A PHYSIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION OF THE ANTAGONISM BETWEEN ALL SUCH
WORDS AS “GOOD” AND “BAD,” AND “RIGHT” AND “WRONG”
“A word is the shadow of an act.”
DEMOCRITUS.
It is a fact of the greatest significance that the words by which we
convey our ideas of value always occur in pairs, one of which is the
opposite of the other. In esthetics the beautiful is contrasted with
the ugly, and the charming with the disgusting; in logic the true
clashes with the false, and in philosophy the real with the unreal;
in matters of public and private economy the cheap is antithetical to
the expensive, and the generous to the miserly; while in ethics we
constantly hear the words good and bad, right and wrong, virtuous and
vicious employed to denote the opposition and contradiction of human
interests and ideals. What is the ultimate reason why we thus employ
such pairs of antonyms in our judgments of praise or blame, our
expressions of desire or aversion, and in our estimations of merit or
defect?
This modern question, upon which the founding of a true science of
ethics depends, cannot be answered by any appeal to the speculative
metaphysics of bygone generations. We have passed out of that
period in which men were content with an explanation based on the
Zoroastrian hypothesis of a world divided between the warring forces
of light and darkness, while our ears are now equally unresponsive to
the bi-polar principles of love and hate which Empedocles propounded.
Even our recent Emerson’s “Law of Compensation,” born though it was
of canny, scientific thinking, is not marked by the least sign of
that finality which the answer we seek should possess. It is, indeed,
our conviction that the presence of antonyms in human speech is not
to be accounted for by the assumption of a theory concerning the
world as a whole, but rather by an examination of some of the baldest
facts of our everyday experience. Nay more, it is our declared
purpose to show that the metaphysical and theological notions of
Empedocles and Zoroaster are themselves to be explained by reference
to the physics and the physiology of man,—in terms of the structure
and functions of the human body. But before we can comprehend the
significance of such a thesis, it is first necessary to understand
some of the physiological mechanisms underlying thought and speech.
_The Rise of Mechanistic Psychology_
Ever since William James employed the phrase “the _stream_ of
thought” to describe mental phenomena, the whole trend of
psychology has been altered. Not only did the wide-spread use of
that phrase result in the giving up of many traditional beliefs in
regard to things mental, but it also stimulated the most profitable
investigations in psychological science. One of the most ancient of
the beliefs which it demolished was the belief in Ideas as eternal,
external, and immutable. According to the notion of a stream of
consciousness (itself a variable conception), ideas are sensory
images which show individual variations, which never are exactly
repeated, and which have meaning only when they refer or lead to
some concrete reality. This view, which finally replaced the ancient
Platonic conception, is now held by practically all psychologists.
Moreover, the influence of James’ teaching was such as to show that
will, intellect, feeling, and the like were not separable parts of a
mind (i. e., faculties) which were capable of acting independently,
but were merely handy words to indicate the various qualities
of the stream of thought. The stream flows swiftly,—call that
impulsiveness; it flows again broadly and deeply with many glancing
eddies,—call that deliberation; it flows once more with swift descent
and foam,—call that strong feeling. Nevertheless, the stream of
thought is one stream, and mental phenomena one and all specify its
labile and fluid consistency. And now let us see to what further
developments this striking conception has led.
Obviously, the astute, enquiring person at once asks, “What makes
this stream of thought? To what is its flowing character due?” At
first it might seem that one must despair of any satisfactory reply.
One feels as did William Harvey, almost hopeless in his quest after
the secret of the circulation of the blood. But just as Harvey boldly
experimented with his eye on the critical features of his problem,
so have a multitude of keen investigators devised test after test to
discover the laws of mental phenomena. And while we cannot yet say
that “Science has laid her doomful hand” upon all of the intricate
secrets of mind, nevertheless, it is becoming more and more certain
that the stream of thought is just as much a bodily function as
is the breath-stream and the blood-stream. Strangely enough, this
conception is not brand-new. It was Aristotle who said, “If the eye
were an organism, vision would be its soul.” Similar thinking is
revealed in our modern view that mind is a function of the body, and
that it depends upon the body for its existence. It “is generated
by the body as the result of its immediate contacts with the
environment, in much the same way as electricity may be generated by
a turbine that has been placed in the midst of a tumbling waterfall.”
