[pg 278]Chapter X. Autonomy Of Spirit.The aim of our study has been to define our attitude to naturalism, and to maintain in the teeth of naturalism the validity and freedom of the religious conception of the world. This seemed to be cramped and menaced by those“reductions to simpler terms”which we have already discussed.But one of these reductions, the most important of all, we have not yet encountered, and it remains to be dealt with now. In comparison with this one all others are relatively unimportant, and it is easy to understand how some have regarded the problem of the relations of the naturalistic and the religious outlook as beginning at this point, and have neglected everything below it. For we have now to consider the attempt of naturalism to“reduce”spirit itself to terms of nature, either to derive it from nature, or, when that is recognised as quite too confused and impossible, to make it subject to nature and her system of laws, or to similar laws, and thus to rob it of its freedom and independence, of its essential character as above nature and free from it, and to bring it down to the level of an accompanying[pg 279]shadow or a mere reverse side of nature. The aggressive naturalism which we have discussed has from very early times exercised itself on this point, and has instinctively and rightly felt that herein lies the kernel of the whole problem under dispute. It has for the most part concentrated its interest and its attacks upon the“immortality of the soul.”But while this was often the starting-point, the nature of soul, and spirit, and consciousness in general have been brought under discussion and subjected to attacks which sought to show how vague and questionable was the reality of spirit as contrasted with the palpable, solid and indubitable reality of the outer world. Prominence was given to the fact that the spiritual side of our nature is dependent on and conditioned by the body and bodily states, the external environment, experiences and impressions. These were often the sole, and always the chief subjects of the doctrine of the vulgar naturalism. But the same is true of the naturalism of the higher order, as we described it in Chapter II. In order to acquire definite guiding principles of investigation, it makes the attempt to find the true reality of phenomena in the mechanical, corporeal, physiological processes, and to take little or no account of the co-operation, the interpolation, the general efficiency of sensation, perception, thought, or will, and to treat them as though they were a shadow and accompaniment of reality, but not as an equivalent, much less a preponderating constituent of it. Out of these[pg 280]fundamental principles of investigation, and out of the opposition and doubt with which the spiritual is regarded, there is compounded the current mongrel naturalism, which, without precision in its ideas, and without any great clearness or logical consequence in its views, is thoroughly imbued with the notion that that only is truly real which we can see, hear, and touch—the solid objective world of matter and energy, and that“science”begins and ends with this. As for anything outside of or beyond this, it is at most a beautiful dream of fancy, with which it is quite safe to occupy oneself as long as one clearly understands that of course it is not true.“Nature”is the only indubitable reality, and mind is but a kind oflususorluxus naturæ, which accompanies it at some few places, like a peculiarly coloured aura or shadow, but which must, as far as reality is concerned, yield pre-eminence to“Nature”in every respect.The religious conception is deeply and essentially antagonistic to all such attempts to range spirit, spiritual being, and the subjective world under“nature,”“matter,”“energy,”or whatever we may call what is opposed to mind and ranked above it in reality and value. The religious conception is made up essentially of a belief in spirit, its worth and pre-eminence. It does not even seek to compare the reality and origin of spirit with anything else whatever. For all its beliefs, the most sublime and the crudest alike, conceal within them the conviction that[pg 281]fundamentally spirit alone has truth and reality, and that everything else is derived from it. It is a somewhat pitiful mode of procedure to direct all apologetic endeavours towards the one relatively small question of“immortality,”thus following exactly the lines usually adopted by the aggressive exponents of naturalism, and thus allowing opponents to dictate the form of the questions and answers. It is quite certain that all religion which is in any way complete, includes within itself a belief in the everlastingness of our spiritual, personal nature, and its independence of the becoming or passing away of external things. But, on the one hand, this particular question can only be settled in connection with the whole problem, and, on the other hand, it is only a fraction of the much farther-reaching belief in the reality of spirit and its superiority to nature. The very being of religion depends upon this. That it may be able to take itself seriously and regard itself as true; that all deep and pious feelings, of humility and devotion, may be cherished as genuine and as founded in truth; that it behoves it to find and experience the noble and divine in the world's course, in history and in individual life; that the whole world of feeling with all its deep stirrings and mysteries is of all things the most real and true, and the most significant fact of existence—all these are features apart from which it is impossible to think of religion at all. But they all depend upon the reality, independence and absolute pre-eminence of[pg 282]spirit. Freedom and responsibility, duty, moral control and self-development, the valuation of life and our life-work according to our life's mission and ideal aims, even according to everlasting aims, and“sub specie æterni,”the idea of the good, the true and the beautiful—all things apart from which religion cannot be thought of—all these depend upon spirit and its truth. And finally“God is Spirit”: religion cannot represent, or conceive, or possess its own highest good and supreme idea, except by thinking in terms of the highest analogies of what it knows in itself as spiritual being and reality. If spirit is not real and above all other realities; if it is derivable, subordinate and dependent, it is impossible to think of anything whatever to which the name of“God”can be given. And this is as true of the refined speculations of the pantheistic poetic religions, as of the idea of God in simple piety. The interest of religion as against the claims of naturalism includes all this. And it would be doing the cause of religion sorry service to extract from this whole some isolated question to which the mood of the time or traditional custom has given prominence. Our task must be to show that religion maintains its validity and freedom because of the truth and independence of spirit and its superiority to nature.It is, of course, impossible to give an exhaustive treatment of this problem in a short study like this. The answer to this question would include the whole range of mental science with all its parts and branches.[pg 283]Mental science, from logic and epistemology up to and including the moral and æsthetic sciences, proves by its very existence, and by the fact that it cannot be reduced to terms of natural science, that spirit can neither be derived from nor analysed into anything else. And it is only when we have mastered all this that we can say how far and how strongly knowledge and known realities corroborate religion and its great conclusions as to spirit and spiritual existence, how they reinforce it and admit its validity and freedom. Since this is so, all isolated and particular endeavours in this direction can only be a prelude or introduction, and a more or less arbitrary selection from the relevant material of facts and ideas. And nothing more than this is aimed at in the following pages.Naturalistic Attacks on the Autonomy of the Spiritual.The attacks that have been made by naturalism upon the independence and freedom of the spiritual are so familiar to every one—even from school days—through books of the type of Büchner's“Kraft und Stoff,”and Haeckel's“The Riddle of the Universe,”and other half or wholly materialistic popular dogmatics, that it is unnecessary to enter into any detail. Very little that is new has been added in this connection to the attack made by Plato on himself in the“Phædo”through Simmias and Kebes. It is only apparently that the modern attacks have become more serious[pg 284]through the deepened knowledge of natural science. At all times they have been as serious and as significant as possible, and the religious and every other idealistic conception of the universe has always suffered from them. It is plain that here, if anywhere,“faith goes against appearances,”and that in the last resource we have to postulate free moral resolution, the will to believe, the desire for the ideal, for freedom, and for the eternity of the spirit, and the confidence of the spirit in itself. All this is, or at least ought to be, self-evident and generally admitted.Let us once more take a brief survey of the reasons on the other side and arrange them in order.That nature is everything and spirit very little seems to follow from a very simple circumstance. There are whole worlds of purely natural and corporeal existence without mind, sensation, or consciousness, which, quite untroubled by their absence, simply exist according to the everlasting laws of matter and energy. But nowhere do we find spirit or mind without a material basis. All that is psychical occurs in connection with a physical being, and with relatively few physical beings. Spirit seems wholly bound up with and dependent upon the states, development, and conditions of material being. With the body of living beings there arises what we call“soul”; with the body it grows, gains content, changes, matures, ages, and disappears. According as the body is constituted and composed, as it is influenced by heredity, race, and[pg 285]selection, by nutrition, mode of life, climate, and other circumstances, there are developed in a hundred different ways what we call the natural disposition or character, inclinations, virtues or vices, passions or temperaments. Even the names given to the different temperaments emphasise this dependence of what is innermost in us, the deepest tendencies of our being, on the bodily organisation and the nature of its physiological constitution. The man whose blood flows easily and freely is called sanguine, and the melancholic is the victim of his liver. According as our organs are good or bad, function freely or sluggishly, our mood rises or sinks, we are bold or cowardly, languid or impetuous, and enthusiasm is often enough only a peculiar name for a state which, physiologically expressed, might be called alcoholic poisoning. There is one soul in the sound body, another in the sickly. Fever, and the impotence of the soul against it, made Holbach a materialist. If the brain be diseased, that marvellous order of psychical processes which we call reasoning is broken; the“soul”is wholly or partly eliminated; it fades away, or becomes nothing more than a confused disconnected medley of images and desires. Even artificial interference with, and changes in the bodily organisation react upon the mind. The removal of the thyroid gland may result in idiocy. Castration not only prevents the“breaking”of the voice in the Sistine choristers, it damps the fires of life to dulness, and makes of the impetuous Abelard a comfortable discursive father-confessor.[pg 286]The mind is bound up almost piece by piece with its material basis. Through the“localisation”of psychic processes in the particular parts of the brain, naturalism has enormously strengthened the impression that existed even among the ancients, that sensation and imagination are nothing more than, let us say, what the note is to a tightly stretched string. Cerebrum and cerebellum are regarded as the seats of different psychic processes. The secret of the higher processes is believed to be hidden in the grey matter of the cortex of the cerebrum. We seek and find in the various lobes and convolutions of the brain the“centres”for the different capacities, the power of sight, of smell, of moving the arms, of moving the legs, of associating ideas, of co-ordinated speech, and so on. When brain and spinal cord are injured or removed piece by piece from a pigeon or a frog, it seems as if the“soul”were eliminated piece by piece,—the capacity for spontaneous free co-ordination, for voluntary action, for the various sense-impressions, and so on from the higher to the lower. It has even been maintained that the different feelings and perceptions which are gradually acquired can be apportioned among the individual cells of the brain in which they are localised, and the thought-processes, the associations of percepts, the origin of consecutive ideas, the rapid and easy recalling of memory-images, and the process of voluntary control, of instincts, can be explained as due to the“gradual laying down of nerve-paths”between[pg 287]the different centres and areas of localisation in the brain. All this seems to refute utterly the old belief in the unity and personality of the soul. It is different in youth and in age, and indeed varies continually. It is the ever-varied harmony of the notes of all the strings which are represented by the fibres and ganglion-cells of the nerve-substance. It apparently can not only be completely confused and brought to disharmony, but it may be halved and divided. An almost terrifying impression was produced when Trembley in 1740 made the experiment of cutting a“hydra”in two, and showed that each of the halves became a complete animal, so that obviously each of the two halves of the soul grew into a new hydra-soul. And Trembley's hydra was only the precursor of all the cut-up worms, of the frogs, birds, and guinea-pigs that have been beheaded, or have had their brain removed, or their nerves cut, and have furnished further examples of this divisibility of“souls.”If the independence of the spiritual is thus shown to be a vain assumption, the alleged difference between the animal and the human Psyche is much more so. Not from the days of Darwinism alone, but from the very beginning, naturalism has opposed this claim to distinctiveness. But it is due to Darwinism that the fundamental similarity of the psychical in man and animals has come to be regarded as almost self-evident. The mental organisation of man, as well as his corporeal organisation, is traced back through gradual stages to[pg 288]animal antecedents, and in thus tracing it there are two favourite methods of procedure, which are, however, apt to be mutually destructive.On the one hand, some naturalists regard the animal anthropomorphically, insist on its likeness to man, discovering and extolling, not without emotion, all the higher and nobler possessions of the human mind, intellectual capacities, reason, reflection, synthesis, fancy, the power of forming ideas and judgments, of drawing conclusions and learning from experience, besides will in the true sense, ethical, social and political capacities, æsthetic perceptions, and even fits of religion in elephants, apes, dogs, down even to ants and bees, and these naturalists reject old-fashioned explanations in terms of instinct, and find the highest already contained in the lowest. Those of another school are inclined to regard man theriomorphically, to insist on his likeness to animals, explaining reason in terms of perception and sensation, deriving will from impulse and desire, and ethical and æsthetic valuations from physiological antecedents and purely animal psychological processes, thus, in short, seeking to find the lowest in the highest. (We have already met with an analogous instance of a similarly fallacious double-play on parallel lines.) So it comes about that both the origin and the development of the psychical and spiritual seem to be satisfactorily cleared up and explained, and at the same time a new proof is adduced for its dependence upon the physical. For what is true of all[pg 289]other parts of the organisation, of the building up and perfecting of every member and every system of organs, the bony skeleton, the circulatory system, the alimentary canal, that they can be referred back to very simple beginnings, and that their evolution may be traced through all its stages—is equally true of the nervous system in general and of the brain in particular. It increases more and more in volume and in intricacy of structure, it expands the cranial cavity and diversifies its convolutions. And the more it grows, and the more complex it becomes, the more do the mental capacities increase in perfection, so that here again it seems once more apparent that the psychical is an accompaniment and result of the physical.Popular naturalism usually stops short here, and contents itself with half-truths and inconsequences, for it naïvely admits that psychical processes, sensation, perception, will, have a real influence upon the physical, and, not perceiving how much the admission involves, it does not trouble itself over the fact that, for instance in the so-called voluntary movements of the body, in ordinary behaviour, the psychical, and the will, in particular, is capable of real effect, and can move hand and foot and the whole body, and thus has a real reciprocal relation with the physical. This form of popular naturalism sometimes amuses itself with assuming a psychical inwardness even in non-living matter, and admitting the co-operation of psychical motives even in regard to it.[pg 290]But it is far otherwise with naturalism in the strict sense, which takes its fundamental principles and its method of investigation seriously. It is aware that such half-and-half measures interrupt the continuity of the system at the most decisive point. And therefore with the greatest determination it repeats along psychological lines the same kind of treatment that it has previously sought to apply to biological phenomena: the corporeal must form a sequence of phenomena complete in itself and not broken into from without. All processes of movement, all that looks as if it happened“through our will,”through a resolve due to the intervention of a psychical motive, every flush of shame that reddens the cheek, every stroke executed by the hand, every sound-wave caused by tongue and lips, must be the result of conditions of stimulation and tension in the energy of the body itself.This is the meaning of all those psycho-physical experiments that have been carried on with so much ingenuity and persistence (usually associated with attempts to explain vital phenomena in terms of mechanism). First, they attempt to interpret the expressions of will, feeling and need, the spontaneous activities and movements of the lowest forms of life—protists—as“pure reflexes,”as processes which take place in obedience to stimuli, and thus are ultimately due to chemical and physical influences and causes without the intervention of a psychical motive; and, secondly, when this has been apparently or really achieved, the theory of irritability[pg 291]and reflex mechanism is pushed from below upwards, until even the most intricate and complex movements and operations of our own body, which we have wrongly distinguished as acts or behaviour from mere processes of stimulation, are finally recognised as reflexes and liberations due to stimuli. Some stimulus or other, from light or sound or something else, is, according to this theory, conducted to the nervous centre, the ganglion, the spinal cord, the cerebellum or the cerebrum. Here it produces an effect, not of a psychical nature, but some minute chemical, or physical,—or purely mechanical change, which goes through many permutations within the nervous centre itself, unites there with the stored energies, and then, thus altered, returns by the efferent nerve paths to effect a muscle-contraction in some organ, a stretching of the hand, or a movement of the whole body. The physical process is accompanied by a peculiar inward mirroring, which is the psychical penumbra or shadow of the whole business. Thus what is in reality a purely mechanical and reflex sequence appears like a psychical experience, like choice and will and psychical causality. We may be compared to Spinoza's stone; it was thrown, and it thought it was flying.The reasons for interpreting things in this way lie in the principles of investigation. It is only in this way, we are told, that nature can be reduced to natural terms, that is, to chemistry, physics, and mechanics. Only in this way is it possible to gain a true insight[pg 292]into and understanding of things, and to bring them under mathematical formulæ. Thus only, too, can“the miraculous”be eliminated. For if we are obliged to admit that the will has a real influence on the corporeal, for instance upon our brain, and nerves, and arm-muscles, this would be a violation of the law of the constancy of the sum of energy. For in this case there would occur, at a certain point in the nexus of phenomena, a piece of work done, however small it might be, for which there was no equivalent of energy in the previous constitution. But this is, since the days of Helmholtz, an impossible assumption. And thus all those experiments and theories on what we have called the“second line”of mechanistic interpretation of the universe show themselves to be relevant to our present subject.Interpretations of the psychical such as these have given rise to four peculiar“isms”of an epistemological nature,i.e., related to a theory of knowledge. Not infrequently they are the historical antecedents which result in the naturalistic theory of the psychical. These are nominalism and sensualism, empiricism and a-posteriorism, which, setting themselves against epistemological rationalism, assail the dignity, the independence, and the autonomy of the thinking mind. They are so necessarily and closely associated with naturalism that their fate is intimately bound up with its fate, and they are corroborated or refuted with it. And it would be possible to conduct the whole discussion with which we[pg 293]are concerned purely with reference to these four“isms.”The strife really begins in their camp.The soul is atabula rasa, all four maintain, a white paper on which, to begin with, nothing is inscribed. It brings with it neither innate knowledge nor commands. What it possesses in the way of percepts, concepts, opinions, convictions, principles of action, rules of conduct, are inscribed upon it through experience (empiricism). That is, not antecedent to, but subsequent to experience (a posteriori). But experience can only be gained through the senses. Only thus does reality penetrate into and stamp itself upon us.“What was not first in the senses (sensus) cannot be in the intelligence.”What the senses convey to us alone builds up our mental content, from mere sensory perceptions upwards to the most abstract ideas from the simplest psychical elements up to the most complex ideas, concepts, and conclusions, to the most varied imaginative constructions. And in the development of the mental content the“soul”itself is merely the stage upon which all that is acquired through the senses crowds, and jostles, and unites to form images, perceptions, and precepts. But it is itself purely passive, and it becomes what happens to it. Therefore it is not really spirit at all, for spirit implies spontaneity, activity, and autonomy.Philosophy and the mental sciences have always had to carry on the strife with these four opponents. And it is in the teacup of logic and epistemology[pg 294]that the storm in regard to theories of the universe has arisen. It is there, and not in the domain of neurology, or zoology, that the real battlefield lies, upon which the controversy must be fought out to the end. What follows is only a sort of skirmish about the outposts.What naturalism holds in regard to the psychical and spiritual may be, perhaps, most simply expressed by means of an illustration. Over a wide field there glide mighty shadows in constant interplay. They expand and contract, become denser or lighter, disappear for a little, and then reveal themselves again. While they are thus forming and changing, one state follows quite connectedly on another. At first one is tempted to believe that they are self-acting and self-regulating, that they move freely and pass from one state to another according to causes within themselves. But then one sees that they are thrown upon the earth from the clouds above, now in this way and now in that, that all their states and forms and changes are nothing in themselves, and neither effect anything in themselves nor react upon the occurrences and realities up above, which they only accompany, and by which they are determined without any co-operation on their own part, even in determining their own form. So it is with nature and spirit. Nature is the true effective reality; spirit is its shadow, which effects nothing either within or outside of itself, but simply happens.[pg 295]The Fundamental Answer.How can the religious conception of the world justify itself and maintain its freedom in face of such views of spirit and spiritual being? It is questionable whether it is worth while attempting to do so. Is not the essence of the validity and freedom of spirit made most certain simply through the fact that it is able to inquire into it? If we leave popular naturalism out of the question, is not the attempt made by scientific naturalism the best witness against itself? For scientific study, and the establishment of fundamental conceptions and guiding principles are only possible if mind and thought are free and active and creative. The direct experience that spirit has of itself, of its individuality and freedom, of its incomparability with all that is beneath it, is far too constant and genuine to admit of its being put into a difficulty by a doctrine which it has itself established. And this doctrine has far too much the character of a“fixed theory”to carry permanent inward conviction with it. Here again, the mistake made is in starting with scepticism and with the fewest and simplest assumptions. It is by no means the case that in order to discover the truth we must start always from a position of scepticism, instead of from calm confidence in ourselves and in our conviction that we possess in direct experience the best guarantee of truth. For we experience nothing more certainly than the content and riches of our own[pg 296]mind, its power of acting and creating, and all its great capacities. And it is part of the duty laid upon us by the religious conception of the universe, as well as by all other idealistic conceptions, to follow this path of self-assurance alone, that is, through self-development and self-deepening, through self-realisation and self-discipline, to use to the full in our lives all that we have in heart and mind as possibilities, tendencies, content, and capacities, and so practically to experience the reality and power of the spiritual that the mood of suspicion and distrust of it must disappear. The validity of this method is corroborated by all the critical insight into the nature of our knowledge that we have gained in the course of our study, and it might be deepened in regard to this particular case. For here, if anywhere, we must recognise the limitations of our knowledge; the impossibility of attaining to a full understanding of the true nature and depths of things applies to the inquiring mind and its hidden nature. From Descartes to Leibnitz, Kant, and Fries, down to the historian of materialism itself, F. A. Lange, it has been an axiom of the idealistic philosophy, expressed now in dogmatic, now in critical form, that the mathematical-mechanical outlook and causal interpretation of things, not excluding a naturalistic psychology, is thoroughly justifiable as a method of arranging scientifically the phenomena accessible to us and of penetrating more deeply towards an understanding of these. It is, indeed, justifiable, so long as it does not profess[pg 297]to reveal the true nature of things, but remains conscious of the free spirit, whose own work and undertaking the whole is.Yet here again it is by no means necessary to surrender to naturalism a field which it has tried to take possession of, but is certainly unable to hold. We need not try to force naturalism to read out of empirical psychology the high conclusions as to human nature and spirit which pertain to the religious outlook, or to find in the“simplicity”of the“soul monad”a kind of physical proof of its indestructibility, or anything of that kind. We maintain that to comprehend the true inwardness of the vitality, freedom, dignity, and power of the spirit is not the business of psychology at all, but may perhaps be dealt with in ethics, if it be not admitted that with these concepts one has already entered the realm of religious experience, and that they are the very centre of religious theory. But undoubtedly we must reject in great measure the claims which naturalism makes upon our domain, and maintain that the most important starting-points for the higher view are to be found in the priority of everything spiritual over everything material, in the underivability of the spiritual and the impossibility of describing it in corporeal-mathematical terms and concepts.