The Mind and the Brain Part 11

My mental phenomenon is not entirely mental, as is usually supposed from the deceitful brevity of the phrase. It is in great part physical, for it can be decomposed into two elements, a consciousness and its object; and this object of the consciousness, this group of little houses I see in the plain, belongs to sensation--that is to say, to something physical--or, in other words, to matter.

Let us examine in its turn the physical process which is supposed to be discovered in my nervous centres while I am in course of contemplating the landscape. This pretended physical process itself, quite as much as my conscious perception of the landscape, is a physico-psychical phenomenon; for my cerebral movements are perceived, hypothetically at least, by an observer. This is a perception, consequently it can be decomposed into two things, a consciousness and its object. As a further consequence, when we wish, by a metaphysical effort, to attach the consciousness to a material state of the brain and to establish a link between the two events, it will be found that we wrongly hook one physico-mental phenomenon on to another.

But, evidently, this objection is not a refutation. We may if we choose suppose that the so-called cerebral process is capable of subsisting at moments when no one perceives it, and that it exists of itself, is sufficient for itself, and is entirely physical. But can we subject the mental process of perception to the same purification?

Can we separate these two elements, the consciousness and its object, retain the element consciousness and reject the element object, which is physical, thus const.i.tuting a phenomenon entirely mental, which might then be possibly placed beside the entirely physical phenomenon, so as to study their relation to each other? This is quite impossible, and the impossibility is double, for it exists _de facto_ and _de jure_.

_De jure_, because we have already established that a consciousness empty and without object cannot be conceived. _De facto_, because the existence of the object that consciousness carries with it is very embarra.s.sing for the materialist; for this object is material, and as real and material as the fibres and cells of the brain. It might, indeed, be supposed that by transformation or otherwise there goes forth from the cerebral convolution a purely psychical phenomenon resembling a wave. But how can we conceive the transformation of this convolution into a semi-material phenomenon? How can we comprehend that there should issue from this convolution the material object of a perception--for example, a plain dotted with houses?

An English histologist remarked one day, with some eloquence, how little the most minute study of the brain aided us to understand thought. He was thus answering Auguste Comte, who, in a moment of aberration, claimed that psychology, in order to become a science, ought to reject the testimony of the consciousness, and to use exclusively as its means of study the histology of the nerve centres and the measurement of the cranium. Our histologist, who had pa.s.sed part of his life examining, under the microscope, fragments of cerebral matter, in following the forms of the cells, the course of the fibres, and the grouping and distribution of the fascia, made the following remark: "It is the fact that the study, however patient, minute, and thorough it might be, of this nerve-skein can never enable us to know what a state of consciousness is, if we do not know it otherwise; for never across the field of the microscope is there seen to pa.s.s a memory, an emotion, or an act of volition." And, he added, "he who confines himself to peering into these material structures remains as ignorant of the phenomena of the mind as the London cabman who, for ever travelling through the streets of the great city, is ignorant of what is said and what is going on in the interior of the houses." This picturesque comparison, the truth of which has never been questioned, is based on this supposition, that the psychical act is entirely immaterial and invisible, and therefore escapes the piercing eye of the microscope. But a deeper a.n.a.lysis of the mind shows how little exact is this a.s.sertion. From the moment each psychical act implies a material object, we can ask ourselves two things: (1) Why is it that the anatomist does not discover these material objects in the interior of the brain? We ought to see them, for they are material, and therefore visible. We ought to see them with their aspect and colour, or be able to explain why they are not seen. In general, all that is described to us in the brain is the molecular vibrations. But we are not conscious of them. Where, then, is that of which we are conscious? (2) It should next be explained to us by what elaboration, trans.m.u.tation, or metamorphosis a molecular disturbance, which is material, can transform itself into the objects which are equally material.

This is the criticism we have to address to materialism. Until proof to the contrary, I hold it to be irrefutable.

PARALLELISM

For this exposition to follow the logical order of ideas, the discussion on materialism should be immediately succeeded by that on parallelism. These two doctrines are near akin; they resemble each other as the second edition of a book, revised and corrected, resembles the first. Parallelism is the materialist doctrine of those forewarned folk, who have perceived the errors committed and endeavour to avoid them, while cherishing all that can be saved of the condemned doctrine. That which philosophers criticised in materialism was the misunderstanding of the principle of heterogeneity. The parallelists have seen this mistake, and have taken steps to respect this principle: we shall see in what way. They are especially prudent, and they excel in avoiding being compromised. They put forth their hypothesis as a provisional one, and they vaunt its convenience. It is, say they, a practical method of avoiding many difficulties; it becomes for philosophers an equivalent of that phrase which so many timorous ministers repeat: "Above all, no sc.r.a.pes!"

