Part 55 (1/2)
Mental facts synchronise with their basis, for no thought hovers over a dead brain and there is no vision in a dark chamber; but their tenure of life is independent of that of their objects, since thought may be prophetic or reminiscent and is intermittent even when its object enjoys a continuous existence. Mental facts are similar to their objects, since things and images have, intrinsically regarded, the same const.i.tution; but images do not move in the same plane with things and their parts are in no proportionate dynamic relation to the parts of the latter.
Thought's place in nature is exiguous, however broad the landscape it represents; it touches the world tangentially only, in some ferment of the brain. It is probably no atom that supports the soul (as Leibnitz imagined), but rather some cloud of atoms shaping or remodelling an organism. Mind in this case would be, in its physical relation to matter, what it feels itself to be in its moral att.i.tude toward the same; a witness to matter's interesting aspects and a realisation of its forms.
[Sidenote: Perception represents things in their practical relation to the body.]
Mental facts, moreover, are highly selective; especially does this appear in respect to the dialectical world, which is in itself infinite, while the sum of human logic and mathematics, though too long for most men's patience, is decidedly brief. If we ask ourselves on what principle this selection and foreshortening of truth takes place in the mind, we may perhaps come upon the real bond and the deepest contrast between mind and its environment. The infinity of formal truth is disregarded in human thought when it is irrelevant to practice and to happiness; the infinity of nature is represented there in violent perspective, centring about the body and its interests. The seat and starting-point of every mental survey is a brief animal life. A mind seems, then, to be a consciousness of the body's interests, expressed in terms of what affects that body, as if in the Babel of nature a man heard only the voices that p.r.o.nounced his name. A mind is a private view; it is gathered together in proportion as physical sensibility extends its range and makes one stretch of being after another tributary to the animal's life, and in proportion also as this sensibility is integrated, so that every organ in its reaction enlists the resources of every other organ as well. A personal will and intelligence thus arise; and they direct action from within with a force and freedom which are exactly proportionate to the material forces, within and without the body, which the soul has come to represent.
In other words, mind raises to an actual existence that _form_ in material processes which, had the processes remained wholly material, would have had only ideal or imputed being--as the stars would not have been divided into the signs of the Zodiac but for the fanciful eye of astrologers. Automata might arise and be destroyed without any value coming or going; only a form-loving observer could say that anything fortunate or tragic had occurred, as poets might at the budding or withering of a flower. Some of nature's automata, however, love themselves, and comment on the form they achieve or abandon; these constellations of atoms are genuine beasts. Their consciousness and their interest in their own individuality rescues that individuality from the realm of discourse and from having merely imputed limits.
[Sidenote: Mind the existence in which form becomes actual.]
That the basis of mind lies in the body's interests rather than in its atoms may seem a doctrine somewhat too poetical for psychology; yet may not poetry, superposed on material existence and supported by it, be perhaps the key to mind? Such a view hangs well together with the practical and prospective character of consciousness, with its total dependence on the body, its cognitive relevance to the world, and its formal disparity from material being. Mind does not accompany body like a useless and persistent shadow; it is significant and it is intermittent. Much less can it be a link in physiological processes, processes irrelevant to its intent and incompatible with its immaterial essence. Consciousness seems to arise when the body a.s.sumes an att.i.tude which, being an att.i.tude, supervenes upon the body's elements and cannot be contained within them. This att.i.tude belongs to the whole body in its significant operation, and the report of this att.i.tude, its expression, requires survey, synthesis, appreciation--things which const.i.tute what we call mentality. This remains, of course, the mentality of that material situation; it is the voice of that particular body in that particular pa.s.s. The mind therefore represents its basis, but this basis (being a _form_ of material existence and not matter itself) is neither vainly reduplicated by representation nor used up materially in the process.
Representation is far from idle, since it brings to focus those mechanical unities which otherwise would have existed only potentially and at the option of a roving eye. In evoking consciousness nature makes this delimination real and unambiguous; there are henceforth actual centres and actual interests in the mechanical flux. The flux continues to be mechanical, but the representation of it supervening has created values which, being due to imputation, could not exist without being imputed, while at the same time they could not have been imputed without being attached to one object or event rather than to another. Material dramas are thus made moral and raised to an existence of their own by being expressed in what we call the souls of animals and men; a mind is the entelechy of an organic body.[E] It is a region where form breeds an existence to express it, and destiny becomes important by being felt.