[pg 298]Individual Development.What lives in us, as far as we can perceive and trace it in its empirical expression, is not a finished and spiritual being that leaps, mature and complete, from some pre-existence or other into its embodied form, but is obviously something that only develops and becomes actual very gradually. Its becoming is conditioned by“stimuli,”influences, impressions from without, and perfects itself in the closest dependence upon the becoming of the body, is inhibited or advanced with it, and may be entirely arrested by it, forced into abnormal developments which never attain to the level of an“ego”or“personality,”but remain incomprehensible anomalies and monstrosities. In general, the psychical struggles slowly and laboriously free from purely vegetative and physiological processes, and gains control over itself and over the body. Its self-development and concentration to full unity and completeness of personality is only achieved through the deepest self-culture, through complete“simplification”as the ancients said, through great acts and experiences of inward centralisation such as that which finds religious expression in the metaphor of“regeneration.”What“building up”and self-development of the psychical means remains obscure. If we think of it as a summation, an adding on of new parts and constituents, and thus try to form a concrete image of the process, we spoil it altogether. If we speak of the transition from the potential to the actual,[pg 299]from the tendency to the realisation, we may not indeed spoil it, but we have done little to make the process more intelligible. So much only we can say: certain as it is that the Psyche, especially as conscious inner life, only gradually develops and becomes actual, and that in the closest dependence upon the development, maturing, and establishment of the nervous basis and the bodily organisation in general, yet the naturalistic view,a fortiorithe materialistic, is never at any point correct. There are three things to be borne in mind. First, the origin, the“whence”of the psychical is wholly hidden from us, and, notwithstanding the theory of evolution and descent, it remains an insoluble riddle. And secondly, however closely it is associated with and tied down to the processes of bodily development, it is never at any stage of its development really a function of it in actual and exact correspondence and dependence. And finally, the further it advances in its self-realisation, the further the relation of dependence recedes into the background, and the more do the independence and autonomy of the psychical processes become prominent.We have still to consider and amplify this in several respects, and then we may go on to still more important matters.Underivability.The first of the three points we have called attention to has, so to speak, become famous through the lectures of du Bois-Reymond, which attracted much attention, on“The Limits of Natural Knowledge,”and“The Seven[pg 300]Riddles of the Universe.”That these thoughtful lectures made so great an impression did not mean that a great new discovery had been made, but was rather a sign of the general lack of reflection on the part of the public, for they only expressed what had always been self-evident, and what had only been forgotten through thoughtlessness, or concealed by polemical rhetoric. Consciousness, thought, even the commonest sensation of pleasure and pain, or the simplest sense-perception, cannot be compared with“matter and energy,”with the movements of masses. They represent a foreign and altogether inexplicable guest in this world of matter, molecules, and elements. Even if we could follow the play of the nervous processes with which sensation, consciousness, pain, or pleasure are bound up, into their most intricate and delicate details, if we could make the brain transparent, and enlarge its cells to the size of houses, so that, with searching glance, we could count and observe all the processes, and even follow the dance of the molecules within it, we should never see“pain,”“pleasure,”or“thought,”or anything more than bodies and their movements. A thought, such as, for instance, the perception that two and two make four, is not long or broad, above or beneath; it cannot be measured or weighed in inches or pounds like matter, tested with the manometer, thermometer, or electrometer for its potential or intensity and tension, measured by ampères or volts or horse-powers like energies and electric currents; it is something wholly[pg 301]different, which can be known only through inner experience, but which is much better known than anything else whatever, and which it is absolutely impossible to compare with anything but itself. Even if we admit that it can only become actual and develop as an accompaniment of processes within bodies, and only within those bodies we call“living,”and that wherever bodies exist psychical phenomena occur; even if we were able, as we never shall be able, to produce living beings artificially in a retort, and even if psychical phenomena occurred in these also, we should still have made no progress towards explaining what the psychical really is. It would still only be the blazing up in these bodies of a flame which, in some inexplicable way, had fallen upon them, and associated itself with them. We do not doubt that this association, where it takes place, does so in obedience to the strictest law and the most inexorable necessity; therefore, that wherever and however the corporeal conditions are produced, sensation and consciousness will awaken. For we believe in a world governed by law. But the mystery is in no way lessened by this, and the modern theory of evolution throws no light into this utterly impenetrable darkness. In the first place, the whole idea of“explaining”in terms of“evolution”is a futile one. The process of becoming is pictured as a simple process of cumulation, a gradual increase of intensities, while the business is really one of change in quality and the introduction of what is new. In the second place, the occurrence even[pg 302]of the first and most primitive sensation contains the whole riddle concentrated on a single point. In the third place, the riddle meets us anew and undiminished in every developing individual. For to say that the physical inwardness, once it has arisen, is“transmitted,”is not an explanation but merely an admission that the riddle exists. And the idea that the psychical is just a penumbra or shadow of reality, which comes of itself and so to speak gratis, is quite inadmissible from the point of view of strict natural science. There are no longerluxusandlusus naturæ. Reality cannot throw a“shadow.”According to the principles of the conservation of matter and energy, we must be able to show whence it gets the so-called shadow, and with what it compensates for it.Pre-eminence of Consciousness.But we have already spent too much time over this naïve mode of looking at things, which, though it professes to place things in their true light, in reality distorts them and turns them upside down. As if this world of the external and material, all these bodies and forces, were our first and most direct data, and were not really all derived from, and only discoverable by, consciousness. We have here to do with the ancient view of all philosophy and all reflection in general, although in modern days it has taken its place as a great new discovery even among naturalists themselves, by whom it is extolled and recognised as[pg 303]“the conquest of materialism.”Such exaggerated emphasis tends to conceal the fact that this truth has been regarded as self-evident from very early times.What is a body, extension, movement, colour, smell and taste? What do I possess of them, or know of them, except through the images, sensations and feelings which they call up in my receptive mind? No single thing wanders into me as itself, or reveals itself to me directly; only through the way in which they affect me, the peculiar changes which they work in me, do things reveal to me their existence and their special character. I have no knowledge of an apple-tree or of an apple, except through the sense perceptions they call up in me. But these sense perceptions, what are they but different peculiar states of my consciousness, peculiar determinations of my mind? I see that the tree stands there, but what is it to see? What is the perception of a colour, of light, of shade, and their changes? Surely only a peculiar change of my mind itself, a particular state of stimulus and awareness brought about in myself. And in the same way I can feel that the apple lies there. But what is the perception of resistance, of hardness, of impenetrability? Nothing more than a feeling, a change in my psychical state, which is unique and cannot be described in terms of anything but itself. Even as regards“attraction and repulsion,”external existence only reveals itself to us through changes in the mind and[pg 304]consciousness, which we then attribute to a cause outside ourselves.It is well enough known that this simple but incontrovertible fact has often led to the denial of the existence of anything outside of ourselves and our consciousness. But even if we leave this difficult subject alone, it is quite certain that, if the question as to the pre-eminence of consciousness and its relation to external things is to be asked at all, it should be formulated as follows, and not conversely:“How can I, starting from the directly given reality and certainty of consciousness and its states, arrive at the certainty and reality of external things, substances, forces, physics and chemistry?”Creative Power of Consciousness.To this insight into the underivability and pre-eminence of consciousness over the world of external reality there must be added at this stage a recognition of its peculiar creative character. We have here to recognise that consciousness itself creates its world,—that is, the world that becomes our own through actual experience, possession, and enjoyment. We are led to this position even by the conception now current in natural science of the world as it is, not as it is mirrored in consciousness, and the theory of the“subjectivity of sensory qualities.”The qualities which we perceive in things through the senses are“subjective”; philosophy has long taught that, and now natural science teaches[pg 305]it too. That is to say, these qualities are not actually present in the things themselves; they are rather the particular responses which our consciousness makes to stimuli. Take, for instance, tone or colour. What we call tone or sound is not known to acoustics. That takes cognisance only of vibrations and the conditions of vibration in elastic bodies, which, by means of the ear and the nerves of hearing, become a stimulus of consciousness. Consciousness“responds”to this stimulus by receiving a sense-impression of hearing. But in this, obviously, there is nothing of the nature of oscillations and vibrations, but something quite different. What outside of us is nothing more than a complex process of movement according to mathematical conditions, blossoms within us to a world of sound, tone, and music. The world itself is soundless, toneless. And the same is true of light and colour;“light”and“blue”are nothing in themselves—are not properties of things themselves. They are only the infinitely rapid movements of an infinitely delicate substance, the ether. But when these meet our consciousness, they spin themselves within us into this world of light and colour, of brilliance and beauty. Thus without us there is a world of a purely mathematical nature, without quality, charm, or value. But the world we know, the world of sound, light, and colour, of all properties whatsoever, of the ugly or the beautiful, of pain and pleasure, is in the most real sense the product of consciousness itself, a creation which, incited by[pg 306]something outside of itself and of a totally different nature, which we can hardly call“world,”evolves out of itself and causes to blossom. No part of this creation is given from without; not the blue of the heavens, for outside of us there is no colour, only vibrations of the ether; not the gold of the sun nor the red glory of the evening sky. External nature is nothing more than the stimulus, the pressure upon the mind, which liberates from its depths the peculiar reactions and responses to this stimulus, and calls them forth from its own treasure-stores. Certainly in this creating the consciousness is entirely dependent on the impressions stamped on it from outside, and to that extent upon“experience.”But it is by no means atabula rasa, and a merely passive mirror of the outer world, for it translates the stimulus thus received into quite a different language, and builds up from it a new reality, which is quite unlike the mathematical and qualityless reality without. And this activity on the part of consciousness begins on the very lowest stages. The simplest perception of light or colour, the first feeling of pleasure or discomfort, is a reaction of the psychical, which brings about something entirely new and unique.“The spirit is never passive.”That the psychical is not derivable from the physical, that it does not arise out of it, is not secondary to it, but pre-eminent over it, is not passive but creative; so much we have already gained to set over against naturalism. But its claims are even more affected[pg 307]by the fact of real psychical causality. We need not here concern ourselves with the difficult question, whether the mind can of itself act upon the body, and through it upon the external world. But in the logical consistence of naturalism there was implied not only a negative answer to this last question, but also a denial of the causality of the psychical, even within itself and its own domain. This is well illustrated in the figure of the cloud shadows. In consciousness state follows upon state, a upon b, b upon c. According to naturalism, b is not really the result of a, nor c of b, for in that case there would be independence of phenomena, and distinctness of laws in the psychical. But as all the states, a, b, and c, of the cloud shadows, depend upon statesa,b, andc, of the clouds themselves, but do not themselves form a concatenation of causes, so all the states of the mind depend upon those of the body, in which alone there is a true chain of causes because they alone have true reality.This is a complete distortion of the facts of the case. It would never be possible to persuade oneself or any one else that the arm, for instance, did not bend simply because we willed that it should. And it is still less possible to doubt that there are sequences of causes within the psychical, that in the world of thought and feeling, of desire and will, one thing calls up another, awakes it, impels it onwards, and influences it. Indeed, the mode of influence is peculiarly rich, subtle, and[pg 308]certain. Mental images and experiences arouse joy or sorrow, admiration or repulsion. One image calls up another, forces it to appear according to quite peculiar laws, or may crowd it out. Feelings call up desires, desires lead to determination. Good news actually causes joy, this is actually strengthened to willing, and the new situation gives rise to actual resolves. All this is so obvious and so unquestionable that no naturalism can possibly prevail against it. It has also long been made the subject of special investigation and carefully regulated experiment, and it is one of the chief subjects of modern psychological science. And especially as regards the different forms of“association of ideas,”the particular laws of this psychical causality have been established.It cannot be denied, however, that this psychology of association has itself in a deeper sense certain dangers from the point of view of the freedom of the mind, and it is apt to lead, not indeed to naturalistic conceptions, but to views according to which the“soul”is reduced to the level of a passive frame and stage, so to speak, for the exhibition of mental mechanics and statics.“Ideas”or thoughts, or states of feelings, are sometimes represented almost as actual little realities, which come and go in accordance with their own laws of attraction and repulsion, unite and separate again, by virtue of a kind of mental gravitation, move and crowd one another, so that one must almost say“it thinks,”as one says“it rains,”and not“the mind thinks”or“I[pg 309]think.”But more of this later. This psychological orderliness is in sharp antagonism to pure naturalism. It describes the laws of a sequence of causes, which have nothing to do with the physical, chemical, or mechanical, and clearly establishes the uniqueness, independence, and underivability of the psychical as contrasted with the physical.The individuality and incommensurability of this psychical causality shows itself in another series of factors which make even theformof the psychical process quite distinctive, and produce phenomena which have no parallel in the material sequences of the world, indeed, conflict with all its fundamental laws. The great psychologists of to-day, Wundt in particular, and James, have frequently emphasised these factors. We can only briefly call attention to a few points, as, for instance, Wundt's theory of the creative resultants through which the psychical processes show themselves to be quite outside of the scope of the laws of equivalence which hold good in the physical. If, in the realm of the corporeal, two components of energy, a and b, come together, they unite in a common resultant c, which includes in part a new movement, in part transformation into heat, but always in such a way that c remains equal to a and b. But it is otherwise in the psychical. Here there occurs what may be called an increase (and a qualitative change) of the psychical energy. If we take the notes, c, e, and g, and call the sensation- and perception-value of the individual notes x, y, z,[pg 310]when they come together, the resulting sensation-value is by no means simply x + y + z, for a“harmony”results of which the effect is not only greater than the mere sum of x + y + z, but isqualitativelydifferent. This is true of all domains of psychical experience. The parallels from mechanical operation cannot be applied in any case. These only supply inadequate analogies and symbols which never really represent the actual state of the case.Let us take, for instance, a motive,m, that impels us towards a particular action, and another,n, that hinders us. If these meet in us, the result is not simply a weakening of the power of the one, and a remaining motive of the strength ofmminusn. The meeting of the two creates an entirely new and peculiar mental situation, which gives rise to conflict and choice, and the resultant victorious motive is never under any circumstancesm-n, but may be a double or three-foldmorn. Thus, in the different aspects of psychical activity, there are factors which make it impossible to compare these with other activities, remove them outside of the scope of the law of the equivalence of cause and effect, and prove that there is self-increase and growth on the part of psychical energies. And all such phenomena lead us away from the standpoint of any mere theory of association.[pg 311]Activity of Consciousness.Naturalism takes refuge in the doctrine of association, when it does not attain anything with its first claims, and applies this theory in such a way that it seems possible from this standpoint to interpret mental processes as having an approximate resemblance to mechanically and mathematically calculable phenomena. As in physics the molecules and atoms, so here the smallest mental elements, the simplest units of feeling are sought for, and from their relations of attraction and repulsion, their groupings and movements, it is supposed that the whole mental world may be constructed up to its highest contents, will, ideals, and development of character. But even the analogy, the model which is followed, and the fact that a model is followed at all, show that this method is uncritical and not unprejudiced. What reason is there for regarding occurrences in the realm of physics as anormfor the psychical? Why should one not rather start from the peculiar and very striking differences between the two, from the primary and fundamental fact, not indeed capable of explanation, but all the more worthy of attention on that account, that there is an absolute difference between physical occurrences and mental behaviour, between physical and mental causality? These most primitive and simplest mental elements which are supposed to float and have their being within the mind as in a kind of spiritual ether are not atoms[pg 312]at all, but deeds, actions, performances. The laws of the association of ideas are not the laws of a mental chemistry, but laws of mental behaviour; very fixed and reliable laws, but still having to do with modes of behaviour. Their separating and uniting, their relations to one another, their grouping into unities, their“syntheses,”are not automatic permutations and combinations, but express theactivityof a thinking intelligence. Not even the simplest actual synthesis comes about of itself, as psychologists have shown by a neat illustration.[Illustration: Squarea2, next to smaller squareb2. Above them are horizontal linesaandb, the same lengths as the widths of the squares below them. Caption:aandbonly associated. Squares ofaandbin juxtaposition.][Illustration: Squarec2. Above it is horizontal linec, the same length as the width of the square below it. Caption:aandbreally synthetised toc. Square ofa+bas a true unity =c2.]Given that, through some association, the image of the lineacalls up that of the lineb, and both are associatively ranged together, we have still not made the real synthesisa+b=c. For to think ofaandbside by side is not the same thing as thinking ofc, as we shall readily see if we square them. The squares ofaandbthought of beside one another, that is,a2andb2, are something quite different from the square of the really[pg 313]synthetisedaandb, which is (a+b)2=a2+ 2ab+b2, orc2. This requires quite a new view, a spontaneous synthesis, which is an action and not a mere experience.The Ego.It was customary in earlier psychology, as it still is in all apologetic psychology, to regard the soul as a unified, immaterial, indivisible and therefore indestructiblesubstance, as a monad, which, as a unity without parts, superior to its own capacities and the changes of its states, is at all times one and the same subject. Many attempts have been made since the time of Plotinus to accumulate proofs of this substantial unity. We may leave this question untouched here, and need not even inquire whether these definitions are not themselves things of the external world employed as images and analogies and pushed too far. But there are three factors which may be established in regard to the psychical in spite of all naturalistic opposition; and those who have attempted to find proofs for the traditional idea we have noted, have usually really had these three in mind, and quite rightly so: they are, self-consciousness, the unity of consciousness, and the consciousness of the ego.Self-Consciousness.1. Our consciousness is not merely a knowledge of many individual things, the possession of concrete and abstract, particular or general conceptions and ideas, the cherishing of sensations, feelings and the like. We[pg 314]not only know, but we know that we know, and we can ponder in thought over the very fact that we are able thus to reflect in thought. Thought can turn its attention upon itself, can establish that it takes place, and how it runs its course, can reflect upon the forms in which it expresses itself, its powers, its laws, possibilities, and limits, and can ponder over the general nature of thought and the contingent individual nature of the particular thinking subject. (The very possibility and preliminary condition of moral freedom is implied in this.) How naturalism is to do justice to this fact it is not easy to see. Even if it were possible that the mental content was gained through mere experience, that comparisons, syntheses, and abstractions were formed simply according to the laws of association, and that these were sublimed and refined to general ideas, and could grow into axioms of logic and of geometry, or crystallise into necessary and axiomatic principles—none of which can happen—yet it would always be a knowledge of something. But how this something could be given to itself remains undiscoverable. The soul is atabula rasaand a mere mirror, says this theory. But it would still require to show how the silver layer behind the mirror began to see itself in the mirror.The Unity of Consciousness.2. The same holds true of the unity of consciousness, of which we are directly convinced. It is quite inexplicable[pg 315]if consciousness is a function of the extended and divisible physical substratum which is built up of nerve-cells and nerve-fibres. And yet this unity is the fundamental condition of our whole inner life.Even the facts of association demonstrate it. Two images could not come together, the one could not call up the other, if they were not possessed in the same consciousness, and could unite in it. It is the preliminary condition of every higher mode of thought, of every relating of things, of every comparison and abstraction. No judgment can be formed, no conclusion drawn without this. How could a predicate become associated with its subject, or a principal clause with its subordinate clause, if they were in separate consciousnesses, and how could the conclusion be drawn from them?Consciousness of the Ego.3. This unified self-consciousness is consciousness of the ego. It is only by means of an artificial abstraction that we can leave out of account in the consideration of processes of thought the peculiar factor of personal relationship that absolutely attaches to every thought within us. There are no thoughts in general that play their part of themselves alone.“It”never“thinks”in me. On the contrary, all sensation, thought, and will has in every human being a peculiar central relationship to which we refer when we say“my idea,”“my sensation.”What the“I”is cannot be defined. It is that through which the relation of all[pg 316]experiences and actions is referred to a point, and through which the treasuring of them for good or ill, the appreciation, the valuation of them is accomplished. And it plays its part even in the case of cold and indifferent items of knowledge. For instance, that twice two are four is not simply a perception, it ismyperception. Of the ego itself nothing more can be said than that it is the thought of me as the subject of all experience, willing, and action, and if we try to take hold of it nothing more than this formula remains. Yet the fact that the ego is the subject of all this, gives conduct, will, and experience that peculiar character which distinguishes them from mere action and reaction. For it is directly certain that all the psychical contents are not only co-existences in one consciousness but that they are possessed by it.Thus in summing up we have to say, that it is through the ego that all psychical activities and experiences are centred and related, that the ego is itself the point of relation, that it is the reason of the unity of consciousness and of the possibility of self-consciousness, and that in all this it is the most certain reality, without which the simplest psychical life would be impossible. At the same time, it is difficult to state what the“ego”is in itself, apart from the effects in which it reveals itself.[pg 317]
[pg 278]Chapter X. Autonomy Of Spirit.The aim of our study has been to define our attitude to naturalism, and to maintain in the teeth of naturalism the validity and freedom of the religious conception of the world. This seemed to be cramped and menaced by those“reductions to simpler terms”which we have already discussed.But one of these reductions, the most important of all, we have not yet encountered, and it remains to be dealt with now. In comparison with this one all others are relatively unimportant, and it is easy to understand how some have regarded the problem of the relations of the naturalistic and the religious outlook as beginning at this point, and have neglected everything below it. For we have now to consider the attempt of naturalism to“reduce”spirit itself to terms of nature, either to derive it from nature, or, when that is recognised as quite too confused and impossible, to make it subject to nature and her system of laws, or to similar laws, and thus to rob it of its freedom and independence, of its essential character as above nature and free from it, and to bring it down to the level of an accompanying[pg 279]shadow or a mere reverse side of nature. The aggressive naturalism which we have discussed has from very early times exercised itself on this point, and has instinctively and rightly felt that herein lies the kernel of the whole problem under dispute. It has for the most part concentrated its interest and its attacks upon the“immortality of the soul.”But while this was often the starting-point, the nature of soul, and spirit, and consciousness in general have been brought under discussion and subjected to attacks which sought to show how vague and questionable was the reality of spirit as contrasted with the palpable, solid and indubitable reality of the outer world. Prominence was given to the fact that the spiritual side of our nature is dependent on and conditioned by the body and bodily states, the external environment, experiences and impressions. These were often the sole, and always the chief subjects of the doctrine of the vulgar naturalism. But the same is true of the naturalism of the higher order, as we described it in Chapter II. In order to acquire definite guiding principles of investigation, it makes the attempt to find the true reality of phenomena in the mechanical, corporeal, physiological processes, and to take little or no account of the co-operation, the interpolation, the general efficiency of sensation, perception, thought, or will, and to treat them as though they were a shadow and accompaniment of reality, but not as an equivalent, much less a preponderating constituent of it. Out of these[pg 280]fundamental principles of investigation, and out of the opposition and doubt with which the spiritual is regarded, there is compounded the current mongrel naturalism, which, without precision in its ideas, and without any great clearness or logical consequence in its views, is thoroughly imbued with the notion that that only is truly real which we can see, hear, and touch—the solid objective world of matter and energy, and that“science”begins and ends with this. As for anything outside of or beyond this, it is at most a beautiful dream of fancy, with which it is quite safe to occupy oneself as long as one clearly understands that of course it is not true.“Nature”is the only indubitable reality, and mind is but a kind oflususorluxus naturæ, which accompanies it at some few places, like a peculiarly coloured aura or shadow, but which must, as far as reality is concerned, yield pre-eminence to“Nature”in every respect.The religious conception is deeply and essentially antagonistic to all such attempts to range spirit, spiritual being, and the subjective world under“nature,”“matter,”“energy,”or whatever we may call what is opposed to mind and ranked above it in reality and value. The religious conception is made up essentially of a belief in spirit, its worth and pre-eminence. It does not even seek to compare the reality and origin of spirit with anything else whatever. For all its beliefs, the most sublime and the crudest alike, conceal within them the conviction that[pg 281]fundamentally spirit alone has truth and reality, and that everything else is derived from it. It is a somewhat pitiful mode of procedure to direct all apologetic endeavours towards the one relatively small question of“immortality,”thus following exactly the lines usually adopted by the aggressive exponents of naturalism, and thus allowing opponents to dictate the form of the questions and answers. It is quite certain that all religion which is in any way complete, includes within itself a belief in the everlastingness of our spiritual, personal nature, and its independence of the becoming or passing away of external things. But, on the one hand, this particular question can only be settled in connection with the whole problem, and, on the other hand, it is only a fraction of the much farther-reaching belief in the reality of spirit and its superiority to nature. The very being of religion depends upon this. That it may be able to take itself seriously and regard itself as true; that all deep and pious feelings, of humility and devotion, may be cherished as genuine and as founded in truth; that it behoves it to find and experience the noble and divine in the world's course, in history and in individual life; that the whole world of feeling with all its deep stirrings and mysteries is of all things the most real and true, and the most significant fact of existence—all these are features apart from which it is impossible to think of religion at all. But they all depend upon the reality, independence and absolute pre-eminence of[pg 282]spirit. Freedom and responsibility, duty, moral control and self-development, the valuation of life and our life-work according to our life's mission and ideal aims, even according to everlasting aims, and“sub specie æterni,”the idea of the good, the true and the beautiful—all things apart from which religion cannot be thought of—all these depend upon spirit and its truth. And finally“God is Spirit”: religion cannot represent, or conceive, or possess its own highest good and supreme idea, except by thinking in terms of the highest analogies of what it knows in itself as spiritual being and reality. If spirit is not real and above all other realities; if it is derivable, subordinate and dependent, it is impossible to think of anything whatever to which the name of“God”can be given. And this is as true of the refined speculations of the pantheistic poetic religions, as of the idea of God in simple piety. The interest of religion as against the claims of naturalism includes all this. And it would be doing the cause of religion sorry service to extract from this whole some isolated question to which the mood of the time or traditional custom has given prominence. Our task must be to show that religion maintains its validity and freedom because of the truth and independence of spirit and its superiority to nature.It is, of course, impossible to give an exhaustive treatment of this problem in a short study like this. The answer to this question would include the whole range of mental science with all its parts and branches.[pg 283]Mental science, from logic and epistemology up to and including the moral and æsthetic sciences, proves by its very existence, and by the fact that it cannot be reduced to terms of natural science, that spirit can neither be derived from nor analysed into anything else. And it is only when we have mastered all this that we can say how far and how strongly knowledge and known realities corroborate religion and its great conclusions as to spirit and spiritual existence, how they reinforce it and admit its validity and freedom. Since this is so, all isolated and particular endeavours in this direction can only be a prelude or introduction, and a more or less arbitrary selection from the relevant material of facts and ideas. And nothing more than this is aimed at in the following pages.Naturalistic Attacks on the Autonomy of the Spiritual.The attacks that have been made by naturalism upon the independence and freedom of the spiritual are so familiar to every one—even from school days—through books of the type of Büchner's“Kraft und Stoff,”and Haeckel's“The Riddle of the Universe,”and other half or wholly materialistic popular dogmatics, that it is unnecessary to enter into any detail. Very little that is new has been added in this connection to the attack made by Plato on himself in the“Phædo”through Simmias and Kebes. It is only apparently that the modern attacks have become more serious[pg 284]through the deepened knowledge of natural science. At all times they have been as serious and as significant as possible, and the religious and every other idealistic conception of the universe has always suffered from them. It is plain that here, if anywhere,“faith goes against appearances,”and that in the last resource we have to postulate free moral resolution, the will to believe, the desire for the ideal, for freedom, and for the eternity of the spirit, and the confidence of the spirit in itself. All this is, or at least ought to be, self-evident and generally admitted.Let us once more take a brief survey of the reasons on the other side and arrange them in order.That nature is everything and spirit very little seems to follow from a very simple circumstance. There are whole worlds of purely natural and corporeal existence without mind, sensation, or consciousness, which, quite untroubled by their absence, simply exist according to the everlasting laws of matter and energy. But nowhere do we find spirit or mind without a material basis. All that is psychical occurs in connection with a physical being, and with relatively few physical beings. Spirit seems wholly bound up with and dependent upon the states, development, and conditions of material being. With the body of living beings there arises what we call“soul”; with the body it grows, gains content, changes, matures, ages, and disappears. According as the body is constituted and composed, as it is influenced by heredity, race, and[pg 285]selection, by nutrition, mode of life, climate, and other circumstances, there are developed in a hundred different ways what we call the natural disposition or character, inclinations, virtues or vices, passions or temperaments. Even the names given to the different temperaments emphasise this dependence of what is innermost in us, the deepest tendencies of our being, on the bodily organisation and the nature of its physiological constitution. The man whose blood flows easily and freely is called sanguine, and the melancholic is the victim of his liver. According as our organs are good or bad, function freely or sluggishly, our mood rises or sinks, we are bold or cowardly, languid or impetuous, and enthusiasm is often enough only a peculiar name for a state which, physiologically expressed, might be called alcoholic poisoning. There is one soul in the sound body, another in the sickly. Fever, and the impotence of the soul against it, made Holbach a materialist. If the brain be diseased, that marvellous order of psychical processes which we call reasoning is broken; the“soul”is wholly or partly eliminated; it fades away, or becomes nothing more than a confused disconnected medley of images and desires. Even artificial interference with, and changes in the bodily organisation react upon the mind. The removal of the thyroid gland may result in idiocy. Castration not only prevents the“breaking”of the voice in the Sistine choristers, it damps the fires of life to dulness, and makes of the impetuous Abelard a comfortable discursive father-confessor.