Let us study the exact point on which parallelism has amended materialism. We have seen that every materialist doctrine is the expression of this idea, that physical phenomena are the only ones that are determined, measurable, explicable, and scientific. This idea does wonders in the natural sciences, but is at fault when, from the physical, we pa.s.s into the moral world, and we have seen how the materialistic doctrine fails when it endeavours to attach the physical to the mental. There are then two great difficulties which the materialistic explanation finds before it; one is a difficulty of mechanism and the other of genesis. By connecting the mind with the brain, like a function to its organ, this doctrine seeks to solve these two problems, and with what little success we have seen.

Parallelism, has tried to avoid these two problems; not only does it not solve them, but it arranges so as not to propound them. The expedient adopted consists in avoiding the meeting of the physical and the mental; instead of placing them end to end and welding one to the other, they are placed in parallel fashion side by side. To explain their correlation, which so many observations vaguely demonstrate, the following hypothesis is advanced. Physical and psychical life form two parallel currents, which never mingle their waters; to every state of definite consciousness there corresponds the counterpart of an equally definite state of the nerve centres; the fact of consciousness has its antecedents and its consequences in the consciousness; and the physical fact equally takes its place in a chain of physical facts.

The two series are thus evolved, and correspond strictly to each other according to a necessary law; so that the scholar who was perfectly instructed, and to whom one of these states was presented, could describe its fellow. But never does any of the terms of one series influence the terms of the other.

Observation and the testimony of the consciousness seem to attest this dual progress; but they are, according to the parallelist hypothesis, illusions. When I move my arm by a voluntary act, it is not my will, _qua_ act of consciousness, which determines the movement of the arm--for this is a material fact. The movement is produced by the coming into play of groups of muscles. Each muscle, composed of a semi-fluid substance, being excited, contracts in the direction of its greatest length. The excitant of the muscles is also a material fact, a material influx which starts from the motor cells of the encephalon, and of which we know the course down through the pyramidal fascium, the anterior roots of the spinal cord, and the nerves of the periphery to its termination in the motor plates of the muscles. It is this excitement which is the physical, direct, and veritable cause of voluntary movements. And it is the same with all acts and signs, all expressions of our conscious states; the trembling of fear, the redness of anger, the movements of walking, down to the words we utter--all these are physical effects produced by physical processes, which act physically, and of which the mental counterpart has in itself no effective action.

Let it be understood that I am here pointing out one of the forms, and that the most usual, of the parallelist theory. Each author varies it according to his fancy; some widen the correspondence between the physical and the moral, others prefer to narrow it. At one time a vague relation is supposed which is only true on a large scale, and is a union rather than an equivalence. At another, it is an exact counterpart, a complete duplicate in which the smallest physical event corresponds to a mental one.

In one of the forms of this theory that has been recently invented, parallelists have gone so far as to a.s.sert that there exists no real cohesion in the mental chain, and that no mental phenomenon can have the property of provoking another mental phenomenon by an act of true causality. It is within the nervous tissue, they say, that the nexus of psychic states should be enclosed. These should succeed in time without being directly connected with one another; they should succeed because the physical basis of them is excited in succession. Some of them would be like an air on the piano: the notes follow each other and arrange themselves into melodies, not by any affinity proper to themselves, but because the keys of the instrument are struck in the required order.

I said a little while ago that parallelism was a perfected materialism. The reason of this will be understood. It is a doctrine which preserves the determinism of physical facts while avoiding the compromising of itself in the difficult explanation of the connection between the soul and the body. It remains scientific without raising a metaphysical heresy.

