind.” Spinoza thus sought to abolish at one stroke the distinction between body and soul as material and immaterial substances, which the labours of philosophers through two thousand years had gradually evolved. It was a bold attempt to avoid the difficulties of both Animism and Materialism. Like the doctrines of occasional causes and of pre-established harmony, the hypothesis was framed to meet, or rather to avoid, the difficulty of conceiving causal interaction between mind and matter; but, unlike the authors of those doctrines, Spinoza did not reject the causal relation as illusory, a figment of our minds only ; rather he held that the causal relation obtains between the real events that we apprehend under the two modes of material and mental events, and that this real causal relation is likewise appre- hended by us under the two modes of material or mechanical and of mental causation. Hence each series appears for us as a closed causal series, the two series having no causal interaction ; ‘‘ so long ANIMISM IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 59 as things are regarded as mental phenomena we must explain the order of nature or the causal connexion by the attribute of thought alone ; and so long as we regard them as material phenomena, we must explain the whole order of nature by the attribute of extension alone/’ ^ “ If,” says Professor Hoffding, “ we ask for the real reason why the mental side of existence cannot be explained by the material, nor the material by the mental, we shall find the answer in Spinoza’s ideal of explanation through causes, according to which cause and effect must resemble one another. In a letter Spinoza says clearly : ‘If two things have nothing in common with one another, the one cannot be the cause of the other : for, since there would be nothing in the effect that was also in the cause, everything that was in the effect would have arisen out of nothing.’ If we keep this fundamental principle consistently before us we shall have the key to Spinoza’s whole system.” ^ The middle years of the seventeenth century produced yet another reaction against Descartes’ spiritualistic Dualism in the Materialism of Thomas Hobbes, a Materialism as consistent and thorough- going as Materialism can be. For Hobbes, who was acquainted with the works and the persons of Galileo and Gassendi, every- thing that exists is corporeal, body and substance are one and the same ; the essential attributes of body are extension and motion ; all change is motion. Sensation is nothing else but motion ; pleasure is really nothing but motion about the heart; mens nihil aliud erit praterquam motus in partibus quibusdam corporis organicir Thus the thinkers of the seventeenth century brought to a sharper issue than ever before the problem of the soul and of its relation to the body, and formulated definitely and clearly four distinct solutions of the problem ; namely, the animistic Dualism of Descartes, the parallelistic Animism of Leibnitz, the identity- hypothesis of Spinoza, the Materialism of Hobbes, each of which has continued to find respectable supporters up to the present day. These four rival doctrines, each associated with the name of one of the four most celebrated philosophers of the seventeenth century, were handed on to the eighteenth century. No wonder, then, that the problem of the soul was eagerly discussed, and that, as Lange says, the human soul was the point around which 1 Hoffding, op. cit. 310. ® Op. cit., p. 310- 6o BODY AND MIND all controversies turned in the eighteenth century.^ Descartes had taught that man is compounded of soul and body acting and reacting upon one another ; Leibnitz that, though he is com- pounded of soul and body, these do not influence one another ; Spinoza that mind and body are equally real or unreal, because but two aspects of one reality ; Hobbes that man consists of body alone, the soul being a mere figment of his imagination. Two possibilities only remained, namely, first, that the soul alone is real, the body being fictitious or appearance only ; secondly, that both body and soul are fictitious. And the ingenuity of the eighteenth century proved equal to the task of propounding and maintaining these doctrines also ; before the century passed away, these two were added to the list of rival doctrines by philosophers, namely, Bishop Berkeley and David Hume, whose penetration and high reputation secured for their views a respectful hearing and a career whose end no man can yet foresee. ^ Op. ctt.i vol. i. p. 244. CHAPTER V ANIMISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH .CENTURY I N the metaphysic of the Schoolmen®' the notion of “substance” occupied a position of fundamental import- ance. In their mouths, the word implied something permanently self-identical and unchanging beneath the flux of appearances, an unalterable substratum or core of real being which supports the accidents, qualities, or attributes in which substance manifests itself ; and, as we have seen, the soul was generally defined as an immaterial substance. The philosophers of the seventeenth century had continued to use the word substance in a similar way, though the meanings they attached to the word were not strictly identical. Descartes had assumed sub- stances of two kinds, the thinking and the extended substances ; for Spinoza, all substance was one only ; for Leibnitz, a substance is an ultimate logical subject, and the infinitely numerous monads were such substances. The philosophical controversies of the eighteenth century revolved around this notion of substance. Conservative thought held fast to substance as to a sheet- anchor; progressive thought turned to rend it to tatters, and left it at the end of the century covered with contempt, merely a discredited shadowy remnant of its former self. And the fate of the notion of the soul was closely bound up with that of substance ; it suffered discredit in an almost equal degree. In the attack upon “ substance,” John Locke was the fore- runner of both Hume and Berkeley ; and, with that temperate sagacity which characterizes all his writings, he anticipated the reasonings of both his brilliant successors upon the psycho- physical problem, without, however, accepting the extreme conclusions of either. He wrote, “When we talk or think of any particular sort of corporeal substances, as horse, stone, etc., though the idea we have of either of them be but the com- plication or collection of those several simple ideas of sensible qualities which we used to find united in the thing called 61 62 BODY AND MIND horse ” or “ stone,” yet because we cannot conceive how they should subsist alone, nor one in another, we suppose them exist- ing in, and supported by, some common subject ; which support we denote by the name substance,” though it be certain we have no clear or distinct idea of that thing we suppose a support The same happens concerning the operations of the mind ; namely, thinking, reasoning, fearing, etc., which we concluding not to subsist of themselves, nor apprehending how they can belong to body, or be produced by it, we are apt to think these the actions of some other substance which we call “ spirit,” whereby yet it is evident, that having no other idea or notion of matter, but something wherein those many sensible qualities which affect our senses do subsist ; by supposing a substance wherein thinking, knowing, doubting, and a power of moving, etc., do subsist ; we have as clear a notion of the substance of spirit as we have of body ; the one being supposed to be (without knowing what it is) the sid^bstraimn to those simple ideas we have from- without ; and the other supposed (with a like ignorance of what it is) to be the substratum to those operations which we experiment in ourselves within. It is plain, then, that the idea of corporeal substance in matter is as remote from our conceptions and apprehensions as that of spiritual substance, or spirit ; and therefore, from our not having any notion of the substance of spirit, we can no more conclude its non-existence than we can, for the same reason, deny the existence of body ; it being as rational to affirm there is no body, because we have no clear and distinct idea of the substance of matter, as to say there is no spirit, because we have no clear and distinct idea of the substance of a spirit” ^ That is to say, Locke saw that our conceptions of matter and of soul are alike hypotheses which we make for the better interpretation of our experience and the guidance of our actions, and that what knowledge we have of them is not direct, but is hypothetical and inferential only, is inferred from the facts of immediate experience. Locke strongly insisted that the conceptions of an immaterial soul and of its action upon the body involved no more obscurity than those of material substance and of the action of one body upon another. '' If any one say, he knows not what it is thinks in him, he means, he knows not what the substance is of that thinking thing ; no more, say I, knows he what the sub- ^ ''An Essay on the Human Understanding,’* Bk. II. chap, xxiix. ANIMISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 63 stance is of that solid thing. Farther, if he says, he knows not how he thinks, I answer, Neither knows he how he is extended ; how the solid parts of body are united or cohere together to make extension.” ^ And in the following passage he anticipated Lotze’s reply to those who raise the difficulty of the Occasionalists. Another idea we have o'f body, is the power of communication of motion by impulse ; and of our souls, the power of exciting motion by thought. These ideas, the one of body, the other of our minds, every day’s experience clearly furnishes us with ; but if here again we inquire how this is done, we are equally in the dark. For in the communication of motion by impulse, wherein as much motion is lost to one body as is got to the other, which is the ordinariest case, we can have no other conception but of the passing of motion out of one body into another ; which, I think, is as obscure and inconceivable, as how our minds move or stop our bodies by thought ; which we every moment find they do.” ^ Hence, he contended, '‘we have as many and as clear ideas belonging to spirit as we have belonging to body, the substance of each being equally unknown to us ; and the idea of thinking in spirit, as clear as of extension in body ; and the communication of motion by thought, which we attribute to spirit, is as evident as that impulse which we ascribe to body. Constant experience makes us sensible of both of these, though our narrow under- standings can comprehend neither.” ® I.ocke, then, held a distinctly dualistic view of human person- ality, though he held it, not dogmatically, but only as the most reasonable and probable view ; for the temper of his mind was scientific rather than metaphysical. He was prepared to admit that God may have endowed material substance with the power of thought ; for, said he, “It is not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive this than to conceive that God should superadd to matter another substance with a faculty of thinking ; since we know not in what thinking consists nor to what sort of substances the first eternal thinking Being has been pleased to give that power.” This passage shows that Locke was familiar with, and regarded as not altogether untenable, that kind of mechanical materialism, professed by his great countrymen, Newton, Boyle, and Priestly, which reconciled itself with religion by postulating God as the designer and creator of the great machine ; and his adherence to ^ Essay, Bk. II. chap, xxiii. ^ Loc, at, ® Loc. ciL BODY AND MIND 64 the dualistic view seems to have been determined by the fact that it was more in harmony with the religious teachings which claimed to be founded upon divine revelation. The more fervid temperament and stronger theological bias of Bishop Berkeley would not allow him to rest content with Locke's calm, balanced, and strictly scientific attitude towards the problem of spirit and matter, or to follow him in accepting the dualistic answer to the problem as the most probable of the rival possibilities. He was a metaphysician by nature and sought for absolute truth. Since, then, it had been made clear by Locke that matter is but an obscure and hypothetical conception based only on inference from the facts of sensation ; and since Berkeley was convinced of the absolute reality of Spirit, on grounds which he never thought of questioning ; he hastened to deny the reality of matter, in order to stem the dangerous flood of Materialism, which seemed to him to threaten all true religion. Locke had ascribed our sensations to the influence of material things, operating indirectly upon our souls through the medium of the sense organs. Berkeley insisted that, if we believe in the omnipotence of God, the assumption of material things as the causes of our sensations is an unnecessary hypothesis ; for we must believe that God can evoke our sensations by the direct action of his Spirit upon ours. Berkeley sets out by agreeing with Locke that all the objects of human knowledge are “ideas” — “either ideas actually im- printed on the senses ; or else such as arc perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind ; or lastly, ideas formed by help of memory and imagination.” ^ “ But,” he goes on, “besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something which knows or perceives them ; and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering, about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call Mind, Spirit, Soul, or Myself. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived — for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived.” ^ As regards the alleged independent existence of material things, he writes — “ It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing ^ “ Of the Principles of Human Knowledge,” §1. 2 op. c%t.^ § 2. ANIMISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY 65 amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding* But, with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world, yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For, what are the foremenlioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations ? and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these^ or any combination of them, should exist unperceived ? ^ And again he writes : Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind — that their being is to be perceived or known ; that, consequently, so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit — it being perfectly unintelligible, and involving all the absurdity of abstrac- tion, to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of a spirit. To be convinced of which the reader need only reflect, and try to separate in his own thoughts the being of a sensible thing from its being perceived. From what has been said it is evident there is not any other Substance than Spirit^ or that which perceivesP ^ As regards the existence of spirit, after denying all power or agency to ideas, he writes : ‘‘We perceive a continual succession of ideas; some are anew excited, others are changed or totally disappear. There is, therefore, some Cause of these ideas, whereon they depend, and which produces and changes them. That this cause cannot be any quality, or idea, or combination of ideas is clear from the preceding section. It must, therefore, be a substance ; but it has been shown that there is no corporeal or material substance : it remains, therefore, that the cause of ideas is an incorporeal active substance or Spirit.” “ A Spirit is one simple, undivided, active being — as it perceives ideas it is called the Understandings and as it produces or otherwise ^ Op. cit.s § 4. ^ Op. cit.s §§ 6 and 7. 66 BODY AND MIND operates about them it is called the Will. . . . Such is the nature of Spirit, or that which acts, that it cannot be of itself perceived, bul- only by the effects which it produceth,” ^ Then, after remarking that “ I find I can excite ideas in my mind at pleasure, and vary and shift the scene as often as I think fit,’^ he goes on, “ But, v/hatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my will. When in broad day- light I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view ; and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses, the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is, therefore, some other Will or Spirit that produces them.” Berkeley, then, regardless of the statement with which his inquiry opens, namely, the statement that all the objects of human knowledge are '‘ideas,” goes on to tell us that “from the Principles we have laid down, it follows Human Knowledge may naturally be reduced to tv/o heads — that of ideas and that of Spirits.” ^ “ Thing or Being is the most general name of all : it comprehends under it two kinds entirely distinct and hetero- geneous, and which have nothing common but the name, viz., Spirits and Ideas. The former are active, indivisible, incor- ruptible substances : the latter are inert, fleeting, or dependent beings, which subsist not by themselves, but are supported by, or exist in minds or spiritual substances.” ^ Other passages that throw light on Berkeley’s conception of the soul are the following : “ It is a plain consequence that the soul always thinks ; and in truth, whoever shall go about to divide in his thoughts, or abstract the existence of a spirit from its cogitation, will, I believe, find it no easy task.” ^ “ By the word spirit we mean only that which thinks, wills, and per- ceives : this, and this alone, constitutes the signification of that term.” ® “ The knowledge I have of other spirits is not immediate, as is the knowledge of my ideas ; but depending on the inter- vention of ideas, by me referred to agents or spirits distinct from myself, as effects or concomitant signs.” ^ Op. cit , §§ 26 and 27. 2 Qp^ § 29. 3 Op. cU., § 86. * Op. ctL, § 89. s Op, ctt.y § 98. ® Op. c%t.y § 138. ’ Op. cit.y § 145. ANIMISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 67 Nothing can be plainer than that the motions, changes, decays, and dissolutions which we hourly see befall natural bodies (and which is what we mean by the course of nature) cannot possibly affect an active simple, uncompounded substance ; such a being, therefore, is indissoluble by the force of nature ; that is to say — the soul of man is naturally immortal.” ^ Locke, then, had shown clearly enough that our conceptions of matter and spirit, of body and soul, are obscure and uncertain, and that they are arrived at only indirectly by reflection upon the facts of immediate experience : but he accepted them as being useful and reasonably probable : Berkeley, carried away by his desire to confound the materialists, rejected altogether the “ unknown somewhat ” that we call matter, while retaining the equally unknown somewhat that we call spirit ; thus he let loose the modern flood of subjectivism and scepticism, and led to the adoption of the critical attitude in philosophy. For Hume, approaching the same problems without Berkeley’s theological bias, but in a similar metaphysical spirit, forcibly argued, as Locke had done, that our conception of spirit is in no better case than that of matter, and that, if, with Berkeley, we reject the conception of matter, we must also reject the conception of spirit. The essential novelty of Hume’s reasoning was his rejection of the validity of the notion of causation. Both Locke and Berkeley had accepted and used the principle of causation without serious question ; noting that our sensations rise to consciousness independently of our volition, they regarded them as the effects of some causes lying outside or beyond the mind, and confidently inferred the reality of the causes from these effects revealed in our immediate experience — Locke conceiving them as the actions of matter on mind, Berkeley as the direct actions of God. But Hume asked : What is our warrant for thus accepting the principle of causation, and for inferring the existence of causes, whether material or spiritual, of our sensations ? And to this question he could find no good answer. “ It is only causation,'' says Hume, “which produces such a connection as to give us assurance from the existence or action of one object, that it was followed or preceded by any other existence or action.” ^ “ It appears that of those three relations which depend not upon the mere ideas (namely identity, the situation in time and place, and ^ Op. ctt., § 41. ^ “ A Treatise of Human Nature,” Part III. § 2. 68 BODY AND MIND causation) the only one that can be traced beyond our senses, and informs us of existences and objects, which we do not see or feel, is causation ” ^ He then goes on to say that our idea of the relation of causation obtaining between events is derived from the observation of their contiguity in space and their immediate succession in time. But, says he, Shall we then rest contented with these two relations of contiguity and succession, as affording a complete idea of causation ? By no means, an object may be contiguous and prior to another, without being considered as its cause. There is a necessary connection to be taken into considera- tion.’^ ^ Hume then investigates through the course of several chapters “ the nature of that necessary connection which enters into our idea of cause and effect” And the outcome of his research is summarized as follows : — “ The idea of necessity arises from some impression. There is no impression conveyed by our senses, which can give rise to that idea. It must, therefore, be derived from some internal impression or impression of reflection. There is no internal impression, which has any relation to the present business, but that propensity which custom produces, to pass from an object to an idea of its usual attendant. This, therefore, is the essence of neceesity. Upon the whole, necessity is something that exists in mind, not in objects, nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, considered as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity or necessity is nothing but that determination of the mind to pass from causes to effects, and from effects to causes, according to their experienced union.” ^ For, “ When any object is presented to us, it immediately conveys to the mind a lively idea of that object which is usually found to attend it ; and this determination of the mind forms the necessary connection of these objects. But when we change the point of view from the objects to the perceptions, in that case the impression is to be considered as the cause, and the lively idea as the effect ; and their necessary connection is that new determination, which we feel to pass from the idea of the one to that of the other.” ^ Hence he concludes “ A cause is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.” ® ^ Loc. ctt. ^ Loc, cit, * Op, cit.y chap. xiv. ^ Loc. cit. ^ Loc, cii. ANIMISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 69 Hume, having thus proved to his own complete satisfaction that the conception of causal relation is purely subjective, that it stands for no real action or influence exerted by one thing on another, has (for those who accept his reasoning) undermined both the reasoning by which Locke justified our conception of matter as the cause of our sensations, and that by which Berkeley sought to prove our sensations to be directly caused by the will of God. Hume had already dismissed to the class of baseless fictions the conception of a thing, or substance, or enduring being, with the dictum that “the idea of a substance is nothing but a collection of simple ideas that are united by the imagination and have a particular name assigned them,” and that “we have no idea of substance, distinct from that of a collection of particular qualities, nor have we any other meaning when we either talk or reason concerning it.”^ But his reasoning about causation (if it be sound) invalidates even more effectively the conception of thing or substance ; for a thing is essentially that which exerts power or action upon another. Hume undertook to refute also the special arguments by which Berkeley had sought to establish the reality of God and of the human soul as real beings, things, or substances. Berkeley had made merry over those philosophers who spoke of the substance of matter as the support or substratum of its accidents or sensible qualities. “ If we inquire into what the most accurate philosophers declare themselves to mean by material substance^ we shall find them acknowledge they have no other meaning annexed to those sounds but the idea of being in general, together with the relative notion of its supporting accidents. The general idea of Being appeareth to me the most abstract and incomprehensible of all other ; and as for its supporting accidents, this, as we have just now observed, cannot be understood in the common sense of those words ; it must, therefore, be taken in some other sense, but what that is they do not explain. So that when I consider the two parts or branches which make the signification of the words material substance, I am convinced there is no distinct meaning annexed to them.” ^ Yet, when in the course of the same essay Berkeley came to treat of souls, he nai’vely described them as spiritual substances by which ideas are ^ Op, ctt,, Part I. § 7. ^ ** Principles of Human Knowledge,’* § 16. 70 BODY AND MIND supported and in which ideas exist as “ inert, fleeting, or dependent beings ” ; without in any way rendering more clear the meaning to be attached to the sounds “ substance and supporting.” Hume, regarding the problem in complete freedom from Berkeley’s theological bias, metes out to spiritual substance the same treatment that Berkeley gave to material substance Referring to “ the curious reasoners concerning the material or immaterial substances in which they suppose our perceptions to inhere,” he says : “In order to put a stop to these endless cavils on both sides, I know no better method than to ask these philosophers in a few words, what they mean by substance and inhesion ? This question we have found impossible to be answered with regard to matter and body ; but besides that in the case of the mind it labours under all the same difficulties, it is burdened with some additional ones, which are peculiar to that subject.” And after displaying these, he concludes : “ Thus neither by considering the first origin of ideas, nor by means of a definition, are we able to arrive at any satisfactory notion of substance, which seems to me a sufficient reason for abandoning utterly that dispute concerning the materiality and immateriality of the soul, and makes me absolutely condemn even the question itself. We have no perfect idea of anything but of a perception. A substance is entirely different from a perception. We have therefore no idea of a substance. Inhesion in something is supposed to be requisite to support the existence of our perception. Nothing appears requisite to support the existence of a perception. We have therefore no idea of inhesion. What possibility then of answering that question, Whether percep- tions inhere in a material or immaterial substance, when we do not so much as understand the meaning of the question ? ” ^ Berkeley, having opened his essay with the emphatic assertion that all the objects of human knowledge are ideas and ideas only; having shown that (in accordance with his general principles of knowledge) “ it is evident there can be no idea of a spirit ; and having said “ that this substance (spirit) which supports or perceives ideas should itself be an idea or like an idea is evidently absurd ” ; may justly be held to have anticipated Hume s denial of spirit ; or at least to have shown that, according to his own principles, we can have no knowledge of ^ " Treatise of Human Nature,” Book I. Part III. § 5. ANIMISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURA 71 spirit. But, regardless of logic, he went on to say somewhat lamely that In a large sense indeed, we may be said to have an idea or rather a notion of spirit.” ^ And in another work he attempted to defend this “ notion,” this “ sort of an idea,” so manifestly inconsistent with his own statements and principles, by saying : “ I know or am conscious of my own being, and that I myself am not my ideas. But I am not in like manner conscious of the existence or essence of Matter. On the contrary, I know that nothing inconsistent can exist, and that the existence of this abstract matter implies inconsistency. There is, therefore, no parity of case between Spirit and Matter.” ^ Berkeley’s defence of soul or spirit against his own fundamental principles being so halting and wanting in logic, it was no great step for Hume to refute it and so to bring back the discussion to the position in which it had been left by Locke. But in doing so he gave the agnostic conclusion as to the existence of both spiritual and material substances, a more positively sceptical or negative flavour ; and indeed he showed an inclination towards the materialistic view, rather than towards Berkeley’s pure spiritualism or Locke’s attitude of impaitial agnosticism towards both spirit and matter. In reference to such affirmations of our immediate awareness of the self as Berkeley had made, he wrote : “Un- luckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience which is pleaded for them ; nor have we any idea of self, after the manner it is here explained. For, from what impression could this idea be derived ? This question it is impossible to answer without a manifest contradiction and absurdity ; and yet it is a question which must necessarily be answered if we would have the idea of self pas.*^ for clear and intelligible. It must be some one impression that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any one impression, but that to which our several impressions and ideas are supposed to have a reference. If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same, through the whole course of our lives ; since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impressionj constant and invariable^ Pain and pleasure, grief and j^yj passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of theselmpressions, or 1 Op cit., § 140. 2 Third Dialogue between Hylas and Philonoig. 72 BODY AND MIND from any other, that the idea of self is derived ; and consequently there is no such idea/' “But further, what must become of all our particular per- ceptions upon this hypothesis? All these are different, and distinguishable, and separable from each other, and may be separately considered, and may exist separately, and have no need of anything to support their existence. After w^hat manner, therefore, do they belong to self, and how are they connected with it ? For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception ; and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself and may truly be said not to exist And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate, after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is further requisite to make me a perfect nonentity. If anyone upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can i;eason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself, though I am certain there is no such principle in me.” “ But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight ; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change ; nor is there any single power of the soul which remains unalterably the same perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance ; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different, whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. ANIMISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 73 They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the rrind, nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed.” ^ And, summing up on this question, Hume wrote : “ To pronounce, then, the final decision upon the whole, the question concerning the substance of the soul is absolutely unintelligible ; all our perceptions are not susceptible of a local union, either with what is extended or unextended ; there being some of them of the one kind, and some of the other. And as the constant conjunction of objects constitutes the very essence of cause and effect, matter and motion may often be regarded as the causes of thought, as far as we have any notion of that relation.” ^ While Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in this country were preparing the way for the critical attitude that has been the presupposition of all subsequent philosophizing, continental thought was pursuing a different course. In spite of the attempt of Spinoza to find a new solution of the psycho-physical problem, the bulk of cultivated opinion remained divided between the two doctrines that had come down from antiquity ; men were, in general, either dogmatic spiritualists or dogmatic materialists. In the earlier part of the eighteenth century the academic philosophers were, in the main, divided into two parties, the followers of Descartes and of Leibnitz respectively. The former, accepting the extreme Dualism of Descartes’ metaphysic, had developed it in two divergent directions ; on the one hand, those of strongly religious tendency developed it in the direction of mysticism, and succeeded in rendering it congenial to the Church in a degree which rendered it for a time the successor of Scholasticism ; on the other hand, others laid more stress on the strictly mechanical view of nature, and on the sceptical attitude which Descartes had assumed at the outset of his investiga- tions. By these divergent stresses Cartesianism was dismem- bered ; and throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century it was overshadowed by the Leibnitzian philosophy. In the early part of the century this was made by Christian Wolff the basis of his rationalistic dogmatic system, which dominated most of the continental academies of learning till towards the end of the 1 Op. cit., Bk. I. Part IV. § 6, '' Of Personal Identitjr.” a Op. cU., Bk. I. Part IV. § 5, Of the Immateriality of the Soul.’^ 74 BODY AND MIND eighteenth century. In this system the immortality of the soul as a spiritual substance was established by some such reasoning as follows : The unity of self-consciousness implies the simplicity of the soul substance. Since the soul is simple or unitary it cannot be a compound or capable of division ; hence it cannot be extended, for all extended substance is divisible ; therefore it is a spiritual substance without extension ; and, since it cannot be divided, it is incapable of being destroyed, and is therefore immortal. On the other hand, the materialists, fascinated by the simplicity of the kinetic view of nature, and fortified by increase of biological knowledge (which showed that the animal body is the seat of many chemical and physical processes and that many of its processes may be mechanically interpreted), accepted with enthusiasm Descartes’ dictum that all the processes of the animal body are mechanically explicable, and extended it without ex- ception to the human body ; thus leaving no place for the inter- vention of the soul This materialistic tendency was a part of the movement of the cultivated classes in France (known as the Enlightenment), which was stimulated by the introduction of British thought by Voltaire and Montesquieu. The sensation- alism of Locke and Hume, eagerly taken up and carried to an extreme length by Voltaire and by Condillac in his “ Traits des Sensations” (17S4X lent itself well to the materialistic interpreta- tion of nature and of man. Condillac adhered to Animism in spite of his reduction of all thought to sensation. But Voltaire fastened eagerly upon Locke’s assertion that God may have endowed matter with the power of thought ; and the Enlighten- ment culminated in the dogmatic and atheistic materialism of Baron D’Holbach’s “ Systeme de la Nature” (1770), which found a large following in the polite world. These acutely opposed dogmatisms were the dominant in- fluences in the intellectual circles of continental Europe when, in 1781, Kant launched upon the world his “Critique of Pure Reason.” It fell like a bombshell among the disputants, shat- tered for ever the dogmatic metaphysics of both parties, and became the starting-point of a powerful new movement. Kant’s attempt was, by combining the scepticism he had learnt from Hume with the idealism of Berkeley, to achieve a position which might claim to reconcile and to combine in a higher ANIMISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 75 synthesis all that was most vital in the opposed dogmatisms. The great and rapid success of his doctrine was due to this fact. The arguments of the materialists had seemed incapable of refu- tation ; yet men would not consent to resign at their bidding the belief in God, freedom, and immortality, whose stronghold was the Wolffian metaphysic. And, when Kant came forward, offer- ing to show them how they might consistently accept the principal tenets of both parties — might reconcile the seemingly opposed teachings of science and of religion — they eagerly welcomed him. Kant held the balance true between Hume and Berkeley, by maintaining the validity of Berkeley’s inference from our sense- perceptions to some agent or agencies that evoke our sensations ; while, with Hume, he denied that we can infer the nature of those agencies. As to the real nature of these agents, the famous things-in-themselves, he held that we know and can know nothing ; that we are not warranted in believing them to be either matter or thinking beings ; but that it is unnecessary to assume them to be of more than one kind. By his doctrine of the subjectivity of Space and Time and of the purely phenomenal character of all the sensible world, he robbed Materialism of its offensive power, while maintaining the validity of mechanical explanation of all phenomenal processes ; and, by his doctrine of the practical reason, he claimed to establish on the sure foundation of the moral nature of man the belief in God, freedom, and immortality. Man’s body belongs, according to Kant, like all other bodies, wholly to the phenomenal world, and has only empirical reality ; this mundus sensibilis is known through the understanding, or theoretical reason ; but the soul belongs to the mundus mtelligibilis^ or ideal world, which is known through the practical reason. Kant taught that the soul has three great faculties — (i) sentiency, which man has in common with the animals ; (2) understanding or theoretical reason ; and (3) pure reason, which in a very partial and imperfect manner man has in com- mon with God, who is pure reason ; the two latter constitute the true Ego. Paulsen summarizes as follows Kant’s meta- physical doctrine of the souP: — *‘The logical nature, understanding and reason, is really the Ego in itself, while on the other hand, time and space belong merely to sentiency, to the sense repre- ^ ** Immanuel Kant, his Life and Doctrine,” p. 185. BODY AND MIND 76 sentation of the Ego which as phenomenal can pass away at death. But there remains the Ego as a pure, thinking essence, free from space and time, a spaceless and timeless, pure, thinking spirit. This is a thought which, although not realizable in perception, remains nevertheless a true and necessary idea.” Though Kant claimed that his Critique showed how the pro- blem of the relation of soul to body is to be overcome (namely by reducing the body to the level of merely empirical or phenomenal reality, while assigning the soul to a sphere of higher reality) ; he did not attempt to show in detail how this solution is to be worked out. But he threw out a suggestion, which has been elaborated by later thinkers. His epistemological system neces- sarily reduced the facts of the world of consciousness, all that we discover by introspection, to the level of phenomena, if only because our states of consciousness succeed one another in time ; they are phenomena perceived by an “ inner sense.” Thus, mental processes and the bodily processes that accompany them are alike phenomena ; and there is a parallelism between psychi- cal and physical phenomena, in the sense that the same thing which arises in my consciousness, or appears to the inner sense as sensation, idea, or feeling, would manifest itself to the per- ception of the external sense as a physical process in my body.^ This is a variation of the psycho-physical doctrine of pheno- menalistic parallelism which was first enunciated by Spinoza ; we shall have to examine it in a later chapter. It was merely thrown out by Kant as a suggestion. That he did ^ ^This suggestion is embodied in the following passage: “If matter were a thing by itself, it would, as a composite being be totally different from the soul, a simple being. But what we call matter is an external phenomenon only,' the substratum of which cannot possibly be known by any possible predicates! I can therefore very well suppose that that substratum is simple, although m the manner in which it affects our senses it produces m us the intuition of something extended, and therefore composite, so that the substance which, with reference to our external sense, possesses extension, might very well by itself possess thoughts which can be represented consciously by its own internal sense. In such wise the same thing which in one respect is called corporeal, would in another respect be at the same time a thinking being, of which, though we cannot see Its thoughts, we can yet see the signs of them phenomenally. Thus the ex- pression that souls only (as a particular class of substances) think, would have to be dropt, and we should return to the common expression that men think that is, that the same thing which, as an external phenomenon is extended, is internally, by itself, a subject, not composite, but simple and intelligent ” (“ Critique of pure Reason.” Criticism of second paralogism of transcendental psychology. Max Muller’s translation). ANIMISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 77 not mean to adopt it, is shown by the opening words of the paragraph following the one which contains the suggestion But without indulging in such hypotheses . . ”) and by an explicit statement in the next section of the Critique, which runs as follows : The transcendental object, which forms the foundation of external phenomena, and the other, which forms the foundation of our internal intuition, is therefore neither matter nor a thinking being by itself, but simply an unknown cause of the phenomena that supplied to us the empirical concept of both.” 1 In the eighteenth century the division and specialization of intellectual labour, which had resulted from the revival of learning,, had gone so far that it was no longer possible for any one man to attempt to master the whole field of science and philosophy, after the manner of Descartes and other great thinkers of the preceding century. Biology had become a relatively independent science, and was pursued for its own sake by a rapidly increasing number of workers. Throughout this century the Animism which had been handed down from Aristotle continued to be the dominant way of thought of biologists, in spite of the large influence of Descartes’ mechanical physiology and the popularity of the Materialism exemplified in “ La Syst^me de la Nature,” The most influential exponents of the vitalistic physiology were G. E. Stahl and C. F. Wolff. The former (1660-1734), rejecting the distinction of vegetative, sensi- tive, and rational souls, to which in the hands of Aristotle’s followers the master’s recognition of the corresponding functions had led, ascribed all vital manifestations, especially growth and movement, to the rational soul {anima rationalis). C. F. Wolff departed further from the Aristotelian tradition, and may be regarded as the father of the later vitalism, which, while denying that the body is a machine merely, confined its attention to the vegetative functions, and sought to account for their peculiarities by means of the conception of some non-mechanical principle. Wolff named this principle the vis essentalis, and later writers, more especially the critics of vitalism, have generally denoted it by the term vital force (Lebens-krafi), Wolff propounded in his chief treatise, “Theoria Generationis” (i 7 S 9 )^ a- vitalistic doctrine of development by epigenesis, in opposition to the generally accepted 1 Op. cit., Criticism of Fourth Paralogism of Trausceudental Psychology.” 