much of individuality persists and passes untouched through death's
fingers? How far does the graduate life carry with it the results of
experience? I would answer: all that you ought to desire, all that
is best, all that you will want when you fully understand how little
and poor is individuality and that there is something including it
and far better. I have a strange inability, personally, to understand
the to me absurd hunger after personal identity. It appears to me a
childish obtuseness of character. The great and glorious freeness and
largeness of life, the decentralised, impersonal quality of it seems
to be unappreciated. I do not see how people can fail to understand
that personal identity is not only impossible, does not exist now
and here, but that the desire of it is the renunciation of progress.
We grow and advance only by change, only by breaking up identity and
becoming other. Think also of the lack of identity or individuality
in nature. There is no personality and individualism there, and yet
there is something that includes personality and is much more. There
is will, consciousness, intelligence, life,—but not identity or
individuality. So the life that is the heart of us invites us to leave
our little self and find a larger self. Religion is our _yes_ to that
invitation. Materialism and pessimism is the saying _no_ to it. The
immortality that is alone possible or desirable is the losing our
life, the individual identity-loving life, again to find it as the
impersonal but richer, deeper life of nature and God. God denies you
an immortality of individualism and identity because he loves you so
well that he refuses you your crude childish desire in order to offer
you something infinitely better. People do not seem to see how narrow,
small, and partial is the dissociate speck of the individual, and
that as an individual progresses in all the virtues of character he
evermore becomes proportionally less individual and less centralised,
always more like the divine prototype of his impersonal father, Life.
The love of individualism is the love of imperfection. This may to
some seem a hard doctrine. It is not perhaps an easy task for the
butterfly to break its way out through the million-fold bonds of its
cocoon, but when risen into the large air and sunshine does it regret
the birth-struggle? They who think they are being cheated of reality
for a metaphysic illusion will find in breaking through the bonds of
flesh that they also have brought with them splendid wings for rising
in the no less real but rarer air of spiritual trust in life. It is
not that we love less the thousand ties of flesh, home and kindred,
but that in recognising the paternity and fraternity of all life, we
find love commensurate with that life. I do not think there was any
cold stony harshness in the face of Jesus when he uttered those most
profoundly significant of all words, "Who is my mother, and who are
my brethren? Whosoever shall do the will of my Father, the same is my
brother, and sister, and mother." What a recall to the common life of
the spirit! What unity with the common life based upon loving obedience
to the will of the Father. What a wonderful rebuke of the love of
individualism. He did not love his mother less but humanity more. The
more we rise into that impersonal atmosphere the more are we careless
of the fate of personal identity. The composite photograph shows the
fundamental and enduring quality, the average feature. In a certain
sense life and history are taking humanity's composite photograph;
but, inordinately-loving individualism, each sitter conceitedly
demands that his own picture be left untouched and unblurred by that
of the others, and that his poor little portrait shall stand alone
and forever—precisely what the divine photographer does not wish and
will not permit. Obstinacy persists and God smashes the negative to
the ground with the unanswerable argument called death. Because it
is more than metaphor that in any ways your body may be likened unto
a photographer's negative: created, for example, by the in-flashing
of a heavenly ray of light among the highly unstable chemicals of
matter; useless, except as an intermediate step to a clearer showing
of the character; black and invisible unless shone through by the pure
light of life and love; fragile as glass,—and lastly the poor, weak,
shadowy, dead counterfeit of a throbbing, marvellous, living reality.