Moreover, the stream-like character of thought, the play of feeling,
the linger and strain of deliberation and expectation are due to the
manner in which the storage battery of the brain releases energy, and
to the way in which the muscles and glands transform it. William
James wrote in 1890, “All consciousness is motor,” that is, it is
dependent upon the expression mechanisms of the body; and today we
have demonstrated the fundamental rôle of the muscles and glands of
the body in “the transformation of the common energies of nature into
the special energies of mind.”
It can be seen at once that such a philosophy of mind furnishes the
most striking and far-reaching ethical implications. If what we call
our mental life turns out upon close inspection to be dependent upon
bodily functions, it follows that conduct and thought differ only in
the degree to which the body is excited to activity (molar motion).
In a word, conduct is overt (visible), while thought is covert
(invisible), behavior. Edwin Holt, in the “Freudian Wish,” speaks
of thought (‘wish’ as he terms it there) as “_a course of action
which the living body executes or is prepared to execute with regard
to some object or some fact of the environment_.” (pp. 56-7.) John
Dewey voices a similar tendency in his “Human Nature and Conduct”
when he says that _bodily habits do our thinking_. (Italics mine.)
“The habit of walking is expressed in what a man sees when he keeps
still, even in dreams.” (p. 37.) Thus the old idols are tumbled to
the ground. Over the doorway of the Germanic Museum at Harvard is
the inscription: “Es ist der Geist der sich den Koerper baut.”
Complete reversal of such an animistic and subjectivistic sentiment
is proposed by Dewey when he declares that a man stands erect, not
because he wills to, but because he can. His willing is the result,
and not the cause, of the muscular contractions which elevate the
chest and keep it convex. The old dualism of mind and body, and the
older superstition that mind rules matter, have both received their
death-blows. In their place a complete mechanistic philosophy is now
securely enthroned. It would thus seem likely that a _natural history
of virtue_ will not long hence be written.
Of all the vexed questions which psychologists have had to answer,
perhaps none is more difficult than the question as to the place
of language in the mental economy. What is language for? How did
it originate? What is its relation to thinking? To overt activity?
It is at once apparent that the answers to these questions are
highly important to ethics, since the words good and bad, right and
wrong, and the like, play such a prominent rôle in our judgments
upon our fellow-men. Neither does it seem possible to understand
why we employ these pairs of antonyms until we know what the single
terms of the pairs signify. And while it will require several of
the following chapters to give a satisfactory answer to some of the
above questions, it is readily agreed that our judgments of value
are employed principally for two purposes:—(1) to sort out some of
the objects of the environment, e. g., by calling these _good_ and
those _bad_, etc., and (2) to indicate to other persons what kind
of behavior is to be expected of us with regard to the objects thus
designated. That is our common experience. If a man calls a shop a
_good_ shop, his future behavior toward it can be predicted. If he
calls his neighbor _vicious_ he can be expected not to leave his
wheelbarrow or his lawn-mower out at night. Moreover, if we know what
sort of things a man calls bad, virtuous, or right, his whole social
philosophy can be plotted from the data provided by these particular
judgments. To state it briefly, speech becomes an instrument for the
transmission of _meanings_. Before we proceed further, let us see
just what this involves in terms of bodily mechanisms.
_A Mechanistic Interpretation of the Meaning of Words_
To the superficial observer of a man who declares that something is
cheap, or beautiful, or good, the sight of his lips moving and the
sound of the words as they are produced might appear to be the whole
phenomenon. Nevertheless, if anyone were to look carefully behind
the scenes of this performance, one would find a much more elaborate
play being enacted than is apparent on the surface. Just as we know
now from the findings of the physiologist that when the eye _sees_,
far more structures than the retina are affected, and just as we
are now certain that when the ear _hears_, many more organs than
the ear-drum and cochlea take part in the response to the stimulus,
so we are convinced that when the words we speak have a meaning, a
neuro-muscular drama of a very elaborate character is being silently
performed within our skin.
