The Attempt to Eliminate Mind
WHAT, it may be asked, were our biologists really aiming at?—for men like
Professor Huxley do not serve protoplasm for nought. They wanted a good
many things, some of them more righteous than others, but all
intelligible. Among the more lawful of their desires was a craving after
a monistic conception of the universe. We all desire this; who can turn
his thoughts to these matters at all and not instinctively lean towards
the old conception of one supreme and ultimate essence as the source from
which all things proceed and have proceeded, both now and ever? The most
striking and apparently most stable theory of the last quarter of a
century had been Sir William Grove’s theory of the conservation of
energy; and yet wherein is there any substantial difference between this
recent outcome of modern amateur, and hence most sincere,
science—pointing as it does to an imperishable, and as such unchangeable,
and as such, again, for ever unknowable underlying substance the modes of
which alone change—wherein, except in mere verbal costume, does this
differ from the conclusions arrived at by the psalmist?
“Of old,” he exclaims, “hast Thou laid the foundation of the earth; and
the heavens are the work of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou shalt
endure; yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt
Thou change them and they shall be changed; but Thou art the same, and
Thy years shall have no end.” {135a}
I know not what theologians may think of this passage, but from a
scientific point of view it is unassailable. So again, “O Lord,” he
exclaims, “Thou hast searched me out, and known me: Thou knowest my
down-sitting and mine up-rising; Thou understandest my thoughts long
before. Thou art about my path, and about my bed: and spiest out all my
ways. For lo, there is not a word in my tongue but Thou, O Lord, knowest
it altogether . . . Whither shall I go, then, from Thy Spirit? Or
whither shall I go, then, from Thy presence? If I climb up into heaven
Thou art there: if I go down to hell, Thou art there also. If I take the
wings of the morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea, even
there also shall Thy hand lead me and Thy right hand shall hold me. If I
say, Peradventure the darkness shall cover me, then shall my night be
turned to day. Yea, the darkness is no darkness with Thee, but . . . the
darkness and light to Thee are both alike.” {136a}
What convention or short cut can symbolise for us the results of laboured
and complicated chains of reasoning or bring them more aptly and
concisely home to us than the one supplied long since by the word God?
What can approach more nearly to a rendering of that which cannot be
rendered—the idea of an essence omnipresent in all things at all times
everywhere in sky and earth and sea; ever changing, yet the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever; the ineffable contradiction in terms
whose presence none can either ever enter, or ever escape? Or rather,
what convention would have been more apt if it had not been lost sight of
as a convention and come to be regarded as an idea in actual
correspondence with a more or less knowable reality? A convention was
converted into a fetish, and now that its worthlessness as a fetish is
being generally felt, its great value as a hieroglyph or convention is in
danger of being lost sight of. No doubt the psalmist was seeking for Sir
William Grove’s conception, if haply he might feel after it and find it,
and assuredly it is not far from every one of us. But the course of true
philosophy never did run smooth; no sooner have we fairly grasped the
conception of a single eternal and for ever unknowable underlying
substance, then we are faced by mind and matter. Long-standing ideas and
current language alike lead us to see these as distinct things—mind being
still commonly regarded as something that acts on body from without as
the wind blows upon a leaf, and as no less an actual entity than the
body. Neither body nor mind seems less essential to our existence than
the other; not only do we feel this as regards our own existence, but we
feel it also as pervading the whole world of life; everywhere we see body
and mind working together towards results that must be ascribed equally
to both; but they are two, not one; if, then, we are to have our monistic
conception, it would seem as though one of these must yield to the other;
which, therefore, is it to be?
This is a very old question. Some, from time immemorial, have tried to
get rid of matter by reducing it to a mere concept of the mind, and their
followers have arrived at conclusions that may be logically irrefragable,
but are as far removed from common sense as they are in accord with
logic; at any rate they have failed to satisfy, and matter is no nearer
being got rid of now than it was when the discussion first began.
Others, again, have tried materialism, have declared the causative action
of both thought and feeling to be deceptive, and posit matter obeying
fixed laws of which thought and feeling must be admitted as concomitants,
but with which they have no causal connection. The same thing has
happened to these men as to their opponents; they made out an excellent
case on paper, but thought and feeling still remain the mainsprings of
action that they have been always held to be. We still say, “I gave him
£5 because I felt pleased with him, and thought he would like it;” or, “I
knocked him down because I felt angry, and thought I would teach him
better manners.” Omnipresent life and mind with appearances of brute
non-livingness—which appearances are deceptive; this is one view.
