question of _attention_, is also treated here, in an incidental yet
very interesting manner (Chapter III). M. Féré connects attention with
the study of the physiological conditions of physical action, and thus
takes sides, it will be seen, with the motory theory of attention.
James Sully, and others, have denied the existence of muscular phenomena
accompanying attention. But physiology is in a position to disclose
the existence of these movements; it can study their qualities, their
energy, their form, their precision, and their rapidity. We will find
in M. Féré’s book a number of new experimental facts establishing the
thesis that “muscular tension constitutes the physiological condition of
attention.” “The mistake of many psychologists (M. Hirth, for example)
has been, that they have confounded rest with willed immobility, which
from a mechanical point of view is very far removed from the former;
for immobility of will is precisely the result of very intense muscular
activities, and can only be produced by a general tension of the muscular
system, which throws the subject in a state such that it can react the
most quickly and most energetically on any excitation, whencesoever it
may proceed.” Willed, or voluntary, immobility is attention itself;
to produce this state, well-enervated and well-nourished muscles are
necessary. “We may say,” declares M. Féré, “that the practice of
immobility is the most favorable exercise for the development of the
mind: a system of education which should neglect this exercise would
suppress attention, it would be a regressive education.”
“It is lack of attention,” he tells us further on, “that is the cause
of the insensibility of hysterical patients, and it is instability of
attention that is the cause of the variability of their sensory and
motory disorders.” It is all due to the want of sufficient energy to
bring simultaneously into a state of tension the muscular settings of all
of the sensory organs. Hysterical anæsthesia according to him—and how
perfectly right he is!—is nothing but a mental and psychical disease,
which may be cured by _suggestion_; it is an organic malady, which cannot
be cured without the restoration of the proper organic state.
Worthy of notice are a few pages on the existence of electrical
phenomena, “which are exaggerated in certain subjects, but which appear
to exist in a more feeble degree in the normal states.” The facts here
involved might furnish us with a key to the phenomena of transmission,
polarisation, elective sensibility, and certain actions at a distance,
whose solution still presents great difficulties. Also to be noted are
a number of corrections of inductions made by Darwin, whom ignorance
of physiology often involved in mistakes concerning the true nature
of phenomena: thus Darwin was often led to attribute an intentional
character to actions which are throughout reflex.
Basing his views on the inevitable correlation of these two orders of
phenomena, the physical and the psychical, M. Féré stands in a position
of direct hostility to the metaphysics (of course, unconscious) of the
great body of alienists. He selects the characteristic disorder of
insanity, namely hallucination, and sets about to show the existence of
physical phenomena concomitant with hallucination. Chapter XIII is one of
the most instructive of his work and well worth thoughtful perusal. Let
us add on this point that M. Féré stoutly combats the doctrine, held by
Magnan in particular, that all forms of phobia, that is to say, of morbid
emotive states, are the brands of degeneration. He admits, however,
that a great number are connected with permanent constitutional states,
congenital or acquired.
M. Féré accepts the pathological and degenerative theory of crime.
But he rejects in a measure Lombroso’s thesis of the assimilation of
genius to insanity. Genius and talent, he says, are by no means devoid
of intellectual and emotional anomalies, but it is not true that
neuropathic states are the indispensable concomitants of genius, although
susceptibility to impressions is, when not developed to excess, one of
the physiological conditions of genius.
With respect to the social consequences involved, I will simply quote
his concise statement that “physiology is quite in accord with political
economy in condemning the intemperate generosity which favors the
development and multiplication of emotive personalities.” With regard,
finally, to the question of responsibility, M. Féré’s position differs,
so far as I can see, in no respect from my own, which I have expounded at
sufficient length in a former number of _The Monist_, to dispense me from
the necessity of reverting to it here.
* * * * *
Our next book is also a remarkable one—_Les transformations du droit_,
by M. G. TARDE, a small volume of some two hundred and twelve pages.