78 MIND AND BODY doctrine of evolution, according to which the development of an organism is merely the growth in size of a minute organism con- tained within the germ and having all the essential parts and organs already present within it It has been usual to employ the word Vitalism to distinguish physiological doctrines of this type from mechanistic physiology on the one hand and from Animism on the other ; but it is clear that Vitalism (understood in this way) cannot be sharply distinguished from Animism, and that it is but a form of Animism characterized by neglect of the psycho-physical problem. CHAPTER VI ANIMISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY T he most striking and immediate lesult of the success of Kant s critical philosophy was the rapid rise of the romantic speculation that dominated Germany during the first third of the nineteenth century and culminated in the system of Hegel During this period, the psycho-physical problem was almost lost sight of, submerged in the flood of idealistic enthusiasm v/hich, accepting the world of ideas as the only real world, hardly deigned to take account of the facts and theories of empirical science. Kant had laid it down that Materialism, though it is utterly impossible as a metaphysical doctrine, is necessarily presupposed by the natural sciences ; for it is, he affirmed, an indispensable presupposition of these sciences that everything that is real manifests itself in space as a body or a function of a body. But reflection on the nature of our knowledge and our cognitive faculties shows that bodies are mere appearance, that they are real only for a perceiving and think- ing subject. Therefore it is impossible that the subject and its activities should be interpreted as a function of a body. The thinking Ego or subject is the presupposition of the possibility of the corporeal world, which is a product of its activity. This was the keynote of the subsequent Idealism : Kant’s thing-in-itself was rejected, and the body was regarded as but the creation of the mind ; from which it followed that it is absurd to suppose that the mind can be in any degree dependent upon the body. For Idealism of this type the body was reduced to the level of unreality ; and it carried the psycho-physical problem with it to that level. But, after thirty years of dominance of the Speculative Philosophy, there came a sudden and violent reaction against it ; purely logical construction fell into disrepute ; men of science had learnt to regard philosophy as the secret ally of reactionary theology and an enemy to true science ; and, mistrusting its 79 So BODY AND MIND methods and results, they went back to the work of faithful observation and minute experiment^ Thus Kanfs successors, by insisting unduly on one part of his doctrine, prepared the way for the renewed outburst of Materialism of the middle of the nineteenth century ; and this in turn brought to the front once more the problem of the relation between soul and body, which Kant had placed in a new light, but without either solving or removing it. It was during this period of revived Materialism that further elaboration of Kant’s psycho-physical suggestion was undertaken by a philosopher who was, by training and profession, a physicist rather than a psychologist or metaphysician, namely, G. T. Fechner. The modern phase of the psycho-physical discussion m*ay be said to begin with the publication in i860 of Fechner’s principal treatise, the “ Elemente der Psycho-physik.” In this and other works, Fechner elaborated a panpsychic and pantheistic world- view, basing it upon a psycho-physical theory which dispenses with the soul and regards all processes of the universe as both physical and psychical. This theory claims, like Kant’s doctrine, to enable us to reap the advantages of both Materialism and Spiritualism, to be materialists in science and idealists in philosophy ; and it avoids that feature of Kant’s doctrine which has been felt by so many of its critics to be wholly unacceptable, namely, the unknowable thing-in-itself. It has become, perhaps, the most widely accepted of the various allied doctrines that are commonly classed together as theories of psycho-physical parallelism. These will be stated in Chapter XL ; here it need only be said that their common claim to escape the reproach of Materialism, while accepting whole-heartedly the strictly mechanistic view of the world, has recommended them through- out the second half of the century to a constantly increasing number of philosophers and men of science. Animism continued to find during the nineteenth century a certain number of respectable supporters besides the philosophers of the Roman Church; the latter have continued to teach a rational psy- chology which descends directly from Thomas Aquinas, and which implies a dualistic metaphysic of the kind formulated by Descartes. ^ So violent was this reaction against the Natur-pMlosopMe that in the opinion of Dr Th. Merz (“ History of European Thought ”) it was responsible for the comparative neglect of the first expositions of the principle of the con- servation of energy by Mayer and Von Helmholtz respectively. ANIMISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 8i Until nearly the middle of the century, Vitalism continued to flourish and found many defenders among the leading representa- tives of the several biological sciences. While most of the vitalists of this period were content to postulate a “ vital force/’ others, like Blumenbach and Treviranus, attempted to give a more positive content to that vague notion ; while a few, like Johannes Muller and R. Wagner, held fast to the conception of the souL^ Even in the third quarter of the century the latter notion was still maintained by a few physiologists of eminence, such as Pfluger and Goltz ; but the efforts of these defenders were generally re- garded at this time as merely prolonging the death throes of an exploded superstition. Of those few German philosophers who opposed the romantic school during its period of dominance and yet managed to obtain a hearing and exert a permanent influence, the most important was J. F. Herbart. His philosophy claimed to be a development of the Kantian teachings, but it was more definitely realistic ; like Kant, he taught that our ideas point beyond themselves, that we are able to infer the existence of a world of real being behind the veil of phenomena ; but, not content with the mere affirmation of the existence of that world, he held that it consists of a plurality of real beings, or “ Reals,” each of which eternally persists, unchang- ing and unchanged. The soul of each man is such a “ Real,” and the play of ideas is the expression of the efforts of this “ Real ” to preserve its identity unchanged, in spite of the influences of other “ Reals ” upon it But, though he professed to found his psychology on this metaphysical conception of an animating soul, Herbart’s account of the course of mental life represents it as the strife and interplay of ideas or presentations, whose relation to the soul is never definitely conceived or cleared from inconsistencies. And, since the psychology of Herbart, the part of his teaching of the most enduring influence, really operated with the presentations, treated these as the foundations of all psychical life, regarded psychical laws as laws of their operations, and found no place for the soul, many of the numerous psycho- logists who have accepted his psychological principles have found themselves able to do so, while neglecting or rejecting his meta- physical notion of the soul as a member of the world of Reals.” Thus, although Herbarfs own teaching was animistic, it has contri- buted, only less powerfully than the association-psychology, to the 1 See '' Vitalismus, als Gescliichte u. Lehre,’" by Hans Dreiscb, Leipzig, 1902. 82 BODY AND MIND predominance of the “ psychology without a soul ” which charac- terizes the later part of the nineteenth century. Another independent and original psychologist of this period, F. E. Beneke, continued to hold the conception of the soul as the ground of mental life ; but he too contributed to bring about the predominance of the “ psychology without a soul/' by affirming the validity of purely physiological and anatomical explanations of mental disorders, and by his sympathetic presentment of Spinoza's doctrine of the relation of mind to matter. In the middle of the century. Animism found its most brilliant and thoroughgoing modern defender in R. H. Lotze. Trained in the medical sciences, and a master of the physiology of his time, one of his first efforts was an attack on Vitalism, He exhibited the futility of the formless notion of the vital force, and, conceiving the mechanical principles in a very broad spirit, he attempted to show the adequacy of those principles to the explanation of all the facts of biology. But in his chief works ^ he defended in the most thorough and searching manner the notiorx of psycho-physical interaction and the conception of the soul as a being distinct from the body. His metaphysic was a realistic but spiritualistic monism ; for he regarded the physical world as the appearance to us of a system of psychic existents of like nature with the soul of man, but of many grades of development. Never- theless he maintained that “no general scruples must therefore hinder us from accepting for the two great distinct groups of physical and of psychical phenomena grounds of explanation equally distinct and independent." ^ He maintained also that “ anywhere and in any form, however surbordinate (i.e. animal forms), we may see elements of mental life, intervening between the operation of the corporeal organs, and filling gaps between the single links of the chain of vital processes.”^ It is, I think, impossible to reconcile the views expressed in these and many similar passages with Lotze’s thoroughgoing rejection of Vitalism and his defence of the mechanical view of nature ; for, although his conception of mechanism was so wide that he felt justified in speaking of the mechanical course of all mental pro- cesses, he excepted those in which he recognized the operation of explicit volition, and defended the notion of free-will, looking upon the free act as a new beginning in the universe ; and Lotze attributed 1 Mcdizinische Psychologic,” “ Microcosmus,” and “ Metaphysik ” 2 Mikrokosmns,” J. p. 149 (Eng, trans,). ^ Op. cit,y p. 135. ANIMISM IN THE NINETEENTB CfiNTURY 83 all mental retention to the soul alone, thus conceived, not as an unchanging “ real ” or a mere atoH^ of soul-substance, but as the bearer of all that essentially constiti^*^^s personality. But his early opposition to the current Vitalism pre'^^nted him attribut- ing to the soul any other than purely mental fully conscious functions ; and, not having grasped the full ^duplications of the Darwinian principles, he made no attempt to reconcile his animistic doctrine with evolutionary biology* The argument to which he repeatedly turned for proof of the clistinctness of the soul from the body was drawn from the uni^y of consciousness. But more must be said of this reasoning in a later chapter. In spite of the high position accorded to Lotze, later German thought has in the main turned scornfully from Animism ; and, though the psycho-physical problem has l^een discussed in a multitude of books and articles, most of these discussions have aimed at rendering clearer and more intelligible the notion of psycho-physical Parallelism, very few, howeveU attempting to show that the principle of Parallelism can be carriecl through in detail. On the other hand. Animism has continued to find some notable defenders in academic circles ; among them being Prof. C. Stumpf,^ a friend and pupil of Lotze ; Prof. O. Kiilpe, who briefly defends the dualistic metaphysic in his “ Einleitung in der Philosophic ^ ; and the late Prof. L, Busse, whose book,® published in 1903, is at once the most thorough examination of the psycho-physical question and a critical defence of Animism on the basis of a spiritualistic metaphysic. The close of the century has witnessed a revival of Vitalism among German biologists ; the cortinion note of these Neo-Vitalists being the insistence that Darwitiism fails to explain away the evidences of teleological determination presented by living organisms. In the early years of the century, French thought on psycho- logical problems was dominated by the teaching of Condillac and by that of the physiologist, Cabanis, who, though not strictly a materialist, gave precedence to physiological explanations of mental processes : a tendency exemplified by his famous dictum, the brain excretes thought as the liver bile. ^ “ Leib XL. Seele.” The inaugural address to international Congress of Psychologists at Munich, 1896. ® First Edition, Leipzic, 1895. ® “ Geist u. Korfer, Seele u. Leib ** Leipzic, 1903. '^^^^ent German psychol- ogists who have accepted psycho-physical duali MMWR ehmke. Volkmann, Jerusalem, Pfknder. 84 BODY AND MIND Maine de Biran, whose psychological writings were perhaps the most important of this period, was much influenced by Condillac and Cabanis, but held fast to the conception of the soul as a being distinct from the body and having a destiny not limited by the life of the body. He found the surest evidence for this view in our consciousness of putting forth power or energy to effect changes in the world, and in man s capacity for aesthetic, religious, and mystical experience. But the influence of Comte and the positivist way of thought predominated in France throughout the century ; until at its close a new star of great brilliance appeared in the person of Prof. H. Bergson. His thought, as so far expressed, is very difficult to characterize on its positive or constructive side ; but he attacks the mechanistic view of nature by impugning the intellectual apparatus by means of which it has been built up. In his treatise on matter and memory ^ he distinguishes sharply between the habits rooted in the structure of the brain and true memory, a purely psychical mode of retention, and he regards traces of these two kinds, the material and the immaterial, as co-operating in the determination of the course of thought and action. And in his “ volution Cr^atrice ” he propounds a distinctly vitalistic doctrine of biological evolution. He must therefore be ranked among the defenders of Animism. In Great Britain the scepticism of Hume had provoked by a natural reaction the common-sense philosophy of Reid and his followers, who accepted in the main the popular notion of the soul. Sir William Hamilton, whose influence in Scotland has been very great, attempted to combine the common sense of Reid with the critical phenomenalism of Kant. Consciousness, he maintained, is phenomenal only ; but it points to a reality behind it, of which it is the property : and this real being, the soul, cannot be identified with the reality that underlies material phenomena. But the dominant influence throughout the middle years of the century was that of the association-psychology of Locke, Hume, and Hartley, as elaborated by the two Mills, Bain, Spencer, and Shadworth-Hodgson. This tends naturally to be a “ psychology without a soul,” for which the fundamental realities are sensations that cluster and combine together accord- ing to the laws of association and of “ mental chemistry.” The Mills hardly attempted to deal with the psycho-physical problem, ^ '' Matiere et Memoire,” Paris. ANIMISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY 85 though John Mill was troubled with some misgivings as to the associational doctrine that a series of states of consciousness can be aware of itself ; but Spencer, B^in, and Shad worth- Hodgson definitely adopted the doctrine of psycho-physical Parallelism, the statement of which, in Spencer s “ Principles of Psychology ” (1855), is perhaps the earliest of the modern formulations. The British revival of the absolute Idealism of Hegel, which has been the dominant influence of the later part of the century, has tended to divert attention from the psycho-physical problem ; though a few of its prominent exponents have incidentally defended the animistic conception.^ Prof. James Ward has maintained that psychology cannot dispense with the notion of an Ego or Subject, and has argued forcibly against psycho- physical Parallelism in his “Naturalism and Agnosticism.’^^ Dr F. C. S. Schiller has maintained a Berkeleyan Idealism,^ and the late F. W. H. Myers propounded a psycho-physical doctrine of a thoroughly animistic type.^ In America Prof. G. T. Ladd has ably expounded and defended the ideas of Lotze ; and the late Prof. William James, in his celebrated “ Principles of Psychology,” has defended the notion of psycho- physical interaction, and in later works has propounded a peculiar form of Animism, of which something will be said in a later chapter. In spite of these defenders. Animism was at a very low ebb in the last quarter of the century ; its few exponents were generally regarded as survivors from an earlier age, actuated by some theological bias to offer a futile opposition to the conquering march of science Thoughout the nineteenth century, then, Animism has rapidly declined. Its claim to figure as the great opponent of Materialism has been successfully disputed by the parallelistic or monistic theories, which seek to combine the scientific advantages of Materialism with the philosophic respectability of Idealism. Of the three influences that have contributed to bring about this decline, namely, the critical philosophy of Kant, the absolute Idealism of the romantic school, and the astonishing and splendid development of the natural sciences, based in the main upon the ^ Especially Mr F. H. Bradley and Prof. A. E. Taylor. (See The Problem of Mind and Body m recent Psychology.” Mtnd^ N.S. No 52.) 2 Gifford Lectures, 1899. * ** Riddles of the Sphinx,” London 1892. ** ' Human Personality and its Survival of the Death of the Body,” London, 1903 86 BODY AND MIND strictly mechanistic view of nature, the last has been the most far-reaching and decisive. From it the claim of mechanistic principles of explanation to universal and exclusive sv/ay in the physical world has gained much greater strength than it derived from Kant's epistemology or from the natural science of his time ; and it is the strength of this claim that has well nigh banished Animism from the culture-tradition of the present age. We must therefore trace the growth of the strength of this claim and notice in some detail the bearing of modern scientic discoveries upon the psycho-physical problem. CHAPTER VII MODERN DEVELOPMENTS OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE ADVERSE TO ANIMISM T he epistemological reflections of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, culminating in the critical philosophy of Kant, not only completed the list of possible answers to the psycho-physical problem, but also introduced the modern scientific or critical attitude towards it. In spite of the presence of strong elements of old-fashioned dogmatism in the teaching of Kant, and to a less extent in that of Berkeley ; the enduring result of the discussions of these four thinkers was to make it clear that we can have no absolute and no immediate knowledge of either soul or body, and that the two conceptions can only be justified (or rejected) by showing that they are (or are not) neces- sary features of the system of conceptions which the human mind is slowly working out, for the purpose of rendering an intelligible and consistent explanation of the chaotic flux of individual ex- perience. Though it was necessary to accept this demonstration, it was not necessary, it was not possible, to accept the sceptical attitude towards all knowledge which Hume half-seriously advo- cated as the only respectable one. To have done so would have been profoundly irrational and in the last degree cowardly. If man is to live, he must act ; and, if he must act, he must govern his actions in accordance with conceptions of his own nature and of the world in which he is set, conceptions of whose validity he can have no absolute guarantee, and which he must choose develop, reshape, or reject, according as he finds them more or less efficient guides to successful action. And of all conceptions, the conceptions of the nature of, and of the relations between, mind and body are those which in the long run affect most pro- foundly, and are of the first importance for, this guidance of conduct ; for they must always exert a determining influence upon man’s view of his place in the world, upon his prospects, his hopes, and his deepest purposes, and hence upon his conduct. 87 38 BODY AND MIND Although, then, Hume’s scepticism has continued to secure the adhesion of certain temperaments, and is represented at the present day by a few vigorous thinkers,^ it has not gained any wide acceptance among peoples in whom the tide of life runs strongly. Its acceptance implies the Eastern doctrine that all is illusion ; it involves a thoroughgoing Solipsism, the doctrine that I, or my thoughts, alone exist ; for the consistent follower of Hume must admit that his principles involve the rejection, not only of the material world, but of all thought or mental life other than his own. And among all the wide divergences of thought in our Western world, one principle has continued to secure a predominance never yet seriously shaken, namely, the principle, accepted whether explicitly or implicitly, whether as a reasoned conclusion or as a venture of faith, that each man lives, not by and for himself alone, but as a member of a community of beings of like nature with himself ; that our life is not a mere dream ; that our knowledge is not mere fantasy, but, however imperfect and inadequate, is yet real knowledge of a real world, and is capable of indefinitely great extension and improvement. Hume's absolute condemnation of all discussion of the materiality or immateriality of the soul was, then, of no effect in stemming the tide of discussion. The upshot of his work and that of his British predecessors was in the main to produce a change in the mode of approach to the problem. It was made clear that no solution of it can be achieved by reasoning a priori or from general principles alone ; but that rather we must work towards its solution by the aid of the methods of empirical science, by increasing the stock of well established facts and well grounded hypotheses. Accordingly, we find since the time of Hume an increasing tendency for the psycho-physical problem to be regarded as belonging to the province of science, rather than that of meta- physic. We have seen that Kant himself touches on the psycho- physical problem but lightly, and that what he wrote of the soul exhibits a curious mixture of dogmatic metaphysics with the critical procedure. Nevertheless, be too contributed to bring about the relegation of the problem from metaphysics to em- pirical science — on the one hand, by furthering that form of ^ Notably by Prof. E Macb of Vienna and by Prof Karl Pearson, who agree with Hume in asserting that the known and knowable world consists of sensa- tions only PHYSICAL SCIENCE ADVERSE TO ANIMISM 89 idealistic metaphysic which regards the body as negligible, because unreal ; on the other hand, by making clear the impossibility of establishing the existence and nature of the soul by theoretical reasoning from general principles in the style of the Wolffian metaphysic. Accordingly, few of the metaphysicians since Kant have put the problem of the relation between soul and body in the foreground of their discussions, after the fashion of earlier ages ; they have, in fact, for the most part, left it on one side, or treated of it incidentally only and with uncertain tones, showing a dis- position to accept the opinions dominant in the scientific world ; and, if they have continued to speak of the soul of man, they have done so in a fashion which commits them to no definite answer to the psycho-physical problem. The history of the psycho-physical problem since the middle of the eighteenth century is, then, in the main the history of the way in which the progress of the physical, the biological, and the psychological sciences has rendered ever more confident, and secured wider acceptance for, the belief in the universality of the laws of mechanism revealed by the study of the realm of physical phenomena ; a belief which necessarily involves the rejection of Animism. And this rejection of Animism has been rendered easier by the wide prevalence of the notion that Kanfs phenomenalistic epistemology somehow renders it possible to hold to God, freedom, and immortality, in spite of it In the following pages I propose to describe concisely the way in which the modern development of each of these branches of empirical science has contributed to bring about this result. The three lines of development of scientific knowledge and thought have acted and reacted upon one another in a way that has in the main favoured this result ; but they may be briefly outlined in succession. We have seen that, in the seventeenth century, Kepler, Galileo, Gassendi, and Hobbes had rehabilitated the atomic Materialism of the ancients. In the eighteenth century the genius of Newton, especially by the formulation of the funda- mental laws of motion and of the law of gravitation, gave an immense impetus to this way of thought. Newton himself and his leading disciples and successors, Priestly and Boyle, regarded the laws of mechanism as universally valid, and saved themselves from the charge of atheistic Materialism only by 90 BODY AND MIND acknowledging matter and its laws to be the creations of the one Supreme Being. Laplace went further and, intoxicated by the intellectual splendour of the nebular hypothesis and by the wonderful powers of the mathematical instruments of which he was a master, denied in his famous reply to the great Napoleon the necessity of the hypothesis of a Creator ; and he it was who formulated clearly and explicitly the supreme faith of mechanical Materialism by asserting that, if the state of the material universe at any one moment of time could be completely described, it would be possible in principle to arrive by calculation at the complete description of it at any other moment of its history. Laplace’s confidence in the universality of the mechanical laws was founded in the belief that all physical processes are essentially the movements of particles of matter ; it was the apotheosis of atomic Materialism, developed by modern science into a scheme of universal kinetic mechanism. This scheme of kinetic mechanism has been of very great value as a working hypothesis for the guidance of physical research. It has proved so useful, is so attractive in its simplicity, is so well adapted to the powers of concrete representation or pictorial imagination which most men exercise with greater confidence and ease than any other of our intellectual faculties ; that it has obtained a very strong hold upon the scientific world. Throughout the nine- teenth century it continued to win fresh triumphs in various fields of physical research, notably in acoustics, optics, and the theory of gases, repeatedly proving itself the most fruitful of all physical hypotheses. It may be said to have reached its culmination in Lord Kelvin’s theory of the vortex-atom, the most successful attempt yet made to describe the nature of matter and its relation to the ether ; and it has successfully withstood every attempt to supersede it, so that at the end of the century Dr Merz, judicially weighing its claims, affirms : ‘‘ there is no doubt that the century ends with a very emphatic assertion of the rights and the legitimacy of the atomic and mechanical views of nature.” ^ No wonder, then, that in the minds of very many men this scheme of kinetic mechanism has stood for a true and, in principle, an exhaustive description of the nature of the physical universe, and that it has played a very considerable part, especially in ^ History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century,” vol. ii. p. 198. PHYSICAL SCIENCE ADVERSE TO ANIMISM 91 the minds of biologists, in determining the rejection of every form of Animism. It was argued that every physical event consists in the motion of particles, or the communication of motion from particle to particle ; such communication of motion by impact being held to be the only effective cause of acceleration or change of motion All psychical influence upon the physical world was thus ruled out by the very definition of the physical world ; for in a world where all change is motion, and where all causation is of the nature of communication of motion by impact, there is no room for psychical influences. This conception has contributed to bring about the rejection of Animism in a second way also ; namely, it has served to strengthen the old argument of the occasionalists, that interaction between things so diverse as soul and body is inconceivable ; for,, when all physical process is definitely conceived as motion or acceleration of particles, the difficulty of conceiving how mind can in any way modify this motion becomes correspondingly definite. The difficulty has been forcibly put by a contemporary writer who bids us try to imagine the thought of a beef-steak binding two molecules together ; while another brilliant author has illustrated the manifest absurdity of any belief in psychical influence upon the physical world, by likening it to the belief that the wagons of a railway train might be held together by the friendly feeling of the engine-driver for the guard.^ But the nineteenth century has achieved a physical general- ization which has played an even greater part than the kinetic view of nature in expelling Animism from scientific thought. I mean of course the great generalization known as the law of conservation of energy. In spite of the seductiveness of the kinetic view of the physical world, in spite of the wealth of biological arguments skilfully arrayed in the “ Syst^me de la Nature,” in spite of Kant’s epistemological dictum, Animism continued to rear its head from time to time in the scientific world, like a snake scotched, but not quite killed. But the law of the conservation of energy has, in the opinion of many philosophers and men of science, given it its death- blow ; and in contemporary demonstrations of the impossibility of Animism, the argument from this law is generally given the place of honour, as the most weighty of all. ^ Dr C. Mercier in The Nervous System and the Mind*'; W. K. Clifford, “ Lectures and Essays ” 92 BODY AND MIND The law of the conservation of energy was enunciated almost at the same time by R. Mayer and Von Helmholtz in Germany and by Joule in England (in the year t 847) ; Mayei being led to it by reflection on biological facts, Helmholtz by physical and mathematical considerations, Joule by experiments which proved the exact equivalence of the energy converted into heat during the performance of mechanical work. The law has received many different formulations ; but since its first enuncia- tion, it has been empirically verified by many experiments ; and the more refined the methods of experimental observation that have been applied, the more exact have been the demonstrations that the quantity of energy remains unchanged in every trans- formation of energy ; further, no exception to the law has been experimentally demonstrated. It is claimed, therefore, that these experimental observations justify us in generalizing the statement of the facts of observation, so that it runs — The transformation of energy involved in every physical process results in no change in the quantity of energy, the quantity of physical energy is exactly conserved in every case. From this statement it follows that the total sum of physical processes of the universe result in no change of the quantity of its physical energy. From this the further deduction is made that the sum total of the energy of the physical universe is a constant quantity, remaining without the least increase or diminution throughout all time. It has been widely held that this conclusion is confirmed by a metaphysical view which has found favour with many scientific authorities, the view namely that energy is a real thing or sub- stance, constituting, alone or in conjunction with matter, the substance of the physical universe.^ Now, the law of the conservation of energy, if accepted in this form, is held to be incompatible with the belief that psychical influences can modify in any way or degree the course of physical processes ; for any such influence, it is said, must either diminish or increase the quantity of physical energy of the universe and so violate the law of the conservation of energy. But the nervous changes which are the concomitants of our ^ e.g. the late Prof. P G. Tait, who wrote : ** The only other known thin^ in the physical universe, which is conserved in the same sense as matter is con- -served, is energy. Hence we naturally consider energy as the other objective rea.lity in the physical universe” (Article: Mechanics m “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” Ninth Edition). PHYSICAL SCIENCE ADVERSE TO ANIMISM 95 psychical activities are physical processes. Therefore, it is argued, they must run their course without being in the slightest degree affected by psychical influences. But the argument is generally stated more briefly and more dogmatically and in a way which combines the two great arguments against Animism drawn from physical science, namely, that from the kinetic view of nature and that from the law of the conserva- tion of energy ; I quote the following passage from a lecture by the late Dr J. G. Romanes as a fair sample of such statements. Spiritualism (or Animism), said Romanes, is unsatisfactory because it is opposed to the whole trend and momentum of modern science. “ For if mind is supposed, on no matter how small a scale, to be a cause of motion, the fundamental axiom of science is impugned. This fundamental axiom is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed — that just as motion can produce nothing but motion, so, conversely, motion can be produced by nothing but motion. Regarded, therefore, from the standpoint of physical science, the theory of Spiritualism is in precisely the same sense as the theory of Materialism ; that is to say, if the supposed causation takes place, it can only be supposed to do so by way of miracle.” ^ If the animist retorts to this argument that the law of conservation of energy is founded upon measurement of the quantities of energy undergoing transformation in the course of inorganic physical processes, and that it is illegitimate to apply the generalization to organic processes, because these form a peculiar realm in which the operation of laws of the inorganic world may be interfered with or suspended by other modes of influence ; then he is met with the results of recent exact quantitative investigation of the energy transformations of the human body. These investigations ^ have shown that the energy value of the output of the human body in the form of work, heat, chemical products, and so forth, equals, almost exactly, the energy value of food and oxygen absorbed, that is, the value of the sum total of energy supplied to the body ; the difference between the quantities measured being so small as to fall well within the margin of error of the most careful experiment. 1 Rede Lecture, published in Contemporary Review,*’ 1885. 2 Atwater, ** Reports of British Association,” 1904- CHAPTER VIII THE RISE OF THE MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY AND OF THE “PSYCHOLOGY WITHOUT A SOUL” T he development of modem biology has contributed not less powerfully than that of physical science to bring about the general rejection of Animism ; though the bearing of its discoveries has been less simple and direct. In all earlier ages the peculiarities of living beings, their powers of growth, assimilation, reproduction, self-restitution and so forth, had been almost universally attributed to their animation, that is, to the presence and operation* of the soul within the body. Descartes was the first of the moderns decisively to reject this conception and to maintain that all the bodily processes of men and animals (with the single exception of the movements of the pineal gland of the human brain) are of a strictly mechanical nature, needing no psychical guidance or control. While Descartes’ famous dictum “ Cogito ergo stwi ” became the starting-point of modern Idealism, his view of the purely mechanical nature of all bodily processes initiated the wave of confident Materialism that rose to a great height in the eighteenth century, especially in France. The most popular exponents of this doctrine were De la Mettrie^ and Baron D’tlolbach,^ The former, '‘a wit, philosopher and friend of Frederick the Great, traced his own materialism to Descartes, and maintained that the wily philosopher, purely for the sake of the parsons, had patched on to his theory a soul, which was in reality quite superfluous.” ^ He argued in a lively manner for a materialistic view of human nature, relying chiefly upon illustrations of the intimate dependence of our moods, feelings, and mental processes generally upon physical influences such as food and drink. Like Diderot and Holbach he was a hylozoist, that is to say, he attributed psychical life to all material things ; and, though he admitted that ^ * Histoire tLaturelle de I’Ame,*^ I74S» 3-n.d “ L’homme Machine,’* 1748. ® “ Syst^me de la, Nature,” 1770. ® A. Lange, ” History of Materialism,** vol. i, p. 244. THE RISE OF THE MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY 95 we cannot know what matter is in itself, he made all psychical life a property of matter, maintaining that sensation and thought are modifications of matter and entirely dependent upon it. Man,” he wrote, “ is framed of materials not exceeding in value those of other animals ; nature has made use of one and the same paste — she has only diversified the ferment in working it up. . . . We may call the body an enlightened machine. It is a clock, and the fresh chyle from the food is the spring.” D’Holbach's treatise, written under the influence of Diderot in a more sober and dignified style, made use of similar arguments. It represents the culmination of the Materialism of the eighteenth century, and, unlike the Materialism of Newton, Priestly, and Boyle, was avowedly atheistic. It would seem to have been the conjunction of Materialism and Atheism affected by these two writers that secured for their works so wide an influence ; for they aroused a violent opposition. But these writers were merely the popular exponents of the dominant tendencies of physiological science in the eighteenth century. G. E, Stahl has been mentioned in Chapter V. as one of the leading physiologists of the earlier part of the century who continued the older animistic tradition. He “ put forward and brilliantly maintained the view that all the chemical events of the living body, even though they might superficially resemble, were at the bottom wholly different from, the chemical changes taking place in the laboratory, since in the living body all chemical changes were directly governed by the sensitive soul, anima sensitiva^ which pervaded all parts and presided over all events.” ^ “ Stahl’s fundamental position is that between living things, so long as they are alive, however simple, and non-living things, however composite, however complex in their phenomena, there is a great gulf fixed. The former, so long as they are alive, are actuated by an immaterial agent, the sensitive soul, the latter are not. . . . Further, the living body is fitted for special ends and purposes ; the living body does not exist for itself ; it is constituted to be the true and continued minister of the soul. The body is made for the soul, the soul is not made for, and is not the product of, the body.”^ Stahl himself wrote “We may therefore rightly and truly conclude that all the actions of the body, both those which concern its structure and those which relate to the ^ Sir M. Foster, op. cit,^ p. 168. ® Sir M. Foster, op. cit., p. 169. BODY. AND MIND 96 preservation of its composition, are carried out by the soul itself for its own uses and ends, and are directed and brought to completion, knowingly and properly, in the proportions and relations which fit those ends and uses” And again he wrote “ Vital activities are directly administered and exercised by the soul itself, and are truly organic acts carried out in corporeal instruments of a superior acting cause, in order to bring about certain effects, which are not only in general certain, and in particular necessary, but also in each and every particular adapted, in a special and yet most complete manner, to the needs of the moment and to the various irregularities introduced by accidental external causes. Vital activities, vital movements, cannot, as some recent crude speculations suppose, have any real likeness to such movements as, in an ordinary way, depend on the material condition of a body and take place without any direct use or end or aim.” Thus Stahl from the side of ph3^siology, as Descartes from the side of psychology, defined more clearly than any of their predecessors the issue between Animism and Materialism. By conceiving the soul as an immaterial teleological factor controlling the physical processes of the living body, he set upon its modern lines the controversy as to the reality of a teleological determina- tion of the processes of living beings. The subsequent history of modern physiology is the history of the constantly increasing ascendancy of the purely mechanical view of the processes of the animal body over the vitalistic and teleological modes of explanation. The first great step towards this ascendancy had been made when, in the year 1628, William Harvey announced and demon- strated his discovery of the circulation of the blood, explaining it by purely physical and mechanical reasoning. A little later in the seventeenth century, the new mode of purely mechanical and chemical explanation of physiological processes was greatly pro- moted by Franciscus Sylvius of Leyden and his pupils. Van Helmont had studied the chemical processes of the body, but had mingled with his chemistry strange mystical doctrines and obscure conceptions of animal spirits and Archei, which he had derived from Paracelsus. “ The spiritualistic fancies of Van Helmont, and still more the earlier ones of Paracelsus, had had the tendency to make men think that chemical inquiry, in contrast with physical inquiry, was in some way necessarily bound up with speculations THE KISE OE THE MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY 97 about invisible agencies of a spiritual kind ; and this doubtless was more or less a bar to men of sober and exact thought enter- ing upon that line of inquiry. To Sylvius at least is due the credit of showing that there was no such necessary connexion between chemistry and spiritualism ; that on the contrary the newer chemistry in its attempts to solve vital problems trod the path of the most valued Materialism.” ^ While Sylvius and his pupils set chemical physiology, especi- ally the chemistry of digestion, upon the path of its modern development ; the influence of the more exact mechanical concep- tions introduced by Galileo, the first great victory of which when applied to physiology was Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, continued to bear fruit. In Italy, BorelH, a mathe- matician trained in the school of Galileo, first gave a clear account of the mechanics of respiration ; and in England a small band of Harvey's followers, Hooke, Lower, Mayow, applied the new understanding of the nature of combustion to explain the chemistry of respiration, the relations of the respiratory and cir- culatory systems, and the part played by the blood in conducting air to the tissues to sustain their processes of combustion. These various mechanical and chemical modes of explanation of bodily processes were brought together in the teaching of Boerhave of Leyden, perhaps the most influential physiologist of the earlier part of the eighteenth century. And the tradition was given an assured predominance over the animistic doctrines of Stahl and his successors by the great influence of Albrecht Haller, generally called the father of modern physiology, whose Elementa Physiologiae ” was completed in the year 1765. Thus, when De la Mettrie and D’Holbach wrote their popular treatises with the avowed purpose of propagating the materialistic view of the nature of man, their doctrines could find solid support in the teachings of the most influential physiologists of their time : they may in fact be regarded as expressing the influence of those teachings upon minds of a positive and materialistic tendency. The rapid progress of the physical sciences in the early decades of the nineteenth century seemed to bring much nearer to realisation the possibility of complete physical and chemical explanations of the processes of living bodies ; and at the same time much of their technical apparatus of research was found 1 Sir Foster, op, city p. 153. BODY AND MIND 98 to be applicable in physiological investigations. There was a renewal of physiological research and progress, in which Johannes Muller was the leading spirit ; and a confident expectation of the rapid reduction of all vital processes to terms of physics and chemistry began to be widely entertained. Although Muller himself must be reckoned among the vitalists, the great school of physiology founded by him made splendid progress along these physico-chemical lines ; and the continued success of this way of physiological thought and research secured for it an undisputed predominance over the vitalistic physiology and seemed to justify to the full the hopes of its adherents. This triumphant progress of the mechanistic school of physiology soon gave rise to a fresh outburst of dogmatic Materialism. This time Germany was the centre of the storm, and its moving spirits were Moleschott/ Karl Vogt, and Ludwig Buchner.