as that of the advent of this “significance.” Animals interpret each
other’s aspect and gestures, often indeed with a subtle precision which
to some extent we have lost. But interpretation in the intellectual
sense becomes, from our present point of view, that which makes us
really human. Our progress, our ascent, is mainly marked in this. The
root-question to ask in gauging levels of humanity is, how much can a
given man interpret or translate, of a world that teems with meaning? How
much can he truly classify and relate, how much can he rightly infer and
conclude, how much can he account for, explain, and fruitfully apply? For
after all, results must be our tests. Claims and credentials are nothing,
unless they can show this warrant; whereas truth which can use all facts
alike is the very means of survival. Man begins by doing, by acting
out impulse; then he learns to “think” little by little, observing,
questioning, pondering, testing his way onward and upward. And throughout
his patient, often painful journey, he is himself perpetually challenged.
Nature’s stimulating appeals rain upon him ceaselessly from every side;
she orders him to master all her meanings. He responds:—at first again,
“blindly,” but ever rising to higher grades of answer. Both deficiency
and error are no doubt more or less present in all mental response to
actual fact—that is, in all experience. But the essence of sanity from
the first lies in corrective power. Everywhere there is either absence of
notice, absence of response, or there is experimental activity (broadly
speaking) corrected at once; automatically or by the combined effect of
the related organic activities. For instance, in health, if in using
the hand, one finger accidentally goes astray, the coördinating muscles
promptly recall it to a “sense of duty.” We know how the same rule works
in speech and writing. Therefore, unless “voluntary” and “capricious”
(or “willing” and “wilful”) are synonyms, the advent of volition ought
not to mean the abrogation of this rule.
It is, however, obvious that “natural selection” can only operate
in cases where death or sterility is the consequence of failure in
adaptation and appropriate reaction, or segregation the consequence of
excessive variation. But the point here is, why does not a tendency
to correction, thus established, survive automatically in incipient
imagination and therefore in language? It seems almost a burlesque
of popular notions of “free will” to suppose that the moment the
death-penalty is taken off, the new-born intelligence, unique in adapting
power, should go astray persistently without let or hindrance. Many now
merely formal or even jocular customs still prevailing[93] testify, as
legacies from a remote time of danger needing to be averted, to the
strength of tendencies organised during myriads of generations under the
pressure of the struggle for life. Why does not this apply to language?
But sight gives us here perhaps the most suggestive lesson; for therein
the ascending series seems especially gradual and unbroken. The eye,
unlike the other organs of sense is an outgrowth of the very brain
itself; “the retina ... is in reality a part of the brain.”[94] We
may well therefore connect its functions specially with the thought
of significance; it is the main out-post of our central means of
interpretation.
Taking the stages in the evolution of the eye, and using a short summary
of these as a convenient means of testing the value of a conspicuous
group of metaphors, we find (1) a mere dint; (2) this dint deepening
into a pit which (3) gradually narrows. Hitherto we have had only light
and darkness; now we have an image, though but a dim one. (4) The pit is
closed by a transparent membrane; this is protection, not obstacle. (5)
The lens is formed by deposit of cuticle. Gain; increased distinctness
and increased brightness. The lens can focus a larger pencil of rays
from each part of the object to each part of the retina (corresponding
point). Finally, iris and eyelid protect the perfected eye more
completely, and enable it both to bear more light and to discern more
detail.