Omnipresent non-livingness or mechanism with appearances as though the
mechanism were guided and controlled by thought—which appearances are
deceptive; this is the other. Between these two views the slaves of
logic have oscillated for centuries, and to all appearance will continue
to oscillate for centuries more.
People who think—as against those who feel and act—want hard and fast
lines—without which, indeed, they cannot think at all; these lines are as
it were steps cut on a slope of ice without which there would be no
descending it. When we have begun to travel the downward path of
thought, we ask ourselves questions about life and death, ego and non
ego, object and subject, necessity and free will, and other kindred
subjects. We want to know where we are, and in the hope of simplifying
matters, strip, as it were, each subject to the skin, and finding that
even this has not freed it from all extraneous matter, flay it alive in
the hope that if we grub down deep enough we shall come upon it in its
pure unalloyed state free from all inconvenient complication through
intermixture with anything alien to itself. Then, indeed, we can docket
it, and pigeon-hole it for what it is; but what can we do with it till we
have got it pure? We want to account for things, which means that we
want to know to which of the various accounts opened in our mental ledger
we ought to carry them—and how can we do this if we admit a phenomenon to
be neither one thing nor the other, but to belong to half-a-dozen
different accounts in proportions which often cannot even approximately
be determined? If we are to keep accounts we must keep them in
reasonable compass; and if keeping them within reasonable compass
involves something of a Procrustean arrangement, we may regret it, but
cannot help it; having set up as thinkers we have got to think, and must
adhere to the only conditions under which thought is possible; life,
therefore, must be life, all life, and nothing but life, and so with
death, free will, necessity, design, and everything else. This, at
least, is how philosophers must think concerning them in theory; in
practice, however, not even John Stuart Mill himself could eliminate all
taint of its opposite from any one of these things, any more than Lady
Macbeth could clear her hand of blood; indeed, the more nearly we think
we have succeeded the more certain are we to find ourselves ere long
mocked and baffled; and this, I take it, is what our biologists began in
the autumn of 1879 to discover had happened to themselves.
For some years they had been trying to get rid of feeling, consciousness,
and mind generally, from active participation in the evolution of the
universe. They admitted, indeed, that feeling and consciousness attend
the working of the world’s gear, as noise attends the working of a
steam-engine, but they would not allow that consciousness produced more
effect in the working of the world than noise on that of the
steam-engine. Feeling and noise were alike accidental unessential
adjuncts and nothing more. Incredible as it may seem to those who are
happy enough not to know that this attempt is an old one, they were
trying to reduce the world to the level of a piece of unerring though
sentient mechanism. Men and animals must be allowed to feel and even to
reflect; this much must be conceded, but granted that they do, still (so,
at least, it was contended) it has no effect upon the result; it does not
matter as far as this is concerned whether they feel and think or not;
everything would go on exactly as it does and always has done, though
neither man nor beast knew nor felt anything at all. It is only by
maintaining things like this that people will get pensions out of the
British public.
Some such position as this is a _sine quâ non_ for the Neo-Darwinistic
doctrine of natural selection, which, as Von Hartmann justly observes,
involves an essentially mechanical mindless conception of the universe;
to natural selection’s door, therefore, the blame of the whole movement
in favour of mechanism must be justly laid. It was natural that those
who had been foremost in preaching mindless designless luck as the main
means of organic modification, should lend themselves with alacrity to
the task of getting rid of thought and feeling from all share in the
direction and governance of the world. Professor Huxley, as usual, was
among the foremost in this good work, and whether influenced by Hobbes,
or Descartes, or Mr. Spalding, or even by the machine chapters in
“Erewhon” which were still recent, I do not know, led off with his
article “On the hypothesis that animals are automata” (which it may be
observed is the exact converse of the hypothesis that automata are
animated) in the _Fortnightly Review_ for November 1874. Professor
Huxley did not say outright that men and women were just as living and
just as dead as their own watches, but this was what his article came to
in substance. The conclusion arrived at was that animals were automata;
true, they were probably sentient, still they were automata pure and
simple, mere sentient pieces of exceedingly elaborate clockwork, and
nothing more.
