CHAPTER II.ANIMISM.
The Common Characteristic of Animism and Vitalism: the Human Statue—Primitive Animism—Stahl’s Animism—First Objection with Reference to the Relation between Soul and Body—Second Objection: the Unconscious Character of Vital Operations—Twofold Modality of the Soul—Continuity of the Soul and Life.
Children are taught that there are three kingdoms in Nature—the mineral kingdom and the two living kingdoms, animal and vegetable. This is the whole of the sensible world. Then above all that is placed the world of the soul. School-boys therefore have no doubts on the doctrines that we discuss here. They have the solution. To them there are three distinct spheres, three separate worlds—matter, life, and thought.
It is this preconceived idea that we are about to examine. Current opinion solvesa priorithe question of the fundamental homogeneity or lack of resemblance of these three orders of phenomena—the phenomena of inanimate nature, of living nature, and of the thinking soul.Animism,vitalism, andmonismare, in reality, different ways of looking at them. They are the different answers to this question:—Are vital, psychic, and physico-chemical manifestations essentially distinct? Vitalists distinguish between life and thought, animists identify them. In the opposite camp mechanicians, materialists, or monists make the same mistake as the animists, but to that mistake they add another: they assimilate the forces at play in animals and plants to the general forces of the universe; they confuse all three—soul, life, inanimate nature.
These problems belong on many sides to metaphysical speculation. They have been discussed by philosophers; they have been solved from time immemorial in different ways, for reasons and by arguments which it is not our purpose to examine here, and which, moreover, have not changed. But on some sides they belong to science, and must be tested in the light of its progress. Cuvier and Bichat, for example, considered that the forces in action in living beings were not only different from physico-mechanical forces, but were utterly opposed to them. We now know that this antagonism does not exist.
The preceding doctrines, therefore, depend up to a certain point on experiment and observation. They are subject to the test of experiment and observation in proportion as the latter can give us information on the degree of difference or analogy presented by psychic, vital, and physico-chemical facts. Now, scientific investigations have thrown light on these points. There is no doubt that the analogies and the resemblances of these three orders of manifestations have appeared more and more numerous and striking as our knowledge has advanced. Hence it is that animism can count to-day but very few advocates in biological science. Vitalism in its different forms counts more supporters, but the great majority have adopted the physico-chemical theory.
Both animism and vitalism separate from matter a directing principle which guides it. At bottom they are mythological theories somewhat similar to the paganism of old. The fable of Prometheus or the story of Pygmalion contains all that is essential. An immaterial principle, divine, stolen by the Titan from Jupiter, or obtained from Venus by the Cypriot sculptor, descends from Olympus and animates the form, till then inert, which has been carved in the marble or modelled in the clay. In a word, there is a human statue. It receives a breath of heavenly fire, a vital force, a divine spark, a soul, and behold! it is alive. But this breath can also leave it. An accident happens, a clot in a vein, a grain of lead in the brain—the life escapes, and all that is left is a corpse. A single instant has proved sufficient to destroy its fascination. This is how all men picture to their minds the scene of death. The breath escapes; something flies away, or flows away with the blood. The happy genius of the Greeks conceived a graceful image of this, for they represented the life or the soul in the form of a butterfly (Psyche) leaving the body, an ethereal butterfly, as it were, opening its sapphire wings.
But what is this subtle and transient guest of the human statue, this passing stranger which makes of the living body an inhabited house? According to the animists it is the soul itself, in the sense in which the word is understood by philosophers; the immortal and reasoning soul. To the vitalists it is an inferior, subordinate soul; a soul, as it were, of secondary majesty, the vital force, or in a word, life.
Primitive Animism.—Animism is the oldest and most primitive of the conceptions presented to thehuman mind. But in so far as it is a co-ordinated doctrine, it is the most recent. In fact it only received its definitive expression in the eighteenth century, from Stahl, the philosopher-physician and chemist.
