Hegel's Philosophy of Mind Part 5

On this original kindred depends all the process of education; the influence of which therefore is primarily negative or auxiliary. Thus the process of history and experience,-which the work of education only reproduces in an accelerated _tempo_-serves but to bring out the implicit reason within into explicit conformity with the rationality of the world.

Knowledge, then, in this ethical sphere means the harmony of will, emotion, intellect: it means the clear light which has no illusions and no deceptions. And to those who feel that much of their life and of the common life is founded on prejudice and illusion, such white light will occasionally seem hard and steely. At its approach they fear the loss of the charm of that twilight hour ere the day has yet begun, or before the darkness has fully settled down. Thus the heart and feelings look upon the intellect as an enemy of sentiment. And Plato himself is not without antic.i.p.ations of such an issue. Yet perhaps we may add that the danger is in part an imaginary one, and only arises because intelligence takes its task too lightly, and encroaches beyond its proper ground. Philosophy, in other words, mistakes its place when it sets itself up as a dogmatic system of life. Its function is to comprehend, and from comprehension to criticise, and through criticising to unify. It has no positive and additional teaching of its own: no addition to the burden of life and experience. And experience it must respect. Its work is to maintain the organic or super-organic interconnexion between all the spheres of life and all the forms of reality. It has to prevent stagnation and absorption of departments-to keep each in its proper place, but not more than its place, and yet to show how each is not independent of the others. And this is what the philosopher or ancient sage would be. If he is pa.s.sionless, it is not that he has no pa.s.sions, but that they no longer perturb and mislead. If his controlling spirit be reason, it is not the reason of the so-called "rationalist," but the reason which seeks in patience to comprehend, and to be at home in, a world it at first finds strange. And if he is critical of others, he is still more critical of himself: critical however not for criticism's sake (which is but a poor thing), but because through criticism the faith of reason may be more fully justified.

To the last, if he is true to his mission and faithful to his loyalty to reality, he will have the simplicity of the child.

Whether therefore we agree or not with Plato's reduction of Right and Duty to self-actualisation, we may at least admit that in the idea of perfection or excellence, combined with the idea of knowledge or inward lucidity, he has got the fundamental ideas on which further ethical development must build. Self-control, self-knowledge, internal harmony, are good: and so are the development of our several faculties and of the totality of them to the fullest pitch of excellence. But their value does not lie entirely in themselves, or rather there is implicit in them a reference to something beyond themselves. They take for granted something which, because it is so taken, may also be ignored and neglected, just because it seems so obvious. And that implication is the social humanity in which they are the spirits of light and leading.

To lay the stress on ??et? or excellence tends to leave out of sight the force of duty; and to emphasise knowledge is allowed to disparage the heart and feelings. The mind-even of a philosopher-finds a difficulty in holding very different points of view in one, and where it is forced from one to another, tends to forget the earlier altogether. Thus when the ethical philosopher, presupposing as an absolute or unquestionable fact that man the individual was rooted in the community, proceeded to discuss the problem of the best and completest individual estate, he was easily led to lose sight of the fundamental and governing condition altogether.

From the moment that Aristotle lays down the thesis that man is naturally social, to the moment when he asks how the bare ideal of excellence in character and life can become an actuality, the community in which man lives has retired out of sight away into the background. And it only comes in, as it first appears, as the paedagogue to bring us to morality. And Plato, though professedly he is speaking of the community, and is well aware that the individual can only be saved by the salvation of the community, is constantly falling back into another problem-the development of an individual soul. He feels the strength of the egoistic effort after perfection, and his essay in the end tends to lose sight altogether of its second theme. Instead of a man he gives us a mere philosopher, a man, that is, not living with his country's life, instinct with the heart and feeling of humanity, inspired by art and religion, but a being set apart and exalted above his fellows,-charged no doubt in theory with the duty of saving them, of acting vicariously as the mediator between them and the absolute truth-but really tending more and more to seclude himself on the _edita templa_ of the world, on the high-towers of speculation.

And what Plato and Aristotle did, so to speak, against their express purpose and effort, yet did, because the force of contemporary tendency was irresistible-that the Stoa and Epicurus did more openly and professedly. With a difference in theory, it is true, owing to the difference in the surroundings. Virtue in the older day of the free and glorious commonwealth had meant physical and intellectual achievement, acts done in the public eye, and of course for the public good-a good with which the agent was identified at least in heart and soul, if not in his explicit consciousness. In later and worse days, when the political world, with the world divine, had withdrawn from actual ident.i.ty with the central heart of the individual, and stood over-against him as a strange power and little better than a nuisance, virtue came to be counted as endurance, indifference, negative independence against a cold and a perplexing world.