^ These writers, especially the last, exercised a great influence on popular thought. Their favourite dictum was — “No matter without force, no force without matter.” The language and thought of all three was open to the charge of confusion, inconsistency, and philosophical crudity, to a degree that prevented them exerting any serious influence in academic circles. Nevertheless these materialists, and indeed the French materialists of the eighteenth century also, had made some refinement upon the crudity of Hobbes and others of their forerunners. Their Materialism consisted chiefly in the repudia- tion of the notion of immaterial or spiritual substances, agents, forces, or modes of being, rather than in any assertion so crude as that thought is nothing but matter or motion of matter. They were concerned ro show that matter consists not merely of inert solid particles, capable only of moving under the influence of external forces ; but that it is rather endowed with intrinsic powers of activity, of which thought and feeling are special developments. For, as Lotze has pointed out, few modern materialists have maintained doctrines so crude as those commonly attributed to them by their opponents. In our own day Materialism has undergone a further re- finement which makes it less easy to attack or refute and has in fact rendered it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to draw any line between the more subtle forms of Materialism and doctrines that are classified under the head of Idealism. 1 “ Der Kreislauf des Lebens,** 1852. * “ Kraft und Stoff,’* 1856. THE RISE OF THE MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY 99 Before noting the position of present day Materialism, let us follow in more detail those lines of development of biological science which have done most to bring about a wide acceptance of it and of the other psycho-physical doctrines that agree with it in rejecting all forms of Animism. The Search for the Seat of the Soul We have seen that the ancients entertained various notions as to the seat of the soul, assigning the several vital and psychical functions that they distinguished to this or that bodily organ, or regarding the soul as equally present and active in all parts of the body. In the second century of our era, Galen, the great Roman physician and anatomist, made a considerable advance upon Aristotle’s physiology ; he showed by his dissections that the brain is connected with the muscles and with the sense-organs by the nerves, and taught that it is some- how concerned in mental process. After Galen no progress in anatomy and physiology was made for more than a thousand years ; in fact, the authority of Galen remained supreme until in the middle of the sixteenth century the labours of Vesalius set these sciences once more on the path of progress. We have seen that Vesalius, while he took a materialistic view of the nature of soul, distinguished three souls, the vital, natural, and chief souls, each of which was but the sum of the spirits of corresponding function, and that he assigned to the brain the chief soul, the sum of the animal spirits, whose functions were distinctly mental. He taught that the animal spirit is made in the brain and that the brain influences the muscles and other organs by sending out the animal spirit along the nerves. “ He was clear that the soul was engendered in and by the brain, but beyond that he knew next to nothing. Vivisection taught him that when the brain is removed, sensation and movement are lost ; but it taught him little more than this.” ^ He observed also “ that the mass of the brain attains its highest dimensions in man, which we know to be the most perfect animal, and that his brain is found to be bigger than that of three oxen ; and then in proportion to the size of the body, first the ape, and next the dog exhibit a large train, suggesting that animals excel in the size of their brains ir|| pro- Sir M. Foster, op. cit., Lect. x. lOO BODY AND MIND portion as they seem the more openly and clearly to be endowed with the faculties of the chief soul (i.e. mental powers).” A hundred years later the brain was still not fully established as the seat of the soul, for Van Helmont assigned that honour to the orifice of the stomach. Willis, Sedleian professor in the University of Oxford, a con- temporary of Descartes and one of the founders of the “ Royal Society,” was fully aware of the importance of the brain for mental processes, the higher modes of which, in the case of man, he attributed to a rational incorporeal soul ; nevertheless he distinguished a corporeal soul consisting of two parts, one of flame residing in the blood, the other of light diffused throughout the nervous system and in a less degree through other tissues. Although Descartes was but an amateur in physiology, his assignment of the rational soul to the brain and his speculative de- scription of the functions of the brain, mark a distinct epoch in the search for the seat of the soul For, from his time onwards, the brain was securely established as the seat of the mental functions and as the medium through which the soul effects its commerce with the other parts of the body ; and, though Stahl regarded the soul as operating directly in all parts of the body, the search for the seat of the soul followed the lines laid down by Descartes, i.e, it continued to be the search for that part of the brain in which the nerves come most closely together. Stensen and Borelli showed themselves to be clearly aware that the brain is the seat of sensation and originator of bodily movements. But no progress was made with this problem until the middle of the eighteenth century, when Haller applied to it his penetrating intellect. He rejected Stahl’s view, that the soul acts directly in all parts of the body ; but he argued “ no narrower seat can be allotted to the soul than the conjoint origin of all the nerves ; nor can any structure be proposed as its seat, except that to which we can trace all the nerves. For it will be easily under- stood that the sensorium commune ought to lack no feeling of any part of the whole animated body nor any nerve which can convey from any part of the body the impression of external objects. And the same may be said of the nerves of movement. Where- fore, even quite apart from the experimental results described above, we cannot admit as the exclusive seat of the soul, either the corpus callosum or the septum lucidum or the tiny pineal gland, or the corpora striata or any particular region of the brain.’' THE RISE OF THE MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY loi And he concluded that “ both sensation and movement have their source in the medulla of the brain. This, therefore, is the seat of the soul.” By medulla he denoted the whole of the central mass of both cerebrum and cerebellum. Haller nevertheless inclined to the view that different parts of the brain are specially con- cerned in different mental functions ; though in summing up he wrote: “Our present knowledge does not permit us to speak with any show of truth about the more complicated functions of the mind, or to assign in the brain to imagination its seat, to common sensation its seat, to memory its seat.” In spite of this vague foreshadowing by Haller of the modern doctrine of cerebral localization of mental functions, the search for the seat of the soul continued to be prosecuted under the influence of the reasoning that led Descartes to choose the pineal gland. It was held that the soul must be present at some one spot in the brain, where it could receive or be affected by all the agitations brought from the sense-organs by the converging sensory nerves, and where it could control the outflow of nervous impulses along the motor nerves ; for the soul was conceived as playing upon the central ends of groups of motor nerves and originating in them impulses appropriate to the production of the movements it willed, much as a musician plays upon the keys of a piano, striking them in combinations appropriate to the production of harmonious chords. According to this way of thinking, it was necessary that the seat of the soul should be a central and single organ in the brain, and, since almost all parts of the brain exist in bilateral symmetrical duplication, the choice was strictly limited and fell in turn upon each of the single median structures, e.g. the septum lucidum, the corpus callosum^ the central ventricle ; all of which, however, were in turn shown to have no immediate connexion with consciousness. No less a man than R. H. Lotze was the last psychologist of note seriously to accept this reasoning ; and though his know- ledge of anatomy and physiology of the brain forbade him to designate any one part as the seat of the soul, and though he afterwards relinquished this view, nevertheless, in his “ Medizinische Psychologic” (published in 1851), he postulated such a central seat of the soul. Early in the nineteenth century, the great anatomist Gall laid the foundations of our modern doctrine of the localization of cerebral functions, by means of his comparative studies of the 102 BODY AND MIND brains of men and animals. From the time of Gall the study of cerebral functions has been carried on by an ever increasing army of keen workers. Forty years ago it was still possible for one party of experimental observers to maintain that there obtains no specialization of function of the parts of the great brain, that each part is of similar undifferentiated function with all the rest of its substance. But Broca’s discovery of the motor speech-centre, a small part of the cortex of the left frontal lobe of the cerebrum, rapidly gained general acceptance. Since the establishment of this instance of the dependence of a special mental function on the integrity of a particular part of the brain, an immense amount of labour has been devoted to the problem, and has proved that the cerebral cortex, the thin surface layer of grey matter, is the part of the brain most immediately con- cerned in mental process ^ ; it has been shown also that a large part of the cerebral cortex can be mapped out into areas, the integrity of each of which is essential to the enjoyment of certain modes of consciousness. The evidence is especially clear in the case of the sensations and perceptions of the higher senses. Let us glance at the nature of the evidence which has convinced all physiologists that all the visual perception and sensation and imagery of any normal human being are invariably accompanied by certain physico-chemical processes in the cortical grey matter of the occipital pole of his brain ; and that visual sensation is normally experienced, only when these processes are excited by the arrival of nervous impulses travelling from the retina directly to this part of the cortex. First, it has been shown that, in man and the higher animals, the retina is connected with this part of the brain cortex by a system of nerve fibres more direct and more numerous than those that connect it with any other part. Secondly, it has been shown that in animals this part of the cortex remains in a state of very incomplete development, if the animal is in any way deprived of the use of its eyes from birth onwards ; while it is known that, if a human being is blind from birth, or loses his eyesight within the first two years of life, he remains devoid of all visual imagery, all power of visual representation or imagination. Thirdly, it has been ^hown by the clinical and post mortem ^ There is some ground for believing that some of the masses of grey matter the base of the brain have equally intimate relation with conscious life. study of a very large number of cases that, if, in an adult human being, the tract of nerve fibres which connects the retina of one eye with this part of the cortex is broken across in any part of its course, that eye becomes blind ; and that, if both tracts are thus broken across, total and permanent blindness is the result, even though the lesion be confined to the upper part of the tract, and the connections of the retinae with the lower parts of the brain remain uninjured. In such cases the powers of visual imagination may remain unimpaired. Fourthly, it has been shown that destruction of, or serious injury to, this part of the cortex always impairs more or less seriously the powers of vision. If the whole of the occipital cortex of one hemisphere of the brain (say the left) is destroyed (as by the rupture of a blood vessel in that region), the patient suffers permanently the defect of vision known as hemianopsia, Le, the optical impressions made on the left halves of both retinae no longer excite visual sensation ; for the left halves of both retinae are connected directly only with the left occipital cortex.^ In rare cases in which the occipital cortex of both cerebral hemispheres is gravely injured, visual sensation, perception, and imagination are almost completely destroyed ; and, though no case of complete destruction of the occipital cortex of both hemispheres has been carefully studied, the evidence at present available is held by almost all physiologists to warrant the belief that in such a case the patient would be completely deprived of all power of visual sensation, perception, and imagination ; and it seems highly probable that the deprivation would be permanent and would be so complete that he would not even be aware of the nature of the gap in his mental life. Similar observations have yielded almost equally strong evidence that the sensations, perceptions, and representations of each of the other senses are similarly dependent on the integrity of other circumscribed areas of the cerebral cortex ; that they are invariably accompanied by nervous processes in those parts of the brain, and that they are no longer experienced when the nervous structures of those parts are destroyed. We have evidence that is, if possible, even more conclusive, showing that ^ This statement is perhaps not strictly true. Some authorities believe that a small central region of each retina is connected directly with the occipital cortex of both hemispheres ; for in many cases of hemianopsia this small central part of both retmse continues to function normally. BODY AND MIND 104 the production and control of all skilled voluntary movement is dependent on the integrity of the extensive region of the cortex known as the Rolandic or sensori-motor area ; and that the skilled movements of the various parts of the body, the fingers, thumb, wrist, tongue, lips, etc., are dependent on the integrity of different specialized parts of this area. For not only is the power of production of such movements lost when these parts of the cortex are destroyed, but it has been abundantly shown that artificial direct stimulation of these parts excites movements of the corresponding parts of the body. And in this case also, the anatomical connexions of these parts with the corresponding muscles has been worked out in considerable detail. Again, we have now good evidence that outside these sensory and motor areas of the cortex, which together make up less than half its total extent, are parts whose integrity seems essential to such mental processes as the synthetic elaboration of the sensations involved in intelligent perception ; for example, it is established that the intelligent appreciation of the significance of written words depends on the integrity of a small part of the cortex that lies a little in front of the “ visual area,^' or area directly concerned in visual sensation. And it seems to be proved that injury to such parts may leave the patient capable of enjoying the normal range of sensations, while depriving him of the power of interpreting certain of them ; so that, he may remain capable of dis- tinguishing objects in his visual field, though he is incapable of recognizing them, of naming them, or of reacting upon them in any intelligent fashion. It is unnecessary to pursue the evidence in greater detail. Observation and experiment of the kind we have been con- sidering seem to have established beyond serious question the doctrine of the localization of cerebral functions j that is to say that, although the functions of many parts of the brain remain obscure, we are compelled to believe that the exercise of various kinds of mental activity and the enjoyment of various modes of consciousness, including all that is properly called sensation and imagery, are invariably bound up with, and are directly dependent upon, the occurrence of nervous processes in various parts of the brain, parts consisting of nervous elements of highly specialized functions, which are distributed widely throughout the cortex of the cerebral hemispheres, and possibly in other parts of the brain also. THE RISE OF THE MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY 105 Thus the search for a punctual seat of the soul, for some one spot at which the sensory nerves might be supposed to converge to act upon the soul, and at which in turn the soul might be supposed to play upon the central ends of the motor nerves, has been shown to be a hopeless one : it is proved that there is no such seat of the soul. The Doctrine of the Reflex Type of all Nervous Process Closely connected with this search for the seat of the soul, and closely allied to the failure of this search in its bearing upon our problem, has been the development of the doctrine of reflex action. Descartes' bold speculations anticipated the modern doctrine of reflex action ; and the writings of Willis and of other physiolo- gists of the seventeenth century also contain some vague fore- shadowings of it. But it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the nature of reflex action was clearly understood. Descartes distinguished between the afferent and motor modes of nervous conduction, but it is not clear that he conceived the processes as taking place in two different sets of nerves ; and it was Sir Charles Bell who first clearly demonstrated, early in the nineteenth century, that all the peripheral nerves are of two kinds — the afferent nerves which, entering the spinal cord by the posterior nerve-roots, carry up impulses from the sense- organs ; and the efferent nerves which, issuing from the cord by the ventral roots, carry impulses from the central nervous system to the muscles and other executive organs. It had, of course, long been observed that, in both men and animals, certain simple movements can be evoked in a regular involuntary machine - like fashion by the application of certain forms of stimulation to the sense organs ; e.g. the winking of the eyelid and the contraction of the pupil by the sudden flashing of a light upon the eye ; the withdrawal of a hand or foot by the pricking of the skin of the part. It was known also that some of these reflex movements may be excited in man, not only without his volition, but even in spite of his utmost voluntary efforts to prevent them. This remarkable fact could not fail to excite the attention of students of the nervous system ; and early in the nineteenth century it was shown that some of these movements may be equally well excited in both io6 BODY AND MIND men and animals, when the brain is destroyed or the spinal cord severed from the brain ; when, for example, the spinal cord of a man has been broken across by accident , it is in some cases possible to evoke movements of the lower limbs by tickling or pricking the skin ; and in such cases the stimulus evokes in the patient neither feeling nor sensation. It was clear, then, that the integrity of the spinal cord is the sufficient condition of such reflex response. In the middle of the last century a famous controversy was waged over the question whether such reflex movements, effected through the spinal cord in the absence of the brain, imply the presence of some kind of soul-life, some kind of psychical activity, associated with the nervous processes of the cord. For some of these movements are so nicely adapted to effect results beneficial to the organ- ism, that they seemed to some observers to imply intelligent and purposive direction. But physiologists, with few exceptions, soon came to hold very decidedly the opinion that all such spinal reflex actions are determined in a purely mechanical fashion. And this opinion has received very strong support from the modern studies of the minute structure of the nervous system. These studies have shown that in almost all cases the sensory fibre, which carries up impulses from some sense-organ and enters the spinal cord by a dorsal nerve-root, sends across the spinal cord a branch which (either directly or through the medium of another neurone) comes into contact with one or more of the motor neurones, whose long branches or axones pass down to the muscles as their motor nerves These studies, in fact, have displayed the material mechanisms by means of which the incoming impulses of the sensory nerves are distributed to motor nerves, through systems of nervous connexions in the spinal cord of various degrees of complexity ; and there is little reason to doubt that, in all spinal reflexes, the paths taken by the nervous impulses, and the conjunctions of efferent nerves thus thrown into action by them, are wholly determined by the material connexions of the nervous elements, and by their physico-chemical state at the moment of the arrival of the afferent impulse. This revelation of the material mechanism conditioning the seemingly purposive reflex action, has cut away the ground from under those who would maintain that the spinal reflexes are psychically guided in any way. But the conception of reflex THE RISE OF THE MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY 107 action as a seemingly purposive, though in reality a mechanically determined, response to the stimulus applied to the sense-organ has exercised a much more important influence upon the con- sideration of the psycho-physical problem. For the incessant labours of a multitude of workers has revealed the fact that not only the spinal cord, but the whole of the brain also, is built up on the reflex plan ; that the whole of the brain may properly be regarded as made up of a multitude of nervous loops, interlacing and communicating with one another, it is true, in wonderfully complex fashion, yet still being essentially loops or long bye- paths ; each of these diverges from the afferent limb of some spinal reflex arc to ascend to the brain, and, after traversing the brain, descends to join the efferent or motor limb of some spinal reflex arc. Just as it is possible to trace the path of the spinal reflex impulse across the cord from sensory to motor nerve, so it is possible to reconstruct in imagination the ascent of the various sensory paths to the lower brain, thence to the appropriate sensory areas of the cortex, and thence again in great converging systems to the motor area of the cortex ; whence they descend by the great pyramidal tract to be distributed to the various motor mechanisms of the cord. And this reconstruction is no mere piece of fancy, but is fully warranted by a great quantity of careful observations. Hence we have to suppose that, when a man sees an object and stretches out his hand to take it, the nervous excitation follows such a long loop-path, passing up to the visual cortex, thence by long association-tracts to the motor cortex, and so down by the pyramidal tract to the spinal centres through which all movements of the arm are effected. And we have to believe that the sensa- tions which are involved in this perceptual reaction are somehow determined by the nervous current as it traverses the cortex of the brain in the course of this long journey. Again, there is good reason to believe, though here we are on less firm ground, that all the processes of the brain, even those that accompany the most abstruse thought, conform to the same fundamental reflex type. Everywhere, then, in the central nervous system, in the brain no less than in the spinal cord, there seems to be continuity of the physical processes of nervous conduction ; nowhere do we find the sensory nerve coming suddenly to an end at any place where its physical process might be supposed to terminate in giving rise to a sensation or any other psychical effect ; and nowhere does the impulse of the efferent nerve seem io8 BODY AND MIND to be originated as a physical process without physical cause or antecedent ; rather there seems always and everywhere to be continuity of material substance and of physical process, nowhere and at no time spontaneous or psychical origination of nervous process. The study of spinal reflex action has shown us also that the energy expended in the efferent process need bear no simple and constant relation to the magnitude or intensity of the excitation by which it is induced ; that rather the nervous system contains in its various parts stores of potential energy, which may be liberated in large quantities by very small excitations, so that under favourable conditions a very slight sensory stimulus may provoke a violent reflex action. We can therefore, no longer see in the disproportion of physical effect to physical cause, in the case of intense voluntary reaction upon a stimulus, any evidence of psychical intervention in the chain of physical events. It is obvious that the two lines of development of our knowledge of the brain and its functions reviewed in the foregoing paragraphs, necessitate the rejection of any such conception of the interaction of the soul with the body, as was commonly entertained half a century ago and was clearly set forth by Lotze in his “ Medizinische Psychologie.^^ For this conception had postulated the abutting of all sensory paths about some central part of the brain, the seat of the soul ; the abrupt termination of all the sensory nervous processes at that place; and the equally abrupt inception of the excitation of motor nerves without physical cause or antecedent. And, though the argument is seldom explicitly set forth, yet there can be no doubt that these two allied developments of physio- logical knowledge have done much to banish the belief that the brain is the seat of psycho- physical interactions, of action and reaction between soul and body.^ But their influence in this direction has worked in conjunction with other lines of physiological thought ; and these we must consider, before we can appreciate the full force of the physiological argument. ^ Prof. Th. Ziehen regards the absence of any gap in the chains of physical causation in the brain as the most important of all the grounds on which he bases his rejection of psycho-physical interaction. “ Gehirn u. Seelenleben," Leipzig, 1902, p. 39. THE RISE OF THE MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY 109 U7ico7isciotts Cereb7'atio7i We have seen that reflex movements of a seemingly purposive character may occur without, and even in spite of, the volition of the subject, and, in fact, without the subject becoming aware of the stimulus that evokes the movement or of the move- ment itself. Now, in certain abnormal states, actions of much more complicated character are performed, while the subject seems to remain unconscious of them. Thus, epileptics sometimes execute, in the period succeeding to an acute attack, long trains of action that imply intelligent design and choice of means, as well as nice control and regulation of all bodily movements ; and yet the subject, returning after a time to his normal state, asserts that of the whole period during which these actions were performed he retains not the slightest remembrance, that he is absolutely ignorant of all that he did and of all that happened to him during this space of time. Similar examples of the intelligent performance of complex actions of which no recollec- tion can be evoked, are afforded by subjects in a state of trance or somnambulism, and by others suffering from lesions of the brain. Other persons, apparently normal in all respects, have wakened up from sleep to find that they have written down original verses or the solution of some problem that had remained insoluble up to the moment of falling asleep. The feature common to all these cases is the inability of the subject to remember anything of the execution or the circum- stances of actions that seemed to imply perception, feeling, reasoning, and volition. Now the recollection of any past action is our only direct evidence that that action was consciously performed, especially if, as in many of these cases, the subject is irresponsive to all questioning during the execution of the actions. It is argued, then, that w^e have in these cases examples of highly complex, purposive, and intelligently controlled action taking place without consciousness ; it would seem to follow that in these cases the material mechanisms of the nervous system suffice for the execution of such actions, independently of all conscious- ness or psychical guidance ; and, therefore, we seem compelled to believe that, when similar actions are executed consciously, the nervous mechanisms are the only essential conditions ; that their physico-chemical processes constitute the complete causal sequences intervening between the sense-impressions and no BODY AND MIND our reactions upon them ; and that consciousness is a superfluous accompaniment, so far as the causal sequence is concerned,^ The Association-Psychology and the Law of Habit The association-psychology, founded by Locke and Hume, and developed by a succession of British writers, reached its climax of confident explanation of all mental process in the works of Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer, about the same time that the physiological facts and inferences described above were brought to light From the first it had been clear that the association- psychology lends itself admirably to a physiological interpretation of mental process j and, as early as the middle of the eighteenth century. Hartley sketched a system of physiological explana- tion of mental process, based on the assumption that all mental processes consist in the association and associative reproduction of ideas. But the increase of knowledge of the nervous system brought by the researches of the nineteenth century, provided a much less inadequate basis for such a system of explanations than was available to Hartley. According to the association- psychology, all mental process consists in the reception of im- pressions by the senses and in the revival of these impressions in various conjunctions and sequences, as the simple and complex ideas of memory and of imagination, according to the laws of association and associative reproduction ; and it was held that, by the careful analysis of instances of all types, the various laws of association recognized by the earlier writers may properly be reduced to a single principle, namely, that of association of ideas in virtue of their immediate succession in time. Now, a fixed habit of action resembles very closely a reflex action ; an habitual action may be effected involuntary, without design or reflection, and with very little or no consciousness of the action or of the impressions on the senses by which it is evoked and guided. We have, therefore, good warrant for believing that nervous mechanisms, such as have been shown to be the essential conditions of reflex actions, are the sufficient conditions of habitual actions. Further, a habit is formed by the repetition of an action on the repetition of particular sense- impressions ; that is to say, the repeated sequence of a particular ^ The late Prof. Huxley described a case of such apparently unconscious, yet intelligent and complex, activities, and attached great weight to such cases as justifying the denial of psycho-physical interaction (Collected Essays, vol. i.) THE RISE OE THE MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY iii action upon a particular sense-impression results in the formation of a mechanism consisting of a system of nervous connexions in the brain, which system is capable of bringing about the appropri- ate response to the sense-impression in a purely mechanical fashion. The nervous system, then, is plastic and has a tend- ency to take on habits ; wherever the nervous current runs from one part to another, it leaves behind a more or less enduring tendency for the path it has traversed to be an open path, a path of low resistance, between the two parts. Here, then, is a basis for the physiological and mechanical explanation of the course of all mental process in terms of the association-psych- ology. We have only to suppose (as we have good warrant for doing) that the rise to consciousness of each idea is accompanied by the excitation of some particular group of nervous elements in the brain ; and to assume that, when one sense-impression following upon another gives rise to a second idea following immediately upon another, the nervous current strikes across from the one group of nervous elements to the other. If so much be assumed, then it follows from the law of habit that the revival of the one idea ^ will tend to be followed by, or accompanied by, the revival of the other ; and we have in outline a scheme for the explanation of all that clustering, cohesion, and succession of simple ideas, which, according to the principles of the associa- tion-psychology, constitute the whole of mental process. For this scheme is held to afford a mechanical explanation, not only of the facts of association and reproduction of ideas, but also of memory itself ; it is said the idea is merely a cluster of simple ideas or sensational elements (as Locke first taught), which cohere, in virtue of the principle of habit, in the groupings in which they are evoked by the fortuitous conjunctions of sense-impressions. Such is the conception of mental process which has gained a wide currency, especially among the biologists ; and, since this conceptual scheme makes use of no other principles and faculties than those inherent in the nervous system, it has played no inconsiderable part in banishing the belief in psychical inter- vention with the course of the physical processes of the brain.^ ^ I here use the word idea in the sense given it by Hume and the Associa- tiomsts, as equivalent to presentation, and as covering both percept and image. * The most consistent elaboration of this mechanical system of explanation of mental process may be found in Prof. Ziehen’s “ Outlines of Physiological Psychology.'* 112 BODY AND MIND The four lines of development of physiological fact and theory reviewed in the foregoing pages have, then, all tended to the one conclusion, namely, that the actions of man are capable of being fully explained in terms of mechanism — that a sufficient knowledge of the structure and physico-chemical constitution of the nervous system would enable us to describe completely in terms of physical and chemical changes the causal sequence of events that issues in any action, no matter how much deliberation, choice, and effort may seem to be involved in its preparation and determination. Long ago, Spinoza, in proposing to regard mind and body as but two aspects of one reality, found himself compelled to make this assumption. He wrote : '' Certainly no man hath yet deter- mined what are the powers of the body ; I mean that none has yet learnt from experience what the body may perform by mere laws of nature, considering it only as a material thing, and what it cannot do without the mind’s determination of it. For nobody has known as yet the frame of the body so thoroughly as to explain all its operations ; not to say that in brutes much is noted which doth far surpass human cunning, and that men walking in their sleep often perform, so sleeping, that which they would never dare waking : which is proof enough that the body may, merely by the laws of its own constitution, do much that its own mind is amazed at. Again, there is none can tell how and in what manner the mind moves the body, what measure of motion it can impart to it, or with what velocity.” Spinoza, in making this great assumption so contrary to all the accepted ways of thought of his time, could appeal only to men’s profound ignorance of the body and its processes ; whereas those who make the same assumption in the present age appeal with confidence and good show of reason to our knowledge of the body and its processes, claiming that the knowledge which we now have amply justifies the assumption and allows us to understand in a general way the mechanics of human conduct In strict logic, the physiological knowledge we have been considering does not do more than this ; it does not provide any positive argument against psycho-physical interaction, although in the minds of many it has seemed to justify and necessitate this negative conclusion. But we have now to consider certain other physiological and THE BISE OF THE MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY 113 biological arguments which are held to prove the dependence of all mental process on the brain. The dependence of Thought on B7'ain function. The materialists of the eighteenth century based their argu- ments very largely on facts of the kind we have to consider in this section. But modern research has rendered much more exact and extensive our knowledge of these facts. First and foremost, we have to put all the facts which, in the course of our description of the search for the seat of the soul, were referred to as proving the localization of cerebral functions ; especially the facts of brain-lesion, which show that the sensations and imagery of each of the senses are dependent upon the integrity of special parts of the cerebral cortex and that other special mental functions are abolished by injuries of other parts. But there are many other evidences of the intimate dependence of mental processes upon the brain-functions, of which the principal are indicated in the following paragraphs. There obtains throughout the animal scale, and also within the course of development of each human being, a close corres- pondence between the degree of development of the brain and the degree of development of intelligence or mental capacity in general. Passing over the facts of the comparative size of the brain in the various animal species, let us consider for a moment the parallelism of mental and cerebral development in the human being. The lack of all but a vague sentiency and appetition in the new-born infant corresponds to a very undeveloped state of its brain : not only is its mass very much less than that of the adult brain ; but also, microscopic study has shown that, for some time after birth, the majority of the nervous elements of the cerebrum are in a condition in which they cannot take part in any concerted nervous activities. Gradually, throughout all the years of child- hood and adolescence, more and more of these elements become perfected and organized within the general system or hierarchy of minor systems ; first, as the sensory powers develop, the neurons of the sensory areas become organized, later those of the inter- vening “association-areas,'' which subserve the higher mental functions ; and this process of the organization of fresh neural elements continues far on into adult life, multitudes of new branches and twigs growing out from millions of nerve cells to BODY AND MIND 1 14 establish a plexus or network of constantly increasing complexity, in correspondence with the development of knowledge and intel- lectual power. Then, as middle age begins to pass over into old age, this multiplication of twigs and branches and this formation of new connexions between the neural elements come to an end ; and at the same time the mind becomes less and less capable of making new acquisitions of knowledge, of skill, of capacity of any kind ; until in advanced age the powers of acquisition and reten- tion are reduced to a minimum : the old man lives again in the scenes of his youth, and remembers hardly, if at all, the events of yesterday. Again, we know how, when the surface of the brain becomes chronically inflamed, the mental powers of the patient exhibit a progressive deterioration running parallel with the deterioration of the grey matter of the cortex ; so that a man of splendid intellect and fine character may be gradually reduced to a state in which he stands, both intellectually and morally, below the level of the higher animals ; a state of complete mental degradation, from which he is released only by death. Surely the most terrible object the mind of man can contemplate ! And modern medical science is showing more and more clearly that many mental disorders are primarily due to disorders of the body which, by poisoning the blood, secondarily produce a chronic poisoning of the brain, and thereby a degradation of intellect and character. We have to take account also of the many modes in which mental process may be profoundly affected or arrested by physical agents acting on the body. A very small quantity of laughing gas, chloroform, or ether in the blood quickly deranges all our mental processes, and a slightly larger dose seems to arrest all mental activity and completely to abolish consciousness. In the case of alcohol, the steps by which the activity of the mind is arrested and consciousness abolished may be followed, the change being greater in proportion to the dose of the drug in- troduced into the blood, and, through it, into the brain-substance : the highest, most delicate functions seem to be first abolished, and then in turn the functions successively lower in the scale of complexity and delicacy ; until, when the dose is large enough, all the parts of the brain are paralysed, and consciousness seems as completely abolished as in chloroform narcosis. Various other drugs, such as Indian hemp and mescal, produce specific altera- tions of our mental processes, without arresting them. THE RISE OF THE MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY 1 15 A copious stream of blood, rich in oxygen, is constantly supplied to the brain during waking life ; the more active the mind at any moment, the more copious is the supply of blood pumped up to the brain, the more rapidly is oxygen taken up from the blood, and the more rapidly is the substance of the nervous tissues oxidised and consumed and cast out into the blood- stream, in the form of carbonic acid and other waste products of combustion. On the other hand, any checking of the stream of blood flowing through the vessels of the brain, or any diminution of the quantity of oxygen contained in it, produces at once some disturbance of mental process ; and a sudden stoppage of the supply of oxygen to the brain arrests almost instantaneously all mental process and abolishes consciousness — as we see in the case of the ordinary fainting caused by insufficiency of the heart's action. A mechanical shock or jar of the brain will also instantane- ously arrest all mental activity and abolish consciousness, if only it is sufficiently severe. Not least important among the facts of this order are those which indicate the dependence of