Bain is one of those who have most clearly expressed, not only the advantages, but also the aspirations of this theory (_Mind and Body_, p. 130):--

"We have every reason for believing," he says, "that there is in company with all our mental processes, _an unbroken material succession_. From the ingress of a sensation, to the outgoing responses in action, the mental succession is not for an instant dissevered from a physical succession. A new prospect bursts upon the view; there is mental result of sensation, emotion, thought--terminating in outward displays of speech or gesture. Parallel to this mental series is the physical series of facts, the successive agitation of the physical organs, called the eye, the retina, the optic nerve, optic centres, cerebral hemispheres, outgoing nerves, muscles, &c. While we go the round of the mental circle of sensation, emotion, and thought, there is an unbroken physical circle of effects. It would be incompatible with everything we know of the cerebral action, to suppose that the physical chain ends abruptly in a physical void, occupied by an immaterial substance; which immaterial substance, after working alone, imparts its results to the other edge of the physical break, and determines the active response--two sh.o.r.es of the material with an intervening ocean of the immaterial. There is, in fact, no rupture of nervous continuity. The only tenable supposition is, that mental and physical proceed together, as undivided twins."

On reading this pa.s.sage it is easy to see the idea which forms the basis of the doctrine. It is, as I have already said, the fetichism of mechanics: parallelism takes its inspiration from this quite as directly as does materialism, but with more skill, inasmuch as it avoids the most dangerous question, that of the interaction of physics and morals, and replaces it by an hypothesis much resembling Leibnitz's hypothesis of the pre-established harmony, On the other hand, a second merit of this prudent doctrine is the avoiding the question of genesis. It does not seek for the origin of thought, but places this last in a relation of parallelism with the manifestations of matter; and in the same way that parallel lines prolonged _ad infinitum_ never meet, so the partisans of this doctrine announce their resolution not to inquire how the actual state of things has been formed, nor how it will end if, for example, one of the terms should disappear by the death of the bodily organism.

Notwithstanding so many precautions, criticisms have not been wanting; only they would seem not to have touched the weak part of the doctrine and not to be decisive. We will only run through them briefly.

It has been said: there is no logical necessity which forces us to refuse to the consciousness the privilege of acting in complete independence of the nervous mechanism.

It has also been said: it is by no means certain that any nervous mechanism can be invented which imitates and, if need were, could replace an intellectual act. For instance, what a.s.sociation of nerve cells, what molecular action, can imitate an act of comparison which enables us to see a resemblance between two objects? Let it be supposed, for example, that the resemblance of two impressions come from a partial ident.i.ty, and that the latter has for material support an ident.i.ty in the seat or the form of the corresponding nervous influx. But what is ident.i.ty? How can it be conceived without supposing resemblance, of which it is but a form? How, then, can the one be explained by the other? Thus, for instance, at the bottom of all our intellectual acts, there is a certain degree of belief. Can any material combination be found which corresponds thereto?

There is one last objection, the most serious of all. Parallelism, by establishing a fixed and invariable relation between the physical and the moral, ends by denying the role of this last, since the physical mechanism is sufficient to draw to itself all the effects which general belief attributes to the moral. The parallelists on this point go very much further than the materialists; the latter at least concede that the consciousness is of some use, since they compared it to a function or a secretion, and, after all, a secretion is a useful liquid. The parallelists are so strongly convinced that mechanism is alone efficacious that they come to deny any role to thought. The consciousness for them has no purpose: yet it keeps company with its object. The metaphors which serve to define it, part of which have been imagined by Huxley, are all of a pa.s.sive nature. Such is the light, or the whistling noise which accompanies the working of an engine, but does not act on its machinery. Or, the shadow which dogs the steps of the traveller. Or a phosph.o.r.escence lighting up the traces of the movements of the brain.

It has also been said that the consciousness is a useless luxury. Some have even gone further, and the fine and significant name of _epiphenomenon_, that has been given to thought, well translates that conception, according to which semi-realities may exist in nature.

All these objections certainly carry great weight, but they are not capable of killing the doctrine--they only scotch it.

I think there is a radical vice in parallelism, which till now has not been sufficiently indicated, and I ask what can really remain of the whole edifice when this vice has been once exposed?

Parallelism implies a false idea, which we have already come across when discussing materialism. It is the idea that a phenomenon of consciousness const.i.tutes one complete whole.

The error proceeds from the use of concepts which cause the reality to be lost sight of. The reality shows that every phenomenon of consciousness consists in a mode of activity, an aggregate of faculties which require an object to fasten on to and so realise themselves, and that this object is furnished by matter. What we always note in intuition is the union, the incarnation of consciousness-matter. Our thoughts, our memories, our reasonings have as object sensations, images--that is to say, things which, strictly speaking, are as material as our own brains. It is therefore rather childish to put all these workings of the spirit on another plane and in another world than the workings of the brain since they are in great part of the same nature as the last named and they contain so many material elements. Now if we re-establish facts as they are, if we admit a parallelism between physical phenomena, on the one hand, and phenomena at once physical and psychical, on the other, the parallelist hypothesis loses every sort of meaning. It ceases to present to us the image of two phenomena of an absolutely different order, which are found coupled together like the two faces of a unity, the front and back of a page, the right and wrong side of a stuff. If there is anything material in the psychical part, the opposition of nature no longer exists between the two terms; they become identical.

