Naturalism And Religion Part 15

"Individuality" in a less marked manner belongs to them all, and where it exists it is a distinctly original thing, which cannot be derived from its antecedents. No psyche is simply derivable from other psyches. What a child receives from its parents by "heredity" are factors which, taken together, amount to more than the mere sum of them. The synthesis of these is at once the creation of something new and peculiar, and what has been handed down is merely the building material. This can be felt in an intensified and striking degree in regard to "p.r.o.nounced individuality,"

but careful study will disclose the fact that there are no men quite alike. This kind of "creative synthesis," that is, the underivability of the individual, was the element of truth in the mythologies of "creationism" held by the Church fathers, or in the theory of the "pre-existence of the soul" maintained by Plato and others.

And from this point of view we must safeguard what has already been said in regard to the culture and gradual development of our psychical inner nature. It is true that the "soul" does not spring up ready-made in the developing body, lying dormant in it, and only requiring to waken up gradually. It really becomes. But the becoming is a self-realisation. It is not true that it is put together and built up bit by bit by experience, so that a different being might develop if the experiences were different.

It is undoubtedly dependent upon experience, impressions, and circ.u.mstances, and without these its development would be impossible. But these impressions act as a stimulus, developing only what is previously inherent. They do not themselves create anything. A characteristic predetermination restricts the development to comparatively narrow limits.

And this is identical with the individuality itself. A man may turn out very different according to circ.u.mstances, education, influences. But he would nevertheless recognise "himself" under any circ.u.mstances. He will never become anything of which he had not the possibility within him from the very beginning, any more than the rose will become a violet if it is nurtured with a different kind of manure.

Genius.

We cannot venture to say much about genius and the mystery of it. In it and its creative power something of the spirit, the nature of the spirit, seems to look up at us, as we might think of it in itself and apart from the limits of existence in time and s.p.a.ce. It is usually most obvious and most accessible to us in the domain of art. But it has its place too in the realm of science. And it is most of all genius, and therefore most inaccessible to us ordinary mortals, in the domain of religion.

Mysticism.

Even "p.r.o.nounced individuality" "has an element of mysticism" in it-of the non-rational, which we feel the more distinctly the more decidedly we reject all attempts to make it rational again through crude or subtle mythologies. This is much more true of genius, artistic insight, and inspiration. But these are much too delicate to be exposed to the buffeting of controversy, much more so the dark and mysterious boundary region in the life of the human spirit which we know under the name of mysticism in the true sense, without inverted commas. It is not a subject that is adapted for systematic treatment. Where it has been subjected to it, everything becomes crude and repulsive, a mere caricature of pure mysticism like the recrudescent occultism of to-day. Therefore it is enough simply to call the attention of the sympathetic reader to it and then to pa.s.s it by. In face of the witness borne to it by all that is finest and deepest in history, especially in the history of religion, naturalism is powerless.

Mind and Spirit. The Human and the Animal Soul.

What is the relation between the human and the animal mind? This has always been a vital question in the conflict between naturalism and the religious outlook. And as in the whole problem of the psychical so here the interest on both sides has been mainly concentrated on the question of "mortality" or "immortality." Man is immortal because he has a soul.

Animals "have no souls." "Animals also have souls, differing only in degree but not in substantial nature from the soul of man: as they are mortal, man must be so too." "Animals have minds: the merely psychical pa.s.ses away with the body. But man has spirit in addition. It is imperishable." These and many other a.s.sertions were made on one side or the other. And both sides made precisely the same mistake: they made the belief in the immortality of our true nature dependent upon a proof that the soul has a physical "substantial nature," which is to be regarded as an indestructible substance, a kind of spiritual atom. And on the other hand they overlooked the gist of the whole matter, the true starting-point, which cannot be overlooked if the religious outlook is not to be brought into discredit. It is undoubtedly a fundamental postulate, and one which the religious outlook cannot give up, that the human spirit is more than all creatures, and is in quite a different order from stars, plants, and animals. But absolutely the first necessity from the point of view of the religious outlook is to establish the incomparable value of the human spirit; the question of its "substantial nature" is in itself a matter of entire indifference. The religious outlook observes that man can will good and can pray, and no other creature can do this. And it sees that this makes the difference between two worlds. Whether the bodily and mental physics in both these worlds is the same or different, is to it a matter rather of curiosity than of importance.

