English poetry and fiction have expressed the inner man far better
than British philosophy has defined him. He is a hidden spring, a
source of bubbling half-thoughts and characteristic actions, and the
philosophers have called him a series of ideas. Ideas are rather his
weak point. Idealism, on principle, leaves no room for anything latent;
but in a living being, especially in a nice Englishman, what is latent
is the chief thing. The vital organs are under the skin and far more
complicated, I suspect, than anatomy would lead us to imagine: the case
is somewhat as if some giant in remote space should examine the surface
of our earth with a glass, measuring its motion round the sun and
perhaps round its own axis, but regarding as perfectly inexplicable and
unmeaning the coursing of ships, the march of armies and migrations,
the change of forests into cornfields, and of cornfields into deserts.
So, perhaps, far beyond the reach of any microscope, the politic
congregation of atoms within us is busy in its curiously organic and
curiously aimless way: sustaining on the whole, until disease or
death supervenes, the international peace and commerce of the animal
body. How much wireless telegraphy, how many alliances, and how many
diplomatic compromises there must be in our system for the human body
to live at all! But psychological philosophers, like children, think
the whole economy of life the simplest thing in the world: experience,
they say, just _comes_ as it does come; as the boy, asked where he
would get the money necessary for all the fine things he said he
would do when he was a man, replied, full of empirical wisdom, "Out
of my pocket, like papa!" Experience is the paternal pocket of these
philosophers; they have not discovered the financial system, the life
of the body, which fills that minute and precarious reservoir.
It is not only a stronger glass that the remote giant would need to
disclose to him the life of the earth; he would need imagination akin
to the human, which such a giant would probably not possess. For
suppose anatomy had done its best or its worst, and had completely
mapped the machinery of the human automaton; and suppose at the
same time the modern dream-readers and diviners had unearthed all a
man's infant concupiscences and secret thoughts: there would still
be something essential undiscovered. I do not mean that behind the
whole physical machinery there would be another material agency,
another force or set of events; nor that besides the totality of
mental discourse, remembered or unremembered, there would be more
thinking elsewhere: the hypothesis is that all that exists in these
spheres has been surveyed, and assigned to its place in the evolving
system. What has been so far ignored is something on another plane of
being altogether, which this automatic life and this mental discourse
involve, but do not contain. It is the _principle_ of both and of their
relation; the system of repetitions, correspondences, developments,
and ideal unities created by this march of human life in double
column. For instance, men are mortal; they are born; they are begotten
by sexual fertilization; they have a childhood; their passions and
thoughts flow in a certain general order; and there are units in the
human world called persons, nations, interests, purposes. I do not
refer to the _ideas_ of these things in the mental discourse of this
or that man; but to the groups or cycles of facts designated by these
ideas. To perceive these groups or cycles requires a certain type of
intelligence: but intelligence does not invent them without cause; it
_finds_ the order which it designates by some word, some metaphor, or
some image.
That this order of human life is something natural, and not a fiction
of discourse, appears in many ways. The relation of discourse itself
to physical life is one proof of it. Mental discourse is the inner
luminosity or speech that accompanies dramatic crises in the fortunes
of the body; it is not self-generated; it is always the _expression_ of
another event, then occurring in the body, as is a cry of pain; and it
is usually, at the same time, a _report_ of still another event that
has already occurred beyond the body, as is a memory or a perception.
Feeling and thought are perpetually interrupted and perpetually
renewed by something not themselves. Their march, logic, and sanity,
no less than their existence, translate into mental language an order
proper to material events. A sense of comfort is the symptom of a good
digestion; pain expresses a lively discord in the nervous system, and
pleasure a lively harmony. When we can scarcely live, because something
is stifling us, we hate that thing; and when we breathe more freely
because something approaches, we love it. Spirit everywhere expresses
the life of nature, and echoes its endeavours; but the animal life
which prompts these feelings is itself not arbitrary: it passes through
a cycle of changes which are pre-ordained. This predetermined, specific
direction of animal life is the key to everything moral; without it
no external circumstance could be favourable or unfavourable to us;
and spirit within us would have no reason to welcome, to deplore, or
to notice anything. What an anomaly it would seem to a free spirit
(if there could be such a thing) that it should care particularly for
what happens in the body of some animal, or that it should see one set
of facts rattier than another, and this in so partial and violent a
perspective! But spirit does, and must, do this; and it is an absurd
and satanic presumption on its part to profess that it could exist,
or be a spirit at all, if it were not the spirit of some body, the
voice of some animal heart. To have a station in matter, and to have
interests in the material world, are essential to spirit, because
spirit is life become articulate, experience focussed in thought and
dominated ideally; but experience and life are inconceivable unless
an organism with specific capacities and needs finds itself in an
environment that stimulates it variously and offers it a conditioned
career.
