CHAPTER XIII.

Sophereus discourses on the Nature and Origin of the Human Mind.

SOPHEREUS, in fulfillment of his intention expressed at their

last meeting, reads to the scientist the following

DISCOURSE ON THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF THE HUMAN MIND.

I regard the mind as an organism, capable of anatomical examination, as

the body is, but of course by very different means. In the anatomical

examination of an animal organism we use our eye-sight to acquire

a knowledge of its component parts, its organs, and its structure,

by dissection of a dead or inspection of a living subject. But, in

studying the anatomy of mind, we have a subject that is beyond our

visual perception. It is not, however, beyond our examination. We carry

on that examination by means of the introspection which consciousness

enables us to have of our own minds, and by observing and comparing the

phenomena of mind as manifested in other persons. If these respective

means of investigation enable us to reach the conviction that in each

individual of the human race there is an existence of a spiritual

nature and another existence of a corporeal or physical nature, we

shall have attained this conclusion by observing the difference between

the two organisms. The fact that we can not detect the bond that unites

them while they are united should not lead us to doubt their distinct

existence as organisms of different natures, but made for a temporary

period to act on and with each other.

Before entering further into the subject, I will refer to some of the

terms which we are obliged to use in speaking of the nature of mind as

an organism, when contrasted with the nature of the physical organism.

We speak, for example, and from the want of another term we are obliged

to speak, of the substance of mind. But, while we thus speak of mind

in a term of matter, there is no implication that the subject of which

we speak is of the same nature as that which constitutes the physical

organism; nor is there any danger of the incorporation of materialistic

ideas with our ideas of the fabric of mind. On the contrary, the

very nature of the inquiry is whether that which constitutes mind is

something different from that which constitutes body; and, although in

speaking of both we use the term substance, we mean in the one case

organized matter, and in the other case organized spirit. There is a

very notable instance of a corresponding use of terms in the passage

of one of St. Paul's epistles, where he discourses on the doctrine

of the resurrection. According to my universal custom when I refer

to any of the writings regarded by the Christian world as sacred,

or inspired, I lay aside altogether the idea of a person speaking

by divine or any other authority. I cite the statement of St. Paul,

in its philosophical aspect, as an instance of the use of the term

body applied to each of the distinct organisms. His statement, or

assertion, or assumption--call it what you please--is, "If there is

a natural body, there is also a spiritual body";[139] he uses the

term _body_ in speaking of that which is natural, or of the earth,

earthy, and of that which is spiritual, or heavenly. Without following

him into the nature of the occurrence which he affirms is to take

place in the resurrection, the question is whether he was or was not

philosophically correct, in speaking of two kinds of organisms, one

composed of matter, and liable to corruption and dissolution, and the

other composed of spirit, indestructible and imperishable.

In order to be understood, he was obliged to use the term _body_ in

reference to both of these organisms, just as we are obliged to use the

term _substance_ when we speak of the subject of contemplation as a

physical or as a spiritual organism. Can this distinctness of nature be

predicated of the body and the mind of man before what we call death?

The peculiar occurrence which St. Paul so vigorously and vividly

describes as what is to happen at the resurrection, is a prophecy in

which he mingles with great force philosophical illustrations and the

information which he claims to have received from inspiration; or

things revealed to him by the Almighty through the Holy Spirit. He

expresses himself in terms level to the apprehension of those whom he

is addressing; and in this use of terms he does just what we do when we

speak of a natural body and a spiritual body. He puts the existence of

the natural body hypothetically:

"_If_ there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body."[140]

Paraphrased as the whole passage may be, he says, "You well know that

there is a natural body, and I tell you that there is also a spiritual

body." Laying aside the mode in which the spiritual body is to be

manifested at and after the resurrection, we have to consider whether,

during this life, there is a bodily organism and a mental organism,

distinct in their natures, but united for a time by a bond which is

hidden from our detection.

I have used the term anatomy of the mind, from the same necessity which

compels me to speak of the substance of mind. You will understand

that, when I speak of anatomical examination of the mind, I mean

that analysis of its structure which we can make by the use of the

appropriate means, and which enables us to conceive that it is an

organized structure of a peculiar character.

The grand difficulty with Mr. Spencer's "Psychology" is, that after he

has made what he calls "the proximate components of mind" to consist

of "two broadly contrasted kinds--feelings and the relations between

feelings," which are mere impressions produced on the nerve-center by

molecular changes in the fluid or semi-fluid substance of the nerves,

he has not approached to a solution of the question whether there is or

is not a something to which these feelings and the relations between

them suggest ideas, and which holds ideas continuously for future use.

Thus he makes consciousness to consist in passing groups of feelings

and their relations, and not in a conscious subject. He denies that

there is any _ego_, in the sense in which every person is conscious

of a self, and maintains that the only substantive existence is the

unknown ligament which holds together the ever-changing states of

feelings and impressions produced in the nerve-center. There is a far

better method of investigation. It is to inquire into the fabric of the

mind as an organism, by determining whether mental phenomena justify

us in the conclusion that it is an organism. In this way we may reach

a satisfactory conclusion that the mind is a substantive existence,

possessing a uniform structure, of a character, however, fundamentally

different from the bodily structure; and in this way we may be able to

explain, wholly or in part, how the mind and the body act on and with

each other so long as the connection is maintained.

I am entirely free to acknowledge that, when I speak of the

substance of mind, or speak of it as an organism, I am and must

remain ignorant of the nature of its substance beyond the point where

its self-manifestations cease. But the question is, whether we are

not under an irresistible necessity of adopting as a postulate the

existence of a something which has certain inherent powers, and whether

the mental phenomena, the self-manifestations of those powers, do not

necessarily lead us to the conception and conviction that mind is a

substantive existence. I can not talk or think of consciousness apart

from a conscious subject, or of feelings without a subject that feels.

A thread of consciousness, or a series of feelings, conveys no meaning

to me, apart from a being who has the consciousness and perceives the

feelings.[141]

One very important question to be considered in all such investigations

is, Whether our experience does not teach us that we are mentally so

constituted that certain conceptions are necessary to us? Our mental

nature is placed under certain laws, as our physical or corporeal

nature is placed under certain other laws. One of these necessary

conceptions, which are imposed on us, as it seems to me, by a law of

our mental constitution, is a conception of the fundamental difference

between matter and spirit. In what way is it forced upon us that there

is a natural world and a spiritual world? The phenomena of matter

and the phenomena of mind are essentially different. In ourselves

they occur in conjunction, and they occur in disjunction. They are

manifested synchronously, and they are manifested separately in point

of time. The normal action of all the functions of the body is not

necessary to the action of the mind. The body may be prostrated by

disease, and the moment of its death may be at hand; yet the mind,

to the last moment of the physical life, may be unclouded, and its

manifestations may be as perfect as they ever were in the full health

and activity of the vital functions of the body. No one who stands at

a death-bed where this phenomenon occurs, and observes how completely

the mind is master of itself; how it holds in consciousness the past

and the present; how it essays to grasp the future for those whom it is

to leave and for itself, can easily escape the conviction that death

is nothing but the dissolution of the bond which has hitherto held

together the two existences that constituted the human being, one of

which is to be dissolved into its elemental and material substances,

and the other of which is to go elsewhere, intact and indestructible.

Let me now refer to what is taking place while I am writing this essay.

I have said that the phenomena of our bodily organism and the phenomena

of our mental organism may occur synchronously in the same individual.

The act of writing an original composition is an instance of this. The

action of certain organs of the body and the action of the mind are

simultaneous. In time, they can not be separated. In themselves, they

are separable and separate. The thought springing up in the mind may be

retained there, or may flow into language and be written by the hand

upon the page. No one can detect in himself any instant of time when

the mental formation of a sentence, or any clause of a sentence, as

he writes, is separable from the physical act of writing. In that not

very common, but still possible, feat of dictating to two amanuenses,

at what appears to be the same time, on two distinct subjects, there

is undoubtedly an appreciable interval, in which the mind passes from

one subject to the other, and then back again, with great rapidity.

But, when one is one's own amanuensis, when the act of thinking and

formulating the thought, and the act of writing it down in words, is

performed by the same person, there is a simultaneous action of that

which originates the thought and clothes it in words, and the act of

the bodily organ which inscribes the words upon paper. How is this

phenomenon to be explained? And to what does it lead? Is there anything

in the whole range of Mr. Spencer's "Psychology" that will interpret

this familiar experience? May it not be interpreted by an anatomical

examination of the mind as an organism?

I do not now refer to cases where a thought is completely formulated

before the pen begins to be moved over the paper, and is then recalled

by an effort of the memory and written down. I am referring to what

I suppose is the habit of many persons in writing, namely, the

origination and formulation of the thought as the hand moves the pen,

a habit of which most practiced writers are perfectly conscious. The

same thing occurs in what is truly called extemporaneous speaking,[142]

when oral discourse is not a mere repetition, _memoriter_, of thoughts

and sentences which had been previously formulated, but, as the

word extemporaneous implies, when the thought and the language flow

from the vocal organs _eo instanti_ with their conception. In these

and the similar cases of improvisation and animated conversation,

in which there is a synchronous action of the mind and the bodily

organs, it would be impossible for us to have that action if mind were

constituted as Mr. Spencer supposes it to be. If there were no mind in

the sense of an organized entity, conceiving a thought and clothing

it in the language needful to give it written or oral expression,

"if the _ego_ were nothing more than the passing group of feelings

and ideas"--if an "idea lasts (only) while the nerves of molecular

motion last, ceasing when they cease"--if that which remains is (only)

the "set of plexuses"--how could we originate any new thought? The

very illustration to which Mr. Spencer resorts, when he likens the

automatic human being to the non-automatic piano, and makes them

analogous in their action, in order to show that passing ideas do not

have a continual existence in the mind, but that the actual existence

is the physical structure which, under like conditions, again evolves

like combinations, reduces us at once to the level of the piano,

and precludes the potentiality of a new and original idea which is

not a combination of former ideas, and is produced under different

conditions. The assertion or argument that each set of plexuses is

capable of entering into countless combinations with others, and so

renders possible future ideas, does not advance us one step to the

solution of what takes place when we conceive a new thought, clothe it

in language, and write it down on paper, or give it oral expression.

In justification of this criticism, let me now refer to that

intellectual process which is called "invention," in its application

to the mechanic arts. I do not mean to suggest or to claim that this

kind of invention is an act which is to be referred to a distinct and

peculiar faculty of certain minds, in the possession of which one

man may differ from another. But I shall endeavor to describe what

takes place when one conceives the intellectual plan of a certain new

combination of mechanical devices, and embodies that plan in a machine

which differs from all other previous machines in its characteristic

method of operation. For convenience, I shall speak of the person who

produces such a machine as the inventor, which is the same as speaking

of him as the maker, as the poet is the maker of a poem. This act of

invention, or the making of some concrete new thing, is an act of

creation. The inventor, then, may be supposed to have learned all

that empirical and all that scientific mechanics could teach him; to

have had any quantity of passing groups of ideas pass through his

consciousness; to be possessed of any number of plexuses capable of

entering into countless combinations with others. These plexuses, or

networks of transitory ideas, consisting of former impressions in the

nerve-center, must, it is said, be recalled under the like conditions

which produced them. But the conditions for the inventor are not the

same. Something is to be produced into which the old ideas do not

enter. There is to be a new arrangement of old mechanical devices;

a new combination is to be made, which will possess a method of

operation and accomplish a result never before seen or obtained.