M. Tarde has again and again declared himself the avowed adversary of
Spencerianism, and of evolution generally, at least in so far as the idea
of evolution is indiscriminately and unreflectingly employed, as is the
case, he maintains, in a great class of social questions which make up
the criminal and civil law. Everywhere in these domains, despite apparent
uniformity, which is the simple effect of a perspective that effaces the
differences of remote times, is found diversity. The serial stages of
development professedly disclosed, he rejects as absolutely incompetent
in the explanation of criminal law, procedure, the status of persons and
things, and obligations.
In criminal law, for example, we ordinarily regard the system of
pecuniary composition as the origin of penal justice, and the idea
of vengeance as necessarily antecedent to the idea of culpability. A
mistake, says M. Tarde. And he offers on this subject a distinction which
is quite curious. He sees the defensive reaction made against criminal
acts originally splitting up into two distinct forms of quite unequal
scope: the one moral, the joint product of indignation and compassion;
the other vindictive, malevolent, and ruthless. The first, according
to him, is exercised within the family and between members of the same
social group; the second is displayed towards the foreigner and the
enemy. Of these two sources of penality, the domestic moral punishment
is the most important; the blow-for-blow policy, or vengeance, although
more apparent, is a secondary source. I fully admit that the instinct
of sympathy, the primitive condition of all social aggregation, has
never been wholly absent from human relations, and it might be that
the distinction perceived by M. Tarde is well founded, although the
two sources appear to have become so confounded in the justice of the
tribunals that it is difficult to trace them to that point. But M.
Tarde seems to me to be too much disposed to flatter the portrait of
the primitive man and to make as “mild as lambs” these prehistoric
creatures whom we have pictured as “cruel as tigers,” and to be too much
preoccupied with the ideas of penality and moral responsibility, which he
thinks the new theories have compromised.
With respect to the status of persons, he denies the existence of the
well-known order of development by which promiscuity, matriarchy, and
patriarchy are said to succeed each other. The tribe could only have
arisen, he tells us, from the federation of families, and the strong
family, the one capable of development, could only have been patriarchal.
It is wrong, he adds, to regard uterine filiation, that is, the custom
of considering a child the son of its mother and not the son of its
father, as a vestige of a pre-existent matriarchy. “In a patriarchal
society, polygamy—which is the very reverse of matriarchy—ought in the
very necessity of things to give predominance to the custom referred to,
so that children born of the same mother could be distinguished from one
another.” This, indeed, was the idea of the Greek tragedians. The maxim,
which occurs so often in Euripides, that it is not good that a man should
have several wives, is always disclosed as the anxiety of assuring the
legitimacy of children; Æschylus charges Minerva to defend the “cause of
her father”; it is one of the aspects of the reaction against the customs
of Asia. The primitive family, says M. Tarde, in summing up, was quite
different in its original forms; it was here monogamic, there polygamic,
and in other places polyandrous, at one time exogamic and at another
endogamic, and so forth. “Marriage, therefore, did not spring from a
single typical form, nor does it, in its various forms, make towards
such.”
His criticisms are of equal strength with regard to the status of
things and the presumed priority of collective property. Contrary to
the views of M. de Laveleye, he is of opinion that the community of the
village could only have arisen on an enlarged model of the community of
the family, “just as the vestal fire of the city could only have been
lighted in imitation of the fire of the domestic hearth”: The certain
effect of the first must in its origin have been to encroach upon, not to
produce, the second. Excessively preoccupied in finding in the present
the vestiges of a state of things that is past, the evolutionists involve
themselves, regardless of consequences, in many naïve and wonderful
theories, which M. Tarde, in his keen and pointed style, has not
hesitated to expose. There is much point and a profusion of the _granum
salis_ in these instructive pages.
With respect to obligations, he makes a distinction, as in criminal law,
between internal and external relations. Also, after having asserted
with Sir Henry Sumner Maine, the non-fusion of the law of nature and
the law of nations, he remarks that here also there exists two sources
whose waters have not subsequently flowed together: the _jus naturæ_ is
conceived to be the generalisation of a type of relations abstracted from
the internal relations of the members of the primitive social group; the
_jus gentium_ to be the outcome of relations between men that belong to
different groups.
