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SO MANY critics have made one and the same objection to the doorway to
immortality which my lecture claims to be left open by the "transmission theory"
of cerebral action, that I feel tempted, as the book is again going to press, to
add a word of explanation.
* Due to their extensive length, the footnotes are
placed at the end of the article. To view the footnote simply follow the link.
If our finite personality here below, the objectors say, be due to the
transmission through the brain of portions of a pre-existing larger
consciousness, all that can remain after the brain expires is the larger
consciousness itself as such, with which we should thenceforth be perforce
reconfounded, the only means of our existence in finite personal form having
ceased.
But this, the critics continue, is the pantheistic idea of immortality,
survival, namely, in the soul of the world; not the Christian idea of
immortality, which means survival in strictly personal form.
In showing the possibility of a mental life after the brain's death, they
conclude, the lecture has thus at the same time shown the impossibility of its
identity with the personal life, which is the brain's function.
Now I am myself anything but a pantheist of the monistic pattern; yet for
simplicity's sake I did in the lecture speak of the "mother-sea" in terms that
must have sounded pantheistic, and suggested that I thought of it myself as a
unit. On page 30, I even added that future lecturers might prove the
loss of some of our personal limitations after death not to be matter for
absolute regret. The interpretation of my critics was therefore not unnatural;
and I ought to have been more careful to guard against its being made.
In note 5 on page 58 [note 7] I partially guarded against it by saying that the
"mother-sea" from which the finite mind is supposed to be strained by the brain,
need not be conceived of in pantheistic terms exclusively. There might be, I
said, many minds behind the scenes as well as one. The plain truth is that one
may conceive the mental world behind the veil in as individualistic a form as
one pleases, without any detriment to the general scheme by which the brain is
represented as a transmissive organ.
If the extreme individualistic view were taken, one's finite mundane
consciousness would be an extract from one's larger, truer personality, the
latter having even now some sort of reality behind the scenes. And in
transmitting it - to keep to our extremely mechanical metaphor, which
confessedly throws no light on the actual modus operandi - one's brain would
also leave effects upon the part remaining behind the veil; for when a thing is
torn, both fragments feel the operation.
And just as (to use a very coarse figure) the stubs remain in a check-book
whenever a cheek is used, to register the transaction, so these impressions on
the transcendent self might constitute so many vouchers of the finite
experiences of which the brain had been the mediator; and ultimately they might
form that collection within the larger self of memories of our earthly passage,
which is all that, since Locke's day, the continuance of our personal identity
beyond the grave has by psychology been recognized to mean.
It is true that all this would seem to have affinities rather with pre-existence
and with possible reincarnations than with the Christian notion of immortality.
But my concern in the lecture was not to discuss immortality in general. It was
confined to showing it to be not incompatible with the brain-function theory of
our present mundane consciousness. I hold that it is so compatible, and
compatible moreover in fully individualized form. The reader would be in accord
with everything that the text of my lecture intended to say, were he to assert
that every memory and affection, of his present life is to be preserved, and
that he shall never in saecula saeculorum cease to be able to say to himself: "I
am the same personal being who in old times upon the earth had those
experiences."
Human Immortality
It is a matter unfortunately too often seen in history to call for much remark,
that when a living want of mankind has got itself officially protected and
organized in an institution, one of the things which the institution most surely
tends to do is to stand in the way of the natural gratification of the want
itself. We see this in laws and courts of justice; we see it in
ecclesiasticisms; we see it in academies of the fine arts, in the medical and
other professions, and we even see it in the universities themselves.
Too often do the place-holders of such institutions frustrate the spiritual
purpose to which they were appointed to minister, by the technical light which
soon becomes the only light in which they seem able to see the purpose, and the
narrow way which is the only way in which they can work in its service.
I confess that I thought of this for a moment when the Corporation of our
University invited me last spring to give this Ingersoll lecture. Immortality is
one of the great spiritual needs of man. The churches have constituted
themselves the official guardians of the need, with the result that some of them
actually pretend to accord or to withhold it from the individual by their
conventional sacraments - withhold it at least in the only shape in which it can
be an object of desire. And now comes the Ingersoll lectureship. Its high-minded
founder evidently thought that our University might serve the cause he(2)
had at heart more liberally than the churches do, because a university is a body
so much less trammeled by traditions and by impossibilities in regard to choice
of persons. And yet one of the first things which the University does is to
appoint a man like him who stands before you, certainly not because he is known
as an enthusiastic messenger of the future life, burning to publish the good
tidings to his fellow men, but apparently because he is a University official.
Thinking in this way, I felt at first as if I ought to decline the appointment.
The whole subject of immortal life has its prime roots in personal feeling. I
have to confess that my own personal feeling about immortality has never been of
the keenest order, and that, among the problems that give my mind solicitude,
this one does not take the very foremost place. Yet there are individuals with a
real passion for the matter, men and women for whom a life hereafter is a
pungent craving, and the thought of it an obsession; and in whom keenness of
interest has bred an insight into the relations of the subject that no one less
penetrated with the mystery of it can attain. Some of these people are known to
me. They are not official personages; they do not speak as the scribes, but as
having direct authority. And surely, if anywhere a prophet clad in goatskins,
and not a uniformed official, should be called to give inspiration, assurance,
and instruction, it would seem to be here, on such a theme. Office, at any rate,
ought not to displace spiritual calling.
And yet, in spite of these reflections, which I could not avoid making, I am
here tonight, all uninspired and official as I am. I am sure that prophets clad
in goatskins, or, to speak less figuratively, laymen inspired with emotional
messages on the subject, will often enough be invited by our Corporation to give
the Ingersoll lecture hereafter. Meanwhile, all negative and deadening as the
remarks of a mere professional psychologist like myself may be in comparison
with the vital lessons they will give, I am sure, upon mature reflection, that
those who have the responsibility of administering the Ingersoll foundation are
in duty bound to let the most various kinds of official personages take their
turn as well. The subject is really an enormous subject. At the back of Mr.
Alger's "Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life," there is a
bibliography of more than five thousand titles of books in which it is treated.
Our Corporation cannot think only of the single lecture: it must think of the
whole series of lectures in futuro. Single lectures, however emotionally
inspired and inspiring they may be, will not be enough. The lectures must remedy
each other, so that out of the series there shall emerge a collective literature
worthy of the importance of the theme. This unquestionably was what the founder
had in mind. He wished the subject to be turned over in all possible aspects, so
that at last results might ponderate harmoniously in the true direction. Seen in
this long perspective, the Ingersoll foundation calls for nothing so much as for
minute division of labor. Orators must take their turn, and prophets; but narrow
specialists as well. Theologians of every creed, metaphysicians,
anthropologists, and psychologists must alternate with biologists and physicists
and psychical researchers-even with mathematicians. If any one of them presents
a grain of truth, seen from his point of view, that will remain and accrete with
truths brought by the others, his will have been a good appointment.
In the hour that lies before us, then, I shall seek to justify my appointment by
offering what seem to me two such grains of truth, two points well fitted, if I
am not mistaken, to combine with anything that other lecturers may bring.
These points are both of them in the nature of replies to objections, to
difficulties which our modem culture finds in the old notion of a life hereafter
- difficulties that I am sure rob the notion of much of its old power to draw
belief, in the scientifically cultivated circles to which this audience belong.
The first of these difficulties is relative to the absolute dependence of our
spiritual life, as we know it here, upon the brain. One hears not only
physiologists, but numbers of laymen who read the popular science books and
magazines, saying all about us, How can we believe in life hereafter when
science has once for all attained to proving, beyond possibility of escape, that
our inner life is a function of that famous material, the so-called "gray
matter" of our cerebral convolutions? How can the function possibly persist
after its organ has undergone decay?