“Professor Huxley,” says Mr. Romanes, in his Rede Lecture for 1885,
{140a} “argues by way of perfectly logical deduction from this statement,
that thought and feeling have nothing to do with determining action; they
are merely the bye-products of cerebration, or, as he expresses it, the
indices of changes which are going on in the brain. Under this view we
are all what he terms conscious automata, or machines which happen, as it
were by chance, to be conscious of some of their own movements. But the
consciousness is altogether adventitious, and bears the same ineffectual
relation to the activity of the brain as a steam whistle bears to the
activity of a locomotive, or the striking of a clock to the time-keeping
adjustments of the clockwork. Here, again, we meet with an echo of
Hobbes, who opens his work on the commonwealth with these words:—
“‘Nature, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by the
_art_ of man, as in many other things, in this also imitated, that it can
make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the
beginning whereof is in the principal part within; why may we not say
that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as
doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the _heart_ but a
spring, and the _nerves_ but so many _strings_; and the _joints_ but so
many _wheels_ giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by
the artificer?’
“Now this theory of conscious automatism is not merely a legitimate
outcome of the theory that nervous changes are the causes of mental
changes, but it is logically the only possible outcome. Nor do I see any
way in which this theory can be fought on grounds of physiology.”
In passing, I may say the theory that living beings are conscious
machines, can be fought just as much and just as little as the theory
that machines are unconscious living beings; everything that goes to
prove either of these propositions goes just as well to prove the other
also. But I have perhaps already said as much as is necessary on this
head; the main point with which I am concerned is the fact that Professor
Huxley was trying to expel consciousness and sentience from any causative
action in the working of the universe. In the following month appeared
the late Professor Clifford’s hardly less outspoken article, “Body and
Mind,” to the same effect, also in the _Fortnightly Review_, then edited
by Mr. John Morley. Perhaps this view attained its frankest expression
in an article by the late Mr. Spalding, which appeared in _Nature_,
August 2, 1877; the following extracts will show that Mr. Spalding must
be credited with not playing fast and loose with his own conclusions, and
knew both how to think a thing out to its extreme consequences, and how
to put those consequences clearly before his readers. Mr. Spalding
said:—
“Against Mr. Lewes’s proposition that the movements of living beings are
prompted and guided by feeling, I urged that the amount and direction of
every nervous discharge must depend solely on physical conditions. And I
contended that to see this clearly is to see that when we speak of
movement being guided by feeling, we use the language of a less advanced
stage of enlightenment. This view has since occupied a good deal of
attention. Under the name of automatism it has been advocated by
Professor Huxley, and with firmer logic by Professor Clifford. In the
minds of our savage ancestors feeling was the source of all movement . . .
Using the word feeling in its ordinary sense . . . _we assert not only
that no evidence can be given that feeling ever does guide or prompt
action_, _but that the process of its doing so is inconceivable_.
(Italics mine.) How can we picture to ourselves a state of consciousness
putting in motion any particle of matter, large or small? Puss, while
dozing before the fire, hears a light rustle in the corner, and darts
towards the spot. What has happened? Certain sound-waves have reached
the ear, a series of physical changes have taken place within the
organism, special groups of muscles have been called into play, and the
body of the cat has changed its position on the floor. Is it asserted
that this chain of physical changes is not at all points complete and
sufficient in itself?”
I have been led to turn to this article of Mr. Spalding’s by Mr. Stewart
Duncan, who, in his “Conscious Matter,” {142a} quotes the latter part of
the foregoing extract. Mr. Duncan goes on to quote passages from
Professor Tyndall’s utterances of about the same date which show that he
too took much the same line—namely, that there is no causative connection
between mental and physical processes; from this it is obvious he must
have supposed that physical processes would go on just as well if there
were no accompaniment of feeling and consciousness at all.
I have said enough to show that in the decade, roughly, between 1870 and
1880 the set of opinion among our leading biologists was strongly against
mind, as having in any way influenced the development of animal and
vegetable life, and it is not likely to be denied that the prominence
which the mindless theory of natural selection had assumed in men’s
thoughts since 1860 was one of the chief reasons, if not the chief, for
the turn opinion was taking. Our leading biologists had staked so
heavily upon natural selection from among fortuitous variations that they
would have been more than human if they had not caught at everything that
seemed to give it colour and support. It was while this mechanical fit
was upon them, and in the closest connection with it, that the protoplasm
boom developed. It was doubtless felt that if the public could be got to
dislodge life, consciousness, and mind from any considerable part of the
body, it would be no hard matter to dislodge it, presently, from the
remainder; on this the deceptiveness of mind as a causative agent, and
the sufficiency of a purely automatic conception of the universe, as of
something that will work if a penny be dropped into the box, would be
proved to demonstration. It would be proved from the side of mind by
considerations derivable from automatic and unconscious action where mind
_ex hypothesi_ was not, but where action went on as well or better
without it than with it; it would be proved from the side of body by what
they would doubtless call the “most careful and exhaustive” examination
of the body itself by the aid of appliances more ample than had ever
before been within the reach of man.