A new concrete thing, a new machine, is to be created. That the

conception must be formed, that the objective point, to which the whole

intellectual effort is to aim, must be seen, is manifest. A tentative

intellectual process may have to be gone through before the full

conception is reached, just as a tentative experimental process may be

necessary in finding out how the practical embodiment of the conception

is to be reached in building the structure. These processes may go on

simultaneously or separately; but, when they are both completed, when

the new machine stands before us, we see at once that the plan is an

intellectual conception, perfectly original, and the physical structure

is a new arrangement of matter effected by the hand of the inventor

or by the hands of others, which he uses as his instruments in doing

the physical work. I do not know, therefore, how this phenomenon is

to be explained upon the theory that the only _ego_ is the body and

its functions, which lies behind and determines ever-changing states

of consciousness. I know not how else to interpret the phenomenon of

invention, excepting to adopt the postulate that there is a mind, a

substantive existence, which, while its consciousness holds ideas

suggested by former conditions, has the inherent power to originate

ideas that did not form a part of any previous state of consciousness.

I have spoken of mind as an organism and as a substantive existence.

This is a deduction to be drawn from the manifestations of mental

phenomena. In order to guard against an objection that may possibly

be interposed in the way of this method of investigation, I will

anticipate and answer it. It will be said that we can not define or

describe the substance of mind; can not tell whether it is a unit,

in itself, or an aggregate of units; we know and can know nothing

more than its approximate components, and all that we know of these

does not justify us in assuming to speak of the substance of mind. I

have more than once suggested, in our former conferences, that our

inability to define and to describe the substance of any supposed

existence is no proper objection to the hypothesis that there is such

an existence. When we undertake to define matter, or to describe the

substance of that which we call matter, we find that we soon reach a

point where precise definition or description ceases. Yet we do not

for that reason refrain from deducing the existence of matter from the

manifestations of certain phenomena and from our experience with them.

It is perfectly true that we know matter only by the manifestations of

certain physical phenomena; that we can not define the nature of its

substance. All we can do, by the most minute analysis, is to arrive at

the perception of the ultimate particles or units of matter; and the

nature of the substance of which these units are composed is incapable

of any further description. "Matter"[143] is one of the words in the

English language which are used in a great variety of senses, exact and

inexact, literal and figurative. In its philosophical sense, meaning

the substance of which all physical bodies are composed, the efforts of

lexicographers to give a definition, descriptive of the nature of what

is defined, show that definition is, strictly speaking, impossible.

All that can be said is that matter is "substance extended"; or that

which is visible or tangible, as "earth, wood, stone, air, vapor,

water"; or "the substance of which all bodies are composed." But these

efforts at definition express only what is needful to be expressed in

contrasting matter with that other existence which is called "spirit."

This is another word which is used in very different senses, but of

which no more exact definition can be given, when it is used in its

philosophical sense, than can be given of "matter." Lexicographers

have defined "spirit," in one of its meanings, as "the _soul_ of man;

the intelligent, immaterial, and immortal part of human beings"; and in

another of its meanings, more broadly, as "an immaterial, intelligent

substance." In these definitions they have followed the metaphysicians,

and the uses of the word in the English translation of the Bible.

When we turn to the definition of "soul," we find it given as "the

spiritual and immortal substance in man, which distinguishes him from

brutes; that part of man which enables him to think and reason, and

which renders him a subject of moral government." We also have it

defined as "the understanding, the intellectual principle." Undoubtedly

these definitions involve certain assumptions, such as the existence

of a substance called spirit, and the existence of an intellectual

principle, of which "soul," "spirit," and "intellect" are mere names.

But there is no difficulty in the way of our knowing what is meant when

these terms are used. The difficulty of giving a definition without

a circuitous use of terms, explaining the one by the other, and then

explaining the last by the first, does not prevent us from having a

definite conception of the thing spoken of. When we speak of mind,

soul, or intellect, what we think of is the something in ourselves

of which we are conscious, and whose manifestations we observe in

other beings like ourselves; and what we have to do is to examine the

evidence which may bring home to our convictions the existence of this

something that perceives, thinks, acts, originates new ideas; holds

former ideas in consciousness, is connected with and acts upon and

is acted on by bodily organs, and is at the same time more than and

different from those organs.

I have referred to some of the mental phenomena which have the

strongest tendency to prove the existence of the mind as an organized

entity. These are the phenomena which occur in our waking hours,

when the intellectual faculties and the bodily organs are in the full

exercise of their normal functions respectively. There is another class

of mental phenomena which may be said to be abnormal, in this, that

the intellectual faculties and the bodily organs do not preserve the

same relations to each other in all respects that they do when we are

fully awake. These are the phenomena that occur during sleep--a class

of mental phenomena of great consequence to be observed and analyzed in

any study of psychology. They are of an extraordinary variety, complex

in the highest degree, and dependent on numerous causes of mental and

physical disturbance; but it is quite possible to extract from some of

them certain definite conclusions.

Sleep, properly regarded, when it is perfect, is a state of absolute

rest and inactivity of all the organs and functions of the body

save the digestion of food and the circulation of the blood, and of

all the mental faculties. Perfect sleep, sleep in which there is

absolutely no consciousness, is more rare than those states in which

there is more or less consciousness. But it is often an actual state

of both body and mind, and it was evidently designed to renew the

vigor of both, and to prevent the wear and tear of unbroken activity.

Between absolute unconsciousness induced by perfect sleep and the

full consciousness of our waking moments, there are many intermediate

states; and the phenomena of these intermediate states present very

strong proofs of the existence of the mind as a special and spiritual

entity, capable in greater or less degree of acting without the aid

of the physical organs. I do not except even the organ of the brain

from this suspension of action during certain states when the mind

is in more or less of activity; for I am convinced that in some

of the mental phenomena to which I shall advert and which I shall

endeavor to describe, the brain is in a state of perfect sleep, and

that in the production of those phenomena it takes no part. In other

mental phenomena, which occur during sleep, the brain or some part

of it is evidently acted upon by the mind, as in the somnambulistic

condition, when the nerves of motion, responding to the action of the

mind, communicate action to the muscles, and the body walks about and

performs other external acts.

There are other mental phenomena occurring during very profound sleep

of the body and its organs, when the mind does not appear to derive

its action from the brain, or to be dependent on the brain for its

activity; when it is exceedingly active, and when it communicates

action to none of the bodily organs; when, for example, it carries on

long trains of thought, composes sentences, invents conversations,

makes poetry and prose, and performs other intellectual processes.

Distributed into classes, the most important mental phenomena occurring

during sleep are the following:

First, and presenting perhaps the strongest proof of the mind's

independence of all the bodily organs, is that whole class of mental

phenomena in which, during profound sleep of the body, we carry on

conversations, compose original matter in the form of oral or written

discourse, which we seem to ourselves to be producing, and solve

intellectual difficulties which have baffled us when awake, or imagine

that we receive from an unexpected source important information that we

are not conscious of having previously received.

The phenomena of conversations, to which we appear to ourselves to be

listening during sleep, or in which we appear to ourselves to be taking

part, are, when analyzed, most remarkable occurrences, for it is the

mind of the sleeper which originates the whole of what appears to be

said by different persons. These conversations are as vivid, as much

marked by different intellectual and personal characteristics, sudden

and unexpected turns, apt repartee, interchange of ideas between two or

more persons, as are the real conversations which we overhear, or in

which we take part, when we are awake. Yet the whole of what is said,

or appears to us to be said, is the invention of the one mind, which

appears to itself to be listening to or talking with other minds, and

all the while the body is wrapped in profound sleep. This extraordinary

intellectual feat, so familiar to us that it scarcely attracts our

attention unless we undertake to analyze it, is closely akin to the

action of the mind when the body and the mind are neither of them

asleep, and when we invent a conversation between different persons.

But this occurrence is marked by another extraordinary peculiarity:

for it happens, during sleep, to persons who could not, when awake,

invent and write such conversations at will, and who in their waking

hours have very little of the imaginative faculty needed for such

productions. I account for this phenomenon by the hypothesis that when

the mind is free from the necessity of depending on the bodily organs

for its action, as it is during profound sleep of the body, when its

normal relations with the body are completely suspended and it is left

to its independent action, it has a power of separate action. This, I

think, accounts for a kind of mental action which, when compared with

that which occurs in conjunction with the action of the bodily organs,

may be called abnormal. Under the impulse of its own unrestrained and

uncorrected activity, the mind goes through processes of invention,

the products of which are sometimes wild and incoherent, sometimes

exceedingly coherent, sensible, and apt. Let the person to whom this

occurs be thoroughly awakened out of one of these states, and the mind

becomes immediately again subjected to the necessity of acting along

with, and under the conditions of its normal relations to the body.

Akin to this mental feat of inventing conversations, during a sleep of

the body, is the power of composing, during such sleep, oral discourse

of one's own, or the power of composing something which we appear

to ourselves to be writing. I suppose this is an occurrence which

happens to most persons who are much accustomed to writing or to public

speaking. It is often an involuntary action of the mind; that is to

say, it is sometimes accompanied with a distinct consciousness that

it is a process that ought to be arrested because it is a dangerous

one, and yet it can not be arrested before full waking consciousness

returns. On goes the flow of thought and language, apparently with

great success; we seem to be speaking or writing with even more than

our usual power, and all the while in the style that belongs to us;

but, until we are fully restored to the normal relation of the mind

and the body, we can not at will arrest this independent action of

the mind, but must wait until our bodily senses are again in full

activity. I do not suppose that this phenomenon ought to be explained

by the hypothesis that there are certain parts or organs of the brain

which are specially concerned in the work of original composition of

intellectual matter, and that these organs are not affected by the

sleep that is prevailing in other parts of the brain. While it is

doubtless true that there are special systems of nerves which proceed

from or conduct to special parts of the brain, and by which action

is imparted to or received from the other organs of the body, and

while some of these special parts of the brain may be in the state

of absolute inactivity called sleep, and others are not, I know of

no warrant for the hypothesis that the intellectual operations or

processes are dependent upon any particular organ or organs of the

brain, as distinguished from those from and to which proceed special

systems of nerves. If any person, who is much accustomed to that kind

of intellectual activity which consists in original composition of

intellectual matter, will attend to his own consciousness, and probe

it as far as he may, he will not find reason, I apprehend, to conclude

that the power of thought and of clothing thought in language resides

in any special part of the brain. His experience and introspection

will be more likely to lead him to the conclusion that this power,

whether it is exerted when he is asleep or awake bodily, is a power

that inheres in the mind itself regarded as a spiritual existence and

organism, and that the action of the brain, or of any part of it, is

necessary to the exercise of this power only when it is necessary, as

it is in our waking moments, to use some of the bodily organs in order

to give the thought oral or written expression by giving it utterance

through the vocal organs or by writing it down on paper. Certain it

is that we conceive thoughts in more or less of connected sequence,

and clothe them intellectually in language of which we have entire

consciousness while the process is going on, without the action of any

part of the body.