Mind adds to being a new and needful witness so soon as the const.i.tution of being gives foothold to apperception of its movement, and offers something in which it is possible to ground an interest.
That Aristotle has not been generally followed in views essentially so natural and pregnant as these is due no doubt to want of thoroughness in conceiving them, not only on the part of his readers but even on his own part; for he treated the soul, which should be on his own theory only an expression and an unmoved mover, as a power and an efficient cause. a.n.a.lysis had not gone far enough in his day to make evident that all dynamic principles are mechanical and that mechanism can obtain only among objects; but by this time it should no longer seem doubtful that mental facts can have no connection except through their material basis and no mutual relevance except through their objects.
[Sidenote: Attempt at idealistic physics.]
There is indeed a strange half-a.s.sumption afloat, a sort of reserved faith which every one seems to respect but n.o.body utters, to the effect that the mental world has a mechanism of its own, and that ideas intelligently produce and sustain one another. Systematic idealists, to be sure, have generally given a dialectical or moral texture to the cosmos, so that the pa.s.sage from idea to idea in experience need not be due, in their physics, to any intrinsic or proportionate efficacy in these ideas themselves. The march of experience is not explained at all by such high cosmogonies. They abandon that practical calculation to some science of illusion that has to be tolerated in this provisional life. Their own understanding is of things merely in the gross, because they fall in with some divine plan and produce, unaccountably enough, some interesting harmony. Empirical idealists, on the contrary, in making a metaphysics out of psychology, hardly know what they do. The laws of experience which they refer to are all laws of physics. It is only the ”possibilities” of sensation that stand and change according to law; the sensations themselves, if not referred to those permanent possibilities, would be a chaos worse than any dream.
Correct and scrupulous as empiricism may be when it turns its face backward and looks for the seat, the criterion, and the elements of knowledge, it is altogether incoherent and self-inhibited when it looks forward. It can believe in nothing but in what it conceives, if it would rise at all above a stupid immersion in the immediate; yet the relations which attach the moments of feeling together are material relations, implying the whole frame of nature. Psychology can accordingly conceive nothing but the natural world, with its diffuse animation, since this is the only background that the facts suggest or that, in practice, anybody can think of. If empiricism trusted the intellect, and consented to immerse flying experience in experience understood, it would become ordinary science and ordinary common sense. Deprecating this result, for no very obvious reason, it has to balance itself on the thin edge of an unwilling materialism, with a continual protestation that it does not believe in anything that it thinks. It is wholly entangled in the prevalent sophism that a man must renounce a belief when he discovers how he has formed it, and that our ancestors--at least the remoter ones--begin to exist when we discover them.
When Descartes, having composed a mechanical system of the world, was asked by admiring ladies to say something about the pa.s.sions, what came into his mind was characteristically simple and dialectical. Life, he thought, was a perpetual conflict between reason and the emotions. The soul had its own natural principle to live by, but was diverted from that rational path by the waves of pa.s.sion that beat against it and sometimes flooded it over. That was all his psychology. Ideal ent.i.ties in dramatic relations, in a theatre which had to be borrowed, of course, from the other half of the world; because while a material mechanism might be conceived without minds in it, minds in action could not be conceived without a material mechanism--at least a represented one--lying beneath and between. Spinoza made a great improvement in the system by attaching the mind more systematically to the body, and studying the parts which organ and object played in qualifying knowledge; but his conception of mental unities and mental processes remained literary, or at best, as we have seen, dialectical. No shadow of a principle at once psychic and genetic appeared in his philosophy.
All mind was still a transcript of material facts or a deepening of moral relations.
[Sidenote: a.s.sociation not efficient]
The idea of explaining the flow of ideas without reference to bodies appeared, however, in the principle of a.s.sociation. This is the nearest approach that has yet been made to a physics of disembodied mind--something which idealism sadly needs to develop. A terrible incapacity, however, appears at once in the principle of a.s.sociation; for even if we suppose that it could account for the flow of ideas, it does not pretend to supply any basis for sensations. And as the more efficient part of a.s.sociation--a.s.sociation by contiguity--is only a repet.i.tion in ideas of the order once present in impressions, the whole question about the march of mental experience goes back to what a.s.sociation does not touch, namely, the origin of sensations. What everybody a.s.sumed, of course, was that the order and quality of sensations were due to the body; but their derivation was not studied.