Science as yet has no answer to this most important of all questions,
if we wish to understand human nature: namely, How is the body, and how
are its senses and passions, determined to develop as they do? We may
reply: Because God wills it so; or Because such is the character of
the human species; or Because mechanical causes necessitate it. These
answers do not increase our scientific understanding in the least;
nevertheless they are not wholly vain: for the first tells us that we
must be satisfied with ignorance; the second that we must be satisfied
with the facts; and the third, which is the most significant, that
these facts are analogous in every province of nature. But how dose
are these analogies? Mechanism is one habit of matter, and life is
another habit of matter; the first we can measure mathematically and
forecast accurately, the second we can only express in moral terms,
and anticipate vaguely; but that the mechanical habit runs through
the vital habit, and conditions it, is made obvious by the dependence
of life on food, on time, on temperature, by its routine in health
and by its diseases, by its end, and above all by its origin; for it
is a habit of matter continuous with other inorganic habits, and (if
evolution is true) arising out of them. In any case, life comes from a
seed in which it lies apparently dormant and arrested, and from which
it is elicited by purely mechanical agencies. On the other hand, the
seed reacts on those agencies in a manner as yet inexplicable by what
we know of its structure; and its development closely repeats (though
perhaps with some spontaneous variation) the phases proper to the
species.
To this mysterious but evident predetermination of normal life by
the seed the ancients gave the name of soul; but to us the word soul
suggests a thinking spirit, or even a disembodied one. It is totally
incredible that a thinking spirit should exist in the seed, and should
plan and carry out (by what instruments?) the organization of the
body; and if so wise and powerful and independent a spirit lay in us
from the beginning, or rather long before our birth, how superfluous a
labour to beget us at all, and how unkind of it to dangle after it, in
addition to its own intelligence, these poor blundering and troubled
thoughts of which alone we are aware! Evidently the governing principle
in seeds is no soul in this modern sense, no thinking moral being; it
is a mysterious habit in matter. Whether this total habit is reducible
to minor habits of matter, prevalent in the world at large, is the
question debated between mechanical and vitalist psychologists; but it
is a stupid controversy. The smallest unit of mechanism is an event as
vital, as groundless, and as creative as it is possible for an event
to be; it summons fresh essences into existence, which the character
of the essences previously embodied in existence by no means implied
dialectically. On the other hand, the romantic adventure of life, if
it is not a series of miracles and catastrophes observed _ex post
facto_, must be a resultant of simpler habits struggling or conspiring
together. However minute, therefore, or however comprehensive the
units by which natural processes are described, they are equally
vital and equally mechanical, equally free and (for an observer with
a sufficient range of vision) equally predictable. On the human scale
of observation it is the larger habits of living beings that are most
easily observed; and the principle of these habits, transmitted by a
seed, I call the Psyche: it is either a complex of more minute habits
of matter, or a mastering rhythm imposed upon them by the habit of the
species. Many Greek philosophers taught that the Psyche was material;
and even Plato, although of course his Psyche might eventually take to
thinking, regarded it as primarily a principle of motion, growth, and
unconscious government; so that the associations of the word Psyche are
not repugnant, as are those of the word soul, to the meaning I wish to
give to it: that habit in matter which forms the human body and the
human mind.[1]
There is, then, in every man a Psyche, or inherited nucleus of life,
which from its dormant seminal condition expands and awakes anew in
each generation, becoming the person recognized in history, law, and
morals. A man's body is a sort of husk of which his Psyche (itself
material) is the kernel; and it is out of the predispositions of this
living seed, played upon by circumstances, that his character and
his mind are formed. The Psyche's first care is to surround itself
with outer organs, like a spider with its web; only these organs
remain subject to her central control, and are the medium by which
she acts upon outer things, and receives, in her patient labour, the
solicitations and rebuffs of fortune. The Psyche, being essentially
a way of living, a sort of animated code of hygiene and morals, is a
very selective principle: she is perpetually distinguishing--in action,
if not in words--between good and bad, right and wrong. Choice is the
breath of her nostrils. All the senses, instincts, and passions are
her scouts. The further she extends her influence the more she feels
how dependent she is on external things, and the more feverishly she
tries to modify them, so as to render them more harmonious with her own
impulses.
At first, when she was only a vegetative Psyche, she waited in a
comparatively peaceful mystical torpor for the rain or the sunshine
to foster her, or for the cruel winter or barbarous scythe to cut her
down; and she never would have survived at all if breeding had not been
her chief preoccupation; but she distributed herself so multitudinously
and so fast amongst her children, that she has survived to this day.