Very often, certain parallelists, after thinking they have discovered the duality of nature, endeavour to bring it back to unity by supposing that the two faces of the reality are as two effects of one unique reality, inaccessible to our senses and underlying appearances.

Why go so far afield to seek unity? It is trouble in vain: for it is to be found in the phenomenon itself.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 46: I can quote two observations in support of this. M.

BRIEUX, to whom I was relating this part of my argument, stopped me, saying, "You have guessed right; I represent to myself thought issuing from brain in the form of an electric gleam." Dr. SIMON also informed me, during the reading of my ma.n.u.script, that he saw "thought floating over the brain like an _ignis fatuus_."]

CHAPTER IV

MODERN THEORIES

It may be thought that the objection taken above to parallelism and materialism is personal to myself, because I have put it forward as the consequence of my a.n.a.lysis of the respective shares of thought and matter in every act of cognition. This is not so. I am here in harmony with other philosophers who arrived at the same conclusions long before me, and it may be useful to quote them.

We will begin with the prince of idealists, Berkeley. "'Everything you know or conceive other than spirits,' says Philonous to Hylas, 'is but your ideas; so then when you say that all ideas are occasioned by impressions made in the brain, either you conceive this brain or you do not. If you conceive it, you are in that case talking of ideas imprinted in an idea which is the cause of this very idea, which is absurd. If you do not conceive it, you are talking unintelligibly, you are not forming a reasonable hypothesis.' 'How can it be reasonable,'

he goes on to say, 'to think that the brain, which is a sensible thing, _i.e._ which can be apprehended by the senses--an idea consequently which only exists in the mind--is the cause of our other ideas?'"[47]

Thus, in the reasoning of Berkeley, the function of the brain cannot explain the production of ideas, because the brain itself is an idea, and an idea cannot be the cause of all our other ideas.

M. Bergson's argument is quite similar, although he takes a very different standpoint from that of idealism. He takes the word image in the vaguest conceivable sense. To explain the meaning of this word he simply says: "images which are perceived when I open my senses, and unperceived when I close them." He also remarks that the external objects are images, and that the brain and its molecular disturbances are likewise images. And he adds, "For this image which I call cerebral disturbance to generate the external images, it would have to contain them in one way or another, and the representation of the whole material universe would have to be implicated in that of this molecular movement. Now, it is enough to enunciate such a proposition to reveal its absurdity."[48]

It will be seen that this reasoning is the same as Berkeley's, though the two authors are reasoning on objects that are different; according to Berkeley, the brain and the states of conscience are psychical states; according to Bergson, the definition of the nature of these two objects designated by the term image is more comprehensive, but the essential of his argument is independent of this definition. It is enough that the two terms should be of similar nature for one to be unable to generate the other.

My own argument in its turn comes rather near the preceding ones. For the idea of Berkeley, and the image of Bergson, I subst.i.tute the term matter. I say that the brain is matter, and that the perception of any object is perception of matter, and I think it is not easy to explain how from this brain can issue this perception, since that would be to admit that from one matter may come forth another matter. There is certainly here a great difficulty.

M. Bergson has thought to overcome it by attacking it in the following way. He has the very ingenious idea of changing the position of the representation in relation to the cerebral movement. The materialist places the representation after this movement and derives it from the movement; the parallelist places it by the side of the movement and in equivalence to it. M. Bergson places it before the movement, and supposes it to play with regard to it the part of exciting cause, or simply that of initiator. This cerebral movement becomes an effect of the representation and a motor effect. Consequently the nervous system pa.s.ses into the state of motor organ: the sensory nerves are not, as supposed, true sensory nerves, but they are the commencements of motor nerves, the aim of which is to lead the motor excitements to the centres which play the part of commutators and direct the current, sometimes by one set of nerves, sometimes by others. The nervous system is like a tool held in the hand: it is a vehicle for action, we are told, and not a substratum for cognition. I cannot here say with what ingenuity, with what powerful logic, and with what close continuity of ideas M. Bergson develops his system, nor with what address he braves its difficulties.