[pg 286]The mind is bound up almost piece by piece with its material basis. Through the“localisation”of psychic processes in the particular parts of the brain, naturalism has enormously strengthened the impression that existed even among the ancients, that sensation and imagination are nothing more than, let us say, what the note is to a tightly stretched string. Cerebrum and cerebellum are regarded as the seats of different psychic processes. The secret of the higher processes is believed to be hidden in the grey matter of the cortex of the cerebrum. We seek and find in the various lobes and convolutions of the brain the“centres”for the different capacities, the power of sight, of smell, of moving the arms, of moving the legs, of associating ideas, of co-ordinated speech, and so on. When brain and spinal cord are injured or removed piece by piece from a pigeon or a frog, it seems as if the“soul”were eliminated piece by piece,—the capacity for spontaneous free co-ordination, for voluntary action, for the various sense-impressions, and so on from the higher to the lower. It has even been maintained that the different feelings and perceptions which are gradually acquired can be apportioned among the individual cells of the brain in which they are localised, and the thought-processes, the associations of percepts, the origin of consecutive ideas, the rapid and easy recalling of memory-images, and the process of voluntary control, of instincts, can be explained as due to the“gradual laying down of nerve-paths”between[pg 287]the different centres and areas of localisation in the brain. All this seems to refute utterly the old belief in the unity and personality of the soul. It is different in youth and in age, and indeed varies continually. It is the ever-varied harmony of the notes of all the strings which are represented by the fibres and ganglion-cells of the nerve-substance. It apparently can not only be completely confused and brought to disharmony, but it may be halved and divided. An almost terrifying impression was produced when Trembley in 1740 made the experiment of cutting a“hydra”in two, and showed that each of the halves became a complete animal, so that obviously each of the two halves of the soul grew into a new hydra-soul. And Trembley's hydra was only the precursor of all the cut-up worms, of the frogs, birds, and guinea-pigs that have been beheaded, or have had their brain removed, or their nerves cut, and have furnished further examples of this divisibility of“souls.”If the independence of the spiritual is thus shown to be a vain assumption, the alleged difference between the animal and the human Psyche is much more so. Not from the days of Darwinism alone, but from the very beginning, naturalism has opposed this claim to distinctiveness. But it is due to Darwinism that the fundamental similarity of the psychical in man and animals has come to be regarded as almost self-evident. The mental organisation of man, as well as his corporeal organisation, is traced back through gradual stages to[pg 288]animal antecedents, and in thus tracing it there are two favourite methods of procedure, which are, however, apt to be mutually destructive.On the one hand, some naturalists regard the animal anthropomorphically, insist on its likeness to man, discovering and extolling, not without emotion, all the higher and nobler possessions of the human mind, intellectual capacities, reason, reflection, synthesis, fancy, the power of forming ideas and judgments, of drawing conclusions and learning from experience, besides will in the true sense, ethical, social and political capacities, æsthetic perceptions, and even fits of religion in elephants, apes, dogs, down even to ants and bees, and these naturalists reject old-fashioned explanations in terms of instinct, and find the highest already contained in the lowest. Those of another school are inclined to regard man theriomorphically, to insist on his likeness to animals, explaining reason in terms of perception and sensation, deriving will from impulse and desire, and ethical and æsthetic valuations from physiological antecedents and purely animal psychological processes, thus, in short, seeking to find the lowest in the highest. (We have already met with an analogous instance of a similarly fallacious double-play on parallel lines.) So it comes about that both the origin and the development of the psychical and spiritual seem to be satisfactorily cleared up and explained, and at the same time a new proof is adduced for its dependence upon the physical. For what is true of all[pg 289]other parts of the organisation, of the building up and perfecting of every member and every system of organs, the bony skeleton, the circulatory system, the alimentary canal, that they can be referred back to very simple beginnings, and that their evolution may be traced through all its stages—is equally true of the nervous system in general and of the brain in particular. It increases more and more in volume and in intricacy of structure, it expands the cranial cavity and diversifies its convolutions. And the more it grows, and the more complex it becomes, the more do the mental capacities increase in perfection, so that here again it seems once more apparent that the psychical is an accompaniment and result of the physical.Popular naturalism usually stops short here, and contents itself with half-truths and inconsequences, for it naïvely admits that psychical processes, sensation, perception, will, have a real influence upon the physical, and, not perceiving how much the admission involves, it does not trouble itself over the fact that, for instance in the so-called voluntary movements of the body, in ordinary behaviour, the psychical, and the will, in particular, is capable of real effect, and can move hand and foot and the whole body, and thus has a real reciprocal relation with the physical. This form of popular naturalism sometimes amuses itself with assuming a psychical inwardness even in non-living matter, and admitting the co-operation of psychical motives even in regard to it.[pg 290]But it is far otherwise with naturalism in the strict sense, which takes its fundamental principles and its method of investigation seriously. It is aware that such half-and-half measures interrupt the continuity of the system at the most decisive point. And therefore with the greatest determination it repeats along psychological lines the same kind of treatment that it has previously sought to apply to biological phenomena: the corporeal must form a sequence of phenomena complete in itself and not broken into from without. All processes of movement, all that looks as if it happened“through our will,”through a resolve due to the intervention of a psychical motive, every flush of shame that reddens the cheek, every stroke executed by the hand, every sound-wave caused by tongue and lips, must be the result of conditions of stimulation and tension in the energy of the body itself.This is the meaning of all those psycho-physical experiments that have been carried on with so much ingenuity and persistence (usually associated with attempts to explain vital phenomena in terms of mechanism). First, they attempt to interpret the expressions of will, feeling and need, the spontaneous activities and movements of the lowest forms of life—protists—as“pure reflexes,”as processes which take place in obedience to stimuli, and thus are ultimately due to chemical and physical influences and causes without the intervention of a psychical motive; and, secondly, when this has been apparently or really achieved, the theory of irritability[pg 291]and reflex mechanism is pushed from below upwards, until even the most intricate and complex movements and operations of our own body, which we have wrongly distinguished as acts or behaviour from mere processes of stimulation, are finally recognised as reflexes and liberations due to stimuli. Some stimulus or other, from light or sound or something else, is, according to this theory, conducted to the nervous centre, the ganglion, the spinal cord, the cerebellum or the cerebrum. Here it produces an effect, not of a psychical nature, but some minute chemical, or physical,—or purely mechanical change, which goes through many permutations within the nervous centre itself, unites there with the stored energies, and then, thus altered, returns by the efferent nerve paths to effect a muscle-contraction in some organ, a stretching of the hand, or a movement of the whole body. The physical process is accompanied by a peculiar inward mirroring, which is the psychical penumbra or shadow of the whole business. Thus what is in reality a purely mechanical and reflex sequence appears like a psychical experience, like choice and will and psychical causality. We may be compared to Spinoza's stone; it was thrown, and it thought it was flying.The reasons for interpreting things in this way lie in the principles of investigation. It is only in this way, we are told, that nature can be reduced to natural terms, that is, to chemistry, physics, and mechanics. Only in this way is it possible to gain a true insight[pg 292]into and understanding of things, and to bring them under mathematical formulæ. Thus only, too, can“the miraculous”be eliminated. For if we are obliged to admit that the will has a real influence on the corporeal, for instance upon our brain, and nerves, and arm-muscles, this would be a violation of the law of the constancy of the sum of energy. For in this case there would occur, at a certain point in the nexus of phenomena, a piece of work done, however small it might be, for which there was no equivalent of energy in the previous constitution. But this is, since the days of Helmholtz, an impossible assumption. And thus all those experiments and theories on what we have called the“second line”of mechanistic interpretation of the universe show themselves to be relevant to our present subject.Interpretations of the psychical such as these have given rise to four peculiar“isms”of an epistemological nature,i.e., related to a theory of knowledge. Not infrequently they are the historical antecedents which result in the naturalistic theory of the psychical. These are nominalism and sensualism, empiricism and a-posteriorism, which, setting themselves against epistemological rationalism, assail the dignity, the independence, and the autonomy of the thinking mind. They are so necessarily and closely associated with naturalism that their fate is intimately bound up with its fate, and they are corroborated or refuted with it. And it would be possible to conduct the whole discussion with which we[pg 293]are concerned purely with reference to these four“isms.”The strife really begins in their camp.The soul is atabula rasa, all four maintain, a white paper on which, to begin with, nothing is inscribed. It brings with it neither innate knowledge nor commands. What it possesses in the way of percepts, concepts, opinions, convictions, principles of action, rules of conduct, are inscribed upon it through experience (empiricism). That is, not antecedent to, but subsequent to experience (a posteriori). But experience can only be gained through the senses. Only thus does reality penetrate into and stamp itself upon us.“What was not first in the senses (sensus) cannot be in the intelligence.”What the senses convey to us alone builds up our mental content, from mere sensory perceptions upwards to the most abstract ideas from the simplest psychical elements up to the most complex ideas, concepts, and conclusions, to the most varied imaginative constructions. And in the development of the mental content the“soul”itself is merely the stage upon which all that is acquired through the senses crowds, and jostles, and unites to form images, perceptions, and precepts. But it is itself purely passive, and it becomes what happens to it. Therefore it is not really spirit at all, for spirit implies spontaneity, activity, and autonomy.Philosophy and the mental sciences have always had to carry on the strife with these four opponents. And it is in the teacup of logic and epistemology[pg 294]that the storm in regard to theories of the universe has arisen. It is there, and not in the domain of neurology, or zoology, that the real battlefield lies, upon which the controversy must be fought out to the end. What follows is only a sort of skirmish about the outposts.What naturalism holds in regard to the psychical and spiritual may be, perhaps, most simply expressed by means of an illustration. Over a wide field there glide mighty shadows in constant interplay. They expand and contract, become denser or lighter, disappear for a little, and then reveal themselves again. While they are thus forming and changing, one state follows quite connectedly on another. At first one is tempted to believe that they are self-acting and self-regulating, that they move freely and pass from one state to another according to causes within themselves. But then one sees that they are thrown upon the earth from the clouds above, now in this way and now in that, that all their states and forms and changes are nothing in themselves, and neither effect anything in themselves nor react upon the occurrences and realities up above, which they only accompany, and by which they are determined without any co-operation on their own part, even in determining their own form. So it is with nature and spirit. Nature is the true effective reality; spirit is its shadow, which effects nothing either within or outside of itself, but simply happens.[pg 295]The Fundamental Answer.How can the religious conception of the world justify itself and maintain its freedom in face of such views of spirit and spiritual being? It is questionable whether it is worth while attempting to do so. Is not the essence of the validity and freedom of spirit made most certain simply through the fact that it is able to inquire into it? If we leave popular naturalism out of the question, is not the attempt made by scientific naturalism the best witness against itself? For scientific study, and the establishment of fundamental conceptions and guiding principles are only possible if mind and thought are free and active and creative. The direct experience that spirit has of itself, of its individuality and freedom, of its incomparability with all that is beneath it, is far too constant and genuine to admit of its being put into a difficulty by a doctrine which it has itself established. And this doctrine has far too much the character of a“fixed theory”to carry permanent inward conviction with it. Here again, the mistake made is in starting with scepticism and with the fewest and simplest assumptions. It is by no means the case that in order to discover the truth we must start always from a position of scepticism, instead of from calm confidence in ourselves and in our conviction that we possess in direct experience the best guarantee of truth. For we experience nothing more certainly than the content and riches of our own[pg 296]mind, its power of acting and creating, and all its great capacities. And it is part of the duty laid upon us by the religious conception of the universe, as well as by all other idealistic conceptions, to follow this path of self-assurance alone, that is, through self-development and self-deepening, through self-realisation and self-discipline, to use to the full in our lives all that we have in heart and mind as possibilities, tendencies, content, and capacities, and so practically to experience the reality and power of the spiritual that the mood of suspicion and distrust of it must disappear. The validity of this method is corroborated by all the critical insight into the nature of our knowledge that we have gained in the course of our study, and it might be deepened in regard to this particular case. For here, if anywhere, we must recognise the limitations of our knowledge; the impossibility of attaining to a full understanding of the true nature and depths of things applies to the inquiring mind and its hidden nature. From Descartes to Leibnitz, Kant, and Fries, down to the historian of materialism itself, F. A. Lange, it has been an axiom of the idealistic philosophy, expressed now in dogmatic, now in critical form, that the mathematical-mechanical outlook and causal interpretation of things, not excluding a naturalistic psychology, is thoroughly justifiable as a method of arranging scientifically the phenomena accessible to us and of penetrating more deeply towards an understanding of these. It is, indeed, justifiable, so long as it does not profess[pg 297]to reveal the true nature of things, but remains conscious of the free spirit, whose own work and undertaking the whole is.Yet here again it is by no means necessary to surrender to naturalism a field which it has tried to take possession of, but is certainly unable to hold. We need not try to force naturalism to read out of empirical psychology the high conclusions as to human nature and spirit which pertain to the religious outlook, or to find in the“simplicity”of the“soul monad”a kind of physical proof of its indestructibility, or anything of that kind. We maintain that to comprehend the true inwardness of the vitality, freedom, dignity, and power of the spirit is not the business of psychology at all, but may perhaps be dealt with in ethics, if it be not admitted that with these concepts one has already entered the realm of religious experience, and that they are the very centre of religious theory. But undoubtedly we must reject in great measure the claims which naturalism makes upon our domain, and maintain that the most important starting-points for the higher view are to be found in the priority of everything spiritual over everything material, in the underivability of the spiritual and the impossibility of describing it in corporeal-mathematical terms and concepts.[pg 298]Individual Development.What lives in us, as far as we can perceive and trace it in its empirical expression, is not a finished and spiritual being that leaps, mature and complete, from some pre-existence or other into its embodied form, but is obviously something that only develops and becomes actual very gradually. Its becoming is conditioned by“stimuli,”influences, impressions from without, and perfects itself in the closest dependence upon the becoming of the body, is inhibited or advanced with it, and may be entirely arrested by it, forced into abnormal developments which never attain to the level of an“ego”or“personality,”but remain incomprehensible anomalies and monstrosities. In general, the psychical struggles slowly and laboriously free from purely vegetative and physiological processes, and gains control over itself and over the body. Its self-development and concentration to full unity and completeness of personality is only achieved through the deepest self-culture, through complete“simplification”as the ancients said, through great acts and experiences of inward centralisation such as that which finds religious expression in the metaphor of“regeneration.”What“building up”and self-development of the psychical means remains obscure. If we think of it as a summation, an adding on of new parts and constituents, and thus try to form a concrete image of the process, we spoil it altogether. If we speak of the transition from the potential to the actual,[pg 299]from the tendency to the realisation, we may not indeed spoil it, but we have done little to make the process more intelligible. So much only we can say: certain as it is that the Psyche, especially as conscious inner life, only gradually develops and becomes actual, and that in the closest dependence upon the development, maturing, and establishment of the nervous basis and the bodily organisation in general, yet the naturalistic view,a fortiorithe materialistic, is never at any point correct. There are three things to be borne in mind. First, the origin, the“whence”of the psychical is wholly hidden from us, and, notwithstanding the theory of evolution and descent, it remains an insoluble riddle. And secondly, however closely it is associated with and tied down to the processes of bodily development, it is never at any stage of its development really a function of it in actual and exact correspondence and dependence. And finally, the further it advances in its self-realisation, the further the relation of dependence recedes into the background, and the more do the independence and autonomy of the psychical processes become prominent.We have still to consider and amplify this in several respects, and then we may go on to still more important matters.Underivability.The first of the three points we have called attention to has, so to speak, become famous through the lectures of du Bois-Reymond, which attracted much attention, on“The Limits of Natural Knowledge,”and“The Seven[pg 300]Riddles of the Universe.”That these thoughtful lectures made so great an impression did not mean that a great new discovery had been made, but was rather a sign of the general lack of reflection on the part of the public, for they only expressed what had always been self-evident, and what had only been forgotten through thoughtlessness, or concealed by polemical rhetoric. Consciousness, thought, even the commonest sensation of pleasure and pain, or the simplest sense-perception, cannot be compared with“matter and energy,”with the movements of masses. They represent a foreign and altogether inexplicable guest in this world of matter, molecules, and elements. Even if we could follow the play of the nervous processes with which sensation, consciousness, pain, or pleasure are bound up, into their most intricate and delicate details, if we could make the brain transparent, and enlarge its cells to the size of houses, so that, with searching glance, we could count and observe all the processes, and even follow the dance of the molecules within it, we should never see“pain,”“pleasure,”or“thought,”or anything more than bodies and their movements. A thought, such as, for instance, the perception that two and two make four, is not long or broad, above or beneath; it cannot be measured or weighed in inches or pounds like matter, tested with the manometer, thermometer, or electrometer for its potential or intensity and tension, measured by ampères or volts or horse-powers like energies and electric currents; it is something wholly[pg 301]different, which can be known only through inner experience, but which is much better known than anything else whatever, and which it is absolutely impossible to compare with anything but itself. Even if we admit that it can only become actual and develop as an accompaniment of processes within bodies, and only within those bodies we call“living,”and that wherever bodies exist psychical phenomena occur; even if we were able, as we never shall be able, to produce living beings artificially in a retort, and even if psychical phenomena occurred in these also, we should still have made no progress towards explaining what the psychical really is. It would still only be the blazing up in these bodies of a flame which, in some inexplicable way, had fallen upon them, and associated itself with them. We do not doubt that this association, where it takes place, does so in obedience to the strictest law and the most inexorable necessity; therefore, that wherever and however the corporeal conditions are produced, sensation and consciousness will awaken. For we believe in a world governed by law. But the mystery is in no way lessened by this, and the modern theory of evolution throws no light into this utterly impenetrable darkness. In the first place, the whole idea of“explaining”in terms of“evolution”is a futile one. The process of becoming is pictured as a simple process of cumulation, a gradual increase of intensities, while the business is really one of change in quality and the introduction of what is new. In the second place, the occurrence even[pg 302]of the first and most primitive sensation contains the whole riddle concentrated on a single point. In the third place, the riddle meets us anew and undiminished in every developing individual. For to say that the physical inwardness, once it has arisen, is“transmitted,”is not an explanation but merely an admission that the riddle exists. And the idea that the psychical is just a penumbra or shadow of reality, which comes of itself and so to speak gratis, is quite inadmissible from the point of view of strict natural science. There are no longerluxusandlusus naturæ. Reality cannot throw a“shadow.”According to the principles of the conservation of matter and energy, we must be able to show whence it gets the so-called shadow, and with what it compensates for it.Pre-eminence of Consciousness.But we have already spent too much time over this naïve mode of looking at things, which, though it professes to place things in their true light, in reality distorts them and turns them upside down. As if this world of the external and material, all these bodies and forces, were our first and most direct data, and were not really all derived from, and only discoverable by, consciousness. We have here to do with the ancient view of all philosophy and all reflection in general, although in modern days it has taken its place as a great new discovery even among naturalists themselves, by whom it is extolled and recognised as[pg 303]“the conquest of materialism.”Such exaggerated emphasis tends to conceal the fact that this truth has been regarded as self-evident from very early times.What is a body, extension, movement, colour, smell and taste? What do I possess of them, or know of them, except through the images, sensations and feelings which they call up in my receptive mind? No single thing wanders into me as itself, or reveals itself to me directly; only through the way in which they affect me, the peculiar changes which they work in me, do things reveal to me their existence and their special character. I have no knowledge of an apple-tree or of an apple, except through the sense perceptions they call up in me. But these sense perceptions, what are they but different peculiar states of my consciousness, peculiar determinations of my mind? I see that the tree stands there, but what is it to see? What is the perception of a colour, of light, of shade, and their changes? Surely only a peculiar change of my mind itself, a particular state of stimulus and awareness brought about in myself. And in the same way I can feel that the apple lies there. But what is the perception of resistance, of hardness, of impenetrability? Nothing more than a feeling, a change in my psychical state, which is unique and cannot be described in terms of anything but itself. Even as regards“attraction and repulsion,”external existence only reveals itself to us through changes in the mind and[pg 304]consciousness, which we then attribute to a cause outside ourselves.It is well enough known that this simple but incontrovertible fact has often led to the denial of the existence of anything outside of ourselves and our consciousness. But even if we leave this difficult subject alone, it is quite certain that, if the question as to the pre-eminence of consciousness and its relation to external things is to be asked at all, it should be formulated as follows, and not conversely:“How can I, starting from the directly given reality and certainty of consciousness and its states, arrive at the certainty and reality of external things, substances, forces, physics and chemistry?”Creative Power of Consciousness.To this insight into the underivability and pre-eminence of consciousness over the world of external reality there must be added at this stage a recognition of its peculiar creative character. We have here to recognise that consciousness itself creates its world,—that is, the world that becomes our own through actual experience, possession, and enjoyment. We are led to this position even by the conception now current in natural science of the world as it is, not as it is mirrored in consciousness, and the theory of the“subjectivity of sensory qualities.”The qualities which we perceive in things through the senses are“subjective”; philosophy has long taught that, and now natural science teaches[pg 305]it too. That is to say, these qualities are not actually present in the things themselves; they are rather the particular responses which our consciousness makes to stimuli. Take, for instance, tone or colour. What we call tone or sound is not known to acoustics. That takes cognisance only of vibrations and the conditions of vibration in elastic bodies, which, by means of the ear and the nerves of hearing, become a stimulus of consciousness. Consciousness“responds”to this stimulus by receiving a sense-impression of hearing. But in this, obviously, there is nothing of the nature of oscillations and vibrations, but something quite different. What outside of us is nothing more than a complex process of movement according to mathematical conditions, blossoms within us to a world of sound, tone, and music. The world itself is soundless, toneless. And the same is true of light and colour;“light”and“blue”are nothing in themselves—are not properties of things themselves. They are only the infinitely rapid movements of an infinitely delicate substance, the ether. But when these meet our consciousness, they spin themselves within us into this world of light and colour, of brilliance and beauty. Thus without us there is a world of a purely mathematical nature, without quality, charm, or value. But the world we know, the world of sound, light, and colour, of all properties whatsoever, of the ugly or the beautiful, of pain and pleasure, is in the most real sense the product of consciousness itself, a creation which, incited by[pg 306]something outside of itself and of a totally different nature, which we can hardly call“world,”evolves out of itself and causes to blossom. No part of this creation is given from without; not the blue of the heavens, for outside of us there is no colour, only vibrations of the ether; not the gold of the sun nor the red glory of the evening sky. External nature is nothing more than the stimulus, the pressure upon the mind, which liberates from its depths the peculiar reactions and responses to this stimulus, and calls them forth from its own treasure-stores. Certainly in this creating the consciousness is entirely dependent on the impressions stamped on it from outside, and to that extent upon“experience.”But it is by no means atabula rasa, and a merely passive mirror of the outer world, for it translates the stimulus thus received into quite a different language, and builds up from it a new reality, which is quite unlike the mathematical and qualityless reality without. And this activity on the part of consciousness begins on the very lowest stages. The simplest perception of light or colour, the first feeling of pleasure or discomfort, is a reaction of the psychical, which brings about something entirely new and unique.“The spirit is never passive.”That the psychical is not derivable from the physical, that it does not arise out of it, is not secondary to it, but pre-eminent over it, is not passive but creative; so much we have already gained to set over against naturalism. But its claims are even more affected[pg 307]by the fact of real psychical causality. We need not here concern ourselves with the difficult question, whether the mind can of itself act upon the body, and through it upon the external world. But in the logical consistence of naturalism there was implied not only a negative answer to this last question, but also a denial of the causality of the psychical, even within itself and its own domain. This is well illustrated in the figure of the cloud shadows. In consciousness state follows upon state, a upon b, b upon c. According to naturalism, b is not really the result of a, nor c of b, for in that case there would be independence of phenomena, and distinctness of laws in the psychical. But as all the states, a, b, and c, of the cloud shadows, depend upon statesa,b, andc, of the clouds themselves, but do not themselves form a concatenation of causes, so all the states of the mind depend upon those of the body, in which alone there is a true chain of causes because they alone have true reality.This is a complete distortion of the facts of the case. It would never be possible to persuade oneself or any one else that the arm, for instance, did not bend simply because we willed that it should. And it is still less possible to doubt that there are sequences of causes within the psychical, that in the world of thought and feeling, of desire and will, one thing calls up another, awakes it, impels it onwards, and influences it. Indeed, the mode of influence is peculiarly rich, subtle, and[pg 308]certain. Mental images and experiences arouse joy or sorrow, admiration or repulsion. One image calls up another, forces it to appear according to quite peculiar laws, or may crowd it out. Feelings call up desires, desires lead to determination. Good news actually causes joy, this is actually strengthened to willing, and the new situation gives rise to actual resolves. All this is so obvious and so unquestionable that no naturalism can possibly prevail against it. It has also long been made the subject of special investigation and carefully regulated experiment, and it is one of the chief subjects of modern psychological science. And especially as regards the different forms of“association of ideas,”the particular laws of this psychical causality have been established.It cannot be denied, however, that this psychology of association has itself in a deeper sense certain dangers from the point of view of the freedom of the mind, and it is apt to lead, not indeed to naturalistic conceptions, but to views according to which the“soul”is reduced to the level of a passive frame and stage, so to speak, for the exhibition of mental mechanics and statics.