But even still, virtue is excellence: it is to rise above the ign.o.ble level: to a.s.sert self-liberty against accident and circ.u.mstance-to attain self-controlled, self-satisfying independence-and to become G.o.d-like in its seclusion. Yet in two directions even it had to acknowledge something beyond the individual. The Epicurean-following out a suggestion of Aristotle-recognised the help which the free society of friends gave to the full development of the single seeker after a self-satisfying and complete life. The Stoic, not altogether refusing such help, tended rather to rest his single self on a fellowship of ideal sort, on the great city of G.o.ds and men, the _civitas Dei_. Thus, in separate halves, the two schools, into which Greek ethics was divided, gave expression to the sense that a new and higher community was needed-to the sense that the visible actual community no longer realised its latent idea. The Stoic emphasised the all-embracing necessity, the absolute comprehensiveness of the moral kingdom. The Epicurean saw more clearly that, if the everlasting city came from heaven, it could only visibly arise by initiation upon the earth.

Christianity-in its best work-was a conjunction of the liberty with the necessity, of the human with the divine.

More interesting, perhaps, it is to note the misconception of reason and knowledge which grew up. Knowledge came more and more to be identified with the reflective and critical consciousness, which is outside reality and life, and judges it from a standpoint of its own. It came to be esteemed only in its formal and abstract shape, and at the expense of the heart and feelings. The ant.i.thesis of philosophy (or knowledge strictly so called) according to Plato was mere opinion, accidental and imperfect knowledge. The knowledge which is truly valuable is a knowledge which presupposes the full reality of life, and is the more and more completely articulated theory of it as a whole. It is-abstractly taken-a mere form of unity which has no value except in uniting: it is-taken concretely-the matter, we may say, in complete unity. It is ideal and perfect harmony of thought, appet.i.te, and emotion: or putting it otherwise, the philosopher is one who is not merely a creature of appet.i.te and production, not merely a creature of feeling and practical energy, but a creature, who to both of these superadds an intelligence which sets eyes in the blind forehead of these other powers, and thus, far from superseding them altogether, only raises them into completeness, and realises all that is worthy in their implicit natures. Always these two impulsive tendencies of our nature are guided by some sort of ideas and intelligence, by beliefs and opinions.

But they, like their guides, are sporadically emergent, unconnected, and therefore apt to be contradictory. It is to such erratic and occasional ideas, half-truths and deceptions, that philosophy is opposed.

Unfortunately for all parties, the ant.i.thesis is carried farther.

Philosophy and the philosopher are further set in opposition to the faith of the heart, the intimacy and intensity of feeling, the depth of love and trust, which in practice often go along with imperfect ideas. The philosopher is made one who has emanc.i.p.ated himself from the heart and feelings,-a pure intelligence, who is set above all creeds, contemplating all, and holding none. Consistency and clearness become his idol, to be worshipped at any cost, save one sacrifice: and that one sacrifice is the sacrifice of his own self-conceit. For consistency generally means that all is made to harmonise with one a.s.sumed standpoint, and that whatever presents discrepancies with this alleged standard is ruthlessly thrown away. Such a philosophy mistakes its function, which is not, as Heine scoffs, to make an intelligible system by rejecting the discordant fragments of life, but to follow reverently, if slowly, in the wake of experience. Such a "perfect sage," with his parade of reasonableness, may often a.s.sume the post of a dictator.

And, above all, intelligence is only half itself when it is not also will.

And both are more than mere consciousness. Plato-whom we refer to, because he is the coryphaeus of all the diverse host of Greek philosophy-seems to overestimate or rather to misconceive the place of knowledge. That it is the supreme and crowning grace of the soul, he sees. But he tends to identify it with the supreme or higher soul:-as Aristotle did after him, to be followed by the Stoics and Neo-Platonists. For them the supreme, or almost supreme reality is the intelligence or reason: the soul is only on a second grade of reality, on the borders of the natural or physical world. When Plato takes that line, he turns towards the path of asceticism, and treats the philosophic life as a preparation for that truer life when intelligence shall be all in all, for that better land where "divine dialogues" shall form the staple and substance of spiritual existence. Aristotle,-who less often treads these solitudes,-still extols the theoretic life, when the body and its needs trouble no more, when the activity of reason-the theory of theory-is attained at least as entirely as mortal conditions allow man to be deified. Of the "apathy" and the reasonable conformity of the Stoics, or of the purely negative character of Epicurean happiness (the excision of all that pained) we need not here speak. And in Plotinus and Proclus the deification of mere reason is at any rate the dominant note; whatever protests the larger Greek nature in the former may from time to time offer. The truth which philosophy should have taught was that Mind or intelligence was the element where the inner life culminated and expanded and flourished: the error which it often tended to spread was that intelligence was the higher life of which all other was a degenerate shortcoming, and something valuable on its own account.