Novelists and story-tellers of all ages seem to have intuited this
truth in their portrayal of human emotions. They speak of “pent-up
anger,” of “stifled sorrow,” and they describe often in minute detail
the course of a passion that in seeking to get adequate expression
causes the face to flush, the hand to clench, or the body as a
whole to be violently agitated. The Iliad and the Odyssey abound in
descriptions of this sort, and every novelist since the days of Homer
has felt the need of such portrayals in order to make his characters
understood. Indeed, the cultivation of this technique is the essence
of dramatic art. But mark, that such emotions are aroused not only
when a person is confronted by the physical facts of battle, murder,
or sudden death, for example, but also _by the bare mention of the
words or phrases_ which appropriately describe such catastrophes. The
more carefully such a person is observed, the plainer will it become
that the agitation which his body is covertly manifesting would, if
it were unhindered in its free expression, result in an elaborate
pantomine appropriate to the events described by the story-teller.
In other words, the emotions which a thrilling narrative arouses
are substitutes for the overt activity which the auditor might be
expected to manifest were he actually a participant in the scene
described. When, then, we say that a dramatic situation _moves_
us, the description is absolutely accurate. Indeed, from the most
credible scientific evidence we possess, the emotions which are thus
aroused are characterized by all the organic stresses and strains
which are present in the most violent overt activity of which we
are capable. We inwardly writhe and tussle, we half-start one kind
of positive behavior, only to find it checked by the initiation of
its opposite,—in a word, we display on a small scale all the conduct
appropriate to the situation. And this elaborate arousal to activity
is, we undertake to say, precisely what gives every dramatic scene or
narrative its meaning.
Dr. George W. Crile has coined the appropriate phrase
“action-pattern” to describe the mechanism involved in the cases just
cited. Crile’s “action-pattern” is, indeed, practically identical
with Holt’s “specific response,” and with Titchener’s “motor set,”
of which phrases the latter two are today familiar to most students
of psychology. Briefly, this action-pattern is simply a more or less
fixed way in which some part of the body produces a movement. It
depends principally upon the physical structure of the part, as well
as upon its muscle and nerve supply, and secondly upon the habits of
movement which external stimuli have repeatedly produced in it. Thus
every healthy leg has acquired the action-patterns of walking and
running, and some legs have in addition the patterns of kicking, or
of “stepping on the gas” in open level country. What we call the most
skilful parts of the body are those which have the greatest number
of action-patterns. The hands, lips, eyes, and tongue could on this
point be properly called the reservoirs of intelligence. Certainly in
the evolution of man they have played the strategical part. Moreover,
it is supposedly these action-patterns, these habits of movement,
which are aroused whenever we are said to remember or imagine, to
cogitate or ponder; and this is, I take it, what Dewey implies when
he says that bodily habits do our thinking. I have elsewhere shown[2]
how one action-pattern of the human hand performs yeoman service in
this respect, and it would not be difficult to demonstrate that every
action-pattern is capable of generating a multitude of thoughts.
When, then, we say that a novelist or poet has portrayed a moving,
tragic scene, we shall now understand that he has re-aroused in
us bodily habits which we started to acquire when we first became
acquainted with grief.
While we do not claim that all cases of meaning involve such
wide-spread and imperative bodily disturbances as those which occur
in connection with tragic or erotic situations, it is nevertheless
a valid inference that words which stimulate us to no activity
whatsoever mean nothing to us. Certain it is, at least, that the
more meaningful or significant any word is, the more does it stir up
latent tendencies to action throughout our whole organism. Political
and religious slogans are telling examples of this. “Great is Diana
of the Ephesians!” “Remember the Maine!” and “For God, for Country,
and for Yale!” have been for some persons phrases of the maximal
philosophic content. Moreover, the same word may arouse different
meanings (or action-patterns) in different people, depending not only
on how the word is spoken, but also on the mood of the auditor. It is
a matter of common observation that the shout of “Fire!” calls forth
by no means the same responses from an insured landlord as it evokes
from an uninsured tenant, while the mention of _water_ will stimulate
one sort of reflex action in a thirsty man, and quite another sort in
a man who has just been rescued from drowning.