What occurs or does not occur within the animal mind is, as a matter of fact, wholly hidden from us. We have no way of determining this except by a.n.a.logy with ourselves, and therefore our idea of it is necessarily anthropomorphic. And apologists are undoubtedly right when they maintain that this is far too much the case. To reach a more unprejudiced att.i.tude towards the customary anthropomorphisation of animals, it is profitable to study Wundt's lectures on "The Human and the Animal Mind" (see especially Lecture XX.). Perhaps it is true that, notwithstanding all the much-praised cleverness, intelligence and teachableness of elephants, dogs, and chimpanzees, they are incapable of forming "general ideas,"

"rules," and "laws," of forming judgments in the strict sense, and constructive syllogisms, that they have only a.s.sociations of ideas, and expectations of similar experience, but no thinking in conceptual terms, and cannot perceive anything general or necessary, that they recognise _a posteriori_ but not _a priori_, as Leibnitz supposed, and that they form only perceptual inferences, not judgments from experience. But it is not easy to see that this contributes anything of importance to our problem.

It does not even help us in regard to the interesting question of a physical guarantee for the indestructibility of the soul. For even if the psychical acts of animals were fewer and less important than they are admitted to be, they have certainly sensations, images, feelings, pleasure, pain, and desire. All these are of a psychical nature, immaterial, and underivable from the material. And it is difficult to see, for instance, why the forming of judgments should be regarded as more durable and indestructible than sensation and desire. The difference lies higher than this,-not in the fact that man has a few "capacities" more than the animal, but in the difference in principle, that the psychical in man can be developed to spirit, and that this is impossible anywhere else.

The very example that naturalism loves to cite in its own favour makes its error clear. It asks whether the difference, let us say, between a Fuegian and one of the higher mammals such as an ape, is not much less than that between a Fuegian and a European. This sounds obvious, if we measure simply by habits, morals, and possibly also the content of feeling and imagination in a "savage" as we find him. And yet it is obviously false. I can _train_ a young ape or an elephant, can teach it to open wine-bottles and perform tricks. But I can _educate_ the child of the savage, can develop in him a mental life equal in fineness, depth, and energy, frequently more than equal, to that of the average European, as the mission to the Eskimos and to the Fuegians proves, and as Darwin frankly admitted. Psychical capacity is nothing more than raw material. It is in the possibility of raising this to the level of spirit, of using the raw material to its purpose, that the absolute difference, the impa.s.sable gulf between man and animals lies.

Even in animals there is a primitive thinking, rising above the level of blind instinct. But it can neither be schooled, nor is it capable of developing even the crudest beginnings of science. Even the animal has a sensory satisfaction in colour, form and tone (not nearly so much, however, as the theory of s.e.xual selection requires us to suppose). But art, even the most rudimentary self-expression of the spirit upon this basis, is wholly sealed to it. Even the animal possesses strong altruistic instincts, impulses towards companionship, pairing, and caring for its young, and some have seen in this the beginnings of morality. But morality is a matter of the spirit, which begins with the idea of duty and rises to the recognition of an ideal of life. Nowhere else do we see so directly and emphatically the incomparability of the natural-psychical and the spiritual as in the idea of duty and an ideal of life, although the contrast is equally great at all points of the spiritual life.

Finally and highest of all, we have the capacity of the human spirit to rise to religion and the greatest heights of feeling. In science and art, in morality and religion, the spirit possesses itself. And as such it is a unique and strange guest in this world, absolutely incomparable with anything beneath or around it. It may, perhaps, be true that the psychical difference between the ape and man is smaller than that between the ape and unicellular organisms (though we really can know nothing about that).

But nowhere in the animal world does the psychical overstep the limits of purely natural existence, of striving after and being prompted by the directly and purely natural ends of a vegetative and animal instinctive life, physical pleasure, self-preservation, and the maintenance of the species.

And there is more than this. However different the psychical equipment may be at different animal stages, it has one thing in common in them all, it is absolutely limited to what is given it by nature. An animal species may last for a million years. But it has no history. It is and remains the same history-less natural product. In this respect the animal is not a step in advance of the stone or the crystal. The only thing it can achieve is to express more or less perfectly the character of the species. This is the utmost height of its capacity. But for man this is only the starting-point, and the really human begins just there. What is implicit in him as _h.o.m.o sapiens_, a member of a zoological order, is nothing more than the natural basis upon which, in human and individual history, he may build up an entirely unique and new creation, an upper story: the world and life of the spirit.