It may be that thus to interpret Plato is to do him an injustice. It has been sometimes said that his division of parts or kinds of soul-or his distinction between its fighting horses-tends to destroy the unity of mental life. But perhaps this was exactly what he wanted to convey. There are-we may paraphrase his meaning-three kinds of human being, three types of human life. There is the man or the life of appet.i.te and the flesh: there is the man of n.o.ble emotion and energetic depth of soul: there is the life of reasonable pursuits and organised principle. Or, we may take his meaning to be that there are three elements or provinces of mental life, which in all except a few are but imperfectly coherent and do not reach a true or complete unity. Some unity there always is: but in the life of mere appet.i.te and impulse, even when these impulses are our n.o.bler sentiments of love and hatred, the unity falls very far short. Or, as he puts the theme elsewhere, the soul has a pa.s.sion for self-completion, a love of beauty, which in most is but a misleading l.u.s.t. It is the business of the philosophic life to re-create or to foster this unity: or philosophy is the persistent search of the soul for its lost unity, the search to see that unity which is always its animating principle, its inner faith. When the soul has reached this ideal-if it can be supposed to attain it (and of this the strong-souled ancient philosophers feel no doubt),-then a change must take place. The love of beauty is not suppressed; it is only made self-a.s.sured and its object freed from all imperfection. It is not that pa.s.sion has ceased; but its nature is so transfigured, that it seems worthy of a n.o.bler name, which yet we cannot give. To such a life, where battle and conflict are as such unknown, we cannot longer give the t.i.tle of life: and we say that philosophy is in life a rehearsal of death(70). And yet if there be no battle, there is not for that reason mere inaction. Hence, as the Republic concludes, the true philosopher is the complete man. He is the truth and reality which the appet.i.tive and emotional man were seeking after and failed to realise. It is true they at first will not see this. But the whole long process of philosophy is the means to induce this conviction. And for Plato it remains clear that through experience, through wisdom, and through abstract deduction, the philosopher will justify his claim to him who hath ears to hear and heart to understand. If that be so, the asceticism of Plato is not a mere war upon flesh and sense as such, but upon flesh and sense as imperfect truth, fragmentary reality, which suppose themselves complete, though they are again and again confuted by experience, by wisdom, and by mere calculation,-a war against their blindness and shortsightedness.

Essay IV. Psycho-Genesis.

"The key," says Carus, "for the ascertainment of the nature of the conscious psychical life lies in the region of the unconscious(71)." The view which these words take is at least as old as the days of Leibniz. It means that the mental world does not abruptly emerge a full-grown intelligence, but has a genesis, and follows a law of development: that its life may be described as the differentiation (with integration) of a simple or indifferentiated ma.s.s. The terms conscious and unconscious, indeed, with their lax popular uses, leave the door wide open for misconception. But they may serve to mark that the mind is to be understood only in a certain relation (partly of ant.i.thesis) to nature, and the soul only in reference to the body. The so-called "superior faculties"-specially characteristic of humanity-are founded upon, and do not abruptly supersede, the lower powers which are supposed to be specially obvious in the animals(72). The individual and specific phenomena of consciousness, which the psychologist is generally supposed to study, rest upon a deeper, less explicated, more indefinite, life of sensibility, which in its turn fades away by immeasurable gradations into something irresponsive to the ordinary tests for sensation and life.

And yet the moment we attempt to leave the daylight of consciousness for the darker sides of sub-conscious life, the risks of misinterpretation multiply. The problem is to some extent the same as confronts the student of the ideas and principles of primitive races. There, the temptation of seeing things through the "spectacles of civilisation" is almost irresistible. So in psychology we are apt to import into the life of sensation and feeling the distinctions and relations of subsequent intellection. Nor is the difficulty lessened by Hegel's method which deals with soul, sentiency, and consciousness as grades or general characteristics in a developmental advance. He borrows his ill.u.s.trations from many quarters, from morbid and anomalous states of consciousness,-less from the cases of savages, children and animals. These ill.u.s.trations may be called a loose induction. But it requires a much more powerful instrument than mere induction to build up a scientific system; a framework of general principle or theory is the only basis on which to build theory by the allegation of facts, however numerous. Yet in philosophic science, which is systematised knowledge, all facts strictly so described will find their place and be estimated at their proper value.

(i.) Primitive Sensibility.

Psychology (with Hegel) takes up the work of science from biology. The mind comes before it as the supreme product of the natural world, the finest flower of organic life, the "truth" of the physical process. As such it is called by the time-honoured name of Soul. If we further go on to say that the soul is the principle of life, we must not understand this vital principle to be something over and above the life of which it is the principle. Such a locally-separable principle is an addition which is due to the a.n.a.logy of mechanical movement, where a detached agent sets in motion and directs the machinery. But in the organism the principle is not thus detachable as a thing or agent. By calling Soul the principle of life we rather mean that in the vital organism, so far as it _lives_, all the real variety, separation, and discontinuity of parts must be reduced to unity and ident.i.ty, or as Hegel would say, to _ideality_. To live is thus to keep all differences fluid and permeable in the fire of the life-process. Or to use a familiar term of logic, the Soul is the concept or intelligible unity of the organic body. But to call it a concept might suggest that it is only the conception through which _we_ represent to ourselves the variety in unity of the organism. The soul, however, is more than a mere concept: and life is more than a mere mode of description for a group of movements forming an objective unity. It is a unity, subjective and objective. The organism is one life, controlling difference: and it is also one by our effort to comprehend it. The Soul therefore is in Hegelian language described as the Idea rather than the concept of the organic body. Life is the generic t.i.tle for this subject-object: but the life may be merely physical, or it may be intellectual and practical, or it may be absolute, i.e. will and know all that it is, and be all that it knows and wills.