Is, then, this disordered succession of the social data mere chance? The
reader will bethink himself of a number of facts which go to disprove
this conclusion, and it is a difficulty moreover which M. Tarde has
also felt. He replies by making a distinction of “two kinds of laws,
the laws of causation and the supposed laws of evolution.” The first,
which in his theory are analogous to the laws of celestial mechanics,
whose formulæ remain constant no matter what the history of the solar
systems distributed throughout the heavens may be, are the psychological
laws; the second are merely arbitrary formulæ, which, when we come to
define them accurately, do not admit of adaptation even to the majority
of cases. The psychological laws of which M. Tarde here speaks are
reducible to _imitation_[82]—consequently to _invention_—and to _logic_.
I certainly do not propose to question the importance of these factors.
In a short tract published several years ago I pointed out myself that
the influences of contact are more efficient than the influences of race
or even of climate, and this implicitly involves the idea of imitation.
Yet the character of the psychological factor does not, it seems to me,
exclude a tendency towards a certain arrangement of the data of society,
despite their possible and actual diversity. “With respect to the facts
of society,” I wrote, “we point out their changes but do not succeed
in disclosing the laws of their evolution; the most we have done is to
note amid the totality certain features which appear to predominate.”
To extricate these features is a task not unworthy of the historian. M.
Tarde himself admits that results of this character have already been
reached, and he especially points to “the splendid and commendable
movement in advance, which though not generally noticed[83] has,
nevertheless, accompanied all juridical evolutions”—namely, the constant
enlargement of the relations of law as the result of a growing sympathy
and sociability.
To sum up, the point of view which M. Tarde has taken does not exclude
a class of researches different from his. Nothing can be better than to
formulate the laws of the psychological agent, and M. Tarde, original
mind that he is, has done this with a superiority and penetration to
which I yield my unqualified admiration. At bottom, does not the view
of Auguste Comte, despite his contempt for psychology, involve the
preliminary study of the biological individual and the social agent?
Psychological laws and physical laws undoubtedly meet in the same group
of “laws of causation”; still, it should not be forgotten that in the
social order of things man is the creator of the facts and that his
creations react upon him in the proportion in which they are realised. At
any rate, a tangible relation exists between the creations of the agent
and the variations of the results, and it is not forbidden to inquire if
there does not also exist a certain order in these creations, the effect
of which would be to produce a recognisable serial succession in the
results, a medial line about which the events of our life oscillate. A
difficult investigation—and one in which M. Tarde has shown himself to be
too speedily satisfied, and in which we should strenuously guard against
hasty generalisations. It is unpleasant, we admit, to turn topsy-turvy a
house in which we have long lived in comfort; but our contentment returns
in an increased measure when we have replaced our things in their proper
places, and swept out the dusty corners.
* * * * *
M. M. AGUILÉRA has just published a work entitled, _L’idée du Droit en
Allemagne_. His book is a history of the different schools of law which
have arisen in Germany and lays especial emphasis on the fact that no
nation has advanced as far as this in seeking in philosophical ideas the
motives and the justification of its acts, and he sets about showing how
the existence of Germany’s special conception of law may be explained.
Germany, he writes in his conclusion, everywhere starts from the idea of
force. Its peculiar characteristic is to bow before victorious force. And
to this must be added, if we wish to comprehend its aggressive character,
the sentiment of vanity, which has led it to proclaim “that incredible
formula: the ideal of Germany is the ideal of humanity.”
M. GEORGE LYON gives us a learned historical study, _La philosophie
de Hobbes_. He points out how everything is interrelated in the work
of this philosopher—his conception of the state to his theories of
ethics, his ethical doctrines to his psychological theories, and the
latter to general principles concerning nature, thought, and their laws.
But he also presents with much force the objections to Hobbism. He
condemns its final consequence, which is submission to force. He points
out finally the inevitable ambiguity which permeates this system in
consequence of the struggle “between individual inspiration, which is
purely ontological, and the action of an intellectual environment which
is eminently empirical. Hobbes was the metaphysician of empiricism as
Bacon was its poet.” I dismiss for the present all discussion of these
subjects; an occasion will present itself later of dealing with them.