It is also erroneous to regard the gradual development of the psychical capacities at the different levels of animal evolution as the development of and preparation for the human spirit. It is not the spirit, but the raw material of it, that is thus being prepared and developed. It is as if, in the history of colour manufacture, an "evolution" of colour were taking place. The quality of the colour gradually becomes better and better. Each generation learns to make it purer and more brilliant. But the painting which is painted with the most brilliant colour cannot be regarded as a link in the evolutionary sequence, and is certainly not the crown and culmination of the pigment; the latter is only the gradual perfecting of a necessary preliminary condition.

It is only of secondary interest to point out the immense leaps in the evolution of colour and colour-technique, and especially the vast difference between the last stage and the one before it, or, to drop the metaphor, the enormous psychological differences between the animal and the human mind.

There is no doubt that an apologetic which interests itself in such matters would find abundant opportunity for work, and could find a powerful argument against a too hasty naturalism in the differences between animal and human psychical capacities, which have been recognised much more sanely and clearly through recent investigation than they usually were in earlier times. But the question has no special interest for us here.

Personality.

In as far as man is endowed with a capacity for spiritual life and spiritual possession, he is likewise destined for personality. This includes and designates everything that expresses the peculiar dignity of human nature. Personality is a word which gives us an inward thrill. It expresses what is most individual in us, what is set before us, our highest task and the inmost tendency of our being. What is personality?

Certainly something which is only a rudiment in us at birth, and is not then realised, and at the same time an ideal which we feel more or less indistinctly, but without being able to outline it clearly. To exhaust the idea as far as possible is the task of ethical science. But one thing at any rate we can affirm about it with certainty: it is absolutely bounded off from the whole world and all existence as a self-contained and independent world in itself. The more we become persons, the more clearly, definitely, and indissolubly we raise ourselves with our spiritual life and spiritual possessions out of all the currents of natural phenomena, the more do we cease to be mere modes of a general existence and happening that flows about us, and in which we would otherwise float with vaguely defined outlines. A microcosm forms itself in contradistinction to the macrocosm, and a unity, a monad, arises, in regard to which there is now warrant for inquiring into its duration and immortality as compared with the stream of general becoming and pa.s.sing away. For what does it matter to religion whether, in addition to physical indivisible atoms, there are spiritual ones which, by reason of their simplicity, are indestructible?

But that the unities which we call personalities are superior to all the manifoldness and diversity of the world, that they are not fleeting fortuitous formations among the many which evolution is always giving rise to and breaking down again, but that they are the aim and meaning of all existence, and that as such they are above the common lot of all that has only a transient meaning and a temporal worth-to inquire into all this and to affirm it is religion itself.

Parallelism.

The independence and underivability of the psychical, the incomparability of its uniformities with those of mechanical or physico-chemical laws, has proved itself so clear and incontrovertible, notwithstanding all the distortions of naturalism, that it is now regarded as a self-evident fact, not only among philosophers and epistemologists, and technical psychologists, but for the last decade even among all thinking men, and "materialism" is now an obsolete position. It was too crude and too contrary to all experience to define the relation between physical and mental, as if the latter were a mere secretion of the former, although a very subtle one, or a mere epi-phenomenon of it, in such a way that all reality and effectiveness was on the side of the physical.

In place of this, another theory has become widespread, which claims to define the relation of the two series of phenomena better and more adequately: the theory of psychophysical parallelism. It is not new. There are occasional indications of it even in Aristotle's psychology. It was suggested by Descartes in his automaton theory, by the occasionalists in their parable of the two watches running in exact agreement; it was developed by Spinoza and Leibnitz, and refined by the idealistic philosophers, by Schopenhauer, Fechner, and the modern psychologists. The form in which it is most prevalent now is that given to it by Spinoza, and he is usually referred to in connection with it. Its general tenor is as follows: The physical cannot be referred back to the psychical, nor the psychical to the physical. Both orders of phenomena run side by side as parallels that never separate. Both represent a concatenation of causes complete in itself, that is never broken, or interrupted, or completed.

And in both there is real causality. Thought really causes thoughts and feelings. Movement really causes movements. But the one series is always strictly correlated with the other, and corresponds with it. And thus all existence is double, and man is an obvious ill.u.s.tration of this. To every thought, feeling, or exercise of will there corresponds some excitement, movement or change in the body. I will: my arm moves. Subtle nervous processes run their course in my brain, and I think. That I will has its sufficient reasons, its causes lie entirely in the preceding state of my mind, in motives of feeling, in ideas which again have their efficient causes in a previous psychical condition, and so on. And that my arm moves has its efficient cause in the stored-up energies of the muscle-substance, in the stimulus and impulse conveyed by the motor nerve from the brain.