Up to this point the world is what is called an external, which is here taken to mean (not a world external to the individual, but) a self-externalised world. That is to say, it is the observer who has. .h.i.therto by his interpretation of his perceptions supplied the "Spirit in Nature." In itself the external world has no inside, no centre: it is we who read into it the conception of a life-history. We are led to believe that a principle of unity is always at work throughout the physical world-even in the mathematical laws of natural operation. It is only intelligible and credible to us as a system, a continuous and regular development. But that system is only a hypothetical idea, though it is held to be a conclusion to which all the evidence seems unequivocally to point. And, even in organic life, the unity, though more perfect and palpable than in the mechanical and inorganic world, is only a perception, a vision,-a necessary mode of realising the unity of the facts. The phenomenon of life reveals as in a picture and an ocular demonstration the conformity of inward and outward, the ident.i.ty of whole and parts, of power and utterance. But it is still outside the observer. In the function of sensibility and sentiency, however, we stand as it were on the border-line between biology and psychology. At one step we have been brought within the harmony, and are no longer mere observers and reflecters. The sentient not merely is, but is aware that it is. Hitherto as life, it only is the unity in diversity, and diversity in unity, for the outsider, i.e. only implicitly: now it is so for itself, or consciously. And in the first stage it does not know, but feels or is sentient. Here, for the first time, is created the distinction of inward and outward. Loosely indeed we may, like Mr. Spencer, speak of outward and inward in physiology: but strictly speaking, what Goethe says is true, _Natur hat weder Kern noch Schaale_(73). Nature in the narrower sense knows no distinction of the inward and outward in its phenomena: it is a purely superficial order and succession of appearance and event. The Idea which has been visible to an intelligent percipient in the types and laws of the natural world, now _is_, actually is-is in and for itself-but at first in a minimum of content, a mere point of light, or rather the dawn which has yet to expand into the full day.

Spinoza has a.s.serted that "all individual bodies are animate, though in different degrees(74)." Now it is to a great extent this diversity of degree on which the main interest turns. Yet it is well to remember that the abrupt and trenchant separations which popular practice loves are overridden to a deeper view by an essential unity of idea, reducing them to indifference. If, that is, we take seriously the Spinozist unity of Substance, and the continual correlation (to call it no more) of extension and consciousness therein, we cannot avoid the conclusion which even Bacon would admit of something describable as attraction and perception, something subduing diversity to unity. But whether it be well to name this soul or life is a different matter. It may indeed only be taken to mean that all true being must be looked on as a real unity and individuality, must, that is, be conceived as manifesting itself in organisation, must be referred to a self-centred and self-developing activity. But this-which is the fundamental thesis of idealism-is hardly all that is meant. Rather Spinoza would imply that all things which form a real unity must have life-must have inner principle and unifying reality: and what he teaches is closely akin to the Leibnitian doctrine that every substantial existence reposes upon a monad, a unity which is at once both a force and a cognition, a "representation" and an appet.i.te or _nisus_ to act. When Fechner in a series of works(75) expounds and defends the hypothesis that plants and planets are not dest.i.tute of soul, any more than man and animals, he only gives a more p.r.o.nounced expression to this idealisation or spiritualisation of the natural world. But for the moment the point to be noted is that all of this idealistic doctrine is an inference, or a development which finds its _point d'appui_ in the fact of sensation. And the problem of the Philosophy of Mind is just to trace the process whereby a mere shock of sensation has grown into a conception and a faith in the goodness, beauty and intelligence of the world.

Schopenhauer has put the point with his usual picturesqueness. Outward nature presents nothing but a play of forces. At first, however, this force shows merely the mechanical phenomena of pressure and impact, and its theory is sufficiently described by mathematical physics. But in the process of nature force a.s.sumes higher types, types where it loses a certain amount of its externality(76), till in the organic world it acquires a peculiar phase which Schopenhauer calls _Will_, meaning by that, however, an organising and controlling power, a tendency or _nisus_ to be and live, which is persistent and potent, but without consciousness.

This blind force, which however has a certain coherence and purposiveness, is in the animal organism endowed with a new character, in consequence of the emergence of a new organ. This organ, the brain and nervous system, causes the evolution into clear day of an element which has been growing more and more urgent. The gathering tendency of force to return into itself is now complete: the cycle of operation is formed: and the junction of the two currents issues in the spark of sensation. The blind force now becomes seeing.

But at first-and this is the point we have to emphasise-its powers of vision are limited. Sensibility is either a local and restricted phenomenon: or, in so far as it is not local, it is vague and indefinite, and hardly ent.i.tled to the name of sensibility. Either it is a dim, but far-reaching, sympathy with environing existence, and in that case only so-called blind will or feeling: or if it is clear, is locally confined, and at first within very narrow limits. Neither of these points must be lost sight of. On the one hand feeling has to be regarded as the dull and confused stirring of an almost infinite sympathy with the world-a pulse which has come from the far-distant movements of the universe, and bears with it, if but as a possibility, the wealth of an infinite message. On the other hand, feeling at first only becomes real, in this boundless ideality to which its possibilities extend, by restricting itself to one little point and from several points organising itself to a unity of bodily feeling, till it can go on from thence to embrace the universe in distinct and articulate comprehension.