Later, she found a new means of safety and profit in locomotion; and it
was then that she began to perceive distinct objects, to think, and to
plan her actions--accomplishments by no means native to her. Like the
Chinese, she is just as busy by night as by day. Long before sunrise
she is at work in her subterranean kitchen over her pots of stewing
herbs, her looms, and her spindles; and with the first dawn, when the
first ray of intuition falls through some aperture into those dusky
spaces, what does it light up? The secret springs of her life? The aims
she is so faithfully but blindly pursuing? Far from it. Intuition,
floods of intuition, have been playing for ages upon human life: poets,
painters, men of prayer, scrupulous naturalists innumerable, have
been intent on their several visions; yet of the origin and of the
end of life we know as little as ever. And the reason is this: that
intuition is not a material organ of the Psyche, like a hand or an
antenna; it is a miraculous child, far more alive than herself, whose
only instinct is play, laughter, and brooding meditation. This strange
child--who could have been his father?--is a poet; absolutely useless
and incomprehensible to his poor mother, and only a new burden on her
shoulders, because she can't help feeding and loving him. He _sees_;
which to her is a mystery, because although she has always acted as if,
in some measure, she felt things at a distance, she has never seen and
never can see anything. Nor are his senses, for all their vivacity,
of any use to her. For what do they reveal to him? Always something
irrelevant: a shaft of dusty light across the rafters, a blue flame
dancing on the coals, a hum, a babbling of waters, a breath of heat or
of coolness, a mortal weariness or a groundless joy--all dream-images,
visions of a play world, essences painted on air, such as any poet
might invent in idleness. Yet the child cares about them immensely: he
is full of sudden tears and of jealous little loves. "Hush, my child,"
says good mother Psyche, "it's all nonsense." It is not for those
fantastic visions that she watches: she knits with her eyes shut, and
mutters her same old prayers. She has always groped amidst obstacles
like a mole pressing on where the earth is softest. She can tell
friends from enemies (not always correctly) by a mysterious instinct
within her, and the rhythm, as it were, of their approaching step. She
is long-suffering and faithful, like Penelope; but when hard-pressed
and at bay she becomes fierce. She is terribly absolute then, blindly
bent on vengeance and wild destruction. At other times she can melt
and be generous; in her beehive she is not only the congregation of
workers, but also the queen. Her stubborn old-womanish temper makes her
ordinarily unjust to her best impulses and hypocritical about her worst
ones. She is artful but not intelligent, least of all about herself.
For this reason she can never understand how she gave birth to such a
thankless child. She hardly remembers the warm ray from the sun or from
some other celestial source which one day pierced to her heart, and
begat there this strange uneasiness, this truant joy, which we call
thought. Seeing how quick and observant the brat is, she sometimes
sends him on errands; but he loiters terribly on the way, or loses
it altogether, forgets what he was sent for, and brings home nothing
but strange tales about Long-noses and Helmets-of-gold, whom he says
he has encountered. He prefers the poppies to the com, and half the
mushrooms he picks are of the poisonous variety; he sometimes insists
on setting apart his food for imaginary beings called the dead or the
gods; and worst of all, he once ravished and married a fairy, whom he
called Truth; and he wished to bring her to live with him at home. At
that, good mother Psyche naturally put her foot down. No hussies here!
Yet there are moments when she relents, when her worn old hands rest
in her lap, when she remembers and wonders, and two cold tears trickle
down from her blind eyes. What is the good of all her labour? Has it
all been, perhaps, for his sake, that he might live and sing and be
happy? Even in her green days, in her cool vegetable economy, there
had been waste; she had unwittingly put forth flowers she could not
see and diffused a fragrance that eluded her. Now her warmer heart has
bred this wilder, this diviner folly: a wanton sweetness shed by her
longer travail and a flower of her old age. But he forgets her in his
selfishness, and she can never, never understand him.
[Footnote 1: I beg the learned to notice that the Psyche, as I use the
term, is not a material atom but a material system, stretching over
both time and space; it is not a monad; it has not the unity proper to
consciousness; nor is it a mass of "subconscious," mental discourse.
The Psyche may be called a substance in respect to mental and moral
phenomena which (I think) are based on modes or processes in matter,
not on any material particle taken singly; but the Psyche is not a
substance absolutely, since its own substance is matter in a certain
arrangement--in other words, body. Matter may be called mind-stuff or
psychic substance inasmuch as it can become on occasion the substance
of a Psyche, and through the Psyche the basis of mind; but of course
not in the sense that matter may be an aggregate of thinking spirits.
Mental events may be called psychic when we consider their origin
rather than their essence, as certain pleasures are called material,
although pleasures, in being, are all equally spiritual. "Psychic
phenomena" are crudely material, and "psychical research" has for its
object, not spirits in another world, but the habits of matter that
produce apparitions.]
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