memory upon the nervous system. A blow on the head seems in some cases to abolish throughout a period of minutes or hours all memory of experi- ences preceding the moment of the blow. Local lesions, i.e. injuries of small parts of the brain, seem in some cases to destroy memories of some one class, e.g, visual memories ; as we have noticed in discussing the localization of cerebral functions. The effectiveness with which we can commit any matter to memory varies greatly with the bodily state at the moment, with the degree of fatigue, the state of general bodily vigour and health, with youth and age. And, most significant of all perhaps, the minute study in recent years of the processes of mental association and reproduc- tion has shown that they obey laws which seem to be identical with those of the formation and operation of habits. Now, there is no room for doubt that the acquisition of a habit consists in the formation of material connexions between nervous elements and in the consolidation, improvement, or wearing smooth of such paths of communication between nerve cells, or, as it is commonly put, in the formation of paths of low resistance in the nervous system. A 11 ^1 _ -3 — 4 - 1 «, ^ BODY AND MIND ii6 that the continuance of our mental processes and consciousness, in the only form of which we have any positive knowledge, is intimately dependent upon the metabolism of the brain and upon the maintenance of certain very complex chemical conditions, conditions which cannot vary beyond very narrow limits without producing disorder or arrest of the brain’s metabolism and, with it, of the stream of mental life. The Law of Psycho-neural Correlation or Concomitance. The physiological facts of the kind we have been considering are generally held, and with good reason, to justify the empirical generalization known as the law of psycho-neural concomitance, which runs as follows: — All mental process is accompanied by neural process in the brain, each thought or idea having its specific neural correlate, or, in the language of Huxley — every psychosis is definitely correlated with a netii^osis. The Composite Nature of the Mind. In former years, the proposition that the mind of each man is a unity was very generally accepted as a fundamental and unquestionable truth. But modern research has shaken very seriously even this inner stronghold of the castle of Animism. Biology has made clear that the human body is a vast and harmoniously cooperating aggregation of cells, each of which is in a sense a vital unit, which seems to have a life of its own, rela- tively independent of that of the rest of the body. Embryology has shown that this aggregation of cells is formed by the repeated division of a single parent-cell, the germ-cell, and the cohesion of the many cells thus formed. Now, the principle of continuity and the analogy presented by the unicellular animals, each of which divides repeatedly into two or more cells that lead inde- pendent lives, seem to compel us to suppose that the germ-cell has not only life but also mind, that it enjoys psychical life in however lowly a manner or degree, and that, on the division of the germ-cell, each of the cells derived from it has also its psychical capacities. This line of thought leads us inevitably to the view that the developed human being is, as it were, a vast colony of cells of more or less highly-specialized functions ; that in the cells constituting the nervous system the psychical functions are most highly developed and specialized ; and that the con- THE RISE OF THE MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY 117 sciousness of each man is in some sense the sum, or aggregation, or resultant, of the consciousnesses of the cells of his brain. This view of the composite nature of mind and consciousness, which has now gained very wide acceptance, seems to be borne out by two classes of very striking and curious facts. The facts of the one class are those established by the experi- mental division of lower animals ; their significance did not escape the observation of Aristotle, but they were first studied in detail in the eighteenth century by Charles Bonnett. Many of the lower animals, notably some of the segmented worms, may be divided by the knife into two or more portions, each of which continues to live and to manifest all the indications of psychical life proper to the species. In such cases we seem compelled to believe that, in dividing the body and nervous system, the knife divides also the psychical life of the creature ; if indeed the psychical life of the parts of the intact creature is integrated to a unitary consciousness. The reproduction or genesis of each human being takes place by a process of fission which is essentially analogous to such simple transection of an animal ; for the inception of the new individual is a budding off of the germ-cell from the mass of cells constituting the body of the parent, a cell which seems to carry with it the rudiment, or at least the potentiality, of the psychical life of the developed man. Consideration of these facts has led many competent thinkers ^ to assert that the consciousness of any man is composite, is a great stream formed by the flowing together of the many little streams of consciousness, the consciousnesses of the vital units of which his body or brain is composed ; ^ and they have not hesitated to assert that, if a man's brain could be mechanically divided into two parts (as by the transection of the corpus callosum) without arresting the life of the parts, the nervous activities of each part would be accompanied by its own stream of consciousness ; that, in fact, the condition or ground of the unity of personal consciousness is the material and functional connection between the cells of which the brain is composed. Secondly, since Fechner boldly propounded this view fifty 1 Notably G. T. Fechner in the Psycho-physik,” and Von Hartmann in The Philosophy of the Unconscious.” * This view is strictly in harmony with the widely accepted speculation of philosophers that an absolute mind or consciousness comprehends or includes the consciousness of all lesser minds. BODY AND MIND n8 years ago, it has received very strong support from modern studies in mental pathology. Students of hysteria, of hyp- nosis, of trance, and of automatic speech and writing, medical psychologists of the school of Charcot and Janet, loudly proclaim that the doctrine of the unity of the individual consciousness is an exploded dogma, and that, even in the normal individual, many obscure currents of thought and consciousness flow on independ- ently beside or beneath the main stream ; and that this multiplicity of consciousness is but accentuated and brought more clearly to view in the abnormal states that they have studied with so much success.^ For these abnormal states, known as states of multiple personality, dual or divided consciousness, and so forth, seem to afford evidence of the existence of two or more streams of mental activity and consciousness associated with the processes of a single brain and body, the two streams of consciousness alternating with one another in time in cases of the commoner type, but seeming in rarer cases to run on contemporaneously and independently of one another. Now there is very good reason for believing that in all cases of these kinds, the kinds that are now commonly classed under the head of mental dissociation^ there obtains some degree of functional dissociation among the elements of the brain ; in fact, the evidence of such neural dissociation is much more clear and direct than the evidence for dual or multiple consciousness.^ It is, then, easy to see in these facts a confirmation of the view that such unity of consciousness as we normally enjoy is conditioned by the functional continuity of the elements of the brain ; for in these cases we seem to find that rupture of this neural continuity is accompanied by a rupture or division of consciousness, just such as, according to the view of Fechner and Von Hartmann, would result from division of the brain by the surgeon’s knife. ^ For an authoritative statement of this kind see an article by Prof. Th. Flournoy, ^"Esprits et Mediums,” in the BuUehn deVInstitut giniralpsychologiquef 1909, No. 3 : ” En resume, au cours de ce dernier demi-si^cle, les experiences d^hypnotisme, retude des alterations spontan^es de la personnalite, et Tobserva- kion mdme de nos proems psychologiques courants, ont rev616 dans Tdme humaine line complexite de nature, et des possibilites de dissociation interieure ou de [lolymorphisme, dont on ne se doubtait gu^re k I’epoque d’ Allan Kardec, et lui ont totalement mine Taxiome servant tacitement de pilier principal k sa tJieorie ” (the axiom, namely, that the consciousness of the individual is unitary). *The nature and production of such states of neural dissociation has been discussed by the author in a paper in Brain, vol. xxxi., ” The State of the Brain during Hypnosis.” CHAPTER IX THE INFLUENCE OF THE DARWINIAN THEORY W E have now reviewed the principal ways in which the development of our knowledge of the nervous system and its functions has contributed to the rejection of Animism. But the progress of other branches of biology has contributed powerfully towards the same result, especially the establishment of the doctrine of biological evolution through the influence of the ideas of Charles Darwin. The multitude of nice adaptations of animal structure and function to the situations and circumstances and needs of the animals had always been looked upon as evidence of the operation of a teleological factor in the determination of those structures and functions ; whether this factor was regarded as operating from outside to mould the development of the animals, or was identified, as by Lamarck, with the minds of the animals, with their intelligent psychical efforts to achieve their purposes and to adapt themselves more perfectly to their environment. Then, in the middle of the nineteenth century, just when the triumphs of physical science and the rapid progress of physiology were leading men to regard all animal growth and behaviour as capable of mechanical explanation, came the Darwinian hypothesis of the evolution of species and the adaptation of species to their environment by the blind mechanical operation of natural selection. Darwin himself retained the hypothesis of Lamarck and con- tinued to regard mind as a teleological factor in the evolutionary process. But to a great number, perhaps the majority, of biologists who came after Darwin, his hypothesis has seemed capable of explaining as mechanically engendered all instances of adaptation of structure and function ; and it is maintained by those who accept the view of this Neo-Darwinian school, of which Weismann is the leader, that the last ground for the recognition of any teleological factor in the biological realm has been washed away for ever by the Darwinian principles. 120 BODY AND MIND The modern doctrine of biological evolution contributes in a second way also to the abolition of Animism. It compels us to believe in the continuity of the evolution of the animal kingdom from the simplest to the most highly developed animal, namely man ; and it regards man’s mental organization as having been continuously evolved from that of his animal ancestry, by means of the same processes of natural selection and in- heritance of chance variations that have produced his bodily organization. Now it is obvious that the acceptance of this view raises new difficulties for any animistic doctrine. If man has a soul, what is its relation to the souls of animals? If it is of an altogether different order from these, at what point in the scale of evolution did the human soul replace the animal soul ? and so on and so on. The doctrine of the continuity of the evolution of man’s mental powers from those of his animal ancestry forbids us to accept Descartes’ easy way of escape from these difficult problems, namely, the denial of all psychical life to the animals. But in addition to the raising of these unanswerable conundrums, the doctrine of the continuity of evolution seems to make against Animism in yet another way. It is said that the principles of continuity and of economy justify us in regarding the world of living things as having been gradually evolved from inanimate or non-living matter,^ and that the rejection of this view involves the assumption of a miraculous interference with the course of nature for the first production of living organisms. And it is held that the successes of modern chemistry in analyzing the substance of living matter and in synthesizing complex organic molecules from the chemical elements justify us in believing that living matter will one day, perhaps at no distant date, be synthesized in the laboratory. If, then, such continuity of evolution of the organic world of living things from the inorganic world is established, it justifies the belief that all organic processes, in- cluding those of the human brain, are determined according to the laws of mechanism to which all inorganic matter has been proved by exact experiment to conform ; for we cannot suppose that the mere aggregation of the chemical elements in the more complex molecules of organic matter removes them in any degree from the sway of those laws. Hence there is no room ^ Prof. Lloyd Morgan is one of those who have laid great stress upon t h is argument : see his " Introduction to Comparative Psychology.’* THE INFLUENCE OF THE DARWINIAN THEORY 121 for psychical guidance among the strictly mechanical processes of human brains. The evolutionary speculations of Herbert Spencer must also be mentioned here as having played a considerable part in establishing the psychology without a soul.” For in his Principles of Psychology ” (the first edition of which preceded by a few years the “Origin of Species”) Spencer applied the physiological principles of the association-psychology to explain not only the development of the individual mind, but also the evolution of the mental powers of the race ; claiming to show how all the powers of the human mind have been built up by the transmission and accumulation from generation to generation of the experience of each, embodied in the form of associated groups of nervous elements. And these speculations met with very general approval and exerted a widespread influence. Thus, just ten years after physical science had launched its heaviest bolt against Animism, in the shape of the law of con- servation of energy, the Darwinian theory seemed to undermine its last prop. To the scientific world in general it seemed that Animism was forever dead; and when, in the year 1874, Prof. Tyndall gave to his presidential address before the British Association the double character of an inquest into the death of Animism and a funeral oration over its corpse, the mind of the cultured public was well prepared to bid it a regretful farewell. We have it on the authority of a leading newspaper of that date,^ that “ The Address has been received with a unanimity of commendation that has fairly bewildered those who make it a business to study the drifts and currents of public sentiment.” ^ The New York Tribune, CHAPTER X CURRENT PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST ANIMISM B eside the weighty arguments against Animism provided by the results of modern physical and biological research, other arguments of a metaphysical or epistemological character, which have long been current, have been presented again and again with great force and liveliness, and still carry great weight with many minds. Of these, one of the most widely influential is still undoubtedly the objection raised by the Occasionalists to Descartes’ teaching. It is inconceivable, it is said, and therefore impossible, that things so utterly unlike as body and soul should act upon one another, that the immaterial inextended soul or thinking substance postu- lated by Descartes should be capable either of acting upon, or of being acted upon by, the material extended substance of the brain. The development of physical science with its more exact notions of physical causation has strengthened the appeal of this argument ; it is therefore still much relied upon, and has been stated again and again in recent years and given a variety of slightly different forms. To all those who accept the scheme of kinetic mechanism as a literal description of the constitution of the physical world, it is most effective when stated in the form that we cannot conceive how consciousness can affect the move- ments of molecules.^ One of the best known and authoritative statements of it is that contained in the late Prof, Tyndall’s famous Belfast address ; others were cited in Chapter VI L Some philosophers prefer to give to this argument a logical flavour. They say that all our conceptions of physical pheno- mena are built up on the mechanical type, all involve the notions of extension, of position and of changes of position in space ; that we can only conceive of physical processes in this way ; and that to regard psychical agencies as affecting physical ^ See the passage quoted on p. 93 from Romanes^ Rede Lecture. 122 PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST ANIMISM 123 processes is to attempt to combine two systems of ideas that have no relation to one another ; that, in short, any such attempt is illegitimate, because the two systems of conceptions have been evolved for dealing with different aspects of experience. Dr Stout has presented this argument in a way which combines these two rather different formulations of it, without implying the acceptance of the scheme of kinetic mechanism. “The main objection to this view (interaction of soul and body) is that the kind of interaction presupposed is utterly incongruous with the conception of causation on which the whole system of our know- ledge both of physical and psychical process is based. It is the function of science to explain how events take place, or, in other words, to make their occurrence intelligible ; but this is only possible in so far as we can discover such a connection between cause and effect as will enable us to understand how the effect follows from the cause ; or, in other words, we must exhibit cause and effect as parts of one and the same continuous process. To explain is to exhibit a fact as the resultant of its factors. This is the ideal of science, and it is never completely attained. But in so far as it is unattained, our knowledge is felt to be incom- plete. Now when we come to the direct connection between a nervous process and a correlated conscious process, we find a complete solution of continuity. The two processes have no common factor. Their connection lies entirely outside of our total knowledge of physical nature on the one hand, and of conscious process on the other.'’ ^ These may be said to be the modern attenuated forms of Kant’s epistemological dictum that all processes of the phenomenal world must be conceived as the movements of bodies and be regarded as strictly subject to mechanical law. A thoroughly metaphysical objection to the soul is the following ; — We have no immediate experience of the soul ; the conception is reached by inference only ; therefore it is bad meta- physics to assign a higher or greater reality to the soul than to con- sciousness ; for of the latter we have immediate knowledge. Pro- fessor Strong, who makes much of this objection in his discussion of the question,^ supports it with closely allied arguments, which ^ Manual of Psychology,** chap. iii. * In his book, “ Why the Mind has a Body,** a lucid and forcible presentation of the argument for the position designated on a later page (chap, xi.) Psychical Monism. 124 BODY AND MIND may best be given in his own words. “ But the hypothesis of a soul involves a second difficulty equally great, in regard to the nature to be ascribed to it if assumed. What could the soul itself, apart from consciousness, be like ? It has been carefully distinguished from and opposed to consciousness, therefore it cannot have the latter’s luminous nature. We are forced to conceive it as a dark and mysterious source from which conscious- ness in some unintelligible manner flows. Insensibly we are drawn to picture it by the aid of that illegitimate notion of matter existing with all its materiality apart from consciousness, — in short, as a mind-atom. But, no matter how carefully we define it as immaterial, since we contrast it in nature with consciousness, the origin of the latter out of it is as irrational, as much “ the birth of a new nature,” as its origin out of matter. Thus the nature of the Soul in itself is as unassignable as our knowledge of it is inexplicable” Other writers who urge this argument hide its purely metaphysical nature under the disguise of an argumenium ad hominem ; they say that to posit a soul is but a disguised Materialism ; they assert that, describe it how we may, the soul remains essentially of the same nature as our naive conception of matter, that the two conceptions arose from, and owe their survival to, the same weakness of the human intellect Professor Strong goes on to say — ‘^Finally the phenomena- transcending assumption that occasions these difficulties is irreconcilable with the fact that our existence is something of which we are immediately aware. For the existence of conscious- ness is our existence. If the Soul should continue but conscious- ness cease, we should be as good as non-existent ; whereas, if the Soul should be annihilated but consciousness still go on, we should exist as truly as now. Thus our existence is bound up with that of consciousness, not with that of the Soul ; or, as I said before, the existence of consciousness is our existence.” ^ It only remains to point out that the almost universal re- jection of Animism by the learned world of our time is due not merely to the force of the arguments provided by the physical and biological sciences, nor to the reasonings of epistemologists and metaphysicians, but to the co-operation of these influences. In earlier ages the materialistic tendencies of science and the spiritualistic affirmations of philosophy had generally arrayed the men of science and the philosophers ^ Op. cit. pp. 199 and 200. PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST ANIMISM 125 in hostile parties, the opposition between which reached its climax towards the close of the eighteenth century. Then came Kant, who taught the philosophers that ihey might accept the materialistic conclusions of science without giving up all that they held most dear ; and the men of science, on the other hand, mollified by these great concessions to their claims, and finding their most cherished tenets no longer imperilled by the prepossessions of the philosophers, have sought to make what concessions seemed possible, and have found that an agnostic or neutral Monism is at once more defensible and more respectable than the crude Materialism of their predecessors. Hence, in the course of the nineteenth century, these parties have drawn closer together ; until now they are united in a common opposition to Animism under the twin banners of Monism and idealism, each confirmed in its opposition to Animism by the knowledge that it can claim the support of its powerful ally. In this process of reconcilement of science and philosophy at the cost of Animism, which only in recent years has made rapid progress, a great part has been played by the exposition of a variety of solutions of the pyscho-physical problem ; the essen- tial features common to all these are the denial of all psycho- physical interaction, and the insistence that all the processes of the organic world (including all the behaviour of men and animals) are capable in principle of being fully explained in mechanical terms. They may therefore be classed together under the head of automaton theories ; though the clumsy expression, anti- animistic theories, would bring out more clearly their common opposition to Animism. In the following chapter I propose to describe the varieties of the automaton theory most widely accepted at the present time. CHAPTER XI THE AUTOMATON THEORIES O F the many authors who have adopted and presented an anti-animistic solution of the psycho-physical problem, each has given to his doctrine some peculiar turn and flavour.^ The formulations range from the crudest materialism on the one hand to the grossest subjective idealism on the other, and not a few authors oscillate uncertainly between these two extreme varieties of Monism. These many formulations fall into four groups, although of some of them it is difficult to say to which group they properly belong. I adopt the plan of describing the type formulation of each of these four groups. The first, generally known as Epi- pJienomenalism, is the modern representative of Materialism. The others are often loosely classed together under the title, theories of psycho-physical Parallelism^ and many writers signify in general terms their adhesion to “ the theory of psycho-physical parallelism,’’ without specifying which of its three distinct forms they approve, and, it may be suspected, without distinguishing between them in their own minds. Epiphenonienalism The simplest formulation of the monistic view is of course the materialistic. Perhaps no reputable writer of the present time formulates Materialism so crudely as some of the older writers. Since Hobbes asserted that sensation is nothing but motion, the statement of the materialistic creed has undergone considerable refinement. Even the dictum of Cabanis, that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile, marked a considerable refine- ment ; and a further refinement is implied by the formula that ^ It is surprising and amusing to anyone who forages among the literature of this subject to find that so many authors have put forward one or other of these allied doctrines, claiming it in all good faith as an original discovery. 120 THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 127 consciousness is a function of the brain. But the modern mate- rialist refines still further upon his predecessors. He will not commit himself to the statement that the brain secretes con- sciousness or thought, and he hesitates to say that the processes of the brain are the cause of sensation or of consciousness of any kind ; he prefers to say that the stream of consciousness accom- panies the flow of brain-processes, each detail of the stream of consciousness being dependent upon some specific feature or detail of the total brain-process with which it coincides, or to which it immediately succeeds, in time. Huxley did more than anyone else to define and to give currency to this formulation, and to him it owes the name by which it is generally known ; for he it was who suggested that the stream of consciousness should be called epiphenomenal, or the epiphenomenon of the brain-process.^ Now, though some of those who have adopted this view are shy of using the word cause in this connexion, and especially of describing the relation of consciousness to brain-process as one of casual dependence, yet others are less reticent ; and it cannot be denied that the doctrine of Epiphenomenalism as widely enter- tained by scientific men does imply this casual dependence. The doctrine may, then, be stated succinctly in the form of the follow- ing propositions : — (i) The universe is a system of forces, or of matter and energy, in which every event or process is completely determined or caused by antecedent physical process accord- ing to the laws of mechanism (the bodies and brains of all organisms, including those of men not excepted). (2) Certain complex physico-chemical processes, taking place in those very highly specialized collocations of matter which we call brains, produce or cause (in their own right, as it were) all that we call consciousness, all sensation and imagery, all feeling, emotion, thought and sense of effort, or other mode of consciousness ; that is to say, every feature or element of the content of the consciousness of any organism is caused by some immediately preceding physical or chemical change occurring in the brain of that organism, and all that we call psychical process is merely the successive and momentary appearance of new elements in the stream of consciousness, each new element being called into existence by a corresponding process in the brain, and ceasing to exist when that process comes to an end. ^ Dr Shadworth Hodgson is perhaps the most thorough and consistent exponent of this view among contemporary writers. 128 BODY AND MIND According to this doctrine, then, there is no true psychical activity ; all psychical existence is consciousness only, and con- sciousness consists of a stream of fragments or elements of consciousness, appearing simultaneously or successively, merely subsisting for a moment and then disappearing, without in any way influencing one another and without reacting in any way upon the brain-processes by which they are produced ; the causal sequence and all true activity and effectiveness belong to the brain- processes. The relation of consciousness is one of dependence without reciprocity of influence. The consciousness of any moment is a passive conjunction of “ epiphenomenal’^ elements. Huxley and others have illustrated this doctrine by likening this stream of epiphenomenal elements to the shadows cast by the moving parts of a machine, or to the noise fortuitously produced by them — the creaking of the wheels. Perhaps a better simile would be the electrical disturbances that always are incidental to the strains and frictions of the working of a machine. Epiphenomenalism may be illustrated and fixed in the mind by help of the diagram (Fig. i), Fig. I. or, less inadequately but less simply, by the second diagram (Fig. 2). fn these, as in the following diagrams, physical processes of the brain are indicated by the black discs below ; the circles above stand for elements of the stream of consciousness ; causal links are indicated by the lines, and the time-direction by the arrow- heads. The diagram thus indicates the causal network con- THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 129 necting the physical processes of the brain, and the causal de- pendence of each element of consciousness upon some one of the brain-processes. This doctrine is very widely held among men of science at the present time, especially perhaps among the physiologists ; for the facts with which they are most familiar, those which seem to indicate the dependence of all mental process upon the material brain-processes, are those which incline the mind most strongly towards this view. Although this doctrine escapes some of the most obvious crudities of the older Materialism, it must be classed as materialistic ; for it gives the primacy to matter. Material collocations and their forces are held to be the real and effective agents in the production of all change and process. The material universe is held to have existed throughout an indefinitely long time, and to have undergone an immensely prolonged evolutionary process of a purely mechanical nature, as described by Herbert Spencer; which process has resulted at a certain point of time in the production of living organisms, through the increasing complexity of the atomic structute of certain molecules. In these organisms further evolution of the same kind has resulted in a further increase of complexity of atomic structure and molecular arrangement ; until, when the brains of some organisms attained a certain degree of this complexity of atomic and molecular structure, their physico-chemical processes began to be accompanied by consciousness. Con- sciousness, or mind, was thus called into being for the first time in the history of the universe ; which consciousness continued to incx'ease in complexity as brains grew larger and more complex and more highly integrated, and has attained its greatest richness and complexity in the case of the large and very complex brain of the human species. It is further implied that, if and when these very highly specialized collocations of matter which we call brains shall cease to exist, all mind and consciousness will dis- appear from the universe. The material universe is thus regarded as rolling on through the ages according to eternally fixed mechanical principles, and as producing nov/ and again, on one or more of the stellar bodies on which brains happen to be evolved, little flecks of consciousness, which flash out like sparks of light, flicker for a moment and dis- appear, coming and going without affecting in the slightest degree the secular evolution and dissolution of material systems. 130 BODY AND MIND There are no special arguments advanced in favour of this view, beyond all those objections to Animism which we have noticed. It is the only alternative to Animism open to the crude realist, who believes the physical world to consist of matter such as we perceive or as physical science describes. An interesting variation of this doctrine has been proposed a few 3rears ago by Professor W. Ostwald,^ who claims that his suggested modification would remove it from the category of Materialism. The suggestion is bound up with his attempt to show that the conception of matter is a false and improper, because useless, hypothesis, and that we may profitably do away with it altogether and replace it by the conception of energy. Energy, according to this doctrine of ‘‘ Energetics,” is the only enduring reality ; it is capable of assuming, or transforming itself into, many different modes or species ; and of these species consciousness or psychical energy is one among the rest. All mental process is thus con- ceived as the interplay of psychical energy with other species of energy. It seems possible that this suggestion might be developed in a way not inconsistent with Animism ; ^ but as presented by its author it would seem to be very closely allied to Epi- phenomenalism. It may be illustrated by developing the simile in which we likened the consciousness that accompanies the brain- processes to the electrical disturbances that accompany the strains and frictions incidental to the working of a machine. Just as man-made machines continued through long ages to develop incidentally feeble electrical disturbances which played no effective part, so through long ages natural mechanisms developed inci- dentally feeble psychical energies which played no effective part. And, just as man evolved machines (namely dynamos) in which, by the special arrangement of the parts, the electrical energy generated became much greater in quantity and was given an essential and dominant role in the working of the system, so certain natural mechanisms (namely organisms), through the evolution of brains, became capable of generating psychical energy in larger quantity, which energy, with each further evolution of the brain, has played a more important part in the working of the whole organism. ^ '' Vorlesungen liber Naturphilosophie,’* Leipzig, 1902. ^ This development (if I rightly comprehend them) seems to be attempted by several Russian authors, especially Grot, Krainsky, and Bechterew. (See "Psyche und Leben," W. Bechterew, Wiesbaden, 1901.) THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 13 ^ Psycho-physical Parallelism The expression, psycho-physical parallelism, is conveniently used in a loose way to denote all the doctrines that deny psycho- physical interaction, but in this section I am concerned only with that one to which in strictness the designation should be confined. According to this view physical and psychical processes are equally real ; but there is no causal relation between psychical and physical processes ; the two series of events, the psychical processes of any mind and the physical processes of the brain with which they are associated, merely accompany one another in time ; their relation is one of simple concomitance only ; the two series of events merely run parallel to one another in time, as two railway trains running side by side on a double track, or two rays of light projected towards the same infinitely distant point, run parallel with one another in time and space. Within each series the law of causation holds good, the successive steps being related to the preceding and succeeding steps as effects and ^ o o 0 o a ■' > # • • ' • •— Fig. 3. causes ; but no causal links stretch across from one series to the other. The diagrams illustrate this view, the one (Fig. 3) in the Fig. 4. simplest possible manner, the other (Fig. 4) rather less inadequately. In the latter figure the clear circles are supposed to lie in one plane at right angles to the plane of the paper, the black circles in another. This doctrine is held in either of two forms, restricted or universal parallelism. In the former case, brain-processes alone BODY AND MIND 132 of all physical processes are supposed to be accompanied by psychical events corresponding to them point for point in this mysterious fashion. In the latter case it is assumed that all physical processes alike, those of the inorganic realm no less than those of brains, have their psychical concomitants. This doctrine of par- allelism without interaction was, as we have seen, suggested by Leibnitz ; but it may be and is held without accepting the doctrine or pre-established harmony by means of which Leibnitz sought to make it intelligible. It may be, and in fact usually is, held only as a working hypothesis or as a heuristic principle making no claim to metaphysical validity. Those who are not content with the bare affirmation of temporal concomitance of brain-process and consciousness, and who, while denying all psycho-physical interaction, seek to make their relation intelligible, find themselves compelled to adopt the doctrine of the identity of mind and body in one or other of the two forms in which it is current Both of these necessarily claim to embody metaphysical or ontological truth, i.e. to give us some account of the nature of real being, or at least to make certain assertions in regard to it Phenomenalistic Parallelism {Identity -Hypothesis A) Under this heading we may put together the closely allied formulations of the psycho-physical relation suggested by Spinoza and by Kant respectively ; for both regarded mind and body as but two aspects of one reality ; Spinoza’s doctrine is more properly called the two-aspect view ” ; Kant’s, “ phenomenalistic parallelism.” The diagram (Fig. 5) may serve to illustrate both Fig. 5. varieties. As the diagram implies, the causal links belong wholly to the unknown series of real processes which appear to us under the two aspects, the physical and the psychical, although both series of appearances will seem to be causally linked, just as one THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 133 shadow may seem to draw another shadow after it This form of the identity-hypothesis thus implies the metaphysical doctrine known as realistic Monism. It asserts that reality or real being, of which mind and body are appearances only, is not immediately given to or known by us. This underlying reality may be regarded as an unknown and unknowable X. This was the teaching of Herbert Spencer, as also of Kant, who declared that it is “ weder Materienoch ein denkend Wesen.”^ But those who, on other grounds, adopt a pantheistic metaphysic will naturally follow Spinoza in affirming that this real being is God. Psychical Monism (Identity -Hypothesis B) The alternative formulation of the identity-hypothesis runs as follows : — Consciousness is the only reality, and the consciousness of each of us partakes of this real nature ; all that each man calls matter or the physical world is but the form under which con- sciousness other than his own is manifested to him, so that, if I could observe the processes of your brain while you are thinking, I should be observing the phenomenal manifestation of your consciousness. According to this doctrine, then, the causal efficiency is wholly confined to the psychical series ; and matter and its processes (all that we call the physical world or Nature) are but, as it were, the shadows thrown by thought It is thus the converse of Epiphenomenalism, which regards thought as the shadow thrown by matter. It may be illustrated by the diagram (Fig. 6). Fig. 6. This form of the identity-hypothesis implies a metaphysical doctrine which is usually designated idealistic Monism, but is better described as realistic or objective psychical Monism. It must not be confused with subjective Idealism or Solipsism ; this also is a psychical Monism, for it maintains that my thought or consciousness alone exists. But, while the latter denies the exist- ence of the physical world and of other minds than my own (except as ideas of my own mind), the former mainiains the 1 See p. 77. BODY AND MIND 134 objective existence both of the things which appear to me as composing the physical world and of other minds like my own, while holding that they are all of the same nature, namely consciousness. It will be convenient to designate it simply “ Psychical Monism.” A diagram illustrating Solipsism on the plan of the foregoing diagrams may help to make clear the difference between these two forms of psychical Monism. It would take the form of figure 7, though the links joining the ® ® ® - ® Fig. 7. circles would not stand for causal links, since Solipsism necessarily denies validity to the principle of causation. In order to complete the series of diagrams illustrating the various psycho-physical doctrines which reject Animism, I add — # # • • # Fig. 8. figure 8 ; this may stand for the crude Materialism which asserts that consciousness is matter or the movement of matter. Of all the anti-animistic answers to the psycho-physical problem this second form of the identity-hypothesis is the one which is most widely accepted at the present time and which has been the most thoroughly elaborated. It is therefore important that it should be clearty grasped, and I restate it in the words of the late Professor Paulsen, one of its most enlightened and thorough- going advocates of recent years. “ Alle korperliche Wirklichkeit ist durchaus und iiberall Plinweisung auf eine Innenwelt, die der verwandt ist, die wir in uns selber erleben. Und allerdings werden wir nun sagen : in der Innenwelt, die uns freilich nur an einem Punkt unmittelbar gegeben ist, im Selbstbewusstsein, dariiber hinaus erreichen wir sie nur durch stets unsichere Interpretation und jenseits der Tierwelt nur durch schematisierende Konstruktion, und durch idealisirende Symbolik ; in der Innenwelt offenbart sich die Natur des Wirklichen, wie es an und fur sich ist : die Korperwelt ist im Grunde nur eine zufallige Ansicht, eine unadaquate Darstellung der Wirklichkeit in unserer Sinnlichkeit.” ^ And again, “ Das Dasein der Seele besteht in ihrem Leben, in der 1 “ Einleitung in die Philosopliie,** p. 126, twelfth edition, 1904. THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 135 Einheit aufeinander bezogener pychischer Vorgange ; nehmen wir diese weg, so bleibt kein Ruckstand, Bewusstseinsvorgange sind das an und fiir sich Wirkliche, sie bedxirfen nicht eines anderen, eines Seelensubstantiale, das ihnen erst zur Wirklichkeit helfen Oder sie in der Wirklichkeit halten und tragen miisste ; so etwas gibt es iiberhaupt nicht/* ^ “ Seele ist die auf nicht weiter sagbare Weise zur Einheit verbundene Vielheit innerer Erlebnisse/* This is the conception of “ the actual soul *’ which we are told on all hands must replace that of the substantial soul/* ^ More recently, Prof. C. A. Strong, in a book bearing the significant title “ Why the Mind has a Body,*’ has presented this form of the identity-hypothesis and the metaphysical argument for it with admirable force and clearness. He demands that metaphysic should give some clear account of the nature of the realities it recognizes ; and defining a reality as “ something that exists of itself and in its own right, and not merely as a modifica- tion of something else,** he maintains that consciousness, the only mode of being of which we have immediate knowledge, has the best possible claim to be regarded as real being or reality.