This was all very well, but for its success one thing was a _sine quâ
non_—I mean the dislodgment must be thorough; the key must be got clean
of even the smallest trace of blood, for unless this could be done all
the argument went to the profit not of the mechanism, with which, for
some reason or other, they were so much enamoured, but of the soul and
design, the ideas which of all others were most distasteful to them.
They shut their eyes to this for a long time, but in the end appear to
have seen that if they were in search of an absolute living and absolute
non-living, the path along which they were travelling would never lead
them to it. They were driving life up into a corner, but they were not
eliminating it, and, moreover, at the very moment of their thinking they
had hedged it in and could throw their salt upon it, it flew mockingly
over their heads and perched upon the place of all others where they were
most scandalised to see it—I mean upon machines in use. So they retired
sulkily to their tents baffled but not ashamed.
* * * * *
Some months subsequent to the completion of the foregoing chapter, and
indeed just as this book is on the point of leaving my hands, there
appears in _Nature_ {144a} a letter from the Duke of Argyll, which shows
that he too is impressed with the conviction expressed above—I mean that
the real object our men of science have lately had in view has been the
getting rid of mind from among the causes of evolution. The Duke says:—
“The violence with which false interpretations were put upon this theory
(natural selection) and a function was assigned to it which it could
never fulfil, will some day be recognised as one of the least creditable
episodes in the history of science. With a curious perversity it was the
weakest elements in the theory which were seized upon as the most
valuable, particularly the part assigned to blind chance in the
occurrence of variations. This was valued not for its scientific
truth,—for it could pretend to none,—but because of its assumed bearing
upon another field of thought and the weapon it afforded for expelling
mind from the causes of evolution.”
The Duke, speaking of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s two articles in the
_Nineteenth Century_ for April and May, 1886, to which I have already
called attention, continues:—
“In these two articles we have for the first time an avowed and definite
declaration against some of the leading ideas on which the mechanical
philosophy depends; and yet the caution, and almost timidity, with which
a man so eminent approaches the announcement of conclusions of the most
self-evident truth is a most curious proof of the reign of terror which
has come to be established.”
Against this I must protest; the Duke cannot seriously maintain that the
main scope and purpose of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s articles is new. Their
substance has been before us in Mr. Spencer’s own writings for some
two-and-twenty years, in the course of which Mr. Spencer has been
followed by Professor Mivart, the Rev. J. J. Murphy, the Duke of Argyll
himself, and many other writers of less note. When the Duke talks about
the establishment of a scientific reign of terror, I confess I regard
such an exaggeration with something like impatience. Any one who has
known his own mind and has had the courage of his opinions has been able
to say whatever he wanted to say with as little let or hindrance during
the last twenty years, as during any other period in the history of
literature. Of course, if a man will keep blurting out unpopular truths
without considering whose toes he may or may not be treading on, he will
make enemies some of whom will doubtless be able to give effect to their
displeasure; but that is part of the game. It is hardly possible for any
one to oppose the fallacy involved in the Charles-Darwinian theory of
natural selection more persistently and unsparingly than I have done
myself from the year 1877 onwards; naturally I have at times been very
angrily attacked in consequence, and as a matter of business have made
myself as unpleasant as I could in my rejoinders, but I cannot remember
anything having been ever attempted against me which could cause fear in
any ordinarily constituted person. If, then, the Duke of Argyll is right
in saying that Mr. Spencer has shown a caution almost amounting to
timidity in attacking Mr. Darwin’s theory, either Mr. Spencer must be a
singularly timid person, or there must be some cause for his timidity
which is not immediately obvious. If terror reigns anywhere among
scientific men, I should say it reigned among those who have staked
imprudently on Mr. Darwin’s reputation as a philosopher. I may add that
the discovery of the Duke’s impression that there exists a scientific
reign of terror, explains a good deal in his writings which it has not
been easy to understand hitherto.
As regards the theory of natural selection, the Duke says:—
“From the first discussions which arose on this subject, I have ventured
to maintain that . . . the phrase ‘natural-selection’ represented no true
physical cause, still less the complete set of causes requisite to
account for the orderly procession of organic forms in Nature; that in so
far as it assumed variations to arise by accident it was not only
essentially faulty and incomplete, but fundamentally erroneous; in short,
that its only value lay in the convenience with which it groups under one
form of words, highly charged with metaphor, an immense variety of
causes, some purely mental, some purely vital, and others purely physical
or mechanical.”