The hunger for an immortality of the body, of the senses, the lust of
immortality, is, in empty fatuousness, only comparable to the mania of
a crazy photographer interested only in his negatives, and who never
"develops" one, or to the foolishness that values photographs more than
the friends themselves. If we once get our spiritual eye fixed upon the
deep reality and unity hidden by the Maia-veilings of individuality
and flesh, the cravings of our weak hearts for eternal continuance of
our little bundle of littlenesses, would fall away from us as softly
as the wayward longings of childhood. We could then see that it is the
quality of all life, the progressive purity, power, and increase of
life in the abstract, that become all-important. Religion would become
the love and veneration of Life the Father of us; morality the cheerful
obedience of the individual to that Father; Heaven the re-entrance of
the individual life into the great unity. Much of the old religion
was irreligious; its God a far-away dead abstraction, not a living,
ever-present love; its immortality was at heart a desire for death,
its spiritualism at heart a barbaric materialism. To this death of
faith and irreligious religion, comes the sympathetic study and love
of nature—that is, science—and reveals to us the opulence of life,
the infinity of intellect in nature, the inexhaustibleness of her
resources and of her diversity, her beauty, and her splendor. The old
materialistic degradation of religion forefelt its doom would come from
this spiritualistic revivification, and the devotees cried out against
science as atheistic. And science found some foolish enemies in her own
camp who, misreading their divine book, joined in the cry—"Nothing
but mechanics." It was a dismal short-lived croak. We now see that not
only are science and her workers religious, but without scientific
knowledge there can be no adequate idea or practice of religion. You
can't love God unless you love and know what he is doing in this
universe. The man who in a walk goes neglectfully and obliviously by a
million mysteries and wonders that God has been toiling to eliminate
for ages,—such a man cannot lay much claim to God's friendship. If
we love our friend, we have some interest in the deepest concern of
his life. The foolishest of all fears is the fear that science is
somehow going to destroy all good things of faith and life. In truth
it reveals all good things. It demonstrates and manifests both God and
immortality,—God as the Father of all life, immortality as the surety
of the conservation and non-wastage of that life. Much of the fear of
science, is as I have said the fear of the old materialistic religion
in presence of the larger faith that burns up its beloved errors. They
who had been promised and had argued themselves into a groundless
belief in the value and immortality of a bundle of sensual appetites,
selfish desires, and imperfections saw far in advance that any large
study of life and nature would dash their wretched faith to atoms. And
science has overridden this unfaithful faith. "He that soweth to his
flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the
Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." This is as true
scientifically as it is true morally and religiously.
It requires but a little study of neurology and psychology to give
demonstration to this truth. The products of organisation die with
disorganisation. Most, if not all, of what people mean by individuality
and personal identity is a product of organisation, is an accident
of incarnation. Children are similar to each other; they are lovable
partly because idiosyncrasy and individualism haven't yet developed.
As we grow older we cultivate individuality, until the very old are
usually angular, cranky, individual with a vengeance! Death, thank
heaven, is the end of that, the certainty of a non-eternalising of the
imperfect. Birth is a new trial. Incarnation and reincarnation are
the ever-renewed work of Life. Through the laws of heredity, through
physiology, sociology, and biology, science is tirelessly illustrating
to us how all life holds together, how individualism is valueless,
and sacrificed to the common weal. There is no escape, sensual or
supersensual from the world's great common life. The old selfish dream
of a heaven apart from incarnation, from doing and becoming was a
pitiful mistake. You cannot clutch your cake of happiness and like a
spoiled child run into the attic of heaven to eat it alone. Life will
see to it that you do not slip off. And if you have been born again of
the spirit you will have no such desire, but will beg for kindred work
upon the old earth-home.
In the meantime the conclusion is clear: to love and aid the work of
our master Life we need not wait for death. We may not seek our own
salvation; it is no matter whether you and I are saved or not. The
reincarnation of life is our work here and now. It took you twenty
years to fashion out of a microscopically-small speck of unorganised
protoplasm your body and brain. Within us we are to keep that
organisation from cramping and binding the life,—keep life as large
and free and pliant as possible. Outside of us the incarnation goes on
as well, and every person you influence either for good or for ill,
thus by the fact, becomes a product of your incarnating work. Every
day you have a hundred opportunities to give, without lessening your
own supply, some of your own life, to increase the quantity and to
elevate the quality of the general stock of the world's life. Help the
young, they inherit the world and will use it well or ill according
to your teaching and example. Stop cruelty to animals, they are your
brothers, filled with the same life as your own; fight the political
ruin we are preparing for ourselves by partisanship, bribery, and
class-legislation; discourage war and intemperance and lessen the
tyranny of the strong and wealthy. Wage a ceaseless war to the death
against luxury, the poison that is eating and rotting the hearts of all
of us; love trees, meadows, clear brooks, the mountains and silences
of Nature. Love, not so much your own or another's individual life, as
Life itself. There is otherwise no immortality.
The divine story tells us that after measureless suffering and
self-purification, Buddha had gained the right to enter Nirvana. With
compassion filling his heart he put his merited reward aside and
resolved to remain without to teach and to help until every child of
earth should have become his disciple, and until every disciple should
have entered Nirvana before him. Such must be the resolve of every true
lover of life and of every right seeker after immortality.
GEORGE M. GOULD.
SOME QUESTIONS OF PSYCHO-PHYSICS.[80]
SENSATIONS AND THE ELEMENTS OF REALITY.
[80] This article is the substance of a private communication
from Prof. Ernst Mach to the Editor of _The Monist_—published
in the present form with Prof. Mach's consent. Translated from
Professor Mach's MS. by Thomas J. McCormack.
I have read Dr. Carus's article "Feeling and Motion"[81] with care,
and have also perused Clifford's essay on "The Nature of Things
in Themselves." Let me attempt to present the points in which our
agreements and differences consist.