If mental development were in any way comparable to this physiological
development, we should expect to find (1) something which would
naturally be described as a vague or dim “impression”; gradually
deepening, becoming more distinctly localised as the stimulus became
more definitely “impressive.” (2) We should begin to find “reality” and
the “unreal”; “fact” and “fancy”; “truth” and “falsehood”; knowledge and
ignorance,—contrasted as “light” and “darkness.”[95] And this is what
actually happens.[96]
(3) Still our mental “impression” would not as yet afford us an image;
“imagination” only now comes upon the scene and begins to work (though as
yet “dimly”) upon the objects which more and more “incisively” “impress”
us. (4) Our deep “impression” is closed in one sense from direct contact
with the outward; mental vision becomes more delicately differentiated
from the emotional “touch,” however this may be specialised and
intensified. But what secludes this is transparent; it is protection, not
obstacle. We rightly speak of mental penetration; of “seeing through”
a superficial limit. The mental “lens” is formed from that “continuum”
on which the original “impression” was made. The gain now is increased
distinctness and brightness. More rays of “light,” of reality, of fact,
of truth, of knowledge, can now be focussed from each part of a given
object (or group of objects) of mental attention and interest; to each
part of the responsive “sensitive plate” of the mind. Finally we have,
so to speak, increased protective growth. The function of what are called
academic culture and scientific method, with their fastidious standards
of fitness and accuracy, may perhaps represent something not unlike that
of iris and eyelid, enabling the developing mind safely to bear intenser
illumination and also to discern more subtle detail.
It must be admitted that so far as it goes this is a significant
psychological parable. However slender its right to the position even
of a working clue to early stages of mind, it has at least better
credentials than many accepted analogies can claim. And throughout
its course what most “impresses” itself upon one’s mind is the steady
maintenance of invariable reaction to excitation, and of protection from
unfavorable stimulus.
“Mind,” as Mr. Shadworth Hodgson tells us,[97] “is a fiction of the
fancy.” Of course this is open to the retort that so is fancy a fiction
of the mind, or fiction a fancy of the mind.
Psychology is full of these see-saws of paradox, depending on
vicissitudes of linguistic usage or context. But mind is indeed a fiction
of the fancy when we endow it with a fanciful freedom from all ties with
what we call physical reality. For this, however plainly we may recognise
its genesis in our own sequences of sense-impression, does practically
through them rule us with an undeviating severity which neither fiction
nor fancy can tamper with. Therefore, if we think it absurd to suppose
that there may possibly be an undiscovered vein of authentic and really
indicative symbol or metaphor running through the arbitrary meshes of
fanciful custom or mythical term, we are in fact implying that all clues
from the original interactions of physical energy were entirely lost when
what we call “mind” issued first in language. But at all events we may be
sure that links between the “physical” and the “psychical” are everywhere
drawing closer and emerging clearer, however buried as yet in a mass of
the fantastic or the arbitrary.
It will probably be objected that we can never hope to find these. No
doubt such an attempt must mean the patient work of many lifetimes, and
at best we could not hope to lay bare the ultimate point of “origin.”
But yet it seems worth trying. For after all, even the results which
may appear so scanty in the tracing back of language, are already rich
far beyond what could have been hoped for a few generations back. And
if it were once realised that such a line of work might have practical
and far-reaching issues; if we really saw that thus some barren disputes
and speculations might cease to bar the way or to waste some precious
energies, we should be more than rewarded. In his “Dialogues of
Plato”[98] Professor Jowett warned us twenty years ago of our linguistic
dangers, repeating his warning with greater emphasis and in fresh forms
in the admirable essays added in the edition just published. He urges
that the “greatest lesson which the philosophical analysis of language
teaches us is, that we should be above language, making words our
servants and not allowing them to be our masters.” “Words,” he tells
us, “appear to be isolated but they are really the parts of an organism
which is always being reproduced. They are refined by civilisation,
harmonised by poetry, emphasised by literature, technically applied in
philosophy and art; they are used as symbols on the border-ground of
human knowledge; they receive a fresh impress from individual genius,
and come with a new force and association to every lively-minded person.