According to Tylor, one of the first speculations of primitive man, of the savage, is as to the difference between the living body and the corpse. The former is an inhabited house, the latter is empty. To such rudimentary intellects the mysterious inhabitant is a kind ofdoubleor duplicate of the human form. It is only revealed by the shadow which follows the body when illuminated by the sun, by the image of its reflection in the water, by the echo which repeats the voice. It is only seen in a dream, and the figures which people and animate our dreams are nothing but these doubled, impalpable beings. Some savages believe that at the moment of death the double, or the soul, takes up its residence in another body. Sometimes each individual possesses, not one of these souls, but several. According to Maspero, the Egyptians counted at least five, of which the principle, thekaordouble, would be the aeriform or vaporous image of the living form. Space is peopled by souls on their travels, which leave one set of bodies to occupy another set. After having been the cause of life in the bodies which they animated, they react from without on other beings, and are the cause of all sorts of unexpected events. They are benevolent or malevolent spirits.
Analogy inevitably leads simple minds to extend the same ideas to animals and plants; in a word, to attribute souls to everything alive, souls more or less nomadic, wandering, or interchangeable, as is taughtin the doctrine of metempsychosis. Mons. L. Errera points out that this primitive, co-ordinated, hierarchized doctrine—meet subject for the poet’s art—is the basis of all ancient mythologies.
The Animism of Stahl.—Modern animism was much more narrow in scope. It was a medical theory—i.e.almost exclusive to man. Stahl had adopted it in a kind of reaction against the exaggerations of the mechanical school of his time. According to him, the life of the body is due to the intelligent and reasoning soul. It governs the corporeal substance and directs it towards an assigned end. The organs are its instruments. It acts on them directly, without intermediaries. It makes the heart beat, the muscles contract, the glands secrete, and all the organs perform their functions. Nay more, it is itself the architectonic soul, which has constructed and which maintains the body which it rules. It is themens agitat molemof Virgil.
It is remarkable that these ideas, so excessively and exaggeratedly spiritualistic, should have been brought forward by a chemist and a physician, while ideas completely opposed to these were admitted by philosophers like Descartes and Leibniz, who were decided believers in the spirituality of the soul. Stahl had been Professor of Medicine at the University of Halle, physician to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and later to the King of Prussia. He left an important medical and chemical work, both theoretical and practical. He is the author of the celebrated theory of phlogiston, which held its ground in chemistry up to the time of Lavoisier. He died about 1734.
Animism survived him for some time, maintained by the zeal of a few faithful disciples. But after thewitty mockery of Bordeu,[1]in 1742, it began to decay. We must, however, point out that an attempt to revive this theory was made in 1878 by a well-known doctor of the last generation, E. Chauffard. While preserving the essential features of the theory, this learned physician proposed to bring it into harmony with modern science, and to free it from all the reproaches which had been levelled at it.
The Animism of E. Chauffard.—These reproaches were numerous. The most serious is of a philosophic nature. It rises from the difficulty of conceiving a direct and immediate action of the soul, considered as a spiritual principle, upon the matter of the body. There is such an abyss—hewn by the philosophic mind itself—between soul and body, that it is impossible to imagine any relation between them. We can only get a glimpse of how the soul might become an instrument of action.
This was the problem which sorely tried the genius of Leibniz. Descartes, in earlier days, attacked it vigorously, like an Alexander cutting the Gordian knot. He separated the soul from the body, and made of the latter a pure machine in the government of which the soul had no part. He attributed all the known manifestations of vital activity to inanimate forces. Leibniz, also, was compelled to reject all action, all contact, all direct relation, every real bond between soul and body, and to imagine between thema purely metaphysical relation—pre-established harmony:—“Soul and body agree in virtue of this harmony, the harmony pre-established since the creation, and in no way by a mutual, actual, physical influence. Everything that takes place in the soul takes place as if there were no body, and so everything takes place in the body as if there were no soul.” At this point we almost reach a scientific materialism. It is easy for the materialist to break this frail tie of pre-established harmony which so loosely unites body and soul, and to exhibit the organism as under the sole control of universal mechanics and physics.
