animated as our bodies are, make the mistake of working the analogy
too literally, and allowing for no differences. If the earth be a
sentient organism, we say, where are her brain and nerves? What
corresponds to her heart and lungs? In other words, we expect
functions which she already performs through us, to be performed
outside of us again, and in just the same way. But we see perfectly
well how the earth performs some of these functions in a way unlike
our way. If you speak of circulation, what need has she of a heart
when the sun keeps all the showers of rain that fall upon her and all
the springs and brooks and rivers that irrigate her, going? What need
has she of internal lungs, when her whole sensitive surface is in
living commerce with the atmosphere that clings to it?
The organ that gives us most trouble is the brain. All the
consciousness we directly know seems tied to brains.--Can there be
consciousness, we ask, where there is no brain? But our brain, which
primarily serves to correlate our muscular reactions with the external
objects on which we depend, performs a function which the earth
performs in an entirely different way. She has no proper muscles or
limbs of her own, and the only objects external to her are the other
stars. To these her whole mass reacts by most exquisite alterations in
its total gait, and by still more exquisite vibratory responses in
its substance. Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty
mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the
clouds and snow-fields combine them into white, the woods and flowers
disperse them into colors. Polarization, interference, absorption,
awaken sensibilities in matter of which our senses are too coarse to
take any note.
For these cosmic relations of hers, then, she no more needs a special
brain than she needs eyes or ears. _Our_ brains do indeed unify and
correlate innumerable functions. Our eyes know nothing of sound, our
ears nothing of light, but, having brains, we can feel sound and light
together, and compare them. We account for this by the fibres which in
the brain connect the optical with the acoustic centre, but just how
these fibres bring together not only the sensations, but the centres,
we fail to see. But if fibres are indeed all that is needed to do that
trick, has not the earth pathways, by which you and I are physically
continuous, more than enough to do for our two minds what the
brain-fibres do for the sounds and sights in a single mind? Must every
higher means of unification between things be a literal _brain_-fibre,
and go by that name? Cannot the earth-mind know otherwise the contents
of our minds together?
Fechner's imagination, insisting on the differences as well as on the
resemblances, thus tries to make our picture of the whole earth's life
more concrete. He revels in the thought of its perfections. To carry
her precious freight through the hours and seasons what form could be
more excellent than hers--being as it is horse, wheels, and wagon all
in one. Think of her beauty--a shining ball, sky-blue and sun-lit over
one half, the other bathed in starry night, reflecting the heavens
from all her waters, myriads of lights and shadows in the folds of her
mountains and windings of her valleys, she would be a spectacle of
rainbow glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of her
from her own mountain-tops. Every quality of landscape that has a
name would then be visible in her at once--all that is delicate or
graceful, all that is quiet, or wild, or romantic, or desolate, or
cheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh. That landscape is her face--a
peopled landscape, too, for men's eyes would appear in it like
diamonds among the dew-drops. Green would be the dominant color, but
the blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is
shrouded in her veil--a veil the vapory transparent folds of which
the earth, through her ministers the winds, never tires of laying and
folding about herself anew.
Every element has its own living denizens. Can the celestial ocean of
ether, whose waves are light, in which the earth herself floats, not
have hers, higher by as much as their element is higher, swimming
without fins, flying without wings, moving, immense and tranquil, as
by a half-spiritual force through the half-spiritual sea which they
inhabit, rejoicing in the exchange of luminous influence with one
another, following the slightest pull of one another's attraction, and
harboring, each of them, an inexhaustible inward wealth?
Men have always made fables about angels, dwelling in the light,
needing no earthly food or drink, messengers between ourselves and
God. Here are actually existent beings, dwelling in the light and
moving through the sky, needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries
between God and us, obeying his commands. So, if the heavens really
are the home of angels, the heavenly bodies must be those very angels,
for other creatures _there_ are none. Yes! the earth is our great
common guardian angel, who watches over all our interests combined.
In a striking page Fechner relates one of his moments of direct vision
of this truth.
'On a certain spring morning I went out to walk. The fields were
green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here
and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all
things. It was only a little bit of the earth; it was only one moment
of her existence; and yet as my look embraced her more and more it
seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear
a fact, that she is an angel, an angel so rich and fresh and
flower-like, and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and so
at one with herself, turning her whole living face to Heaven, and
carrying me along with her into that Heaven, that I asked myself how
the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life
so far as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels
above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky,--only to find them
nowhere.... But such an experience as this passes for fantastic. The
earth is a globular body, and what more she may be, one can find in
mineralogical cabinets.'[2]
Where there is no vision the people perish. Few professorial
philosophers have any vision. Fechner had vision, and that is why one
can read him over and over again, and each time bring away a fresh
sense of reality.