It may be objected to this view that the intellectual products which

we seem to ourselves to be making when we are asleep would, if they

could be repeated by an effort of the memory, word for word, just as

they seem to have occurred, be found to be of the same incoherent,

senseless stuff of which all dreams are made; and that this test would

show that the brain is at such times not absolutely and completely in

the condition which is called sleep, but that it is only partially in

that condition; that it is performing its function feebly, imperfectly,

and not as it performs that function when the whole body is awake. In

reference to this hypothesis, I will repeat an anecdote which I have

somewhere read, which is equally valuable whether it was an imaginary

or a real occurrence.

A gentleman of literary pursuits, who was a very respectable poet, was

subject to this habit of composition during sleep. One night he awoke

his wife and informed her that he had composed in his dream some of

the best and most original verses that he had ever written. He begged

her at once to get a candle, pen, ink, and paper, and let him dictate

to her the new composition that appeared to him so striking. When they

read together the new poem on the next morning, it turned out to be

nonsensically puerile. But occurrences of this kind, if they could be

multiplied, would prove only that we are liable to illusions in sleep,

in regard to the comparative merits of our intellectual products,

which we imagine ourselves to be creating when we are in that state,

as we are in regard to other things. We are under a delusion when we

imagine in our dreams that we encounter and converse with another

person, living or dead. We are perhaps deluding ourselves when in sleep

we compose or seem to compose an original poem. But what is it that

deludes itself, either in respect to the interview with another person,

or in respect to the new composition? Is it the brain, or is it the

mind? Is it a person, or a bodily organ that has the false impression,

in the one case or the other? There must be a something that is subject

to an illusion, before there can be an illusion. If both brain and

mind are in profound sleep, absolute suspension of all action, there

can be no illusion about anything. If the brain is absolutely asleep

and the mind is not, the illusion is in the mind and not in the brain.

That the latter is what often occurs, the experience of the illiterate

and uncultivated makes them aware, as well as the experience of the

lettered scholar and the practiced writer.[144]

Under the same head, I will now refer to those strange but familiar

occurrences which take place when there come to us, in sleep, solutions

of difficulties which we had not overcome by all our efforts while

awake, and which appeared to us utterly dark when we lay down to rest.

These mental phenomena are almost innumerably various. They take place

in regard to all kinds of subjects, to lines of conduct and action, to

everything about which our thoughts are employed; and they are a class

of phenomena within everybody's experience. There is scarcely any one

to whom it has not happened to lie down at night with a mind distressed

and perplexed about some problem that requires a definite solution,

and to rise in the morning, usually after a night of undisturbed

rest, with his mind perfectly clear on the subject, and with just the

solution that did not come to him when he devoted to it all his waking

thoughts. What is the explanation of this phenomenon? If the mind

is an independent entity, a spiritual organism, capable of its own

action without the aid of the body under certain circumstances, this

phenomenon can be explained. If the mind is not a spiritual organism,

capable, under any circumstances, of acting without the aid of the

bodily organs, this phenomenon can not be explained.

The most probable explanation is this: When we are awake, and devote

our thoughts to a particular subject that is attended with great

difficulties, we go over the same ground repeatedly--the mind travels

and toils in the same ruts. Nothing new occurs, because we look at the

subject in the same way every time we think of it. We are liable to be

kept in the same beaten path by the associations between our thoughts

and the bodily states in which we have those thoughts--associations

which are exceedingly powerful. But let these associations be dissolved

as they are during perfect sleep--let the mind be in a condition to act

without being dependent on the brain or any other bodily organ for aid,

or exposed to be hampered by the conditions of the body, and there will

be a mental activity in which ideas will be wrought out that did not

occur to us while we were awake. The memory, too, may recall a fact

which we had learned while awake, and yet we may be unable to recollect

how it came to our knowledge. At such times, the fact is recalled; but

as the mind is acting in a condition which is abnormal when compared

with the waking condition, and is liable to delusions about some

things, we imagine that the fact is revealed to us in some wild and

supernatural way, as by a person who is dead and who has come to us to

communicate it. There is a well-authenticated account of an occurrence

of this kind, given by Sir Walter Scott in one of the notes to his

"Antiquary," and on which he founds an incident related by one of the

personages in his story. The real occurrence was this: A gentleman in

Scotland was involved in a litigation about a claim asserted upon his

landed estate. He had a strong conviction that his father had bargained

and paid for a release of the claim, but he could find no such paper.

Without it he was sure to be defeated in the suit. Distressed by this

prospect, but utterly unable to see any way out of his misfortune, he

lay down to sleep, on the night before he was to go into Edinburgh to

attend the trial of the cause. He dreamed that his father appeared to

him, and told him that the claim had been released, and that the paper

was in the hands of a lawyer in a neighboring town, whose name the

paternal shade mentioned.

Before going into Edinburgh on the next day, the gentleman rode to

the place which his father had indicated, and found the lawyer, of

whose name he had been previously unconscious. This person turned out

to be an old man, who had forgotten the fact that he had transacted

this piece of business for the gentleman's father; but on being

told of the fact that his client had paid his fee in a foreign coin

of a peculiar character--which was one part of the story which the

father's apparition related to the son--he recalled the whole of the

circumstances, searched for the paper, and found it. The gentleman's

estate was saved to him; but he became very superstitious about dreams,

and suffered much from that cause, as was quite natural. Sir Walter's

solution of the whole affair is of course the correct one: "The dream

was only the recapitulation of information which Mr. R---- had really

received from his father while in life, but which at first he merely

recalled as a general impression that the claim was settled. It is not

uncommon for persons to recover, during sleep, the thread of ideas

which they have lost during their waking hours."[145] Sir Walter makes

another observation which is worthy of being repeated--that in dreams

men are not surprised by apparitions. Why are we not? Because the mind

is in a state of abnormal activity, in which everything that occurs to

it seems perfectly natural. The delusion in regard to the mode in which

the very important fact was communicated to Mr. R---- in his dream, was

substituted in the place of the actual communication made to him by

his father during life. The latter he had wholly forgotten, and he had

forgotten the circumstance of payment of the lawyer's fee in a peculiar

coin, which had also been mentioned to him by his father when living.

This remarkable incident, which might doubtless be paralleled by many

similar occurrences, proves one of two things: either that the exercise

of the memory is wholly dependent upon a waking condition of the brain,

or that there may be an abnormal and imperfect act of memory while

the brain is in profound sleep, in the course of which a fact becomes

mixed with a delusion about the mode in which we are told of the fact.

What happened to Mr. R---- was that his mind recalled the fact, but

imagined that he then learned it for the first time from an apparition.

I do not know how such a phenomenon can be explained, excepting by the

hypothesis that the mind is a special existence, which acts during

sleep of the body upon facts that are lodged in the memory, but mixes

them with imaginary and delusive appearances, so that the mode in which

the fact was actually learned is obliterated from the memory, and some

supernatural mode of communication takes its place. On the return of

waking consciousness, the mode in which the fact was actually learned

is still shut out from recollection, and, if the person to whom this

kind of delusion has occurred is of a superstitious turn, he will act

on what he has imagined was told him by the apparition, because he has

no other means of rescuing himself from an evil.

In regard to the mental phenomena which occur without delusions or

apparitions, where the thoughts on a difficult subject become clearer

and more satisfactory to us when we awake from sleep than they ever

were during our waking hours, I suppose the explanation is this: During

profound sleep of the body, including the brain, there is an entire

suspension of every bodily function excepting the digestion of food and

the circulation of the blood. If there is excited in some of the other

organs an action of a peculiar kind, by an excitation of the nerves

connected with those organs, it is proof that the condition of perfect

sleep is not prevailing in all parts of the brain. The state to which I

now refer supposes a complete inactivity of the whole bodily organism

save in the digestive function and the circulation of the blood. In

such a state, the mind, that which thinks and reasons, does not act

upon the brain, and is not acted upon by it. It is capable of thinking

on any subject which has employed its thoughts during the waking hours;

and while, in some cases, it is visited by apparitions and subject

to delusions, it is in other cases engaged in ideas that involve no

delusive appearances. Freed from all the associations of these ideas

with the feelings prevailing in the body when we think of the subject

during our waking hours, we are able to perceive relations of the

subject which have not before occurred to us. When we pass from the

condition of sleep to the full consciousness of our bodily and mental

organism, we are intellectually possessed of these new relations of the

subject, which we have brought with us out of the state in which we

acquired them, and they furnish us with new materials for the solution

of the problem that we had not solved when we lay down to rest. It

is not, I am persuaded, because the mind was at rest during sleep,

and when we become awake is by reason of that rest better able to

grapple with the difficulties of the subject, that we do grapple with

them successfully; for in the case supposed, which is a very common

experience, the thoughts are actually employed on the subject, while

the body and the brain are in the absolute rest and inactivity of all

the organic functions excepting those of digestion and circulation of

the blood. I do not know that it is possible to detect, in a person

sleeping, an increased circulation of the blood to any part of the

brain which may be supposed to be concerned in the act of thinking,

and at the same time to know that thinking is going on, unless such an

observation could be made of a person in the state called somnambulism,

which is not the state of which I am now speaking. But reasoning upon

the phenomenon which I have now described, according to all that we can

learn from our own experience or from observation of others, I reach

the conclusion that the mind, the thinking and reasoning entity, can

and does, in profound sleep of the body and the brain, employ itself

upon a subject that has occupied us when awake, and can perceive new

relations of that subject, which had not before occurred to us, without

the activity of any portion of the nerve-center which is called the

brain. Does this hypothesis assume that our thoughts when asleep are

more valuable than our waking thoughts? It does, to a certain extent

and under certain circumstances, for experience proves that in sleep

we acquire ideas which we did not have before we fell asleep, and which

we bring with us out of that condition.

That I have now given the true explanation of this familiar experience

will appear, I think, from this consideration: There are very few

nights when we do not in sleep have many thoughts. The states of

perfect unconsciousness are comparatively rare. If the brain were never

entirely asleep, if it were always engaged in the physical work of

thinking--whatever that work may be--it would be worn out prematurely.