[81] _The Open Court_, Nos. 153 and 154.
To begin with, I state with pleasure that the monistic tendency of both
endeavors is in the direction that appears to me to be the true one and
that is most likely to afford elucidation. Consequently, agreement in
matters of detail is of subordinate importance and is only a question
of time.
Let me cite, first, a few passages from "Feeling and Motion" to which I
give my full assent. They are the following:
"The interconvertibility of motion and feeling is an error."
"Feeling is real as much as are matter and motion."
"Its reality accordingly is most immediate and direct, so that it would
be ridiculous to doubt it."
"Man's method of understanding the process of nature is that of
abstraction."
"Every concept is formed for some purpose, and every concept by serving
one purpose necessarily becomes one-sided.... We must bear in mind....
(1) the purpose it has to serve, and (2) that the totality of things
from which abstractions can be made is one indivisible whole.... We
must not imagine that the one side only is true reality."
Some years ago I should also have agreed _in toto_ with the passages
in which Dr. Carus speaks of the animation of all nature, and of the
feeling that accompanies _every_ motion. To-day this form of expression
would not, it seems to me, correctly characterise the matter. If I were
now prematurely to advance a definitive formulation, I should fear
lest, so far as myself and perhaps others are concerned, important
aspects might remain concealed.
I shall next cite the passages with respect to which I do not agree
with Dr. Carus, and then I shall endeavor to state wherein our
differences of opinion consist:
"All series _A B C_ ... are _accompanied_ by α β γ." [The _A B C_ ...
series of Dr. Carus has a different meaning from mine.]
"We may represent _motion_ or we may represent _mind_ as the basis of
the world, or we may conceive them as being on equal terms." [I cannot
agree with a co-ordination of "motion" and "mind."]
"They [viz. feeling and motion] are as inseparable as are the two sides
of a sheet of paper." [Fechner says, "As inseparable as the concave
and convex sides of the same circle." This appears to me an inapposite
simile in so far as a _duality_ is predicated where in my view a
_unity_ alone exists.]
My view of the problem is as follows: We have colors, sounds,
pressures, and so forth (_A B C_ ...), which, as simplest component
parts, make up the world. In addition thereto, percepts (resolvable
into α β γ ...), feelings, and so forth, more or less composite. How α
β γ ... differ from _A B C_ ... I will not define here, for I do not
know exactly. It is enough for the time being that they do differ from
_A B C_ ..., as the latter do from one another. And let us now leave α
β γ ... entirely out of account and put ourselves in a time and state
in which there are only _A B C_. Now I say, that if I see a tree with
green leaves (_A_), with a hard (_B_), gray (_C_) trunk, that _A B C_
are _elements_ of the world. I say _elements_—and not sensations,
also not motions—because it is not my purpose at this place to arrive
at either a psychological or a physiological or a physical _theory_,
but to proceed _descriptively_. The every-day man, indeed, takes
greenness, grayness, hardness, or complexes thereof it may be, for
constituent parts of the world—for he does not trouble himself about a
psychologico-physiological theory—and does not learn moreover anything
more about the world; from his point of view he is right. Similarly,
for the descriptive physicist the question is also one merely of the
dependencies of _A B C_ ... on one another; for him too _A B C_ ..., or
complexes thereof, are and remain constituent parts of the world.
If, however, I close my eye (_K_), withdraw my feeling hand (_L_), _A
B C_ ... disappear. If I contemplate _A B C_ ... in _this_ dependence
they are my _sensations_. This is but a special point of view within
the first.
According to my conception, therefore, _the same A B C_ ... is both
element of the _world_ (the "outer" world, namely) and element of
_feeling_.
The question how feeling arises out of the physical element has for me
no significance, since both are _one and the same_. The parallelism
stands to reason, since each is parallel to itself. It is not _two_
sides of the same paper (which latter is invested with a metaphysical
rôle in the simile), but simply the _same_ thing.
A perfect physics could strive to accomplish nothing more than to
make us familiar beforehand with whatever it were possible for us
to come across _sensorily_; that is, we should have knowledge of
the interrelation of _A B C_. A perfect psychology would supply
the interrelation of α β γ. Leaving out of account the theoretical
intermediaries of physics—physiology and psychology—questions like
"How does feeling arise from motion" would never come up. However, the
artificial inventions of a physical or psychological theory, must not
be introduced into a general discussion of this character—for they are
necessarily "one-sided."