His earliest book was a vision of what the inner life of plants may be
like. He called it 'Nanna.' In the development of animals the nervous
system is the central fact. Plants develop centrifugally, spread their
organs abroad. For that reason people suppose that they can have no
consciousness, for they lack the unity which the central nervous
system provides. But the plant's consciousness may be of another type,
being connected with other structures. Violins and pianos give out
sounds because they have strings. Does it follow that nothing but
strings can give out sound? How then about flutes and organ-pipes?
Of course their sounds are of a different quality, and so may the
consciousness of plants be of a quality correlated exclusively with
the kind of organization that | they possess. Nutrition, respiration,
propagation take place in them without nerves. In us these functions
are conscious only in unusual states, normally their consciousness is
eclipsed by that which goes with the brain. No such eclipse occurs in
plants, and their lower consciousness may therefore be all the more
lively. With nothing to do but to drink the light and air with their
leaves, to let their cells proliferate, to feel their rootlets draw
the sap, is it conceivable that they should not consciously suffer
if water, light, and air are suddenly withdrawn? or that when the
flowering and fertilization which are the culmination of their life
take place, they should not feel their own existence more intensely
and enjoy something like what we call pleasure in ourselves? Does
the water-lily, rocking in her triple bath of water, air, and light,
relish in no wise her own beauty? When the plant in our room turns to
the light, closes her blossoms in the dark, responds to our watering
or pruning by increase of size or change of shape and bloom, who has
the right to say she does not feel, or that she plays a purely passive
part? Truly plants can foresee nothing, neither the scythe of the
mower, nor the hand extended to pluck their flowers. They can neither
run away nor cry out. But this only proves how different their modes
of feeling life must be from those of animals that live by eyes and
ears and locomotive organs, it does not prove that they have no mode
of feeling life at all.
How scanty and scattered would sensation be on our globe, if the
feeling-life of plants were blotted from existence. Solitary would
consciousness move through the woods in the shape of some deer or
other quadruped, or fly about the flowers in that of some insect, but
can we really suppose that the Nature through which God's breath blows
is such a barren wilderness as this?
I have probably by this time said enough to acquaint those of you who
have never seen these metaphysical writings of Fechner with their more
general characteristics, and I hope that some of you may now feel like
reading them yourselves.[3] The special thought of Fechner's with
which in these lectures I have most practical concern, is his
belief that the more inclusive forms of consciousness are in part
_constituted_ by the more limited forms. Not that they are the mere
sum of the more limited forms. As our mind is not the bare sum of
our sights plus our sounds plus our pains, but in adding these terms
together also finds relations among them and weaves them into schemes
and forms and objects of which no one sense in its separate estate
knows anything, so the earth-soul traces relations between the
contents of my mind and the contents of yours of which neither of
our separate minds is conscious. It has schemes, forms, and objects
proportionate to its wider field, which our mental fields are far too
narrow to cognize. By ourselves we are simply out of relation with
each other, for it we are both of us there, and _different_ from each
other, which is a positive relation. What we are without knowing, it
knows that we are. We are closed against its world, but that world is
not closed against us. It is as if the total universe of inner life
had a sort of grain or direction, a sort of valvular structure,
permitting knowledge to flow in one way only, so that the wider might
always have the narrower under observation, but never the narrower the
wider.
Fechner's great analogy here is the relation of the senses to our
individual minds. When our eyes are open their sensations enter into
our general mental life, which grows incessantly by the addition of
what they see. Close the eyes, however, and the visual additions stop,
nothing but thoughts and memories of the past visual experiences
remain--in combination of course with the enormous stock of other
thoughts and memories, and with the data coming in from the senses
not yet closed. Our eye-sensations of themselves know nothing of this
enormous life into which they fall. Fechner thinks, as any common man
would think, that they are taken into it directly when they occur,
and form part of it just as they are. They don't stay outside and
get represented inside by their copies. It is only the memories and
concepts of them that are copies; the sensible perceptions themselves
are taken in or walled out in their own proper persons according as
the eyes are open or shut.
Fechner likens our individual persons on the earth unto so many
sense-organs of the earth's soul. We add to its perceptive life so
long as our own life lasts. It absorbs our perceptions, just as they
occur, into its larger sphere of knowledge, and combines them with the
other data there. When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world
were closed, for all _perceptive_ contributions from that particular
quarter cease. But the memories and conceptual relations that have
spun themselves round the perceptions of that person remain in the
larger earth-life as distinct as ever, and form new relations and grow
and develop throughout all the future, in the same way in which our
own distinct objects of thought, once stored in memory, form new
relations and develop throughout our whole finite life. This is
Fechner's theory of immortality, first published in the little
'Büchlein des lebens nach dem tode,' in 1836, and re-edited in greatly
improved shape in the last volume of his 'Zend-avesta.'