Thus physiological psychology is what is supposed to bar the way to the old
faith. And it is now as a physiological psychologist that I ask you to look at
the question with me a little more closely.
It is indeed true that physiological science has come to the conclusion cited;
and we must confess that in so doing she has only carried out a little farther
the common belief of mankind. Everyone knows that arrests of brain development
occasion imbecility, that blows on the head abolish memory or consciousness, and
that brain-stimulants and poisons change the quality of our ideas. The
anatomists, physiologists, and pathologists have only shown this generally
admitted fact of a dependence to be detailed and minute. What the laboratories
and hospitals have lately been teaching us is not only that thought in general
is one of the brain's functions, but that the various special forms of thinking
are functions of special portions of the brain. When we are thinking of things
seen, it is our occipital convolutions that are active; when of things heard, it
is a certain portion of our temporal lobes; when of things to be spoken, it is
one of our frontal convolutions. Professor Flechsig of Leipzig (who perhaps more
than anyone may claim to have made the subject his own) considers that in other
special convolutions those processes of association go on which permit the more
abstract processes of thought to take place. I could easily show you these
regions if I had here a picture of the brain(3).
Moreover, the diminished or exaggerated associations of what this author calls
the Körperfühlsphäre with the other regions accounts, according to him, for the
complexion of our emotional life, and eventually decides whether one shall be a
callous brute or criminal, an unbalanced sentimentalist, or a character
accessible to feeling, and yet well poised. Such special opinions may have to be
corrected; yet so firmly established do the main positions worked out by the
anatomists, physiologists, and pathologists of the brain appear, that the youth
of our medical schools are everywhere taught unhesitatingly to believe them. The
assurance that observation will go on to establish them ever more and more
minutely is the inspirer of all contemporary research. And almost any of our
young psychologists will tell you that only a few belated scholastics, or
possibly some crack-brained theosophist or psychical researcher, can be found
holding back, and still talking as if mental phenomena might exist as
independent variables in the world.
For the purposes of my argument, now, I wish to adopt this general doctrine as
if it were established absolutely, with no possibility of restriction. During
this hour I wish you also to accept it as a postulate, whether you think it
incontrovertibly established or not; so I beg you to agree with me today in
subscribing to the great psycho-physiological formula: Thought is a function of
the brain.
The question is, then, Does this doctrine logically compel us to disbelieve in
immortality? Ought it to force every truly consistent thinker to sacrifice his
hopes of an hereafter to what he takes to be his duty of accepting all the
consequences of a scientific truth?
Most persons imbued with what one may call the puritanism of science would feel
themselves bound to answer this question with a yes. If any medically or
psychologically bred young scientists feel otherwise, it is probably in
consequence of that incoherency of mind of which the majority of mankind happily
enjoy the privilege. At one hour scientists, at another they are Christians or
common men, with the will to live burning hot in their breasts; and, holding
thus the two ends of the chain, they are careless of the intermediate
connection. But the more radical and uncompromising disciple of science makes
the sacrifice, and, sorrowfully or not, according to his temperament, submits to
giving up his hopes of heaven(4).
This, then, is the objection to immortality; and the next thing in order for me
is to try to make plain to you why I believe that it has in strict logic no
deterrent power. I must show you that the fatal consequence is not coercive, as
is commonly imagined; and that, even though our soul's life (as here below it is
revealed to us) may be in literal strictness the function of a brain that
perishes, yet it is not at all impossible, but on the contrary quite possible,
that the life may still continue when the brain itself is dead.
The supposed impossibility of its continuing comes from too superficial a look
at the admitted fact of functional dependence. The moment we inquire more
closely into the notion of functional dependence, and ask ourselves, for
example, how many kinds of functional dependence there may be, we immediately
perceive that there is one kind at least that does not exclude a life hereafter
at all. The fatal conclusion of the physiologist flows from his assuming offhand
another kind of functional dependence, and treating it as the only imaginable
kind(5).
When the physiologist who thinks that his science cuts hope of immortality
pronounces the phrase, "Thought is a function of the brain," he thinks of the
matter just as he thinks when he says, "Steam is a function of the tea-kettle,"
"Light is a function of the electric circuit," "Power is a function of the
moving waterfall." In these latter cases the several material objects have the
function of inwardly creating or engendering their effects, and their function
must be called productive function, just so, he thinks, it must be with the
brain. Engendering consciousness in its interior, much as it engenders cholesterin and creatin and carbonic acid, its relation to our soul's life must
also be called productive function. Of course, if such production be the
function, then when the organ perishes, since the production can no longer
continue, the soul must surely die. Such a conclusion as this is indeed
inevitable from that particular conception of the facts(6).
But in the world of physical nature productive function of this sort is not the
only kind of function with which we are familiar. We have also releasing or
permissive function; and we have transmissive function.
The trigger of a crossbow has a releasing function: it removes the obstacle that
holds the string, and lets the bow fly back to its natural shape. So when the
hammer falls upon a detonating compound. By knocking out the inner molecular
obstructions, it lets the constituent gases resume their normal bulk, and so
permits the explosion to take place.
In the case of a colored glass, a prism, or a refracting lens, we have
transmissive function. The energy of light, no matter how produced, is by the
glass sifted and limited in color, and by the lens or prism determined to a
certain path and shape. Similarly, the keys of an organ have only a transmissive
function. They open successively the various pipes and let the wind in the
air-chest escape in various ways. The voices of the various pipes are
constituted by the columns of air trembling as they emerge. But the air is not
engendered in the organ. The organ proper, as distinguished from its air-chest,
is only an apparatus for letting portions of it loose upon the world in these
peculiarly limited shapes.
My thesis now is this: that, when we think of the law that thought is a function
of the brain, we are not required to think of productive function only; we are
entitled also to consider permissive or transmissive function. And this the
ordinary psychophysiologist leaves out of his account.
Suppose, for example, that the whole universe of material things - the furniture
of earth and choir of heaven - should turn out to be a mere surface-veil of
phenomena, hiding and keeping back the world of genuine realities. Such a
supposition is foreign neither to common sense nor to philosophy. Common sense
believes in realities behind the veil even too superstitiously; and idealistic
philosophy declares the whole world of natural experience, as we get it, to be
but a time-mask, shattering or refracting the one infinite Thought which is the
sole reality into those millions of finite streams of consciousness known to us
as our private selves.
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.
Suppose, now, that this were really so, and suppose, moreover, that the dome,
opaque enough at all times to the full super-solar blaze, could at certain times
and places grow less so, and let certain beams pierce through into this
sublunary world. These beams would be so many finite rays, so to speak, of
consciousness, and they would vary in quantity and quality as the opacity varied
in degree. Only at particular times and places would it seem that, as a matter
of fact, the veil of nature can grow thin and rupturable enough for such effects
to occur. But in those places gleams, however finite and unsatisfying, of the
absolute life of the universe, are from time to time vouchsafed. Glows of
feeling, glimpses of insight, and streams of knowledge and perception float into
our finite world.
Admit now that our brains are such thin and half-transparent places in the veil.
What will happen? Why, as the white radiance comes through the dome, with all
sorts of staining and distortion imprinted on it by the glass, or as the air now
comes through my glottis determined and limited in its force and quality of its
vibrations by the peculiarities of those vocal chords which form its gate of
egress and shape it into my personal voice, even so the genuine matter of
reality, the life of souls as it is in its fullness, will break through our
several brains into this world in all sorts of restricted forms, and with all
the imperfections and queernesses that characterize our finite individualities
here below.