It is plain, then, that if physiological science has achieved the
least light upon the problems of psychology, the meaning which any
word or phrase possesses is not something that the sound of the word
or its written symbol is endowed with, or something that filters
through from any Platonic realm of ideas, but the meaning of any word
is given to it by the person who speaks or hears it. Moreover, this
endowment of meaning is implicit in the arousal of action tendencies
at the time when the word is spoken or heard. In the example recently
cited, the word “fire” had a different meaning for the insured
landlord from what it had for the uninsured tenant because the habits
of precaution which the former had acquired established a different
motor attitude toward fire than did the procrastination of the
latter. Consequently, the shouting and the conflagration were stimuli
in the presence of which the landlord could be calm, while the tenant
could not.
The application of this principle of the dependence of meaning upon
action-patterns extends, however, to other situations than those
in which emotional riots are observable. Indeed, we undertake to
say that even such plain, concrete words as _basket_, _horse_, and
_river_ have a meaning because they arouse us to motor activities
of one sort or another. It may well be, of course, that we start
to think of a basket in terms of its color, or shape, or its cost;
and of a horse in like terms; while we think of a river only in
connection with its height during seasons of drought or flood: but
eventually the basket will, by implying _receptacle_, lead in our
imagination to the acts of filling and emptying; while the horse
will be finally pulling our loads or carrying our weight on his
back; and the river will be either waded or swum by us, or become
related to our necessities or pastimes (our habits) in some other
manner. And when we thus develop a specific action-pattern toward
such an object, we are said to know what it _means_. It has long been
a maxim in education that not until we know how to use and control
our environment, do we become fully intelligent towards it. The
theory and the fact of action-patterns gives unusual support to this
particularly profitable maxim. Spinoza laid down the principle that
the will and the intellect are one and the same, and this principle
too has complete verification from mechanistic psychology. Thought
is dependent upon bodily activity, and it does not matter for our
present purpose whether that activity be overt or subtly concealed.
The question now arises: Does the meaning of abstract terms, of the
terms we use in our judgments of value, consist in the same kind of
motor tendencies as those which are aroused by concrete terms? From
the following considerations I believe we can say that it does.
To begin with, abstract terms are one and all the result of the
process of abstraction. This process consists in our picking out some
common feature or quality from a great variety of objects, and giving
it a name in order to fix it in our memory. For example, fire, the
inside of ripe watermelon, and the outside of ripe cherries may all
be called _red_. The concept, or abstract term, “red” can thereafter
be used on occasion as a gestural sign for all these various
objects when their color is being signified. Moreover, the process
of abstracting these common qualities is itself a motor process. It
is, physiologically speaking, the same sort of activity as collecting
postage stamps or beetles’ wings. Indeed, the simplest perception
of any concrete object, any red object, for example, involves motor
activity of a highly elaborate character. When we look at such an
object, not only is the retina of the eye stimulated, but various
muscles and glands are simultaneously activated to an elaborate
transformation of energy. Likewise, when we hear, taste, smell, or
have any other perception, other characteristic transformations of
energy are taking place through the arousal of action-patterns.
Now we have just stated that abstract terms are derived from the
multifarious perception of concrete objects. In what, then, does the
meaning of abstract terms consist? It consists in their function of
recalling some of the particular experiences from which they were
derived. Such an abstract word as “red” has, then, a meaning for
us simply because it arouses in any of its phases that particular
action-pattern which all sorts of red things have stimulated in us.
This same principle may now be applied to show how even the meaning
which attaches to the words we employ to convey judgments of value
may be explained in physiological terms. For the highly abstract
character which the words _cheap_, _beautiful_, and _good_ seem at
times to possess is simply due to the fact that at the mention of any
such word we are simultaneously stimulated to so great a variety of
actions that we are unable to follow any one of them through to its
conclusion. When such a condition persists, the meaning is said to be
vague.