In _Les races et les langues_ M. ANDRÉ LEFÈVRE sums up the state of
the science of language. The distinguishing characteristic of his work
is the non-separation of language from the organism which has produced
it, and the simultaneous presentation of languages with the ethnical
groups which speak them. M. Lefèvre accepts, let us note at once, the
well-known stages of the linguistic school—monosyllabism, agglutination,
inflection, and analysis, which M. Tarde, if he should unexpectedly
become a philologist would stigmatise as gratuitous. Of the races, of the
places of origin, and of the migrations of the ancient peoples he tells
a great many stories which are somewhat of the fairy-tale order, but
this reservation does not affect in the least the value of his special
linguistic researches.
In conclusion I shall mention _Le problème de la mort, ses solutions
imaginaires et la science positive_, by M. L. BOURDEAU, and _Platon,
sa philosophie, précédé d’un aperçu de sa vie et de ses écrits_, by M.
CH. BÉNARD, a new volume in the series of historical studies by this
venerable professor.[84]
LUCIEN ARRÉAT.
FOOTNOTES:
[82] See his work _Les lois de l’imitation_ (Alcan, Paris).
[83] I have called attention to this in a less definite manner in
several passages of my book _La morale dans le drame, l’épopée et le
roman_, in which I shall have to incorporate the corrections which the
splendid studies of M. Tarde have suggested. For the citation given a
few lines above I ask permission to refer the reader to my _Journal d’un
philosophe_ (Alcan, Paris).
[84] All the works mentioned are published by F. Alcan.
BOOK REVIEWS.
EINLEITUNG IN DIE PHILOSOPHIE. By _Prof. Friedrich Paulsen_. Berlin:
Wilhelm Hertz. 1892.
Friedrich Paulsen, professor at the University of Berlin, writes this
“Introduction” not so much for connoisseurs as for students, whom it
may serve as a guide. He discusses in general outlines the various
fundamental problems of philosophy, at the same time indicating his
own position, which, in more than one respect, is very similar to the
philosophy presented in the columns of _The Monist_.
His own view, which, as he trusts, is the general tendency of modern
philosophical thought, he calls “idealistic monism.” It is opposed, on
the one hand, to supernatural dualism, and on the other hand to atomistic
materialism; the former being the traditional doctrine of the schoolmen
and of ecclesiasticism, separating body and soul, nature and God, etc.,
each into two distinct realities, which are accidentally combined,
the latter being an attempt, having its beginning in the eighteenth
century, to explain all natural phenomena in a purely mechanical way.
Paulsen adds: “The whole history of modern philosophy can be said to
be a continuous attempt to overcome this opposition.... The principle
of natural science is the _Natur-Gesetzmässigkeit_ of all events....
Modern materialism derives from this a kind of metaphysics, represents
all reality as a system of blindly operating physical forces....
Philosophy undertakes to dispel the opposition of these two doctrines;
its proposition is—and we may say that this is the main-spring of the
entire evolution of modern philosophy—_to reconcile the religious
world-conception with that of natural science_. There are many who regard
this aspiration as a sort of squaring of the circle, and we grant that
some similitude between the two may exist, for here as well as there we
can attain only to approximations, here as well as there we can never
solve the problem finally and forever. At any rate, we must recognise the
fact that the whole philosophical thought of the last three centuries has
been directed towards this goal.”
Professor Paulsen classes the various philosophies of the present time
as follows: (1) The phenomenalistic-positivistic philosophy which denies
any absolute cognition of reality, least of all in physics; the world of
objects is a world of phenomena. (2) The idealistic monistic philosophy.
To define the nature of reality as it is in itself, we must rely upon
the data of our inner experience. The intellectual-historical world is
to us the most comprehensible dénouement of reality—in fact, the only
comprehensible one. The ultimate idea to which we are led in tracing
out facts, is this: Reality, which presents itself to our senses in the
objective world as a unitary system of motions, is the appearance of a
spiritual all-being, which must be conceived as the evolution of some
unitary idea. In this respect idealistic monism agrees upon the whole
with speculative philosophy, or rather with all idealism since Plato.