“Ideas”or thoughts, or states of feelings, are sometimes represented almost as actual little realities, which come and go in accordance with their own laws of attraction and repulsion, unite and separate again, by virtue of a kind of mental gravitation, move and crowd one another, so that one must almost say“it thinks,”as one says“it rains,”and not“the mind thinks”or“I[pg 309]think.”But more of this later. This psychological orderliness is in sharp antagonism to pure naturalism. It describes the laws of a sequence of causes, which have nothing to do with the physical, chemical, or mechanical, and clearly establishes the uniqueness, independence, and underivability of the psychical as contrasted with the physical.The individuality and incommensurability of this psychical causality shows itself in another series of factors which make even theformof the psychical process quite distinctive, and produce phenomena which have no parallel in the material sequences of the world, indeed, conflict with all its fundamental laws. The great psychologists of to-day, Wundt in particular, and James, have frequently emphasised these factors. We can only briefly call attention to a few points, as, for instance, Wundt's theory of the creative resultants through which the psychical processes show themselves to be quite outside of the scope of the laws of equivalence which hold good in the physical. If, in the realm of the corporeal, two components of energy, a and b, come together, they unite in a common resultant c, which includes in part a new movement, in part transformation into heat, but always in such a way that c remains equal to a and b. But it is otherwise in the psychical. Here there occurs what may be called an increase (and a qualitative change) of the psychical energy. If we take the notes, c, e, and g, and call the sensation- and perception-value of the individual notes x, y, z,[pg 310]when they come together, the resulting sensation-value is by no means simply x + y + z, for a“harmony”results of which the effect is not only greater than the mere sum of x + y + z, but isqualitativelydifferent. This is true of all domains of psychical experience. The parallels from mechanical operation cannot be applied in any case. These only supply inadequate analogies and symbols which never really represent the actual state of the case.Let us take, for instance, a motive,m, that impels us towards a particular action, and another,n, that hinders us. If these meet in us, the result is not simply a weakening of the power of the one, and a remaining motive of the strength ofmminusn. The meeting of the two creates an entirely new and peculiar mental situation, which gives rise to conflict and choice, and the resultant victorious motive is never under any circumstancesm-n, but may be a double or three-foldmorn. Thus, in the different aspects of psychical activity, there are factors which make it impossible to compare these with other activities, remove them outside of the scope of the law of the equivalence of cause and effect, and prove that there is self-increase and growth on the part of psychical energies. And all such phenomena lead us away from the standpoint of any mere theory of association.[pg 311]Activity of Consciousness.Naturalism takes refuge in the doctrine of association, when it does not attain anything with its first claims, and applies this theory in such a way that it seems possible from this standpoint to interpret mental processes as having an approximate resemblance to mechanically and mathematically calculable phenomena. As in physics the molecules and atoms, so here the smallest mental elements, the simplest units of feeling are sought for, and from their relations of attraction and repulsion, their groupings and movements, it is supposed that the whole mental world may be constructed up to its highest contents, will, ideals, and development of character. But even the analogy, the model which is followed, and the fact that a model is followed at all, show that this method is uncritical and not unprejudiced. What reason is there for regarding occurrences in the realm of physics as anormfor the psychical? Why should one not rather start from the peculiar and very striking differences between the two, from the primary and fundamental fact, not indeed capable of explanation, but all the more worthy of attention on that account, that there is an absolute difference between physical occurrences and mental behaviour, between physical and mental causality? These most primitive and simplest mental elements which are supposed to float and have their being within the mind as in a kind of spiritual ether are not atoms[pg 312]at all, but deeds, actions, performances. The laws of the association of ideas are not the laws of a mental chemistry, but laws of mental behaviour; very fixed and reliable laws, but still having to do with modes of behaviour. Their separating and uniting, their relations to one another, their grouping into unities, their“syntheses,”are not automatic permutations and combinations, but express theactivityof a thinking intelligence. Not even the simplest actual synthesis comes about of itself, as psychologists have shown by a neat illustration.[Illustration: Squarea2, next to smaller squareb2. Above them are horizontal linesaandb, the same lengths as the widths of the squares below them. Caption:aandbonly associated. Squares ofaandbin juxtaposition.][Illustration: Squarec2. Above it is horizontal linec, the same length as the width of the square below it. Caption:aandbreally synthetised toc. Square ofa+bas a true unity =c2.]Given that, through some association, the image of the lineacalls up that of the lineb, and both are associatively ranged together, we have still not made the real synthesisa+b=c. For to think ofaandbside by side is not the same thing as thinking ofc, as we shall readily see if we square them. The squares ofaandbthought of beside one another, that is,a2andb2, are something quite different from the square of the really[pg 313]synthetisedaandb, which is (a+b)2=a2+ 2ab+b2, orc2. This requires quite a new view, a spontaneous synthesis, which is an action and not a mere experience.The Ego.It was customary in earlier psychology, as it still is in all apologetic psychology, to regard the soul as a unified, immaterial, indivisible and therefore indestructiblesubstance, as a monad, which, as a unity without parts, superior to its own capacities and the changes of its states, is at all times one and the same subject. Many attempts have been made since the time of Plotinus to accumulate proofs of this substantial unity. We may leave this question untouched here, and need not even inquire whether these definitions are not themselves things of the external world employed as images and analogies and pushed too far. But there are three factors which may be established in regard to the psychical in spite of all naturalistic opposition; and those who have attempted to find proofs for the traditional idea we have noted, have usually really had these three in mind, and quite rightly so: they are, self-consciousness, the unity of consciousness, and the consciousness of the ego.Self-Consciousness.1. Our consciousness is not merely a knowledge of many individual things, the possession of concrete and abstract, particular or general conceptions and ideas, the cherishing of sensations, feelings and the like. We[pg 314]not only know, but we know that we know, and we can ponder in thought over the very fact that we are able thus to reflect in thought. Thought can turn its attention upon itself, can establish that it takes place, and how it runs its course, can reflect upon the forms in which it expresses itself, its powers, its laws, possibilities, and limits, and can ponder over the general nature of thought and the contingent individual nature of the particular thinking subject. (The very possibility and preliminary condition of moral freedom is implied in this.) How naturalism is to do justice to this fact it is not easy to see. Even if it were possible that the mental content was gained through mere experience, that comparisons, syntheses, and abstractions were formed simply according to the laws of association, and that these were sublimed and refined to general ideas, and could grow into axioms of logic and of geometry, or crystallise into necessary and axiomatic principles—none of which can happen—yet it would always be a knowledge of something. But how this something could be given to itself remains undiscoverable. The soul is atabula rasaand a mere mirror, says this theory. But it would still require to show how the silver layer behind the mirror began to see itself in the mirror.The Unity of Consciousness.2. The same holds true of the unity of consciousness, of which we are directly convinced. It is quite inexplicable[pg 315]if consciousness is a function of the extended and divisible physical substratum which is built up of nerve-cells and nerve-fibres. And yet this unity is the fundamental condition of our whole inner life.Even the facts of association demonstrate it. Two images could not come together, the one could not call up the other, if they were not possessed in the same consciousness, and could unite in it. It is the preliminary condition of every higher mode of thought, of every relating of things, of every comparison and abstraction. No judgment can be formed, no conclusion drawn without this. How could a predicate become associated with its subject, or a principal clause with its subordinate clause, if they were in separate consciousnesses, and how could the conclusion be drawn from them?Consciousness of the Ego.3. This unified self-consciousness is consciousness of the ego. It is only by means of an artificial abstraction that we can leave out of account in the consideration of processes of thought the peculiar factor of personal relationship that absolutely attaches to every thought within us. There are no thoughts in general that play their part of themselves alone.“It”never“thinks”in me. On the contrary, all sensation, thought, and will has in every human being a peculiar central relationship to which we refer when we say“my idea,”“my sensation.”What the“I”is cannot be defined. It is that through which the relation of all[pg 316]experiences and actions is referred to a point, and through which the treasuring of them for good or ill, the appreciation, the valuation of them is accomplished. And it plays its part even in the case of cold and indifferent items of knowledge. For instance, that twice two are four is not simply a perception, it ismyperception. Of the ego itself nothing more can be said than that it is the thought of me as the subject of all experience, willing, and action, and if we try to take hold of it nothing more than this formula remains. Yet the fact that the ego is the subject of all this, gives conduct, will, and experience that peculiar character which distinguishes them from mere action and reaction. For it is directly certain that all the psychical contents are not only co-existences in one consciousness but that they are possessed by it.Thus in summing up we have to say, that it is through the ego that all psychical activities and experiences are centred and related, that the ego is itself the point of relation, that it is the reason of the unity of consciousness and of the possibility of self-consciousness, and that in all this it is the most certain reality, without which the simplest psychical life would be impossible. At the same time, it is difficult to state what the“ego”is in itself, apart from the effects in which it reveals itself.[pg 317]
Chapter X. Autonomy Of Spirit.The aim of our study has been to define our attitude to naturalism, and to maintain in the teeth of naturalism the validity and freedom of the religious conception of the world. This seemed to be cramped and menaced by those“reductions to simpler terms”which we have already discussed.But one of these reductions, the most important of all, we have not yet encountered, and it remains to be dealt with now. In comparison with this one all others are relatively unimportant, and it is easy to understand how some have regarded the problem of the relations of the naturalistic and the religious outlook as beginning at this point, and have neglected everything below it. For we have now to consider the attempt of naturalism to“reduce”spirit itself to terms of nature, either to derive it from nature, or, when that is recognised as quite too confused and impossible, to make it subject to nature and her system of laws, or to similar laws, and thus to rob it of its freedom and independence, of its essential character as above nature and free from it, and to bring it down to the level of an accompanying[pg 279]shadow or a mere reverse side of nature. The aggressive naturalism which we have discussed has from very early times exercised itself on this point, and has instinctively and rightly felt that herein lies the kernel of the whole problem under dispute. It has for the most part concentrated its interest and its attacks upon the“immortality of the soul.”But while this was often the starting-point, the nature of soul, and spirit, and consciousness in general have been brought under discussion and subjected to attacks which sought to show how vague and questionable was the reality of spirit as contrasted with the palpable, solid and indubitable reality of the outer world. Prominence was given to the fact that the spiritual side of our nature is dependent on and conditioned by the body and bodily states, the external environment, experiences and impressions. These were often the sole, and always the chief subjects of the doctrine of the vulgar naturalism. But the same is true of the naturalism of the higher order, as we described it in Chapter II. In order to acquire definite guiding principles of investigation, it makes the attempt to find the true reality of phenomena in the mechanical, corporeal, physiological processes, and to take little or no account of the co-operation, the interpolation, the general efficiency of sensation, perception, thought, or will, and to treat them as though they were a shadow and accompaniment of reality, but not as an equivalent, much less a preponderating constituent of it. Out of these[pg 280]fundamental principles of investigation, and out of the opposition and doubt with which the spiritual is regarded, there is compounded the current mongrel naturalism, which, without precision in its ideas, and without any great clearness or logical consequence in its views, is thoroughly imbued with the notion that that only is truly real which we can see, hear, and touch—the solid objective world of matter and energy, and that“science”begins and ends with this. As for anything outside of or beyond this, it is at most a beautiful dream of fancy, with which it is quite safe to occupy oneself as long as one clearly understands that of course it is not true.“Nature”is the only indubitable reality, and mind is but a kind oflususorluxus naturæ, which accompanies it at some few places, like a peculiarly coloured aura or shadow, but which must, as far as reality is concerned, yield pre-eminence to“Nature”in every respect.The religious conception is deeply and essentially antagonistic to all such attempts to range spirit, spiritual being, and the subjective world under“nature,”“matter,”“energy,”or whatever we may call what is opposed to mind and ranked above it in reality and value. The religious conception is made up essentially of a belief in spirit, its worth and pre-eminence. It does not even seek to compare the reality and origin of spirit with anything else whatever. For all its beliefs, the most sublime and the crudest alike, conceal within them the conviction that[pg 281]fundamentally spirit alone has truth and reality, and that everything else is derived from it. It is a somewhat pitiful mode of procedure to direct all apologetic endeavours towards the one relatively small question of“immortality,”thus following exactly the lines usually adopted by the aggressive exponents of naturalism, and thus allowing opponents to dictate the form of the questions and answers. It is quite certain that all religion which is in any way complete, includes within itself a belief in the everlastingness of our spiritual, personal nature, and its independence of the becoming or passing away of external things. But, on the one hand, this particular question can only be settled in connection with the whole problem, and, on the other hand, it is only a fraction of the much farther-reaching belief in the reality of spirit and its superiority to nature. The very being of religion depends upon this. That it may be able to take itself seriously and regard itself as true; that all deep and pious feelings, of humility and devotion, may be cherished as genuine and as founded in truth; that it behoves it to find and experience the noble and divine in the world's course, in history and in individual life; that the whole world of feeling with all its deep stirrings and mysteries is of all things the most real and true, and the most significant fact of existence—all these are features apart from which it is impossible to think of religion at all. But they all depend upon the reality, independence and absolute pre-eminence of[pg 282]spirit. Freedom and responsibility, duty, moral control and self-development, the valuation of life and our life-work according to our life's mission and ideal aims, even according to everlasting aims, and“sub specie æterni,”the idea of the good, the true and the beautiful—all things apart from which religion cannot be thought of—all these depend upon spirit and its truth. And finally“God is Spirit”: religion cannot represent, or conceive, or possess its own highest good and supreme idea, except by thinking in terms of the highest analogies of what it knows in itself as spiritual being and reality. If spirit is not real and above all other realities; if it is derivable, subordinate and dependent, it is impossible to think of anything whatever to which the name of“God”can be given. And this is as true of the refined speculations of the pantheistic poetic religions, as of the idea of God in simple piety. The interest of religion as against the claims of naturalism includes all this. And it would be doing the cause of religion sorry service to extract from this whole some isolated question to which the mood of the time or traditional custom has given prominence. Our task must be to show that religion maintains its validity and freedom because of the truth and independence of spirit and its superiority to nature.It is, of course, impossible to give an exhaustive treatment of this problem in a short study like this. The answer to this question would include the whole range of mental science with all its parts and branches.[pg 283]Mental science, from logic and epistemology up to and including the moral and æsthetic sciences, proves by its very existence, and by the fact that it cannot be reduced to terms of natural science, that spirit can neither be derived from nor analysed into anything else. And it is only when we have mastered all this that we can say how far and how strongly knowledge and known realities corroborate religion and its great conclusions as to spirit and spiritual existence, how they reinforce it and admit its validity and freedom. Since this is so, all isolated and particular endeavours in this direction can only be a prelude or introduction, and a more or less arbitrary selection from the relevant material of facts and ideas. And nothing more than this is aimed at in the following pages.Naturalistic Attacks on the Autonomy of the Spiritual.The attacks that have been made by naturalism upon the independence and freedom of the spiritual are so familiar to every one—even from school days—through books of the type of Büchner's“Kraft und Stoff,”and Haeckel's“The Riddle of the Universe,”and other half or wholly materialistic popular dogmatics, that it is unnecessary to enter into any detail. Very little that is new has been added in this connection to the attack made by Plato on himself in the“Phædo”through Simmias and Kebes. It is only apparently that the modern attacks have become more serious[pg 284]through the deepened knowledge of natural science. At all times they have been as serious and as significant as possible, and the religious and every other idealistic conception of the universe has always suffered from them. It is plain that here, if anywhere,“faith goes against appearances,”and that in the last resource we have to postulate free moral resolution, the will to believe, the desire for the ideal, for freedom, and for the eternity of the spirit, and the confidence of the spirit in itself. All this is, or at least ought to be, self-evident and generally admitted.Let us once more take a brief survey of the reasons on the other side and arrange them in order.That nature is everything and spirit very little seems to follow from a very simple circumstance. There are whole worlds of purely natural and corporeal existence without mind, sensation, or consciousness, which, quite untroubled by their absence, simply exist according to the everlasting laws of matter and energy. But nowhere do we find spirit or mind without a material basis. All that is psychical occurs in connection with a physical being, and with relatively few physical beings. Spirit seems wholly bound up with and dependent upon the states, development, and conditions of material being. With the body of living beings there arises what we call“soul”; with the body it grows, gains content, changes, matures, ages, and disappears. According as the body is constituted and composed, as it is influenced by heredity, race, and[pg 285]selection, by nutrition, mode of life, climate, and other circumstances, there are developed in a hundred different ways what we call the natural disposition or character, inclinations, virtues or vices, passions or temperaments. Even the names given to the different temperaments emphasise this dependence of what is innermost in us, the deepest tendencies of our being, on the bodily organisation and the nature of its physiological constitution. The man whose blood flows easily and freely is called sanguine, and the melancholic is the victim of his liver. According as our organs are good or bad, function freely or sluggishly, our mood rises or sinks, we are bold or cowardly, languid or impetuous, and enthusiasm is often enough only a peculiar name for a state which, physiologically expressed, might be called alcoholic poisoning. There is one soul in the sound body, another in the sickly. Fever, and the impotence of the soul against it, made Holbach a materialist. If the brain be diseased, that marvellous order of psychical processes which we call reasoning is broken; the“soul”is wholly or partly eliminated; it fades away, or becomes nothing more than a confused disconnected medley of images and desires. Even artificial interference with, and changes in the bodily organisation react upon the mind. The removal of the thyroid gland may result in idiocy. Castration not only prevents the“breaking”of the voice in the Sistine choristers, it damps the fires of life to dulness, and makes of the impetuous Abelard a comfortable discursive father-confessor.[pg 286]The mind is bound up almost piece by piece with its material basis. Through the“localisation”of psychic processes in the particular parts of the brain, naturalism has enormously strengthened the impression that existed even among the ancients, that sensation and imagination are nothing more than, let us say, what the note is to a tightly stretched string. Cerebrum and cerebellum are regarded as the seats of different psychic processes. The secret of the higher processes is believed to be hidden in the grey matter of the cortex of the cerebrum. We seek and find in the various lobes and convolutions of the brain the“centres”for the different capacities, the power of sight, of smell, of moving the arms, of moving the legs, of associating ideas, of co-ordinated speech, and so on. When brain and spinal cord are injured or removed piece by piece from a pigeon or a frog, it seems as if the“soul”were eliminated piece by piece,—the capacity for spontaneous free co-ordination, for voluntary action, for the various sense-impressions, and so on from the higher to the lower. It has even been maintained that the different feelings and perceptions which are gradually acquired can be apportioned among the individual cells of the brain in which they are localised, and the thought-processes, the associations of percepts, the origin of consecutive ideas, the rapid and easy recalling of memory-images, and the process of voluntary control, of instincts, can be explained as due to the“gradual laying down of nerve-paths”between[pg 287]the different centres and areas of localisation in the brain. All this seems to refute utterly the old belief in the unity and personality of the soul. It is different in youth and in age, and indeed varies continually. It is the ever-varied harmony of the notes of all the strings which are represented by the fibres and ganglion-cells of the nerve-substance. It apparently can not only be completely confused and brought to disharmony, but it may be halved and divided. An almost terrifying impression was produced when Trembley in 1740 made the experiment of cutting a“hydra”in two, and showed that each of the halves became a complete animal, so that obviously each of the two halves of the soul grew into a new hydra-soul. And Trembley's hydra was only the precursor of all the cut-up worms, of the frogs, birds, and guinea-pigs that have been beheaded, or have had their brain removed, or their nerves cut, and have furnished further examples of this divisibility of“souls.”If the independence of the spiritual is thus shown to be a vain assumption, the alleged difference between the animal and the human Psyche is much more so. Not from the days of Darwinism alone, but from the very beginning, naturalism has opposed this claim to distinctiveness. But it is due to Darwinism that the fundamental similarity of the psychical in man and animals has come to be regarded as almost self-evident. The mental organisation of man, as well as his corporeal organisation, is traced back through gradual stages to[pg 288]animal antecedents, and in thus tracing it there are two favourite methods of procedure, which are, however, apt to be mutually destructive.On the one hand, some naturalists regard the animal anthropomorphically, insist on its likeness to man, discovering and extolling, not without emotion, all the higher and nobler possessions of the human mind, intellectual capacities, reason, reflection, synthesis, fancy, the power of forming ideas and judgments, of drawing conclusions and learning from experience, besides will in the true sense, ethical, social and political capacities, æsthetic perceptions, and even fits of religion in elephants, apes, dogs, down even to ants and bees, and these naturalists reject old-fashioned explanations in terms of instinct, and find the highest already contained in the lowest. Those of another school are inclined to regard man theriomorphically, to insist on his likeness to animals, explaining reason in terms of perception and sensation, deriving will from impulse and desire, and ethical and æsthetic valuations from physiological antecedents and purely animal psychological processes, thus, in short, seeking to find the lowest in the highest. (We have already met with an analogous instance of a similarly fallacious double-play on parallel lines.) So it comes about that both the origin and the development of the psychical and spiritual seem to be satisfactorily cleared up and explained, and at the same time a new proof is adduced for its dependence upon the physical. For what is true of all[pg 289]other parts of the organisation, of the building up and perfecting of every member and every system of organs, the bony skeleton, the circulatory system, the alimentary canal, that they can be referred back to very simple beginnings, and that their evolution may be traced through all its stages—is equally true of the nervous system in general and of the brain in particular. It increases more and more in volume and in intricacy of structure, it expands the cranial cavity and diversifies its convolutions. And the more it grows, and the more complex it becomes, the more do the mental capacities increase in perfection, so that here again it seems once more apparent that the psychical is an accompaniment and result of the physical.Popular naturalism usually stops short here, and contents itself with half-truths and inconsequences, for it naïvely admits that psychical processes, sensation, perception, will, have a real influence upon the physical, and, not perceiving how much the admission involves, it does not trouble itself over the fact that, for instance in the so-called voluntary movements of the body, in ordinary behaviour, the psychical, and the will, in particular, is capable of real effect, and can move hand and foot and the whole body, and thus has a real reciprocal relation with the physical. This form of popular naturalism sometimes amuses itself with assuming a psychical inwardness even in non-living matter, and admitting the co-operation of psychical motives even in regard to it.[pg 290]But it is far otherwise with naturalism in the strict sense, which takes its fundamental principles and its method of investigation seriously. It is aware that such half-and-half measures interrupt the continuity of the system at the most decisive point. And therefore with the greatest determination it repeats along psychological lines the same kind of treatment that it has previously sought to apply to biological phenomena: the corporeal must form a sequence of phenomena complete in itself and not broken into from without. All processes of movement, all that looks as if it happened“through our will,”through a resolve due to the intervention of a psychical motive, every flush of shame that reddens the cheek, every stroke executed by the hand, every sound-wave caused by tongue and lips, must be the result of conditions of stimulation and tension in the energy of the body itself.This is the meaning of all those psycho-physical experiments that have been carried on with so much ingenuity and persistence (usually associated with attempts to explain vital phenomena in terms of mechanism). First, they attempt to interpret the expressions of will, feeling and need, the spontaneous activities and movements of the lowest forms of life—protists—as“pure reflexes,”as processes which take place in obedience to stimuli, and thus are ultimately due to chemical and physical influences and causes without the intervention of a psychical motive; and, secondly, when this has been apparently or really achieved, the theory of irritability[pg 291]and reflex mechanism is pushed from below upwards, until even the most intricate and complex movements and operations of our own body, which we have wrongly distinguished as acts or behaviour from mere processes of stimulation, are finally recognised as reflexes and liberations due to stimuli. Some stimulus or other, from light or sound or something else, is, according to this theory, conducted to the nervous centre, the ganglion, the spinal cord, the cerebellum or the cerebrum. Here it produces an effect, not of a psychical nature, but some minute chemical, or physical,—or purely mechanical change, which goes through many permutations within the nervous centre itself, unites there with the stored energies, and then, thus altered, returns by the efferent nerve paths to effect a muscle-contraction in some organ, a stretching of the hand, or a movement of the whole body. The physical process is accompanied by a peculiar inward mirroring, which is the psychical penumbra or shadow of the whole business. Thus what is in reality a purely mechanical and reflex sequence appears like a psychical experience, like choice and will and psychical causality. We may be compared to Spinoza's stone; it was thrown, and it thought it was flying.The reasons for interpreting things in this way lie in the principles of investigation. It is only in this way, we are told, that nature can be reduced to natural terms, that is, to chemistry, physics, and mechanics. Only in this way is it possible to gain a true insight[pg 292]into and understanding of things, and to bring them under mathematical formulæ. Thus only, too, can“the miraculous”be eliminated. For if we are obliged to admit that the will has a real influence on the corporeal, for instance upon our brain, and nerves, and arm-muscles, this would be a violation of the law of the constancy of the sum of energy. For in this case there would occur, at a certain point in the nexus of phenomena, a piece of work done, however small it might be, for which there was no equivalent of energy in the previous constitution. But this is, since the days of Helmholtz, an impossible assumption. And thus all those experiments and theories on what we have called the“second line”of mechanistic interpretation of the universe show themselves to be relevant to our present subject.Interpretations of the psychical such as these have given rise to four peculiar“isms”of an epistemological nature,i.e., related to a theory of knowledge. Not infrequently they are the historical antecedents which result in the naturalistic theory of the psychical. These are nominalism and sensualism, empiricism and a-posteriorism, which, setting themselves against epistemological rationalism, assail the dignity, the independence, and the autonomy of the thinking mind. They are so necessarily and closely associated with naturalism that their fate is intimately bound up with its fate, and they are corroborated or refuted with it. And it would be possible to conduct the whole discussion with which we[pg 293]are concerned purely with reference to these four“isms.”The strife really begins in their camp.The soul is atabula rasa, all four maintain, a white paper on which, to begin with, nothing is inscribed. It brings with it neither innate knowledge nor commands. What it possesses in the way of percepts, concepts, opinions, convictions, principles of action, rules of conduct, are inscribed upon it through experience (empiricism). That is, not antecedent to, but subsequent to experience (a posteriori). But experience can only be gained through the senses. Only thus does reality penetrate into and stamp itself upon us.