But if the brain is perfectly at rest, while the mind is actively

employed, the brain undergoes no strain and suffers no exhaustion; and

the mind suffers no strain or exhaustion because it is in its nature

incapable of wear and tear. It is only when the mind acts on the brain

that exhaustion takes place. I speak now of what happens in states of

ordinarily good health.[146]

I shall now refer to some of the very peculiar phenomena of

somnambulism; and in illustration of their various phases I shall

resort to Shakespeare's picture of the sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth,

which, although purely imaginary, is a most accurate exhibition of

nature. Treating it, as we are entitled to treat it, as if it were a

real occurrence at which we ourselves were witnesses, with a knowledge

of her character and history, an analysis of the situation in which she

was placed when the habit of somnambulism came upon her, and of the

mode in which her mind acted upon her body, will enable us to see the

phenomena in their true philosophical aspect. We may suppose ourselves

present, with the doctor and the gentlewoman of her bedchamber, when

she comes forth in her night-dress and with a candle in her hand, and

we witness the impressive scene of a disturbed mind overmastering the

body while the body is asleep. It seems that, after the murder of

Duncan, when she imbrued her own hands with his blood in smearing the

faces of his sleeping grooms, the habit of sleep-walking had come

over her. As we stand by the side of the awe-stricken witnesses, and

hear their whispered conversation, we get the first description of

her actions since the new king, Macbeth, her husband, whom she had

instigated to murder the old king, went into the field. These first

actions of hers, as described by the gentlewoman to the doctor, do not

necessarily exhibit the working of a guilty conscience. They exhibit

a mind oppressed and disturbed by cares of business and of state;

and they are a distinct class of the phenomena of somnambulism. The

gentlewoman tells the doctor that "since his Majesty went into the

field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon

her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon it, read

it, afterward seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in

a most fast sleep." This is merely a description of what the witness

has seen, and it might occur to any person of strong intellectual

faculties, disturbed by great cares, without the action of a guilty

conscience. It makes the situation real when the doctor recognizes

the fact of this "great perturbation in nature! to receive at once

the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching." As they are

whispering together, the doctor trying to make the gentlewoman tell

him what at such times she has heard her say, which the loyal servant

refuses to tell, Lady Macbeth moves forward, with the taper in her hand.

Here we may pause upon the first exhibition of the phenomenon called

sleep-walking, which we get by description only, and analyze the nature

of the action. It is perfectly apparent that what the poet accepted

as true, is the power of the mind to move the body while the body is

asleep, so as to make it perform many acts. Experience makes this

assumption perfectly correct. I presume it will not be questioned that

this phenomenon is described by Shakespeare with entire accuracy,

and it is explicable only upon the hypothesis that the mind has some

control over the body while the body is asleep. Actions as minute and

as much premeditated as those performed by Lady Macbeth "in a most fast

sleep," have been witnessed in persons who were undoubtedly asleep,

and whose eyes were open for some purposes, but, as in her case, their

sense was shut for other purposes.

We now pass to the more awful exhibition of a mind worked upon by a

guilty conscience. Lady Macbeth comes out of her bedroom fast asleep,

but with a light in her hand. The gentlewoman who interprets her

state to the doctor informs him that she has a light by her bedside

continuously; and we thus learn that her nights are so disturbed

that she can not bear darkness. They notice that her eyes are open,

but "their sense is shut." Then begin the terrific manifestations of

the control of a guilty conscience over both mind and body, when the

memory, alive to certain terrible facts, plays fantastic tricks with

itself, and mingles delusions with realities. As she approaches, with

the taper in her hand, she performs an action which the gentlewoman

says she has repeatedly seen her go through, for a quarter of an hour

at a time, endeavoring to rub a spot of blood off from one of her

hands. Her hands have been clean, physically, since the time when she

first washed them on the fatal night; but the delusion that is upon her

is that there is blood on them still. She goes on rubbing them, and her

first exclamation is, "Out, damned spot! out, I say!" Yet it will not

out. That little hand wears what she imagines to be an indelible stain.

After her first exclamation, the memory rushes back to the moment

before the murder. She thinks she hears, perhaps does hear, the clock

strike--"one, two"; and then, as if speaking to her husband, she says,

"Why, then 'tis time to do't." Then there is a pause, and out comes

the reflection, "Hell is murky!" This seems to indicate that darkness,

in which she and her husband are whispering together just before

the murder, is a hell, and so very fit for what is about to be done.

Hell is murky, as this chamber is. Then she remembers her husband's

reluctance, and fancying that she is still talking with him and

bracing him up to the deed, she says: "Fye, my lord, fye! a soldier,

and afeard? What need we _fear_ who knows it, when none can call our

_power_ to account?" Presently she is looking back upon the deed, and

exclaims, "Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much

blood in him!" Then she recurs to herself as if she were another: "The

thane of Fife had a wife; where is _she_ now?" Again she thinks of her

stained hands: "What, will these hands _ne'er_ be clean?" Are they to

wear this horrible stain forever? Instantly she is again at the door

of Duncan's chamber, speaking to her husband: "No more o' that, my

lord, no more o' that: you mar all with this starting!" Then her hands

again, her poor hands; they _smell_ of the blood: "Here's the smell

of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this

little hand! Oh, oh, oh!" Then, after another pause, she is speaking

to her husband, when the deed has been done: "Wash your hands, put on

your night-gown; look not so pale!" In another instant she is thinking

of Banquo's murder, which occurred after Duncan's, and she says to her

husband: "I tell you yet again, Banquo's _buried_; he can not come out

of his _grave_!" Once more she is back at the door of Duncan's chamber,

in the darkness, and the murder has been committed. Speaking to her

husband, she says: "To bed, to bed; there's knocking at the gate. Come,

come, come, come, give me your hand. What's done can not be undone. To

bed, to bed, to bed!" Then she goes quickly toward her chamber and to

bed, believing that Macbeth is with her and that she is holding his

hand.

How mixed, how wild, how fantastic, how coherent and incoherent are

these phantoms of the imagination! If she were awake, things would

not thus present themselves to her. Every event in the dreadful story

would stand in its true relations, and, however she might be suffering

the pangs of a guilty conscience, she would not mix up the scenes

through which she had passed, but every fact would stand in its due

order. She would be conscious that there was no blood upon her hands,

and that they did not need the perfumes of Arabia to sweeten them.

She would know that Duncan had been murdered, and would not enact the

murder over again. She would remember that Banquo's murder had not been

distinctly made known to her, and that she had only surmised it, when

at the banquet Macbeth fancied that the ghost of Banquo rose and sat

at the table--an apparition which neither she nor any one else saw.

But, in that strange scene, it flashed across her mind that Banquo was

dead, and to herself she interpreted truly what was passing in her

husband's mind, and instantly explained his conduct to the company as

the recurrence of an old malady to which he was subject.

If we go back to what had actually happened before the banquet, and

then go forward to the condition in which she is seen by the doctor and

her attendant, we shall understand how her mind was working, not upon

a fact that she knew, but upon a fact which she had truly surmised.

In her somnambulistic state, she says to her husband: "_I tell you

yet again_, Banquo's buried; he can not come out of his grave." Had

she said this to him before? According to the course of the story, as

the text of the play gives it to us, she had not. In the second scene

of the third act, where, after Duncan had been murdered and Macbeth

had become king, they are preparing for the banquet, to which Banquo

was expected as one of the guests, Macbeth and his wife are talking

together, and she is trying to get him out of the contemplative and

conscience-stricken mood in which he looks back upon what they have

done. He concludes one of his mixed and melancholy reflections with

these words:

Duncan is in his grave;

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;

Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,

Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing

Can touch him further!

Then she says to him:

_Lady Macbeth._ Come on;

Gentle my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks;

Be bright and jovial 'mong your guests to-night.

_Macbeth._ So shall I, love; and so, I pray, be you;

Let your remembrance apply to _Banquo_;

_Present him eminence_,[147] _both with eye and tongue_:

Unsafe the while, that we

Must lave our honors in these flattering streams;

And make our faces vizards to our hearts,

Disguising what they are.

Just at this moment, therefore, he is not thinking of killing Banquo,

but wishes him to be received with all honor. But, in answer to his

last reflection on the hypocritical part that they must act, she says

to him:

You must leave this.

Then bursts forth the terrific oppression of his soul:

_Macb._ Oh, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!

Thou know'st that Banquo, and his Fleance, _lives_.

_Lady M._ _But in them nature's copy's not eterne._[148]

_Macb._ There's comfort yet; they _are_ assailable;

Then be thou jocund: ere the bat hath flown

His cloistered flight; ere, to black Hecate's summons,

The shard-borne beetle, with his drowsy hums,

Hath rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done

A deed of dreadful note!

She affects not to understand him--perhaps does not--and she asks:

_What's_ to be done?

_Macb._ Be innocent of the _knowledge_, dearest chuck,

Till thou applaud the _deed_. Come, seeling night,

Skarf up the tender eye of pitiful day;

And, with thy bloody and invisible hand,

Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond

Which keeps me pale!--Light thickens; and the crow

Makes wing to the rooky wood;

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;

While night's black agents to their prey do rouse.

Thou marvel'st at my words: but hold thee still;

Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill:

So, prithee, go with me. [_Exeunt._

In the next scene, the murderers, previously engaged by Macbeth,

waylay Banquo in the park as he is approaching the castle, and kill

him, his son Fleance and a servant escaping. Then follows the banquet,

Macbeth himself moving about at first, and then he takes a seat at

the table lower down. One of the murderers comes in and whispers to

him what has been done. The stage direction is, "The ghost of Banquo

rises and sits in Macbeth's place." As no one at the table but Macbeth

sees this apparition, it might be inferred that it is the force of

his imagination which presents the spectacle to him, as Lady Macbeth

supposes, when she says to him:

O proper stuff!

This is the very painting of your fear:

This is the air-drawn dagger, which, you said,

Led you to Duncan.

But the stage direction must be taken as a literal appearance of the

ghost, so as to make it visible to the audience, while it is invisible

to all at the table excepting Macbeth himself.

If, now, we go forward to the night when Lady Macbeth is walking in her

sleep, and remember what had occurred previous to and at the banquet,

we see how, without any actual previous knowledge that her husband

intended to have Banquo killed, and with only the surmise that he had

been killed, which comes to her at the banquet, she came to say to her

husband, in her dream:

I tell you yet again, Banquo's buried; he can not come out of his grave.

Here we have a fact lodged in the mind during the waking hours, and

in sleep wrought into a strange mixture with the killing of Duncan,

with which it had in reality no connection, having transpired

afterward. This is very strong proof of the capacity of the mind to

act during sleep without the action of the brain. The mind of the

guilty sleep-walker is filled with horrible memories, which it can not

shut out, but with which it can not deal in their actual order and

true relations, because the sequences of thought, during sleep, are

abnormal. Those whose experience has never involved any such workings

of conscience are perfectly aware of the fact that in dreams ideas

that are separately lodged in the consciousness become entangled with

each other in the most fantastic manner. Lady Macbeth at one moment

even thinks of herself as if she were some one else, and asks, Where

is the woman now who was the wife of the thane of Fife? Every one has

experienced in sleep the same projection of one's self out of one's own

consciousness; so that we seem to be contemplating ourselves as if we

were a different person.

The phenomena that occur during the delirium of fever, where the

normal consciousness is lost for the time being, are in some respects

analogous to and in some respects different from those which occur

during the somnambulistic condition. Delirium occurs when the body

and the brain are not in the condition of sleep; but the senses of

perception convey false impressions to the mind, and the mind itself

has temporarily lost its power of correcting its own action by its

former experience. The nearest friends who are around the bedside

are not recognized by the sufferer; they appear to be strangers,

and the patient talks to them as if both they and he were not their

real selves. It would seem that we can safely infer from the state

of delirium a suspension of the direct and normal connection between

the brain and the mind; that neither of them can act, in relation to

the other, as they both act when there is no such disturbance: but

that this condition, so far from proving or tending to prove that the

mind is not an independent spiritual existence, has a strong tendency

to prove that it is. Insanity, on the other hand, is probably a

derangement of the mental organism akin to derangement of the physical

organism, but not necessarily connected with or induced by the latter,

for the bodily health of the insane is often entirely sound while

the mind is in an entirely unsound and irrational condition. But the

phenomena of insanity are too various and multiform, and too much

dependent on both physical and moral causes, to afford any satisfactory

proofs of the postulate which I propound in this essay. The safest

line of investigation is that which I suggested in the first instance,

namely, to regard the mind as an organism, and to ascertain whether

it is susceptible of anatomical examination in a sense analogous

to anatomical examination of the bodily organism. All that I have

hitherto said is useful by way of preliminary illustration of my main

hypothesis. It has a strong tendency to show that the mind, instead

of consisting, as some philosophers now suppose, of the products of

a material organism, is itself an organized being with a definite

structure and capable of living a life of its own, although at present

dwelling in a corporeal organism which affects it in various ways

while the connection lasts. The theory that all mental phenomena are

products of our corporeal organism is one that appears to derive

great support from examinations of the structure of the brain and of

the whole nervous system. The physical anatomy of man exhibits very

striking illustrations of the influence of corporeal changes upon the

mental state, as the mental changes show corresponding influences upon

the corporeal state. But, then, there are undoubtedly phenomena that

are purely and exclusively mental; and therefore when we undertake to

solve these mental phenomena by the materialistic hypothesis we find a

sense of inadequate causation confronting us so directly that we are

compelled to look for a solution elsewhere. It is certain that things

take place in the inner recesses of our minds, in the production of

which the bodily senses not only render no aid, but in which they

have no part whatever. It is necessary, therefore, to carry our

investigations into a class of mental phenomena in which all physical

causation ceases to afford an adequate guide to a conclusion.

It will not be denied that the products of material organisms can be

proved to consist of matter and of nothing else. Their presence can

be detected by some physical test. For example, if it be true that

all animals have been evolved from protoplasm, the organisms are

simply changes in the form of a certain portion of matter. If, in an

individual organism having a highly developed nervous structure, there

are actions produced by an excitation of the nerves of sensation,

those actions are simply molecular changes in the matter comprising

the sensitive and easily moved substance of the nerve-fibers. However

far and into whatever minutiæ we carry our investigations into

organized matter, we find that its products remain material, and that

they consist only of changes in the material substance of a material

organization. But, when we pass from such material products into

the domain of purely mental phenomena, are we warranted in saying

that, although the latter are not, properly speaking, _products_ of

the material organization, they are _effects_ corresponding to and

dependent upon the excitation of the nerves of sensation? This last

hypothesis must assume one of two things: either that there is a

distinction between those corporeal feelings which do not and those

which do produce mental changes or mental effects, or, if there are

corporeal feelings which produce corresponding mental states and

mental action, there must be a something on which the effects can

be wrought, and this something must be an independent organism. It

is doubtless true that there are many corporeal feelings which are

followed by no very important mental effects, especially during a

sound state of bodily health. But it is equally true that, if there

are corporeal feelings which influence our mental action, there must

be an organism which is capable of being so influenced; and our

experience and consciousness teach us that there is such a difference

between corporeal feelings and mental phenomena that the probability

of a difference in the originating causes becomes very great. We know

that the mind can and does act with great force when bodily suffering

is extreme; that it has an energy of its own which enables it to rise

above all the power of physical pain to restrain or influence it. I

must therefore follow out, as I had originally projected, my anatomical

analysis of the mind as an independent spiritual organism.

In order to arrive at a correct conclusion concerning the structure

of mind, we must first observe that there are four special corporeal

organs by which the capability of the mind to receive impressions

from matter is acted upon. It is through these means that the

properties of matter, or those properties which can make themselves

known to us, become known to us. The senses, as they are usually

called, are sight, hearing, smell, and taste. The external organ of

each of these senses is furnished with a set of nerves, the function

of which is to transmit from that organ a wave of molecular motion

along the fluid or semi-fluid substance inclosed in the nerve-tubes

to the great nerve-center the brain, the central recipient of all

such motions. Such, at least, is the theory, which may be accepted

as a fact. But, then, the question remains, What is the intellectual

perception or mental cognition of the idea suggested by one of these

supposed transmissions of a wave of molecular motion? Is there a

being, a person, a spiritual entity, conceiving the idea or having an

intellectual perception of it? Or is there no such being, and while we

attribute to the office of the nervous system the function of producing

certain feelings or sensations in the brain, do these sensations or

feelings constitute all that there is of consciousness?

It is impossible for me to conceive of consciousness as anything but an

intuitive sense of his own existence, experienced by a being capable of

such an experience, because endowed with such a faculty. It is certain

that when we so regard consciousness we are not deceiving ourselves;

for if any one will consider what would happen to him if he should

lose this faculty of being sensible of his own existence, he will see

that in the event of that loss he could neither distinguish himself

from other persons, nor have any control over his own actions, or any

cognition whatever. For this reason, the theory on which I made some

criticisms in one of our late conversations is the one with which

I contrast my conception of mind. If that theory fails to satisfy

a reflecting person in regard to the nature of consciousness, as

certified to him by his own experience, the hypothesis that the mind is

an extended and organized being, of which a conception can be formed,

and not an unextended and unorganized something of which no conception

can be formed, must be accepted as the alternative.

I explained in our former discussion my understanding of Mr. Spencer's

theory of the only _ego_ that can be scientifically recognized; and,

in order to encounter it by my own hypothesis, I will here restate its

substantial position in a condensed form.

By the _ego_ of which he treats, I understand him to mean all that

we can arrive at by an analysis of what takes place in the body

and its functions, and of "what is given in consciousness." This

phrase--"what is given in consciousness"--reveals to us his purpose to

reduce consciousness from a self-conviction and cognition of one's own

existence to a mere passing group of feelings, which constitute "the

ever-changing states of consciousness" that we "_call_ mind." So that,

when we speak of mind, we mean and can mean nothing more than certain

states of feeling produced in our brains by perpetually changing

impressions. We do not and can not mean that there is a person who

perceives and holds ideas suggested by external objects through the

action of his nervous system. All that we know about any _ego_, any

mental I, is that there is a physical structure, pervaded by certain

physical forces, that produce "consecutive states," which Mr. Spencer

calls "mental _states_"; and the aggregate of the feelings and ideas

which thus constitute the _mental states_ is the only _ego_ of which

any continued existence can be predicated. But even these aggregates of

feelings and ideas have, according to this philosopher, no principle

of cohesion holding them together as a whole; and, therefore, all

that we can assume as having any continuously surviving and durable

existence is the changing _states_ produced by the action through us

of a certain unknowable power, statically conditioned in our nervous

organism, which is pervaded by a dynamically conditioned portion of

that unknowable power which is operating everywhere in nature, and is

called "energy."[149]

So far as this theory is based upon the existence of a physical

organism, whose functions liberate from the food supplied to it certain

forces, which are distributed by the activities of the organism, we may

accept it as a statement of what actually takes place in the form of

physical phenomena. But when we follow the physical phenomena of the

diffused energy into its action upon the brain, by the transmission

of an impulse, we must stop with the effect of that impulse upon a

corporeal organ, or we must go further and find a something which

receives into itself and appropriates to itself the idea the elements

of which the impulse has transmitted. The presence of that something

in ourselves may be illustrated by its absence from a mechanism in

which we know that it does not exist, but which appears superficially

to be animated by an intelligent principle possessing volition. We

stand, for example, before one of those automatic machines which

perform actions that seem to be guided by a living spirit. They are

mere physical organisms, constructed without the principle of life

that inhabits animal organisms, but they are so admirably contrived

for the production of certain limited but complex movements that they

suggest the presence of a spiritual being acting as we ourselves act.

But the least reflection upon what we see makes us aware that there is

nothing before us but a mechanical organism, in which the artisan who

made it has availed himself of certain forces of nature and properties

of matter, whereby he uses a portion of the energy that pervades the

universe. There is nothing within the machine to which this energy

communicates ideas that are to be the subject of its future voluntary

operation. All is comprehended in a fixed mechanical operation of

certain machinery, and, when we have analyzed and understood the

physical phenomena, we can follow them no further, because there is

no translation of the physical energy into mental phenomena. But in

ourselves there is such a translation, and we must follow it into the

mental phenomena. So following it, we find ourselves in the presence

of a something which has a self-conscious individuality, and which, by

a mysterious bond of connection, is so united with a physical organism

that it is capable of receiving, appropriating, and preserving the

ideas which the physical organism was designed to produce in it.

My objection to Mr. Spencer's system of psychology may be summed up in

what I shall now say upon his chief position, which is that "an idea

is the psychical side of what, on its physical side, is an involved

set of molecular changes, propagated through an involved set of

nervous plexuses." Translated into what I take to be his meaning, the

assertion, or hypothesis, is this: An idea is the mental cognition of

an external object, as, for example, a tree. When we are looking at

or thinking of a tree, we have a mental cognition of a tree; and this

idea of a tree is said to be the psychical side of that which on its

physical side has been transmitted to our brain by molecular changes

through our visual nerves. The idea of the tree is the psychical

correlative of a wave of molecular motion diffused through our organs

of vision; and the conception of a tree thus becomes a possible

conception. But why did not the learned philosopher follow the wave

of molecular motion until he found the impression of the object which

the visual organs have transmitted to the brain, or the nerve-center,

translated into a thought by an intelligent being, capable, by its own

organization, of having that thought? Why does he speak of an idea

as the psychical side of what, on its physical side, is one and the

same thing? Obviously, because he meant to ignore the psychical or

mental existence as an independent existence, or as any existence at

all. Now, there is no way in which the psychical side and the physical

side can be bridged over, excepting by the hypothesis that the mind

is an entity of a peculiar nature, different in structure from the

bodily organism, but capable, by the connection between them, of

receiving and transmuting into thought the impressions which the waves

of molecular motion transmit to the brain from the external object.

To say that the set of plexuses, or networks, which hold together

the waves of molecular motion, constitute the potentiality of the

idea and make possible future ideas like it, explains nothing. The

potentiality of the idea, or the possibility of ideas like it, depends

upon the existence of a something which is capable of conceiving

the idea, holding it, and reproducing it to itself, after the waves

of molecular motion cease. I call this a process of translation, or

transmutation, because there is no other convenient term for it. It is

a process analogous to the physical assimilation of food by the organs

of physical digestion, with this difference, however, that the action

of the mental organism in the assimilation of ideas is the action of

a spiritual and intellectual organism upon materials that are brought

within its reach by the means of communication with the external world

afforded by the physical senses and the nervous system. The image of

the tree produced upon the retina of the eye by the lines of light

that proceed from every point of that object is the food which the

mind assimilates and transmutes into the idea of the tree; and this

may remain as a permanent mental perception or cognition, although

the object itself may have been seen but once. If seen many times,

the various aspects in which it has been seen are transmuted into so

many distinct ideas. If many kinds of trees, of different shapes

and dimensions, have been seen, the varieties become a part of our

consciousness in the several degrees of their precise resemblances

and differences which we happen to have observed, when the different

impressions were produced upon the retina. Can there be any doubt that

this is the process by which the infant begins to acquire ideas of

external objects, and that, as adolescence goes on and the powers of

sense expand with the growth and exercise of the physical organs, there

is a corresponding growth and expansion of the mental powers?

This hypothesis of the progress of mental growth, _paris passibus_ with

the growth of the physical organism, brings me to the consideration of

one of those specimens of Mr. Spencer's peculiar logic, in a passage

in which he undertakes to disprove the existence of mind as anything

more than what he calls the psychical side of physical impressions. He

is treating of the impossibility of our "knowing" anything about the

substance of mind; and he propounds this impossibility in the following

logical formula:

...To know anything is to distinguish it as such or such--to class

it as of this or that order. An object is said to be but little

known when it is alien to objects of which we have had experience;

and it is said to be well known when there is great community of

attributes between it and objects of which we have had experience.

Hence, by implication, an object is completely known when this

recognized community is complete; and completely unknown when there

is no recognized community at all. Manifestly, then, the smallest

conceivable degree of knowledge implies at least two things between

which some community is recognized. But, if so, how can we know the

substance of mind? To know the substance of mind is to be conscious

of some community between it and some other substance. If, with

the idealist, we say that there exists no other substance, then,

necessarily, as there is nothing with which the substance of mind can

be even compared, much less assimilated, it remains unknown; while, if

we hold with the realist that being is fundamentally divisible into

that which is present to us as mind, and that which, lying outside of

it, is not mind, then, as this proposition itself asserts a difference

and not a likeness, it is equally clear that mind remains unclassable

and therefore unknowable.

The answer to this supposed insuperable dilemma may be made by

determining what we mean when we speak of knowing a thing. Definition

of knowing is here essential, and the first inquiry we have to make

is whether, in order to know mind, it is necessary to find and

recognize some community between the substance of mind and some other

substance? The statement is, on the one hand, that there exists no

other substance with which the substance of mind can be compared, much

less assimilated, and therefore there is no aid to be derived from

resemblance; or, on the other hand, that, if being is fundamentally

divisible into something which is mind and something which is not

mind, we depend for a knowledge of mind on a difference, and not on a

likeness, and we have no means of knowing that difference. Upon either

proposition, mind remains unclassable and therefore unknowable.

It may be conceded that our knowledge of the properties and forms of

matter consists in recognizing a community or a difference between

things which belong to the same class, so that there is a comparison

between things which are of the same substance. But what is to prevent

us from classifying the substance of mind, when the fundamental idea

of its substance is that it is something which resembles no other

substance, but constitutes a class or description of being that stands

entirely by itself, and in which, for a knowledge of its properties we

distinguish its properties from those of any other substance? The only

difficulty that arises here springs from the fact that we have but one

word--substance--by which to speak of the two existences that we call

mind and matter; just as we can only speak of an organism when we speak

of the natural body and the spiritual body. But this use of the same

term to express things which in our consciousness stand fundamentally

opposed to each other does not prevent us from discriminating between

the means by which we become conscious of the two things, or from

classifying the knowledge which we have of mind as something distinct

from the knowledge which we have of matter.

We must discriminate between the means by which the properties of

matter become known to us and the means by which the properties of

mind become known to us. In both cases there is knowledge, but it is

knowledge of a different kind; it is obtained by different means;

and we must therefore recognize a fundamental difference between

the substance of mind and the substance of matter. It is true that

our knowledge of the properties of matter and our knowledge of the

properties of mind are alike in this, that in both cases it is

knowledge by one and the same person; but the distinction is that, in

the one case, I have knowledge of objects external to myself, and, in

the other case, I have knowledge of myself as the person possessing

knowledge of external objects. The knowledge that we have of ourselves

is what most persons mean by consciousness, and it is what we should

scientifically understand by that term, although consciousness is

often used as synonymous with mental cognition of things external to

ourselves, and as cognition of ourselves also.

I shall now quote from the chapter in which Mr. Spencer makes a special

synthesis of reason, and in which he denies the existence of the

commonly assumed _hiatus_ between reason and instinct, maintaining that

the former is the continuation of the latter, because, as he thinks,

the highest forms of psychical activity arise little by little out of

the lowest and can not be separated from them. The passage which I

shall now analyze is this:

"Here seems to be the fittest place for pointing out how the general

doctrine that has been developed supplies a reconciliation between the

experience-hypothesis as commonly interpreted and the hypothesis which

the transcendentalists oppose to it.

"The universal law, that, other things equal, the cohesion of psychical

states is proportionate to the frequency with which they have followed

one another in experience, supplies an explanation of the so-called

'forms of thought,' as soon as it is supplemented by the law that

habitual psychical successions entail some hereditary tendency to such

successions, which, under persistent conditions, will become cumulative

in generation after generation. We saw that the establishment of those

compound reflex actions called instincts is comprehensible on the

principle that inner relations are, by perpetual repetition, organized

into correspondence with outer relations. We have now to observe that

the establishment of those consolidated, those indissoluble, those

instinctive mental relations constituting our ideas of space and time,

is comprehensible on the same principle.

"For, if, even to external relations that are often experienced

during the life of a single organism, answering internal relations

are established that become next to automatic--if such a combination

of psychical changes as that which guides a savage in hitting a bird

with an arrow becomes, by constant repetition, so organized as to

be performed almost without thought of the processes of adjustment

gone through--and if skill of this kind is so far transmissible that

particular races of men become characterized by particular aptitudes,

which are nothing else than partially organized psychical connections;

then, if there exist certain external relations which are experienced

by all organisms at all instants of their waking lives--relations

which are absolutely constant, absolutely universal--there will

be established answering internal relations that are absolutely

constant, absolutely universal. Such relations we have in those of

space and time. The organization of subjective relations adjusted to

these objective relations has been cumulative, not in each race of

creatures only, but throughout successive races of creatures; and such

subjective relations have, therefore, become more consolidated than

all others. Being experienced in every perception and every action of

each creature, these connections among outer existences must, for this

reason, too, be responded to by connections among inner feelings that

are, above all others, indissoluble. As the substrata of all other

relations in the _non-ego_, they must be responded to by conceptions

that are the substrata of all other relations in the _ego_. Being the

constant and infinitely repeated elements of thought, they must become

the automatic elements of thought--the elements of thought which it is

impossible to get rid of--the 'forms of intuition.'

"Such, it seems to me, is the only possible reconciliation between the

experience-hypothesis and the hypothesis of the transcendentalists,

neither of which is tenable by itself. Insurmountable difficulties

are presented by the Kantian doctrine (as we shall hereafter see);

and the antagonist doctrine, taken alone, presents difficulties that

are equally insurmountable. To rest with the unqualified assertion

that, antecedent to experience, the mind is a blank, is to ignore the

questions: Whence comes the power of organizing experiences? Whence

arise the different degrees of that power possessed by different races

of organisms, and different individuals of the same race? If, at birth,

there exists nothing but a passive receptivity of impressions, why

is not a horse as educable as a man? Should it be said that language

makes the difference, then why do not the cat and the dog, reared in

the same household, arrive at equal degrees and kinds of intelligence?

Understood in its current form, the experience-hypothesis implies

that the presence of a definitely organized nervous system is a

circumstance of no moment--a fact not needing to be taken into account!

Yet it is the all-important fact--the fact to which, in one sense, the

criticisms of Leibnitz and others pointed--the fact without which an

assimilation of experiences is inexplicable.

"Throughout the animal kingdom in general the actions are dependent

on the nervous structure. The physiologist shows us that each reflex

movement implies the agency of certain nerves and ganglia; that a

development of complicated instincts is accompanied by complication

of the nervous centers and their commissural connections; that the

same creature in different stages, as larva and imago, for example,

changes its instincts as its nervous structure changes; and that,

as we advance to creatures of high intelligence, a vast increase in

the size and in the complexity of the nervous system takes place.

What is the obvious inference? It is that the ability to co-ordinate

impressions and to perform the appropriate actions always implies

the pre-existence of certain nerves arranged in a certain way. What

is the meaning of the human brain? It is that the many _established_

relations among its parts stand for so many _established_ relations

among the psychical changes. Each of the constant connections among

the fibers of the cerebral masses answers to some constant connection

of phenomena in the experiences of the race. Just as the organized

arrangement subsisting between the sensory nerves of the nostrils and

the motor nerves of the respiratory muscles not only makes possible a

sneeze, but also, in the newly born infant, implies sneezings to be

hereafter performed, so, all the organized arrangements subsisting

among the nerves of the infant's brain not only make possible certain

combinations of impressions, but also imply that such combinations

will hereafter be made, imply that there are answering combinations in

the outer world, imply a preparedness to cognize these combinations,

imply faculties of comprehending them. It is true that the resulting

compound psychical changes do not take place with the same readiness

and automatic precision as the simple reflex action instanced; it is

true that some individual experiences seem required to establish them.

But, while this is partly due to the fact that these combinations are

highly involved, extremely varied in their modes of occurrence, made

up, therefore, of psychical relations less completely coherent, and

hence need further repetitions to perfect them, it is in a much greater

degree due to the fact that at birth the organization of the brain is

incomplete, and does not cease its spontaneous progress for twenty or

thirty years afterward. Those who contend that knowledge results wholly

from the experiences of the individual, ignoring as they do the mental

evolution which accompanies the autogenous development of the nervous

system, fall into an error as great as if they were to ascribe all

bodily growth and structure to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency

to assume the adult form. Were the infant born with a full-sized and

completely constructed brain, their position would be less untenable.

But, as the case stands, the gradually increasing intelligence

displayed throughout childhood and youth is more attributable to

the completion of the cerebral organization than to the individual

experiences--a truth proved by the fact that in adult life there is

sometimes displayed a high endowment of some faculty which, during

education, was never brought into play. Doubtless, experiences received

by the individual furnish the concrete materials for all thought.

Doubtless, the organized and semi-organized arrangements existing

among the cerebral nerves can give no knowledge until there has been

a presentation of the external relations to which they correspond.

And, doubtless, the child's daily observations and reasonings aid the

formation of those involved nervous connections that are in process of

spontaneous evolution, just as its daily gambols aid the development

of its limbs. But saying this is quite a different thing from saying

that its intelligence is wholly _produced_ by its experiences. That is

an utterly inadmissible doctrine--a doctrine which makes the presence

of a brain meaningless--a doctrine which makes idiocy unaccountable.

"In the sense, then, that there exist in the nervous system certain

pre-established relations answering to relations in the environment,

there is truth in the doctrine of 'forms of intuition'--not the truth

which its defenders suppose, but a parallel truth. Corresponding to

absolute external relations, there are established in the structure

of the nervous system absolute internal relations--relations that are

potentially present before birth in the shape of definite nervous

connections, that are antecedent to, and independent of, individual

experiences, and that are automatically disclosed along with the first

cognitions. And, as here understood, it is not only these fundamental

relations which are thus predetermined, but also hosts of other

relations of a more or less constant kind, which are congenitally

represented by more or less complete nervous connections. But these

predetermined internal relations, though independent of the experiences

of the individual, are not independent of experiences in general: they

have been determined by the experiences of preceding organisms. The

corollary here drawn from the general argument is that the human brain

is an organized register of infinitely numerous experiences received

during the evolution of life, or, rather, during the evolution of that

series of organisms through which the human organism has been reached.

The effects of the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have

been successively bequeathed, principal and interest; and have slowly

amounted to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain

of the infant--which the infant in after-life exercises and perhaps

strengthens or further complicates, and which, with minute additions,

it bequeaths to future generations; and thus it happens that the

European inherits from twenty to thirty cubic inches more brain than

the Papuan. Thus it happens that faculties, as of music, which scarcely

exist in some inferior human races, become congenital in superior ones.

Thus it happens that out of savages unable to count up to the number of

their fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs,

arise at length our Newtons and Shakespeares."[150]

The learned philosopher has here dealt with two hypotheses, neither

of which he considers tenable by itself. The first is that the

individual mind, anterior to experience, is a blank; that at birth

there exists nothing but a passive receptivity of impressions, which

become organized into intelligence by experience. The other hypothesis

is that of the transcendental school, which attributes the growth of

intelligence wholly to implanted intuitions, which become expanded by

the increase of mental power. His argument is put thus: If at birth the

mind of the individual is a blank, and it becomes capable of thought

or possessed of intelligence by experience, beginning with a passive

receptivity of impressions, and going on to their organization into

intelligence by the repetition of experiences and their increasing

complexity--why, he asks, is not a horse as educable as a man? Why

do not the cat and the dog, reared in the same household and hearing

human beings use language every moment of their lives, arrive at equal

degrees and kinds of intelligence? In the first place, as a matter

of fact, many animals are educable beyond their natural capacity of

intelligence, or beyond the point at which they would arrive without

such education, to a very remarkable degree. I have heard a credible

description of a dog which would ascend to a chamber and bring down

an article that he had been told to bring. Many repetitions of the

command and the performance had taught the animal to associate the

name of the article which he was to bring down with the act which he

was to perform. While I am writing, a bear beneath my window is going

through performances, at the word of command, of very considerable

varieties; actions which he would not do if he had not been trained

to do them. The trained war-horse knows the meaning of the different

airs played on the bugle upon the battle-field or the parade-ground,

and instantly charges or wheels about, without waiting to be prompted

by the bit or the spur. Insects can be trained, to some extent, in the

same way; birds to a much greater extent. Is the explanation of these

capacities to be found in a definitely organized nervous system as the

all-important fact without which an assimilation of experiences is

inexplicable? Grant that, as we advance from creatures of very low to

creatures of very high intelligence, we find a vast increase in the

size and complexity of the nervous system taking place through the

series, until we arrive at its highest and most complex development

in man. What is the hypothesis which explains the difference in

mental power between man and all the other creatures below him in the

capability of co-ordinating impressions and performing the appropriate

actions? It is, according to Mr. Spencer, that the capability implies

the existence of certain nerves arranged in a certain way; that where

this arrangement does not exist the capability is not found; and where

it exists in only a low degree the capability exists only in the same

degree. As two parallel and concurring facts these may be conceded. But

why are not these facts entirely consistent with another hypothesis,

namely, that to each creature, along with its specially organized

nervous system, there has been given by divine appointment a certain

degree of innate mental power, to explain which we must follow the

impressions produced in the nervous system into their transmutation

into intelligence, until we arrive at the limit of that intelligence?

Mr. Spencer's answer to this inquiry is twofold: first, that the

experience-hypothesis, in the case of the individual creature, or the

constant repetition of the impressions and the appropriate actions, is

insufficient to account for what takes place, without recognizing the

fact that the actions are dependent on the nervous structure, without

which the impressions would not be followed by the actions; second,

that the nervous structure in the different races of animals has come

to be what it is in each race by gradual modifications and increments

through the process of evolution of organisms out of one another, and

that these accumulations have resulted in the human brain, which has

the highest power of co-ordinating the impressions and performing the

appropriate actions. Then he puts, with an air of final solution, the

question, "What is the human brain?" which he answers in his own way.

His mode of answering this question is that the brain is an organ

with established relations among its parts, which stand for so many

established relations among the psychical changes. I understand this

to mean, that as the human brain, in the process of animal evolution,

has come to have certain constant connections among the fibers of the

cerebral masses, each of these connections answers to some constant

connection of phenomena in the experiences of the race. His corollary

is that the human brain is an organized register of infinitely numerous

experiences received by the race during the evolution of life, or

during the evolution of that series of organisms through which the

human organism has been reached. Each infant of the human race, to

whom has descended this improved and perfect brain, has latent in that

organ a high capacity for intelligence. This it begins to exercise and

strengthen and further complicate as life goes on, and at the end of

twenty or thirty years the individual brain is fully developed, and

this development, or capacity for development, the individual bequeaths

with minute additions, principal and interest, to future generations.

In different races of men the cubic bulk of the brain varies greatly,

according to the size transmitted from ancestors; and so certain

faculties which scarcely exist in some races become congenital in

others; and whereas the remote ancestors of all of us were savages,

incapable even of conceiving of numbers, and possessing but the rudest

elements of language, there have at length arisen our Newtons and

Shakespeares.

This hypothesis leads me to ask a question and to state a fact. The

question is, What is it in the infant of the most developed and

cultivated race that constitutes the high intelligence which is said

to lie latent in his brain? In other words, is there nothing in that

infant, or in the adult which he becomes, but a brain and a nervous

system of a highly organized and complex physical structure adapted

to receive impressions on itself from without? Are the experiences

which have been enjoyed by the progenitors of the human infant or by

preceding organisms registered in his brain, and is his capacity of

intelligence dependent on his having inherited the same or nearly the

same volume of brain as that which was possessed by his progenitors?

And does the intelligence consist, in degree or in kind, in nothing

but a repetition of the same experiences as those through which his

progenitors were carried, or is there a something in him to which his

individual experiences contribute the mental food by which the mind is

nourished and by the assimilation of which its individual intellectual

growth becomes possible?

It is not necessary to question the fact that individuals of great

intellect, the Newtons and the Shakespeares, have had or may have

had large brains; or the fact that, as between races of men, the

most intelligent have brains of greater cubic measure than the less

intelligent. But it has not always been found that individuals of

superior intellect have had comparatively larger brains than other

individuals, nor that those who have had very large brains have

transmitted them to their children. The important fact to which I meant

to advert is that, since we have known much about the human brain and

the nervous system connected with it, it has not been found that, in

its several parts and in the action of the nerves connected with it,

it has been differently organized and acted upon in the lowest savages

from what we know of it in the European and the most civilized races.

There is a difference in volume, but not in the organization or the

office of the brain in different races of men, as there is in different

individuals of the same race. The fact that all men, since they became

a completed type of animal, however they originated and became men,

have possessed a capacity to become in different degrees intelligent

and thinking beings, points strongly to the conclusion that while in

each individual there is a nervous system so organized as to transmit

impressions from external objects to the central physical organ called

the brain, there must be another existence in that individual, of a

spiritual and intellectual nature, of a substance that is not physical,

to which the brain supplies the materials of thought, thought being

mental cognition of an idea. If I am asked for the proof of such an

existence, I answer that the proof is consciousness, as I define it,

and this I conceive is the highest kind of proof.

One may appeal to the convictions of mankind for an answer to the

question, What is the highest and most satisfactory kind of knowledge

that any of us possess? The most intelligent man may be mistaken in

that part of self-knowledge that relates to his own character or

motives. Others may see him very differently from the light in which

he sees himself, and they may be right and he may be wrong. He may

think, too, that he knows a great deal that he does not know; but no

intelligent man is mistaken or in any way deluded when he believes in

his own existence. No man in his waking moments and in his right mind

ever confounded his own identity, as we have seen that Lady Macbeth

did when she was walking in her sleep, with the identity of another

person. No man in his right mind loses the constant, ever-present

sense of himself as a being and as one distinct from all other beings.

The reason is that his own existence is certified to him by the most

unerring of witnesses, one who can not lie, because the fact of one's

own existence is the fact of which that witness must speak. Of all

other facts the witness may speak falsely. The mind can not speak

falsely when it speaks to us of our own existence, for the witness who

speaks and the person spoken to are one and the same. The falsehood, if

there could be a falsehood, would be instantly detected.

As the mind certifies to itself its own existence by the most direct

and the highest kind of proof, so it certifies to itself the powers

with which it is endowed; and this brings me to the anatomical

examination of the structure of the mind. I shall not make this

analysis a very minute one, but shall confine it to those distinct

elementary powers which are constituted by systems, as the powers of

the bodily organism are constituted by systems distinguishable by the

functions which they perform. In the bodily organism we recognize the

digestive system, the system of circulation of the blood, the muscular

system, the nervous system, the sensory system, which is distributed

into the different organs of sense, the male and female systems of

sexual generation, and the female system of gestation. These several

systems, acting together as one complex mechanism endowed with the

mysterious principle of life, form in each human being of either sex

the physical existence of the individual. Acting in each individual of

either sex simultaneously and with mutual involved interdependencies,

they form a whole which, in its several parts and their functions, may

be likened to the several parts and functions in one of those machines

which we ourselves construct--with this difference, however, that

in one life is present and in the other it is not. The fundamental

question is whether this complex animal mechanism, thus constituted

of certain physical systems, also constitutes during this life the

entire individual. If so, the individual existence is a unit, and, when

the physical organism perishes by what we call death, the individual

existence ceases. If, on the contrary, we have satisfactory proof

that there is, during this life, in each individual an organized and

extended entity, composed, like the systems of the bodily organisms,

of certain systems of its own but of a substance that is not material,

then the existence of each individual is a dual existence; and one of

the two existences now associated and acting together may be dissolved

into its original material elements, while the other, composed of a

different substance, may be indissoluble and have an endless life.

There is no middle ground that I can perceive between these two

hypotheses. One or the other of them is absolutely true, independent of

the inquiry as to the mode in which mind came to exist; for after going

through with all the reasoning and all the proofs that are supposed to

show its origin by the process called evolution, we must still come

back to the question of what mind is after it has come into existence;

must determine on which side lies the preponderating probability of its

continuance after the death of the body; and must accept the conclusion

of its destruction or cessation when the body dies, or the other

conclusion that it is unlike the body in its substance, and therefore

indestructible by the means which destroy the body. For this reason we

must examine the mind for proof that it is an organism of a special

nature because composed of a special substance, and this proof is to be

reached by an analysis of the systems of which the mind is composed. I

select, of course, for the purposes of this analysis, any individual

whose physical and mental faculties have had the average development

into the condition that is called a sound mind in a sound body--_mens

sana in corpore sano_. I shall treat incidentally of the condition of

idiocy.