Soul, says Hegel, is not a separate and additional something over and above the rest of nature: it is rather nature's "'universal immaterialism, and simple ideal life(77)." There were ancient philosophers who spoke of the soul as a self-adjusting number,-as a harmony, or equilibrium(78)-and the moderns have added considerably to the list of these a.n.a.logical definitions. As definitions they obviously fall short. Yet these things give, as it were, by antic.i.p.ation, an image of soul, as the "ideality,"

which reduces the manifold to unity. The adhesions and cohesions of matter, its gravitating attractions, its chemical affinities and electrical polarities, the intricate out-and-in of organic structure, are all preludes to the true incorporating unity which is the ever-immanent supersession of the endless self-externalism and successionalism of physical reality. But in sentiency, feeling, or sensibility, the unity which all of these imply without reaching, is explicitly present. It is implicitly an all-embracing unity: an infinite,-which has no doors and no windows, for the good reason that it needs none, because it has nothing outside it, because it "expresses" and "envelopes" (however confusedly at first) the whole universe. Thus, even if, with localising phraseology, we may describe mind, where it _appears_ emerging in the natural world, as a mere feeble and incidental outburst,-a rebellion breaking out as in some petty province or isolated region against the great law of the physical realm-we are in so speaking taking only an external standpoint. But with the rise of mind in nature the bond of externalism is implicitly overcome.

To it, and where it really is, there is nothing outside, nothing transcendent. Everything which is said to be outside mind is only outside a localised and limited mind-outside a mind which is imperfectly and abstractly realised-not outside mind absolutely. Mind is the absolute negation of externality: not a mere relative negative, as the organism may be biologically described as inner in respect of the environment. To accomplish this negation in actuality, to bring the multiplicity and externality of things into the unity and ident.i.ty of one Idea, is the process of development of mind from animal sensibility to philosophic knowledge, from appet.i.te to art,-the process of culture through the social state under the influence of religion.

Sentiency or psychic matter (mind-stuff), to begin with, is in some respects like the _tabula rasa_ of the empiricists. It is the possibility-but the real possibility-of intelligence rather than intelligence itself. It is the monotonous undifferentiated inwardness-a faint self-awareness and self-realisation of the material world, but at first a mere vague _psychical protoplasm_ and without defined nucleus, without perceptible organisation or separation of structures. If there is self-awareness, it is not yet discriminated into a distinct and unified self, not yet differentiated and integrated,-soul in the condition of a mere "Is," which, however, is nothing determinate. It is very much in the situation of Condillac's statue-man-_une statue organisee interieurement comme nous, et animee d'un esprit prive de toute espece d'idees_: alike at least so far that the rigid uniformity of the latter's envelope prevents all articulated organisation of its faculties. The foundation under all the diversity and individuality in the concrete intelligent and volitional life is a common feeling,-a _sensus communis_-a general and indeterminate susceptibility to influence, a sympathy responsive, but responsive vaguely and equivocally, to all the stimuli of the physical environment. There was once a time, according to primitive legend, when man understood the language of beast and bird, and even surprised the secret converse of trees and flowers. Such fancies are but the exaggeration of a solidarity of conscious life which seems to spread far in the sub-conscious realm, and to narrow the individual's soul into limited channels as it rises into clear self-perception,

"As thro' the frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined."

It may be a mere dream that, as Goethe feigns of Makaria in his romance(79), there are men and women in sympathy with the vicissitudes of the starry regions: and hypotheses of lunar influence, or dogmas of astrological destiny, may count to the present guardians of the sciences as visionary superst.i.tions. Yet science in these regions has no reason to be dogmatic; her function hitherto can only be critical; and even for that, her data are scanty and her principles extremely general. The influences on the mental mood and faculty, produced by climate and seasons, by local environment and national type, by individual peculiarities, by the differences of age and s.e.x, and by the alternation of night and day, of sleep and waking, are less questionable. It is easy no doubt to ignore or forget them: easy to remark how indefinable and incalculable they are. But that does not lessen their radical and inevitable impress in the determination of the whole character. "The sum of our existence, divided by reason, never comes out exact, but always leaves a marvellous remainder(80)." Irrational this residue is, in the sense that it is inexplicable, and incommensurable with the well-known quant.i.ties of conscious and voluntarily organised life. But a scientific psychology, which is adequate to the real and concrete mind, should never lose sight of the fact that every one of its propositions in regard to the more advanced phases of intellectual development is thoroughly and in indefinable ways modified by these preconditions. When that is remembered, it will be obvious how complicated is the problem of adapting psychology for the application to education, and how dependent the solution of that problem is upon an experiential familiarity with the data of individual and national temperament and character.

The first stage in mental development is the establishment of regular and uniform relations between soul and body: it is the differentiation of organs and the integration of function: the balance between sensation and movement, between the afferent and efferent processes of sensitivity.