It is, of course, not to be forgotten that every time we use a word,
whether we read it, speak it, or hear it, the meaning it arouses is
traceable to the fact that firm bonds have been established between
the eye, ear, and throat mechanisms on the one hand, and related
parts of the body which are involved on the other. This union of the
reading-reflexes with the somatic-reflexes is provided for by a very
simple mechanism called the conditioned reflex. By such a device, any
two reflexes which have been aroused _together_ frequently enough by
external stimuli will ever thereafter tend to arouse each other. That
is why the word “fire” which we all were taught to use to indicate
a certain kind of object, will, even if spoken in a wilderness of
snow, make us feel some of the effects which flame once produced
upon us. Contrariwise, the blindfolded man will, by no other cue
than the touch of his fingers, name such objects as carpet, leather,
sandpaper, and nails. And from what we have already said about the
source of the meaning of abstract terms being traceable to concrete
experiences, we may now say that such words as cheap, beautiful, and
good, one and all owe their significance to the fact that they too
exhibit the law of the conditioned reflex both in their origin and in
their maturity.
_How the “All-or-none” Principle Helps to Disclose an Amazing Secret_
It being thus apparent that words possess meaning because they arouse
motor tendencies in us, let us now see what justification there
is for the assertion previously made that these motor tendencies
need not be at all visible as overt actions in order to perform
their epistemological function. This justification is found in the
all-or-none principle of nervous and muscular activity,—a principle
having the most far-reaching consequences for both psychology
and ethics. We are all familiar with the fact that less work is
involved in lifting the arm leisurely to a horizontal position than
in moving it through the same radius with a heavy weight held in
the hand. However, we are not all familiar with the fact that in
the case of the leisurely movement only a few of the myriad nerve
and muscle fibers of the arm are being innervated, the rest being
completely passive, while in the case of lifting the heavy weight,
the proportion of fully active and inertly passive fibers is just the
opposite. But this is exactly the case. According to the all-or-none
principle discovered by Lucas and Adrian,[3] whenever a single nerve
fiber functions at all, it acts in its maximum capacity. Never is
such a fiber partially activated; in its all-or-none functioning it
is as uncompromising as gravity. Consequently, even though the arm
may _feel_ uniformly flabby when it is indolently moved about, some
few of its nerve and muscle fibers are working to their limit.
This being the case, it is readily apparent that the various
qualities of muscular movement,—languid, intentional, unintentional,
or deliberate,—have one and all a strictly quantitative basis. If a
man’s smile spreads out into a grin, this change in the quality of
his countenance is caused by the simple addition of fully functioning
neuro-muscular units under the skin of his face. If the grin dwindles
to the smile, and that again vanishes into a look only faintly
reminiscent of pleasure, the opposite process of subtraction is then
taking place. Consider now the further implications of this law of
Lucas and Adrian. For the logical inference is that when we merely
_think_ of lifting our arm, but do not lift it visibly, an essential
part of the arm-lifting mechanism has been nevertheless specifically
stimulated to activity; it is only because not enough muscle fibers
have been innervated to overcome the inertia of the limb that the
arm does not rise. That is, indeed, our common experience. When we
lie abed on a cold winter morning and speculate on the question
of getting up, our imagination of the heroic deed is perfectly of
a piece with the real business of shivering on the drafty floor.
Indeed, according to the all-or-none principle, since even the
slightest neuro-muscular activity is _positive_, the terms “overt” or
“covert” as applied to action refer merely to what an observer can or
cannot readily perceive. This principle can be justly applied to the
problem of the meaning of words. The implication is sound that even
though the action-patterns which are aroused by words are unfelt by
us or invisible to an onlooker, these motor tendencies are just as
truly positive physiological events, so far as they go, as are the
most violent efforts we openly manifest. For the pattern of action is
the same; the only difference is in the number of nerve and muscle
fibers involved.