The philosophy of the present time is, further on, characterised (3) as
passing from intellectualism to voluntaryism; namely, it allows the will
to have its legitimate influence in the construction of a world-view. It
is (4) evolutionistic-theological, which latter tendency meets half way
the above-mentioned idealistic monism. Both are beginning to permeate
ethics, sociology, jurisprudence, and politics. The old formalistic
methods are dropped and teleological considerations prevail. Purpose
is recognised to rule in life. Lastly (5) the philosophy of to-day
is historical. The older philosophy is mathematical-naturalistic or
abstract-rationalistic. Speculative philosophy precedes the construction
of an intellectual-historical world; it then attempts also to construct
nature historically, at least in a logico-genetic schematism. Natural
science has already pursued this course in its cosmical and biological
theories of evolution. It is apparent how these tendencies follow the old
tradition of harmonising the physical and the intellectual-historical
worlds into one unitary conception of the whole.
The book is divided into two parts, with an introduction and conclusion.
The introduction defines the relation of philosophy to mythology and to
the sciences. Philosophy cannot be separated from the sciences. Says
Paulsen: “Figuratively speaking, reality is a great riddle proposed to
man; all the various sciences determine some parts of it, and the attempt
to solve the _whole_, to find the key to the _mysterium magnum_ of being,
is called philosophy.”
The first book treats, in two chapters, of the problems of metaphysics,
viz.: the ontological problem and the cosmo-theological problem. In
the former chapter materialism, panpsychism, and the nature of the
soul are discussed, while the second chapter is devoted to atomism and
teleological theism, implying such subjects as the theory of evolution,
causality, pantheism. The second part reviews, in the first chapter, the
problems of the theory of cognition, viz.: the idealistic arguments, the
realistic views, and our knowledge of the outer world. The second chapter
presents an exposé of the problems regarding the origin of cognition as
viewed by rationalism and empiricism, paying special attention to Kant’s
formalistic realism. The conclusion is a brief treatment of some ethical
problems.
It is impossible to discuss all the details of the 444 pages of Paulsen’s
book, but a few specimen quotations from the chapter “Pantheism and
World-soul” may be welcome to our readers. Our author asks: Considering
all the tendencies of yearning and willing that appear in the innumerable
forms of reality, is there a unity of inner life corresponding to the
unity of the physical world in its universal interaction? The affirmation
of this question constitutes the idealistic pantheism.
Idealistic pantheism is to Professor Paulsen the simplest and most
obvious construction of the world possible. To other world-views, the
existence of the soul is a problem; it has even been called an “absolute
problem.” “I believe,” he adds, with great truth, “that there can be
no stronger argument against any world-view than that it regards the
existence of soul as something absolutely mysterious.” There is a power
of conviction in idealistic pantheism verified by the astonishing
agreement of the testimonies of many various thinkers in the Orient as
well as in the Occident, in antiquity no less than in modern times. (P.
243.)
Says Professor Paulsen: “The dayfly may imagine when the sun sinks that
all is at an end; light vanishes forever and the whole world is swallowed
up in darkness and death. But man who sees so many suns sink and rise
should have learned that in the infinite there are many possibilities
which he cannot see at present [p. 241]. The conception of a world-soul,
of a spiritual all-being, of a _mundus intelligibilis_ appears to our
physicists and physiologists in the same light as the conception of
anthropomorphic deities—as a childish dream. They have no need of this
hypothesis [pp. 243-244]. Du Bois-Reymond declares that a naturalist
before admitting the assumption of a world-soul should demand, ‘that
we ought to find somewhere in the world neuroglia embedded in warm
arterial blood under the proper pressure and provided with appropriate
sense-organs, ganglions, and fibres, corresponding to the intellectual
capacities of such a soul.’ An animal,” says Paulsen, “needs as a matter
of course legs to stand upon and to move with, a stomach, teeth, eyes,
and a central nervous system, but the All is not in need of this; it
needs no legs to stand upon and to move with, no stomach for alimentary
purposes, no eyes, no ears, for there is nothing to be seen or heard
outside of it, and so it can also dispense with a nervous system and a
brain.”