According to the state in which the brain finds itself, the barrier of its
obstructiveness may also be supposed to rise or fall. It sinks so low, when the
brain is in full activity, that a comparative flood of spiritual energy pours
over. At other times, only such occasional waves of thought as heavy sleep
permits get by. And when finally a brain stops acting altogether, or decays,
that special stream of consciousness which it subserved will vanish entirely
from this natural world. But the sphere of being that supplied the consciousness
would still be intact; and in that more real world with which, even whilst here,
it was continuous, the consciousness might, in ways unknown to us, continue
still.
You see that, on all these suppositions, our soul's life, as we here know it,
would none the less in literal strictness be the function of the brain. The
brain would be the independent variable, the mind would vary dependently on it.
But such dependence on the brain for this natural life would in no wise make
immortal life impossible - it might be quite compatible with supernatural life
behind the veil hereafter.
As I said, then, the fatal consequence is not coercive, the conclusion which
materialism draws being due solely to its one-sided way of taking the word
"function." And, whether we care or not for immortality in itself, we ought, as
mere critics doing police duty among the vagaries of mankind, to insist on the
illogicality of a denial based on the flat ignoring of a palpable alternative.
How much more ought we to insist, as lovers of truth, when the denial is that of
such a vital hope of mankind!
In strict logic, then, the fangs of cerebralistic materialism are drawn. My
words ought consequently already to exert a releasing function on your hopes.
You may believe henceforward, whether you care to profit by the permission or
not. But, as this is a very abstract argument, I think it will help its effect
to say a word or two about the more concrete conditions of the case.
All abstract hypotheses sound unreal; and the abstract notion that our brains
are colored lenses in the wall of nature, admitting light from the super-solar
source, but at the same time tingeing and restricting it, has a thoroughly
fantastic sound. What is it, you may ask, but a foolish metaphor? And how can
such a function be imagined? Isn't the common materialistic notion vastly
simpler? Is not consciousness really more comparable to a sort of steam, or
perfume, or electricity, or nerve-glow, generated on the spot in its own
peculiar vessel? Is it not more rigorously scientific to treat the brain's
function as function of production?
The immediate reply is, that, if we are talking of
science positively understood, function can mean nothing more than bare
concomitant variation. When the brain-activities change in one way,
consciousness changes in another; when the currents pour through the occipital
lobes, consciousness sees things; when through the lower frontal region,
consciousness says things to itself; when they stop, she goes to sleep, etc. In
strict science, we can only write down the bare fact of concomitance; and all
talk about either production or transmission, as the mode of taking place, is
pure superadded hypothesis, and metaphysical hypothesis at that, for we can
frame no more notion of the details on the one alternative than on the other.
Ask for any indication of the exact process either of transmission or of
production, and science confesses her imagination to be bankrupt. She has, so
far, not the least glimmer of a conjecture or suggestion - not even a bad verbal
metaphor or pun to offer. Ignoramus, ignorabimus, is what most physiologists, in
the words of one of their number, will say here. The production of such a thing
as consciousness in the brain, they will reply with the late Berlin professor of
physiology, is the absolute world-enigma - something so paradoxical and abnormal
as to be a stumbling block to nature, and almost a self-contradiction. Into the
mode of production of steam in a tea-kettle we have conjectural insight, for the
terms that change are physically homogeneous one with another, and we can easily
imagine the case to consist of nothing but alterations of molecular motion. But
in the production of consciousness by the brain, the terms are heterogeneous
natures altogether; and as far as our understanding goes, it is as great a
miracle as if we said, Thought is "spontaneously generated," or "created out of
nothing."
The theory of production is therefore not a jot more simple or credible in
itself than any other conceivable theory. It is only a little more popular. All
that one need do, therefore, if the ordinary materialist should challenge one to
explain how the brain can be an organ for limiting and determining to a certain
form a consciousness elsewhere produced, is to retort with a tu quoque, asking
him in turn to explain how it can be an organ for producing consciousness out of
whole cloth. For polemic purposes, the two theories are thus exactly on a par.
But if we consider the theory of transmission in a wider way, we see that it has
certain positive superiorities, quite apart from its connection with the
immortality question.
Just how the process of transmission may be carried on, is indeed unimaginable;
but the outer relations, so to speak, of the process, encourage our belief.
Consciousness in this process does not have to be generated de novo in a vast
number of places. It exists already, behind the scenes, coeval with the world.
The transmission theory not only avoids in this way multiplying miracles, but it
puts itself in touch with general idealistic philosophy better than the
production theory does. It should always be reckoned a good thing when science
and philosophy thus meet(7).
It puts itself also in touch with the conception of a "threshold" - word with
which, since Fechner wrote his book called Psycho-physik, the so-called "new
Psychology" has rung. Fechner imagines as the condition of consciousness a
certain kind of psychophysical movement, as he terms it. Before consciousness
can come, a certain degree of activity in the movement much be reached. This
requisite degree is called the "threshold"; but the height of the threshold
varies under different circumstances: it may rise or fall. When it falls, as in
states of great lucidity, we grow conscious of things of which we should be
unconscious at other times; when it rises, as in drowsiness, consciousness sinks
in amount. This rising and lowering of a psychophysical threshold exactly
conform to our notion of a permanent obstruction to the transmission of
consciousness, which obstruction may, in our brains, grow alternately greater or
less(8).
The transmission theory also puts itself in touch with a whole class of
experiences that are with difficulty explained by the production theory. I refer
to those obscure and exceptional phenomena reported at all times throughout
human history, which the "psychical researchers," with Mr. Frederic Myers at
their head, are doing so much to rehabilitate(9);
such phenomena, namely, as religious conversions, providential leadings in
answer to prayer, instantaneous healings, premonitions, apparitions at time of
death, clairvoyant visions or impressions, and the whole range of mediumistic
capacities, to say nothing of still more exceptional and incomprehensible
things. If all our human thought be a function of the brain, then of course, if
any of these things are facts - and to my own mind some of them are facts - we
may not suppose that they can occur without preliminary brain action. But the
ordinary production theory of consciousness is knit up with a peculiar notion of
how brain action can occur - that notion being that all brain action, without
exception, is due to a prior action, immediate or remote, of the bodily
sense-organs on the brain. Such action makes the brain produce sensations and
mental images, and out of the sensations and images the higher forms of thought
and knowledge in their turn are framed. As transmissionists, we also must admit
this to be the condition of all our usual thought. Sense-action is what lowers
the brain-barrier. My voice and aspect, for instance, strike upon your ears and
eyes; your brain thereupon becomes more pervious, and an awareness on your part
of what I say and who I am slips into this world from the world behind the veil.
But, in the mysterious phenomena to which I allude, it is often hard to see
where the sense-organs can come in. A medium, for example, will show knowledge
of his sitter's private affairs which it seems impossible he should have
acquired through sight or hearing, or inference therefrom. Or you will have an
apparition of someone who is now dying hundreds of miles away. On the production
theory one does not see from what sensations such odd bits of knowledge are
produced. On the transmission theory, they don't have to be "produced" - they
exist ready-made in the transcendental world, and all that is needed is an
abnormal lowering of the brain-threshold to let them through. In cases of
conversion, in providential leadings, sudden mental healings, etc., it seems to
the subjects themselves of the experience as if a power from without, quite
different from the ordinary action of the senses or of the sense-led mind, came
into their life, as if the latter suddenly opened into that greater life in
which it has its source. The word "influx," used in Swedenborgian circles, well
describes this impression of new insight, or new willingness, sweeping over us
like a tide. All such experiences, quite paradoxical and meaningless on the
production theory, fall very naturally into place on the other theory. We need
only suppose the continuity of our consciousness with a mother sea, to allow for
exceptional waves occasionally pouring over the dam. Of course the causes of
these odd lowerings of the brain's threshold still remain a mystery on any
terms.