Given a potential soul, the problem is to make it actual in an individual body. It is the business of a physical psychology to describe in detail the steps by which the body we are attached to is made inward as our idea through the several organs and their nervous appurtenances: whereas a psychical physiology would conversely explain the corresponding processes for the expression of the emotions and for the objectification of the volitions. Thus soul inwardises (_erinnert_) or envelops body: which body "expresses" or develops soul. The actual soul is the unity of both, is the percipient individual. The solidarity or "communion" of body and soul is here the dominant fact: the soul sentient of changes in its peripheral organs, and transmitting emotion and volition into physical effect. It is on this psychical unity,-the unity which is the soul of the diversity of body-that all the subsequent developments of mind rest. Sensation is thus the _prius_-or basis-of all mental life: the organisation of soul in body and of body in soul. It is the process which historically has been prepared in the evolution of animal life from those undifferentiated forms where specialised organs are yet unknown, and which each individual has further to realise and complete for himself, by learning to see and hear, and use his limbs. At first, moreover, it begins from many separate centres and only through much collision and mutual compliance arrives at comparative uniformity and centralisation. The common basis of united sensibility supplied by the one organism has to be made real and effective, and it is so at first by sporadic and comparatively independent developments. If self-hood means reference to self of what is prima facie not self, and projection of self therein, there is in primitive sensibility only the germ or possibility of self-hood. In the early phases of psychic development the centre is fluctuating and ill-defined, and it takes time and trouble to co-ordinate or unify the various starting-points of sensibility(81).

This consolidation of inward life may be looked at either formally or concretely. Under the first head, it means the growth of a central unity of apperception. In the second case, it means a peculiar aggregate of ideas and sentiments. There is growing up within him what we may call the individuality of the individual,-an irrational, i.e. not consciously intelligent, nether-self or inner soul, a firm aggregation of hopes and wishes, of views and feelings, or rather of tendencies and temperament, of character hereditary and acquired. It is the law of the natural will or character which from an inaccessible background dominates our action,-which, because it is not realised and formulated in consciousness, behaves like a guardian spirit, or genius, or destiny within us. This genius is the sub-conscious unity of the sensitive life-the manner of man which unknown to ourselves we are,-and which influences us against our nominal or formal purposes. So far as this predominates, our ends, rough hew them how we will, are given by a force which is not really, i.e. with full consciousness, ours: by a ma.s.s of ingrained prejudice and unreasoned sympathies, of instincts and pa.s.sions, of fancies and feelings, which have condensed and organised themselves into a natural power. As the child in the mother's womb is responsive to her psychic influences, so the development of a man's psychic life is guided by feelings centred in objects and agents external to him, who form the genius presiding over his development. His soul, to that extent, is really in another: he himself is selfless, and when his stay is removed the principle of his life is gone(82). He is but a bundle of impressions, held together by influences and ties which in years before consciousness proper began made him what he is. Such is the involuntary adaptation to example and environment, which establishes in the depths below personality a self which becomes hereafter the determinant of action. Early years, in which the human being is naturally susceptible, build up by imitation, by pliant obedience, an image, a system, reproducing the immediate surroundings. The soul, as yet selfless, and ready to accept any imprint, readily moulds itself into the likeness of an authoritative influence.

The step by which the universality or unity of the self is realised in the variety of its sensation is Habit. Habit gives us a definite standing-ground in the flux of single impressions: it is the identification of ourselves with what is most customary and familiar: an identification which takes place by practice and repet.i.tion. If it circ.u.mscribes us to one little province of being, it on the other frees us from the vague indeterminateness where we are at the mercy of every pa.s.sing mood. It makes thus much of our potential selves our very own, our acquisition and permanent possession. It, above all, makes us free and at one with our bodily part, so that henceforth we start as a subjective unit of body and soul. We have now as the result of the anthropological process a self or ego, an individual consciousness able to reflect and compare, setting itself on one side (a soul in bodily organisation), and on the other setting an object of consciousness, or external world, a world of other things. All this presupposes that the soul has actualised itself by appropriating and acquiring as its expression and organ the physical sensibility which is its body. By restricting and establishing itself, it has gained a fixed standpoint. No doubt it has localised and confined itself, but it is no longer at the disposal of externals and accident: it has laid the foundation for higher developments.

(ii.) Anomalies of Psychical Life.

Psychology, as we have seen, goes for information regarding the earlier stages of mental growth to the child and the animal,-perhaps also to the savage. So too sociology founds certain conclusions upon the observations of savage customs and inst.i.tutions, or on the earlier records of the race.

In both cases with a limitation caused by the externality and fragmentariness of the facts and the need of interpreting them through our own conscious experiences. There is however another direction in which corresponding inquiries may be pursued; and where the danger of the conclusions arrived at, though not perhaps less real, is certainly of a different kind. In sociology we can observe-and almost experiment upon-the phenomena of the lapsed, degenerate and criminal cla.s.ses. The advantage of such observation is that the object of study can be made to throw greater light on his own inner states. He is a little of the child and a little of the savage, but these aspects co-exist with other features which put him more on a level with the intelligent observer. Similar pathological regions are open to us in the case of psychology. There the anomalous and morbid conditions of mind co-exist with a certain amount of mature consciousness. So presented, they are thrown out into relief. They form the negative instances which serve to corroborate our positive inductions.