“What was not first in the senses (sensus) cannot be in the intelligence.”What the senses convey to us alone builds up our mental content, from mere sensory perceptions upwards to the most abstract ideas from the simplest psychical elements up to the most complex ideas, concepts, and conclusions, to the most varied imaginative constructions. And in the development of the mental content the“soul”itself is merely the stage upon which all that is acquired through the senses crowds, and jostles, and unites to form images, perceptions, and precepts. But it is itself purely passive, and it becomes what happens to it. Therefore it is not really spirit at all, for spirit implies spontaneity, activity, and autonomy.Philosophy and the mental sciences have always had to carry on the strife with these four opponents. And it is in the teacup of logic and epistemology[pg 294]that the storm in regard to theories of the universe has arisen. It is there, and not in the domain of neurology, or zoology, that the real battlefield lies, upon which the controversy must be fought out to the end. What follows is only a sort of skirmish about the outposts.What naturalism holds in regard to the psychical and spiritual may be, perhaps, most simply expressed by means of an illustration. Over a wide field there glide mighty shadows in constant interplay. They expand and contract, become denser or lighter, disappear for a little, and then reveal themselves again. While they are thus forming and changing, one state follows quite connectedly on another. At first one is tempted to believe that they are self-acting and self-regulating, that they move freely and pass from one state to another according to causes within themselves. But then one sees that they are thrown upon the earth from the clouds above, now in this way and now in that, that all their states and forms and changes are nothing in themselves, and neither effect anything in themselves nor react upon the occurrences and realities up above, which they only accompany, and by which they are determined without any co-operation on their own part, even in determining their own form. So it is with nature and spirit. Nature is the true effective reality; spirit is its shadow, which effects nothing either within or outside of itself, but simply happens.[pg 295]The Fundamental Answer.How can the religious conception of the world justify itself and maintain its freedom in face of such views of spirit and spiritual being? It is questionable whether it is worth while attempting to do so. Is not the essence of the validity and freedom of spirit made most certain simply through the fact that it is able to inquire into it? If we leave popular naturalism out of the question, is not the attempt made by scientific naturalism the best witness against itself? For scientific study, and the establishment of fundamental conceptions and guiding principles are only possible if mind and thought are free and active and creative. The direct experience that spirit has of itself, of its individuality and freedom, of its incomparability with all that is beneath it, is far too constant and genuine to admit of its being put into a difficulty by a doctrine which it has itself established. And this doctrine has far too much the character of a“fixed theory”to carry permanent inward conviction with it. Here again, the mistake made is in starting with scepticism and with the fewest and simplest assumptions. It is by no means the case that in order to discover the truth we must start always from a position of scepticism, instead of from calm confidence in ourselves and in our conviction that we possess in direct experience the best guarantee of truth. For we experience nothing more certainly than the content and riches of our own[pg 296]mind, its power of acting and creating, and all its great capacities. And it is part of the duty laid upon us by the religious conception of the universe, as well as by all other idealistic conceptions, to follow this path of self-assurance alone, that is, through self-development and self-deepening, through self-realisation and self-discipline, to use to the full in our lives all that we have in heart and mind as possibilities, tendencies, content, and capacities, and so practically to experience the reality and power of the spiritual that the mood of suspicion and distrust of it must disappear. The validity of this method is corroborated by all the critical insight into the nature of our knowledge that we have gained in the course of our study, and it might be deepened in regard to this particular case. For here, if anywhere, we must recognise the limitations of our knowledge; the impossibility of attaining to a full understanding of the true nature and depths of things applies to the inquiring mind and its hidden nature. From Descartes to Leibnitz, Kant, and Fries, down to the historian of materialism itself, F. A. Lange, it has been an axiom of the idealistic philosophy, expressed now in dogmatic, now in critical form, that the mathematical-mechanical outlook and causal interpretation of things, not excluding a naturalistic psychology, is thoroughly justifiable as a method of arranging scientifically the phenomena accessible to us and of penetrating more deeply towards an understanding of these. It is, indeed, justifiable, so long as it does not profess[pg 297]to reveal the true nature of things, but remains conscious of the free spirit, whose own work and undertaking the whole is.Yet here again it is by no means necessary to surrender to naturalism a field which it has tried to take possession of, but is certainly unable to hold. We need not try to force naturalism to read out of empirical psychology the high conclusions as to human nature and spirit which pertain to the religious outlook, or to find in the“simplicity”of the“soul monad”a kind of physical proof of its indestructibility, or anything of that kind. We maintain that to comprehend the true inwardness of the vitality, freedom, dignity, and power of the spirit is not the business of psychology at all, but may perhaps be dealt with in ethics, if it be not admitted that with these concepts one has already entered the realm of religious experience, and that they are the very centre of religious theory. But undoubtedly we must reject in great measure the claims which naturalism makes upon our domain, and maintain that the most important starting-points for the higher view are to be found in the priority of everything spiritual over everything material, in the underivability of the spiritual and the impossibility of describing it in corporeal-mathematical terms and concepts.[pg 298]Individual Development.What lives in us, as far as we can perceive and trace it in its empirical expression, is not a finished and spiritual being that leaps, mature and complete, from some pre-existence or other into its embodied form, but is obviously something that only develops and becomes actual very gradually. Its becoming is conditioned by“stimuli,”influences, impressions from without, and perfects itself in the closest dependence upon the becoming of the body, is inhibited or advanced with it, and may be entirely arrested by it, forced into abnormal developments which never attain to the level of an“ego”or“personality,”but remain incomprehensible anomalies and monstrosities. In general, the psychical struggles slowly and laboriously free from purely vegetative and physiological processes, and gains control over itself and over the body. Its self-development and concentration to full unity and completeness of personality is only achieved through the deepest self-culture, through complete“simplification”as the ancients said, through great acts and experiences of inward centralisation such as that which finds religious expression in the metaphor of“regeneration.”What“building up”and self-development of the psychical means remains obscure. If we think of it as a summation, an adding on of new parts and constituents, and thus try to form a concrete image of the process, we spoil it altogether. If we speak of the transition from the potential to the actual,[pg 299]from the tendency to the realisation, we may not indeed spoil it, but we have done little to make the process more intelligible. So much only we can say: certain as it is that the Psyche, especially as conscious inner life, only gradually develops and becomes actual, and that in the closest dependence upon the development, maturing, and establishment of the nervous basis and the bodily organisation in general, yet the naturalistic view,a fortiorithe materialistic, is never at any point correct. There are three things to be borne in mind. First, the origin, the“whence”of the psychical is wholly hidden from us, and, notwithstanding the theory of evolution and descent, it remains an insoluble riddle. And secondly, however closely it is associated with and tied down to the processes of bodily development, it is never at any stage of its development really a function of it in actual and exact correspondence and dependence. And finally, the further it advances in its self-realisation, the further the relation of dependence recedes into the background, and the more do the independence and autonomy of the psychical processes become prominent.We have still to consider and amplify this in several respects, and then we may go on to still more important matters.Underivability.The first of the three points we have called attention to has, so to speak, become famous through the lectures of du Bois-Reymond, which attracted much attention, on“The Limits of Natural Knowledge,”and“The Seven[pg 300]Riddles of the Universe.”That these thoughtful lectures made so great an impression did not mean that a great new discovery had been made, but was rather a sign of the general lack of reflection on the part of the public, for they only expressed what had always been self-evident, and what had only been forgotten through thoughtlessness, or concealed by polemical rhetoric. Consciousness, thought, even the commonest sensation of pleasure and pain, or the simplest sense-perception, cannot be compared with“matter and energy,”with the movements of masses. They represent a foreign and altogether inexplicable guest in this world of matter, molecules, and elements. Even if we could follow the play of the nervous processes with which sensation, consciousness, pain, or pleasure are bound up, into their most intricate and delicate details, if we could make the brain transparent, and enlarge its cells to the size of houses, so that, with searching glance, we could count and observe all the processes, and even follow the dance of the molecules within it, we should never see“pain,”“pleasure,”or“thought,”or anything more than bodies and their movements. A thought, such as, for instance, the perception that two and two make four, is not long or broad, above or beneath; it cannot be measured or weighed in inches or pounds like matter, tested with the manometer, thermometer, or electrometer for its potential or intensity and tension, measured by ampères or volts or horse-powers like energies and electric currents; it is something wholly[pg 301]different, which can be known only through inner experience, but which is much better known than anything else whatever, and which it is absolutely impossible to compare with anything but itself. Even if we admit that it can only become actual and develop as an accompaniment of processes within bodies, and only within those bodies we call“living,”and that wherever bodies exist psychical phenomena occur; even if we were able, as we never shall be able, to produce living beings artificially in a retort, and even if psychical phenomena occurred in these also, we should still have made no progress towards explaining what the psychical really is. It would still only be the blazing up in these bodies of a flame which, in some inexplicable way, had fallen upon them, and associated itself with them. We do not doubt that this association, where it takes place, does so in obedience to the strictest law and the most inexorable necessity; therefore, that wherever and however the corporeal conditions are produced, sensation and consciousness will awaken. For we believe in a world governed by law. But the mystery is in no way lessened by this, and the modern theory of evolution throws no light into this utterly impenetrable darkness. In the first place, the whole idea of“explaining”in terms of“evolution”is a futile one. The process of becoming is pictured as a simple process of cumulation, a gradual increase of intensities, while the business is really one of change in quality and the introduction of what is new. In the second place, the occurrence even[pg 302]of the first and most primitive sensation contains the whole riddle concentrated on a single point. In the third place, the riddle meets us anew and undiminished in every developing individual. For to say that the physical inwardness, once it has arisen, is“transmitted,”is not an explanation but merely an admission that the riddle exists. And the idea that the psychical is just a penumbra or shadow of reality, which comes of itself and so to speak gratis, is quite inadmissible from the point of view of strict natural science. There are no longerluxusandlusus naturæ. Reality cannot throw a“shadow.”According to the principles of the conservation of matter and energy, we must be able to show whence it gets the so-called shadow, and with what it compensates for it.Pre-eminence of Consciousness.But we have already spent too much time over this naïve mode of looking at things, which, though it professes to place things in their true light, in reality distorts them and turns them upside down. As if this world of the external and material, all these bodies and forces, were our first and most direct data, and were not really all derived from, and only discoverable by, consciousness. We have here to do with the ancient view of all philosophy and all reflection in general, although in modern days it has taken its place as a great new discovery even among naturalists themselves, by whom it is extolled and recognised as[pg 303]“the conquest of materialism.”Such exaggerated emphasis tends to conceal the fact that this truth has been regarded as self-evident from very early times.What is a body, extension, movement, colour, smell and taste? What do I possess of them, or know of them, except through the images, sensations and feelings which they call up in my receptive mind? No single thing wanders into me as itself, or reveals itself to me directly; only through the way in which they affect me, the peculiar changes which they work in me, do things reveal to me their existence and their special character. I have no knowledge of an apple-tree or of an apple, except through the sense perceptions they call up in me. But these sense perceptions, what are they but different peculiar states of my consciousness, peculiar determinations of my mind? I see that the tree stands there, but what is it to see? What is the perception of a colour, of light, of shade, and their changes? Surely only a peculiar change of my mind itself, a particular state of stimulus and awareness brought about in myself. And in the same way I can feel that the apple lies there. But what is the perception of resistance, of hardness, of impenetrability? Nothing more than a feeling, a change in my psychical state, which is unique and cannot be described in terms of anything but itself. Even as regards“attraction and repulsion,”external existence only reveals itself to us through changes in the mind and[pg 304]consciousness, which we then attribute to a cause outside ourselves.It is well enough known that this simple but incontrovertible fact has often led to the denial of the existence of anything outside of ourselves and our consciousness. But even if we leave this difficult subject alone, it is quite certain that, if the question as to the pre-eminence of consciousness and its relation to external things is to be asked at all, it should be formulated as follows, and not conversely:“How can I, starting from the directly given reality and certainty of consciousness and its states, arrive at the certainty and reality of external things, substances, forces, physics and chemistry?”Creative Power of Consciousness.To this insight into the underivability and pre-eminence of consciousness over the world of external reality there must be added at this stage a recognition of its peculiar creative character. We have here to recognise that consciousness itself creates its world,—that is, the world that becomes our own through actual experience, possession, and enjoyment. We are led to this position even by the conception now current in natural science of the world as it is, not as it is mirrored in consciousness, and the theory of the“subjectivity of sensory qualities.”The qualities which we perceive in things through the senses are“subjective”; philosophy has long taught that, and now natural science teaches[pg 305]it too. That is to say, these qualities are not actually present in the things themselves; they are rather the particular responses which our consciousness makes to stimuli. Take, for instance, tone or colour. What we call tone or sound is not known to acoustics. That takes cognisance only of vibrations and the conditions of vibration in elastic bodies, which, by means of the ear and the nerves of hearing, become a stimulus of consciousness. Consciousness“responds”to this stimulus by receiving a sense-impression of hearing. But in this, obviously, there is nothing of the nature of oscillations and vibrations, but something quite different. What outside of us is nothing more than a complex process of movement according to mathematical conditions, blossoms within us to a world of sound, tone, and music. The world itself is soundless, toneless. And the same is true of light and colour;“light”and“blue”are nothing in themselves—are not properties of things themselves. They are only the infinitely rapid movements of an infinitely delicate substance, the ether. But when these meet our consciousness, they spin themselves within us into this world of light and colour, of brilliance and beauty. Thus without us there is a world of a purely mathematical nature, without quality, charm, or value. But the world we know, the world of sound, light, and colour, of all properties whatsoever, of the ugly or the beautiful, of pain and pleasure, is in the most real sense the product of consciousness itself, a creation which, incited by[pg 306]something outside of itself and of a totally different nature, which we can hardly call“world,”evolves out of itself and causes to blossom. No part of this creation is given from without; not the blue of the heavens, for outside of us there is no colour, only vibrations of the ether; not the gold of the sun nor the red glory of the evening sky. External nature is nothing more than the stimulus, the pressure upon the mind, which liberates from its depths the peculiar reactions and responses to this stimulus, and calls them forth from its own treasure-stores. Certainly in this creating the consciousness is entirely dependent on the impressions stamped on it from outside, and to that extent upon“experience.”But it is by no means atabula rasa, and a merely passive mirror of the outer world, for it translates the stimulus thus received into quite a different language, and builds up from it a new reality, which is quite unlike the mathematical and qualityless reality without. And this activity on the part of consciousness begins on the very lowest stages. The simplest perception of light or colour, the first feeling of pleasure or discomfort, is a reaction of the psychical, which brings about something entirely new and unique.“The spirit is never passive.”That the psychical is not derivable from the physical, that it does not arise out of it, is not secondary to it, but pre-eminent over it, is not passive but creative; so much we have already gained to set over against naturalism. But its claims are even more affected[pg 307]by the fact of real psychical causality. We need not here concern ourselves with the difficult question, whether the mind can of itself act upon the body, and through it upon the external world. But in the logical consistence of naturalism there was implied not only a negative answer to this last question, but also a denial of the causality of the psychical, even within itself and its own domain. This is well illustrated in the figure of the cloud shadows. In consciousness state follows upon state, a upon b, b upon c. According to naturalism, b is not really the result of a, nor c of b, for in that case there would be independence of phenomena, and distinctness of laws in the psychical. But as all the states, a, b, and c, of the cloud shadows, depend upon statesa,b, andc, of the clouds themselves, but do not themselves form a concatenation of causes, so all the states of the mind depend upon those of the body, in which alone there is a true chain of causes because they alone have true reality.This is a complete distortion of the facts of the case. It would never be possible to persuade oneself or any one else that the arm, for instance, did not bend simply because we willed that it should. And it is still less possible to doubt that there are sequences of causes within the psychical, that in the world of thought and feeling, of desire and will, one thing calls up another, awakes it, impels it onwards, and influences it. Indeed, the mode of influence is peculiarly rich, subtle, and[pg 308]certain. Mental images and experiences arouse joy or sorrow, admiration or repulsion. One image calls up another, forces it to appear according to quite peculiar laws, or may crowd it out. Feelings call up desires, desires lead to determination. Good news actually causes joy, this is actually strengthened to willing, and the new situation gives rise to actual resolves. All this is so obvious and so unquestionable that no naturalism can possibly prevail against it. It has also long been made the subject of special investigation and carefully regulated experiment, and it is one of the chief subjects of modern psychological science. And especially as regards the different forms of“association of ideas,”the particular laws of this psychical causality have been established.It cannot be denied, however, that this psychology of association has itself in a deeper sense certain dangers from the point of view of the freedom of the mind, and it is apt to lead, not indeed to naturalistic conceptions, but to views according to which the“soul”is reduced to the level of a passive frame and stage, so to speak, for the exhibition of mental mechanics and statics.“Ideas”or thoughts, or states of feelings, are sometimes represented almost as actual little realities, which come and go in accordance with their own laws of attraction and repulsion, unite and separate again, by virtue of a kind of mental gravitation, move and crowd one another, so that one must almost say“it thinks,”as one says“it rains,”and not“the mind thinks”or“I[pg 309]think.”But more of this later. This psychological orderliness is in sharp antagonism to pure naturalism. It describes the laws of a sequence of causes, which have nothing to do with the physical, chemical, or mechanical, and clearly establishes the uniqueness, independence, and underivability of the psychical as contrasted with the physical.The individuality and incommensurability of this psychical causality shows itself in another series of factors which make even theformof the psychical process quite distinctive, and produce phenomena which have no parallel in the material sequences of the world, indeed, conflict with all its fundamental laws. The great psychologists of to-day, Wundt in particular, and James, have frequently emphasised these factors. We can only briefly call attention to a few points, as, for instance, Wundt's theory of the creative resultants through which the psychical processes show themselves to be quite outside of the scope of the laws of equivalence which hold good in the physical. If, in the realm of the corporeal, two components of energy, a and b, come together, they unite in a common resultant c, which includes in part a new movement, in part transformation into heat, but always in such a way that c remains equal to a and b. But it is otherwise in the psychical. Here there occurs what may be called an increase (and a qualitative change) of the psychical energy. If we take the notes, c, e, and g, and call the sensation- and perception-value of the individual notes x, y, z,[pg 310]when they come together, the resulting sensation-value is by no means simply x + y + z, for a“harmony”results of which the effect is not only greater than the mere sum of x + y + z, but isqualitativelydifferent. This is true of all domains of psychical experience. The parallels from mechanical operation cannot be applied in any case. These only supply inadequate analogies and symbols which never really represent the actual state of the case.Let us take, for instance, a motive,m, that impels us towards a particular action, and another,n, that hinders us. If these meet in us, the result is not simply a weakening of the power of the one, and a remaining motive of the strength ofmminusn. The meeting of the two creates an entirely new and peculiar mental situation, which gives rise to conflict and choice, and the resultant victorious motive is never under any circumstancesm-n, but may be a double or three-foldmorn. Thus, in the different aspects of psychical activity, there are factors which make it impossible to compare these with other activities, remove them outside of the scope of the law of the equivalence of cause and effect, and prove that there is self-increase and growth on the part of psychical energies. And all such phenomena lead us away from the standpoint of any mere theory of association.[pg 311]Activity of Consciousness.Naturalism takes refuge in the doctrine of association, when it does not attain anything with its first claims, and applies this theory in such a way that it seems possible from this standpoint to interpret mental processes as having an approximate resemblance to mechanically and mathematically calculable phenomena. As in physics the molecules and atoms, so here the smallest mental elements, the simplest units of feeling are sought for, and from their relations of attraction and repulsion, their groupings and movements, it is supposed that the whole mental world may be constructed up to its highest contents, will, ideals, and development of character. But even the analogy, the model which is followed, and the fact that a model is followed at all, show that this method is uncritical and not unprejudiced. What reason is there for regarding occurrences in the realm of physics as anormfor the psychical? Why should one not rather start from the peculiar and very striking differences between the two, from the primary and fundamental fact, not indeed capable of explanation, but all the more worthy of attention on that account, that there is an absolute difference between physical occurrences and mental behaviour, between physical and mental causality? These most primitive and simplest mental elements which are supposed to float and have their being within the mind as in a kind of spiritual ether are not atoms[pg 312]at all, but deeds, actions, performances. The laws of the association of ideas are not the laws of a mental chemistry, but laws of mental behaviour; very fixed and reliable laws, but still having to do with modes of behaviour. Their separating and uniting, their relations to one another, their grouping into unities, their“syntheses,”are not automatic permutations and combinations, but express theactivityof a thinking intelligence. Not even the simplest actual synthesis comes about of itself, as psychologists have shown by a neat illustration.[Illustration: Squarea2, next to smaller squareb2. Above them are horizontal linesaandb, the same lengths as the widths of the squares below them. Caption:aandbonly associated. Squares ofaandbin juxtaposition.][Illustration: Squarec2. Above it is horizontal linec, the same length as the width of the square below it. Caption:aandbreally synthetised toc. Square ofa+bas a true unity =c2.]Given that, through some association, the image of the lineacalls up that of the lineb, and both are associatively ranged together, we have still not made the real synthesisa+b=c. For to think ofaandbside by side is not the same thing as thinking ofc, as we shall readily see if we square them. The squares ofaandbthought of beside one another, that is,a2andb2, are something quite different from the square of the really[pg 313]synthetisedaandb, which is (a+b)2=a2+ 2ab+b2, orc2. This requires quite a new view, a spontaneous synthesis, which is an action and not a mere experience.The Ego.It was customary in earlier psychology, as it still is in all apologetic psychology, to regard the soul as a unified, immaterial, indivisible and therefore indestructiblesubstance, as a monad, which, as a unity without parts, superior to its own capacities and the changes of its states, is at all times one and the same subject. Many attempts have been made since the time of Plotinus to accumulate proofs of this substantial unity. We may leave this question untouched here, and need not even inquire whether these definitions are not themselves things of the external world employed as images and analogies and pushed too far. But there are three factors which may be established in regard to the psychical in spite of all naturalistic opposition; and those who have attempted to find proofs for the traditional idea we have noted, have usually really had these three in mind, and quite rightly so: they are, self-consciousness, the unity of consciousness, and the consciousness of the ego.Self-Consciousness.1. Our consciousness is not merely a knowledge of many individual things, the possession of concrete and abstract, particular or general conceptions and ideas, the cherishing of sensations, feelings and the like. We[pg 314]not only know, but we know that we know, and we can ponder in thought over the very fact that we are able thus to reflect in thought. Thought can turn its attention upon itself, can establish that it takes place, and how it runs its course, can reflect upon the forms in which it expresses itself, its powers, its laws, possibilities, and limits, and can ponder over the general nature of thought and the contingent individual nature of the particular thinking subject. (The very possibility and preliminary condition of moral freedom is implied in this.) How naturalism is to do justice to this fact it is not easy to see. Even if it were possible that the mental content was gained through mere experience, that comparisons, syntheses, and abstractions were formed simply according to the laws of association, and that these were sublimed and refined to general ideas, and could grow into axioms of logic and of geometry, or crystallise into necessary and axiomatic principles—none of which can happen—yet it would always be a knowledge of something. But how this something could be given to itself remains undiscoverable. The soul is atabula rasaand a mere mirror, says this theory. But it would still require to show how the silver layer behind the mirror began to see itself in the mirror.The Unity of Consciousness.2. The same holds true of the unity of consciousness, of which we are directly convinced. It is quite inexplicable[pg 315]if consciousness is a function of the extended and divisible physical substratum which is built up of nerve-cells and nerve-fibres. And yet this unity is the fundamental condition of our whole inner life.Even the facts of association demonstrate it. Two images could not come together, the one could not call up the other, if they were not possessed in the same consciousness, and could unite in it. It is the preliminary condition of every higher mode of thought, of every relating of things, of every comparison and abstraction. No judgment can be formed, no conclusion drawn without this. How could a predicate become associated with its subject, or a principal clause with its subordinate clause, if they were in separate consciousnesses, and how could the conclusion be drawn from them?Consciousness of the Ego.3. This unified self-consciousness is consciousness of the ego. It is only by means of an artificial abstraction that we can leave out of account in the consideration of processes of thought the peculiar factor of personal relationship that absolutely attaches to every thought within us. There are no thoughts in general that play their part of themselves alone.“It”never“thinks”in me. On the contrary, all sensation, thought, and will has in every human being a peculiar central relationship to which we refer when we say“my idea,”“my sensation.”What the“I”is cannot be defined. It is that through which the relation of all[pg 316]experiences and actions is referred to a point, and through which the treasuring of them for good or ill, the appreciation, the valuation of them is accomplished. And it plays its part even in the case of cold and indifferent items of knowledge. For instance, that twice two are four is not simply a perception, it ismyperception. Of the ego itself nothing more can be said than that it is the thought of me as the subject of all experience, willing, and action, and if we try to take hold of it nothing more than this formula remains. Yet the fact that the ego is the subject of all this, gives conduct, will, and experience that peculiar character which distinguishes them from mere action and reaction. For it is directly certain that all the psychical contents are not only co-existences in one consciousness but that they are possessed by it.Thus in summing up we have to say, that it is through the ego that all psychical activities and experiences are centred and related, that the ego is itself the point of relation, that it is the reason of the unity of consciousness and of the possibility of self-consciousness, and that in all this it is the most certain reality, without which the simplest psychical life would be impossible. At the same time, it is difficult to state what the“ego”is in itself, apart from the effects in which it reveals itself.
The aim of our study has been to define our attitude to naturalism, and to maintain in the teeth of naturalism the validity and freedom of the religious conception of the world. This seemed to be cramped and menaced by those“reductions to simpler terms”which we have already discussed.