We rise upon the earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of
her soil as leaves grow from a tree. The wavelets catch the sunbeams
separately, the leaves stir when the branches do not move. They
realize their own events apart, just as in our own consciousness, when
anything becomes emphatic, the background fades from observation. Yet
the event works back upon the background, as the wavelet works upon
the waves, or as the leaf's movements work upon the sap inside the
branch. The whole sea and the whole tree are registers of what has
happened, and are different for the wave's and the leaf's action
having occurred. A grafted twig may modify its stock to the roots:--so
our outlived private experiences, impressed on the whole earth-mind as
memories, lead the immortal life of ideas there, and become parts of
the great system, fully distinguished from one another, just as we
ourselves when alive were distinct, realizing themselves no longer
isolatedly, but along with one another as so many partial systems,
entering thus into new combinations, being affected by the perceptive
experiences of those living then, and affecting the living in their
turn--altho they are so seldom recognized by living men to do so.
If you imagine that this entrance after the death of the body into a
common life of higher type means a merging and loss of our distinct
personality, Fechner asks you whether a visual sensation of our own
exists in any sense _less for itself_ or _less distinctly_, when
it enters into our higher relational consciousness and is there
distinguished and defined.
--But here I must stop my reporting and send you to his volumes. Thus
is the universe alive, according to this philosopher! I think you
will admit that he makes it more _thickly_ alive than do the other
philosophers who, following rationalistic methods solely, gain the
same results, but only in the thinnest outlines. Both Fechner and
Professor Royce, for example, believe ultimately in one all-inclusive
mind. Both believe that we, just as we stand here, are constituent
parts of that mind. No other _content_ has it than us, with all the
other creatures like or unlike us, and the relations which it finds
between us. Our eaches, collected into one, are substantively
identical with its all, tho the all is perfect while no each is
perfect, so that we have to admit that new qualities as well as
unperceived relations accrue from the collective form. It is thus
superior to the distributive form. But having reached this result,
Royce (tho his treatment of the subject on its moral side seems to
me infinitely richer and thicker than that of any other contemporary
idealistic philosopher) leaves us very much to our own devices.
Fechner, on the contrary, tries to trace the superiorities due to the
more collective form in as much detail as he can. He marks the various
intermediary stages and halting places of collectivity,--as we are to
our separate senses, so is the earth to us, so is the solar system
to the earth, etc.,--and if, in order to escape an infinitely long
summation, he posits a complete God as the all-container and leaves
him about as indefinite in feature as the idealists leave their
absolute, he yet provides us with a very definite gate of approach to
him in the shape of the earth-soul, through which in the nature of
things we must first make connexion with all the more enveloping
superhuman realms, and with which our more immediate religious
commerce at any rate has to be carried on.
Ordinary monistic idealism leaves everything intermediary out. It
recognizes only the extremes, as if, after the first rude face of the
phenomenal world in all its particularity, nothing but the supreme in
all its perfection could be found. First, you and I, just as we are in
this room; and the moment we get below that surface, the unutterable
absolute itself! Doesn't this show a singularly indigent imagination?
Isn't this brave universe made on a richer pattern, with room in
it for a long hierarchy of beings? Materialistic science makes it
infinitely richer in terms, with its molecules, and ether, and
electrons, and what not. Absolute idealism, thinking of reality only
under intellectual forms, knows not what to do with _bodies_ of
any grade, and can make no use of any psychophysical analogy or
correspondence. The resultant thinness is startling when compared with
the thickness and articulation of such a universe as Fechner paints.
May not satisfaction with the rationalistic absolute as the alpha
and omega, and treatment of it in all its abstraction as an adequate
religious object, argue a certain native poverty of mental demand?
Things reveal themselves soonest to those who most passionately want
them, for our need sharpens our wit. To a mind content with little,
the much in the universe may always remain hid.
To be candid, one of my reasons for saying so much about Fechner has
been to make the thinness of our current transcendentalism appear
more evident by an effect of contrast. Scholasticism ran thick; Hegel
himself ran thick; but english and american transcendentalisms run
thin. If philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than of
logic,--and I believe it is, logic only finding reasons for the vision
afterwards,--must not such thinness come either from the vision being
defective in the disciples, or from their passion, matched with
Fechner's or with Hegel's own passion, being as moonlight unto
sunlight or as water unto wine?[4]
But I have also a much deeper reason for making Fechner a part of my
text. His _assumption that conscious experiences freely compound and
separate themselves_, the same assumption by which absolutism explains
the relation of our minds to the eternal mind, and the same by
which empiricism explains the composition of the human mind out of
subordinate mental elements, is not one which we ought to let pass
without scrutiny. I shall scrutinize it in the next lecture.