Add, then, this advantage to the transmission theory - an advantage which I am
well aware that some of you will not rate very high - and also add the advantage
of not conflicting with a life hereafter, and I hope you will agree with me that
it has many points of superiority to the more familiar theory. It is a theory
which, in the history of opinion on such matters, has never been wholly left out
of account, though never developed at any great length. In the great orthodox
philosophic tradition, the body is treated as an essential condition to the
soul's life in this world of sense; but after death, it is said, the soul is set
free, and becomes a purely intellectual and non-appetitive being. Kant expresses
this idea in terms that come singularly close to those of our transmission
theory. The death of the body, he says, may indeed be the end of the sensational
use of our mind, but only the beginning of the intellectual use. "The body," he
continues, "would thus be, not the cause of our thinking, but merely a condition
restrictive thereof, and, although essential to our sensuous and animal
consciousness, it may be regarded as an impeder of our pure spiritual life"(10).
And in a recent book of great suggestiveness and power, less well known as yet
than it deserves - I mean Riddles of the Sphinx, by Mr. F. C. S. Schiller of
Oxford, late of Cornell University - the transmission theory is defended at some
length(11).
But still, you will ask, in what positive way does this theory help us to
realize our immortality in imagination? What we all wish to keep is just these
individual restrictions, these selfsame tendencies and peculiarities that define
us to ourselves and others, and constitute our identity, so called. Our
finitenesses and limitations seem to be our personal essence; and when the
finiting organ drops away, and our several spirits revert to their original
source and resume their unrestricted condition, will they then be anything like
those sweet streams of feeling which we know, and which even now our brains are
sifting out from the great reservoir for our enjoyment here below? Such
questions are truly living questions, and surely they must be seriously
discussed by future lecturers upon this Ingersoll foundation. I hope, for my
part, that more than one such lecturer will penetratingly discuss the conditions
of our immortality, and tell us how much we may lose, and how much we may
possibly gain, if its finiting outlines should be changed. If all determination
is negation, as the philosophers say, it might well prove that the loss of some
of the particular determinations which the brain imposes would not appear a
matter for such absolute regret.
But into these higher and more transcendental matters I refuse to enter upon
this occasion; and I proceed, during the remainder of the hour, to treat of my
second point. Fragmentary and negative it is, as my first one has been. Yet,
between them, they do give to our belief in immortality a freer wing.
My second point is relative to the incredible and intolerable number of beings
which, with our modern imagination, we must believe to be immortal, if
immortality be true. I cannot but suspect that this, too, is a stumbling-block
to many of my present audience. And it is a stumbling-block which I should
thoroughly like to clear away.
It is, I fancy, a stumbling-block of altogether modern origin, due to the strain
upon the quantitative imagination which recent scientific theories, and the
moral feelings consequent upon them, have brought in their train.
For our ancestors the world was a small, and - compared with our modern sense of
it - a comparatively snug affair. Six thousand years at most it had lasted. In
its history a few particular human heroes, kings, ecclesiarchs, and saints stood
forth very prominent, overshadowing the imagination with their claims and
merits, so that not only they, but all who were associated familiarly with them,
shone with a glamour which even the Almighty, it was supposed, must recognize
and respect. These prominent personages and their associates were the nucleus of
the immortal group; the minor heroes and saints of minor sects came next, and
people without distinction formed a sort of background and filling in. The whole
scene of eternity (so far, at least, as Heaven and not the nether place was
concerned in it) never struck the believer's fancy as an overwhelmingly large or
inconveniently crowded stage, One might call this an aristocratic view of
immortality; the immortals - I speak of Heaven exclusively, for an immortality
of torment need not now concern us - were always an elite, a select and
manageable number.
But, with our own generation, an entirely new quantitative imagination has swept
over our western world. The theory of evolution now requires us to suppose a far
vaster scale of times, spaces, and numbers than our forefathers ever dreamed the
cosmic process to involve. Human history grows continuously out of animal
history, and goes back possibly even to the tertiary epoch. From this there has
emerged insensibly a democratic view, instead of the old aristocratic view, of
immortality. For our minds, though in one sense they may have grown a little
cynical, in another they have been made sympathetic by the evolutionary
perspective. Bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh are these half-brutish
prehistoric brothers. Girdled about with the immense darkness of this mysterious
universe even as we are, they were born and died, suffered and struggled. Given
over to fearful crime and passion, plunged in the blackest ignorance, preyed
upon by hideous and grotesque delusions, yet steadfastly serving the profoundest
of ideals in their fixed faith that existence in any form is better than
non-existence, they ever rescued triumphantly from the jaws of ever-imminent
destruction the torch of life, which, thanks to them, now lights the world for
us. How small indeed seem individual distinctions when we look back on these
overwhelming numbers of human beings panting and straining under the pressure of
that vital want! And how inessential in the eyes of God must be the small
surplus of the individual's merit, swamped as it is in the vast ocean of the
common merit of mankind, dumbly and undauntedly doing the fundamental duty and
living the heroic life! We grow humble and reverent as we contemplate the
prodigious spectacle. Not our differences and distinctions - we feel - no, but
our common animal essence of patience under suffering and enduring effort must
be what redeems us in the Deity's sight. An immense compassion and kinship fill
the heart. An immortality from which these inconceivable billions of fellow
strivers should be excluded becomes an irrational idea for us. That our
superiority in personal refinement or in religious creed should constitute a
difference between ourselves and our messmates at life's banquet, fit to entail
such a consequential difference of destiny as eternal life for us, and for them
torment hereafter, or death with the beasts that perish, is a notion too absurd
to be considered serious. Nay, more, the very beasts themselves - the wild ones
at any rate - are leading the heroic life at all times. And a modern mind,
expanded as some minds are by cosmic emotion, by the great evolutionist vision
of universal continuity, hesitates to draw the line even at man. If any creature
lives forever, why not all? - why not the patient brutes? So that a faith in
immortality, if we are to indulge it, demands of us nowadays a scale of
representation so stupendous that our imagination faints before it, and our
personal feelings refuse to rise up and face the task. The supposition we are
swept along to is too vast, and, rather than face the conclusion, we abandon the
premise from which it starts. We give up our own immortality sooner than believe
that all the hosts of Hottentots and Australians that have been, and shall ever
be, should share it with us in saecula saeculorum. Life is a good thing on a
reasonably copious scale; but the very heavens themselves, and the cosmic times
and spaces, would stand aghast, we think, at the notion of preserving eternally
such an ever-swelling plethora and glut of it.
Having myself, as a recipient of modem scientific culture, gone through a
subjective experience like this, I feel sure that it must also have been the
experience of many, perhaps of most, of you who listen to my words. But I have
also come to see that it harbors a tremendous fallacy; and, since the noting of
the fallacy has set my own mind free again, I have felt that one service I might
render to my listeners tonight would be to point out where it lies.
It is the most obvious fallacy in the world, and the only wonder is that all the
world should not see through it. It is the result of nothing but an invincible
blindness from which we suffer, an insensibility to the inner significance of
alien lives, and a conceit that would project our own incapacity into the vast
cosmos, and measure the wants of the Absolute by our own puny needs. Our
Christian ancestors dealt with the problem more easily than we do. We, indeed,
lack sympathy; but they had a positive antipathy for these alien human
creatures, and they naively supposed the Deity to have the antipathy, too.