I may now set forth my differing point of view with regard to the idea
of "motion." A motion is either perceptible by the senses, as the
displacing of a chair in a room or the vibration of a string, or it
is only supplied, added (hypothetical), like the oscillation of the
ether, the motion of molecules and atoms, and so forth. In the first
instance the motion is _composed_ of _A B C_ ..., it is itself merely
a certain relation between _A B C_ ..., and plays therefore in the
discussion now in hand no especial part. In the second instance the
hypothetical motion, under especially favorable circumstances, can
become perceptible by the senses. In which case the first instance
recurs. As long as this is not the case, or in circumstances in
which this _can never happen_ (the case of the motions of atoms and
molecules), we have to do with a _noumenon_, that is, a mere mental
auxiliary, an artificial expedient, the purpose of which is solely to
indicate, to represent, after the fashion of a model, the connection
between _A B C_ ..., to make it more familiar to us. It is a thing
of thought, an entity of the mind (α β γ ...). I cannot believe that
this is to be co-ordinated with _A B C_ ... in the same way as _A B C_
... among each other are. Putting together motion and feeling goes as
much against me as would say the co-ordination of numbers and colors.
Perhaps I stand quite alone in this, for physicists have accustomed us
to regard the motions of atoms as "more real" than the green of trees.
In the latter I see a (sensory) fact, in the former a _Gedankending_, a
thing of thought. The billions of ether-vibrations which the physicist
for his special purposes _mentally annexes_ to the green, are not to be
co-ordinated with the green, which is given immediately.
When a piece of zinc and a piece of copper, united by a wire, are
dipped in sulphuric acid and deflect a magnetic needle in the vicinity
of the wire, the unprepossessed _discoverer_ of the fact discerns
naught of motion beyond the deflection of the needle and the diffusion
in the fluid. Everything reverts to certain combinations of _A B
C_. Electricity is a thing of thought, a mental adjunct; its motion
another; its magnetic field still another. All these noumena are
implements of physical science, contrived for very special purposes.
They are discarded, cast aside, when the interconnection of _A B C_ ...
has become familiar; for _this last_ is the very gist of the affair.
The implement is not of the same _dignity_, or reality, as _A B C_ ...,
and must not be placed in the same category, must not be co-ordinated
with it where general considerations are involved to which physics with
its special objects does not extend.
The green (_A_) of the tree is not only adjoined to the presence of
the sun (_B_), but also to the deflection of the needle (_X_), by my
optic nerve. Familiarising intermediary connections to-day by motions,
to-morrow by some other means, is the business of the special sciences,
and can only disturb and obscure a general discussion. What should we
say of a cosmology from a pharmaceutical point of view? In principle,
this very thing is done, it seems to me, when physical augers and saws
are employed in all fields of work, as is universally the case.
So much for the juxtaposition of motion and feeling. Perhaps I alone am
right, perhaps I alone am wrong.
* * * * *
According to my conception accordingly "material" processes are not
"_accompanied_" by "feelings," but are _the same_ (_A B C_ ...); only
the relation in which we consider them makes them at one time physical
elements and at another time feelings.
The relation in which "percepts" and "feelings" as distinguished
from "sensations" stand to sensations, is not clear to me. I am
much inclined to regard these feelings as a species of sensation
(co-ordinate with sensations). How the representative percepts of
imagination and memory are connected with sensations, what relation
they bear to them, I dare venture no opinion. The relation of α β γ ...
to _A B C_ ... is the point regarding which I do not feel sufficiently
sure. Regarding _A B C_ ... (world of sense in its objective and
subjective significance) I believe I am clear.
Dr. Carus in a private letter to me says: "It almost seems as if you
transform all _A B C_ ... series into the corresponding α β γ ...
series."
This is not the case. I designate by α β γ ... representative percepts
(not sensations), and say simply that _A B C_ ..., _the same A B
C_ ..., play, according to circumstances, now the rôle of physical
elements, now the role of sensations. I call _A B C_ ..., therefore,
_elements_, pure and simple.
Mine is not the Berkeleian point of view. The latter has been
mistakenly attributed to me time and again, the separation that I make
of _A B C_ ... from α β γ ... not having been sharply discriminated
and it not having been borne in mind that I call _A B C_ ... alone
_sensations_, not however α β γ. Clifford, with his "mind-stuff,"
approaches very near to Berkeley.
Monism, as yet, I cannot thoroughly _follow out_; because I am lacking
in clearness with regard to the relation of α β γ ... to _A B C_ ...,
which can only be supplied by further physiologico-psychological
investigations; but I believe that the first step towards a
competent monism lies in the assertion that the same _A B C_ ...
are both physical and psychical elements. As regards the psychical
"accompanying" the physical, the question How? continually recurs.