They are fixed by the simultaneous utterance of millions and yet are
always imperceptibly changing:—not the inventors of language, but writing
and speaking, and particularly great writers, or works which pass into
the hearts of nations, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, the German or English
Bible, Kant and Hegel, are the makers of them in later ages. They carry
with them the faded recollection of their own past history; the use of
a word in a striking and familiar passage, gives a complexion to its
use everywhere else, and the new use of an old and familiar phrase has
also a peculiar power over us.” Then he reminds us of what we too often
forget; that “language is an aspect of man, of nature, and of nations,
the transfiguration of the world in thought, the meeting-point of the
physical and mental sciences, and also the mirror in which they are
reflected, an effect and partly a cause of our common humanity, present
at every moment to the individual and yet having a sort of eternal or
universal nature.”[99]
Nowadays, when we feel most scathingly superior, we often announce that
we fail to see and have yet to learn something which, bringing us, it
may be, a really fresh idea, unpleasantly stirs misgiving. Let us go
on with our greeting, meaning it in good earnest. For when we honestly
and without reservation consent to learn and succeed in seeing some
things now waiting for our study we may find more than we look for,
within reach. After all it may be that we have really failed to see
and have really yet to learn the part that meaning—whether of language
or of conduct—and its change or variations (successive or simultaneous)
have had throughout the mental history of man. It may be that while
the ordinary modern metaphor like the ordinary modern analogy is a
mere rhetorical device, some few images may be found to hail from an
altogether deeper and more authentic source. Many, however ancient, are
not of course any the more valid for their antiquity. On the contrary it
is obvious that such a figure for instance as “foundation” or “basis” to
express an ultimate necessity, is a survival from days in which the earth
was supposed to require and to possess such fixed and immutable base,
while the analogies, e. g. between the human and the inorganic orders are
now reversed. We import the idea of mechanism and invariable sequence
into the former instead of exporting conscious intention into the latter;
we level down where our forefathers levelled up. And we have to beware of
the subtle atmosphere of fallacy thus introduced.
But on the other hand it is conceivable that some may be found to belong
to that as yet mysterious energy on which natural selection plays and of
which variation is the outcome or the sign. What we find in language may
thus be, as it were, not merely the “scarred and weather-worn” remnant
of geogenic strata but sometimes the meteorite, the calcined fragment of
earlier worlds of correspondence, ultra-earthly, cosmical. We have no
right to do more than ask and seek and knock at the gates of fact in such
a matter as this. But until that has been done; until at least we have
tried the experiment; have looked for grades of validity in metaphor and
analogy in the light of modern science, and still more, have recognised
clearly the powerful though hidden effects upon us of organised mental
picture brought in surreptitiously with verbal imagery, or by comparison;
we cannot know whether such an effort is worth while or no, or what
harvest it may yield. For after all, whether we like it or no, we _are_
heliocentric; the world and all that is in it is cosmically generated.
As far as science—and experience—are concerned, anything which says “I
don’t admit that origin; I claim to have produced myself or to have
been originated by and on the earth in a final sense,” must make good
its geocentric or self-creating pretensions with overwhelming cogency
and rigorous proof. We appeal to the “light” of science, of reason, of
experience, against the “darkness” of superstition, myth, and mysticism.
And we are thus appealing not to the supersensuous or supernatural
but to the ultra-satellitic. Not only beyond the earth and touch but
beyond the atmosphere and hearing is the home of the light that lightens
our small world, calling forth in us the answer of sight. And the
manifold revelations through this sense—in its mental as well as bodily
character—press upon us, with greater and greater insistence, the wealth
of our relations with the universe.
In any case, _meaning_—in the widest sense of the word—is the only value
of whatever “fact” presents itself to us. Without this, to observe and
record appearances or occurrences would become a worse than wasteful
task. Significance is the one value of all that consciousness brings, or
that intelligence deals with; the one value of life itself. But perhaps
for this very reason we have taken it too much for granted. It may need a
more definite place in psychological inquiries. It may have unsuspected
bearings.
When we have realised better what manner of gift this is, we may find
answers of which we have prematurely despaired; answers coming not from
the “mystical” point of the horizon of experience, but rather from the
neural. And let us beware here of repeating the pre-scientific error of
postulating, for figurative purposes, a flat earth on which whatever lies
beyond “horizons” never meets! But, it may be said, why not? Why should
it signify? Why, but because Man is the one not merely who thinks, or
speaks, or writes, or looks upwards, but the one who _means_, the one
who _is_ the meaning of much, and makes the meaning of all; the one who
will not tolerate the unmeaning anywhere in experience. Nothing remains
but that he should interpret rightly; that he should apprehend nature and
experience in their true sense. It is the glory of science that she puts
this aim in the forefront of her labors. She tells us that nothing can
be done without assumption and hypothesis as to the meaning of things.