Being, as they were, "heathen," our forefathers felt a certain sort of joy in
thinking that their Creator made them as so much mere fuel for the fires of
hell. Our culture has humanized us beyond that point, but we cannot yet conceive
them as our comrades in the fields of heaven. We have, as the phrase goes, no
use for them, and it oppresses us to think of their survival. Take, for
instance, all the Chinamen. Which of you here, my friends, sees any fitness in
their eternal perpetuation unreduced in numbers? Surely not one of you. At most,
you might deem it well to keep a few chosen specimens alive to represent an
interesting and peculiar variety of humanity; but as for the rest, what comes in
such surpassing numbers, and what you can only imagine in this abstract summary
collective manner, must be something of which the units, you are sure, can have
no individual preciousness. God himself, you think, can have no use for them. An
immortality of every separate specimen must be to him and to the universe as
indigestible a load to carry as it is to you. So, engulfing the whole subject in
a sort of mental giddiness and nausea, you drift along, first doubting that the
mass can be immortal, then losing all assurance in the immortality of your own
particular person, precious as you all the while feel and realize the latter to
be. This, I am sure, is the attitude of mind of some of you before me.
But is not such an attitude due to the veriest lack and dearth of your
imagination? You take these swarms of alien kinsmen as they are for you: an
external picture painted on your retina, representing a crowd oppressive by its
vastness and confusion. As they are for you, so you think they positively and
absolutely are. I feel no call for them, you say; therefore there is no call for
them. But all the while, beyond this externality which is your way of realizing
them, they realize themselves with the acutest internality, with the most
violent thrills of life. 'Tis you who are dead, stone-dead and blind and
senseless, in your way of looking on. You open your eyes upon a scene of which
you miss the whole significance. Each of these grotesque or even repulsive
aliens is animated by an inner joy of living as hot or hotter than that which
you feel beating in your private breast. The sun rises and beauty beams to light
his path. To miss the inner joy of him, as Stevenson says, is to miss the whole
of him(12). Not a being of the countless throng
is there whose continued life is not called for, and called for intensely, by
the consciousness that animates the being's form. That you neither realize nor
understand nor call for it, that you have no use for it, is an absolutely
irrelevant circumstance. That you have a saturation-point of interest tells us
nothing of the interests that absolutely are. The universe, with every living
entity which her resources create, creates at the same time a call for that
entity, and an appetite for its continuance - creates it, if nowhere else, at
least within the heart of the entity itself. It is absurd to suppose, simply
because our private power of sympathetic vibration with other lives gives out so
soon, that in the heart of infinite being itself there can be such a thing as
plethora, or glut, or supersaturation. It is not as if there were a bounded room
where the minds in possession had to move up or make place and crowd together to
accommodate new occupants. Each new mind brings its own edition of the universe
of space along with it, its own room to inhabit; and these spaces never crowd
each other-the space of my imagination, for example, in no way interferes with
yours. The amount of possible consciousness seems to be governed by no law
analogous to that of the so-called conservation of energy in the material world.
When one man wakes up, or one is born, another does not have to go to sleep, or
die, in order to keep the consciousness of the universe a constant quantity.
Professor Wundt, in fact, in his System of Philosophy, has formulated a law of
the universe which he calls the law of increase of spiritual energy, and which
he expressly opposes to the law of conservation of energy in physical things(13).
There seems no formal limit to the positive increase of being in spiritual
respects; and since spiritual being, whenever it comes, affirms itself, expands,
and craves continuance, we may justly and literally say, regardless of the
defects of our own private sympathy, that the supply of individual life in the
universe can never possibly, however immeasurable it may become, exceed the
demand. The demand for that supply is there the moment the supply itself comes
into being, for the beings supplied demand their own continuance.
I speak, you see, from the point of view of all the other individual beings,
realizing and enjoying inwardly their own existence. If we are pantheists, we
can stop there. We need, then, only say that through them, as through so many
diversified channels of expression, the eternal Spirit of the Universe affirms
and realizes its own infinite life. But if we are theists, we can go farther
without altering the result. God, we can then say, has so inexhaustible a
capacity for love that his call and need is for a literally endless accumulation
of created lives. He can never faint or grow weary, as we should, under the
increasing supply. His scale is infinite in all things. His sympathy can never
know satiety or glut.
I hope now that you agree with me that the tiresomeness of an over-peopled
heaven is a purely subjective and illusory notion, a sign of human incapacity, a
remnant of the old narrow-hearted aristocratic creed. "Revere the Maker, lift
thine eye up to his style and manners of the sky," and you will believe that
this is indeed a democratic universe, in which your paltry exclusions play no
regulative part. Was your taste consulted in the peopling of this globe? How,
then, should it be consulted as to the peopling of the vast City of God? Let us
put our hand over our mouth, like job, and be thankful that in our personal
littleness we ourselves are here at all. The Deity that suffers us, we may be
sure, can suffer many another queer and wondrous and only half-delightful thing.
For my own part, then, so far as logic goes, I am willing that every leaf that
ever grew in this world's forests and rustled in the breeze should become
immortal. It is purely a question of fact: are the leaves so, or not? Abstract
quantity, and the abstract needlessness in our eyes of so much reduplication of
things so much alike, have no connection with the subject. For bigness and
number and generic similarity are only manners of our finite way of thinking;
and, considered in itself and apart from our imagination, one scale of
dimensions and of numbers for the universe is no more miraculous or
inconceivable than another, the moment you grant to a universe the liberty to be
at all, in place of the non-entity that might conceivably have reigned.
The heart of being can have no exclusions akin to those which our poor little
hearts set up. The inner significance of other lives exceeds all our powers of
sympathy and insight. If we feel a significance in our own life which would lead
us spontaneously to claim its perpetuity, let us be at least tolerant of like
claims made by other lives, however numerous, however unideal they may seem to
us to be. Let us at any rate not decide adversely on our own claim, whose
grounds we feel directly, because we cannot decide favorably on the alien
claims, whose grounds we cannot feel at all. That would be letting blindness lay
down the law to sight.
(1)
This was originally delivered as a lecture by William James at Harvard
University in 1898 as one of the annual Ingersoll Lectures on Immortality
established in 1893 by the will of Miss Caroline Haskell Ingersoll. It was later
published as a small book. It is here reprinted with the Preface to the Second
Edition, in which James expands somewhat upon concepts expressed in the original
lecture, from The Will to Believe and Other Essays (New York. Dover
Publications, 1956). [back to main text].
(2)
William James was, of course, in error in the gender of the pronoun. See
footnote (8). [back to main text]
(3) The gaps between the centers first recognized as motor and
sensory - gaps which form in man two-thirds of the surface of the hemispheres -
are thus positively interpreted by Flechsig as intellectual centers strictly so
called. (Compare his Gehirn und Seele, 2te Ausgabe, 1896, p. 23.) They have, he
considers, a common type of microscopic structure; and the fibers connected with
them are a month later in gaining their medullary sheath than are the fibers
connected with the other centers. When disordered, they are the starting-point
of the insanities, properly so called. Already Wernicke had defined insanity as
disease of the organ of association, without so definitely pretending to
circumscribe the latter - compare his Grundriss der Psychiatrie, 1894, p. 7. Flechsig goes so far as to say that he finds a difference of symptoms in general
paralytics according as their frontal or their more posterior association
centers are diseased. Where it is the frontal centers, the patient's
consciousness of self is more deranged than is his perception of purely
objective relations. Where the posterior associative regions suffer, it is
rather the patient's system of objective ideas that undergoes disintegration
(loc. cit., pp. 89-91). In rodents Flechsig thinks there is a complete absence
of association centers - the sensory centers touch each other. In carnivora and
the lower monkeys the latter centers still exceed the association centers in
volume. Only in the katarhinal apes do we begin to find anything like the human
type (p. 84).