Thus the weak point of Stahl’s animism was the supposition of a direct action exercised on the organism by a distinct, heterogeneous, spiritual principle.
Chauffard has endeavoured to avoid this pitfall. In conformity with modern ideas, he has brought together what the ancient philosophers and Stahl himself separated—the activity of matter and the activity of the soul. “Thought, action, function, are embraced in an indissoluble union.” This is the classical but not very lucid theory which has been so often reproduced—Homo factus est anima vivens—which Bossuet has expressed in the celebrated formula: “Soul and body form a natural whole.”
A second objection raised against animism is that the soul acts consciously, with reflection, and with volition, and that its essential attributes are not found in most physiological phenomena, which, on the contrary are automatic, involuntary, and unconscious. The contradictory nature of these characteristics has obliged vitalists to conceive of a vital principle distinct from thought. Chauffard, agreeing here withBoullieu, Tissot, and Stahl himself, does not accept this distinction; he refuses to shatter the unity of the vivifying and thinking principle. He prefers to attribute to the soul two modes of action: the one which is exercised on the acts of thought, and hence it proceeds consciously, with reflection, and with volition; the other exercising control over the physiological phenomena which it governs, “by unconscious impressions, and by instinctive determinations, obeying primordial laws.” This soul is hardly in keeping with his definition of a conscious, reflecting, and voluntary principle; it is a new soul, a somatic soul, singularly akin to thatrachidian soulwhich, according to Pflüger, a well-known German physiologist, resides in each segment of the spinal marrow, and is responsible for reflex movements.
Twofold Modality of the Soul.—This twofold modality of the soul, this duality admitted by Stahl and his disciples, was repugnant to many thinkers, and it is this repugnance that gave rise to the vitalistic school. It appeared to them to be a heresy tainted by materialism—and so it was. In this lay the strength and the weakness of animism. It admits of a unique animating principle for all the manifestations of the living being, for the higher facts in the realm of thought, and for the lower facts connected with the body. It throws down the barriers which separate them. It fills up the gap between the different forms of human activity, and assimilates them the one to the other.
Now this is precisely what materialism does. It, too, reduces to a single order the psychical and physiological phenomena, between which it no longer recognizes anything but a difference of degree,thought being only a maximum of the vital movement, or life a minimum of thought. In truth, the aims of the two schools are diametrically opposed; the one claims to raise corporeal activity to the dignity of thinking activity, and to spiritualize the vital fact; the other lowers the former to the level of the latter and materializes the psychic fact. But, though the intentions are different, the result is identical. Spiritualistic monism inclines towards materialistic monism. One step more, and the soul, confused with life, will be confused with physical forces.
On the other hand, twofold modality has this advantage, that it escapes the objection drawn from the existence of so many living beings to which a thinking soul cannot be attributed; an anencephalous fœtus, the young of the higher animals, the lower animals and plants, living without thought, or with a minimum of real, conscious thought. The advocate of animism replies that this physiological activity is still a soul, but one which is barely aware of its existence—a gleam of consciousness. In this theory, the knowledge of self, the consciousness, is of all degrees. On the other hand, in the eyes of the vitalist, it is an absolute fact which allows of no attenuation, of no middle course between the being and the non-being.
It is this conception of the continuity of the soul and life, it is the affirmation of a possible lowering of the complete consciousness down to a mere gleam of knowledge, and finally down to unconscious vital activity, which saved animism from complete shipwreck. That is why this ancient doctrine finds, even in the present day, a few rare supporters. An able German scientist,G. von Bunge, well known for his researches in physiological chemistry, professes animistic views in a work which appeared in 1889. He attributes to organized beings a guiding principle, a kind of vital soul. A distinguished naturalist, Rindfleisch, of Lübeck, has likewise taken his place among the advocates of what we may call neo-animism.