But that significance belongs to the very spring to which we owe her
dauntless energy and her accumulating triumphs.
Why should it signify? The very term answers us. To “signify” is the one
test of the important. The significant is alone worth notice. We inherit
a mode of thinking which we are at last becoming able to criticise in
the light of knowledge gained by observation and experiment. But if we
persist in using, without warning to hearer or reader, imagery which has
no longer either sense or relevance, or which tends to call up a false
mental picture or to perpetuate an else decaying error, we shall to that
extent forfeit the very gifts which science brings us, and must not
complain of the obstinate persistence of ideas which needlessly divide
us. At least, let us try to realise more clearly what we are losing in
this way. The danger even thus must needs be lessened; detected bogies
become powerless for mischief; but we need not leave their ancient home
empty, swept, and garnished; stores of verified analogy are waiting to
replace them. The figurative must not indeed be pressed, still less
literalised. But we may see that it conveys a true, rather than a false
impression; and harmonises with, instead of contradicting that which we
most surely know.[100]
It may be said in a true sense that the function of the hero, the saint,
the poet, is to bring the world to _life_. But the function of the
devoted servant of science, the critical scholar, the true philosopher,
is to bring the world to _truth_, in a sense only now becoming possible.
Through the last discipline alone, in its most thorough applications, can
we hope fully to master the scope of all significance and the laws of all
its workings. Then, indeed, we may further hope to read with a fresh eye
the Significance of Life.
VICTORIA WELBY.
FOOTNOTES:
[89] _The Nineteenth Century_, April, 1886. (Reprinted in _Essays on
Controverted Questions_.)
[90] “Light affects the new-born infant at an early stage, although in
this as in other respects individual differences immediately assert
themselves. The child seems to take pleasure in an excitation of light
and tries (even on the second day after birth) to turn towards it in
order to retain it.” (_Outlines of Psychology_, H. Höffding, p. 4.)
“Under the influence of light the conversion of inorganic matter into
more complex organic matter takes place, more particularly in the green
cells of plants.” (_Ibid._, p. 315.)
“It is certainly necessary to look further back than the visual
sensations to understand the great influence of light on all creatures
that have sensuous perception.... Light is thus one of the most
elementary conditions of life.” (_Ibid._, p. 229.)
[91] It must be borne in mind that I am using psychological terms in
a merely general sense. Among many examples of such use I may quote
Sachs (_Physiology of Plants_, p. 200) and F. Darwin (_Address to
Biological Section_, Brit. Assoc, August 1891), who speaks of the plant
as “perceiving” external change, as “recognising” the vertical line,
“knowing” where the centre of the earth is, “translating” stimulus, etc.
See also Darwin’s _Forms of Flowers_, p. 90.
Again Prof. M. Foster uses the word “will” in the same general (rather
than metaphorical) sense. (_Text Book of Phys._, Part 3, pp. 1059, 1062,
1063.) Modes of reaction are thus verbally linked with consciousness, and
we must remember that all our terms for the “mental” belong first to the
“physical,” and that many are reciprocally used in the two spheres.
[92] _Natural Religion_, p. 243.
[93] See Dr. Tylor’s _Primitive Culture_, Vol. I, pp. 74-121; _Ibid._,
Vol. II, pp. 297-298, 404-428.
[94] Dr. M. Foster’s _Text-Book of Physiology_, Part 4, p. 1142.
[95] I am of course merely directing attention to the relative aptness
of metaphors of mental process familiarly in use in our own language. It
is obvious that before any inference could be made from them as to the
value of unconscious analogies of imagery, we should have to make appeal
to comparative philology and embark on a wide inquiry, for which the
English-speaking races must wait for Dr. Murray’s epoch-making Dictionary.
[96] It must be borne in mind that the whole process presupposes the
other senses or at least the temperature-sense, the “muscular sense”
and that of touch; that is, we should have “felt” simple stimuli
“emotionally” before we “saw” things intellectually. And hearing is
not now in question, though in that, too, we should find the same
character of development, i. e. the same prominence of the protective and
discriminative factors.