® Then, having demonstrated the necessity of the assumption of things- in-themselves, of which physical objects are the phenomena or appearances to us ; he asks — Why should we postulate two modes of real being, namely these things-in-themselves and consciousness ? Why not make the simplest possible assumption and regard them as identical? “No solution of the problem, in fact, could be simpler or more economical. We have two things, the brain-process and consciousness, and the question is as to their relation. The brain-process is a phenomenon, and every phenomenon symbolizes a reality, and consciousness is a reality. Therefore, conclude the psycho-physical materialists and monists (i.e. those who accept Epiphenomenalism or identity-hypothesis A), the brain-process symbolizes a reality of which consciousness is the manifestation or on which it is dependent. They actually go out of their way to avoid the solution ! For, if the reality symbolized by the brain-process is distinct from consciousness, then the two are loosely and externally attached as we commonly conceive brain and mind to be attached, and the problem is simply transferred to another sphere and perpetuated. Whereas, 1 Op. cit., p. 384. 2 Aktualitatsbegriff der Seele,” or Die aktuelle Seele,” in the language of Wundt. 3 p. 1^4. BODY AND MIND 136 if the reality symbolized by the brain-process is consciousness itself, their connexion is explained and the problem solved. Indeed, this is the only conceivable solution of a problem which all other hypotheses necessarily perpetuate. On every other hypothesis, the duality of mind and body is either a duality of existences or a duality of disparate phenomena ; in either case their connexion is a new fact, not provided for in their naiure, and consequently inexplicable. On this hypothesis, the duality is that of a reality and its phenomenon ; this, for believers in things-in-themselves, is a vera relatio, and the connexion is therefore explained by being subsumed under the relation of phenomenon and thing-in-itself.”^ Professor Strong supports this metaphysical argument for this form of the monistic doctrine as follows : we have an ineradicable conviction that our consciousness is a real factor in the course of things, and a review of the evolution of mind in the animal world justifies this conviction of the efficiency of con- sciousness. Now Psychical Monism (the identity-hypothesis B) does no violence to this well-based belief ; for in a world where all is consciousness and all causal action is of consciousness on con- sciousness, our own consciousness finds a natural sphere of influence. The other monistic doctrines on the other hand ask us to reject as a delusion our belief in the effective agency of our consciousness. Among the clearest statements of this doctrine is that of the late Prof. W. K. Clifford in his essay entitled “ On the Nature of Things-in-themselves.” ^ He asserted that “ consciousness is made up of elementary feelings grouped together in various ways ” ; that “ the elementary feeling is a thing-in-itself ” ; that “ conscious- ness is a complex of ejective facts, — of elementary feelings, or rather of those remoter elements which cannot even be felt, but of which the simplest feeling is built up ” ; and, proposing to give to these remoter elements of which the simplest feeling is built up the name mind-stuff, he asserted that “ mind-stuff is the reality which we perceive as matter” and that ‘‘the universe consists entirely of mind-stuff.” He wrote further that “ a moving molecule of inorganic matter does not possess mind or consciousness, but it possesses a small piece of mind-stujfr This should have run — the molecule, or what we conceive as a molecule, is a small piece of 1 ** Why the Mind has a Body,** chap. xv. 2 Lectures and Essays,** vol. li. THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 137 mind-stuff. Lastly it must be noted that with complete consistency Clifford asserted that these eject-elements, these small pieces of mind-stuff “ are connected together in their sequence and co- existence by counterparts of the physical laws of matter ” ; that is to say, what we call laws of matter are the laws of mind-stuff. Clifford ascribed the first distinct enunciation of this doctrine to Prof, Wundt, but it appears in the writings of Wundt’s master, G. T. Fechner. We owe to him, I believe, the first statement and the most elaborate defence of it The language in which Fechner sets forth his view is not always strictly consistent ; it seems sometimes to imply psycho- physical parallelism in the strict sense defined on page 1 3 1 , some- times the first, and sometimes the second, form of the identity- hypothesis ; and it may be doubted whether he always dis- tinguished clearly between these three formulations. But, as it was Fechner who, by the publication of his celebrated treatise Elemente der Psycho-physik,’’ ^ brought the identity- hypothesis into fashion in the scientific world, I quote from that work the following passage in which he illustrates his view. When anyone stands inside a sphere ^ its convex side is for him quite hidden by the concave surface ; conversely, when he stands outside, the concave surface is hidden by the convex. Both sides belong together as inseparably as the psychical and the bodily sides of a human being, and these also may by way of simile ivergleichsweise) be regarded as inner and outer sides ; but it is just as impossible to see both sides of a circle from a stand- point in the plane of the circle, as to see these two sides of humanity from a standpoint in the plane of human existence/’ ^ Again, he wrote — “The solar system seen from the sun presents an aspect quite other than that which it presents when viewed from the earth. There it appears as the Copernican, here as the Ptolemaic world-system. And for all time it will remain impossible for one observer to see both systems at the same time, although both belong inseparably together, and, just like the concave and the convex sides of a circle, they are at bottom only two different modes of appearance of the same thing seen from different standpoints ; ” ^ and yet again — “ What appears to you, 1 Leipsic, i860. ^ The word used is Kveis^ but a sphere seems to be implied by the first sentence. ^ Elemente der Psycho-physik,” vol. i., Introduction. ^ Loc, cit. BODY AND MIND 133 who 3/ ourself are spirit, when at the inner standpoint as spirit, appears from the outer standpoint as the bodily substratum of this spirit”^ The first and second passages may seem to imply phen- omenalistic Parallelism (identity-hypothesis A) ; the last, on the other hand, would rather imply Psychical Monism (identity- hypothesis B) ; and the passage following upon the last sentence makes it clear that this was the view Fechner adopted and defended with such admirable industry and ingenuity. It runs — “ The difference of standpoint is whether one thinks with one’s brain or looks into the brain of another thinker. The appearances are then quite different ; but the standpoints are very different, there an inner, here an outer standpoint ; and they are indescrib- ably more different than in the foregoing example (i.e. the circle and the solar system), and just for that reason the difference of the modes of appearance is indescribably greater. For the double mode of appearance of the circle, or of the solar system, is after all only obtained from two different outer standpoints over against it ; at the centre of the circle, or on the sun, the observer remains outside the line of the circle, or outside the planets. But the appearance of the spirit to itself is obtained from a truly inner standpoint of that underlying being over against itself, namely the standpoint of coincidence with itself, while the appearance of the bodily self is obtained from a standpoint truly external to it, namely, one which does not coincide with it.” ^ “ Therefore no spirit perceives immediately another spirit, although one might suppose that it should most easily apprehend a being of like nature with itself ; it perceives, in so far as the other does not coincide with it, only the bodily appearance of that other. Therefore no spirit can in any way become aware of another save by the aid of its corporeality ; for what of the spirit appears outwardly is just its bodily mode of appearance.” ^ Fechner worked for the establishment of his view along two very different lines. On the one hand he sought an exact empirical foundation for it by means of laborious psycho- physical experiment, on the other, he appealed to the aesthetic side of human nature. We may briefly notice these two main lines of his argument. Fechnefs view necessarily involves the assumption that all the objects and events composing the physical world are, like the processes of the cortex of our brains, the outward ^ Loc. cit. 2 3 THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 139 appearances of what is really consciousness or consciousnesses. For to set certain of the processes of the brain apart from all other physical processes, attributing to them alone this peculiar relation to consciousness, would be but to deepen the mystery of the psycho-physical relation. Fechner, far from shrinking from this necessary implication, revelled in it ; and his two chief lines of endeavour were, on the one hand to provide some empirical evidence of the psychical nature of all that we call physical pro- cesses, and on the other to show how pleasing and inspiring the world becomes when thus regarded. The former line he pursued in the following way. His friend, E. H. Weber, had formulated on the basis of experiment the empirical generalization know as Weber’s law. This law may be briefly expounded as follows : the application of a physical stimulus to a sense-organ evokes a sensation of a certain intensity ; and, if a second stimulus of greater intensity is then applied, the subject experiences a sensation of greater intensity, provided the increase of the stimulus is not too small. Now it is possible to determine with some exactitude the least increment of stimulus- intensity which will suffice to evoke a sensation just perceptibly more intense than that evoked by the weaker stimulus. Weber’s experiments showed that, in the case of several of the senses, the amount by which the intensity of a stimulus must be increased in order to evoke such a just perceptibly more intense sensation is not a constant quantity, but that it varies with the intensity of the stimulus, being always a certain fraction of the total value of the stimulus ; for example, in the case of vision, the intensity of the light stimulating the retina must be increased by about one per cent, of its total value, in order to evoke a just perceptibly more intense sensation. Fechner saw in this generalization the indication of a definite mathematical relation between physical and psychical magnitudes, between the magnitude of a sensation and that of its phenomenon, the brain-process. He first strove to render the empirical basis of this generalization more exact and to explain away the apparent exceptions to it ; and then he sought to deduce from it a more definite mathematical statement of the relation. The gist of his argument was this : J ust perceptible increments of sensation-intensity are equal increments ; therefore we may state Weber s law more generally thus — Equal increments of sensation-intensity are determined by increments of stimulus- BODY AND MIND 140 intensity whose value is in each case a certain fraction or per- centage of the total value of the stimulus. Now let this percentage be made equal to one hundred per cent ; that is, let the intensity of the stimulus be increased by a series of steps such that the value of the stimulus at each step is double that of the stimulus of the preceding step ; then from our empirical law we may deduce that the sensations evoked by this series of stimuli will differ in intensity by equal amounts. That is to say the sensation- intensities will form a series of values in arithmetical progression, while the corresponding stimulus-values will form a series in geometrical progression. This inference may be stated in the form of geometrical curves. Construct two curves, Sn and St, representing the two series of intensities, the sensation-intensities and the stimulus-intensities respectively, in the following way : — n The ordinates of Sn {a, b, Cy </, e) represent the values of the sensation-intensities, those of St the values of the corresponding stimulus-intensities a, ft 7, s. THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 141 Now, if we apply to any sense organ the slightest possible stimulation we find that it evokes no perceptible sensation, and that the intensity of the stimulus must be raised to a certain definite value, before it suffices to evoke a just perceptible sensation. Fechner argued that the stimuli which are too feeble to evoke perceptible sensations cannot be supposed to produce no effect at all ; and that they must rather be supposed to produce imperceptible sensations, or, as he preferred to say, sensations which do not rise above the threshold of consciousness. And he saw in the definite mathematical relation of the two series of intensities, represented by the two curves, a proof of the reality of these sensations below the threshold of consciousness. For, let C6 be a stimulus of such intensity that it just suffices to evoke the sensation a of just perceptible intensity. Then the horizontal line passing through a represents the threshold of consciousness ; whereas the ordinate expressing the intensity of stimulus a rises to a definite height above the base line representing zero of stimulus intensity. Now the two curves having definite mathe- matical properties may be produced in both directions, each according to its own law. When we thus produce the curves,, we find that, while the curve St (representing the stimulus- intensities) approaches the base line asymptotically, Sn (represent- ing the sensation-intensities) sinks at once below the line repre- senting the threshold of consciousness. The part of the curve St between a and the base line, which represents a series of subminimal stimuli, implies the corresponding part of the curve Sn, z.e., the part below the line which represents the threshold of consciousness. Here, said Fechner, we have proof that a series of sensations, .r, z, which remain below the threshold of con- sciousness, is evoked by the series of subminimal stimuli. This was the line of argument developed at length by Fechner in the “ Elcmente der Psycho-physik.'* The aesthetic argument or persuasion was set forth at great length in several works.^ Professor James has recently pub- lished 2 a vivid summary of this part of Fechner’s work, and I may therefore describe it in a very few words. Fechner, as I said above, did not shrink from the corollary implied by his psycho-physical doctrine, the corollary that all the universe consists of consciousness j rather he gloried in it, ^ " Die Seelenfrage,” “ Zendavesta,” “ Nana.*’ 2 “ A Pluralistic Universe,” chap. iv. 142 BODY AND MIND regarding it as the chief claim of his view to acceptance. He called this peculiar view of the constitution of the world, the ‘‘ day- view ” of Nature, and favourably contrasted this view, that all Nature enjoys or is consciousness, with the view, prevalent in the scientific world, that the inorganic part of Nature is inert and unconscious, the “ night-view ” as he called it. He held up his day- view as revealing a Nature indefinitely more pleasing and satisfying to our contemplation than the Nature of the night- view ; he drew a glowing picture of all Nature rejoicing together, delighting in the sense of its own beauty and orderliness ; he even regarded each planet and star as enjoying an individual consciousness and glowing with joyful pride as it rolls on its majestic way through space. For, just as he regarded the individual consciousness of each man as in some sense a sum or aggregate of the feebler poorer consciousnesses of the vital units, the cells, of which his body is composed, and as in turn entering as a component into the wider richer consciousness of the whole human race ; so he regarded the consciousness of each stellar body as being in a similar way the mighty stream of consciousness formed by the flowing together of the conscious- nesses of all its constituent parts, both organic and inorganic, human and infrahuman, and as in turn entering into a still mightier stream, the universal consciousness. How much more satisfying, said Fechner, is the contemplation of the universe when so conceived, than when we look upon it as consisting of immense systems of lifeless matter, forming a stage on which men spend their brief moments of conscious life, oppressed by the dreary vastness of the spaces, times, and forces that compass them about ! We have seen that the doctrine or postulate of the continuity of evolution of the organic and inorganic worlds is used as an argument against Animism. The same postulate is used in a rather different way as the basis of a special argument in favour of the identity-hypothesis in one or other of its two forms, and by some authors, notably by Tyndall ^ and b}^ Professor Lloyd Morgan, 2 this argument is regarded as of the greatest weight It runs thus : — The evolution of organic life has been continuous From the lowliest unicellular form up to man ; at no point is there ^ The Belfast Addiess to British the Association, 1874. ^ " Introduction to Comparative Psychology,’^ chap, xviii. THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 143 an absolute break in the series, or any indication of the incoming of mind as a new factor in the evolutionary process. Now we have evidence that the earth has existed in isolation (so far as any material continuity is concerned) from all other parts of the material universe, since a date long preceding that at which the existence of organic matter upon it became possible ; for such matter cannot exist at high temperatures and could only begin to exist when the crust was pretty well cooled down. Hence organic matter must be presumed to have been evolved from inorganic matter by a continuous and gradual process ; hence what we call life and mind or soul or consciousness^ must have been present in some very lowly forms in the inorganic matter from which organic matter was evolved, and therefore in all inorganic matter ; that is to say, all matter must be regarded as in some sense and degree conscious or endowed with psychical life ; and, since inorganic matter is wholly subject to the strictly mechanical laws in spite of its consciousness, so organic matter must be likewise subject to the strictly mechanical principles, and psychical life or process accompanying the physical processes of matter, must be devoid of all influence on the physical processes — a conclusion which is compatible only with one or other of the parallelistic theories, and not at all with interaction theories. This reasoning from the continuity of the evolution of the animal kingdom from non-living matter is supplemented by the following argument, which I give in the form in which it was presented by F. A. Lange in a well-known passage of his History of Materialism.’^ Let a pair of mice be shut up in a room with a sack of flour and allowed to breed undisturbed. After a few months the whole of the flour has disappeared, the greater part of its substance having been converted into the bodies of a swarm of mice. Whatever consciousness or psychical capacity may be enjoyed by the mice must then, it is said, have been present in some form in the flour. In addition to the special arguments in favour of the several automaton theories that we have now reviewed, we must notice certain considerations which may be adduced in favour of a monistic solution in general. These considerations are appeals to various motives, various sentiments and prejudices, rather than logical arguments. The motives brought into operation ^ Infra-consciousness is the term ■Dreferred bv Prof. Llovd Moreran, Hoc. cit.). BODY AND MIND 144 by these appeals have played a great part in determining the choice of the monistic theories by so many moderns. The most important of these motives is probably the desire for a well-rounded, self-consistent, conceptual scheme of the physical world. Now the rejection root and branch of all psycho-physical interaction enables us to entertain such a conceptual scheme ; while the adoption of any one of the parallcl- istic hypotheses enables us to hold it without incurring the reproach of philosophical crudity or absurdity which, as all with few exceptions can see, lies against crude Materialism. The adoption of any one of the monistic hypotheses, then, brings with it all the advantages of a materialistic metaphysic while avoiding its principal drawback. And that is, doubtless, the explanation of the fact that these monistic hypotheses have secured the adhesion of so large a proportion of the students of the natural sciences. The peculiar advantage of the materialistic scheme of things, to which it chiefly owes its attractiveness, is that its acceptance brings with it a confident sense of intellectual mastery. So long as we can confidently believe that all the events to be reckoned with by science are but the motions of masses, or the transforma- tions of measurable quantities of energy according to exact equations that can be calculated and therefore foretold, the mind feels itself at home and master of what it deals with, and there lies before it the prospect of a continued approach towards a completed power of prediction and control of the future course of events. Under these conditions, the working hypotheses of the natural sciences become confidently held doctrines from which we feel ourselves able to deduce the limits of the possible ; and we seem able to rule out from our scheme of the universe all that con- fused crowd of obscure ideas which, under the names of magic, occultism, and mysticism, have been at war with science, ever since it began to take shape as a system of verifiable ideas inductively established on an empirical basis. Once admit, on the other hand, that psychical influences may interfere with the course of physical nature and — “you don’t know where you are,” you can no longer serenely affirm that “ miracles ” do not happen ; they may happen at any moment and may falsify the most confident predictions of physical science. Thus the gates are opened to all the floods of Spiritualism and superstition of every kind, which to some gloomy scientists seem to threaten to light up once more THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 145 the fires of persecution and to drag down our civilization from its hardly - won footing upon the steep path of progress. Paulsen urges his Psychical Monism upon our acceptance in a rather different way. The function of philosophy, says he, is to mediate between science and religion, to reconcile their teachings and aspirations. Now, the physical scientists will never tolerate the intervention of non-physical agencies in their physical world ; they will always assume that every event is determined strictly according to the laws of physical or mechanical causation ; that such explanation of all events in the universe without exception is possible, is the fundamental axiom of science.^ Therefore a reconciliation of science with religion can only be effected by admitting the claim of science to furnish causal explanations of all events in terms of mechanism, while reserving for religion the task of providing an idealistic interpretation of the mechanically caused events. “ Also : A lies muss physisch zugehen und erklart werden ; und : A lies muss metaphysisch betrachtet und gedeutet werden. Das ist die Formal, in der Physiker und Metaphysiker Ubereinkommen konnenP’^ The establishment of the monistic solution of the psycho-physical problem thus becomes the principal task of philosophy ; and we ought to welcome and accept this solution, because it allows us as men of science to be rigid materialists, to accept without scruple and without regret the most rigidly materialistic conclusions and tendencies of science, while as philosophers we remain idealists, asserting that all reality is at bottom mental. Another argument for Parallelism or psycho-physical Monism is found in the desire for a monistic scheme of the universe. Many philosophers seem to experience this desire to conceive the ^ Daniber tausche man sich nicht : die Naturwissenschaft kann und wird sich von ihrem Wege nicht wieder abbringen lassen, eine vein physikalische Erklarung aller Naturerscheinungen zu suchen. Es mag tausend Dinge geben, die sie gegenwartig nicht erklaren kann, aber das prinzipielle Axiom, dass es auch fur sie eine physische Ursache imd also eine naturwissenschaftliche Erk- larung gebe, wird sie nicht wieder fahren lassen. Daher wird eine Philosophie, die darauf besteht, gewisse Naturvorgange konnten nicht ohne Rest physisch erklart werden, sondern machten die Annahme der Wirkung eines metaphysischen Prinzips oder eines supranaturalen Agens notwendig, die Naturwissenschaft zur unversohnlichen Gegnerin haben. In Frieden kann sie mit ihr nur leben, wenn sie sich der Emmischung in die hausale Erklarung der Naturerscheinungen grundsatzlich enthalt und die Naturwissenschaft ruhig ihren Weg bis zu Ende gehen lasst ” (“ Einleitung in die Philosophie,” p. i8o). ® Op, c%t., p. i8i. BODY AND MIND 146 universe as at bottom consisting of only one kind of real being ; and not a few claim that this desire is a demand that our intel- lectual nature inevitably makes, and one that carries with it a guarantee of the validity of the monistic interpretation. Closely connected with this in many minds is the conviction that a universe monistically conceived, that is, conceived as a unitary whole of which all the parts are of one nature, is indefinitely nobler than one consisting of ultimate real beings of diverse natures. To many, again, it seems that the second form of the identity- hypothesis is preferable to all others, because it is essentially and necessarily an idealistic doctrine ; that is to say, because it is one which regards all reality as of the nature of mind : and such a view of the universe seems to them aesthetically superior to, or in some indefinable way nobler than, any scheme which recognizes the real existence of anything not mental in nature. This was the line of persuasion which, as we have seen, Fechner developed at great length. Least in worth, though not perhaps of least effect, among the influences that have brought about the very general acceptance of Parallelism, is the feeling that such a doctrine derives a certain distinction from being so entirely different from and opposed to the scholastic doctrine and all popular conceptions and common- sense views. For to many minds there is something attractive in any esoteric and difficult doctrine that rises above the reach of the common herd. And this feeling is given the form of an appeal to reason, in the following way : it is pointed out that the doctrine of Animism was originated by the first crude efforts of speculative reason, at a time when man was but a naked savage following a bestial mode of life, knowing little of the laws of nature, ignorant of their harmony and constancy ; that it was a monstrous birth begot by fear out of greed ; a conception not without its social uses in the earlier stages of social evolution, serving through superstitious fear to discipline man in the control of his cruder impulses ; but one which no longer serves any useful purpose, and which is fit only to be set up in the ethnographical museums of primitive customs and beliefs alongside of its monstrous progeny, totemism and magic, witch - craft and polytheism, vitalism and possession, free-will, human immortality and divine retribution, heaven, hell, and the devil, and all the crowd of spectres with which man's wayward and fearful imagination has for so many THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 147 ages oppressed him, cumbering his progress in true knowledge and in command over the forces of nature. We have seen now how, in the long course of development of thought, the conception of the soul, which came into the culture tradition of Europe as a heritage from our savage ancestors, has been refined in successive ages, until it has been refined away altogether : how the soul, beginning as a material or quasi- material shadowy duplicate of the body, became divested of its bodily characters ; so that it remained a mere spirituous tenuous vapour, diffused equally throughout the body or concentrated more or less in certain of its parts or organs, and somehow play- ing an essential and dominant role in the life of the body : how the specialization of learning along the biological and psycho- logical lines led to the division of the soul into two souls, one concerned in the governance of the bodily functions, the other the substrate of the intellectual functions, while those organic functions in which the co-operation of mind and body is most strikingly obvious continued to hover uncertainly between the two souls or to demand a third as their substrate : how the two souls became, the one the vital principle of the physiologists, the other the immortal inextended substrate or support of the mental functions : how then the progress of physiology led to the rejection of the vital principle, and how increasing insight into the structure and functions of the nervous system seemed to render superfluous the notion of the teleological agency of the soul and to reduce con- sciousness to an epiphenomenon : how the development of exact quantitative notions in physical science, first under the form of the scheme of kinetic mechanism, later as dynamic mechanism obeying the law of the conservation of energy, confirmed the physiologists in their rejection of both the vital principle and the soul, by affirm- ing that the physical world constitutes a closed system of causally related processes insusceptible of being influenced by other than physical agencies : how the philosophers discovered that the concep- tions of both soul and body are mere inferences from our immediate experience and that neither can be regarded as above suspicion : and how, under the influence of physical and biological science, they have excogitated solutions of the psycho-physical problem that escape the absurdities of Materialism and Subjective Idealism, while claiming to reconcile the materialistic conclusions of modern BODY AND MIND 148 science with our ineradicable belief in the reality and efficiency of mind, with the principles of the most exacting metaphysic, and even in some degree with the demands of religion. Who then would hesitate to accept the conclusion towards which all branches of science, all those lines of exact research whose results we have noted, seem to drive us irresistibly ? Who would seek to deny the universal sway of the laws of mechanism and to subvert the vast and splendid pyramid of modern science to which the monistic interpretation of the psycho-physical problem is the very crown, the glorious consummation which heals the age-long struggle between scientific Materialism and the philosopher's conviction ot the reality and primacy of mind ? Who would still hanker after that vague elusive notion of the soul, first launched into the stream of thought by the troubled fancy of savage man, while yet he lived like a beast, knowing nought of the wonderful harmonies of nature and seeing in all her motions neither law nor order but only the vengeful caprice of a host of spirits, before which he grovelled muttering spells and incantations ? Surely only a fool or a fanatic ! Yet hesitate we must until we shall have critically examined the arguments, drawn from epistemology, from metaphysic, and from the natural sciences, which seem to make Animism unten- able, and the special and general arguments advanced in favour of the several monistic interpretations ; and until we shall have inquired whether any one of the automaton theories allows us to construct an intelligible and self-consistent account of human personality. This part of our task will occupy us in the following chapters. CHAPTER XII EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON-THEORIES AND OF THE SPECIAL ARGUMENTS IN THEIR FAVOUR I N this chapter I propose to examine in turn the four principal monistic interpretations of the relation of mind to body, to weigh the special arguments advanced in their support, and to point out the special difficulties in the way of each of them* Beside these special difficulties there is a number of empirically- based objections of a more general kind, which may be more suitably dealt with in later chapters under the head of positive arguments in favour of Animism. Epiphenomenalism To some persons it seems sufficient for the refutation of Epiphenomenalism to assert the absurdity of the supposition that the existence of mind should be dependent on that of matter, or that mind and consciousness should have been generated by the mere increase in complexity of molecular organization of certain forms of inanimate matter ; for, they say, it is only through and by mind that matter can be known. But this assertion does not confute the epiphenomenalist. He may reply — But suppose for a moment that my account of the case is the true one, that matter really did precede mind, did generate it in the course of the evolution of material processes of ever greater complexity ; then, he might say, your attitude might still be just what it is now ; mind, once evolved and once having learnt to reflect upon itself and its relation to matter, would inevitably use just your arguments ; it would claim a primacy over matter, the primacy of the knower over the known, and in the pride of self-consciousness would despise its parent, matter, and would incline to assert its independence of it. In face of this reply a repeated assertion of the conviction of the primacy of mind would have little effect. Nor will it suffice to assert that the human mind will never rest satisfied with this account of itself as a mere by-product of 149 BODY AND MIND ISO matter and its evolutions, but will always continue to seek some position that will do less outrage to the reality of experience. Epiphenomenalism must be met in a different way, namely, by pointing out that just those considerations which are held to make the doctrine of psycho-physical interaction impossible tell equally strongly against it, while the motives which make for the parallelistic doctrines find no satisfaction in it ; that, in fact, it combines the principal weaknesses of both the parallelist and the interaction doctrines, while it lacks the principal advantages of either. Thus, the biological argument from continuity of evolution makes against Epiphenomenalism ; for the appearance of consciousness at some undefined point in the course of the evolution of the animal kingdom, as postulated by it, constitutes a distinct breach of continuity. The argument from incon- ceivability also makes against Epiphenomenalism more strongly than against Animism ; for the notion that material processes should generate consciousness out of nothing is certainly a more difficult conception than that of the interaction of soul and body. Again, Epiphenomenalism, though it may perhaps be consistent with the law of the conservation of energy, offends against a law that has a much stronger claim to universality, namely the law of causation itself ; for it assumes that a physical process, say a molecular movement in the brain, causes a sensation, but does so without the cause passing over in any degree into the effect, without the cause spending itself in any degree in the production of the effect, namely, the sensation. It thus saves the law of con- servation of energy at the expense of the law of causation ; and such similes as those used by Huxley to illustrate his exposition and offered by him as examples of the production by mechanism of effects that are indifferent to its workings — the shadow thrown by the wheel, the whistling of the locomotive engine and so on — all such similes are misleading and fallacious if regarded as an- alogies ; for in every case the production of the effect, even though it be but a shadow or a reflection, leaves the machine and its processes other than they would have been if the effect had nor been produced. Again, the identity-hypothesis claims with some show of reason to reconcile the teachings of science and philosophy ; but Epiphenomenalism, in assigning to mind an altogether insignifi- cant, dependent, and ineffective position in the scheme of the EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 151 universe, sets itself in direct opposition to the overwhelmingly large majority of philosophers of all times and of all races. It is for these reasons that Epiphenomenalism has been accepted by few or none of those who have seriously tried to think out the psycho-physical problem ; and it is, I hope, un- necessary to say more in order to convince any reader that, if the balance of argument seems to him to incline against Animism, he must not prefer Epiphenomenalism. Before finally dismissing Epiphenomenalism, I must remark upon the illegitimate attempt made by some of its defenders to redeem it from the charge of Materialism. After assuring us that science has proved the absolute dependence of all mind on the material processes of animal organisms, and that the evolu- tion of these material organisms was but a trifling incident in the life of a universe which consists only of matter and physical energy in eternal agitation ; they turn round upon matter and ask — But what is this matter? You charge me with being a materialist, but I know as well as you that matter is only a figment of my imagination, that in seeing, touching, tasting, I perceive only certain states of my own consciousness, that material phenomena are but my own perceptions or ideas. Have I not, therefore, as good a right to call myself an idealist as you, or Bishop Berkeley, or any man? Now, this is Solipsism or Subjective Idealism pure and simple ; it is the denial of all existence save one’s own consciousness ; and, in attempting to save himself in this way from the absurdity of Materialism, the epiphenomenalist does but take upon himself the additional absurdity of Solipsism, and crowns himself with the final absurdity of professing adherence to both of the two most violently opposed metaphysical dogmas. Yet absurd as this procedure is, it is not unnecessary to utter a warning against it, for no less a writer than T. H. Huxley was guilty of it, as also, to the best of my judgment, the admirable historian of Materialism, F. A. Lange. The Idealist,” he wrote, “ can and must in fact in natural science everywhere, apply the same con- ceptions and methods as the Materialists ; but what to the latter is definitive truth, is to the Idealist only the necessary result of our organization.”^ Lange, having accepted whole-heartedly the teaching of Materialism that mind is evolved from, and wholly dependent upon, matter, goes on to tell us, in the language ^ Op. cit. BODY AND MIND 152 of a glowing enthusiasm for humanity which commands our sympathy, that the human mind creates for itself a world of ideals in which it finds its true home — that man's spirit must soar above the vulgar real into the realm of ideas which are symbols of the Unknowable Absolute. It is true that Lange seems in some passages to accept Kant's notion of the thing-in- itself ; but, as Professor Hoffding says, he wavers between the acceptance and the rejection of it, and on the whole his language justifies the assertion that for him matter is the only reality and the ideal is the unreal. Lange was thus an idealist only in the sense in which any materialist may be an idealist, namely, that he entertained ideals and, in splendid defiance of logical con- sistency, strove to make them real. Psycho-physical Parallelism The doctrine that psychical processes and physical processes run parallel with one another without any causal relation is not seriously maintained save in the form of universal parallelism of the physical and the psychical. To assume that of all physical processes just certain brain-processes alone are accompanied by conscious concomitants, would leave the relation too obviously mysterious ; the coming into being of the sensation, at the moment of the occurrence of a brain-process of a certain quality, would be too decidedly miraculous. If we accept the principle of causation at all, we must assume that the rise of a sensation in consciousness is in some sense the effect of some cause. And, if we do not accept the principle of causation, we have no ground for believing in the existence of the brain-process, save as one's own thought of it ; and it then would be absurd to speak of parallelism, for my sensations do not run parallel with, are not temporal concomitants of, my thoughts of my brain-processes. This insuperable objection to partial Parallelism is avoided by universal Parallelism ; for, according to this doctrine, every physical process has its psychical concomitant, and both series are closed causal series. Thus, when a sense-stimulus seems to evoke a sensation in my consciousness, the physical stimulus causes only the sequence of physical changes in sensory nerves and brain ; and the sensation is a member of a causal sequence of events which runs parallel in time with every step of the physical sequence, stim- ulus, sense-organ-processes, processes of conduction throughout BODY AND MIND 154 doctrines chiefly in that Leibnitz’s view of causation was peculiar He assigned to each organism a soul, and though the soul was called a monad, and though the body and all other material things also were said by him to consist of monads, yet, as we have seen (p* 57), tie assigned to the human soul a position and a nature very different from those of other monads. The essential peculiarity of his view, which marks it off from other animistic doctrines, is that it substitutes for the principle of causal interaction that of the pre-established harmony of the internal evolution of all monads, just as thoroughgoing Occasionalism substitutes for it the conception of the perpetual action of God. And, since it is the behaviour of things which we are interested to understand, it matters little or nothing, from the point of view of science, whether we call the bond between them which secures the harmony of their changes one of causal interaction or of transient influence, or one of harmony pre-established by the design of the Creator, or one consisting in the perpetual adjustment of their states by the direct act of God. Some of those who accept psycho-physical Parallelism in the strict or narrow sense tell us that we ought to accept it as a heuristic principle or a necessary working hypothesis for psycho- logy. Wundt and Munsterberg are the most prominent exponents of this doctrine ; though I speak with diffidence about Wundt’s views, because, like some others, I have wrestled long and earnestly with his exposition of Parallelism, without being able to discover that he presents a consistent and intelligible doctrine. For Wundt, Parallelism is an empirical postulate ; for Munsterberg it is a postulate which we are driven to accept, not by empirical fact, but by epistemological theory.^ Both agree that the parallelism is only true of the sensory content of consciousness, and that therefore psychology can base itself on Parallelism only on the condition of regarding the whole of our psychical life as con- sisting in the conjunction and succession of elements of sensation, or of sensation and feeling.^ Both admit that to describe our mental life in this way is to falsify it ; and Munsterberg goes so far as to insist that the “ scientific ” psychology constructed on the basis of Parallelism has no bearing whatever upon real life ^ Grundzuge der Psychologic,” p. 435. ^ ThUsS Munsterberg {op. cit, p. 429), AUes Psychische besteht aus Empfin- dungen und aus nichts als Empfindungen.” Wundt adds to the elements of sensation also elements of feeling. EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 155 and its problems. It is then a little difficult to understand what it is hoped to gain by basing psychology upon this postulate. Surely, when it is found that any working hypothesis so falsifies a science as to render it incapable of having any bearing upon practical life, only a mind having some curious twist can continue to retain it. The culminating absurdity of Wundt's position is that, after arguing at great length to show that psychology must accept psycho-physical Parallelism as a ‘‘ heuristic principle " empirically based, he turns round and tells us that in considering voluntary movements of the body we must treat them as being psychically originated, because we cannot ascertain the nature of the physiological process which initiates them ; and that we must make use of the conception of psycho-physical interaction, so long as we cannot complete our account of the brain-processes.