It was a motto of Jesus that “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is
he.” Although the particular phrase, “in his heart,” is now regarded
as too wild a hyperbole to be justified by the facts, yet the
all-or-none principle furnishes an unsuspected substantiation of the
essential truth of this motto with respect to certain individuals.
We have long known that thinking did somehow lead to action,—that
both the rogue and the philanthropist, the slanderer and the coquette
often schemed and planned secretly for years without giving any
outward hint of what their future behavior was to be. History is full
of the trouble caused for those who had “no art to read the mind’s
construction in the face” of him who could “smile and smile and be a
villain.” And now the secret is out why for so many centuries it was
believed that thought produced action and mind ruled matter. Thought
_is_ action, but action of so elusive a character as to be totally
beyond the unaided eye to detect; and thought “leads” to action for
the same reason that a spark can produce a conflagration and a hole
in a dyke produce a flood. In all three cases the greater effect is
due to the magnification of the exciting cause. The ancients held
that mind ruled the body for the reason that, being ignorant of the
fact of covert muscular responses, they assumed an incorporeal cause
for a series of events whose end-term alone they were able to discern
as embodied in the movements of matter.
It is thus finally apparent how by means of the law of the
conditioned reflex and the all-or-none principle, both concrete and
abstract terms serve not only as gestural signs, but also serve
to imply and predict human activities. We have shown that every
word which has a meaning _ipso facto_ implies action. It matters
not whether that action be sudden or violent, or merely one that
is carried out on “low gear,” so to speak, by the neuro-muscular
mechanisms of the body. Neither does it matter whether that action be
precise or groping, specific or diffuse; if the word has a meaning
it will be accompanied by an action-tendency, and that tendency
will be added to the kinetic potentialities,—the character,—of the
individual. For if it is the case that by the law of the conditioned
reflex, words _get_ meaning, it is equally to be asserted that by
virtue of the all-or-none principle, they _keep_ it. Moreover,
Holt to the contrary notwithstanding, it is such demonstrable
physiological principles as these, and not the mysterious Freudian
categories, which are the keys whereby the secrets of mind will be
unlocked.
Having thus dealt with the problem of how the neuro-muscular
mechanisms of the body generate and maintain the meanings of words,
let us now return to the original question of this chapter, namely,
What is the ultimate reason why we employ such pairs of antonyms as
“good” and “bad” in our judgments of praise or blame, our expressions
of desire or aversion, and in our estimations of merit or defect?
Our answer is that the felt opposition and contradiction of antonyms
is due to the conflict of motor tendencies, and in support of this
theory we cite a well-recognized physiological principle,—the law of
reciprocal innervation.
_The Physiological Explanation of the Opposition of Antonyms_
Every freely moving part of the body, such as the leg, the arm, and
the head, is equipped principally with two sets of muscles, called,
from their functions, the _flexors_ and the _extensors_. The flexors
are those muscles which for example, upon contracting, draw the
legs and the arms toward the body and fold them close to it, and
which lower the head upon the chest; while the extensors stretch out
the arms and legs, open wide the hands, and raise the head to an
erect posture. Other parts of the body are similarly equipped for
producing motions of an opposite character in the skeletal system.[4]
The eyeballs are lowered by the use of a different muscle than that
by which they are elevated; the muscle which depresses the wings of
the nose is a direct antagonist of the other muscles which control
the movements of this organ, and so on throughout the whole of our
movable bodily structures. Moreover, when one such pair of muscles is
contracted, the opposed member is normally relaxed, and vice versa;
or, as the physiologist would say, the two muscles are reciprocally
innervated.[5]
However, it must not be understood that this law refers only to
the visible contractions of the muscles which produce the overt
behavior of a man, for it equally explains the case where a very
small number of nerve and muscle fibers are activated. That is to
say, the law of all-or-none _and_ the law of reciprocal innervation
can both operate in the face or the hand at the same time. Indeed,
we must not neglect to consider that _all_ of the myriad fibers
of our largest muscles are never simultaneously contracted; rather
is it the rule that these fibers contract in relays,[6] thereby
automatically saving us from the fatigue and exhaustion which would
otherwise ensue. Moreover, the more intelligent and skilful we
become, or, as we sometimes say, the more our head saves our heels,
the fewer muscle fibers are required to generate and maintain any
specific action-tendency. Consequently, then, the law of reciprocal
innervation can be exhibited in the antagonism of extremely small
muscular units, such as we have postulated to be involved in
certain cases of meaning provided they be anatomically situated in
the correct position for producing antagonistic strains. Now the
experimental demonstration of the law of dynamogenesis at the hands
of Richet, Charcot, etc., revealed that just such slight movements of
an opposed character are produced when we merely “think” of _up_ and
_down_, _right_ and _left_, _in_ and _out_, and the like. In every
case of this sort, some part of the movable, skeletal system performs
overtly or covertly the appropriate movement, thereby giving meaning
to the word. We may therefore, unless we read all signs incorrectly,
safely affirm that whatever be the action-pattern which any abstract
term arouses in us, the antonym of that term, if indeed it be its
logical and physiological antonym, arouses action-patterns of an
opposite character.