His mind is remarkable alike for its power of systematisation and its suppleness of adaptation. Before commencing to criticise him, I am anxious to say how much I admire him, how much I agree with him throughout the critical part of his work, and how much I owe to the perusal of his book, _Matiere et Memoire_. Though I was led into metaphysics by private needs, though some of the ideas I have set forth above were conceptions of my own (for example, the criticism of the mechanical theory of matter, and the definition of sensation), before I had read M. Bergson's book, it cannot be denied that its perusal has so strongly modified my ideas that a great part of these are due to him without my feeling capable of exactly discerning which; for ideas have a much more impersonal character than observations and experiments. It would therefore have been ungrateful to criticise him before having rendered him this tribute.

There are, in M. Bergson's theory, a few a.s.sertions which surprise us a little, like everything which runs counter to old habits. It has always been supposed that our body is the receptacle of our psychological phenomena. We store our reminiscences in our nerve centres; we put the state of our emotions in the perturbations of certain apparatus; we find the physical basis of our efforts of will and of attention in the sensations of muscular tension born in our limbs or trunk. Directly we believe that the nervous system is no longer the depository of these states, we must change their domicile; and where are they to be placed? Here the theory becomes obscure and vague, and custom renders it difficult to understand the situation of the mind outside the body. M. Bergson places memory in planes of consciousness far removed from action, and perception he places in the very object we perceive.

If I look at my bookcase, my thought is in my books; if I look at the sky, my thought is in a star.[49] It is very difficult to criticise ideas such as these, because one is never certain that one understands them. I will therefore not linger over them, notwithstanding the mistrust which they inspire in me.

But what seems to me to require proof is the function M. Bergson is led to attribute to the sensory nerves. To his mind, it is not exact to say that the excitement of a sensory nerve excites sensation. This would be a wrong description, for, according to him, every nerve, even a sensory one, serves as a motor; it conducts the disturbance which, pa.s.sing through the central commutator, flows finally into the muscles. But then, whence comes it that I think I feel a sensation when my sensory nerve is touched? Whence comes it that a pressure on the epitrochlear nerve gives me a tingling in the hand? Whence comes it that a blow on the eyeball gives me a fleeting impression of light?

One must read the page where M. Bergson struggles against what seems to me the evidence of the facts. "If, for one reason or another," he says, "the excitement no longer pa.s.ses, it would be strange if the corresponding perception took place, since this perception would then put our body in relation with points of s.p.a.ce which would no longer invite it to make a choice. Divide the optic nerve of any animal; the disturbance starting from the luminous point is no longer transmitted to the brain, and thence to the motor nerves. The thread which connected the external object to the motor mechanism of the animal by enveloping the optic nerve, is severed; the visual perception has therefore become powerless, and in this powerlessness consists unconsciousness." This argument is more clever than convincing. It is not convincing, because it consists in exaggerating beyond all reason a very real fact, that of the relation which can be discovered between our sensations and our movements. We believe, with M. Bergson, that it is absolutely correct to see in action the end and the _raison d'etre_ of our intelligence and our sensibility. But does it follow that every degree, every shade, every detail of sensation, even the most insignificant, has any importance for the action? The variations of sensibility are much more numerous than those of movements and of adaptation; very probably, as is seen in an attentive study of infancy, sensibility precedes the power of motion in its differentiations. A child shows an extraordinary acuteness of perception at an age when its hand is still very clumsy. The correlation, then, is not absolute. And then even if it were so, it would not follow that the suppression of any movement would produce by rebound the suppression of the sensation to which this movement habitually corresponds. On this hypothesis, a sensation which loses its motor effect becomes useless. Be it so; but this does not prove that the uselessness of a sensation is synonymous with insensibility.

I can very well imagine the movement being suppressed and the useless sensation continuing to evoke images and to be perceived. Does not this occur daily? There are patients who, after an attack of paralysis remain paralysed in one limb, which loses the voluntary movement, but does not necessarily lose its sensibility. Many clear cases are observed in which this dissociation takes place.

I therefore own that I cannot follow M. Bergson in his deduction. As a physiologist, I am obliged to believe firmly in the existence of the sensory nerves, and therefore I continue to suppose that our conscious sensations are consequent to the excitement of these nerves and subordinate to their integrity. Now, as therein lies, unless I mistake, the essential postulate, the heart of M. Bergson's theory, by not admitting it I must regretfully reject the whole.

FOOTNOTES: