that form of subjectivity which constitutes our mind. _Z_ is not,
as Professor Romanes asserts that it is, a fixed quantity; it varies
greatly, as every one knows from his own experience. It is lowest
in trance or swoon or profound sleep. It is highest in the state of
concentrated attention. The ejective element, which we assume to be
present as a correlative concomitant in the objective world, we assume,
with Professor Romanes, varies greatly in the different parts of the
area _Y_. Like Professor Romanes, we also do _not_ assume the existence
of any unshaded _X_. There is no objectivity without its subjective
correlate. But, according to the theory of monism, the nature of the
concomitant subjectivity is not unknowable: it can be inferred from the
nature of objective existence. The subjectivity of the falling stone
is most elementary, and _not mental_; its action is not prompted by
meaning. That something which impels the stone to fall, and which science
calls gravity, does not possess any representative element. There is no
symbolism involved in gravity. There is no soul in the stone. The stone
is not incited to falling by any purpose; it has no end in view. Purpose
originates with and through the presence of representative symbols.
According to the theory of monism the shading of the surrounding zones is
not a matter concerning which we have to suspend our judgment. If monism
is true, we know very well how deeply we have to shade the different
phenomena of objective nature.
Taking this view, we object to Professor Romanes’s conclusion when he
says:
“Without in any way straining the theory of monism, we may
provisionally shade _X_ more deeply than _Z_, and this in some
immeasurable degree.
“Monism sanctions the shading of _X_ as deeply as we choose;
but the shading which it sanctions is only provisional.”
While the presence of mind in the phenomena of the stellar universe and
of inorganic nature must decidedly be denied, I would not, for that
reason, declare that monism is atheistic.
Monism is decidedly theistic although not anthropotheistic. It is
monotheistic in so far as it recognises that the all-existence in which
we live and move and have our being is the ἙΝ ΚΑΙ ΠΑΝ, the One and All.
But there is not the slightest reason for the theory, and there are
sufficient reasons against it, that the universe is possessed of a huge
world-ego, that it is a person or a mind.
We maintain on the one hand that the laws of nature are not designs
arranged With consciously preconceived purposes. Yet on the other hand,
we do not forget, that the world-order possesses quite definite features
and that the course of evolution runs in a very unmistakable direction.
We can plainly decipher its character, and the great religious teachers
of mankind have with a truly prophetic instinct proclaimed the ethical
injunctions to be derived therefrom—injunctions which, millenniums after
them, science has discovered to be founded in the nature of things.
God is no mind, yet God is mentality, the source of all mind: God is not
a spirit, but he is spirituality. The subjectivity of the universe from
which all consciousness rises is part of his being, and whatever that
subjectivity, considered as a whole, be or be not, that much is certain,
that in grandeur it corresponds to the objectivity of the world. It does
not think in symbols as a man does; it is not a mind: but it exists
nevertheless. Whatever it is like we learn from the revelation of its
appearance in objective existence, from the cosmic order, the laws of
nature, and the moral ideas of mankind.
Knowledge of nature means knowledge of God, for nature is God as he
appears and the objectivity of being is the revelation of God.
We would not limit God to the subjectivity of nature: God is both
subjectivity and objectivity combined. He is that All-power that is, was,
and will be, thus being the ultimate authority of conduct.
God is not a mind, he is more than a mind; God is not a system of
symbols, he is the reality symbolised in mind. He is not a person, he is
super-personal.
He who does not see that the God of monism is greater than the God
of anthropotheism, had better believe in a personal God, until he
appreciates the truth that God is not personal but super-personal. For
after all anthropotheism is nearer the truth than atheism, for atheism
(well understood, the atheism of our definition above) is a moral
nihilism devised to shake off all ethical obligation so as to make the
lust of the moment and the pleasure of the individual the supreme rule of
action.
Monism, accordingly, does not leave the problem of theism where it was
before. Monism proves that God is not to be conceived in the likeness
of man, but the reverse: man, being a system of symbols representing
the world, is to be conceived as having been made or rather as having
originated in the likeness of God. God is the original, man is the copy.
God is the whole, man is the part, in which the whole finds a more or
less correct representation. The picture is not perfect, but the grandest
duty a man has is the constant approach to a greater perfection. Man is
the temporal, God is the eternal. Man is limited, God is the infinite.
EDITOR.
FOOTNOTES:
[41] _The Monist_, Vol. II, No. 4.
[42] Spontaneous motion (as here defined) does not mean action without
a cause; nor does the spontaneity of the cart exclude the co-operation
of other spontaneities (_e. g._ the attraction of the earth) entering as
factors in bringing about the final result.
[43] This theory of pleasure and pain was first set forth in an editorial
article of No. 120 of _The Open Court_, which has been republished in
the chapter “Pleasure and Pain,” pp. 338-345, of _The Soul of Man_. A
correct view of the nature of pleasure and pain is of great importance,
especially in ethics. Notwithstanding the palpable erroneousness of the
old view, several articles written by prominent authors have appeared
of late, that continue in the old strain without taking notice of the
criticism that overthrows the basis of their theories.
[44] _Italics are ours._
[45] This same position is maintained with equal vigor in Professor
Romanes’s latest work _Darwin and After Darwin_, pp. 412-442. The Open
Court Publishing Co., 1892.
LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE.
I.
FRANCE.
Dr. Paul Sollier has just published, in the Bibliothéque
Charcot-Debove,[46] a new and excellent work, _Les troubles de la
memoire_. This work is not identical in its purpose with that of
M. Ribot; it corrects the latter in certain points, completes and
corroborates it in others. M. Sollier set out to discuss this question
solely from a medical standpoint, which was intentionally passed over
by M. Ribot, but he has also necessarily touched upon its psychological
aspects, and, as he informs us himself, he was obliged on the whole to
make a medico-psychological study of the question.
The subject is a vast one; one could include in it aphasia and all the
weaknesses resulting from the destruction of the brain-centres, whether
those of motion or of sensation. M. Sollier has taken the pains to reduce
it, however, to definite limits. He studies especially the subject of
acquired amnesia (diminutive changes and disaggregations of the memory).
He does not consider the subject of congenital amnesia, which is an
absence and not a loss of memory. Strictly considered, the only cases
of true amnesia, or _organic_ amnesia, are those which result from the
destruction of the nerve-centres, since in this case there is an absolute
loss of the power of forming mental images, and not simply an enfeebling
or forgetting of them, which is characteristic of _functional_ amnesia.
From a clinical standpoint amnesia exists only in the last case. Though
the effect may be the same in both cases, the causes are not identical.
Clinical investigation cannot, however, overlook the diminutive changes
which take place in the memory and which, as early as 1817, were called
by Louyer-Villermay dysmnesia, and which are always closely allied
to organic modifications of the brain. As regards amnesia itself, it
is important to distinguish simple amnesia from retrogressive and
progressive amnesia. M. Sollier explains the motive causes of these
different conditions with great lucidity, and renders them easy of
comprehension by means of ingenious illustrations.
I call attention to the information he gives us as to the conditions
under which a revival of mental images takes place, p. 30; to his
criticism of Ribot’s opinion, according to which the power of correctly
locating events in the scale of time is the true characteristic of
psychical memory: it is quite enough if it reproduces events as in
the past, that is to say if there exists a conscious knowledge which
shows that the mental conception belongs to the past, or is, simply, a
remembrance, p. 35 and 40; to his remarks on the strengthening of mental
images due to the repetition of remembrances, the necessary sequence of
which is that a weakening of old memories follows the destruction of
accumulated mental images, p. 48; to his explanation of the processes
of retrogressive amnesia (coming suddenly after an attack of vertigo,
a blow, etc.) which he bases upon a supposition of a group of mental
conceptions in touch with one another, in such a way that the loss of
one leading conception in a group deprives this group of sufficient
consistency to form a conscious synthesis, p. 70.
As regards the classifications of amnesia M. Sollier censures that of M.
Ribot as being neither openly psychological nor openly clinical, and of
taking successively as bases the extent of an observed phenomenon, its
evolution, its location in time. Moreover, from a clinical standpoint
it has led to a joining together of totally incongruous disorders. M.
Sollier therefore rejects it, and contents himself with adopting first of
all, with M. Falret, the natural classification of general amnesia and of
partial amnesia. Moreover, in taking account of the systematising of lost
remembrances, he proposes to make a distinction as to the two varieties
of systematised (functional) and of non-systematised (organic) amnesia,
considered from the purely psychological standpoint, p. 59. We should
thus have, firstly, the classification of general amnesia, including
(A) true organic amnesia (destruction of the centre of mental images),
and, under the classification of the systematised, (B) functional,
or apparent, amnesia (imperfect performance of the functions of the
centres): this latter subdividing into two groups, (_a_) amnesia with its
varieties (_a´_) simple, (_b´_) retrogressive, (_c´_) progressive, and
(_b_) paramnesia: (_a´_) that of locality, (_b´_) that of exactness; to
which it is proper to add (_c_) dysmnesia, which is organic-functional.
Secondly, the classification of partial amnesia whether systematised or
not, which may be either organic or functional. M. Sollier abandons,
moreover, every pathological or etiological classification as being
exceedingly unsatisfactory. In the presence of a patient, he justly
remarks, the physician can only employ semiology.—I will not enter
here into the details of the inquisitor-like investigation entered
upon by the author. I must even proceed without stopping through the
observations intended for medical men, which form the second part of the
work, but I judge that every reader will also find therein many facts
which may prove of interest. After having read it, one is more impressed
than ever with the importance and delicacy of the motive forces of the
memory, in noting the frequency and the varieties even of its sources of
weakness. M. Sollier has the credit of pointing them out—in the shape
of “defects in synthetical power” and in “will power”—in the sources of
weakness where one had not been accustomed to look for them. It would be
interesting, he thinks, to find out what part amnesia may perhaps take in
the pathogeny of certain nervous disorders, and the influence which it
has on their evolution. Specialists for the insane might find therein a
new subject of study, and psychology will profit, on the other hand, by
that which clinical experience offers it. Is not its main object to learn
to understand life as a unit at the same time that it analyses it as a
diversity?
* * * * *
When one passes from a book like that of M. Sollier to the work of M.
l’Abbé MAURICE DE BAETS, _Les bases de la morale et du droit_,[47]
one is impressed by the change of method. It has become impossible
for us to consider pathology as unallied to questions of morality; and
we have accomplished this great object of studying matters pertaining
to the moral world, the evolution of law, without seeking our base of
support in a religious faith or in a metaphysical affirmation. Even M.
l’Abbé de Baets himself declares emphatically that he desires to adopt
only one starting point from among those we are acquainted with,—the
verification of facts,—and truly he shows a good will and knowledge;
nevertheless the ground which he considers so firm has, as we believe,
no stability. All seems strange to us, if I may so speak, in books of
this description. The tone which is peculiar to them, the nature of the
facts cited, the progress of the reasoning, impeach them just as surely
as the blue color of his costume reveals afar off an inhabitant of the
Celestial Empire. I am not an impassioned adversary of the clergy; far
from it. I appreciate their intentions and esteem their persons as one
should, but I am unable to share their opinions, and I consider indeed
that they deceive themselves when they think that faith has ever given to
the world an absolute assurance. It has not given it because it has not
proved sufficient. Mankind, variable and vacillating though it may be,
does not change its beliefs because of fickleness of heart: its mental
evolution takes place too slowly for that, and is also too painful. The
Catholic church of to-day has adopted as its watch-word the return to
St. Thomas of Aquinas; it will gain by this unity of effort, without
succeeding however in leading back the minds of men to its point of view.
The diverse ways we follow tend doubtless as a matter of fact toward the
same objective point, and run more or less in the same direction; but
humanity scarcely ever passes back again over the paths which it has once
traversed.
* * * * *
We have another little volume by M. LOMBROSO, _Les applications de
l’anthropologie criminelle_; a sequel to _Nouvelles recherches_, which
I have mentioned before. We find here interesting pages in regard to
transportation and reform schools, and a criticism of the new theories
of the penal code (Garofalo, Tarde, Sighele, Onanoff and Blorg, Ferri)—a
part of the question considered in the Congress. A chapter indeed is
devoted to the subject of criminal anthropology in modern literature,
in regard to which it seems to me M. Lombroso always makes more of
a question than is desirable, but which he well understands how to
criticise. Then follow several pages on the criminal type in art, after
a work of Dr. Edward Lefort; then comes a description of anthropological
instruments and methods. I will not affirm that this last work brings us
much of novelty; it is chiefly a new and energetic presentation of his
views, and M. Lombroso has no doubt whatever that by dint of striking the
nail upon the head he will succeed in driving it into the wall of his
adversaries.
* * * * *
The work of M. B. BOURDON, _L’expression des emotions et des tendances
dans le langage_, is certainly one of the most curious books one can
read. He treats in an original manner of phonetical questions, which
are less rife in France than in England and Germany, as to what sounds
signify, or speech; what is their worth in intensity, elevation, form or
quality, duration; what phenomena are shown by successions of intensity,
of elevation, of elementary articulation, of syllables, of words, etc.,
of duration; what are the relations of these phenomena to versification
and what comparison one can make between writing and speech: such are the
problems particularly studied, at times with the aid of very simple but
instructive facts culled from experience.
These studies—I need scarcely add that they are comparative ones—are
of interest for various reasons. They lead up to new ideas of grammar
and of language, and furnish arguments for a reform in orthography of
which M. Bourdon is a very warm partisan. His readers will not be slow
to notice for the matter of that, that he is in regard to this frankly
revolutionary; and it may seem paradoxical to say to them, for example,
that “the distinction between analytical and synthetical languages is
absolutely artificial, and could only be produced through our bad systems
of writing.” Writing, M. Bourdon indeed remarks, introduces separations
in places where spoken language makes no pause. The English write _I
will go_, they pronounce it _Iwillgo_. The analysis which pertains to
writing masks the true cohesion of the spoken language, and “if in the
past all series of articulations had been written as a single word which
were in fact pronounced as a single word, we should not have known the
error which consists in opposing certain languages classed as synthetical
to others which we class as analytical.” The argument is perhaps not
a decisive one, and in the neo-Latin languages, for example, one can
scarcely deny that the analysis of the written language has conformed to
the work of decomposition of the antique forms, so as to adapt itself to
the new groupings of their essential elements, groupings wherein these
elements remain variable because speech separates them effectively, in
many cases by interpolating governing words or others.
But it is not my intention to enter into these detailed discussions.
I leave M. Bourdon in further calling attention to his last chapter,
_Ecriture_. Persons curious as to graphology will find in it some good
ideas concerning this method of “character reading.” The author does not
tell everything, and I have a suspicion that he greatly despises certain
signs valued by the graphologists, and arrived at empirically, but we
should note what he has actually said.
* * * * *
Under the title, _Le monde physique, Essai de conception expérimentale_,
M. Dr. JULIEN PIOGER offers to the public a sketch of a world-system.
This system is summed up in the expression of “Universal Solidarity,”
and is based on the idea of infinitely minute matter-particles, or
“infinitesimals,” the mutual relations of which, and their equilibrium,
constitute the machinery of the universe. The atomic-mechanical
hypothesis, says M. Pioger, is wrong in resolving matter into perfected
differential particles and in assigning to its atoms qualities which
make of them either true material corpuscules or a real entity, “a thing
in itself.” On the contrary, far from intending to assign a limit to
materiality, the hypothesis of infinitesimals confines itself to limiting
the conception which we may have of it. The infinitesimal corresponds
to the infinitely small, that is to say to the non-perfected, to the
non-differentiable, beyond our cognisance and our perceptivity; it
expresses the most reduced condition of the affinities which constitute
matter; it is the expression of the infinitesimal existence of that
which we call motion, extension, ponderability, under the general name
of matter. Now the most simple thing which can be conceived of in the
physical world, is the _couple_ formed by the essential equipoise of two
infinitesimals. In developing the couple it becomes possible to form the
universe in all its great variety. The solidarity of the parts in the
whole appears as the essential condition of existence of all that which
Is—the necessary condition of all individuality.
In conclusion I call attention to two new editions, one the well-known
work of M. BERNARD PÉREZ, _Les trois premières années de l’enfant_, fifth
edition, revised and supplied with an introduction by Mr. James Sully;
the other _Les functions du cerveau_, by M. JULES SOURY, a work highly
esteemed, embodying the most recent researches.
LUCIEN ARRÉAT.
FOOTNOTES:
[46] Rueff, publisher.
[47] This book and the following ones are published by F. Alcan.
II.
GERMANY.
One of our foremost psychiatrists, Professor v. Krafft-Ebing of Vienna,
says in his celebrated text-book on psychiatry: “If Pedagogy made a
more serious study of the character of man in his psychopathological
relations, many of the mistakes and severities of our system of education
would be removed, many an unsuitable choice of vocation would be left
unmade, and thus many a psychical existence rescued.”
Any one who is at all familiar with the most important doctrines of the
diseased phenomena of mental life, and who knows how frequently psychical
disturbances of a more or less serious nature occur during childhood,
will fully agree with Krafft-Ebing, and will only regret that pedagogy,
in this important direction, has completely neglected its task.
Although lately the necessity of psychiatric knowledge for the pedagogue
has been insisted upon in professional circles, for instance, by
Professor STRUEMPELL in his _Pedagogic Pathology_ (comp. _The Monist_ II,
106), yet instruction in this department occupies a wholly subsidiary
place in pedagogic education, and has not been made as it should have
been, an organic part of the same. The writer of these lines has
accordingly discussed this subject in a special treatise, maintaining
that the most important diseased phenomena of mental life might be
treated as a part of pedagogic psychology (comp. _The Monist_ I, 619).
The demands made were met in different ways. While the English and
American press accepted these demands without reserve (for instance, in
HALL’S _Pedagogical Seminary_, I, 297), in Germany there has been more
caution displayed, inasmuch as the opposing difficulties were regarded as
greater than they probably were (Professor REIN’S _Pädagogische Studien_,
1892, Heft I).
We have, however, simply to call to mind the doctrine which more than
twenty years ago Maudsley in his “Physiology and Pathology of the Mind”
laid such special emphasis upon, that psychic laws are the same in
healthy and diseased phenomena, only that they do not operate under the
same conditions and therefore produce different symptoms. Far from its
being true, therefore, that the introduction of psychopathology into
psychology can be opposed by any especially well-founded objections, such
a procedure will, on the contrary, be found to be, just as Maudsley said,
an appropriate and absolutely indispensable auxiliary of the study of
this science. And that which was emphasised by Maudsley, and lately also
by MUENSTERBERG in the treatise already discussed in _The Monist_ (II,
289), _On the Problems and Methods of Psychology_ (Leipsic, 1891, Abel),
Ziehen has done in his “Outlines of Physiological Psychology” in a manner
which will be full of suggestions for the pedagogue (comp. _The Monist_
I, 598).