Our physiological explanation of the meaning of words and the
contradiction of antonyms is now complete. For if, as we have
previously shown, even abstract terms acquire and keep their meaning
by virtue of the reflex tendencies which they arouse, it is likewise
apparent that the basis of logical opposition and contradiction is to
be found by an examination of the baldest facts of the physics and
physiology of the human body. In brief, then, _antonyms are those
words whose utterance stimulates us so to react as to illustrate
the law of reciprocal innervation_. And this, moreover, is the
only reason why _cheap_ is the opposite of _expensive_, _true_ the
contradictory of _false_, and _good_ the antithesis of _bad_.
Two words more, however, remain to be said. The first of these is,
that the number of pairs of antonyms we have in our vocabulary
signifies how many different pairs of antagonistic motor tendencies
or action-patterns we could, were we fully aroused, overtly
manifest. Since thought is either a rehearsal for, or a rumination
upon, action, it is essentially a process which employs the same
structures of the body as those which are activated in our buying and
selling, our giving and taking, our toil and our play. The second
word is, that if it be due strictly to our muscular architecture
that antonyms occur in human speech, we can now safely affirm that
any philosophy or religion which construes the universe as divided
between the warring forces of light and darkness, or as everywhere
illustrating the bi-polar principles of love and hate, is likewise
based upon the law of the reciprocal innervation of antagonistic
muscles. Such philosophies are, indeed, profound, since they attempt
to inscribe on the firmament the drama of man’s limitations.
With this by way of introduction, we are now prepared to examine the
various terms by which we are wont to convey our ideas of ethical
value, in order to see just what the words “good,” “bad,” “right,”
“wrong,” and the like really _mean_. And while the difficulties of
such a task are admittedly great, yet the presumption is entirely in
favor of the methods of mechanistic psychology to give a strictly
scientific interpretation to the subject matter of ethics.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] “The Intellectual Significance of the Grasping Reflex,” Jour. of
Phil., Vol. XVIII, No. 23, pp. 617-628.
[3] See “Journal of Physiology” (1909), 38, 113-133; ibid. (1914),
47, 460-474; also Bayliss, W. M., “Principles of General Physiology,”
383-4; Starling, E. H., “Principles of Human Physiology,” 205-6.
[4] Mark carefully, that according to this, so-called “voluntary”
movement (or will) is simply movement produced by one member of any
pair of antagonistic muscles. This physical equipment is of paramount
importance to the function of willing. Note also, that “free will”
always did mean the choice of two alternatives!
[5] See Bayliss, op. cit., pp. 494-8; Starling, op. cit., pp. 335-6.
[6] This is especially observable in all free-hand or free-arm
movements, as, for example, when one tries to throw missiles in quick
succession at a target. In spite of one’s own verbal suggestions,
both speed and accuracy vary with every shot. This peculiar property
of muscle should henceforth factor into our definitions of _chance_
and _luck_.