In his little pamphlet, Die Grenzen geistiger Gesundheit und Krankheit, Leipzig,
1896, Flechsig ascribes the moral insensibility which is found in certain
criminals to a diminution of internal pain-feeling due to degeneration of the
Körperfühlsphäre, that extensive anterior region first so named by Munk, in
which he lays the scat of all the emotions and of the consciousness of self (Gehirn
und Seele, pp. 62-68; Die Grenzen, etc., pp. 31-39, 48). I give these references
to Flechsig for concreteness' sake, not because his views are irreversibly made
out. [back to main text]
(4) So widespread is this conclusion in positivistic circles, so
abundantly is it expressed in conversation, and so frequently implied in things
that are written, that I confess that my surprise was great when I came to look
into books for a passage explicitly denying immortality on physiological
grounds, which 1 might quote to make my text more concrete. I was unable to find
anything blunt and distinct enough to serve. I looked through all the books that
would naturally suggest themselves, with no effect; and I vainly asked various
psychological colleagues. And yet I should almost have been ready to take oath
that I had read several such passages of the most categoric sort within the last
decade. Very likely this is a false impression, and it may be with this opinion
as with many others. The atmosphere is full of them; many a writer's pages
logically presuppose and involve them; yet, if you wish to refer a student to an
express and radical statement that he may employ as a text to comment on, you
find almost nothing that will do. In the present case there are plenty of
passages in which, in a general way, mind is said to be conterminous with
brain-function, but hardly one in which the author thereupon explicitly denies
the possibility of immortality. The best one I have found is perhaps this: "Not
only consciousness, but every stirring of life, depends on functions that go out
like a flame when nourishment is cut off... The phenomena of consciousness
correspond, element for element, to the operations of special parts of the
brain... The destruction of any piece of the apparatus involves the loss of some
one or other of the vital operations; and the consequence is that, as far as
life extends, we have before us only an organic function, not a Ding-an-sich, or
an expression of that imaginary entity the Soul. This fundamental proposition
... carries with it the denial of the immortality of the soul, since, where no
soul exists, its mortality or immortality cannot be raised as a question ... The
function fills its time - the flame illuminates and therein gives out its whole
being. That is all; and verily that is enough ... Sensation has its definite
organic conditions, and. as these decay with the natural decay of life, it is
quite impossible for a mind accustomed to deal with realities to suppose any
capacity of sensation as surviving when the machinery of our natural existence
has stopped." (E. Duhring: der Werth des Lebens, 3d edition, pp. 48, 165.) [back
to main text]
(5) The philosophically instructed reader will notice that I
have all along been placing myself at the ordinary dualistic point of view of
natural science and of common sense. From this point of view mental facts like
feelings are made of one kind of stuff or substance, physical facts of another.
An absolute phenomenism, not believing such a dualism to be ultimate, may
possibly end by solving some of the problems that are insoluble when propounded
in dualistic terms. Meanwhile, since the physiological objection to immortality
has arisen on the ordinary dualistic plane of thought, and since absolute
phenomenism has as yet said nothing articulate enough to count about the matter,
it is proper that my reply to the objection should be expressed in dualistic
terms-leaving me free, of course, on any later occasion to make an attempt, if I
wish, to transcend them and use different categories.
Now, on the dualistic assumption, one cannot see more than two really different
sorts of dependence of our mind on our brain: Either
1. The brain brings into being the very stuff of consciousness of which our mind
consists; or else
2. Consciousness pre-exists as an entity, and the various brains give to it its
various special forms.
If supposition 2 be the true one, and the stuff of mind pre-exists, there are,
again, only two ways of conceiving that our brain confers upon it the
specifically human form. It may exist
a. In disseminated particles; and then our brains are organs of concentration,
organs for combining and massing these into resultant minds of personal form. Or
it may exist
b. In vaster unities (absolute "world-soul," or something less); and then our
brains are organs for separating it into parts and giving them finite form.
There are thus three possible theories of the brain's function, and no more. We
may name them, severally,
1. The theory of production;
2a. The theory of combination;
2b. The theory of separation.
In the text of the lecture, theory number 2b (specified more particularly as the
transmission theory) is defended against theory number 1. Theory 2a, otherwise
known as the mind-dust or mind-stuff theory, is left entirely unnoticed for lack
of time. I also leave it uncriticized in these notes, having already considered
it, as fully as the so-far published forms of it may seem to call for, in my
work, The Principles of Psychology, New York, Holt & Co., 1892, Chapter VI. I
may say here, however, that Professor W. K. Clifford, one of the ablest
champions of the combination theory, and originator of the useful term
"mind-stuff" considers that theory incompatible with individual immortality, and
in his review of Stewart's and Tait's book, The Unseen Universe, thus expresses
his conviction:
"The laws connecting consciousness with changes in the brain are very definite
and precise, and their necessary consequences are not to be evaded...
Consciousness is a complex thing made up of elements, a stream of feelings. The
action of the brain is also a complex thing made up of elements, a stream of
nerve-messages. For every feeling in consciousness there is at the same time a
nerve-message in the brain ... Consciousness is not a simple thing, but a
complex; it is the combination of feelings into a stream. It exists at the same
time with the combination of nerve-messages into a stream. If individual feeling
always goes with individual nerve-message, if combination or stream of feelings
always goes with stream of nerve-messages, does it not follow that, when the
stream of nerve-messages is broken up, the stream of feelings will be broken up
also, will no longer form a consciousness? Does it not follow that, when the
messages themselves are broken up, the individual feelings will be resolved into
still simpler elements? The force of this evidence is not to be weakened by any
number of spiritual bodies. Inexorable facts connect our consciousness with this
body that we know; and that not merely as a whole, but the parts of it are
connected severally with parts of our brain-action. If there is any similar
connection with a spiritual body, it only follows that the spiritual body must
die at the same time with the natural one." (Lectures and Essays, Vol. i, pp.
247-49. Compare also passages of similar purport in Vol. ii, pp. 65-70.) [back
to main text]
(6) The theory of production, or materialistic theory, seldom
ventures to formulate itself very distinctly. Perhaps the following passage from
Cabanis is as explicit as anything one can find:
"To acquire a just idea of the operations from which thought results, we must
consider the brain as a particular organ specially destined to produce it; just
as the stomach and intestines are destined to operate digestion, the liver to
filter bile, the parotid and maxillary glands to prepare the salivary juices.
The impressions, arriving in the brain, force it to enter into activity; just as
the alimentary materials, falling into the stomach, excite it to a more abundant
secretion of gastric juice, and to the movements which result in their own
solution. The function proper to the first organ is that of receiving [percevoir]
each particular impression, of attaching signs to it, of combining the different
impressions, of comparing them with each other, of drawing from them judgments
and resolves; just as the function of the other organ is to act upon the
nutritive substances whose presence excites it, to dissolve them, and to
assimilate their juices to our nature.