LECTURE V
THE COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS
In my last lecture I gave a miserably scanty outline of the way
of thinking of a philosopher remarkable for the almost unexampled
richness of his imagination of details. I owe to Fechner's shade an
apology for presenting him in a manner so unfair to the most essential
quality of his genius; but the time allotted is too short to say more
about the particulars of his work, so I proceed to the programme
I suggested at the end of our last hour. I wish to discuss the
assumption that states of consciousness, so-called, can separate and
combine themselves freely, and keep their own identity unchanged while
forming parts of simultaneous fields of experience of wider scope.
Let me first explain just what I mean by this. While you listen to
my voice, for example, you are perhaps inattentive to some bodily
sensation due to your clothing or your posture. Yet that sensation
would seem probably to be there, for in an instant, by a change of
attention, you can have it in one field of consciousness with the
voice. It seems as if it existed first in a separate form, and then as
if, without itself changing, it combined with your other co-existent
sensations. It is after this analogy that pantheistic idealism thinks
that we exist in the absolute. The absolute, it thinks, makes the
world by knowing the whole of it at once in one undivided eternal
act.[1] To 'be,' _really_ to be, is to be as it knows us to be, along
with everything else, namely, and clothed with the fulness of our
meaning. Meanwhile we _are_ at the same time not only really and as it
knows us, but also apparently, for to our separate single selves we
appear _without_ most other things and unable to declare with
any fulness what our own meaning is. Now the classic doctrine of
pantheistic idealism, from the Upanishads down to Josiah Royce, is
that the finite knowers, in spite of their apparent ignorance, are one
with the knower of the all. In the most limited moments of our private
experience, the absolute idea, as Dr. McTaggart told us, is implicitly
contained. The moments, as Royce says, exist only in relation to it.
They are true or erroneous only through its overshadowing presence. Of
the larger self that alone eternally is, they are the organic parts.
They _are_, only inasmuch as they are implicated in its being.
There is thus in reality but this one self, consciously inclusive of
all the lesser selves, _logos_, problem-solver, and all-knower; and
Royce ingeniously compares the ignorance that in our persons breaks
out in the midst of its complete knowledge and isolates me from you
and both of us from it, to the inattention into which our finite minds
are liable to fall with respect to such implicitly present details as
those corporeal sensations to which I made allusion just now. Those
sensations stand to our total private minds in the same relation in
which our private minds stand to the absolute mind. Privacy means
ignorance--I still quote Royce--and ignorance means inattention. We
are finite because our wills, as such, are only fragments of the
absolute will; because will means interest, and an incomplete will
means an incomplete interest; and because incompleteness of interest
means inattention to much that a fuller interest would bring us to
perceive.[2]
In this account Royce makes by far the manliest of the post-hegelian
attempts to read some empirically apprehensible content into the
notion of our relation to the absolute mind.
I have to admit, now that I propose to you to scrutinize this
assumption rather closely, that trepidation seizes me. The subject is
a subtle and abstruse one. It is one thing to delve into subtleties by
one's self with pen in hand, or to study out abstruse points in
books, but quite another thing to make a popular lecture out of them.
Nevertheless I must not flinch from my task here, for I think that
this particular point forms perhaps the vital knot of the present
philosophic situation, and I imagine that the times are ripe, or
almost ripe, for a serious attempt to be made at its untying.
It may perhaps help to lessen the arduousness of the subject if I put
the first part of what I have to say in the form of a direct personal
confession.
In the year 1890 I published a work on psychology in which it became
my duty to discuss the value of a certain explanation of our higher
mental states that had come into favor among the more biologically
inclined psychologists. Suggested partly by the association of ideas,
and partly by the analogy of chemical compounds, this opinion was
that complex mental states are resultants of the self-compounding of
simpler ones. The Mills had spoken of mental chemistry; Wundt of a
'psychic synthesis,' which might develop properties not contained in
the elements; and such writers as Spencer, Taine, Fiske, Barratt, and
Clifford had propounded a great evolutionary theory in which, in the
absence of souls, selves, or other principles of unity, primordial
units of mind-stuff or mind-dust were represented as summing
themselves together in successive stages of compounding and
re-compounding, and thus engendering our higher and more complex
states of mind. The elementary feeling of A, let us say, and the
elementary feeling of B, when they occur in certain conditions,
combine, according to this doctrine, into a feeling of A-plus-B, and
this in turn combines with a similarly generated feeling of C-plus-D,
until at last the whole alphabet may appear together in one field of
awareness, without any other witnessing principle or principles beyond
the feelings of the several letters themselves, being supposed to
exist. What each of them witnesses separately, 'all' of them are
supposed to witness in conjunction. But their distributive knowledge
doesn't _give rise_ to their collective knowledge by any act, it _is_
their collective knowledge. The lower forms of consciousness 'taken
together' _are_ the higher. It, 'taken apart,' consists of nothing
and _is_ nothing but them. This, at least, is the most obvious way
of understanding the doctrine, and is the way I understood it in the
chapter in my psychology.