And these conditions have their purely physiological causes and reasons again in preceding purely physiological states and processes. (It goes without saying that a mechanical theory of life is the necessary presupposition of this parallelistic theory.) But both sets of processes correspond exactly one to another, and the first is only the inner aspect of the second, and the second the outer aspect of the first. Thus it is quite true that my arm moves when I will. But in reality it is quite as true to say that when my arm moves I will. But we must not subst.i.tute "because" for "when." This theory must maintain, and does maintain, that even the most abstract and subtle ideas, the deepest processes of consciousness, have some corresponding bodily processes, either in the brain or in the nervous substance generally, and, on the other hand, that no physical process is without this psychical inwardness. The result is that this inwardness and soul are attributed also to the purely material world, the world of "dead" matter. In this way it is believed that everything gets its due; the thorough mechanical explicability of bodily phenomena, and the law of the conservation of energy and of matter, and, on the other hand, very decisively also, the independence and uniqueness of law which can no longer be denied to the psychical. And from this latter standpoint sharp protests are raised against all materialistic distortions. The only thing denied is the old idea of the "influxus physicus," the idea, that is, that mind can operate beyond itself and take effect on the physical world, and conversely the physical world upon it.

This again is regarded as a breach of the law of the conservation of energy. For if the bodily affects consciousness, then at a given moment a certain amount of energy must be transformed into something that is not energy. And if consciousness affects the bodily, a process of movement must suddenly occur, for which no previous equivalent of energy can be shown.

This standpoint is most impressively set forth in Paulsen's widely read "Introduction to Philosophy." The same ideas form the central feature in the work of Fechner, which is having such a marked renaissance to-day.

It seems as though all higher estimates of spirit, even the religious estimate, could quite well rest upon this basis. For full scope is here given to the idea that mind and the mental sciences have their own particular field. G.o.d, as the absolute all-consciousness and self-consciousness, comprehending within Himself all individual consciousness, is thought of as the eternal correlate of this universe in s.p.a.ce. And the theory has room also for a belief in immortality. Of all imaginative attempts to make the idea of immortality clear and possible, undoubtedly that of Fechner is the grandest and most effective. And it, too, is based entirely upon the idea of parallelism. (Yet as a matter of fact it could be shown that neither mortality nor immortality really fit into the scheme of this conception.)

Though its main features are very similar as set forth by its various champions, this theory differs according to the way in which this astonishing and mysterious co-ordination, this parallelism itself, is explained. How is it that "thought" and "extension" can correspond to one another?

The answer may be either navely dogmatic, that this is one of the great riddles of the universe, and that we must simply take it for granted.

Others declare with Spinoza that the two series of phenomena are only the two sides of one and the same fundamental being and happening, which may be designated as _natura sive deus_, and that what is inwardly unified expresses itself outwardly in these two forms of being. But because both sides, thought and extension, are only expressions of one and the same fundamental substance, they correspond exactly to one another. The best ill.u.s.tration of this is Fechner's simile of the curved line. It is concave on one side, convex on the other, and thus entirely different on the two sides. But at every point the concavity corresponds exactly to the convexity. And this is possible because the two are the inner and the outer aspects of the same line.

Others, again, go back to the fundamental ideas of critical idealism, and declare the whole extended world accessible to the senses and the mechanical-physical nexus of cause and phenomena, to be simply the form of appearance in which the fundamentally spiritual existence presents itself to our senses. Body, movement, physiological processes, are all nothing more than the will, to speak with Fichte and Schopenhauer, or the idea, or the spirit itself, which appears thus to sensory beings. Other theories, some of them new, are also put forward.

No Parallelism.

For a long time it seemed as if the theory of parallelism was to gain general acceptance. One might write a whole history of the gradually increasing criticisms of, and reactions from the academic theories which had become almost canonical. But we may here confine ourselves to the most general of the objections to the parallelistic theory. They apply to the general idea of parallelism itself, and affect the different standpoints of the parallelists in different degrees. The theory in no way corresponds to what we find in ourselves from direct experience. It is only with the greatest difficulty that we can convince ourselves that our arm moves only when and not because we will. The consciousness of being, through the will, the actual cause of our own bodily movements is so energetic and direct and certain, that it maintains its sway in spite of all objections, and confuses the argument even of the parallelists themselves. Usually after they have laid the foundations of a purely parallelistic theory, they abandon it again as quickly as possible, and revert to the expressions and images of ordinary thought. Indeed we have no clearer and more certain example of causality in general than in our own capacity for controlling changes in our own bodies. Further, a very fatal addition and burdensome accessory of the parallelistic theory is involved in the two corollaries it has above and beneath it. On the one hand there is the necessity for attributing soul to everything. These mythologies of atom-souls, molecule-souls, this hatred and love which are the inner aspects even of the simple facts of attraction and repulsion among the elements, fit better into the nature-philosophy of Empedocles and Anaxagoras than into ours. The main support, indeed the sole support, of this position is that this world of the infinitely little cannot be brought under control as far as its "soul" is concerned. Thus we can impute "a soul" to it without danger. On the other hand, there is a difficulty which made itself felt even in regard to Spinoza's system. All bodily processes must have psychical processes corresponding to them, said Spinoza. Conversely, all ideas in their turn must have bodily processes.