The regularly concatenated and solid structure of normal mind is under abnormal and deranged conditions thrown into disorder, and its const.i.tuents are presented in their several isolation. Such phenomena are relapses into more rudimentary grades: but with the difference that they are set in the midst of a more advanced phase of intellectual life.

Even amongst candid and honest-minded students of psychology there is a certain reluctance to dabble in researches into the night-side of the mental range. Herbart is an instance of this shrinking. The region of the Unconscious seemed-and to many still seems-a region in which the charlatan and the dupe can and must play into each other's hands. Once in the whirl of spiritualist and crypto-psychical inquiry you could not tell how far you might be carried. The facts moreover were of a peculiar type.

Dependent as they seemed to be on the frame of mind of observers and observed, they defied the ordinary criteria of detached and abstract observation. You can only observe them, it is urged, when you believe; scepticism destroys them. Now there is a widespread natural impatience against what Bacon has called "monodical" phenomena, phenomena i.e. which claim to come under a special law of their own, or to have a private and privileged sphere. And this impatience cuts the Gordian knot by a determination to treat all instances which oppose its. .h.i.therto ascertained laws as due to deception and fraud, or, at the best, to incompetent observation, confusions of memory, and superst.i.tions of ignorance. Above all, great interests of religion and personality seemed to connect themselves with these revelations-interests, at any rate, to which our common humanity thrills; it seemed as if, in this region beyond the customary range of the conscious and the seen, one might learn something of the deeper realities which lie in the unseen. But to feel that so much was at stake was naturally unfavourable to purely dispa.s.sionate observation.

The philosophers were found-as might have been expected-amongst those most strongly attracted by these problems. Even Kant had been fascinated by the spiritualism of Swedenborg, though he finally turned away sceptical. At least as early as 1806 Sch.e.l.ling had been interested by Ritter's researches into the question of telepathy, or the power of the human will to produce without mechanical means of conveyance an effect at a distance.

He was looking forward to the rise of a _Physica coelestis_, or New Celestial Physics, which should justify the old magic. About the same date his brother Karl published an essay on Animal Magnetism. The novel phenomena of galvanism and its congeners suggested vast possibilities in the range of the physical powers, especially of the physical powers of the human psyche as a natural agent. The divining-rod was revived.

Clairvoyance and somnambulism were carefully studied, and the curative powers of animal magnetism found many advocates(83).

Interest in these questions went naturally with the new conception of the place of Man in Nature, and of Nature as the matrix of mind(84). But it had been acutely stimulated by the performances and professions of Mesmer at Vienna and Paris in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

These-though by no means really novel-had forced the artificial world of science and fashion to discuss the claim advanced for a new force which, amongst other things, could cure ailments that baffled the ordinary pract.i.tioner. This new force-mainly because of the recent interest in the remarkable advances of magnetic and electrical research-was conceived as a fluid, and called Animal Magnetism. At one time indeed Mesmer actually employed a magnet in the manipulation by which he induced the peculiar condition in his patients. The accompaniments of his procedure were in many respects those of the quack-doctor; and with the quack indeed he was often cla.s.sed. A French commission of inquiry appointed to examine into his performances reported in 1784 that, while there was no doubt as to the reality of many of the phenomena, and even of the cures, there was no evidence for the alleged new physical force, and declared the effects to be mainly attributable to the influence of imagination. And with the mention of this familiar phrase, further explanation was supposed to be rendered superfluous.

In France political excitement allowed the mesmeric theory and practice to drop out of notice till the fall of the first Empire. But in Germany there was a considerable amount of investigations and hypotheses into these mystical phenomena, though rarely by the ordinary routine workers in the scientific field. The phenomena where they were discussed were studied and interpreted in two directions. Some theorists, like Jung-Stilling, Eschenmayer, Schubert, and Kerner, took the more metaphysicist and spiritualistic view: they saw in them the witness to a higher truth, to the presence and operation in this lower world of a higher and spiritual matter, a so-called ether. Thus Animal Magnetism supplied a sort of physical theory of the other world and the other life. Jung-Stilling, e.g.

in his "Theory of Spirit-lore." (1808), regarded the spiritualistic phenomena as a justification of-what he believed to be-the Kantian doctrine that in the truly real and persistent world s.p.a.ce and time are no more. The other direction of inquiry kept more to the physical field.

Ritter (whose researches interested both Sch.e.l.ling and Hegel) supposed he had detected the new force underlying mesmerism and the like, and gave to it the name of Siderism (1808); while Amoretti of Milan named the object of his experiments Animal Electrometry (1816). Kieser(85), again (1826) spoke of Tellurism, and connected animal magnetism with the play of general terrestrial forces in the human being.