[97] _Brain_, June, 1891. P. 13.
[98] Vol. I, pp. 285-286, 293.
[99] The following, among many pregnant passages between which it is
difficult to choose, may be further quoted:
“The famous dispute between Nominalists and Realists would never have
been heard of, if, instead of transferring the Platonic ideas into a
crude Latin phraseology, the spirit of Plato had been truly understood
and appreciated. Upon the term substance at least two celebrated
theological controversies appear to hinge, which would not have existed,
or at least not in their present form, if we had ‘interrogated’ the word
substance, as Plato has the notions of Unity and Being. Those weeds of
philosophy have struck their roots deep into the soil, and are always
tending to reappear, sometimes in new-fangled forms; while similar words,
such as development, evolution, law, and the like, are constantly put in
the place of facts, even by writers who profess to base truth entirely
upon fact. In an unmetaphysical age there is probably more metaphysics in
the common sense (i. e. more _a priori_ assumption) than in any other,
because there is more complete unconsciousness that we are resting on
our own ideas, while we please ourselves with the conviction that we are
resting on facts. We do not consider how much metaphysics are required to
place us above metaphysics, or how difficult it is to prevent the forms
of expression which are ready made for our use from outrunning actual
observation and experiment.” (Vol. IV, p. 39-40.)
“To have the true use of words we must compare them with things; in using
them we acknowledge that they seldom give a perfect representation of our
meaning. In like manner when we interrogate our ideas we find that we are
not using them always in the sense which we supposed. (_Ibid._, p. 41.)
“Many erroneous conceptions of the mind derived from former philosophies
have found their way into language, and we with difficulty disengage
ourselves from them. Mere figures of speech have unconsciously influenced
the minds of great thinkers. Also there are some distinctions, as,
for example, that of the will and of reason, and of the moral and
intellectual faculties, which are carried further than is justified by
experience. Any separation of things which we cannot see or exactly
define, though it may be necessary, is a fertile source of error. The
division of the mind into faculties or powers or virtues is too deeply
rooted in language to be got rid of, but it gives a false impression. For
if we reflect on ourselves we see that all our faculties easily pass into
one another, and are bound together in a single mind or consciousness;
but this mental unity is apt to be concealed from us by the distinctions
of language.” (_Ibid._, p. 155.)
[100] I would gladly forward to any reader interested in a question of
such practical bearings, a small collection of _Witnesses to Ambiguity_
gathered from representative sources, and a pamphlet which was circulated
at the International Congress of Experimental Psychology, held in London,
August, 1892, giving examples of the mischievous confusions suggested
by the use, even among writers of the first rank, of the metaphor,
_Inner and Outer_. Prof. H. Sidgwick, the president, in his opening
address, expressed the opinion that very important work of this kind
remained to be done, and added, “I have much sympathy with the view
urged in a pamphlet that I have received for distribution among members
of the Congress, which illustrates forcibly the confusion caused by
one established antithesis of terms.” Professor Sully and others have
expressed themselves strongly in the same sense.
REPLY TO THE NECESSITARIANS.
REJOINDER TO DR. CARUS.
§ 1. In _The Monist_ for January, 1891, and in the number for April,
1892, I attacked the doctrine that every event is precisely determined by
law. Like everybody else, I admit that there is regularity: I go further;
I maintain the existence of law as something _real and general_. But I
hold there is no reason to think that there are general formulæ to which
the phenomena of nature _always_ conform, or to which they _precisely_
conform. At the end of my second paper, the partisans of the doctrine of
necessity were courteously challenged and besought to attempt to answer
my arguments. This, so far as I can learn, Dr. Carus alone, in _The
Monist_ of July and October, 1892, has publicly vouchsafed to do. For
this I owe him my particular thanks and a careful rejoinder.
§ 2. I number the paragraphs of his papers consecutively. The following
index shows the pages on which those paragraphs commence, and the
numbered sections of this rejoinder in which they are noticed.