But one of these reductions, the most important of all, we have not yet encountered, and it remains to be dealt with now. In comparison with this one all others are relatively unimportant, and it is easy to understand how some have regarded the problem of the relations of the naturalistic and the religious outlook as beginning at this point, and have neglected everything below it. For we have now to consider the attempt of naturalism to“reduce”spirit itself to terms of nature, either to derive it from nature, or, when that is recognised as quite too confused and impossible, to make it subject to nature and her system of laws, or to similar laws, and thus to rob it of its freedom and independence, of its essential character as above nature and free from it, and to bring it down to the level of an accompanying[pg 279]shadow or a mere reverse side of nature. The aggressive naturalism which we have discussed has from very early times exercised itself on this point, and has instinctively and rightly felt that herein lies the kernel of the whole problem under dispute. It has for the most part concentrated its interest and its attacks upon the“immortality of the soul.”But while this was often the starting-point, the nature of soul, and spirit, and consciousness in general have been brought under discussion and subjected to attacks which sought to show how vague and questionable was the reality of spirit as contrasted with the palpable, solid and indubitable reality of the outer world. Prominence was given to the fact that the spiritual side of our nature is dependent on and conditioned by the body and bodily states, the external environment, experiences and impressions. These were often the sole, and always the chief subjects of the doctrine of the vulgar naturalism. But the same is true of the naturalism of the higher order, as we described it in Chapter II. In order to acquire definite guiding principles of investigation, it makes the attempt to find the true reality of phenomena in the mechanical, corporeal, physiological processes, and to take little or no account of the co-operation, the interpolation, the general efficiency of sensation, perception, thought, or will, and to treat them as though they were a shadow and accompaniment of reality, but not as an equivalent, much less a preponderating constituent of it. Out of these[pg 280]fundamental principles of investigation, and out of the opposition and doubt with which the spiritual is regarded, there is compounded the current mongrel naturalism, which, without precision in its ideas, and without any great clearness or logical consequence in its views, is thoroughly imbued with the notion that that only is truly real which we can see, hear, and touch—the solid objective world of matter and energy, and that“science”begins and ends with this. As for anything outside of or beyond this, it is at most a beautiful dream of fancy, with which it is quite safe to occupy oneself as long as one clearly understands that of course it is not true.“Nature”is the only indubitable reality, and mind is but a kind oflususorluxus naturæ, which accompanies it at some few places, like a peculiarly coloured aura or shadow, but which must, as far as reality is concerned, yield pre-eminence to“Nature”in every respect.
The religious conception is deeply and essentially antagonistic to all such attempts to range spirit, spiritual being, and the subjective world under“nature,”“matter,”“energy,”or whatever we may call what is opposed to mind and ranked above it in reality and value. The religious conception is made up essentially of a belief in spirit, its worth and pre-eminence. It does not even seek to compare the reality and origin of spirit with anything else whatever. For all its beliefs, the most sublime and the crudest alike, conceal within them the conviction that[pg 281]fundamentally spirit alone has truth and reality, and that everything else is derived from it. It is a somewhat pitiful mode of procedure to direct all apologetic endeavours towards the one relatively small question of“immortality,”thus following exactly the lines usually adopted by the aggressive exponents of naturalism, and thus allowing opponents to dictate the form of the questions and answers. It is quite certain that all religion which is in any way complete, includes within itself a belief in the everlastingness of our spiritual, personal nature, and its independence of the becoming or passing away of external things. But, on the one hand, this particular question can only be settled in connection with the whole problem, and, on the other hand, it is only a fraction of the much farther-reaching belief in the reality of spirit and its superiority to nature. The very being of religion depends upon this. That it may be able to take itself seriously and regard itself as true; that all deep and pious feelings, of humility and devotion, may be cherished as genuine and as founded in truth; that it behoves it to find and experience the noble and divine in the world's course, in history and in individual life; that the whole world of feeling with all its deep stirrings and mysteries is of all things the most real and true, and the most significant fact of existence—all these are features apart from which it is impossible to think of religion at all. But they all depend upon the reality, independence and absolute pre-eminence of[pg 282]spirit. Freedom and responsibility, duty, moral control and self-development, the valuation of life and our life-work according to our life's mission and ideal aims, even according to everlasting aims, and“sub specie æterni,”the idea of the good, the true and the beautiful—all things apart from which religion cannot be thought of—all these depend upon spirit and its truth. And finally“God is Spirit”: religion cannot represent, or conceive, or possess its own highest good and supreme idea, except by thinking in terms of the highest analogies of what it knows in itself as spiritual being and reality. If spirit is not real and above all other realities; if it is derivable, subordinate and dependent, it is impossible to think of anything whatever to which the name of“God”can be given. And this is as true of the refined speculations of the pantheistic poetic religions, as of the idea of God in simple piety. The interest of religion as against the claims of naturalism includes all this. And it would be doing the cause of religion sorry service to extract from this whole some isolated question to which the mood of the time or traditional custom has given prominence. Our task must be to show that religion maintains its validity and freedom because of the truth and independence of spirit and its superiority to nature.
It is, of course, impossible to give an exhaustive treatment of this problem in a short study like this. The answer to this question would include the whole range of mental science with all its parts and branches.[pg 283]Mental science, from logic and epistemology up to and including the moral and æsthetic sciences, proves by its very existence, and by the fact that it cannot be reduced to terms of natural science, that spirit can neither be derived from nor analysed into anything else. And it is only when we have mastered all this that we can say how far and how strongly knowledge and known realities corroborate religion and its great conclusions as to spirit and spiritual existence, how they reinforce it and admit its validity and freedom. Since this is so, all isolated and particular endeavours in this direction can only be a prelude or introduction, and a more or less arbitrary selection from the relevant material of facts and ideas. And nothing more than this is aimed at in the following pages.
Naturalistic Attacks on the Autonomy of the Spiritual.The attacks that have been made by naturalism upon the independence and freedom of the spiritual are so familiar to every one—even from school days—through books of the type of Büchner's“Kraft und Stoff,”and Haeckel's“The Riddle of the Universe,”and other half or wholly materialistic popular dogmatics, that it is unnecessary to enter into any detail. Very little that is new has been added in this connection to the attack made by Plato on himself in the“Phædo”through Simmias and Kebes. It is only apparently that the modern attacks have become more serious[pg 284]through the deepened knowledge of natural science. At all times they have been as serious and as significant as possible, and the religious and every other idealistic conception of the universe has always suffered from them. It is plain that here, if anywhere,“faith goes against appearances,”and that in the last resource we have to postulate free moral resolution, the will to believe, the desire for the ideal, for freedom, and for the eternity of the spirit, and the confidence of the spirit in itself. All this is, or at least ought to be, self-evident and generally admitted.Let us once more take a brief survey of the reasons on the other side and arrange them in order.That nature is everything and spirit very little seems to follow from a very simple circumstance. There are whole worlds of purely natural and corporeal existence without mind, sensation, or consciousness, which, quite untroubled by their absence, simply exist according to the everlasting laws of matter and energy. But nowhere do we find spirit or mind without a material basis. All that is psychical occurs in connection with a physical being, and with relatively few physical beings. Spirit seems wholly bound up with and dependent upon the states, development, and conditions of material being. With the body of living beings there arises what we call“soul”; with the body it grows, gains content, changes, matures, ages, and disappears. According as the body is constituted and composed, as it is influenced by heredity, race, and[pg 285]selection, by nutrition, mode of life, climate, and other circumstances, there are developed in a hundred different ways what we call the natural disposition or character, inclinations, virtues or vices, passions or temperaments. Even the names given to the different temperaments emphasise this dependence of what is innermost in us, the deepest tendencies of our being, on the bodily organisation and the nature of its physiological constitution. The man whose blood flows easily and freely is called sanguine, and the melancholic is the victim of his liver. According as our organs are good or bad, function freely or sluggishly, our mood rises or sinks, we are bold or cowardly, languid or impetuous, and enthusiasm is often enough only a peculiar name for a state which, physiologically expressed, might be called alcoholic poisoning. There is one soul in the sound body, another in the sickly. Fever, and the impotence of the soul against it, made Holbach a materialist. If the brain be diseased, that marvellous order of psychical processes which we call reasoning is broken; the“soul”is wholly or partly eliminated; it fades away, or becomes nothing more than a confused disconnected medley of images and desires. Even artificial interference with, and changes in the bodily organisation react upon the mind. The removal of the thyroid gland may result in idiocy. Castration not only prevents the“breaking”of the voice in the Sistine choristers, it damps the fires of life to dulness, and makes of the impetuous Abelard a comfortable discursive father-confessor.[pg 286]The mind is bound up almost piece by piece with its material basis. Through the“localisation”of psychic processes in the particular parts of the brain, naturalism has enormously strengthened the impression that existed even among the ancients, that sensation and imagination are nothing more than, let us say, what the note is to a tightly stretched string. Cerebrum and cerebellum are regarded as the seats of different psychic processes. The secret of the higher processes is believed to be hidden in the grey matter of the cortex of the cerebrum. We seek and find in the various lobes and convolutions of the brain the“centres”for the different capacities, the power of sight, of smell, of moving the arms, of moving the legs, of associating ideas, of co-ordinated speech, and so on. When brain and spinal cord are injured or removed piece by piece from a pigeon or a frog, it seems as if the“soul”were eliminated piece by piece,—the capacity for spontaneous free co-ordination, for voluntary action, for the various sense-impressions, and so on from the higher to the lower. It has even been maintained that the different feelings and perceptions which are gradually acquired can be apportioned among the individual cells of the brain in which they are localised, and the thought-processes, the associations of percepts, the origin of consecutive ideas, the rapid and easy recalling of memory-images, and the process of voluntary control, of instincts, can be explained as due to the“gradual laying down of nerve-paths”between[pg 287]the different centres and areas of localisation in the brain. All this seems to refute utterly the old belief in the unity and personality of the soul. It is different in youth and in age, and indeed varies continually. It is the ever-varied harmony of the notes of all the strings which are represented by the fibres and ganglion-cells of the nerve-substance. It apparently can not only be completely confused and brought to disharmony, but it may be halved and divided. An almost terrifying impression was produced when Trembley in 1740 made the experiment of cutting a“hydra”in two, and showed that each of the halves became a complete animal, so that obviously each of the two halves of the soul grew into a new hydra-soul. And Trembley's hydra was only the precursor of all the cut-up worms, of the frogs, birds, and guinea-pigs that have been beheaded, or have had their brain removed, or their nerves cut, and have furnished further examples of this divisibility of“souls.”If the independence of the spiritual is thus shown to be a vain assumption, the alleged difference between the animal and the human Psyche is much more so. Not from the days of Darwinism alone, but from the very beginning, naturalism has opposed this claim to distinctiveness. But it is due to Darwinism that the fundamental similarity of the psychical in man and animals has come to be regarded as almost self-evident. The mental organisation of man, as well as his corporeal organisation, is traced back through gradual stages to[pg 288]animal antecedents, and in thus tracing it there are two favourite methods of procedure, which are, however, apt to be mutually destructive.On the one hand, some naturalists regard the animal anthropomorphically, insist on its likeness to man, discovering and extolling, not without emotion, all the higher and nobler possessions of the human mind, intellectual capacities, reason, reflection, synthesis, fancy, the power of forming ideas and judgments, of drawing conclusions and learning from experience, besides will in the true sense, ethical, social and political capacities, æsthetic perceptions, and even fits of religion in elephants, apes, dogs, down even to ants and bees, and these naturalists reject old-fashioned explanations in terms of instinct, and find the highest already contained in the lowest. Those of another school are inclined to regard man theriomorphically, to insist on his likeness to animals, explaining reason in terms of perception and sensation, deriving will from impulse and desire, and ethical and æsthetic valuations from physiological antecedents and purely animal psychological processes, thus, in short, seeking to find the lowest in the highest. (We have already met with an analogous instance of a similarly fallacious double-play on parallel lines.) So it comes about that both the origin and the development of the psychical and spiritual seem to be satisfactorily cleared up and explained, and at the same time a new proof is adduced for its dependence upon the physical. For what is true of all[pg 289]other parts of the organisation, of the building up and perfecting of every member and every system of organs, the bony skeleton, the circulatory system, the alimentary canal, that they can be referred back to very simple beginnings, and that their evolution may be traced through all its stages—is equally true of the nervous system in general and of the brain in particular. It increases more and more in volume and in intricacy of structure, it expands the cranial cavity and diversifies its convolutions. And the more it grows, and the more complex it becomes, the more do the mental capacities increase in perfection, so that here again it seems once more apparent that the psychical is an accompaniment and result of the physical.Popular naturalism usually stops short here, and contents itself with half-truths and inconsequences, for it naïvely admits that psychical processes, sensation, perception, will, have a real influence upon the physical, and, not perceiving how much the admission involves, it does not trouble itself over the fact that, for instance in the so-called voluntary movements of the body, in ordinary behaviour, the psychical, and the will, in particular, is capable of real effect, and can move hand and foot and the whole body, and thus has a real reciprocal relation with the physical. This form of popular naturalism sometimes amuses itself with assuming a psychical inwardness even in non-living matter, and admitting the co-operation of psychical motives even in regard to it.[pg 290]But it is far otherwise with naturalism in the strict sense, which takes its fundamental principles and its method of investigation seriously. It is aware that such half-and-half measures interrupt the continuity of the system at the most decisive point. And therefore with the greatest determination it repeats along psychological lines the same kind of treatment that it has previously sought to apply to biological phenomena: the corporeal must form a sequence of phenomena complete in itself and not broken into from without. All processes of movement, all that looks as if it happened“through our will,”through a resolve due to the intervention of a psychical motive, every flush of shame that reddens the cheek, every stroke executed by the hand, every sound-wave caused by tongue and lips, must be the result of conditions of stimulation and tension in the energy of the body itself.This is the meaning of all those psycho-physical experiments that have been carried on with so much ingenuity and persistence (usually associated with attempts to explain vital phenomena in terms of mechanism). First, they attempt to interpret the expressions of will, feeling and need, the spontaneous activities and movements of the lowest forms of life—protists—as“pure reflexes,”as processes which take place in obedience to stimuli, and thus are ultimately due to chemical and physical influences and causes without the intervention of a psychical motive; and, secondly, when this has been apparently or really achieved, the theory of irritability[pg 291]and reflex mechanism is pushed from below upwards, until even the most intricate and complex movements and operations of our own body, which we have wrongly distinguished as acts or behaviour from mere processes of stimulation, are finally recognised as reflexes and liberations due to stimuli. Some stimulus or other, from light or sound or something else, is, according to this theory, conducted to the nervous centre, the ganglion, the spinal cord, the cerebellum or the cerebrum. Here it produces an effect, not of a psychical nature, but some minute chemical, or physical,—or purely mechanical change, which goes through many permutations within the nervous centre itself, unites there with the stored energies, and then, thus altered, returns by the efferent nerve paths to effect a muscle-contraction in some organ, a stretching of the hand, or a movement of the whole body. The physical process is accompanied by a peculiar inward mirroring, which is the psychical penumbra or shadow of the whole business. Thus what is in reality a purely mechanical and reflex sequence appears like a psychical experience, like choice and will and psychical causality. We may be compared to Spinoza's stone; it was thrown, and it thought it was flying.The reasons for interpreting things in this way lie in the principles of investigation. It is only in this way, we are told, that nature can be reduced to natural terms, that is, to chemistry, physics, and mechanics. Only in this way is it possible to gain a true insight[pg 292]into and understanding of things, and to bring them under mathematical formulæ. Thus only, too, can“the miraculous”be eliminated. For if we are obliged to admit that the will has a real influence on the corporeal, for instance upon our brain, and nerves, and arm-muscles, this would be a violation of the law of the constancy of the sum of energy. For in this case there would occur, at a certain point in the nexus of phenomena, a piece of work done, however small it might be, for which there was no equivalent of energy in the previous constitution. But this is, since the days of Helmholtz, an impossible assumption. And thus all those experiments and theories on what we have called the“second line”of mechanistic interpretation of the universe show themselves to be relevant to our present subject.Interpretations of the psychical such as these have given rise to four peculiar“isms”of an epistemological nature,i.e., related to a theory of knowledge. Not infrequently they are the historical antecedents which result in the naturalistic theory of the psychical. These are nominalism and sensualism, empiricism and a-posteriorism, which, setting themselves against epistemological rationalism, assail the dignity, the independence, and the autonomy of the thinking mind. They are so necessarily and closely associated with naturalism that their fate is intimately bound up with its fate, and they are corroborated or refuted with it. And it would be possible to conduct the whole discussion with which we[pg 293]are concerned purely with reference to these four“isms.”The strife really begins in their camp.The soul is atabula rasa, all four maintain, a white paper on which, to begin with, nothing is inscribed. It brings with it neither innate knowledge nor commands. What it possesses in the way of percepts, concepts, opinions, convictions, principles of action, rules of conduct, are inscribed upon it through experience (empiricism). That is, not antecedent to, but subsequent to experience (a posteriori). But experience can only be gained through the senses. Only thus does reality penetrate into and stamp itself upon us.“What was not first in the senses (sensus) cannot be in the intelligence.”What the senses convey to us alone builds up our mental content, from mere sensory perceptions upwards to the most abstract ideas from the simplest psychical elements up to the most complex ideas, concepts, and conclusions, to the most varied imaginative constructions. And in the development of the mental content the“soul”itself is merely the stage upon which all that is acquired through the senses crowds, and jostles, and unites to form images, perceptions, and precepts. But it is itself purely passive, and it becomes what happens to it. Therefore it is not really spirit at all, for spirit implies spontaneity, activity, and autonomy.Philosophy and the mental sciences have always had to carry on the strife with these four opponents. And it is in the teacup of logic and epistemology[pg 294]that the storm in regard to theories of the universe has arisen. It is there, and not in the domain of neurology, or zoology, that the real battlefield lies, upon which the controversy must be fought out to the end. What follows is only a sort of skirmish about the outposts.What naturalism holds in regard to the psychical and spiritual may be, perhaps, most simply expressed by means of an illustration. Over a wide field there glide mighty shadows in constant interplay. They expand and contract, become denser or lighter, disappear for a little, and then reveal themselves again. While they are thus forming and changing, one state follows quite connectedly on another. At first one is tempted to believe that they are self-acting and self-regulating, that they move freely and pass from one state to another according to causes within themselves. But then one sees that they are thrown upon the earth from the clouds above, now in this way and now in that, that all their states and forms and changes are nothing in themselves, and neither effect anything in themselves nor react upon the occurrences and realities up above, which they only accompany, and by which they are determined without any co-operation on their own part, even in determining their own form. So it is with nature and spirit. Nature is the true effective reality; spirit is its shadow, which effects nothing either within or outside of itself, but simply happens.
The attacks that have been made by naturalism upon the independence and freedom of the spiritual are so familiar to every one—even from school days—through books of the type of Büchner's“Kraft und Stoff,”and Haeckel's“The Riddle of the Universe,”and other half or wholly materialistic popular dogmatics, that it is unnecessary to enter into any detail. Very little that is new has been added in this connection to the attack made by Plato on himself in the“Phædo”through Simmias and Kebes. It is only apparently that the modern attacks have become more serious[pg 284]through the deepened knowledge of natural science. At all times they have been as serious and as significant as possible, and the religious and every other idealistic conception of the universe has always suffered from them. It is plain that here, if anywhere,“faith goes against appearances,”and that in the last resource we have to postulate free moral resolution, the will to believe, the desire for the ideal, for freedom, and for the eternity of the spirit, and the confidence of the spirit in itself. All this is, or at least ought to be, self-evident and generally admitted.
Let us once more take a brief survey of the reasons on the other side and arrange them in order.
That nature is everything and spirit very little seems to follow from a very simple circumstance. There are whole worlds of purely natural and corporeal existence without mind, sensation, or consciousness, which, quite untroubled by their absence, simply exist according to the everlasting laws of matter and energy. But nowhere do we find spirit or mind without a material basis. All that is psychical occurs in connection with a physical being, and with relatively few physical beings. Spirit seems wholly bound up with and dependent upon the states, development, and conditions of material being. With the body of living beings there arises what we call“soul”; with the body it grows, gains content, changes, matures, ages, and disappears. According as the body is constituted and composed, as it is influenced by heredity, race, and[pg 285]selection, by nutrition, mode of life, climate, and other circumstances, there are developed in a hundred different ways what we call the natural disposition or character, inclinations, virtues or vices, passions or temperaments. Even the names given to the different temperaments emphasise this dependence of what is innermost in us, the deepest tendencies of our being, on the bodily organisation and the nature of its physiological constitution. The man whose blood flows easily and freely is called sanguine, and the melancholic is the victim of his liver. According as our organs are good or bad, function freely or sluggishly, our mood rises or sinks, we are bold or cowardly, languid or impetuous, and enthusiasm is often enough only a peculiar name for a state which, physiologically expressed, might be called alcoholic poisoning. There is one soul in the sound body, another in the sickly. Fever, and the impotence of the soul against it, made Holbach a materialist. If the brain be diseased, that marvellous order of psychical processes which we call reasoning is broken; the“soul”is wholly or partly eliminated; it fades away, or becomes nothing more than a confused disconnected medley of images and desires. Even artificial interference with, and changes in the bodily organisation react upon the mind. The removal of the thyroid gland may result in idiocy. Castration not only prevents the“breaking”of the voice in the Sistine choristers, it damps the fires of life to dulness, and makes of the impetuous Abelard a comfortable discursive father-confessor.[pg 286]The mind is bound up almost piece by piece with its material basis. Through the“localisation”of psychic processes in the particular parts of the brain, naturalism has enormously strengthened the impression that existed even among the ancients, that sensation and imagination are nothing more than, let us say, what the note is to a tightly stretched string. Cerebrum and cerebellum are regarded as the seats of different psychic processes. The secret of the higher processes is believed to be hidden in the grey matter of the cortex of the cerebrum. We seek and find in the various lobes and convolutions of the brain the“centres”for the different capacities, the power of sight, of smell, of moving the arms, of moving the legs, of associating ideas, of co-ordinated speech, and so on. When brain and spinal cord are injured or removed piece by piece from a pigeon or a frog, it seems as if the“soul”were eliminated piece by piece,—the capacity for spontaneous free co-ordination, for voluntary action, for the various sense-impressions, and so on from the higher to the lower. It has even been maintained that the different feelings and perceptions which are gradually acquired can be apportioned among the individual cells of the brain in which they are localised, and the thought-processes, the associations of percepts, the origin of consecutive ideas, the rapid and easy recalling of memory-images, and the process of voluntary control, of instincts, can be explained as due to the“gradual laying down of nerve-paths”between[pg 287]the different centres and areas of localisation in the brain. All this seems to refute utterly the old belief in the unity and personality of the soul. It is different in youth and in age, and indeed varies continually. It is the ever-varied harmony of the notes of all the strings which are represented by the fibres and ganglion-cells of the nerve-substance. It apparently can not only be completely confused and brought to disharmony, but it may be halved and divided. An almost terrifying impression was produced when Trembley in 1740 made the experiment of cutting a“hydra”in two, and showed that each of the halves became a complete animal, so that obviously each of the two halves of the soul grew into a new hydra-soul. And Trembley's hydra was only the precursor of all the cut-up worms, of the frogs, birds, and guinea-pigs that have been beheaded, or have had their brain removed, or their nerves cut, and have furnished further examples of this divisibility of“souls.”
If the independence of the spiritual is thus shown to be a vain assumption, the alleged difference between the animal and the human Psyche is much more so. Not from the days of Darwinism alone, but from the very beginning, naturalism has opposed this claim to distinctiveness. But it is due to Darwinism that the fundamental similarity of the psychical in man and animals has come to be regarded as almost self-evident. The mental organisation of man, as well as his corporeal organisation, is traced back through gradual stages to[pg 288]animal antecedents, and in thus tracing it there are two favourite methods of procedure, which are, however, apt to be mutually destructive.
On the one hand, some naturalists regard the animal anthropomorphically, insist on its likeness to man, discovering and extolling, not without emotion, all the higher and nobler possessions of the human mind, intellectual capacities, reason, reflection, synthesis, fancy, the power of forming ideas and judgments, of drawing conclusions and learning from experience, besides will in the true sense, ethical, social and political capacities, æsthetic perceptions, and even fits of religion in elephants, apes, dogs, down even to ants and bees, and these naturalists reject old-fashioned explanations in terms of instinct, and find the highest already contained in the lowest. Those of another school are inclined to regard man theriomorphically, to insist on his likeness to animals, explaining reason in terms of perception and sensation, deriving will from impulse and desire, and ethical and æsthetic valuations from physiological antecedents and purely animal psychological processes, thus, in short, seeking to find the lowest in the highest. (We have already met with an analogous instance of a similarly fallacious double-play on parallel lines.) So it comes about that both the origin and the development of the psychical and spiritual seem to be satisfactorily cleared up and explained, and at the same time a new proof is adduced for its dependence upon the physical. For what is true of all[pg 289]other parts of the organisation, of the building up and perfecting of every member and every system of organs, the bony skeleton, the circulatory system, the alimentary canal, that they can be referred back to very simple beginnings, and that their evolution may be traced through all its stages—is equally true of the nervous system in general and of the brain in particular. It increases more and more in volume and in intricacy of structure, it expands the cranial cavity and diversifies its convolutions. And the more it grows, and the more complex it becomes, the more do the mental capacities increase in perfection, so that here again it seems once more apparent that the psychical is an accompaniment and result of the physical.
Popular naturalism usually stops short here, and contents itself with half-truths and inconsequences, for it naïvely admits that psychical processes, sensation, perception, will, have a real influence upon the physical, and, not perceiving how much the admission involves, it does not trouble itself over the fact that, for instance in the so-called voluntary movements of the body, in ordinary behaviour, the psychical, and the will, in particular, is capable of real effect, and can move hand and foot and the whole body, and thus has a real reciprocal relation with the physical. This form of popular naturalism sometimes amuses itself with assuming a psychical inwardness even in non-living matter, and admitting the co-operation of psychical motives even in regard to it.
But it is far otherwise with naturalism in the strict sense, which takes its fundamental principles and its method of investigation seriously. It is aware that such half-and-half measures interrupt the continuity of the system at the most decisive point. And therefore with the greatest determination it repeats along psychological lines the same kind of treatment that it has previously sought to apply to biological phenomena: the corporeal must form a sequence of phenomena complete in itself and not broken into from without. All processes of movement, all that looks as if it happened“through our will,”through a resolve due to the intervention of a psychical motive, every flush of shame that reddens the cheek, every stroke executed by the hand, every sound-wave caused by tongue and lips, must be the result of conditions of stimulation and tension in the energy of the body itself.