"Do you say that the organic movements by which the brain exercises these
functions are unknown? I reply that the action by which the nerves of the
stomach determine the different operations which constitute digestion, and the
manner in which they confer so active a solvent power upon the gastric juice,
are equally hidden from our scrutiny. We see the food-materials fall into this
viscus with their own proper qualities; we see them emerge with new qualities,
and we infer that the stomach is really the author of this alteration. Similarly
we see the impressions reaching the brain by the intermediation of the nerves;
they then are isolated and without coherence. The viscus enters into action; it
acts upon them, and soon it emits [renvoie] them metamorphosed into ideas, to
which the language of physiognomy or gesture, or the signs of speech and
writing, give an outward expression. We conclude, then, with an equal certitude,
that the brain digests, as it were, the impressions; that it performs
organically the secretion of thought." [Rapports du Physique et du Moral, 8th
edition, 1844, p. 137.]
It is to the ambiguity of the word "impression" that such an account owes
whatever plausibility it may seem to have. More recent forms of the production
theory have shown a tendency to liken thought to a "force" which the brain
exerts, or to a "state" into which it passes. Herbert Spencer, for instance,
writes:
"The law of metamorphosis, which holds among the physical forces, holds equally
between them and the mental forces ... How this metamorphosis takes place; how a
force existing as motion, heat, or light can become a mode of consciousness; how
it is possible for aerial vibrations to generate the sensation we call sound, or
for the forces liberated by chemical changes in the brain to give rise to
emotion-these are mysteries which it is impossible to fathom. But they are not
profounder mysteries than the transformations of the physical forces into each
other." (First Principles, 2nd Edition, p. 217.)
So Buchner says:
"Thinking must be regarded as a special mode of general natural
motion, which is as characteristic of the substance of the central nervous
elements as the motion of contraction is of the nerve-substance, or the motion
of light is of the universal-ether... That thinking is and must be a mode of
motion is not merely a postulate of logic, but a proposition which has of late
been demonstrated experimentally ... Various ingenious experiments have proved
that the swiftest thought that we are able to evolve occupies at least the
eighth or tenth part of a second." (Force and Matter, New York, 1891, p. 241.)
Heat and light being modes of motion, "phosphorescence" and "incandescence" are
phenomena to which consciousness has been likened by the production theory:
"As
one sees a metallic rod, placed in a glowing furnace, gradually heat itself,
and-as the undulations of the caloric grow more and more frequent -pass
successively from the shades of bright red to dark red [sic], to white, and
develop, as its temperature rises, heat and light, - so the living sensitive
cells, in presence of the incitations that solicit them, exalt themselves
progressively as to their most interior sensibility, enter into a phase of
erethism, and at a certain number of vibrations, set free [dégagent] pain as a
physiological expression of this same sensibility superheated to a red-white."
(J. Luys: Le Cerveau, p. 91.)
In a similar vein Mr. Percival Lowell writes:
"When we have, as we say, an idea,
what happens inside of us is probably something like this: the neural current of
molecular change passes up the nerves, and through the ganglia reaches at last
the cortical cells ... When it reaches the cortical cells, it finds a set of
molecules which are not so accustomed to this special change. The current
encounters resistance, and in overcoming this resistance it causes the cells to
glow. This white-heating of the cells we call consciousness. Consciousness, in
short, is probably nerve-glow." [Occult Japan, Boston, 1895, p. 311.] [back
to main text]
(7) The transmission theory connects itself very naturally with
that whole tendency of thought known as transcendentalism. Emerson, for example,
writes:
"We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of
its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern
truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams." [Self-Reliance,
p. 56.]
But it is not necessary to identify the consciousness postulated in the
lecture, as pre-existing behind the scenes, with the Absolute Mind of
transcendental Idealism, although, indeed, the notion of it might lead in that
direction. The Absolute Mind of transcendental Idealism is one integral Unit,
one single World-mind. For the purposes of my lecture, however, there might he
many minds behind the scenes as well as one. All that the transmission theory
absolutely requires is that they should transcend our minds, - which thus come
from something mental that pre-exists, and is larger than themselves. [back
to main text]
(8) Fechner's conception of a "psycho-physical threshold" as
connected with his "wave-scheme" is little known to English readers. I
accordingly subjoin it, in his own words, abridged:
"The psychically one is connected with a physically many; the physically many
contract psychically into a one, a simple, or at least a more simple. Otherwise
expressed: the psychically unified and simple are resultants of physical
multiplicity; the physically manifold gives unified or simple results ...
"The facts which are grouped together under these expressions, and which give
them their meaning, are as follows: With our two hemispheres we think singly;
with the identical parts of our two retinae we see singly ... The simplest
sensation of light or sound in us is connected with processes which, since they
are started and kept up by outer oscillations, must themselves be somehow of an
oscillatory nature, although we are wholly unaware of the separate phases and
oscillations ...
"It is certain, then, that some unified or simple psychic resultants depend on
physical multiplicity. But, on the other hand, it is equally certain that the
multiplicities of the physical world do not always combine into a simple
psychical resultant, - no, not even when they are compounded in a single bodily
system. Whether they may not nevertheless combine into a unified resultant is a
matter for opinion, since one is always free to ask whether the entire world, as
such, may not have some unified psychic resultant. But of any such resultant we
at least have no consciousness....
"For brevity's sake, let us distinguish psychophysical continuity and
discontinuity from each other. Continuity, let us say, takes place so far as a
physical manifold gives a unified or simple psychic resultant; discontinuity, so
far as it gives a distinguishable multiplicity of such resultants. Inasmuch,
however, as, within the unity of a more general consciousness or phenomenon of
consciousness, there still may be a multiplicity distinguished, the continuity
of a more general consciousness does not exclude the discontinuity of particular
phenomena.
"One of the most important problems and tasks of Psycho-physics now is this. to
determine the conditions (Gesichtspunkte) under which the cases of continuity
and of discontinuity occur.
"Whence comes it that different organisms have separate consciousnesses,
although their bodies are just as much connected by general Nature as the parts
of a single organism are with each other, and these latter give a single
conscious resultant? Of course we can say that the connection is more intimate
between the parts of an organism than between the organisms of Nature. But what
do we mean by a more intimate connection? Can an absolute difference of result
depend on anything so relative? And does not Nature as a whole show as strict a
connection as any organism does-yea, one even more indissoluble? And the same
questions come up within each organism. How comes it that, with different nerve-fibers
of touch and sight, we distinguish different space-points, but with one fiber
distinguish nothing, although the different fibers are connected in the brain
just as much as the parts are in the single fiber? We may again call the latter
connection the more intimate, but then the same sort of question will arise
again.
"Unquestionably the problem which here lies before Psycho-physics cannot be
sharply unanswered; but we may establish a general point of view for its
treatment, consistently with what we laid down in a former chapter on the
relations of more general with more particular phenomena of consciousness!'
[The earlier passage is here inserted:] "The essential principle is this: That
human psycho-physical activity must exceed a certain intensity for any waking
consciousness at all to occur, and that during the waking state any particular
specification of the said activity (whether spontaneous or due to stimulation),
which is capable of occasioning a particular specification of consciousness,
must exceed in its turn a certain further degree of intensity for the
consciousness actually to arise....
"This state of things (in itself a mere fact needing no picture) may be made
clearer by an image or scheme, and also more concisely spoken of. Imagine the
whole psycho-physical activity of man to be a wave, and the degree of this
activity to be symbolized by the height of the wave above a horizontal basal
line or surface, to which every psycho-physically active point contributes an
ordinate... The whole form and evolution of the consciousness will then depend
on the rising and falling of this wave; the intensity of the consciousness at
any time on the wave's height at that time; and the height must always somewhere
exceed a certain limit, which we will call a threshold, if waking consciousness
is to exist at all.