At a later date (1857) Schindler, in his "Magical Spirit-life," expounded a theory of mental polarity. The psychical life has two poles or centres,-its day-pole, around which revolves our ordinary and superficial current of ideas, and its night-pole, round which gathers the sub-conscious and deeper group of beliefs and sentiments. Either life has a memory, a consciousness, a world of its own: and they flourish to a large extent inversely to each other. The day-world has for its organs of receiving information the ordinary senses. But the magical or night-world of the soul has its feelers also, which set men directly in telepathic rapport with influences, however distant, exerted by the whole world: and through this "inner sense" which serves to concentrate in itself all the telluric forces (-a sense which in its various aspects we name instinct, presentiment, conscience) is constructed the fabric of our sub-conscious system. Through it man is a sort of resume of all the cosmic life, in secret affinity and sympathy with all natural processes; and by the will which stands in response therewith he can exercise a directly creative action on external nature. In normal and healthy conditions the two currents of psychic life run on harmonious but independent. But in the phenomena of somnambulism, clairvoyance, and delirium, the magic region becomes preponderant, and comes into collision with the other. The dark-world emerges into the realm of day as a portentous power: and there is the feeling of a double personality, or of an indwelling genius, familiar spirit, or demon.

To the ordinary physicist the so-called _Actio in distans_ was a hopeless stumbling-block. If he did not comprehend the transmission (as it is called) of force where there was immediate contact, he was at least perfectly familiar with the outer aspect of it as a condition of his limited experience. It needed one beyond the mere hodman of science to say with Laplace: "We are so far from knowing all the agents of nature, that it would be very unphilosophical to deny the existence of phenomena solely because they are inexplicable in the present state of our knowledge."

Accordingly mesmerism and its allied manifestations were generally abandoned to the bohemians of science, and to investigators with dogmatic bias. It was still employed as a treatment for certain ailments: and philosophers, as different as Fichte and Schopenhauer(86), watched its fate with attention. But the herd of professional scientists fought shy of it. The experiments of Braid at Manchester in 1841 gradually helped to give research into the subject a new character. Under the name of Hypnotism (or, rather at first Neuro-hypnotism) he described the phenomena of the magnetic sleep (induced through prolonged staring at a bright object), such as abnormal rigidity of body, perverted sensibility, and the remarkable obedience of the subject to the command or suggestions of the operator. Thirty years afterwards, the matter became an object of considerable experimental and theoretic work in France, at the rival schools of Paris and Nancy; and the question, mainly under the t.i.tle of hypnotism, though the older name is still occasionally heard, has been for several years brought prominently under public notice.

It cannot be said that the net results of these observations and hypotheses are of a very definitive character. While a large amount of controversy has been waged on the comparative importance of the several methods and instruments by which the hypnotic or mesmeric trance may be induced, and a scarcely less wide range of divergence prevails with regard to the physiological and pathological conditions in connexion with which it has been most conspicuously manifested, there has been less anxiety shown to determine its precise psychical nature, or its significance in mental development. And yet the better understanding of these aspects may throw light on several points connected with primitive religion and the history of early civilisation, indeed over the whole range of what is called _Volkerpsychologie_. Indeed this is one of the points which may be said to emerge out of the confusion of dispute. Phenomena at least a.n.a.logous to those styled hypnotic have a wide range in the anthropological sphere(87): and the proper characters which belong to them will only be caught by an observer who examines them in the widest variety of examples. Another feature which has been put in prominence is what has been called "psychological automatism." And in this name two points seem to deserve note. The first is the spontaneous and as it were mechanical consecution of mental states in the soul whence the interfering effect of voluntary consciousness has been removed. And the second is the unfailing or accurate regularity, so contrary to the hesitating and uncertain procedure of our conscious and reasoned action, which so often is seen in the unreflecting and unreasoned movements. To this invariable sequence of psychical movement the superior control and direction by the intelligent self has to adapt itself, just as it respects the order of physical laws.

But, perhaps, the chief conclusion to be derived from hypnotic experience is the value of suggestion or suggestibility. Even cool thinkers like Kant have recognised how much mere mental control has to do with bodily state,-how each of us, in this way, is often for good or for ill his own physician. An idea is a force, and is only inactive in so far as it is held in check by other ideas. "There is no such thing as hypnotism," says one: "there are only different degrees of suggestibility." This may be to exaggerate: yet it serves to impress the comparatively secondary character of many of the circ.u.mstances on which the specially mesmeric or hypnotic experimentalist is apt to lay exclusive stress. The methods may probably vary according to circ.u.mstances. But the essence of them all is to get the patient out of the general frame and system of ideas and perceptions in which his ordinary individuality is encased. Considering how for all of us the reality of concrete life is bound up with our visual perceptions, how largely our sanity depends upon the spatial idea, and how that depends on free ocular range, we can understand that darkness and temporary loss of vision are powerful auxiliaries in the hypnotic process, as in magical and superst.i.tious rites. But a great deal short of this may serve to establish influence. The mind of the majority of human beings, but especially of the young, may be compared to a vacant seat waiting for some one to fill it.