This is the meaning of all those psycho-physical experiments that have been carried on with so much ingenuity and persistence (usually associated with attempts to explain vital phenomena in terms of mechanism). First, they attempt to interpret the expressions of will, feeling and need, the spontaneous activities and movements of the lowest forms of life—protists—as“pure reflexes,”as processes which take place in obedience to stimuli, and thus are ultimately due to chemical and physical influences and causes without the intervention of a psychical motive; and, secondly, when this has been apparently or really achieved, the theory of irritability[pg 291]and reflex mechanism is pushed from below upwards, until even the most intricate and complex movements and operations of our own body, which we have wrongly distinguished as acts or behaviour from mere processes of stimulation, are finally recognised as reflexes and liberations due to stimuli. Some stimulus or other, from light or sound or something else, is, according to this theory, conducted to the nervous centre, the ganglion, the spinal cord, the cerebellum or the cerebrum. Here it produces an effect, not of a psychical nature, but some minute chemical, or physical,—or purely mechanical change, which goes through many permutations within the nervous centre itself, unites there with the stored energies, and then, thus altered, returns by the efferent nerve paths to effect a muscle-contraction in some organ, a stretching of the hand, or a movement of the whole body. The physical process is accompanied by a peculiar inward mirroring, which is the psychical penumbra or shadow of the whole business. Thus what is in reality a purely mechanical and reflex sequence appears like a psychical experience, like choice and will and psychical causality. We may be compared to Spinoza's stone; it was thrown, and it thought it was flying.
The reasons for interpreting things in this way lie in the principles of investigation. It is only in this way, we are told, that nature can be reduced to natural terms, that is, to chemistry, physics, and mechanics. Only in this way is it possible to gain a true insight[pg 292]into and understanding of things, and to bring them under mathematical formulæ. Thus only, too, can“the miraculous”be eliminated. For if we are obliged to admit that the will has a real influence on the corporeal, for instance upon our brain, and nerves, and arm-muscles, this would be a violation of the law of the constancy of the sum of energy. For in this case there would occur, at a certain point in the nexus of phenomena, a piece of work done, however small it might be, for which there was no equivalent of energy in the previous constitution. But this is, since the days of Helmholtz, an impossible assumption. And thus all those experiments and theories on what we have called the“second line”of mechanistic interpretation of the universe show themselves to be relevant to our present subject.
Interpretations of the psychical such as these have given rise to four peculiar“isms”of an epistemological nature,i.e., related to a theory of knowledge. Not infrequently they are the historical antecedents which result in the naturalistic theory of the psychical. These are nominalism and sensualism, empiricism and a-posteriorism, which, setting themselves against epistemological rationalism, assail the dignity, the independence, and the autonomy of the thinking mind. They are so necessarily and closely associated with naturalism that their fate is intimately bound up with its fate, and they are corroborated or refuted with it. And it would be possible to conduct the whole discussion with which we[pg 293]are concerned purely with reference to these four“isms.”The strife really begins in their camp.
The soul is atabula rasa, all four maintain, a white paper on which, to begin with, nothing is inscribed. It brings with it neither innate knowledge nor commands. What it possesses in the way of percepts, concepts, opinions, convictions, principles of action, rules of conduct, are inscribed upon it through experience (empiricism). That is, not antecedent to, but subsequent to experience (a posteriori). But experience can only be gained through the senses. Only thus does reality penetrate into and stamp itself upon us.“What was not first in the senses (sensus) cannot be in the intelligence.”What the senses convey to us alone builds up our mental content, from mere sensory perceptions upwards to the most abstract ideas from the simplest psychical elements up to the most complex ideas, concepts, and conclusions, to the most varied imaginative constructions. And in the development of the mental content the“soul”itself is merely the stage upon which all that is acquired through the senses crowds, and jostles, and unites to form images, perceptions, and precepts. But it is itself purely passive, and it becomes what happens to it. Therefore it is not really spirit at all, for spirit implies spontaneity, activity, and autonomy.
Philosophy and the mental sciences have always had to carry on the strife with these four opponents. And it is in the teacup of logic and epistemology[pg 294]that the storm in regard to theories of the universe has arisen. It is there, and not in the domain of neurology, or zoology, that the real battlefield lies, upon which the controversy must be fought out to the end. What follows is only a sort of skirmish about the outposts.
What naturalism holds in regard to the psychical and spiritual may be, perhaps, most simply expressed by means of an illustration. Over a wide field there glide mighty shadows in constant interplay. They expand and contract, become denser or lighter, disappear for a little, and then reveal themselves again. While they are thus forming and changing, one state follows quite connectedly on another. At first one is tempted to believe that they are self-acting and self-regulating, that they move freely and pass from one state to another according to causes within themselves. But then one sees that they are thrown upon the earth from the clouds above, now in this way and now in that, that all their states and forms and changes are nothing in themselves, and neither effect anything in themselves nor react upon the occurrences and realities up above, which they only accompany, and by which they are determined without any co-operation on their own part, even in determining their own form. So it is with nature and spirit. Nature is the true effective reality; spirit is its shadow, which effects nothing either within or outside of itself, but simply happens.
The Fundamental Answer.How can the religious conception of the world justify itself and maintain its freedom in face of such views of spirit and spiritual being? It is questionable whether it is worth while attempting to do so. Is not the essence of the validity and freedom of spirit made most certain simply through the fact that it is able to inquire into it? If we leave popular naturalism out of the question, is not the attempt made by scientific naturalism the best witness against itself? For scientific study, and the establishment of fundamental conceptions and guiding principles are only possible if mind and thought are free and active and creative. The direct experience that spirit has of itself, of its individuality and freedom, of its incomparability with all that is beneath it, is far too constant and genuine to admit of its being put into a difficulty by a doctrine which it has itself established. And this doctrine has far too much the character of a“fixed theory”to carry permanent inward conviction with it. Here again, the mistake made is in starting with scepticism and with the fewest and simplest assumptions. It is by no means the case that in order to discover the truth we must start always from a position of scepticism, instead of from calm confidence in ourselves and in our conviction that we possess in direct experience the best guarantee of truth. For we experience nothing more certainly than the content and riches of our own[pg 296]mind, its power of acting and creating, and all its great capacities. And it is part of the duty laid upon us by the religious conception of the universe, as well as by all other idealistic conceptions, to follow this path of self-assurance alone, that is, through self-development and self-deepening, through self-realisation and self-discipline, to use to the full in our lives all that we have in heart and mind as possibilities, tendencies, content, and capacities, and so practically to experience the reality and power of the spiritual that the mood of suspicion and distrust of it must disappear. The validity of this method is corroborated by all the critical insight into the nature of our knowledge that we have gained in the course of our study, and it might be deepened in regard to this particular case. For here, if anywhere, we must recognise the limitations of our knowledge; the impossibility of attaining to a full understanding of the true nature and depths of things applies to the inquiring mind and its hidden nature. From Descartes to Leibnitz, Kant, and Fries, down to the historian of materialism itself, F. A. Lange, it has been an axiom of the idealistic philosophy, expressed now in dogmatic, now in critical form, that the mathematical-mechanical outlook and causal interpretation of things, not excluding a naturalistic psychology, is thoroughly justifiable as a method of arranging scientifically the phenomena accessible to us and of penetrating more deeply towards an understanding of these. It is, indeed, justifiable, so long as it does not profess[pg 297]to reveal the true nature of things, but remains conscious of the free spirit, whose own work and undertaking the whole is.Yet here again it is by no means necessary to surrender to naturalism a field which it has tried to take possession of, but is certainly unable to hold. We need not try to force naturalism to read out of empirical psychology the high conclusions as to human nature and spirit which pertain to the religious outlook, or to find in the“simplicity”of the“soul monad”a kind of physical proof of its indestructibility, or anything of that kind. We maintain that to comprehend the true inwardness of the vitality, freedom, dignity, and power of the spirit is not the business of psychology at all, but may perhaps be dealt with in ethics, if it be not admitted that with these concepts one has already entered the realm of religious experience, and that they are the very centre of religious theory. But undoubtedly we must reject in great measure the claims which naturalism makes upon our domain, and maintain that the most important starting-points for the higher view are to be found in the priority of everything spiritual over everything material, in the underivability of the spiritual and the impossibility of describing it in corporeal-mathematical terms and concepts.
How can the religious conception of the world justify itself and maintain its freedom in face of such views of spirit and spiritual being? It is questionable whether it is worth while attempting to do so. Is not the essence of the validity and freedom of spirit made most certain simply through the fact that it is able to inquire into it? If we leave popular naturalism out of the question, is not the attempt made by scientific naturalism the best witness against itself? For scientific study, and the establishment of fundamental conceptions and guiding principles are only possible if mind and thought are free and active and creative. The direct experience that spirit has of itself, of its individuality and freedom, of its incomparability with all that is beneath it, is far too constant and genuine to admit of its being put into a difficulty by a doctrine which it has itself established. And this doctrine has far too much the character of a“fixed theory”to carry permanent inward conviction with it. Here again, the mistake made is in starting with scepticism and with the fewest and simplest assumptions. It is by no means the case that in order to discover the truth we must start always from a position of scepticism, instead of from calm confidence in ourselves and in our conviction that we possess in direct experience the best guarantee of truth. For we experience nothing more certainly than the content and riches of our own[pg 296]mind, its power of acting and creating, and all its great capacities. And it is part of the duty laid upon us by the religious conception of the universe, as well as by all other idealistic conceptions, to follow this path of self-assurance alone, that is, through self-development and self-deepening, through self-realisation and self-discipline, to use to the full in our lives all that we have in heart and mind as possibilities, tendencies, content, and capacities, and so practically to experience the reality and power of the spiritual that the mood of suspicion and distrust of it must disappear. The validity of this method is corroborated by all the critical insight into the nature of our knowledge that we have gained in the course of our study, and it might be deepened in regard to this particular case. For here, if anywhere, we must recognise the limitations of our knowledge; the impossibility of attaining to a full understanding of the true nature and depths of things applies to the inquiring mind and its hidden nature. From Descartes to Leibnitz, Kant, and Fries, down to the historian of materialism itself, F. A. Lange, it has been an axiom of the idealistic philosophy, expressed now in dogmatic, now in critical form, that the mathematical-mechanical outlook and causal interpretation of things, not excluding a naturalistic psychology, is thoroughly justifiable as a method of arranging scientifically the phenomena accessible to us and of penetrating more deeply towards an understanding of these. It is, indeed, justifiable, so long as it does not profess[pg 297]to reveal the true nature of things, but remains conscious of the free spirit, whose own work and undertaking the whole is.
Yet here again it is by no means necessary to surrender to naturalism a field which it has tried to take possession of, but is certainly unable to hold. We need not try to force naturalism to read out of empirical psychology the high conclusions as to human nature and spirit which pertain to the religious outlook, or to find in the“simplicity”of the“soul monad”a kind of physical proof of its indestructibility, or anything of that kind. We maintain that to comprehend the true inwardness of the vitality, freedom, dignity, and power of the spirit is not the business of psychology at all, but may perhaps be dealt with in ethics, if it be not admitted that with these concepts one has already entered the realm of religious experience, and that they are the very centre of religious theory. But undoubtedly we must reject in great measure the claims which naturalism makes upon our domain, and maintain that the most important starting-points for the higher view are to be found in the priority of everything spiritual over everything material, in the underivability of the spiritual and the impossibility of describing it in corporeal-mathematical terms and concepts.
Individual Development.What lives in us, as far as we can perceive and trace it in its empirical expression, is not a finished and spiritual being that leaps, mature and complete, from some pre-existence or other into its embodied form, but is obviously something that only develops and becomes actual very gradually. Its becoming is conditioned by“stimuli,”influences, impressions from without, and perfects itself in the closest dependence upon the becoming of the body, is inhibited or advanced with it, and may be entirely arrested by it, forced into abnormal developments which never attain to the level of an“ego”or“personality,”but remain incomprehensible anomalies and monstrosities. In general, the psychical struggles slowly and laboriously free from purely vegetative and physiological processes, and gains control over itself and over the body. Its self-development and concentration to full unity and completeness of personality is only achieved through the deepest self-culture, through complete“simplification”as the ancients said, through great acts and experiences of inward centralisation such as that which finds religious expression in the metaphor of“regeneration.”What“building up”and self-development of the psychical means remains obscure. If we think of it as a summation, an adding on of new parts and constituents, and thus try to form a concrete image of the process, we spoil it altogether. If we speak of the transition from the potential to the actual,[pg 299]from the tendency to the realisation, we may not indeed spoil it, but we have done little to make the process more intelligible. So much only we can say: certain as it is that the Psyche, especially as conscious inner life, only gradually develops and becomes actual, and that in the closest dependence upon the development, maturing, and establishment of the nervous basis and the bodily organisation in general, yet the naturalistic view,a fortiorithe materialistic, is never at any point correct. There are three things to be borne in mind. First, the origin, the“whence”of the psychical is wholly hidden from us, and, notwithstanding the theory of evolution and descent, it remains an insoluble riddle. And secondly, however closely it is associated with and tied down to the processes of bodily development, it is never at any stage of its development really a function of it in actual and exact correspondence and dependence. And finally, the further it advances in its self-realisation, the further the relation of dependence recedes into the background, and the more do the independence and autonomy of the psychical processes become prominent.We have still to consider and amplify this in several respects, and then we may go on to still more important matters.
What lives in us, as far as we can perceive and trace it in its empirical expression, is not a finished and spiritual being that leaps, mature and complete, from some pre-existence or other into its embodied form, but is obviously something that only develops and becomes actual very gradually. Its becoming is conditioned by“stimuli,”influences, impressions from without, and perfects itself in the closest dependence upon the becoming of the body, is inhibited or advanced with it, and may be entirely arrested by it, forced into abnormal developments which never attain to the level of an“ego”or“personality,”but remain incomprehensible anomalies and monstrosities. In general, the psychical struggles slowly and laboriously free from purely vegetative and physiological processes, and gains control over itself and over the body. Its self-development and concentration to full unity and completeness of personality is only achieved through the deepest self-culture, through complete“simplification”as the ancients said, through great acts and experiences of inward centralisation such as that which finds religious expression in the metaphor of“regeneration.”What“building up”and self-development of the psychical means remains obscure. If we think of it as a summation, an adding on of new parts and constituents, and thus try to form a concrete image of the process, we spoil it altogether. If we speak of the transition from the potential to the actual,[pg 299]from the tendency to the realisation, we may not indeed spoil it, but we have done little to make the process more intelligible. So much only we can say: certain as it is that the Psyche, especially as conscious inner life, only gradually develops and becomes actual, and that in the closest dependence upon the development, maturing, and establishment of the nervous basis and the bodily organisation in general, yet the naturalistic view,a fortiorithe materialistic, is never at any point correct. There are three things to be borne in mind. First, the origin, the“whence”of the psychical is wholly hidden from us, and, notwithstanding the theory of evolution and descent, it remains an insoluble riddle. And secondly, however closely it is associated with and tied down to the processes of bodily development, it is never at any stage of its development really a function of it in actual and exact correspondence and dependence. And finally, the further it advances in its self-realisation, the further the relation of dependence recedes into the background, and the more do the independence and autonomy of the psychical processes become prominent.
We have still to consider and amplify this in several respects, and then we may go on to still more important matters.
Underivability.The first of the three points we have called attention to has, so to speak, become famous through the lectures of du Bois-Reymond, which attracted much attention, on“The Limits of Natural Knowledge,”and“The Seven[pg 300]Riddles of the Universe.”That these thoughtful lectures made so great an impression did not mean that a great new discovery had been made, but was rather a sign of the general lack of reflection on the part of the public, for they only expressed what had always been self-evident, and what had only been forgotten through thoughtlessness, or concealed by polemical rhetoric. Consciousness, thought, even the commonest sensation of pleasure and pain, or the simplest sense-perception, cannot be compared with“matter and energy,”with the movements of masses. They represent a foreign and altogether inexplicable guest in this world of matter, molecules, and elements. Even if we could follow the play of the nervous processes with which sensation, consciousness, pain, or pleasure are bound up, into their most intricate and delicate details, if we could make the brain transparent, and enlarge its cells to the size of houses, so that, with searching glance, we could count and observe all the processes, and even follow the dance of the molecules within it, we should never see“pain,”“pleasure,”or“thought,”or anything more than bodies and their movements. A thought, such as, for instance, the perception that two and two make four, is not long or broad, above or beneath; it cannot be measured or weighed in inches or pounds like matter, tested with the manometer, thermometer, or electrometer for its potential or intensity and tension, measured by ampères or volts or horse-powers like energies and electric currents; it is something wholly[pg 301]different, which can be known only through inner experience, but which is much better known than anything else whatever, and which it is absolutely impossible to compare with anything but itself. Even if we admit that it can only become actual and develop as an accompaniment of processes within bodies, and only within those bodies we call“living,”and that wherever bodies exist psychical phenomena occur; even if we were able, as we never shall be able, to produce living beings artificially in a retort, and even if psychical phenomena occurred in these also, we should still have made no progress towards explaining what the psychical really is. It would still only be the blazing up in these bodies of a flame which, in some inexplicable way, had fallen upon them, and associated itself with them. We do not doubt that this association, where it takes place, does so in obedience to the strictest law and the most inexorable necessity; therefore, that wherever and however the corporeal conditions are produced, sensation and consciousness will awaken. For we believe in a world governed by law. But the mystery is in no way lessened by this, and the modern theory of evolution throws no light into this utterly impenetrable darkness. In the first place, the whole idea of“explaining”in terms of“evolution”is a futile one. The process of becoming is pictured as a simple process of cumulation, a gradual increase of intensities, while the business is really one of change in quality and the introduction of what is new. In the second place, the occurrence even[pg 302]of the first and most primitive sensation contains the whole riddle concentrated on a single point. In the third place, the riddle meets us anew and undiminished in every developing individual. For to say that the physical inwardness, once it has arisen, is“transmitted,”is not an explanation but merely an admission that the riddle exists. And the idea that the psychical is just a penumbra or shadow of reality, which comes of itself and so to speak gratis, is quite inadmissible from the point of view of strict natural science. There are no longerluxusandlusus naturæ. Reality cannot throw a“shadow.”According to the principles of the conservation of matter and energy, we must be able to show whence it gets the so-called shadow, and with what it compensates for it.
The first of the three points we have called attention to has, so to speak, become famous through the lectures of du Bois-Reymond, which attracted much attention, on“The Limits of Natural Knowledge,”and“The Seven[pg 300]Riddles of the Universe.”That these thoughtful lectures made so great an impression did not mean that a great new discovery had been made, but was rather a sign of the general lack of reflection on the part of the public, for they only expressed what had always been self-evident, and what had only been forgotten through thoughtlessness, or concealed by polemical rhetoric. Consciousness, thought, even the commonest sensation of pleasure and pain, or the simplest sense-perception, cannot be compared with“matter and energy,”with the movements of masses. They represent a foreign and altogether inexplicable guest in this world of matter, molecules, and elements. Even if we could follow the play of the nervous processes with which sensation, consciousness, pain, or pleasure are bound up, into their most intricate and delicate details, if we could make the brain transparent, and enlarge its cells to the size of houses, so that, with searching glance, we could count and observe all the processes, and even follow the dance of the molecules within it, we should never see“pain,”“pleasure,”or“thought,”or anything more than bodies and their movements. A thought, such as, for instance, the perception that two and two make four, is not long or broad, above or beneath; it cannot be measured or weighed in inches or pounds like matter, tested with the manometer, thermometer, or electrometer for its potential or intensity and tension, measured by ampères or volts or horse-powers like energies and electric currents; it is something wholly[pg 301]different, which can be known only through inner experience, but which is much better known than anything else whatever, and which it is absolutely impossible to compare with anything but itself. Even if we admit that it can only become actual and develop as an accompaniment of processes within bodies, and only within those bodies we call“living,”and that wherever bodies exist psychical phenomena occur; even if we were able, as we never shall be able, to produce living beings artificially in a retort, and even if psychical phenomena occurred in these also, we should still have made no progress towards explaining what the psychical really is. It would still only be the blazing up in these bodies of a flame which, in some inexplicable way, had fallen upon them, and associated itself with them. We do not doubt that this association, where it takes place, does so in obedience to the strictest law and the most inexorable necessity; therefore, that wherever and however the corporeal conditions are produced, sensation and consciousness will awaken. For we believe in a world governed by law. But the mystery is in no way lessened by this, and the modern theory of evolution throws no light into this utterly impenetrable darkness. In the first place, the whole idea of“explaining”in terms of“evolution”is a futile one. The process of becoming is pictured as a simple process of cumulation, a gradual increase of intensities, while the business is really one of change in quality and the introduction of what is new. In the second place, the occurrence even[pg 302]of the first and most primitive sensation contains the whole riddle concentrated on a single point. In the third place, the riddle meets us anew and undiminished in every developing individual. For to say that the physical inwardness, once it has arisen, is“transmitted,”is not an explanation but merely an admission that the riddle exists. And the idea that the psychical is just a penumbra or shadow of reality, which comes of itself and so to speak gratis, is quite inadmissible from the point of view of strict natural science. There are no longerluxusandlusus naturæ. Reality cannot throw a“shadow.”According to the principles of the conservation of matter and energy, we must be able to show whence it gets the so-called shadow, and with what it compensates for it.
Pre-eminence of Consciousness.But we have already spent too much time over this naïve mode of looking at things, which, though it professes to place things in their true light, in reality distorts them and turns them upside down. As if this world of the external and material, all these bodies and forces, were our first and most direct data, and were not really all derived from, and only discoverable by, consciousness. We have here to do with the ancient view of all philosophy and all reflection in general, although in modern days it has taken its place as a great new discovery even among naturalists themselves, by whom it is extolled and recognised as[pg 303]“the conquest of materialism.”Such exaggerated emphasis tends to conceal the fact that this truth has been regarded as self-evident from very early times.What is a body, extension, movement, colour, smell and taste? What do I possess of them, or know of them, except through the images, sensations and feelings which they call up in my receptive mind? No single thing wanders into me as itself, or reveals itself to me directly; only through the way in which they affect me, the peculiar changes which they work in me, do things reveal to me their existence and their special character. I have no knowledge of an apple-tree or of an apple, except through the sense perceptions they call up in me. But these sense perceptions, what are they but different peculiar states of my consciousness, peculiar determinations of my mind? I see that the tree stands there, but what is it to see? What is the perception of a colour, of light, of shade, and their changes? Surely only a peculiar change of my mind itself, a particular state of stimulus and awareness brought about in myself. And in the same way I can feel that the apple lies there. But what is the perception of resistance, of hardness, of impenetrability? Nothing more than a feeling, a change in my psychical state, which is unique and cannot be described in terms of anything but itself. Even as regards“attraction and repulsion,”external existence only reveals itself to us through changes in the mind and[pg 304]consciousness, which we then attribute to a cause outside ourselves.It is well enough known that this simple but incontrovertible fact has often led to the denial of the existence of anything outside of ourselves and our consciousness. But even if we leave this difficult subject alone, it is quite certain that, if the question as to the pre-eminence of consciousness and its relation to external things is to be asked at all, it should be formulated as follows, and not conversely:“How can I, starting from the directly given reality and certainty of consciousness and its states, arrive at the certainty and reality of external things, substances, forces, physics and chemistry?”
But we have already spent too much time over this naïve mode of looking at things, which, though it professes to place things in their true light, in reality distorts them and turns them upside down. As if this world of the external and material, all these bodies and forces, were our first and most direct data, and were not really all derived from, and only discoverable by, consciousness. We have here to do with the ancient view of all philosophy and all reflection in general, although in modern days it has taken its place as a great new discovery even among naturalists themselves, by whom it is extolled and recognised as[pg 303]“the conquest of materialism.”Such exaggerated emphasis tends to conceal the fact that this truth has been regarded as self-evident from very early times.
What is a body, extension, movement, colour, smell and taste? What do I possess of them, or know of them, except through the images, sensations and feelings which they call up in my receptive mind? No single thing wanders into me as itself, or reveals itself to me directly; only through the way in which they affect me, the peculiar changes which they work in me, do things reveal to me their existence and their special character. I have no knowledge of an apple-tree or of an apple, except through the sense perceptions they call up in me. But these sense perceptions, what are they but different peculiar states of my consciousness, peculiar determinations of my mind? I see that the tree stands there, but what is it to see? What is the perception of a colour, of light, of shade, and their changes? Surely only a peculiar change of my mind itself, a particular state of stimulus and awareness brought about in myself. And in the same way I can feel that the apple lies there. But what is the perception of resistance, of hardness, of impenetrability? Nothing more than a feeling, a change in my psychical state, which is unique and cannot be described in terms of anything but itself. Even as regards“attraction and repulsion,”external existence only reveals itself to us through changes in the mind and[pg 304]consciousness, which we then attribute to a cause outside ourselves.
It is well enough known that this simple but incontrovertible fact has often led to the denial of the existence of anything outside of ourselves and our consciousness. But even if we leave this difficult subject alone, it is quite certain that, if the question as to the pre-eminence of consciousness and its relation to external things is to be asked at all, it should be formulated as follows, and not conversely:“How can I, starting from the directly given reality and certainty of consciousness and its states, arrive at the certainty and reality of external things, substances, forces, physics and chemistry?”