We may classify the distinct systems of the mind, with their several

functions, as easily as we can classify the distinct systems of our

physical structure and their functions. I have seen the systems of

the mind distributed into five; and although I do not adopt the whole

analysis made by the writer to whom I refer, or make use of the same

terminology, I shall follow his classification because it is one which

any thinking person must recognize as a description of mental powers

of which he is conscious.[151] We are all aware that we possess the

following mental systems in which inhere certain elementary powers that

are mental powers:

1. A sensory system, by which the mind takes impressions from matter.

2. A system of intellectual faculties, such as reason, imagination,

reflection, combination of ideas, discrimination between different

ideas.

3. A system of emotions, or susceptibilities to pleasure or pain, of a

moral and intellectual nature as distinguished from the pleasurable or

painful excitation of our nerves.

4. A system of desires, which prompt us to wish for and acquire some

good, or to avoid some evil.

5. A system of affections, which prompt us to like or dislike persons,

things, situations, and whatever is attractive or unattractive, as the

case may be.

A little further analysis of each of these systems will explain why

they are respectively to be thus classified as distinguishable organic

powers or functions of the human mind:

_First._ The mind is placed as a recipient in correspondence with the

material universe through the nerves of sensation and the special

corporeal organs, whereby the properties of matter become to some

extent known to us. As the power of the physical senses to obtain for

us a knowledge of the properties of matter is limited, even when our

senses are in the utmost state of their normal capacity, there may be

properties of matter which will never become known to us in our present

existence. But certain of its properties do become known to us, and we

are perfectly aware that this takes place through our physical organs

of sense, which convey to our mental reception certain impressions.

This power of the mind, therefore, to receive such impressions, to

retain and transmute them into thought, is to be recognized as a power

exerted by means of an organic physical contrivance and an organic

mental structure, the two acting together, the resultant being the

mind's faculty for receiving ideas from the external world. Let us

suppose, then, that the bodily senses are impaired by the partial

destruction of their organs. It does not follow that the knowledge

which has been derived from them, when they were in full activity,

is destroyed; all that happens is that we acquire no more of such

knowledge by the same means, or do not acquire it so readily and

completely. If the destruction of the physical senses is so complete

as it becomes when death of the whole body takes place, the materials

derived from the impressions conveyed to the mind from external objects

during life have been transmuted into ideas and thoughts, and, as

that which holds the ideas and the thoughts is of a substance unlike

in nature to the substance of the physical organs which conveyed the

impressions, the rational conclusion is that the ideas and thoughts

will continue to be held by it, after the dissolution of the body, as

they were held while the body was in full life.

_Second._ I recognize in the mind a system of intellectual faculties.

Of intellect, I should say that the ascertainment of truth is its

primary function; and hence I should say that the power of retaining

permanent possession of truth already ascertained is the means by

which we maintain continued ascertainment, or the utilization of

truth already ascertained.[152] For the exercise of this power of

ascertaining, holding, applying, and expressing truth--the processes

of intellect--we have three recognized faculties. These are the

intuitive faculty; the faculty of association or combination; and

the introspective faculty, or the capacity to look inward upon the

processes of our own minds. The philosophers who maintain that all

our knowledge is derived from experience admit neither the intuitive

faculty nor the fact of intuition. On the other hand, the philosophers

who maintain, as Mr. Spencer does, that the brain of every infant is

an organized register of the experiences of his ancestors, do not

allow of the existence of any intuitions as facts in the individual

life of the infant, because they regard the individual experiences

of the infant as mere repetitions of former experiences that took

place in its progenitors. But rightly regarded the true meaning of

the intuitive faculty is this: that at the instant when a new sensory

impression is received by the infant, or the adult, there is an innate

and implanted power which comes into play, by which is asserted the

reality of that from which the sensory impression is received. This

power, the intuitive faculty, is infallible. It was ordained as the

means by which a sensory impression becomes to us a reality. We are so

constructed, mentally, that we must believe those primary facts which

the sensory impressions certify to us to be facts. On the veracity of

this certification we are absolutely dependent, because we can not

contradict the affirmations of reality which causation makes to our

intuitive mental perceptions. On this veracity we risk our lives; we

could not be safe if we were not subjected to this belief. Intuition,

therefore, is something anterior to experience; it is that power by

which the first experience and the last become to us the means of

belief in a reality. This is a power that can belong to and inhere

in a spiritual organism alone. We must, therefore, recognize in the

infant this original implanted endowment, the capacity to be mentally

convinced of realities; and while, in order to meet the first exercise

of this capacity there must be a physical organism which will conduct

the sensory impressions to the brain and a brain that will receive

them, the capacity of the infant to have its first conviction of the

reality certified to it by the sensory impression is at once the

capacity of an intellectual being, and a necessity imposed upon him by

the law of his existence. Idiocy, when complete, is the absence of this

capacity, by reason of some failure of connection between the brain, as

the central recipient of sensory impressions, and the mind which should

receive and transmute those impressions into thought. We are scarcely

warranted in regarding the idiot as a human animal possessed of no mind

whatever. The absolute idiot should be defined as a human creature whom

we can not educate at all--in whom we can awaken no intelligence; but

we are not therefore authorized in believing that there is no provision

whatever for the development of intelligence after the mere physical

life of the body is ended. Absolute idiocy, or what, from our as yet

imperfect means of developing intelligence in such unfortunate persons

we must regard as at present absolute, is probably very rare. Between

human creatures so born and those vast multitudes in whom average

intelligence is developed by surrounding influences, whatever they may

be, there are various degrees of the capacity for development; and what

happens in these intermediate cases proves that there are different

degrees in which the connection between the physical and the mental

organism is established at birth, so that in some the connection may

be said to be abnormal and imperfect, while in the enormous majority

it is at least so nearly normal and complete that intelligence may be

developed.

Here, then, is the place to advert to Mr. Spencer's assertion that

the doctrine that intelligence in the human being is wholly produced

by experience is utterly inadmissible; that it makes the presence

of a brain meaningless, and idiocy unaccountable. A doctrine which

imputes the development of intelligence _wholly_ to the experience of

the individual is of course untenable. There must be a brain and a

nervous system; but we are not warranted, in the case of the idiot, in

assuming that he has a differently organized brain and nervous system

from those of his parents or others of the human race, as Mr. Spencer

appears to me to assume. What we are warranted in believing is that

while the brain and nervous system of the idiot child may be just

as complete in his structure as in those of the parents, there has

somehow occurred, from some cause, antecedent in some cases to birth,

but operating after birth in other cases, a failure of the adequate

connection between the brain and the mind, so that intelligence can

not be developed at all, or can be developed but partially. The

individual may have inherited just as good an "organized register" of

the experience of his ancestors--just as good a natural brain as his

brothers and sisters who are perhaps highly intelligent from their

birth, or capable of becoming intelligent. Yet he lacks the ability

to co-ordinate impressions and to perform the actions appropriate

to those impressions, because there has failed to be established in

him the necessary connection between the impressions and the sensory

intellectual system which constitutes one organic part of the mind. The

experiences, however often repeated, of the impressions produced by

his physical senses on his brain, remain there as corporeal feelings.

They reach no further. They do not become transmuted into ideas,

and so intelligence can not be developed, or is developed but to a

very feeble extent. Instead of saying that "the gradually increasing

intelligence displayed throughout childhood is more attributable to

the completion of the cerebral organization than to the individual

experiences," I should say that it is most attributable to the presence

of an established connection between the function of the cerebral

organization and the mental receptivity of impressions, which is

not merely passive, but is incessantly active because incessantly

receiving, and that, where this connection is wanting, the receptivity,

although it may exist, can not become active, and so intelligence

can not be developed in this life. But there may be another state of

existence, in which the mind of the idiot, no longer dependent on a

physical organization of brain and nervous system for the reception

of ideas and for intellectual growth, but retaining its capacity for

mental development, may begin and carry on such development by other

means; whereas, if the brain and the nervous system constitute all

there is of any human being, whether born an idiot or born capable of

intellectual growth through his individual experiences, he can have no

future after that brain and nervous system are destroyed, unless we

suppose that mind is something that has been developed out of matter

into a spiritual existence--a supposition which is to me inconceivable.

The second of the intellectual faculties is the associative, or

that intuitive power by which ideas are combined and associated or

held in disjunction and separation. I regard this as an intuitive

faculty, because, as our observation teaches us, its presence and

power, manifested at the first dawning of infantile intelligence, are

attested by every exercise of the organs through which the external

world reaches our minds, to the last moment of our mortal existence.

Experience is, of course, necessary to the first action of this

intuitive faculty. This is only another way of saying that there must

occur a sensory impression upon the brain which becomes transmuted

into the idea of the external object, and then a repetition of that

impression produces a repetition of the idea, and the associative

faculty combines or disjoins them. But unless there exists an intuitive

power, inherent in the intellective system, whereby the first idea and

the second can be associated and compared, there can be no knowledge,

no acquisition of truth, because the sensory impressions will stop

in the brain as so many feelings excited through the nervous system,

instead of being transmuted into thought.

The introspective faculty, on the other hand, does not deal solely

with sensory impressions, or with the ideas which they have suggested.

It is that power of the mind by which it can look inward upon itself.

This is seemingly a paradox; but nevertheless, the existence of such a

faculty is a necessary hypothesis, not only because we are conscious

of it, but because without it we could have no means of analyzing

our own mental structure, although we could make some very partial

analysis of the mind of another individual by studying his actions. As

regards ourselves, it is as if our visual organs possessed the power

of looking at the process by which an image of an external object is

impressed upon the retina and is thence transmitted to the brain, where

the sensory impression is produced. This, of course, is a physical

impossibility. All we can do is to examine the physical structure of

the eye, with its wonderful provision of lenses and other means for

the reception and the effect of light, and to reason upon what we can

discover that the process of what is called seeing must be thus or

thus. But that process itself we can not see by the same organs by

which it is carried on. In the case of the mind, however--and herein

is one of the remarkable proofs of its unlikeness as an organism to

the bodily organism--there is a power to witness, to observe, to

be sensible of its own operations. This power, like all the other

mental powers, may be very feeble in some individuals, for want of

exercise, but in others, from long and frequent exercise, it may become

exceedingly vigorous, and be the means of advancing mental philosophy

if its observations are preserved and recorded. It is one of the

systems which, as a whole, constitute the spiritual organism to which

we give the name of mind. Such a capacity can not be predicated of a

physical organism. It is impossible for us to conceive of a machine

standing and looking upon its own operations, speculating upon their

improvement, or thinking of the relation of its mechanism to the human

author of its being. It is equally impossible for us to think of the

body of man contemplating its own existence, or being sensible of it;

but it is perfectly easy to conceive of its being known to the mind

that inhabits it, which takes cognizance both of its own operations

and of the operations of the physical organism, reflects upon them

separately or in their action upon one another, and spontaneously

refers both to an author.