^ Miinsterberg’s reductio ad absurdum of his adopted principle is more elaborate. After writing two books ^ to prove that his psychology, being based on “ Parallelism," can have no application to real life, he has produced several very able and interesting books which are models of the application of psychology to problems of real life,® and promises others which shall deal with the whole field of applied psychology, Phenomenalistic Parallelism {Identity -hypo thesis A.) Against the doctrine that the psychical process and its concomitant physical process in the brain are but two different modes of appearance or aspects of one real process, two very serious objections must be made, in addition to all those that lie against all forms of psycho-physical monism. When we apply the phrase “two modes of appearance" or “ two aspects " to explain the psycho-physical relation, we are using a phrase which has meaning for our minds only in virtue of certain of our experiences connected with physical phenomena. These experiences are of several kinds and the phrase has accordingly several corresponding meanings. In experiences of the one class we observe a series of events of a certain kind on two successive occasions, on each occasion from a different stand- ^ Physiologische Psychologie," 5th ed., vol. iii., p. 647. 2 “ Grundzuge der Psychologie,” and “ Psychology and Life.” ® “ The Americans,” “ Psychology and Crime,” ** Psychology and the Teacher,*^ ** Psycho-therapeutics.” BODY AND MIND 156 point ; thus, to use the illustration suggested by Fechner, it is in principle possible for one person to observe the passage of the moon round the earth, at one time from a standpoint on the earth and at another from a standpoint on the moon. That is the type of one great class of experiences in which the difference of the appearances of a thing depends upon differ- ence of standpoint : the observation of movements in space from two different points in space. Another kind of experience which gives meaning to the phrase “ two aspects of the same thing or process,” is the abstraction by thought of two features of a process successively ; thus, on considering the motion of a particle, one may fix one’s attention successively upon the direction or changes of direction of its motion and upon the velocity or changes of velocity of its motion ; or, on observing a series of changes of colour, one may direct one’s attention to the changes of colour- tone or to the changes of brightness or of saturation ; on hearing a melody, one may pay attention to the rhythm or to the harmonic relations. In all cases of this class the difference of aspect is secured by a difference of the setting of the attention, and the resulting concep- tions are abstractions merely. Again one may apprehend a physical event successively through two different senses, e.g. one may see the strokes of a hammer upon a gong, or one may hear them ; the one series of physical events appears then under two different aspects, There are, I think, no other radically different classes of experience that give meaning to the phrase “ two aspects of the same process.” The question is then — Does the phrase derive from any one of these classes of experience a meaning which is applicable to the psycho-physical relation ? Or, in other words, is the difference of aspect apprehended in any of these experiences truly analogous to the difference between physical and psychical processes ? As regards the experiences of all these classes it is to be noted that that which appears under two different aspects appears in every case as of the same order in both aspects, and is apprehended in a similar way in both cases ; in the first class both aspects are of the order of paths of motion in space ; in the second class the two aspects are simultaneously given as qualita- tive changes of one series of sensations ; in the third class the two aspects of the one process are the sensations of two different EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 157 classes simultaneously excited in the same consciousness and referred to the same cause, the physical process. But the brain-process and the rise of a sensation in consciousness, which are said to be two aspects or appearances of one real process,, are two events of radically different orders, and are apprehended in two radically different ways, the one by sense-perception, the other by reflective introspection. Again, in the experiences of the first class we do not really observe the same process under two aspects, we merely observe the repetition of a process of a certain kind on two successive occasions. Further, it is characteristic of the experiences of this class, that the appearance of the process at the one standpoint can be inferred or exactly calculated from the appearance at the other standpoint, by a purely logical process. Nothing of this sort is true of the relation of the psychical to the physical ; we cannot in the least degree deduce the nature of the one series from the observation of the other. The experiences of the second and third classes fail in another way to afford a true analogy to the supposed relation of the physical to the psychical and therefore fail to give meaning to the phrase in which the relation is described, It is of the essence of the two-aspect doctrine that,, as Spinoza explicitly affirmed, the causal sequence shall be completely given under both aspects, the physical and the psychical. But, when we abstract the direction of a motion from its velocity, or the change of quality of a colour-sensation from the change of its saturation or intensity ; or when we apprehended simultaneously the series of auditory and visual sensations evoked by the hammer; in all these cases the causal sequence is not given or apprehended under both aspects, for in each case we are dealing with partial aspects achieved only by a process of mental abstraction and by a deliberate neglecting of the remaining aspects simultaneously presented. A still more serious objection to this “ two-aspect doctrine remains to be stated. A thing or being or process can appear under two different aspects, can manifest itself in two different modes, only if and when both aspects are apprehended by the mind of some observer ; either one observer must occupy the two standpoints successively, or two or more observers must apprehend it from the different standpoints. Now, in the case of the physical and the psychical processes which are said to BODY AND MIND 158 be two aspects of one real process, there is no such observer occupying the inner standpoint and apprehending the inner or psychical aspect of the real event, except in the altogether exceptional case of the introspecting psychologist ; in which case a part of the stream of consciousness may, perhaps, be said to be apprehended by a later coming part. The process of apprehending a physical change is itself, according to this doctrine, the inner aspect of a real process ; but, when the observer (let us call him A) is apprehending a physical event, say the fall of a stone, he is not normally at the same time observing his own consciousness ; he is occupying the outer, not the inner standpoint. In such a case, then, the real process, (the two aspects or phenomenal appearances of which are on the one hand A’s consciousness of the falling stone, and on the other hand the corresponding process in A’s brain) is apprehended neither from the inner nor the outer standpoint, although in principle it is capable of being observed from both ; but now the phenomenal appearances consist in being apprehended, their esse is percipi^ they are by the hypothesis merely appearances for an apprehending mind ; hence, in the case we are considering and in all similar cases, i.e., fin all cases of perception in which the subject’s attention is wholly given to his external object), we are led by the hypothesis to the following conclusion — neither the phenomenal process in A’s brain nor his consciousness of the fall- ing stone have any being whatever, since their esse is percipi, and they are not perceived or apprehended. Now the denial of the brain-process raises no insuperable difficulty, it is acceptable to many philosophers ; but the denial of A’s consciousness of the falling stone is more serious. Suppose A to be yourself, and suppose that you play a sharp rally in the course of a game of tennis, or play a difficult ball at the wicket ; then your attention at the moment of expecting the ball was wholly directed to the object A moment later you sit down to describe in detail the way you took that ball ; and a philosopher then undertakes to prove to you, by the reasoning outlined above, that you were not conscious of the bail at the moment of its approach. Will he succeed in convincing you of the truth of his thesis ? I think not It is true that among a certain class of philosophers there is still current the dogma that all consciousness is self- consciousness, and that in all knowing you know that you know. But, even if this dogma were admissible in the case of human EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 159 knowing, it is certainly not admissible for the infra-human intelli- gences ; to the animals we cannot deny consciousness or at least sentiency ; and the double-aspect hypothesis necessitates the assumption of an inner or psychical aspect to the events of the infra-organic realm also. These considerations seem to me to raise an insuperable objection to this form of the identity-hypothesis ; namely there is lacking, except in certain special cases, any observer occupying the inner standpoint The difficulty is not met by saying that in knowing or perceiving one knows that one knows, or that one’s knowing is an appearance to oneself. For such knowing as that is peculiar to the most highly developed minds ; lower types of mind cannot be credited with reflective introspective self- consciousness, or self-consciousness of any kind, and yet they must be allowed to be conscious, their brain-processes must be allowed to have their psychical correlates : their knowing is directly known by no one, is not an appearance for any observing mind, and yet it exists or goes on. Perhaps at this point some reader will wish to remind me of Kant’s doctrine of the ‘‘inner sense,” which perceives the “ phenomena of consciousness ” as the outer sense perceives the phenomena of the physical world. Of this “ inner sense ” I need only say that it was merely a faculty invented by Kant to meet the exigences of his peculiar system, that it is now generally regarded as indefensible, and that, even if we accept the notion, the difficulty of the “ two-aspect doctrine,” pointed out in the foregoing paragraph, is in no way diminished. As to Spinoza’s form of this hypothesis, it is now generally admitted, even by ardent admirers of Spinoza’s philosophy, that it cannot be consistently worked out Sir F. Pollock, for example, demolishes it with the following unanswerable criticism : “ Spinoza’s Attributes are in effect defined as objects, or rather as objective worlds. But the general form of the definition disguises the all-important fact that the world of thought, and that alone, is subjective and objective at once. The intellect which perceives an Attribute as ‘ constituting the essence of Substance,’ itself belongs to the Attribute of Thought Thus, if we push analysis further, we find that Thought swallows up all the other attributes ; for all conceivable Attributes turn out to be objective aspects of Thought itself.” ^ ^ “ Spinoza : His Life and Pidlosopliy,’^ p. 179. i6o BODY AND MIND We may then fairly say, with Professor Stumpf, — “ the one substance which is supposed to manifest itself in the two attri- butes, the physical and the psychical, is nothing but a word which expresses the desire to escape from dualism, but which does not really bridge the gulf for our understanding.” ^ This form of the identity-hypothesis lies open also to all the metaphysical objections that are raised against the conception of substance or substantiality, and, though I do not attach great importance to them, they cannot be set aside as of no weight, since many acute minds take a different view. The difficulties of phenomenalistic parallelism are, then, very great, indeed insuperable ; accordingly we find that the second form of the identity-hypothesis, namely, Psychical Monism, is the form of Parallelism that can claim the most influential supporters at the present day ; and it is this second form that we must chiefly keep in mind, on weighing against one another the rival claims of the animistic and the parallelistic interpretations of the psycho-physical relation. Psychical Monism {Identity -hypothesis B) According to the second form of the identity-hypothesis, consciousness or conscious-process is the thing-in-itself, the fundamental and only reality, while all physical processes are the phenomenal appearances of conscious process ; this is now generally regarded as being the strongest and the most subtle of the monistic interpretations of the psycho-physical relation. But this also has its peculiar difficulties, in addition to those common to all psycho-physical Monism. We must begin our criticism of this view by insisting that its supporters shall stand faithfully by the pre- suppositions from which they have chosen to set out and which they have made the very foundation of their argument. These fundamental propositions are three : (i) consciousness or con- scious-process (or something of the same nature, but so very much simpler as to require a different name, such as mind-stuff or infra- consciousness) is the only reality, the only mode of existence or of real being. (2) By each one of us only one tiny fragment of reality is directly known, namely the stream of his own consciousness ; although all the rest of the universe consists of other conscious processes, it can be apprehended by him only under the form of ^ “ Leib und Seele,” p. 16. EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON THEORIES i6i material or physical phenomena. (3) The appearances to us of other real or conscious processes under the forms of physical objects and processes bear some constant and orderly relation to those real processes, so that the descriptions and explanations of the universe given by physical science are valid, though they are symbolic only ; that is to say, all the processes which constitute the universe proceed according to, or can be fully explained in terms of, the laws of mechanical causation. This last is the pre-supposition on which it is especially necessary to insist ; for it is this one which is most apt to be tacitly let slip by those who accept Parallelism in this form. But it is the acceptance without reserve of the teachings of physical science, especially of its doctrine that the laws of mechanical causation hold universal sway, which constitutes, we are told, the chief claim of the monistic view upon our acceptance ; while the rejection by Animism of the claim of the mechanical principles of explanation to universal validity is its great offence. Now, according as the psychical monist inclines to an intellectualistic or a voluntaristic psychology, he regards knowing or willing as the essence of conscious process. In the former case, then, he claims that all that exists is “ knowing,” though there is no one who knows and nothing, save knowing, to be known ; or, in the latter case, that all that exists is willing,” though there is no one who wills and nothing to be willed but willing. I confess that, if a philosophical gourmet should tell me — “All that exists is ‘ eating,’ though there is no one who eats and nothing to be eaten but eating,” his statement would seem to me hardly less paradoxical. But parody is not serious criticism. The principal positive superiority over its rivals claimed for this form of Monism is its re- jection of the notion of substance or thing and its replacement of it by the notion of activity or process. Substance, whether material or spiritual, is rejected as an antiquated bit of popular metaphysic ; and with it to the same limbo must go all such notions as substantial beings or things, beings that remain self-identical in spite of partial changes. If we object that we find those notions essential to our thought, that we cannot think of relations without terms, of activities without things acting and acted upon, of changes without things that change, of movements without things that move, of knowing without subjects that know and objects i62 BODY AND MIND that are known ; we are told that this is a false or psychological necessity of thought engendered merely by bad habits, a necessity to be carefully distinguished from true or logical necessities of thought.^ Let us first examine, from the point of view of physical science, this proposal to banish things from the universe. Science distinguishes between rest and change, between potential and active energy, between the mere persistence of a given state of a system and its change ; and it regards all changes as involving transformations of energy. Even though it may resolve all things into swarms of atoms in perpetual motion and atoms into ether vortices, yet this is only to drive back the notion of substance or thing ; for the ether remains as the enduring basis of all this process. And even when it is proposed to replace mechanics by energetics and matter by energy, this can only be done by conceiving energy as something capable of enduring, as some- thing whose quantity persists unchanged in spite of qualitative transformations. What then, in the metaphysical translation of the description of the world given by physical science, is to correspond to this distinction between systems of matter or energy at rest or doing no work, and those that are doing work or transforming energy ? ^ But the impossibility of banishing altogether the notion of substance is even clearer in the case of psychological than of physical science. My consciousness is a stream of consciousness which has a certain unique unity ; it is a multiplicity of distinguish- able parts or features which, although they are perpetually changing, yet hang together as a continuous whole within which the changes go on. This then is the nature of consciousness as we know it. Now it is perfectly obvious and universally admitted that my stream of consciousness is not self-supporting, is not self- sufficient, is not a closed self-determining system ; it is admitted ^ Paulsen, Emleitung,” p. 392 2 Clifford’s doctrine of mind-stuff avoids this dif&culty by pointing to the small pieces of mmd-stuff ” of which elementary feehngs are composed. Consciousness is then a composite stuff, and conscious processes are the rearrangements of the pieces of stuff. But this is to make these atoms of mmd-stuff into enduring self-identical units of substance It is substantial atomism of the most un- disguised kind, a simple translation of the material atom of physics into a psychical atom ; and, since these psychical atoms obey, according to the doctrine, the laws of mechanism, it is difficult to see that they differ, save in name, from the physical atom. In any case, Clifford’s conception can claim neither all the merits nor all the difficulties of the Actuahstische Seele.” EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 163 that each phase of the stream does not flow wholly out of the preceding phase, and that its course cannot be explained without the assumption of influences coming upon it from without. What then are these influences ? The Psychical Monist must reply — they are other consciousnesses. How then about the process by which the other consciousnesses, the other streams of conscious- ness, influence my stream of consciousness? Is this also consciousness? (For, we are told, all process is conscious process.) If so, then it also is a stream of consciousness and it must influence my stream through the agency of yet another stream, and so on ad infinitum. Thus my consciousness itself, by reason of the fact that it hangs together as a stream of process relatively independent of other streams of process, implies the essence of what is meant by substantiality, namely, the con- tinuing to have or be a numerically distinct existence, in spite of partial change. That consciousness exists or occurs in streams, each of which is something relatively apart from, demarcated from, other parts of reality, is a fundamental fact which raises insuperable diffi- culties for Psychical Monism. The psychical monist cannot escape them by saying that the stream of consciousness consists of elements or atoms of consciousness or mind-stuff, and that the stream is formed by the coming together of a number of such elements ; that is a psychical atomism involving the notion of substance,” so abhorrent to his fundamental principle. If any one, following Clifford and wishing to adopt the psychical monist’s doctrine without his principles, takes this view of the stream of consciousness, then it must be pointed out to him that every stream has its banks which mark it off from others and give it numerical distinctness, i.e. every stream owes its existence as a stream to conditions that lie outside itself and impress upon it the character of a stream. Perhaps he will point to the Gulf Stream as a stream without banks. Then it must be answered that this is a fallacious analogy — the Gulf Stream owes its formation to external influences, and only persists as a stream so long as the momentum originally impressed upon it from without is not spent through its interaction with the waters through which it flows. The numerical distinctness of streams of consciousness is a fundamental fact with which every psychological theory and every metaphysical system must deal, and which especially demands explanation from the system BODY AND MIND 164 which asserts that all existence is conscious-process. How then does Psychical Monism propose to deal with this fact? Merely by leaving it on one side as inexplicable. “ Gentlemen, let us look this difficulty boldly in the face and pass on to the next” That justly famous proposal accurately describes the attitude of Psychical Monism when confronted with this difficulty. Thus Paulsen says, Soul is the multiplicity of inner experiences bound together to a unity in a way of which nothing can be said.”^ Seele is die auf nicht weiter sagbare Weise zur Einheit verbundene Vielheit innerer Erlebnisse.”) And again he writes — ■ ‘‘ It is a fact that the processes of the inner life do not occur in isolation, and that each is lived with the consciousness of belonging to the unitary whole of this individual life. How this can happen I cannot pretend to say, any more than I can say how consciousness at all is possible.” Now the hanging together of a multiplicity of conscious pro- cesses in a numerically distinct or individual stream is the very essence of soul or spirit ; for, if the distinguishable elements of all consciousness (sensations, feelings, ideas, presentations, or whatever we please to name them) occurred as isolated elements or complexes, or in one huge jumble in which were no coherent streams or groups, there would be nothing that could be called spirit or mind, but rather a mere chaos of mind-stuff. When, then, Paulsen tells us that there can be no stronger proof of the insufficiency of any world-view than that it should find itself com- pelled to declare the existence of spirit to be an insoluble riddle,® Psychical Monism is condemned by the mouth of its champion. For it leaves every spirit or mind as “ eine auf nicht weiter sagbare Weise zur Einheit verbundene Vielheit innerer Erlebnisse.” Most of the other exponents of Psychical Monism ignore this problem or, like Paulsen, are content to call it insoluble and to pass on. F. A. Lange, for example, who would, I think, have classed himself as a Psychical Monist, speaks of The metaphysical riddle, how out of the multiplicity of atomic movements there arises the unity of the psychical image ” ; and adds, “We hold this riddle, as we have often said, to be in- soluble.”^ Prof. Strong leaves the problem untouched.^ Fechner 1 Emleitung,” p 387. ^ op. ctL, p. 386, » “Einleitung,’* p. 258. ^ “ History of Materialism,” vol. iii. p. 213. ® It was interesting to me on meeting Prof. Strong recently to find that he had discovered, and was puzzhng over, this problem, which he formulated in the sentence, ” What holds consciousness together ^ ” EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 165 alone, so far as I am aware, has made a resolute attempt to deal with it ; but that this attempt achieved no success I hope to show in a later chapter on the unity of consciousness. Now let us turn to another difficulty of Psychical Monism. The stream of consciousness is in part determined by influences coming from outside, which we call sense-impressions ; but, when we take these fully into account, the course of the stream of consciousness remains still unexplained ; that is to say, its course is not wholly determined by the two factors, consciousness itself and the sense-stimuli or sense-impressions. It is determined in a very important and, in fact, vastly predominant degree by some other real condition or conditions, which we commonly call the structure or constitution of the individual mind.i Quite apart, then, from any question as to what the structure of the mind may be, what stuff it may be built of, we are able to infer its presence and operation from the orderly and lawful regularity of the stream of consciousness, which cannot be explained from the nature of the stream itself and from the nature and the order of succession of the sense-impressions ; and we are able to discover a number of general laws of this structure and operation, and to describe how it gradually grows, every moment of conscious life leaving it altered in such a way that its influence upon later coming parts of the stream of consciousness is modified, until its structure and its influence upon conscious life become exceedingly complex. But, as compared with consciousness itself, this conditioning fac- tor, the structure of the mind, is relatively stable and unchang- ing ; to its stability is due all that constancy of mode of conscious reaction which distinguishes one personality from another. The faithful retention of memories through periods of many years, manifested by their subsequent return to conscious- ness, implies in fact a statical or relatively unchanging condition of something, call it what we may. The psychical monist, if he is consistent, must affirm that the structure of the mind, the sum of these statical enduring conditions by which the stream of his consciousness is at every moment predominantly determined, is that of which the brain is the phenomenon, and that this enduring structure itself consists of streams of consciousness. 1 This is admitted by the most thoroughgoing monists ; thus Paulsen, for example, writes : “ Im Bewusstsein 1st nur ein uberaus geiinger Teil des gesamten Seelenlebens, das wir doch voraussetzen miissen, urn die Vorgange im Bewusstsein 2u konstruieren ” (“ Einleitung,” p. 158). BODY AND MIND 1 66 Now this supposition is quite inconsistent with all that we know of consciousness ; consciousness is essentially and always a flow, a perpetual flux, a process never enduring without change for the briefest moment. And the ascription to any consciousness of the stable unchanging character of these enduring conditions of our consciousness oversteps the bounds of legitimate analogy. Some of the psychical monists therefore shrink from this assertion and, like Professor Strong, assume that this enduring structure of the mind is a system of psychical dispositions. Writing of these as conceived by Dr Stout, Strong says, “ We must therefore raise these hypothetical psychical dispositions to the rank of extra-mental realities, and a system of such realities, neither ‘ simple ^ nor ' undivided ' yet quite sufficiently ‘ active,' will form our substitute for the soul.” But this is to break with his fundamental metaphysical principles and to go over to the enemy. Animism. For such a system of psychical dispositions, neither conscious processes nor material process, yet the enduring condition of a personal consciousness, is not a substitute for the soul, but the soul itself. Parallelists are so occupied with pouring abuse on the old Cartesian metaphysical description of the soul, and in piling up the private adjectives about it, describing it as a “ Seelenatoml' a simple, undivided, inextended, immaterial, immortal atom, “ ein unveranderliches, starres, absolut beharrliches Realitatspiinktchen,” “ ein Brockchen allgemeines Realitats- stofles,” ^ that they have no ears for any voice that attempts to build up the conception, of the soul according to the principles upon which any other scientific hypothesis is properly fashioned. This difficulty of Psychical Monism may be briefly presented in another way, which supplements the foregoing statement. The doctrine lays it down clearly that the existence of consciousness is our existence.” Strong and Paulsen are equally explicit on this point, and it is clearly a necessary part of the doctrine. Well, then, I fail into profound dreamless sleep, or am stunned by a blow on the head, or spend an hour in deep chloroform narcosis. During this period I am unconscious and, therefore, according to this doctrine, I cease to exist. When I begin to be conscious again, this is the appearance of a new consciousness, a new self, a new “ aktuelle Seele.” The absurdity of this statement is manifest. My personality, my self, all that is characteristic of and essential to me as a person, survives the period of unconsciousness. ^ Paulsen, op, cit , p, 285. EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 167 Therefore my consciousness is not myself, and its existence is not essential to my existence ; the continuance of my existence consists in the continuance of some other reality than my consciousness. Now, according to the doctrine, this other reality can only be some other consciousness or consciousnesses ; thus it is forced to the conclusion (absurd in itself, and opposed to its fundamental proposition that my consciousness is myself) that the continuance of my personality consists in the continuance of other consciousnesses than my own, that my existence, my self, is essentially consciousness other than my own, presumably a system of the streams of consciousness of other selves. The psychical monist, if he has ever pondered this implication of his doctrine, probably seeks to escape the difficulty by saying that when, after a period of unconsciousness, my stream of consciousness flows on again, it is not discontinuous with the stream that was cut short by chloroform ; he will say that my consciousness bridges the time-gap and feels and knows itself continuous across it I do not think that this meets the difficulty. But to establish the objection, i will point out that in some cases, when consciousness returns after being abolished by a blow on the head, it does not feel itself to be continuous with the consciousness that preceded the blow ; the subject awakes like a new-born child, having no memory of his previous life, no sense of resuming or continuing it^ Is, then, such a case really one of a new self, a new consciousness, the inception of a new “ aktuelle Seele ” ? Not at all ; for gradually, after a longer or shorter period of conscious life, the old memories return, the old ways of thinking, feeling, and doing return, until the old person- ality is completely restored. All which proves that the personality, the self, does not consist in the stream of consciousness alone, but that it consists in a far greater degree in those enduring stable conditions by which the stream of consciousness is at every moment determined. Again, I insist, the consistent psychical monist is forced to the absurd conclusion that my self is not my own consciousness, but the streams of consciousness of other selves.2 1 The most remarkable recorded case of this sort is that of Mr Hanna, for which see “ Multiple Personality,” by B. Sidis and S Goodhart. 2 This inconsistency of Psychical Momsm can hardly be better exhibited than by the quotation side by side of two sentences from Paulsen’s chapter on "‘Wesen der Seele.” The one, which is repeated again and again with shght variations, runs : " Die Seele ist die im Bewusstsem zur Einheit zusammenge- i68 BODY AND MIND And here another difficulty may be touched upon, or per- haps rather the same difficulty in another form. My brain is said to be the phenomenon of which my consciousness is the reality. How, then, when I lie dead ? My brain, the phenomenon, will still be present for other men, and will still be the seat of many physical and chemical processes, and for many days it will lose nothing of its complex organisation. But what has become of its reality, my consciousness ? To this it may be answered : Only certain most highly specialized processes of the brain are the phenomena of which your consciousness is the reality. Then of what reality is the brain with its marvellously complex structure, and all its other processes, the appearance ? Or again, my brain, or part of it, is the appearance of my con- sciousness to other men. But no one has perceived my brain. Therefore, it is only a possibility of a phenomenon which has never been realized, a “permanent possibility of sensations” for other men. Suppose, then, that some one lays open my skull with the stroke of an axe ; the latent possibility of the phenomenon is then actualized, my brain appears to another man : but at the moment preceding the realization of that possibility, the reality which is to appear, namely my consciousness, has disappeared, has ceased to be. It may be noted, in passing, that these considerations present difficulties almost equally great to the other form of the identity-hypothesis, the “ two-aspect-doctrine.” For it is com- pelled to admit that that part of unknowable reality, which we are told manifests itself under the two forms of the stream of consciousness and the life of the brain of any person, continues to manifest itself as the brain-life, while its other and parallel mani- festation comes and goes intermittently. Yet another difficulty of Psychical Monism is its conception of the flowing together or composition of individual consciousnesses to form larger consciousnesses. The consciousnesses of men are held to run together into large streams of collective consciousness, civic and national consciousness, and so on ; and these again are said to combine with all infra-human consciousness on earth to form an earth-consciousness ; and this with the consciousness of other worlds, to form by successive stages of concurrence the all-inclusive fasste Vielheit seelischer Erlebnisse ” (p. 145). The other runs : Im Bewusstsein ist nur em uberaus geringer Teil des gesamten Seelenlebens, das wir doch voraus- setzen miissen, um die Vorgange im Bewusstsein zu konstruieren ” (p. 158). EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 169 divine consciousness. Not only so, but each human being’s con- sciousness is already vastly composite, being formed by the con- currence in successive stages of the consciousnesses of his nerve centres, his cells, his molecules, the atoms, the a and 3 particles that compose the atoms, and so on indefinitely. If we pass over, without insistence on it, the fact that there is forthcoming no particle of empirical evidence of any such composition of human consciousness to form greater wholes of consciousness, two difficulties remain. Each consciousness or stream of consciousness exists in and for itself of its own right, for consciousness is reality ; yet each is used over and over again, first existing for itself, but also at the same time existing as an element in successively larger consciousnesses. This treatment of consciousness seems to me compatible only with the concep- tion of it as mind-stuff, as made up of ultimate atoms of con- sciousness ; a conception moulded upon our conception of matter, and inconsistent with the fundamental proposition of Psychical Monism that our consciousness, as we know it, is absolute reality. And how, apart from any question of the conditions that deter mine it, can we conceive this flowing together of consciousness ? Has the phrase any meaning ? For my part, I think not. Suppose my consciousness is filled with the glory of colour of a sunset sky, while yours, as you lie near by under your motor-car, is filled with a problem in mechanics. What sort of a con- sciousness would these two make if compounded ? Presumbly a gorgeously coloured problem in mechanics. This is only one of the simplest forms of the difflculty. Confining ourselves to human consciousness on the earth, let us ask how all the pain and all the pleasure of human consciousnesses are to sum together. Do all the pains run together to make one big pain, and all the pleasures to make one big pleasure, and do these co-exist in the world-consciousness ? Or is it that, as in individual consciousness, the pain-producing influences and operations, and the pleasure- producing influences and operations, neutralize one another, if they are equal, or give an excess of pleasure over pain, if the one set of influences predominates ? If the latter is the case, then the pleasure or pain of the world consciousness, is not the sum of the pains and pleasures of human consciousnesses, but a resultant formed by their common action, a new pain or pleasure. The doctrine that consciousnesses flow together, each subsisting for itself and yet at the same time subsisting as a part of a larger 170 BODY AND MIND consciousness, implies, I submit, a substantialistic and even a materialistic view of consciousness ; it implies an atomistic con- sciousness, a mind-stuff that can be compounded in masses or scattered like powder, and still remain essentially unchanged. Such a view jf consciousness is not only incompatible with the rejection of “substance,” which is the strident keynote of Psychical Monism, but is inadmissible, no matter what our metaphysical views may be. It is plausible only to those who think of all consciousness and all psychical process as consisting in what we call the sensory content of consciousness ; for the sensory content does seem like a patchwork. But the sensory content and the sensations and images that compose it are abstractions only, achieved by fixing our attention on one aspect of mental process. Sensations are merely incidents of the process of cognition, and no amount of compounding of sensations will result in an act of cognition, a knowing of an object ; still less will it produce a judgment, an inference, a train of reasoning, or an act of will. The foregoing discussions may be briefly resumed by saying that Psychical Monism leaves the most fundamental peculiarity of our experience entirely unexplained and unintelligible, the peculiarity namely that consciousness, as we know it, runs always and only in personal streams, the fact, in short, of personality. It describes the world as consisting of conscious processes forming one vast system of consciousness, every part of which is in functional relation with every other ; a unitary whole whose unity each of us can only conceive after the pattern of that unique wholeness or unity which he discovers to be the form of his personal consciousness ; and it leaves as an unrelieved mystery the fact, apparently incompatible with this conception of a world- consciousness, that the consciousness of which alone we have any knowledge occurs only in the form of personal consciousnesses, which not only do not run together, but which seem to be absolutely and completely debarred from all direct communica- tion. It may be said at once that the alternative form of the identity-hypothesis leaves equally mysterious the fact of personality. We find, then, that the fundamental assumption of Psychical Monism, namely, that consciousness is reality and the only reality, and its attempt to abolish as illegitimate the conception of any mode of being other than consciousness, involve it in very great difficulties, not to say absurdities ; and this result will give force to the protest against any attempt to solve the psycho-physical EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 171 problem by the metaphysical method, by setting out with any proposition as to the ultimate nature of reality. Without going so far as to condemn all attempts to describe the nature of reality, we may fairly protest that the powers of the human mind are so little suited to achieve knowledge of absolute reality, that our conclusions in this direction must be of a tentative character ; and that it is absurd to profess to decide the question as to the existence of the soul by deduction from any assertion as to the nature of reality. To attempt to decide any question of fact by setting out from an assertion as to the nature of ultimate reality, is to practise metaphysic in the way which has brought it into disrepute with the majority of thinking men in almost all ages. Let us now glance at certain difficulties common to all forms of Parallelism. They all alike imply universal psycho-physical Parallelism or Pan-psychism ; they necessarily assume that every physical event, the mere fall of a stone to the ground, the rotation of the earth, the vibratory movements of an atom, the flight of the solar system through space, the swaying of a dead leaf on a bough, that all these and all other physical events have their psychical correlates, or aspects, or underlying realities, just as well as those obscure changes in certain restricted portions of our brains, which alone seem on the face of things to be thus accom- panied. And they imply also that every psychical event has its physical correlate or manifestation, that every thought or volition of God, if there be a God who thinks and wills, manifests itself under the form of physical processes subject to mechanical laws. These implications of Parallelism are not always fully grasped by those who accept the doctrine ; yet, in any form less thorough- going than this, it is so fragmentary and inconsistent as not to be worth a moment’s consideration, and its principal exponents have, of course, fully acknowledged and insisted upon these implications. “ All things,” says Paulsen, are psycho-physical beings.” If, with these implications in mind, w’e compare the doctrine with Animism in respect to the strain it throws upon the imagina- tion, it must be admitted that the advantage lies with Animism, in spite of all the conundrums it raises as regards the nature, origin, and destiny of souls. But this is a point of minor import- ance. The serious difficulty raised by this implication of P arallelism may be stated as follows. The rich complex consciousness of man 172 BODY AND MIND is correlated with the processes of an enormously complex and highly developed nervous system. When we survey the scale of animal life, we see that the lower down we go in the scale the simpler becomes the structure of the nervous system, until we come to simple creatures in which it consists of only a few cells but par- tially differentiated from the rest of the body ; and finally we come to the unicellular creatures each consisting of a mere speck of nucleated protoplasm. We have good reason to believe that, if we could observe the consciousness of the animals throughout this descending scale, we should find that the stream of consciousness becomes poorer and thinner in proportion as the nervous system is less developed. Now, it is sufficiently difficult for us to con- ceive the nature of the psychical life of such an animal as a fish ; it would seem to consist in mere sentiency and appetite. But, when we go down into the invertebrate world, the nervous system, and indeed the whole organism, becomes indefinitely simpler ; to conceive of a corresponding reduction in complexity and richness of the psychical life is difficult. We can conceive the consciousness of the animalcule as at most but a mere alternation of the vaguest possible feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction or unrest But when on the physical side we pass over from the animalcule to the molecule of inorganic matter, or to the gravitating atom or particle of negative electricity, or whatever the unit physical phenomenon may be, we cross an interval in the scale of complexity of organization as great as that between man and the animalcule. How, then, are we to conceive consciousness to be correspondingly reduced. To attempt any such further reduction of the concept of individual experience (innerer Erlebniss), of psychical existence or process, is to deprive it of all content, to leave the words empty of all meaning. In order to meet this difficulty, Fechner adopted the fashion, first introduced perhaps by Leibnitz, of speaking of unconscious psychical processes, unconscious sensations and ideas (Unbewusst- sein, unbewusste Empfindungen, unbewusste Vorstellungen),^ and spoke of the assumed psychical aspect or reality underlying the physical processes of the inorganic world as unconscious psychical processes. Other Parallelists have used other terms in order to diminish this difficulty; Lloyd Morgan, for example, prefers to use the word ^ infra-consciousness,’ and Clifford, as we have seen, spoke of a mind-stuff which is not consciousness, but ^ “Elemente der Psycho-pliysik,’^ vol. ii., p. 43S. EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 173 of small pieces of which the most elementary feelings are com- posed ; but the expression most in favour is perhaps subconscious- ness. Parallelism, then, involves the assumption of a vast amount of unconscious psychical process. Is this a valid conception ? We start from the unity of individual experience or consciousness, and we discover the necessity of postulating existences which par- tially determine the course of that experience, and these we call our environment ; this environment is directly apprehended by us only under the form of material objects or physical processes ; we thus arrive at the conception of processes of two fundamentally different kinds, conscious process and physical process. Then the parallelist finds himself compelled, in order to carry through his scheme, to postulate a third kind of process of which, from the nature of the case, we can never have any experience, whether direct or indirect. Thus the endeavour after reduction of Dualism to Monism really results in the assumption of a third kind of exist- ence or process which is as utterly unlike conscious process as are the processes described by physical science. But, in order to cast a veil over the questionable transaction and to create the illusion that the third kind of process is not so very unlike conscious- process, the parallelist calls it unconscious psychical process. Now I do not wish to deny the propriety of the conception of unconscious, still less of subconscious, psychical process ; the conception is perfectly compatible with, and perhaps even de- manded by, Animism. But my point is, that the attempt to identify unconscious psychical process with consciousness is a mere play upon words. The psychical monist begins by using psychical process as synonymous with conscious process, and goes on to use psychical as a term of wider connotation than conscious- ness (as the animist properly and consistently may), hoping, by speaking of unconscious psychical process, to avoid the bad impression that must be made by speaking of unconscious con- scious process. Psychical Monism, whose fundamental proposition is that all that exists is consciousness, is of course the variety of Monism which is hit most hard by any refusal to recognize the possibility of unconscious consciousness, or to admit the legitimacy of describing the evolution of consciousness, in the individual and in the race, as a process of aggregation of unconscious processes. Again, the hypothesis of psycho- physical parallelism, whether it stands by itself or is supported by the identity-hypothesis in either of its two forms, is confronted by the difficulty that, while 174 BODY AND MIND the physical processes are mechanically determined, psychical processes are essentially teleological ; so that mechanical and teleological determination have to be represented as running exactly parallel and issuing always in the same results. In a later chapter I shall say something of the necessity of believing in the reality of teleological determination of mental process ; but here it suffices to point out that this is not denied by most of the philosophical defenders of Parallelism. Wundt and Paulsen, for example, are agreed upon this, and Strong urges that one of the chief merits of Psychical Monism is that it satisfies our deep- rooted conviction of the real efficiency of consciousness. In fact, to give up the validity of either mechanical explanation of physical processes or the teleological explanation of mental process would be to sacrifice the claim of Monism to reconcile natural science and philosophy. The same difficulty recurs in still more urgent form in con- nexion with our higher mental processes, which are not only teleological but also logical. The parallelist has to believe that purely mechanical determination runs parallel with logical process and issues in the same results. He has to believe, or at any rate assert, that every form of human activity and every product of human activity is capable of being mechanically explained. Consider, then, a page of print ; the letters and words of a logical argument are impressed upon the page by a purely mechanical process. But what has determined their order ? Their order is such that, when an adequately educated person reads the lines, he takes the meaning of the words and sentences, follows the reasoning and is led to, and forced to accept, the logical conclusion. And in ordering the words and sentences the author was conscious of their meaning, of the drift of the whole argument and of the conclusion to which it leads, and was animated by the purpose or desire of achieving the end, the demonstration in black and white of the con- clusion of the argument ; and throughout the period of composition his choice of words and order was determined by this purpose, by the desire to achieve an end, a result, which existed only in his consciousness. Now the parallelist necessarily maintains that all this process of ordering the words and sentences, in which the consciousness of their meaning and of their logical connexion and of the conclusion and purpose of the whole argument seem to play so important a part, that all this is in principle capable of being fully explained as the outcome of the mechanical interplay EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 175 of the author’s brain-processes : that a complete description of the mechanics of these processes would be a complete explanation of the ordering of the letters, words, and sentences. This is what I, in common with many others, find incredible, namely, the assertion that the meaning of the words need not be taken into account in explaining the way they were brought into their order on the page. The parallelist will assert that the author’s consciousness of meaning had as its physical correlate some complex system of brain- processes, and that this was the causal mechanism that we have to conceive as ordering the words by governing the movement of the author’s hand as he wrote them down. This then raises the question of empirical fact, — Js there or is there not any complete physical brain-correlate of that part of our consciousness which we call meaning? Or suppose the printed page to bear a poem containing original and delicate similes ; for example : “ Music that gentlier on the spirit lies Than tired eye-lids upon tired eyes.” We are asked to believe that the ordering of these words can be mechanically explained. We have, then, to suppose a mechanism so delicate that it is capable of being affected by the resemblance between ‘‘ tired eyelids upon tired eyes ” and “ gentle music,” or at least of reacting in the same way to both, namely, with the production of the sound of the word “ gentle ” ; for the meaning of the word gentle is here the essential factor in bringing these unlike things together in the consciousness of the poet. Here we come back again to the essential question — Can “ meaning ” be supposed to have its physical correlate in the brain ? To this question I propose to return later and show reason to believe that no such correlate can be assumed. At present I merely urge the incredibility of the assumption that the “meaning” itself can be left out, w'hen we seek to explain the ordering of our words in thinking, in writing, or in speaking. Paulsen maintains the parallelism of the mechanically with the logically and teleologically determined series, and he illustrates his view in the following way. “An orator makes a speech ; he has been attacked, he desires to defend himself and annihilate his opponent, thoughts and arguments flow in, similes and apt turns of speech, biting phrases and quotations, sarcasms against his opponent and flatterings of his hearers, seem to come of BODY AND MIND 176 themselves. It is the link of association by which each thought drags up its successor (i.e. a mechanically operative link) ; but, at each moment, of thousands of possible associative links only that one which leads to the goal actually operates. Thus the whole series of processes constituting the oration is both causally and teleologically conditioned ; the will gives it its general direction and feels a lively satisfaction in the successful progress.” ^ The interactionist could not describe the process in terms more in accordance with his view ; at every step the mechanical factor, the system of materially conditioned links of association, presents a number of rival possibilities, and at each step that one of these mechanically conditioned associations which is most suitable to the purpose of the orator is brought into operation by the psychical teleological factor, his will or purpose. On the face of it, then, the series of events is determined by the co-operation of the material mechanical factors and the psychical teleological factors. But, when Paulsen says that the whole series is both causally and teleologically conditioned, he means that the causal and the teleological processes are the same identical processes looked at in two different ways. How then does he seek to render intelligible this identity of mechanical causation and teleo- logical determination? He achieves it by making them both purely subjective, by depriving both conceptions of all objective validity, and falling back upon Hume’s doctrine that causation is merely sequence. “If one holds the right notion of causality, if one understands by it, with Hume and Leibnitz, nothing more than lawfulness, i.e. regular concomitance of the changes of many elements, then it is obvious that causality holds good of the spiritual mental world no less than of the natural.”^ Hence mechanical causation and teleological determination being alike merely subjective, i.e. applicable only within our conceptual descriptions of the real world and not operative in the real world, “ there can occur no opposition between mechanical explanation and idealistic interpretation.” ® The solipsistic character of this escape is well revealed in the following passage. “ I do not see what should prevent our saying, the logical operation of thought is presented physically in a brain-process, which according to the assumption is to be regarded as a part of the course of nature following physical laws. The brain would not therefore become a calculat- ^ '' Einleitung,'* p. 241. 2 » Einleitung,** p. 243. ® " Einleitung,” p. 18 1. EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON THEORIES 177 ing machine, but we are led to the thought that there obtains a kind of pre-established harmony between logical and physical laws : a thought before which we do not shrink, for the material world is, according to our assumption, not something absolutely foreign to the spirit ; it is after all its own creation (sein Produkt).” ^ Wundt’s reconciliation of the universal sway of mechanical causation with teleological determination is very similar. He writes — '‘The universality of mechanical causation is an assumption which needs to be verified by experience. The supposition that there obtain different modes of connexion, equivocal and unequivocal, in different provinces of nature, cannot therefore be rejected as logically impossible. But then for these provinces un- equivocal mechanical causality does not hold good, and the assertion that both modes of connexion may be combined in one series of phenomena is inadmissible in all cases. Final causes and mechanical causes are mutually exclusive.” ^ And again he writes, “ the teleologically conditioned cannot be at the same time mechanically conditioned.” It might be thought that in face of these explicit statements, Wundt would find it impossible to maintain Parallelism and its implication that all events must be regarded as both mechanically caused and teleologically determined. But, like Paulsen, he succeeds in maintaining Parallelism at the cost of the reality of all causation or determination by falling back upon Hume; thus — “ the difference between teleological and causal conception is not an objectively valid difference (kein sachlicher) that divides the content of experience into two unlike provinces ; but the two ways of conceiving things are formally different only, so that to every purposive relation there belongs a causal connexion as its complement, and conversely a teleological form can be given, if required, to every causal connexion.” ^ Cause and effect, goal and effort, are nothing more than the projection into the world of objective reality of ground and consequence, which exist only for our thought and are connected only by a logical band ; and, since the ground can be inferred from the consequence as readily as the consequence from the ground, the two ways of describing phenomenal sequences are equally valid. Thus the parallelists seek to escape from this difficulty. They are determined to eat their cake and to hold it, to accept the ^ “ Einleitung,” p. 100. 2 “ Physiologische Psychologie,” vol. iii. p. 728. 3 Op. cit., vol. iii. p. 737. BODY AND MIND 178 dictum of science that all events are mechanically caused as well as the dictum of philosophy that mind operates effectively to achieve its purposes. But they can only do this at the cost of denying the applicability to reality of our conceptions both of m.echanical causation and of purposive striving, at the cost, that is to say, of sinking back into Solipsism ; for only by the aid of the principle of causation can each of us infer any reality other than his own consciousness. CHAPTER XIII IS THERE ANY WAY OF ESCAPE FROM THE DILEMMA- ANIMISM OR PARALLELISM ? I N the foregoing pages we have seen how the development of the natural sciences has led to the rejection of Animism by the greater part of the learned world of our time. In the two preceding chapters we have stated and examined the prin- cipal formulations of the psycho-physical relation proposed as substitutes for Animism ; and we have found that these also are confronted with very serious difficulties, difficulties which, though they do not leap to the eye as do those of Animism, are never- theless so great as to forbid us to accept any one of these formu- lations as an intelligible solution of the psycho-physical problem. We must, therefore, at this stage of our inquiry, raise the question — Are the automaton hypotheses (epiphenomenalism and the parallelistic doctrines) the only alternatives to Animism ? Or, putting aside Epiphenomenalism as untenable, we may ask. Are we confronted with the dilemma — Animism or Parallelism ? This inquiry is the more necessary in an English treatise, because the lack of interest in the psycho-physical problem on the part of most of our academic philosophers seems to imply on their part the opinion that the question may be answered with a negation. I believe that, in fact, many of our idealistic philosophers hold, somewhat vaguely, no doubt, the opinion that Kant’s epistemology has rendered the psycho-physical problem unreal, has shown that the problem only arises through asking a question which never should have been asked. They tell us that all thinkers of the pre-critica) period and those who, since Kant, still persist in inquiring into the relations between mind and matter, between soul and body, have taken up the question from a false starting-point ; that, namely, they have accepted uncritically the notions of soul and body current in popular thought ; that these notions were achieved by illegitimate processes of abstraction ; and that, if, instead of doing this, we begin, as Kant did, by making an 179 i8o BODY AND MIND impartial epistemological inquiry, we shall find that this insoluble problem never arises. It might suffice to reply to these insinuations, as follows. We admit that, when we reflect upon the nature of experience, we find immediately given neither body nor mind, but only the duality of subject and object within the unity of experience ; and we admit that the conceptions of body and mind are arrived at by abstracting from this unity of experience, on the one hand the objective and on the other hand the subjective elements. Never- theless, we do not admit that these processes of abstraction are illegitimate; rather we affirm that they are necessary steps for each one of us, if he is to reach out in thought beyond the circle of his own experience and play a part as a member of a world of spirits, which, as you tell us, is the only real world.^ He who refuses to make this step, a step which cannot be justified in strict logic, remains a solipsist With the solipsist we cannot argue ; but all of us are agreed that Solipsism is an impossible attitude for a sane man. We affirm that each of us can escape from Solipsism only by an act of faith or will that posits a real world, of which he IS a member. This real world appears to each of us in the form of the phenomena of sense-perception ; but, if he is not to remain a solipsist, he must affirm and believe that these appear- ances are not created by himself, but are rather due to influences or existences, not himself, yet affecting him. Or, in other words, he must believe in the validity of the category of causation ; for only by believing that his perceptions are caused by some in- fluence, some real being, other than himself, can he escape from Solipsism. Let him conceive these influences or existences how he will, and the psycho-physical problem still confronts him and ^ Avenaxius has described the process by which we pass from the unity of experience to the duality of subject and object, to the conception of the subjective and objective as psychical and physical worlds, and has named it the process of introjection {Der menschhche Welthe griff). This doctrine of introjection seems to be regarded in some quarters as constituting a proof of the unten- ability of psycho-physical dualism ; but, however true it may be as an abstract and generalized account of the way in which the human mind has arrived at the distinction of the physical from the psychical, it does nothing to invalidate that distinction. As Prof. A. E. Taylor has well said, " To attempt the solution of this problem by simply reverting to the standpoint of immediate experience, as it was before the creation of the concept of a physical order, would be to undo at a stroke the whole previous work of our physical scientific constructions. From the standpoint of immediate experience there can be no problem of the connexion between the physical and the psychical” (“Mind,” vol. xiii. p. 481). THE DILEMMA i8i clamours for an answer. For among these appearances is that which he calls his body, one among many similar appearances, and this appearance points to some reality beyond it, and the psycho- physical problem is — What is the relation of my thinking self to this reality beyond ? He may accept Berkeley’s suggestion, to the effect that the body and all other appearances are produced in his thought by the direct action of God, a pure spirit or think- ing being like himself ; but, even if he brings himself seriously to believe that God has chosen to play this monstrous joke upon mankind, he is but solving the psycho-physical problem by arbi- trarily choosing a peculiar and dogmatic form of Animism. Or let him, with Herbert Spencer, affirm that this reality is unknowable ; his need is then all the more urgent for some under- standing of his relation to the appearances of which his body is one, since these appearances are all he can ever know. Or, if he holds that we must be content to affirm that this reality is of the nature of mind or spirit or consciousness, without further specifying it, then he still must discover the nature of the relation between his own consciousness or mind and that other conscious- ness which appears to him under the form of his body. But this preliminary inquiry is so important for the whole course of our subsequent discussion that it seems worth while to examine the modes of dealing with the psycho-physical problem followed by several eminent idealistic philosophers. And, first, we may examine Kant’s own treatment of it. According to Kant, the body belongs to the phenomenal world, which we know through the faculty of sentience and understanding ; within this world of phenomena the law of mechanical causation holds unbroken sway, yet this world, the mundus sensibilis^ has but empirical reality. The understanding, contemplating this phenomenal world, may infer the existence of some noumenon, some thing-for-itself, of which it is the appear- ance, but is unable to make any affirmation concerning it other than the bare affirmation of its existence. By means of a higher faculty, the practical reason, we discover the existence of a world of superior reality, the mundus intelligihilis ; to this world belongs the soul of man, the pure ego, which is the logical nature that comprises both understanding and reason. Now it is clear that the recognition of the truth that the physical world as we perceive or as it appears to us, is an appearance, does not abolish the psycho-physical problem, so i 82 BODY AND MIND long as, with Kant, we hold that this appearance is an appear- ance of something. What is the relation of my thinking self to the thing-for-itself which appears to me as the physical world in space and time? This question still presses for an answer just as urgently as if we accept the crude realist’s view of the physical world. And especially, if we accept Kant’s demonstration of the soul as an immortal being, we wish to know what is the relation of the soul to the thing-for-itself. Kant, in short, has left us with two kinds of reality, empirical reality and rational reality ; with two real worlds, one ruled by mechanical causation, the other a world of freedom and purpose ; and he has not shown us how they are related. Kant even wrote : “ The separation of soul and body forms the termination of the sensible exercise of our faculty of knowledge, and the beginning of the intellectual. The body would thus be regarded, not as the cause of thought, but merely as its restrictive condition, and at the same time as promotive of the sensuous and animal, but therefore the greater hindrance to the pure and spiritual life.” ^ And Kant’s suggestion of phenomenal- istic Parallelism as the solution of the psycho-physical problem shows that he himself was aware that the problem remained in spite of his epistemological Phenomenalism. Kant, in fact, made an elaborate attempt to show how we may run with the hare and yet hunt with the hounds. Confronted with eighteenth-century Materialism and Hume’s Scepticism on the one hand, and with the dogmatic Spiritualism of orthodox philosophy on the other hand, he boldly accepted the methods and results of ^ I quote this passage from “ The Disciphne of Pure Reason in Relation to H3q)othesis,” after Paulsen, who affirms that it continued to represent Kant’s view in his critical period Immanuel Kant, his Life and Doctrine,” p. 254). Kant wrote also, ‘'The opinion that the thinking subject may be able to think before having any relation with bodies may be expressed as follows : that before the beginning of that kind of sense-perception through which things appear in space, the same transcendental objects, which in our present condition appear to us as bodies, may have been capable of being perceived in some quite different manner. But the opinion that the soul may continue to think after the breaking off of all relations with the bodily world may be stated in this way : that, if that kind of sensory perception through which transcendental and hitherto quite unknown objects appear to us as the material world, should cease, then nevertheless ail perception of the world would not necessarily cease ; and it is quite possible that these unknown objects might continue to be cognized by the thinking subject, although, of course, no longer in the guise of bodies. Now no one can adduce from speculative principles the least ground for such an assertion, not even show the possibihty of it, but merely assume it; but just as little also can anyone make any valid dogmatic objection to the assertion” (“Kritik d. r. V.,” Erdmann’s edition, p. 338). THE DILEMMA 183 both — the world of mechanically determined phenomena, which is the natural issue of Materialism modified by Scepticism, and the world of pure and free Spirits which dogmatic metaphysic affirmed ; and he sought to justify our belief in the existence of both worlds by dividing our intellect into two distinct faculties. Thus he achieved a dualism of the intellect with a corresponding duality of unrelated worlds, which surely is the least defensible of all forms of dualism. Nor can Kant be given even the credit of consistent adherence to this strange doctrine ; for, in spite of his insistence on the absolute sway of mechanical principles in the phenomenal world, when he has occasion to treat of organic beings he asserts that they are not to be understood or wholly accounted for on mechanical principles. If this assertion is con- sidered in connexion with Kant’s metaphysic of the soul, it will be seen that Animism might with some plausibility be added to the long list of doctrines for which his interpreters seek to make him responsible. It is clear, at least, that Kant did not discover any way of avoiding the necessity of accepting either Animism or one of the parallelistic formulations of the psycho-physical problem, but that he hovered uncertainly between these alternatives. Kant’s successors have made many attempts to show how the defects of his doctrine may be remedied. Three principal groups may be distinguished. On the one hand are those who, like Paulsen and Strong, have accepted the thing-for-itself and, resolutely facing the psycho- physical problem, have attempted to provide a satisfactory solution of it by developing the notion of psycho-physical Parallelism ; on the other hand are those who would purify Kant’s doctrine by throwing overboard the thing-for-itself, left by him lurking behind the veil of phenomena, and would thus achieve a pure Spiritual Idealism ; while a third party, accepting, like the first, the thing-for-itself, admits all the conclusions of Materialism or its modern equivalent, Epiphenomenalism, and seeks to retain the ideal world only as the creation of human fancy, a purely imaginary world to which the human mind may withdraw itself from time to time for moral uplifting and refresh- ment and the enjoyment of the illusion of freedom, as a child gives itself up to the delightful illusions of fairyland. F. A. Lange, who is generally recognized as the leader of the Neo- Kantians, may be said to be the principal exponent of this last form of Idealism ; for, although he wavers unsteadily between the BODY AND MIND 184 acceptance and rejection of the thing-for-itself, and seems bent on combining Materialism and Solipsism in his creed, he asserts explicitly that the human spirit must soar above the vulgar real (by which he means the world of the natural sciences) into the realm of ideas which are symbols of the unknowable absolute. Those philosophers who belong to the second class of post- Kantians mentioned above indignantly repudiate Lange’s inter- pretation of Kant as a vulgar debasement of his teaching.^ Let us see, then, how one of the most eminent of this school proposes to refine upon Kant’s doctrine in a way which will circumvent the psycho- physical probJem and avoid the necessity of choosing between Animism and Parallelism or Epiphenomenalism. Professor James Ward has recently essayed this task in his Gifford Lectures.^ After an elaborate destructive criticism of Naturalism and its central tenet, psycho-physical Parallelism, and after offering a refutation of Dualism, Professor Ward proceeds to set up in their place a spiritualistic Monism which shall be a pure Idealism, in the sense that it shall regard the physical world as a mere construction or figment of the mind, and which shall nevertheless escape the charge of Solipsism. By a train of lucid and irrefutable epistemo- logical reasoning he shows ^That Nature, as we conceive is neither primary nor independent and complete in itself ; that it is, on the contrary, merely an abstract scheme ; and that, as such, it necessarily presupposes intellectual constructiveness and motives to sustain the labours that such construction entails.” ^ Now this result of epistemological reflexion is valid as a demonstration of the illegitimacy of deducing the impotence and nullity of mind and purpose from the law of the conservation of energy or from any other generalization of the empirical sciences ; but it does not justify the reduction of the physical world to the status of a figment of the imagination. The statement I have quoted is only true in virtue of the phrase which is printed in italics, namely, ‘‘ as we conceive it.” But Professor Ward’s ^ E g. the late Prof. Adamson, in his Lectures on Kant.” 2 “Naturalism and Agnosticism,” London, 1899. I am not sure whether Prof. Ward regards his doctrine as providing an escape from the dilemma — Animism or Parallelism ; but it has recently been proclaimed as an alternative to them by Miss E C. Jones (“Hibbert Journal,” Oct. 1910). I imagine that Prof. Ward would admit the propriety of Animism as a working h 57 pothesis in biological and psychological science. ^ Op. cit , vol. ii p. 247. The italics are mine. THE DILEMMA. 185 argument implies that it should be regarded as true though that phrase were omitted ; for unless the statement is accepted in this sense, the whole argument falls to the ground. That is to say, Professor Ward, like other idealists of this school, shows that our idea of Nature is only our idea of Nature, and draws from this the conclusion that Nature itself, or the physical universe, exists only as a construction of our minds, or is altogether dependent on, and secondary to, mind. This is the fatal error of idealisms of this type. The epistemological reasoning shows not that Nature is, but only that it may be, merely a construction of our minds ; that is to say, it shows that there is no strictly logical process by which we can be compelled to admit that the physical world really exists otherwise than in our thought, and that we may without logical inconsistency refuse to believe that it has any other mode of existence. Now it must be frankly recognized, as I said before, that each one of us can escape from Solipsism only by affirming the real existence of Nature, or by affirming the validity of the category of causation, which enables each of us to infer a world of existing things other than himself playing its part in the causation of his perceptions. But if anyone can discover any other mode of escape from Solipsism, he may, with perfect propriety, regard the physical world as exist- ing only in or for thought. This is the alternative proposed by Professor Ward. He is content to deny all extra- mental exist- ence to the physical world, because he believes he has discovered that one may escape from Solipsism by a different road, namely, by recognizing that the physical world is not merely subjective, but is trans-subjective. By calling the physical world trans- subjective, he means to imply that it exists, not only for the thought of the individual thinker, but for the thought of men in general ; and that the conception of it has been achieved, not by the thought of any one human mind, but by intersubjective inter- course,” i.e., by the united efforts and converse of many minds. By recognizing this fact he escapes the grossest absurdity of the solipsist, the assumption that he alone exists ; and he escapes also the solipsist’s assumption that, if he himself should cease to be, the whole physical universe would also cease to be ; for it would remain as the conception of other minds. This, then, is the way in which Professor Ward proposes to escape from the dilemma of choosing between Solipsism and the acceptance of the physical world as extra-mental reality. The position proposed is certainly BODY AND MIND 1 86 preferable to Solipsism ; but it has two fatal weaknesses : first, it retains much of the absurdity of Solipsism ; secondly, it is reached only by an illegitimate step. Ward himself says of it : “ Inter- subjective intercourse secures us against the Solipsism into which individual experience by itself might conceivably fall, but it does not carry us beyond the wider solipsism of Kant’s consciousness in general.” That is to say, it involves the assumption that all the objects of the natural sciences are purely mythical ; that the astronomers, who accurately foretell eclipses and the reappearance of comets after the lapse of centuries, are foretelling merely the moment at which men in general will, through some miraculous process, aided presumably by “ intersubjective intercourse,” agree to perceive the comet or the onset of the eclipse ; that of the whole series of geological formations each one first came into being when it was discovered, or perhaps at the moment at which it was named and officially recognized by the Royal Society ; that the story of the evolution of the organic world has no more objective truth than any extravagant nature-myth which has been widely entertained by any savage people ; and so on and so on. Clearly, the impetus of Professor Ward’s spirited attack on Naturalism has carried him too far and led him “ to pour out the child with the water.” An Idealism that demands the acceptance of such conclusions will always remain impotent to heal the breach between science and religion. But, even if these conclusions were entirely acceptable, we should still have to complain of the method by which they are reached. Like Berkeley before him, Professor Ward has simply assumed the existence of other spirits than his own : and his position is less satisfactory than Berkeley’s ; for the great idealist did at least infer the existence of God from the evidence that our minds are the recipients of external influences. Each of us learns to recognize the existence of other human minds only through sense-perception of the manifestations of their activities in the phenomenal world ; and, if we deny all extra-mental causes ^ to these sense-perceptions, we have no means of passing beyond the sphere of individual experience to the existence of other minds ; we must, in short, remain solipsists pure and simple. Or does Professor Ward mean that inters abjective intercourse” is main- tained by direct action of mind on mind, and that all our sense- perceptions are induced by such direct action of one human mind on ^ I mean causes extraneous to ttie mmd of the percipient. THE DILEMMA 187 another, as in the alleged telepathic induction of hallucinations ? This seems to be, in fact, the position he means to maintain ; if so^ it resembles Berkeley’s, but with this difference, that whereas Berkeley inferred the existence of God as the cause of his own perceptions and was unable to infer the reality of other human spirits. Ward infers the existence of other human spirits, but is unable to get to God. Which position is preferable must remain a question of taste ; but it is obvious that though in both cases the psycho-physical problem is in a sense transcended, yet for empirical science it is answered in the sense of Animism ; for that part of the phenomenal world which appears to me as my body represents or symbolizes a certain system of influences exerted directly upon me by the divine spirit (Berkeley), or by other human spirits (Ward) ; and what science calls the voluntary movements of my body are changes of the appearance of myself to other spirits (or spirit) directly induced in them by that mode of activity of my soul or spirit which we call volition. Thus we see that Idealism, consistently worked out, justifies Animism as the solution of the psycho-physical problem which must be adopted by empirical science. But, since it rejects the demand of Kant’s epistemology and of Naturalism, the demand, namely, that in the physical world mechanical causation shall rule without exception, and since it involves the reduction of all the results of the natural sciences to the level of pure myth, it would seem that a sober Realism, which accepts Animism, offers a better prospect of reconciling science with the belief in the efficiency of mind and purpose. As for the Idealism which sets out with the dictum that all the phenomena and processes of nature must be explained according to purely mechanical principles (whether this dictum be maintained as an epistemo- logical principle, as by Kant, or as a conclusion forced upon our acceptance by the successes of empirical science, as by Paulsen), nothing remains for it but the desperate attempt to save some- thing from the wreck of religion and philosophy by the aid of the hypothesis of psycho-physical Parallelism. I conclude, then, that there is no way of escape from the dilemma — Animism or Parallelism, and that we must accept Animism, if we find the difficulties involved in Parallelism to be fatal to it. Some of these difficulties were displayed in the foregoing chapter ; in later chapters the fundamental assumption of Parallelism, namelv. that the course of nature can be explained i88 BODY AND MIND or described in terms of mechanism only, will be shown to be unwarranted and untenable. Before going on to this refutation of Parallelism, I shall try to prepare the reader for the acceptance of its alternative by showing that neither the arguments against Animism, nor those directly supporting Parallelism, are of a nature to compel accept- ance of their conclusion. And I shall deal first with the alogical arguments. CHAPTER XIV « ARGUMENTA AD HOMINEM W E have seen that Parallelism is urged upon our accept- ance by certain argument a ad hominem. In this chapter I propose to examine these and to show that arguments of a similar kind, which deserve at least as much consideration, can be adduced in favour of Animism. Of the arguments of this kind urged in favour of Parallelism (more especially of Psychical Monism), the most important is that the hypothesis allows us to accept all the materialistic teachings of natural science, while retaining our belief in the primacy and reality of mind ; that it thus would abolish all strife between science and philosophy, because, as men of science, we shall be materialists, while as philosophers we may be spiritualists or idealists ; it is proposed, in short, to establish a parallelism without interaction of science and philosophy. Now we all know men who keep their science and their religion in separate ‘‘ water- tight compartments ” of their minds, and many of us may be inclined to approve, or at least to excuse, this arrangement.^ But what shall we say of the deliberate attempt to do the same with our scientific and our philosophical convictions ; for that is the essence of Parallelism. Surely this is Dualism of a kind that is radically unsound and reprehensible. If science had finally and completely established the truth of its postulate of the universal sway of the laws of mechanism and physical causation, we might regard the efforts of the parallelists as a meritorious attempt to save something from the wreck of philosophical and religious beliefs. But so long as this postulate remains very far from empirical verification, and in fact is carried over from the inorganic world to the world of life and mind, only at the cost of flying in the face of all the many unmistakable indications that the two realms are widely different, why should the philo- ^ Mr W. H. Mallock has even written a brilliant book Religion as a Credible Doctrine in order to recommend this solution. 189 190 BODY AND MIND sopher or the biologist capitulate to physical science and lay himself out to give plausibility to its extortionate claim that all existence must be brought under its laws ? For a capitulation it is, when the biologist, the psychologist, or the philosopher, accepts Parallelism. Paulsen assures us that physical science will never abate one jot of its claim to explain all events as purely physically caused. But that is his ipse dixit merely, a piece of gratuitous prophecy. There are not wanting now leaders of science who reject this claim of physical science to be the arbiter of the possible and the impossible, and to make of biology and physiology merely dependent branches of its stem.^ Let us put the matter in the following way. It must be, and b}^ the more enlightened parallelists it is, admitted that it is not possible at present to establish the validity of the claim of physical science that its principles will explain all events, or to rule out psycho-physical interaction as impossible. Suppose, then, that psycho-physical interaction is a fact, that it does really occur ; then the capitulation of biology and philosophy to physical science must have the effect of bringing the course of the development of human knowledge into a blind alley, in which further progress must be ever more difficult and must involve in a sense a departure from its true goal ; for that goal will only be attainable by going back upon the track and picking up the true course at the point where this capitulation was made. Surely, then, it is the proper task of philosophy to keep the balance true between the great departments of science, and to show to each how far short of absolute truth its conceptions fall, to make clear their ^For a clear-sighted repudiation of this claim, see Dr J. S, Haldane’s Presi- dential Address to the Physiological Section of the British Association Reports,” 1908). The keynote may be indicated by the follov/ing extracts : ” For Biology we must clearly and boldly claim a higher place than the purely physical sciences can claim in the hierarchy of the sciences — ^higher, because Biology is dealing with a deeper aspect of reality,” ” Since our conception of an organism is different in kind, and not merely in degree, from our conception of a material aggregate, it is clear that in tracing back life to primitive forms we are getting no nearer to what is called abiogenesis ” In Physiology, and Biology generally, we are dealing with phenomena which, so far as our present knowledge goes, not only differ in complexity, but differ in kind from physical and chemical phenomena ; and the fundamental working h5rpothesis of Physiology must differ correspondingly from those of Physics and Chemistry. That a meeting- point between Biology and Physical Science may at some time be found, there is no reason for doubting. But we may confidently predict that if that meeting- point is found, and one of the two sciences is swallowed up, that one will not be Biology.” ARGUMENTA AD HOMINEM 191 limits and their true relations, rather than to try to square the circle of the universe according to the prescriptions of that branch of science which happens to have made the greatest progress and to have put forward its claims with the loudest voice. To some of those who refuse to recognize the claims of physical science to apply its laws to the whole universe of existence, it seems that even now we may dimly foresee the taking up of physical science into a wider synthesis in which it will occupy an important but subordinate place ; and that in this way will be effected the true reconciliation between natural science on the one hand and philosophy and religion on the other, rather than by any pre- mature capitulation to the exorbitant demands of any one of the sciences. We noticed that one of the advantages claimed for Paral- lelism is that it not only puts an end to the strife between materialistic science and spiritualistic philosophy, but that, by enabling us to accept without reserve and without the reproach of philosophical crudity the materalistic generalizations of physical science, it brings us the satisfactions that flow (for some minds) from that acceptance. To this it is added that the acceptance of Animism raises a number of perplexing questions, such as — What is the prenatal history of the soul ? What becomes of it at the death of the body? What part does it play in heredity? And it is obvious that at the present time science has no means of answering these questions in any satisfactory manner. Now, that certain temperaments find satisfaction in the doctrine that the universe is a vast mechanism all events of which, even the thoughts and acts of God (if there be a God), are in principle predictable by calculation as exactly as an eclipse of the moon, this fact goes far to explain the popularity of Parallelism, but does nothing to justify it. There are temperaments, pro- bably equally or more numerous than the others, to which this view of the world seems little better than a nightmare; and their feelings have as much right to be considered, when we are casting our votes for the constitution of the universe. That Parallelism naturally, if not inevitably, implies and demands a monistic conception of the universe is undoubtedly one of the grounds of its popularity ; but there are two good reasons against allowing this fact to weigh against Animism.^ ^ And exactly the same considerations hold good of the claim of Psychical Monism, based on the ground that it imphes an idealistic metaphysic. BODY AND MIND 192 First, the desire for a monistic or an idealistic metaphysic is usually held up by those who experience it as something peculiarly lofty and deserving of considerate treatment. But the fact that such forms of metaphysical or ontological doctrine appeal in this way to certain persons does not in any way strengthen their claim to our acceptance. Such desires are by no means universal, and it is only by ranging all those who share one’s taste in metaphysic as sheep over against the goats, whose tastes are different, that the desire is made to seem, in the eyes of those who experience it, to carry with it a warrant of the truth of their views. Many worthy men have, however, preferred a pluralistic or even a materialistic metaphysic. Such tastes are merely personal idiosyncrasies, like a preference for French mustard or for music in a minor key. Secondly, Animism is perfectly compatible with a monistic view of the universe and with an idealistic metaphysic. (Indeed we have seen that Idealism, when consistently carried through, implies Animism.) This is sufficiently shown by the fact that a number of highly competent philosophers, notably Lotze, Bradley and A. E. Taylor, combine to their own satisfaction their prefer- ence for Animism or psycho-physical Dualism with Monism and Idealism. It is, in fact, one of the great advantages of psycho-physical Dualism that, whereas each of the rival monistic doctrines necessarily commits those who accept it to some particular ontological doctrine (Materialism, Spinozistic agnostic Monism, or Psychical Monism), we are committed by Animism to no meta- physical doctrine. We may accept it while remaining wholly on the plane of empirical science ; and, in view of the strong dislike of metaphysic expressed by so many workers in the natural sciences, this fact should be for them a strong recom- mendation of Animism. It is true that Descartes’ psycho- physical Dualism was made by him a metaphysical Dualism ; for he taught that matter and soul are two ultimately different kinds of reality. But scientific Animism is under no obligation to accept Descartes’ ontological dogma ; it leaves open the ultimate questions, about which it is a mere piece of presumption for any man to express a decided opinion in the present state of human knowledge. For it the real natures of both body and soul remain open questions, the answers to which, we may hope, will be gradually brought nearer to the truth by the labours of after- ARGUMENTA AD HOMINEM 195 coming generations. For the present the animist may, if he likes, suppose the body to consist of matter such as is described by physical science ; or, with Kant, he may regard it as the pheno- menon of an unknowable thing-for-itself ; or, with Leibnitz and Lotze, as a system of real beings of like nature with the soul ; or, with Berkeley, as nothing but the perpetually re- newed acts of God upon our souls. In any case his ontological view, whatever it may be, so long as it is not solipsistic, need not affect, and is perfectly compatible with, his belief in psycho- physical interaction. That mechanical or parallelistic Monism seems to render a coherent account of the world in which no mysteries or fundamental problems remain, whereas Animism leaves on our hands, indeed forces upon us, a number of questions to which we can return no satisfactory answers ; these facts may and do, no doubt, seem to many minds to afford good reason for rejecting Animism ; but surely only to those who desire to “ lay the intellect to rest on a pillow of obscure ideas.” For the solutions of the deepest problems offered by such Monism are largely verbal only. Though such Monism became universally accepted, men, regardless of logic, would still speculate on the possibility of a future life, or even continue to hope for it, and would still ask whether there be not somewhere in the universe “ a power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.’* And this preference for an account of the universe which appears as final and complete, leaving no loose ends and no unfathomed possibilities, is neither universal nor deserving of special consideration. There are minds of another type to which Animism recommends itself just because it points to a great unknown in which great discoveries still await the intrepid explorer, a vast region at whose mysteries we can hardly guess, but to which we can look forward with wonder and awe, and towards which we may go on in a spirit of joyful adventure, con- fident in the knowledge that, though superstition is old, science is still young and has hardly yet learnt to spread^ her wings and leave the solid ground of sense-perception.^ As to the bearing on our problem of the fact that Animism ^ “ The highest philosophy of the scientific investigator is precisely this toleration of an incomplete conception of the world, and the preference for it rather than an apparently perfect, but inadequate, conception.” Thus Prof. Mach in " The Science of Mechanics,” p. 464. 194 BODY AND MIND was first excogitated by savage man, perhaps before he had learnt the use of fire, tools, or clothing, and that it has in all ages and amongst almost all peoples been the popularly accepted doctrine ; I do not know that the modern animist need feel any shame on that account, or need regard the fact as affording any presumption against the truth of his view. Many an existing savage tribe and, probably, that mythical creature, primitive man himself, has agreed with the psychical monists in believing the stars to be conscious beings ; and Fechner and Paulsen have not disdained to call their testimony to the support of their own view, claiming for primitive men the clear untroubled vision natural to the childhood of the world. So,Jn this respect, the rival doctrines may cry “ quits.'’ Let us now glance at certain important consequences that logically follow from the acceptance of Parallelism. To many the most important consequence will seem to be the necessity of rejecting every conception of God, other than the pantheistic. Epiphenomenalism is of course not properly compatible with any religious belief or hope ; it can only be so combined by those who have the water-tight compartment " type of mind. But both forms of the identity-hypothesis are readily and usually combined with a pantheistic metaphysic, and will permit of no other form of religious belief. I do not wish to urge this as an argument against Parallelism ; but it is proper that this important implication of it should be explicitly mentioned in the course of our examination of the various theories of the relation of mind to body. It must be clearly recognized, then, that Animism, or the dualistic doctrine of soul and body reciprocally influencing one another, is the only psycho-physical theory logically compatible with Theism, with a belief in a personal God, a Divine Creator, Designer and Ruler of the World ; and that, when it is claimed for Parallelism that its acceptance will bring to an end the age-long strife between science and religion, the claim is only valid on the improbable assumption that Pantheism, which by the leaders of religion in all past ages has generally been held to be little better than Atheism, will prove in the future to be an acceptable and sufficient basis for all religious thought and feeling. Another important implication of all forms of psycho-physical Monism is that human personality does not survive the death of the body. That Epiphenomenalism necessarily involves this ARGUMENTA AD HOMINEM 195 implication needs no demonstration. But the implication is not perhaps so obvious and incontestable in the case of the parallel- istic hypotheses. In this connexion, only the two varieties of the Identity-hypothesis need consideration ; for, as we have seen, Parallelism proper logically implies one or other of these hypotheses. Fechner held, and sought with much ingenuity and ardent eloquence to show, that his psycho-physical theory was compatible with a belief in a life after death. But all unbiassed minds, I think, will admit that, if either form of the identity- hypothesis may be made to seem not to rule out the possibility of survival of human personality after death, it is only because it leaves the existence and nature of personality, of the individuality of the conscious self, an absolute mystery unrelieved by any ray of light Let us glance for a moment at the way in which Fechner attempted to reconcile his psycho-physical doctrine with his belief in life after death. In “Das Buchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode,’' he begins by ascribing immortality to men in so far as their thoughts and actions continue to affect the thoughts and lives of after-coming generations.^ Survival of this sort is of course undeniable ; it is equally com- patible with all psycho-physical theories ; but it is not survival of the self-conscious personality. After this he plunges at once into poetical descriptions of the life of the souls of the departed, which, if the language is to be taken literally, show him to have shared the beliefs about the dead which are generally regarded as the exclusive property of the despised spiritists.^ Such language alternates with passages more consistent with the pantheistic scheme. We are told that, when a man dies, his spirit pours itself freely through Nature and no longer merely senses the waves of sound and light, but itself rolls on through air and ether ^ ; that the spirits of the dead will dwell in the earth as in a common body, and that all processes of Nature will be to them what the processes of our bodies are to us.^ Fechner himself raises the question — How can an individual •consciousness retain its unity when for its physical or bodily ^ “ Was irgend Jemand wahrend semes Lebens zur, Sebopfung, Gestaltung Oder Bewabxung der diirch die Menschheit und Natur sich ziebenden Ideen beigetragen hat, das ist sem unsterbbeber Teil ** (p. 8). * " At every festival that we make for them the dead rise up ; they hover about every statue that we set up for them ; they hear with us every song in. which their deeds are celebrated*’ (p. 35). ®P. 53. BODY AND MIND 196 aspect it has the whole earth, and has it in common with all other departed souls ? But he answers the question only by asking another — “ Ask first, how consciousness retains its unity in the smaller extension of the body.” And we are left to infer that, because Parallelism can find no answer to this urgent question, it is absolved from the impossible task of finding an answer to the other. In another work he defines his conception of the soul in a way very difficult to reconcile with his psycho- physical doctrine — “ By Soul I understand the unitary being which appears to no one but itself.” ^ And again — “ I understand by Spirit and Soul the same being which, as opposed to the body, appears to itself”^; “the spirit is itself that which unites the multiplicity of the body.”® In short, the language used by Fechner in discussing this subject is woefully lacking in precision and consistency ; the reasoning is loose to the last degree, consisting in the main of hints at analogies, suggestions of similes and metaphors ; and it is only with such reasoning that he attempts to meet the essential difficulty of reconciling Parallelism with belief in any survival of personality. The difficulty may be stated as follows : According to Fechner’s own teaching the consciousness of each individual is a composite resultant of the conjunction of the minor con- sciousnesses of the cells of the brain and body, and these again of their elements ; or, strictly in terms of Psychical Monism, the spatial and functional conjunction of bodily elements is the phenomenal manifestation of the conjunction in the unitary system of personal consciousness of many minor conscious activities ; or again, in terms of the two-aspect doctrine, the composition of the bodily elements is a phenomenal appearance of some composition of real elements, which in its other or psychical aspect appears as the composite stream of con- sciousness.^ The dissolution of the body, then, must also be ^ “ Ueber die Seelenfrage ” Leipzig, 1861, p. 9. ^ Op. cxt.y p. IS 3 op, cit.y p. 168. ^ Kant himself and most of his followers have admitted that the spatial relations of phenomena correspond to some system of real relations between the things-in-themselves that appear to ns in perception as phenomena in space ; thus Vaihinger writes ( “ Kant Commentar,” li. p. 143) : “Kant, therefore, re- cognizes relations of the things-in-themselves which correspond to space, but regards them as unknowable. On the other hand Lambert’s suggestion still holds good, and with all the more force, that to reason by analogy from the spatial relations of appearances to the true relations of things-in-themselves is not only allowable but required.” ARGUMENTA AD HOMINEM 197 regarded as the phenomenal manifestation of some corresponding change in the underlying reality, and must be paralleled by a dissolution of the mental life into its elements. The following passage will serve to illustrate the way Fechner attempts to deal with this difficulty. ‘‘ How is it then with the playing of a violin ? You think, if a violin, which has just been played upon, is broken up, then it is all over with its music : it dies away, never to sound again, and so also dies away the self-conscious music of the human brain, when death destroys the instrument. But at the destruction of the violin, as also at the death of the man, there is something that you neglect, in looking only at that which is most obvious. The notes of the violin resound in the wide air, and not only the last note of the music, but the whole of it. Now you suppose that, when the sound has gone by you, it has died away ; but anyone standing at a greater distance can still hear it, therefore it must still exist ; one who stands too far away will not hear it at all, but not because it has ceased to be ; the sound merely spreads itself out too widely, becomes too feeble to be heard at a single spot ; but imagine that your ear accompanies the sound and spreads itself out with the widening circle of the vibration, then you would continue to hear it. It is never extinguished ; it remains for ever. The narrowly bounded violin has spread its music into infinity. You ask, who could really follow the sound and hear it whithersoever it goes ? But something really follows it everywhere : the sound itself follows itself everywhere. How now, if it could hear itself? Would it not continue to hear itself for ever ? Vain supposition truly in the case of the lifeless violin, but is it vain also in the case of the live instrument? The lifeless one is played upon by others, and so its music is only heard by others just where they happen to be, and does not hear itself. But the living violin of our body plays itself, and so also its music hears itself and only needs to follow after itself in order to continue to hear itself ^ I think it worth while to cite this passage, because it is a fair sample of the reasonings employed by Fechner throughout his many writings on this topic, and illustrates very well their attractive, fantastic, and unconvincing character. Paulsen, who was a faithful disciple of Fechner, evidently recognized the doubtful character of Fechner’s reasonings con- 1 Zend-Avesta,*' Bd. II. S. 293. BODY AND MIND 198 cerning the life after death ; he himself dismisses the question of survival in half a page, saying — “ it is unthinkable that a soul- life should be annihilated”; and suggesting that, as our past soul-life continues to exist in present memory, so the individual life may continue to exist as an enduring element of the life and consciousness of God. To which he adds, a little lamely, that nothing prevents our believing that it may continue to enjoy a certain independence and unity of consciousness within the whole.^ But, it may be said, Kant has settled this question once for all — Why then trouble to display the inconsequence of Fechner’s fantastic reasoning ? Fechner committed the error condemned by Kant in the metaphysicians who preceded him, namely, he attempted to apply his understanding to the things of the mundus intdligibilis, with which only the practical reason can deal. Now I do not know that any living philosopher who is seriously to be reckoned with accepts Kant’s reasoning on this matter ; but the authority and prestige of Kant’s name are so great that it seems necessary to consider his teaching in lespect to immortality. Kant sought to establish the immortality of the soul by setting up the mundus intelligibilis, which he separated from the mundus sensibilis or physical wwld by an impassable chasm, in the dark abysses of which the thing-for-itself hovered uncertainly. For he taught that, just as the world is two worlds, so man is two men, one, a phenomenal man belonging to the mundus sensibilis and wholly subject to mechanical law and, therefore, to dissolution ; the other a pure thinking being belonging to the mundus tntelligibilis^ and therefore immortal, like all other things of that world. And Kant left the relation between these two men as completely obscure as that between the two worlds. I have already commented upon the unacceptable character of this dualism ; and here I have only to insist upon the inad- missibility of the method by which it is reached. That method was to divide the human intellect into two intellects, two disparate faculties of knowing and reasoning, the theoretical and the Einleitung,” S. 267. In almost the last of his published works, A Plural- istic Universe,*’ the late William James expressed a general adhesion to Fechner’s world-view ; and he certainly believed that the mind of man is not wholly de- stroyed on the death of the body. But he never accepted Parallelism or the mechanistic assumptions on which it is based, but held a peculiar animistic view of the psycho-physical relation, which he called the “ transmission theory.” ARGUMENTA AD HOMINEM 199 practical reasons, and to assign the two worlds to the two intellects respectively. To maintain that the human mind comprises these two intellects, the exercise of which leads to incompatible results, to an antinomy, is to assert the inadequacy of the human mind to the tasks of philosophy, especially to the task of reconciling science with religion, which is commonly regarded as the prime function of philosophy ; and, if Kant’s epistemology were such as to compel our adhesion to it, we should have to resign ourselves to a radical '' scepticism of the instrument.” But the reasoning by which Kant attempted to establish the practical reason as a dis- tinct faculty can hardly be seriously maintained at the present day. He found the surest evidence of the mundus intelligibilis and of the faculty by aid of which we apprehend it, in man’s conscious- ness of duty, of vocation, of the worth of spiritual and moral goods. This moral consciousness, he declared, is the expression of man’s inmost nature and in it his belief in God, freedom, and immortality may securely rest. Thus the nature of man’s moral consciousness, ascertainable as empirical fact, is made by Kant the guarantee of the mundus intelligibilis and of all that belongs to it, including the immortal soul of man. But modern psychology shows that what is called a man’s moral consciousness is his system of moral senti- ments ; that he absorbs these moral sentiments in the main from the moral tradition of his social environment, which has been slowly evolved throughout the period of civilization by a process perfectly intelligible in its main outlines ; that the moral senti- ments are no more and no less peculiar or mysterious than the other abstract sentiments, the aesthetic or the intellectual sentiments ; and that, therefore, their existence does not in the least justify the conception of the practical reason as a special faculty of an order distinct from that which we use in our ordinary commerce with the phenomenal world. That Kant should have thought it possible to erect so great a superstructure on so fragile a basis can only be understood when we reflect upon the very peculiar circumstances of his life ; how all his life long, in an age when books were comparatively rare and newspapers almost unknown, he lived in a small provincial city, hardly passing beyond sight of its steeples in all his eighty years ; how in that narrow space he lived an intensely artificial life, the life of a bookish celibate recluse, remote from 200 BODY AND MIND all the natural passions and impulses which move the mass of mankind ; how, owing to these circumstances, he inevitably remained profoundly ignorant of human nature ^ ; and how his conception of man and of his moral consciousness was determined by the fact that he was familiar only with the circle of earnest pietists in which he was born and bred.^ But, even if we could admit that the moral consciousness of mankind is as an empirical fact what Kant held it to be, the argument by which he deduces from it freedom and immortality would remain unconvincing in the last degree. Jn the “Critique of Pure Reason,” he bases the belief in a future life on the very natural demand or desire that happiness shall be proportioned to morality. But in the “ Critique of Practical Reason,” he bases belief in immortality on the demand for the attainment of moral perfection which seemed to him to be implied in the moral imperative : for a finite being cannot attain to moral perfection, but is capable of infinite progress towards it ; therefore, if the moral law is to be fulfilled, we must continue to progress for ever ; therefore we must be immortal. This, in brief, was the reasoning by means of which Kant sought to establish human immortality ; and surely Heine’s scoffing was not altogether without some slight basis in fact, when he said that Kant, having completed his scheme of things, found that the old body-servant who carried his umbrella so faithfully must have a God and a future life, and therefore gave him both. The argument has been well characterized by the late Henry Sidgwick as illustrating equally the ingenuity and the naiveie of Kant^ Few would undertake at the present day to defend Kant’s practical reason and his proof of immortality. Paulsen, for example, who must be reckoned one of the most faithful disciples, as he was one of the most able exponents of Kant, let go, as indefensible and tinged with the vices of the precritical dogmatic metaphysic, the practical reason and the moral philosophy of which it was the basis.^ ^ Be it said with all reverence for his great intellect and fine character. ^ It seems that Kant had a peculiar aversion to literature of the class by aid of which he might have widened his knowledge of human nature. ^ " The Philosophy of Kant,” p. 19. ^ One must say that anything so internally inconsistent as the ' Critique of Practical Keason * is perhaps not to be met with again in the history of philo- sophical thought” (Paulsen’s “Kant,” Eng. trans , p. 321). ARGUMENTA AD HOMINEM 201 Other psycho-physical monists, more particularly Hegelians (though not all of them), perfer to dismiss the question as to the survival of personality as an unmeaning one, or at least as one of no importance if it has any meaning ; thereby showing that their thought has risen to a height of philosophical abstraction at which it ceases to have any bearing upon the problems which to the rest of mankind seem of the deepest and most urgent interest. Of contemporary authors. Prof. H. Miinsterberg has adopted this attitude more boldly perhaps than any other.^ Kant, with one of those glaring inconsistencies which abound in his writings, had treated of the future life as a progress in time, and in fact had based his proof of immortality upon the need for such moral progress, although our conception of time was in his view applicable only to the phenomenal world. Miinsterberg boldly abides by the doctrine of the subjectivity of time and causation ; causality is the creation of my mind merely, and time is the creation of causality and therefore equally subjective- But man is fundamentally will and purpose, and will and purpose are not causes, and therefore are not in time. Hence, “ if we are really will, and thus outside of time, there is no longer any meaning in the desire for a protracted duration, this one hope in which the open and the matured materialists find themselves together.” My life as a causal system of physical and psychical processes, which lie spread out in time between the dates of my birth and of my death, will come to an end with my last breath. . . . But my real life as a system of inter-related will attitudes has nothing before or after, because it is beyond time. ... It is not born and will not die ; it is immortal, all possible thinkable time is enclosed in it ; it is eternal.” There is thus no conflict between the claim of science that we are mental mechanisms bound by law and the claim of our self-consciousness that we are free personalities.” This is what Idealism of this kind offers to the mourner ® and to him who keenly resents the great injustices of life as we know it. That this doctrine of the timeless and therefore eternal self has no value from these points of view seems obvious. And that it is Subjective Idealism and implies Solipsism seems equally clear ; for it denies the validity of the conception of causation, which, as we have seen, alone enables each of us to transcend the sphere of his immediate experience. But even if we pass over ^ It is briefly expounded in bis Ingersol Lecture, The Eternal Life.** 2 Munsterberg’s lecture is actually cast in the form of a consolatory address. 202 BODY AND MIND these objections, can we admit that the phrase the timeless existence of the self has any meaning? In common with the great majority of men of trained intelligence, I would say — none at all Munsterberg tells us repeatedly that we are essentially will and purpose ; and he repeatedly speaks of our wills as progressing or making progress, as seeking and longing, as point- ing backwards. In fact the words will and purpose are deprived at once of all meaning, if we assign them to a timeless existence ; the conceptions are inevitably bound up with the idea of the future, the idea of bringing to pass that which is not yet , and if we were to take away from Munsterberg’s discourse every word which implies the time-reference of will, no meaning would be left to his sentences. The denier of time may object that the use of these words implying time is the inevitable result of the poverty of our language. But we have a right to assert that ideas which cannot be expressed without self-contradiction are themselves self-contradictory. That the difficulty, defined above, of reconciling Parallelism with personal survival after death is very real and great, can hardly be denied ; and that Fechner’s acute mind should have been unable to do anything more towards overcoming it, than to offer such vague analogies as that of the violin, does but accentuate the difficulty, which to my mind seems insuperable. I conclude, then, that the view that the mind is dependent on the body, or that the consciousness and the body of a man are but two aspects of one thing, or that the body is a mode of appear- ance of his mental life, is strictly incompatible with belief in any survival of human personality after the death of the body. That Animism is the only psycho-physical hypothesis which is compatible with a belief in any continuance of human personality after death, cannot, of course, be put forward as evidence of its truth ; but it does justify a lively interest in the establishment of its truth ; especially just now when for the first time serious attempts arc being made to discover empirical evidence of such survival and the fact that these attempts seem already to justify hope of their success should at least serve to warn us against holding dogmatically, as so many now do, to Parallelism, a doctrine which is incompatible with this belief and therefore liable to be overthrown at any moment by the success of these efforts. I do not urge as any support to Animism the fact that so ^ See chap. xxv. ARGUMENTA AD HOMINEM 205 large a proportion of the human race has always believed in the life after death, nor the fact that so many ardently desire such life ; nor should I do so if this belief and this desire were universal. That all men desire immortality is merely a fiction of the literary tradition ; ^ but that we ought to desire a proof of the survival of our personality after death is, I think, de- monstrable from moral considerations. In the first place, the great injustices of human life as we know it remain as a dark shadow that cannot be relieved if each man’s personality ceases with the grave, a shadow that must darken our whole conception of the universe and of man’s position in it^ Secondly, apart from this desire for the possibility of some readjustment of the injustices of this life, and apart altogether from the influence upon conduct of belief in the reception of rewards and punish- ments after death, the desire for evidence of a continuance of personality after death is justified by the influence such evidence might be expected to have upon conduct. There can be no doubt, I think, that, where a belief in a future life obtains generally among any people, it tends to maintain and to raise the standards of thought and conduct of that people. In all ages the national existence of every highly civilized people is seriously threatened by the tendency that has proved fatal to so many States, the tendency for each individual to choose to live for himself alone and to secure for himself as much enjoy- ment as possible, regardless of all other considerations. An effective belief in a future life seems to be the only influence capable in the long run of keeping this tendency in check, when once men have begun to reflect freely upon their position in the universe. And this belief operates in this way, even though we remain entirely in the dark as to the kind of experience that may be ours after death ; for it widens our outlook, pushes back the boundaries, forbids us to regard the horizon that we see as the limit of our world, and so makes us live this life with a sense that issues are involved in it greater than any we can define or grasp ; in a word, it preserves in us something of the religious attitude towards life. Now there can be no doubt that under the influence of science this belief is rapidly decaying iSee Dr F. C. S. Schiller's essay oa **The Desire for Immortality,” in Humanism ” * It was this consideration that led the late Henry Sidgwick to devote so large a part of his energies to the search for empirical evidence of a life after death. 204 BODY AND MIND among all the leading nations of the world. Here is, then, not any new evidence in fav^our of Animism, but good reason for refusing to give it up, unless we are logically compelled to do so ; good reason for subjecting the claims of Parallelism to the most severe criticism ; good reason for keeping open our minds towards all the evidence that goes to prove the inadequacy of the prin- ciples of physical science to explain the whole course of the universe. Lastly, I may properly notice in this chapter a circumstance which has exerted in recent times a very considerable influence in securing for the parallelistic interpretations the large following that they now enjoy among the students of science and philo- sophy ; I mean the fact that so large a majority of influential writers have given their adhesion to one or other of these allied doctrines, especially among those who in recent years have explicitly discussed the pycho-physical problem. Among this large number I enumerate the following authors whose activities have fallen within the distinctly modern period — Fechner, Paulsen, Wundt, Ebbinghaus, Miinsterberg, Hoffding, Ribot, Huxley, Spencer, Tyndal, Romanes, Lewes, Bain, Bosanquet, Lloyd Morgan, Stout. It is right that these names should carry great weight. But in view of the imposing character of this array of names (which might be indefinitely prolonged), it is important that I should point out that the defenders of Animism are not confined to the ranks of authors of popular treatises and manuals of devotion, but that amongst them are a number of men whose philosophical achievements give them the right to a most respectful hearing. Among those authors who have been familiar with the achieve- ments of modern science, and who may be reckoned on the side of Animism, because they either have explicitly defended it or have declared themselves unable to accept any one of the parallelistic doctrines, I name Lotze, Sigwart, C. Stumpf, O. Kiilpe, L. Busse, Bergson, James Ward, William James, Henry Sidgwick, F. H. Bradley, G. T. Ladd, A. E. Taylor.^ ^ To this list of names I think I may add those of two brothers whose claims to rank high among philosophers are apt to be forgotten m a world which freely accords them the higher honours of statesmanship, I mean of course Messrs Arthur and Gerald Balfour. I add their names with some hesitation, because they have not dealt explicitly with the psycho-physical problem. Yet their keen interest in the work of the Society for Psychical Research and various passages in their published writings seem to justify the inclusion of their names an the list. ARGUMENTA AD HOMINEM 205 The reader may therefore approach my defence of Animism with the comforting assurance that, if he should incline towards its acceptance, he will find himself, not indeed on the popular side in the world of science and philosophy, but in highly respectable company. CHAPTER XV EXAMINATION OF THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST ANIMISM FROM EPISTEMOLOGy, “INCONCEIVABILITY,” AND THE LAW OF CONSERVATION OF ENERGY T WO arguments against Animism are put forward with the claim that they suffice to necessitate the rejection of that doctrine, because either one standing alone makes un- tenable the belief in any psychical intervention with the course of physical process. These must first be examined ; for if their claims are valid, our discussion may quickly be brought to its end. It would only remain for us to choose between the rival parallelistic interpretations. If, however, they prove to be incon- clusive, we must go on to examine the arguments on the same side whose claim is less absolute, and which are put forward rather as supports to these leading arguments, than as in themselves capable of deciding the issue. These two principal arguments are that from the law of the conservation of energy, and that from the inconceivability of psycho-physical interaction. By those who accept atomistic Materialism as metaphysical truth they are combined in one great dogma, v.^hich runs — all real process consists in the movement of masses, all motion is caused by motion only, and all acceleration or change of motion of any body is caused by impact of some other body upon it. This dogma, of course, rules out psycho-physical interaction, and, if it were well established truth, there would be nothing more to be said in defence of Animism. But, since this dogmatic metaphysical Materialism is no longer seriously defended, we must consider the two contentions separately. That psycho-physical interaction is impossible because we cannot conceive it or understand it, is the old argument of the Occasionalists. By them it was put in the form — We cannot conceive how things so unlike as inextended immaterial soul and material extended body can act upon one another. For they accepted Descartes’ dualistic metaphysic. The premise of their 206 GENERAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST ANIMISM 207 argument was that action is only possible between things of like nature. This phrase, in so far as it conveys any meaning, is merely the expression of an unfounded prejudice which, like many another, has been given the dignity and importance of a meta- physical truth. The validity of the proposition is at least as doubtful as its meaning is obscure. The various modern dressings of this argument from incon- ceivability, some of which we have noticed,^ add nothing to its force. The argument was answered by Lotze for all time when he wrote — ‘‘ The kernel of this error is always that we believe ourselves to possess a knowledge of the nature of the action of one thing on another which we not only do not possess, but which is in itself impossible, and that we then regard the relation between matter and soul as an exceptional case, and are astonished to find ourselves lacking in all knowledge of the nature of their interaction.^' It is easy to show that in the interaction between body and soul there lies no greater riddle than in any other example of causation, and that only the false conceit that we understand something of the one case, excites our astonishment that we understand nothing of the other.” ^ As Hume long ago showed, we have no insight into causal action in the physical world, even of the simplest kind. The communication of motion by im- pact, as of one billiard ball upon another, is the kind of causation or transitive action in the physical world with which we are most familiar ; and physical science has attempted in the past to exhibit all physical causation as being of this type. In so far as we succeed in conceiving any instance of causation as of this most familiar type, we are apt to feel that we understand it or have explained it. Now, since psycho-physical interaction can- not be reduced to the same familiar type (for by the very terms of the hypothesis it is a kind of interaction sui generis)^ it is true that we cannot understand it in this sense of the word. But in no other sense than that of reduction to a familiar type of sequence, such as that of motion or impact, can we understand physical interaction ; it is admitted by the philo- ^ P. 91 and p. 122. * ** Medizinisciie Psychologie,” S. 56. In a similar vein Kant wrote: For all difficulties winch concern the combination of the thinking being with matter arise without exception from the insidious dualistic idea that matter as such is not appearance, that is to say, a mere presentation of the mind to which corresponds an unknown object, but is thar object itself as it exists outside us and independ- ently of our sensory powers " (** Kritik d. r, V.,” Erdmann^s edition, p. 336). 208 BODY AND MIND sophers and physicists alike that, when we try to penetrate into the intimate nature of the process of communication of motion by impact, we find ourselves in the midst of insuperable difficulties. It is well said by Professor Stumpf that “ the unlikeness of soul and body can hardly be seriously urged (against the possibility of psycho-physical interaction) by any person of insight acquainted with the investigations of David Hume. Cause and effect are not necessarily of like nature. Only experience can show what things belong together as cause and effect. And least of all should those deny the possibility of interaction of these unlike things, who preach their substantial unity or identity ; for the relation of the two worlds, the physical and the psychical, implied by this doctrine of substantial unity, is an even more intimate one than the causal relation.” ^ The following considerations make this argument from in- conceivability appear not only invalid, but also a little absurd. The argument implies, as Lotze said, that we understand physical causation in some more intimate way than any other kind of causation. Now if, as Hume maintained, by causation we mean and can mean nothing more than invariable concomitance or sequence, then the invariable concomitance of consciousness and brain-process asserted by the Monists is as good a case of causation as any other. But the only alternative to this doctrine of Hume is that provided by psychology and now generally accepted ; according to this view, our conception of physical causation is not arrived at only or chiefly by the observation of invariable concomitance of phenomena ; for such observation can rarely be made without interruption of the series of repetitions by apparent exceptions to the rule : it is achieved rather by the projection into the material mass, which we set in movement by pushing against it and which seems to resist our push, a capacity for effort or the exercise of power such as we are immediately conscious of when we put forth our strength. That is to say our conception of causation is principally derived from our experience of volitional effort, of psychical causation, and is only secondarily applied to the explanation of physical events. Accordingly, it may be plausibly maintained, and by many philosophers has been maintained, that psychical causation is the only kind of causation of which we have any understanding. And this view is at ^ "Leib und Seele, 1896.” GENERAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST ANIMISM 209 least as true as that which claims that we understand physical causation only. Now, when we find, as in this case, that all the persons whose training fits them to form a judgment on a particular question are ranged in two opposite camps returning directly opposed answers to the question, the only philosophical attitude we can assume is one of suspension of judgment, and of recognition that the peculiar prejudices of individuals and the limitations of their imaginations, or even the limitation of the imagination of the whole human race at any given period of its evolution, ought not to be accepted as the criterion of what is, or is not, possible in the universe. The other less crude way of presenting the argument fails to render it any more decisive. It is said that the spatial conceptions which we use for dealing in thought with the phenomenal world cannot legitimately be intermixed with conceptions of non-spatial influences. But this is a difficulty of our own making, which disappears if we admit that the spatial processes we perceive and conceive are but the phenomenal manifestation of some underlying real processes. And it must be admitted that, if the conceptions which we habitually use in dealing in thought with the physical world are unsuitable for dealing with the case of psycho-physical interaction, that fact cannot disprove the reality of such interaction, but merely points to our need of a more adequate system of conceptions for dealing with the psycho-physical problem. But perhaps the shortest and most effective way of meeting this argument is the following. If you deny all causation you are a solipsist (for without recognizing the validity of the principle of causation you cannot get beyond your own consciousness), and we leave you in your splendid isolation. If you are an epiphenomenalist, you believe that the brain-processes are the cause of your thoughts, that is, you believe in the action of the physical on the psychical, or causation of the psychical by the physical ; and this is at least as difficult to understand as the action of the psychical on the physical. If you are a parallelist in the strict sense of the word, you leave the relation of the psychical to the physical as a perpetual mystery. If you accept either of the two remaining alternatives