Creative Power of Consciousness.To this insight into the underivability and pre-eminence of consciousness over the world of external reality there must be added at this stage a recognition of its peculiar creative character. We have here to recognise that consciousness itself creates its world,—that is, the world that becomes our own through actual experience, possession, and enjoyment. We are led to this position even by the conception now current in natural science of the world as it is, not as it is mirrored in consciousness, and the theory of the“subjectivity of sensory qualities.”The qualities which we perceive in things through the senses are“subjective”; philosophy has long taught that, and now natural science teaches[pg 305]it too. That is to say, these qualities are not actually present in the things themselves; they are rather the particular responses which our consciousness makes to stimuli. Take, for instance, tone or colour. What we call tone or sound is not known to acoustics. That takes cognisance only of vibrations and the conditions of vibration in elastic bodies, which, by means of the ear and the nerves of hearing, become a stimulus of consciousness. Consciousness“responds”to this stimulus by receiving a sense-impression of hearing. But in this, obviously, there is nothing of the nature of oscillations and vibrations, but something quite different. What outside of us is nothing more than a complex process of movement according to mathematical conditions, blossoms within us to a world of sound, tone, and music. The world itself is soundless, toneless. And the same is true of light and colour;“light”and“blue”are nothing in themselves—are not properties of things themselves. They are only the infinitely rapid movements of an infinitely delicate substance, the ether. But when these meet our consciousness, they spin themselves within us into this world of light and colour, of brilliance and beauty. Thus without us there is a world of a purely mathematical nature, without quality, charm, or value. But the world we know, the world of sound, light, and colour, of all properties whatsoever, of the ugly or the beautiful, of pain and pleasure, is in the most real sense the product of consciousness itself, a creation which, incited by[pg 306]something outside of itself and of a totally different nature, which we can hardly call“world,”evolves out of itself and causes to blossom. No part of this creation is given from without; not the blue of the heavens, for outside of us there is no colour, only vibrations of the ether; not the gold of the sun nor the red glory of the evening sky. External nature is nothing more than the stimulus, the pressure upon the mind, which liberates from its depths the peculiar reactions and responses to this stimulus, and calls them forth from its own treasure-stores. Certainly in this creating the consciousness is entirely dependent on the impressions stamped on it from outside, and to that extent upon“experience.”But it is by no means atabula rasa, and a merely passive mirror of the outer world, for it translates the stimulus thus received into quite a different language, and builds up from it a new reality, which is quite unlike the mathematical and qualityless reality without. And this activity on the part of consciousness begins on the very lowest stages. The simplest perception of light or colour, the first feeling of pleasure or discomfort, is a reaction of the psychical, which brings about something entirely new and unique.“The spirit is never passive.”That the psychical is not derivable from the physical, that it does not arise out of it, is not secondary to it, but pre-eminent over it, is not passive but creative; so much we have already gained to set over against naturalism. But its claims are even more affected[pg 307]by the fact of real psychical causality. We need not here concern ourselves with the difficult question, whether the mind can of itself act upon the body, and through it upon the external world. But in the logical consistence of naturalism there was implied not only a negative answer to this last question, but also a denial of the causality of the psychical, even within itself and its own domain. This is well illustrated in the figure of the cloud shadows. In consciousness state follows upon state, a upon b, b upon c. According to naturalism, b is not really the result of a, nor c of b, for in that case there would be independence of phenomena, and distinctness of laws in the psychical. But as all the states, a, b, and c, of the cloud shadows, depend upon statesa,b, andc, of the clouds themselves, but do not themselves form a concatenation of causes, so all the states of the mind depend upon those of the body, in which alone there is a true chain of causes because they alone have true reality.This is a complete distortion of the facts of the case. It would never be possible to persuade oneself or any one else that the arm, for instance, did not bend simply because we willed that it should. And it is still less possible to doubt that there are sequences of causes within the psychical, that in the world of thought and feeling, of desire and will, one thing calls up another, awakes it, impels it onwards, and influences it. Indeed, the mode of influence is peculiarly rich, subtle, and[pg 308]certain. Mental images and experiences arouse joy or sorrow, admiration or repulsion. One image calls up another, forces it to appear according to quite peculiar laws, or may crowd it out. Feelings call up desires, desires lead to determination. Good news actually causes joy, this is actually strengthened to willing, and the new situation gives rise to actual resolves. All this is so obvious and so unquestionable that no naturalism can possibly prevail against it. It has also long been made the subject of special investigation and carefully regulated experiment, and it is one of the chief subjects of modern psychological science. And especially as regards the different forms of“association of ideas,”the particular laws of this psychical causality have been established.It cannot be denied, however, that this psychology of association has itself in a deeper sense certain dangers from the point of view of the freedom of the mind, and it is apt to lead, not indeed to naturalistic conceptions, but to views according to which the“soul”is reduced to the level of a passive frame and stage, so to speak, for the exhibition of mental mechanics and statics.“Ideas”or thoughts, or states of feelings, are sometimes represented almost as actual little realities, which come and go in accordance with their own laws of attraction and repulsion, unite and separate again, by virtue of a kind of mental gravitation, move and crowd one another, so that one must almost say“it thinks,”as one says“it rains,”and not“the mind thinks”or“I[pg 309]think.”But more of this later. This psychological orderliness is in sharp antagonism to pure naturalism. It describes the laws of a sequence of causes, which have nothing to do with the physical, chemical, or mechanical, and clearly establishes the uniqueness, independence, and underivability of the psychical as contrasted with the physical.The individuality and incommensurability of this psychical causality shows itself in another series of factors which make even theformof the psychical process quite distinctive, and produce phenomena which have no parallel in the material sequences of the world, indeed, conflict with all its fundamental laws. The great psychologists of to-day, Wundt in particular, and James, have frequently emphasised these factors. We can only briefly call attention to a few points, as, for instance, Wundt's theory of the creative resultants through which the psychical processes show themselves to be quite outside of the scope of the laws of equivalence which hold good in the physical. If, in the realm of the corporeal, two components of energy, a and b, come together, they unite in a common resultant c, which includes in part a new movement, in part transformation into heat, but always in such a way that c remains equal to a and b. But it is otherwise in the psychical. Here there occurs what may be called an increase (and a qualitative change) of the psychical energy. If we take the notes, c, e, and g, and call the sensation- and perception-value of the individual notes x, y, z,[pg 310]when they come together, the resulting sensation-value is by no means simply x + y + z, for a“harmony”results of which the effect is not only greater than the mere sum of x + y + z, but isqualitativelydifferent. This is true of all domains of psychical experience. The parallels from mechanical operation cannot be applied in any case. These only supply inadequate analogies and symbols which never really represent the actual state of the case.Let us take, for instance, a motive,m, that impels us towards a particular action, and another,n, that hinders us. If these meet in us, the result is not simply a weakening of the power of the one, and a remaining motive of the strength ofmminusn. The meeting of the two creates an entirely new and peculiar mental situation, which gives rise to conflict and choice, and the resultant victorious motive is never under any circumstancesm-n, but may be a double or three-foldmorn. Thus, in the different aspects of psychical activity, there are factors which make it impossible to compare these with other activities, remove them outside of the scope of the law of the equivalence of cause and effect, and prove that there is self-increase and growth on the part of psychical energies. And all such phenomena lead us away from the standpoint of any mere theory of association.
To this insight into the underivability and pre-eminence of consciousness over the world of external reality there must be added at this stage a recognition of its peculiar creative character. We have here to recognise that consciousness itself creates its world,—that is, the world that becomes our own through actual experience, possession, and enjoyment. We are led to this position even by the conception now current in natural science of the world as it is, not as it is mirrored in consciousness, and the theory of the“subjectivity of sensory qualities.”The qualities which we perceive in things through the senses are“subjective”; philosophy has long taught that, and now natural science teaches[pg 305]it too. That is to say, these qualities are not actually present in the things themselves; they are rather the particular responses which our consciousness makes to stimuli. Take, for instance, tone or colour. What we call tone or sound is not known to acoustics. That takes cognisance only of vibrations and the conditions of vibration in elastic bodies, which, by means of the ear and the nerves of hearing, become a stimulus of consciousness. Consciousness“responds”to this stimulus by receiving a sense-impression of hearing. But in this, obviously, there is nothing of the nature of oscillations and vibrations, but something quite different. What outside of us is nothing more than a complex process of movement according to mathematical conditions, blossoms within us to a world of sound, tone, and music. The world itself is soundless, toneless. And the same is true of light and colour;“light”and“blue”are nothing in themselves—are not properties of things themselves. They are only the infinitely rapid movements of an infinitely delicate substance, the ether. But when these meet our consciousness, they spin themselves within us into this world of light and colour, of brilliance and beauty. Thus without us there is a world of a purely mathematical nature, without quality, charm, or value. But the world we know, the world of sound, light, and colour, of all properties whatsoever, of the ugly or the beautiful, of pain and pleasure, is in the most real sense the product of consciousness itself, a creation which, incited by[pg 306]something outside of itself and of a totally different nature, which we can hardly call“world,”evolves out of itself and causes to blossom. No part of this creation is given from without; not the blue of the heavens, for outside of us there is no colour, only vibrations of the ether; not the gold of the sun nor the red glory of the evening sky. External nature is nothing more than the stimulus, the pressure upon the mind, which liberates from its depths the peculiar reactions and responses to this stimulus, and calls them forth from its own treasure-stores. Certainly in this creating the consciousness is entirely dependent on the impressions stamped on it from outside, and to that extent upon“experience.”But it is by no means atabula rasa, and a merely passive mirror of the outer world, for it translates the stimulus thus received into quite a different language, and builds up from it a new reality, which is quite unlike the mathematical and qualityless reality without. And this activity on the part of consciousness begins on the very lowest stages. The simplest perception of light or colour, the first feeling of pleasure or discomfort, is a reaction of the psychical, which brings about something entirely new and unique.“The spirit is never passive.”
That the psychical is not derivable from the physical, that it does not arise out of it, is not secondary to it, but pre-eminent over it, is not passive but creative; so much we have already gained to set over against naturalism. But its claims are even more affected[pg 307]by the fact of real psychical causality. We need not here concern ourselves with the difficult question, whether the mind can of itself act upon the body, and through it upon the external world. But in the logical consistence of naturalism there was implied not only a negative answer to this last question, but also a denial of the causality of the psychical, even within itself and its own domain. This is well illustrated in the figure of the cloud shadows. In consciousness state follows upon state, a upon b, b upon c. According to naturalism, b is not really the result of a, nor c of b, for in that case there would be independence of phenomena, and distinctness of laws in the psychical. But as all the states, a, b, and c, of the cloud shadows, depend upon statesa,b, andc, of the clouds themselves, but do not themselves form a concatenation of causes, so all the states of the mind depend upon those of the body, in which alone there is a true chain of causes because they alone have true reality.
This is a complete distortion of the facts of the case. It would never be possible to persuade oneself or any one else that the arm, for instance, did not bend simply because we willed that it should. And it is still less possible to doubt that there are sequences of causes within the psychical, that in the world of thought and feeling, of desire and will, one thing calls up another, awakes it, impels it onwards, and influences it. Indeed, the mode of influence is peculiarly rich, subtle, and[pg 308]certain. Mental images and experiences arouse joy or sorrow, admiration or repulsion. One image calls up another, forces it to appear according to quite peculiar laws, or may crowd it out. Feelings call up desires, desires lead to determination. Good news actually causes joy, this is actually strengthened to willing, and the new situation gives rise to actual resolves. All this is so obvious and so unquestionable that no naturalism can possibly prevail against it. It has also long been made the subject of special investigation and carefully regulated experiment, and it is one of the chief subjects of modern psychological science. And especially as regards the different forms of“association of ideas,”the particular laws of this psychical causality have been established.
It cannot be denied, however, that this psychology of association has itself in a deeper sense certain dangers from the point of view of the freedom of the mind, and it is apt to lead, not indeed to naturalistic conceptions, but to views according to which the“soul”is reduced to the level of a passive frame and stage, so to speak, for the exhibition of mental mechanics and statics.“Ideas”or thoughts, or states of feelings, are sometimes represented almost as actual little realities, which come and go in accordance with their own laws of attraction and repulsion, unite and separate again, by virtue of a kind of mental gravitation, move and crowd one another, so that one must almost say“it thinks,”as one says“it rains,”and not“the mind thinks”or“I[pg 309]think.”But more of this later. This psychological orderliness is in sharp antagonism to pure naturalism. It describes the laws of a sequence of causes, which have nothing to do with the physical, chemical, or mechanical, and clearly establishes the uniqueness, independence, and underivability of the psychical as contrasted with the physical.
The individuality and incommensurability of this psychical causality shows itself in another series of factors which make even theformof the psychical process quite distinctive, and produce phenomena which have no parallel in the material sequences of the world, indeed, conflict with all its fundamental laws. The great psychologists of to-day, Wundt in particular, and James, have frequently emphasised these factors. We can only briefly call attention to a few points, as, for instance, Wundt's theory of the creative resultants through which the psychical processes show themselves to be quite outside of the scope of the laws of equivalence which hold good in the physical. If, in the realm of the corporeal, two components of energy, a and b, come together, they unite in a common resultant c, which includes in part a new movement, in part transformation into heat, but always in such a way that c remains equal to a and b. But it is otherwise in the psychical. Here there occurs what may be called an increase (and a qualitative change) of the psychical energy. If we take the notes, c, e, and g, and call the sensation- and perception-value of the individual notes x, y, z,[pg 310]when they come together, the resulting sensation-value is by no means simply x + y + z, for a“harmony”results of which the effect is not only greater than the mere sum of x + y + z, but isqualitativelydifferent. This is true of all domains of psychical experience. The parallels from mechanical operation cannot be applied in any case. These only supply inadequate analogies and symbols which never really represent the actual state of the case.
Let us take, for instance, a motive,m, that impels us towards a particular action, and another,n, that hinders us. If these meet in us, the result is not simply a weakening of the power of the one, and a remaining motive of the strength ofmminusn. The meeting of the two creates an entirely new and peculiar mental situation, which gives rise to conflict and choice, and the resultant victorious motive is never under any circumstancesm-n, but may be a double or three-foldmorn. Thus, in the different aspects of psychical activity, there are factors which make it impossible to compare these with other activities, remove them outside of the scope of the law of the equivalence of cause and effect, and prove that there is self-increase and growth on the part of psychical energies. And all such phenomena lead us away from the standpoint of any mere theory of association.
Activity of Consciousness.Naturalism takes refuge in the doctrine of association, when it does not attain anything with its first claims, and applies this theory in such a way that it seems possible from this standpoint to interpret mental processes as having an approximate resemblance to mechanically and mathematically calculable phenomena. As in physics the molecules and atoms, so here the smallest mental elements, the simplest units of feeling are sought for, and from their relations of attraction and repulsion, their groupings and movements, it is supposed that the whole mental world may be constructed up to its highest contents, will, ideals, and development of character. But even the analogy, the model which is followed, and the fact that a model is followed at all, show that this method is uncritical and not unprejudiced. What reason is there for regarding occurrences in the realm of physics as anormfor the psychical? Why should one not rather start from the peculiar and very striking differences between the two, from the primary and fundamental fact, not indeed capable of explanation, but all the more worthy of attention on that account, that there is an absolute difference between physical occurrences and mental behaviour, between physical and mental causality? These most primitive and simplest mental elements which are supposed to float and have their being within the mind as in a kind of spiritual ether are not atoms[pg 312]at all, but deeds, actions, performances. The laws of the association of ideas are not the laws of a mental chemistry, but laws of mental behaviour; very fixed and reliable laws, but still having to do with modes of behaviour. Their separating and uniting, their relations to one another, their grouping into unities, their“syntheses,”are not automatic permutations and combinations, but express theactivityof a thinking intelligence. Not even the simplest actual synthesis comes about of itself, as psychologists have shown by a neat illustration.[Illustration: Squarea2, next to smaller squareb2. Above them are horizontal linesaandb, the same lengths as the widths of the squares below them. Caption:aandbonly associated. Squares ofaandbin juxtaposition.][Illustration: Squarec2. Above it is horizontal linec, the same length as the width of the square below it. Caption:aandbreally synthetised toc. Square ofa+bas a true unity =c2.]Given that, through some association, the image of the lineacalls up that of the lineb, and both are associatively ranged together, we have still not made the real synthesisa+b=c. For to think ofaandbside by side is not the same thing as thinking ofc, as we shall readily see if we square them. The squares ofaandbthought of beside one another, that is,a2andb2, are something quite different from the square of the really[pg 313]synthetisedaandb, which is (a+b)2=a2+ 2ab+b2, orc2. This requires quite a new view, a spontaneous synthesis, which is an action and not a mere experience.
Naturalism takes refuge in the doctrine of association, when it does not attain anything with its first claims, and applies this theory in such a way that it seems possible from this standpoint to interpret mental processes as having an approximate resemblance to mechanically and mathematically calculable phenomena. As in physics the molecules and atoms, so here the smallest mental elements, the simplest units of feeling are sought for, and from their relations of attraction and repulsion, their groupings and movements, it is supposed that the whole mental world may be constructed up to its highest contents, will, ideals, and development of character. But even the analogy, the model which is followed, and the fact that a model is followed at all, show that this method is uncritical and not unprejudiced. What reason is there for regarding occurrences in the realm of physics as anormfor the psychical? Why should one not rather start from the peculiar and very striking differences between the two, from the primary and fundamental fact, not indeed capable of explanation, but all the more worthy of attention on that account, that there is an absolute difference between physical occurrences and mental behaviour, between physical and mental causality? These most primitive and simplest mental elements which are supposed to float and have their being within the mind as in a kind of spiritual ether are not atoms[pg 312]at all, but deeds, actions, performances. The laws of the association of ideas are not the laws of a mental chemistry, but laws of mental behaviour; very fixed and reliable laws, but still having to do with modes of behaviour. Their separating and uniting, their relations to one another, their grouping into unities, their“syntheses,”are not automatic permutations and combinations, but express theactivityof a thinking intelligence. Not even the simplest actual synthesis comes about of itself, as psychologists have shown by a neat illustration.
[Illustration: Squarea2, next to smaller squareb2. Above them are horizontal linesaandb, the same lengths as the widths of the squares below them. Caption:aandbonly associated. Squares ofaandbin juxtaposition.]
[Illustration: Squarec2. Above it is horizontal linec, the same length as the width of the square below it. Caption:aandbreally synthetised toc. Square ofa+bas a true unity =c2.]
Given that, through some association, the image of the lineacalls up that of the lineb, and both are associatively ranged together, we have still not made the real synthesisa+b=c. For to think ofaandbside by side is not the same thing as thinking ofc, as we shall readily see if we square them. The squares ofaandbthought of beside one another, that is,a2andb2, are something quite different from the square of the really[pg 313]synthetisedaandb, which is (a+b)2=a2+ 2ab+b2, orc2. This requires quite a new view, a spontaneous synthesis, which is an action and not a mere experience.
The Ego.It was customary in earlier psychology, as it still is in all apologetic psychology, to regard the soul as a unified, immaterial, indivisible and therefore indestructiblesubstance, as a monad, which, as a unity without parts, superior to its own capacities and the changes of its states, is at all times one and the same subject. Many attempts have been made since the time of Plotinus to accumulate proofs of this substantial unity. We may leave this question untouched here, and need not even inquire whether these definitions are not themselves things of the external world employed as images and analogies and pushed too far. But there are three factors which may be established in regard to the psychical in spite of all naturalistic opposition; and those who have attempted to find proofs for the traditional idea we have noted, have usually really had these three in mind, and quite rightly so: they are, self-consciousness, the unity of consciousness, and the consciousness of the ego.
It was customary in earlier psychology, as it still is in all apologetic psychology, to regard the soul as a unified, immaterial, indivisible and therefore indestructiblesubstance, as a monad, which, as a unity without parts, superior to its own capacities and the changes of its states, is at all times one and the same subject. Many attempts have been made since the time of Plotinus to accumulate proofs of this substantial unity. We may leave this question untouched here, and need not even inquire whether these definitions are not themselves things of the external world employed as images and analogies and pushed too far. But there are three factors which may be established in regard to the psychical in spite of all naturalistic opposition; and those who have attempted to find proofs for the traditional idea we have noted, have usually really had these three in mind, and quite rightly so: they are, self-consciousness, the unity of consciousness, and the consciousness of the ego.
Self-Consciousness.1. Our consciousness is not merely a knowledge of many individual things, the possession of concrete and abstract, particular or general conceptions and ideas, the cherishing of sensations, feelings and the like. We[pg 314]not only know, but we know that we know, and we can ponder in thought over the very fact that we are able thus to reflect in thought. Thought can turn its attention upon itself, can establish that it takes place, and how it runs its course, can reflect upon the forms in which it expresses itself, its powers, its laws, possibilities, and limits, and can ponder over the general nature of thought and the contingent individual nature of the particular thinking subject. (The very possibility and preliminary condition of moral freedom is implied in this.) How naturalism is to do justice to this fact it is not easy to see. Even if it were possible that the mental content was gained through mere experience, that comparisons, syntheses, and abstractions were formed simply according to the laws of association, and that these were sublimed and refined to general ideas, and could grow into axioms of logic and of geometry, or crystallise into necessary and axiomatic principles—none of which can happen—yet it would always be a knowledge of something. But how this something could be given to itself remains undiscoverable. The soul is atabula rasaand a mere mirror, says this theory. But it would still require to show how the silver layer behind the mirror began to see itself in the mirror.
1. Our consciousness is not merely a knowledge of many individual things, the possession of concrete and abstract, particular or general conceptions and ideas, the cherishing of sensations, feelings and the like. We[pg 314]not only know, but we know that we know, and we can ponder in thought over the very fact that we are able thus to reflect in thought. Thought can turn its attention upon itself, can establish that it takes place, and how it runs its course, can reflect upon the forms in which it expresses itself, its powers, its laws, possibilities, and limits, and can ponder over the general nature of thought and the contingent individual nature of the particular thinking subject. (The very possibility and preliminary condition of moral freedom is implied in this.) How naturalism is to do justice to this fact it is not easy to see. Even if it were possible that the mental content was gained through mere experience, that comparisons, syntheses, and abstractions were formed simply according to the laws of association, and that these were sublimed and refined to general ideas, and could grow into axioms of logic and of geometry, or crystallise into necessary and axiomatic principles—none of which can happen—yet it would always be a knowledge of something. But how this something could be given to itself remains undiscoverable. The soul is atabula rasaand a mere mirror, says this theory. But it would still require to show how the silver layer behind the mirror began to see itself in the mirror.
The Unity of Consciousness.2. The same holds true of the unity of consciousness, of which we are directly convinced. It is quite inexplicable[pg 315]if consciousness is a function of the extended and divisible physical substratum which is built up of nerve-cells and nerve-fibres. And yet this unity is the fundamental condition of our whole inner life.Even the facts of association demonstrate it. Two images could not come together, the one could not call up the other, if they were not possessed in the same consciousness, and could unite in it. It is the preliminary condition of every higher mode of thought, of every relating of things, of every comparison and abstraction. No judgment can be formed, no conclusion drawn without this. How could a predicate become associated with its subject, or a principal clause with its subordinate clause, if they were in separate consciousnesses, and how could the conclusion be drawn from them?
2. The same holds true of the unity of consciousness, of which we are directly convinced. It is quite inexplicable[pg 315]if consciousness is a function of the extended and divisible physical substratum which is built up of nerve-cells and nerve-fibres. And yet this unity is the fundamental condition of our whole inner life.
Even the facts of association demonstrate it. Two images could not come together, the one could not call up the other, if they were not possessed in the same consciousness, and could unite in it. It is the preliminary condition of every higher mode of thought, of every relating of things, of every comparison and abstraction. No judgment can be formed, no conclusion drawn without this. How could a predicate become associated with its subject, or a principal clause with its subordinate clause, if they were in separate consciousnesses, and how could the conclusion be drawn from them?
Consciousness of the Ego.3. This unified self-consciousness is consciousness of the ego. It is only by means of an artificial abstraction that we can leave out of account in the consideration of processes of thought the peculiar factor of personal relationship that absolutely attaches to every thought within us. There are no thoughts in general that play their part of themselves alone.“It”never“thinks”in me. On the contrary, all sensation, thought, and will has in every human being a peculiar central relationship to which we refer when we say“my idea,”“my sensation.”What the“I”is cannot be defined. It is that through which the relation of all[pg 316]experiences and actions is referred to a point, and through which the treasuring of them for good or ill, the appreciation, the valuation of them is accomplished. And it plays its part even in the case of cold and indifferent items of knowledge. For instance, that twice two are four is not simply a perception, it ismyperception. Of the ego itself nothing more can be said than that it is the thought of me as the subject of all experience, willing, and action, and if we try to take hold of it nothing more than this formula remains. Yet the fact that the ego is the subject of all this, gives conduct, will, and experience that peculiar character which distinguishes them from mere action and reaction. For it is directly certain that all the psychical contents are not only co-existences in one consciousness but that they are possessed by it.Thus in summing up we have to say, that it is through the ego that all psychical activities and experiences are centred and related, that the ego is itself the point of relation, that it is the reason of the unity of consciousness and of the possibility of self-consciousness, and that in all this it is the most certain reality, without which the simplest psychical life would be impossible. At the same time, it is difficult to state what the“ego”is in itself, apart from the effects in which it reveals itself.
3. This unified self-consciousness is consciousness of the ego. It is only by means of an artificial abstraction that we can leave out of account in the consideration of processes of thought the peculiar factor of personal relationship that absolutely attaches to every thought within us. There are no thoughts in general that play their part of themselves alone.“It”never“thinks”in me. On the contrary, all sensation, thought, and will has in every human being a peculiar central relationship to which we refer when we say“my idea,”“my sensation.”What the“I”is cannot be defined. It is that through which the relation of all[pg 316]experiences and actions is referred to a point, and through which the treasuring of them for good or ill, the appreciation, the valuation of them is accomplished. And it plays its part even in the case of cold and indifferent items of knowledge. For instance, that twice two are four is not simply a perception, it ismyperception. Of the ego itself nothing more can be said than that it is the thought of me as the subject of all experience, willing, and action, and if we try to take hold of it nothing more than this formula remains. Yet the fact that the ego is the subject of all this, gives conduct, will, and experience that peculiar character which distinguishes them from mere action and reaction. For it is directly certain that all the psychical contents are not only co-existences in one consciousness but that they are possessed by it.
Thus in summing up we have to say, that it is through the ego that all psychical activities and experiences are centred and related, that the ego is itself the point of relation, that it is the reason of the unity of consciousness and of the possibility of self-consciousness, and that in all this it is the most certain reality, without which the simplest psychical life would be impossible. At the same time, it is difficult to state what the“ego”is in itself, apart from the effects in which it reveals itself.