Hume ignored it as much as possible, and Berkeley did not sacrifice a great deal when he frankly suggested that the production of sensation must be the direct work of G.o.d.
This tendency not to recognise the material conditions of mind showed itself more boldly in the treatment of ideation. We are not plainly aware (in spite of headaches, fatigue, sleep, love, intoxication, and madness) that the course of our thoughts is as directly dependent on the body as is their inception. It was therefore possible, without glaring paradox, to speak as if ideas caused one another. They followed, in recurring, the order they had first had in experience, as when we learn something by heart. Why, a previous verse being given, we should sometimes be unable to repeat the one that had often followed it before, there was no attempt to explain: it sufficed that reverie often seemed to retrace events in their temporal order. Even less dependent on material causes seemed to be the other sort of a.s.sociation, a.s.sociation by similarity. This was a feat for the wit and the poet, to jump from China to Peru, by virtue of some spark of likeness that might flash out between them.
[Sidenote: It describes coincidences.]
Much natural history has been written and studied with the idea of finding curious facts. The demand has not been for constant laws or intelligibility, but for any circ.u.mstance that could arrest attention or divert the fancy. In this spirit, doubtless, instances of a.s.sociation were gathered and cla.s.sified. It was the young ladies' botany of mind.
Under a.s.sociation could be gathered a thousand interesting anecdotes, a thousand choice patterns of thought. Talk of the wars, says Hobbes, once led a man to ask what was the value of a Roman penny. But why only once?
The wars must have been often mentioned when the delivering up of King Charles did not enter any mind; and when it did, this would not have led any one to think of Judas and the thirty pence, unless he had been a good royalist and a good Christian--and then only by a curious accident.
It was not these ideas, then, in their natural capacity that suggested one another; but some medium in which they worked, once in the world, opened those particular avenues between them. Nevertheless, no one cared to observe that each fact had had many others, never recalled, a.s.sociated with it as closely as those which were remembered. Nor was the matter taken so seriously that one needed to ask how, among all similar things, similarity could decide which should be chosen; nor how among a thousand contiguous facts one rather than another should be recalled for contiguity's sake.
[Sidenote: Understanding is based on instinct and expressed in dialectic.]
The best instance, perhaps, of regular a.s.sociation might be found in language and its meaning; for understanding implies that each word habitually calls up its former a.s.sociates. Yet in what, psychologically considered, does understanding a word consist? What concomitants does the word ”horse” involve in actual sentience? Hardly a clear image such as a man might paint; for the name is not confined to recalling one view of one animal obtained at one moment. Perhaps all that recurs is a vague sense of the environment, in nature and in discourse, in which that object lies. The word ”kite” would immediately make a different region warm in the world through which the mind was groping. One would turn in idea to the sky rather than to the ground, and feel suggestions of a more buoyant sort of locomotion.
Understanding has to be described in terms of its potential outcome, since the incandescent process itself, as it exists in transit, will not suffer stable terms to define it. Potentiality is something which each half of reality reproaches the other with; things are potential to feeling because they are not life, and feelings are potential to science because they elude definition. To understand, therefore, is to know what to do and what to say in the sign's presence; and this practical knowledge is far deeper than any echo casually awakened in fancy at the same time. Instinctive recognition has those echoes for the most superficial part of its effect. Because I understand what ”horse” means, the word can make me recall some episode in which a horse once figured.
This understanding is instinctive and practical and, if the phrase may be pardoned, it is the body that understands. It is the body, namely, that contains the habit and readiness on which understanding hangs; and the sense of understanding, the instant rejection of whatever clashes and makes nonsense in that context, is but a transcript of the body's education. Actual mind is all above board; it is all speculative, vibrant, the fruit and gift of those menial subterranean processes. Some generative processes may be called psychic in that they minister to mind and lend it what little continuity it can boast of; but they are not processes in consciousness. Processes in consciousness are aesthetic or dialectical processes, focussing a form rather than ushering in an existence. Mental activity has a character altogether alien to a.s.sociation: it is spiritual, not mechanical; an entelechy, not a genesis.