"Let us call this wave the total wave, and the threshold in question the
principal threshold."
[Since our various states of consciousness recur, some in long, some in short
periods], "we may represent such a long period as that of the slowly fluctuating
condition of our general wakefulness and the general direction of our attention
as a wave that slowly changes the place of its summit. If we call this the
under-wave, then the movements of shorter period, on which the more special
conscious states depend, can be symbolized by wavelets superposed upon the
under-wave, and we can call these over-waves. They will cause all sorts of
modifications of the under-wave's surface, and the total wave will be the
resultant of both sets of waves.
"The greater, now, the strength of the movements of short period, the amplitude
of the oscillations of the psycho-physical activity, the higher will the crests
of the wavelets that represent them rise above, and the lower will their valleys
sink below the surface of the under-wave that bears them. And these heights and
depressions must exceed a certain limit of quantity which we may call the
upper threshold, before the special mental state which is correlated with
them can appear in consciousness" [pp. 454-56].
"So far now as we symbolize any system of psycho-physical activity, to which a
generally unified or principal consciousness corresponds, by the image of a
total wave rising with its crest above a certain 'threshold,' we have a means of
schematizing in a single diagram the physical solidarity of all these sycho-physical
systems throughout Nature, together with their pyscho-physical discontinuity.
For we need only draw all the waves so that they run into each other below the
threshold, whilst above it they appear distinct, as in the figure below.
"In this figure a, b, c stand for three organisms, or rather for the total waves
of psycho-physical activity of three organisms, whilst A B represents the
threshold. In each wave the part that rises above the threshold is an integrated
thing, and is connected with a single consciousness. Whatever lies below the
threshold, being unconscious, separates the conscious crests, although it is
still the means of physical connection.
"In general terms: wherever a psycho-physical total wave is continuous with
itself above the threshold, there we find the unity or identity of a
consciousness, inasmuch as the connection of the psychical phenomena which
correspond to the parts of the wave also appears in consciousness. Whenever, on
the contrary, total waves are disconnected, or connected only underneath the
thresh old, the corresponding consciousness is broken, and no connection between
its several parts appears. More briefly: consciousness is continuous or
discontinuous, unified or discrete, according as the psycho-physical total waves
that subserve it are themselves continuous or discontinuous above the threshold
...
"if, in the diagram, we should raise the entire line of waves so that not only
the crests but the valleys appeared above the threshold, then these latter would
appear only as depressions in one great continuous wave above the threshold, and
the discontinuity of the consciousness would be converted into continuity. We of
course cannot bring this about. We might also squeeze the wave together so that
the valleys should be pressed up, and the crests above the threshold flow into a
line; then the discretely-feeling organisms would have become a singly-feeling
organism. This, again, Man cannot voluntarily bring about, but it is brought
about in Man's nature. His two halves, the right one and the left one, are thus
united; and the number of segments of radiates and articulates show that more
than two parts can be thus psycho-physically conjoined. One need only cut them
asunder, i.e. interpolate another part of nature between them under the
threshold, and they break into two separately conscious beings." ... (Elemente
der Psychophysik, 186o, Vol. ii, pp. 526-30.)
One sees easily how, on Fechner's wave scheme, a world-soul may be expressed.
All psycho-physical activity being continuous "below the threshold," the
consciousness might also become continuous if the threshold sank low enough to
uncover all the waves. The threshold throughout nature in general is, however,
very high, so the consciousness that gets over it is of the discontinuous form.
[back to main text]
(9) See the long series of articles by Mr. Myers in the
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, beginning in the third volume
with automatic writing, and ending in the latest volumes with the higher
manifestations of knowledge by mediums. Mr. Myers's theory of the whole range of
phenomena is, that our normal consciousness is in continuous connection with a
greater consciousness of which we do not know the extent, and to which he gives,
in its relation to the particular person, the not very felicitous name hough no
better one has been proposed-of his or her "subliminal" self. [back
to main text]
(10) See Kritik der reinen Vernunft, second edition, p. 809. [back
to main text]
(11) I subjoin a few extracts from Mr. Schiller's work: "Matter
is an admirably calculated machinery for regulating, limiting, and restraining
the consciousness which it encases ... If the material encasement be coarse and
simple, as in the lower organisms, it permits only a little intelligence to
permeate through it; if it is delicate and complex, it leaves more pores and
exists, as it were, for the manifestations of consciousness ... On this analogy,
then, we may say that the lower animals are still entranced in the lower stage
of brute lethargy, while we have passed into the higher phase of somnambulism,
which already permits us strange glimpses of a lucidity that divines the
realities of a transcendent world. And this gives the final answer to
Materialism: it consists in showing in detail ... that Materialism is a hysteron proteron, a putting of the cart before the horse, which may be rectified by just
inverting the connection between Matter and Consciousness. Matter is not that
which produces Consciousness, but that which limits it, and confines its
intensity within certain limits: material organization does not construct
consciousness out of arrangements of atoms, but contracts its manifestation
within the sphere which it permits. This explanation ... admits the connection
of Matter and Consciousness, but contends that the course of interpretation must
proceed in the contrary direction. Thus it will fit the facts alleged in favor
of Materialism equally well, besides enabling us to understand facts which
Materialism rejected as 'supernatural.' It explains the lower by the higher,
Matter by Spirit, instead of vice versa, and thereby attains to an explanation
which is ultimately tenable, instead of one which is ultimately absurd. And it
is an explanation the possibility of which no evidence in favor of Materialism
can possibly affect. For if, e. g., a man loses consciousness as soon as his
brain is injured, it is clearly as good an explanation to say the injury to the
brain destroyed the mechanism by which the manifestation of the consciousness
was rendered possible, as to say that it destroyed the seat of consciousness. On
the other hand, there are facts which the former theory suits far better. If,
e.g., as sometimes happens, the man, after a time, more or less, recovers the
faculties of which the injury to his brain had deprived him, and that not in
consequence of a renewal of the injured part, but in consequence of the
inhibited functions being performed by the vicarious action of other parts, the
easiest explanation certainly is that, after a time, consciousness constitutes
the remaining parts into a mechanism capable of acting as a substitute for the
lost parts. And again, if the body is a mechanism for inhibiting consciousness,
for preventing the full powers of the Ego from being prematurely actualized, it
will be necessary to invert also our ordinary ideas on the subject of memory,
and to account for forgetfulness instead of for memory. It will be during life
that we drink the bitter cup of Lethe, it will be with our brain that we are
enabled to forget. And this will serve to explain not only the extraordinary
memories of the drowning and the dying generally, but also the curious hints
which experimental psychology occasionally affords us that nothing is ever
forgotten wholly and beyond recall." [Riddles of the Sphinx, London, Swan Sonnenschein, 1891, p. 293 ff.]
Mr. Schiller's conception is much more complex in its relations than the simple
"theory of transmission" postulated in my lecture, and to do justice to it the
reader should consult the original work. [back to main text]
(12) I beg the reader to peruse R. L. Stevenson's magnificent
little essay entitled "The Lantern Bearers," reprinted in the collection
entitled Across the Plains. The truth is that we are doomed, by the fact that we
are practical beings with very limited tasks to attend to, and special ideals to
look after, to be absolutely blind and insensible to the inner feelings, and to
the whole inner significance of lives that are different from our own. Our
opinion of the worth of such lives is absolutely wide of the mark, and unfit to
be counted at all. [back to main text]
(13) W. Wundt: System der Philosophie, Leipzig, Engelmann,
1889, pp 315. [back to main text]
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