Either they are two incompatible things (Dubois) or their relation is
bound up in a third thing ("thing-of-itself"). By viewing the matter
as _two sides_ of the same thing, not much more is gained, to my mind,
than a momentary satisfaction.
All non-monistic points of view are, in my opinion, artificial
constructions, which arise by investing with very far-reaching
extensions of meaning psychological or physical special-conceptions,
which have a limited value, applicable only within the department in
question for the elucidation of the facts of that department. The
overvaluing of psychological conceptions leads to spiritualistic
systems, the overrating of physical conceptions to materialistic
systems. Naturally in the latter systems _motion_ plays a great rôle;
for through a mistaken conception of the _principle of energy_, people
have come to believe that everything in physics can be explained by
motion. But explanations by motions have, as a matter of fact, nothing
to do with the principle of energy. The majority of physicists, it is
true, believe and disseminate this opinion. If, when a physicist speaks
of motion and nothing but motion, the question is asked _What_ moves?
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred nothing palpable or demonstrable
is brought forward in answer, but hypothetical atoms or hypothetical
fluids are adduced which execute motions still more hypothetical.
Even in the domain of physics itself, the business of which is to
proceed from the sensory and to return to the sensory, I can regard
these "motions" at best only as provisorily tolerated intermediaries
of _thoughts_, that have no right to be ranked on equal terms with
reality, let alone placed above it.
Still less can I allow "motion" the right to create a world-problem
where none exists, and thereby to conceal the real point of attack in
the investigation of reality.
I may add that some years ago I took exactly Dr. Carus's point of view,
which I presented in a lecture on Psycho-physics published in 1863 in
the _Oesterreichische Zeitschrift für praktische Heilkunde_.
With regard to Clifford I may make the following remarks. The notion
"eject" pleases me very much. I have long had the idea in mind, but
have not defined it because its limitation is not clear to me; nor
has Clifford given me any light on the subject. Is the representation
in us of the material nature of things we _cannot lay hold of_ (the
sun, the moon) to be called an eject? Are the abstract concepts of
physical hypotheses, which in their very nature can never become
sense-affective, ejects? Such things are abstract in widely differing
degrees, and are bound up with the sensory in very unequal proportions;
the impossibility of becoming sense-affective is partly absolute,
partly only relative, that is, it exists for the time being.
I do not at all agree with Clifford's notion "mind-stuff"; in this I
wholly concur with Dr. Carus. It is not unbiased philosophising to come
down in the end to a _psychological_ notion as _comprehensive of the
world_,—a notion on the face of it pre-eminently one-sided.
* * * * *
In connection with the subject under discussion, I might incidentally
make mention of Mr. Charles S. Peirce's article "The Architecture
of Theories" in the last number of _The Monist_. One Mr. Peirce, a
mathematician,[82] has made some very valuable investigations, similar
to Grassmann's. This author's view of the evolution of natural laws
does not strike me as so singular. If predominance be given in our
conception of the world to the spiritualistic or psychical aspect, the
laws of nature may be regarded as tremendous phenomena of memory; as I
attempted some years ago to set forth in a lecture of mine. The idea
of their evolution is then very near at hand. Of course I do not think
that for the time being we can gain much light from this view. For
the present the "scientific method" in the grooves of which we have
moved for three hundred years, continues to be the most fruitful. It is
advisable to be very cautious in advancing beyond this. It is for this
reason also that I do not think very much of the fruitfulness of the
idea that the entire world is animated and feeling. We have as yet too
little insight into the psychical, and still less into the connection
between brain-organisation and brain-function and psychical process.
Of what advantage to us is the assumption of feeling in cells in which
every clue is missing by which to proceed from the psychical assumed
to the physical connected with it. It seems to me that the physical
and psychical investigation of sensations is for the time being the
only thing that can be entered upon with any prospect of accomplishing
anything. In this we shall first learn the proper formulation of
questions that are to form the subject of further investigations.
[82] Mr. Benjamin Peirce, father of Mr. Charles S. Peirce.—ED.
ERNST MACH.
SOME QUESTIONS OF PSYCHO-PHYSICS.
FEELINGS AND THE ELEMENTS OF FEELINGS.
EXPOSITION.
When a man who has done so much valuable work for the progress of
science as Professor Ernst Mach finds it necessary to change the
position he has taken,—a position which has appeared to many thinkers
as a satisfactory solution of the most intricate problem in the
philosophical and psycho-physical field,—there must exist in the
solution some difficulty which has either been overlooked or at least
too little appreciated. If there is a flaw in it, I wish it to be
exposed. And convinced that its discovery must be of general interest,
I take pleasure in publishing Professor Mach's criticism of the view
which I have defended in a former article of mine.