To the system including all bodily processes corresponds the sum-total of psychical processes. This sum-total we call the soul. And in its entirety it is the _idea corporis_. If "soul" were really nothing more than this, the theory of parallelism might be right. But it is more than this. It rises above itself, and becomes also the _idea ideae_; it is self-consciousness and the consciousness of the ego; it makes its own thought and the laws of it, its feelings and their intensity-its experiences in short-a subject of thought. How does this fit in with parallelism? Wundt himself, the most notable modern champion of parallelism, admits and defines these limits of the parallelistic theory on both sides.

Furthermore, the theory of parallelism, notwithstanding its opposition to materialism, must presuppose that localisation of psychical processes of which we have already spoken, and to which all naturalism appeals with so much emphasis. Because of the fact that particular psychical functions seem to be limited to a particular and definable area of the brain-cortex, or to a spot which could be isolated on a particular convolution, it seemed as if naturalism could prove that "soul" was obviously a function of this particular organ or part of an organ. According to the theory of parallelism this does not follow. It would a.s.sert: "What in one aspect appears to be a psychical process, appears in another aspect to be a definite physiological process of the brain." Yet it is clear that in order to gain support for the doctrine of mutual correspondence, parallelism has also the same interest in such localisation. For this is the only method by which it can empirically control its theory. But this whole idea of localisation does not hold good to anything like the extent to which the members of the naturalistic school are wont to a.s.sert that it does. In regard to this point, too, there has been considerable disillusioning in recent years. Perhaps all that can be said is, that localisation of psychical processes is a fact a.n.a.logous to the fact that sight is a.s.sociated with the optic nerves and hearing with the auditory nerves. Progressive investigation leads more and more clearly to the recognition of a fact which makes localisation comparatively unimportant, namely, the vicarious functioning of different parts of the brain. In many cases where this or that "centre" is injured, and rendered incapable of function, or even extirpated, the corresponding part of the mind is by no means destroyed along with it. At first the mind may suffer from "the effect of shock" as the phrase runs, but gradually it may recover and the same function may be transferred to another part of the brain, and there be fulfilled sometimes less perfectly, sometimes quite as perfectly as before. We had to deal with this fact of vicarious function in discussing the general theory of life. It is one of the greatest difficulties in the way of the mechanistic and materialistic theories. But it must give some trouble to the parallelists too.

We need not speak of the wonderful duplication of all existence which parallelism must establish, though it is difficult to evade the question how a _natura sive deus_ could have come, so superfluously, to say the same thing twice over. Superfluously, for since both are alike self-contained and independent of one another, one can have no need of the other.

One objection, however, may be urged against both parallelism and materialism, which makes them both impossible, and that is, automatism.

Both parallelism and materialism maintain that the sequence of physical processes is complete in itself and can be explained in terms of itself.

_All_ physical processes! Not only the movements of the stars, the changes in inanimate matter, the origin and evolution of the forms of life, but also what we call actions, for instance the movements of our arms and our legs, and the complicated processes affecting the breathing organs and tongue, which we call "speech." Every plant, every animal, every human being must be as it is and where it is, must move and act, must perform its functions, which we explain as due to love or hate, to fear or hope, even if there were no such thing as sensation, will, idea, neither love nor hate, fear nor hope. More than this, all that we call history, building towns and destroying them, carrying on war and concluding peace, uniting into states and holding national a.s.semblies, going to school and exercising mouth and tongue, argument, making books and forming letters, writing Iliads, Bibles, and treatises on the soul or on free will, holding psychological congresses and talking about parallelism;-all this must have been done even if there had been no consciousness, no psychical activity in any brain! This is the necessary consequence to which the theories of parallelism and materialism lead. If it does not follow, then there was from the outset no meaning in establishing them. But the monstrosity of their corollary is fatal to them. It is idle to set up theories in which it is impossible to believe.