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IN A book cited earlier, Dr. Lamont defines mind as "the power of abstract
reasoning," referring to the exercise of it as "the experience of thinking or
having ideas," and stating that ideas "are non-material meanings expressing the
relations between things and events."(1)
(1) The Illusion of Immortality, pp. 70, 100, 101.
But although the power of abstract reasoning may well be what differentiates
human minds from the minds of animals, and developed human minds from the minds
of human infants, yet human minds comprise, besides the power of abstract
reasoning, various others, wholly or partly independent of it. This power could
at most be claimed to constitute the intellectual part of the mind of man; for
minds, human as well as animal have also affective and conative capacities, the
existence of which Lamont acknowledges but does not include in his definition of
mind. His definition is therefore arbitrary and unrealistic.
1. The traits in terms of which one describes particular minds
When we are
asked to state the characteristics in which a given person's mind differs from
that of another, what we say is, for example, that he is patient whereas the
other is irritable; intelligent, and the other stupid; widely informed, and the
other ignorant; self-disciplined, and the other self-indulgent; and we add
whatever else we happen to know about his particular tastes, opinions, habits,
intellectual skills, attitudes, knowledge, personal memories, character, ideals,
ambitions, and so on.
It is in terms of such traits that we spontaneously describe the particular
nature of a particular mind. Correspondingly, the generic nature of the human
mind would be described in terms of traits shared by all normal human minds.
Examples of such generic traits would be the capacity to experience sensations -
dizziness, thirst, warmth, pain, color, tone, etc.; the capacity to form mental
images - visual, auditory, or other - as in dreams, in day-dreams, in memories,
and in voluntary imagination; the capacity to experience emotions, moods,
cravings, and impulses; the capacity to imagine and desire experiences or
situations not at the moment occurring; and so on.
2. What is a power, capacity, or disposition
Lamont's definition of mind,
however, although inadequate for the reason stated, is sound to the extent that
it conceives minds in terms of "powers."
The term "power" is nowadays out of favor, as is its virtual synonym, "faculty,"
the utility of which was destroyed by misuse of it as answer to the question
"Why?" The classical horrible example of such misuse is the vis dormitiva
offered as answer to the question why opium puts people to sleep.
But a power, or faculty, or capacity, or ability, or - to use the term currently
in fashion - a disposition, is not an event and therefore never can itself be a
cause. A power or disposition is a more or less abiding causal connection
between events of particular kinds.(2)
(2) No need arises here to go into the question of the nature of causality
itself. I shall therefore say only that a causal connection between events of
specified kinds is a causal law, and that a causal law is a law of causation not
in virtue of its being a law (since some empirical laws are not laws of
causation) but in virtue of the fact that each of the particular sequences, of
which the law is an inductive generalization, was, in its own individual right,
a causal sequence. For the analysis of the nature of causality this assumes,
interested readers are referred to Chs. 7, 8, and 9 of the writer's Nature,
Mind, and Death, Open Court Pub. Co. La SalIe, 111. 1951.
More specifically, that something T - whether T be a material thing or a mind - has
a power, capacity, or disposition D means that T is such that whenever the state
of affairs external or/and internal to T is of a particular kind S, then
occurrence of change of a particular kind C in that state of affairs causes
occurrence in it of a change of another particular kind E.
For example, solubility in water is a power, faculty, ability, capacity, or
disposition of sugar. This means, not that the sugar's solubility causes the
sugar to dissolve when it is placed in water; but that sugar is such that (i.e.,
behaves according to the law that) whenever an event of the kind described as
"placing the sugar in water" occurs, then, in ordinary circumstances, that event
causes an event of a certain other kind, to wit, the kind described as "sugar's
dissolving in water."
This illustration concerns a material thing - sugar. But the mental traits of
persons are capacities or dispositions in exactly the same generic sense of
these terms, defined above, as are the material traits of sugar and of other
material things.
For example, that a person possesses a memory of certain personal experiences,
or of some impersonal fact such as that Socrates died in 399 B.C., does not
consist simply of occurrences in him, at some particular time, of mental images
of those personal experiences, or of word - images formulating that impersonal
fact, together with occurrence of what has been termed the feeling of
familiarity. Rather, it consists in that person's being such that whenever a
question or other "reminder" relating to those personal experiences or to that
impersonal fact presents itself to his attention, then, provided that the
circumstances in which he is at the time be not abnormal, the advent of the
"reminder" causes those images, together with the feeling of familiarity, to
arise in him.
Again, that a person is, say, irritable, does not mean that he is at the time
experiencing the feeling called Irritation; but that he is such that events of
kinds which in most other persons would not in ordinary circumstances cause the
feeling of Irritation to arise in them do, in similar circumstances, regularly
cause it to arise in him. And so on with the tastes, the skills, the gifts -
intellectual, artistic, or other - the habits, etc., which a person possesses.
All of them analyze as capacities or dispositions, i.e., as abiding causal
connections in him between any event of some particular kind and an event of
some other particular kind, under circumstances of some particular kind.
The term "dispositions", however, although currently in greater favor than
"powers" or "capacities," is really less felicitous than these since it suffers
from a certain ambiguity of which they are free and which easily leads to
serious misconceptions. For, besides the sense of "disposition" in which the
word is synonymous with "capacity" or with "power," it has another sense, in
which "a disposition" and the verb "being disposed to ..." designate an
event,
to wit, occurrence of an impulse or inclination to act in some particular
manner.
For example, that a given person is at the moment disposed to forgive a certain
injury that was done him means no more than that, at the moment, an impulse or
inclination to forgive is present in him. This does not mean that he has, or is
acquiring, "a forgiving disposition," i.e., that similar situations regularly
cause, or henceforth will regularly cause, the impulse to forgive to arise in
him.
3. What a mind is
The distinction essential in connection with the immediately
preceding paragraph is between the nature of a given mind, and the history of
that mind.
The history consists of events. Occurrence of some impulse, occurrence of
awareness of some situation, acquisition or loss of some habit or capacity,
etc., are events; each of them results from exercise of some capacity, and each
is an item in the history of a mind. On the other hand, an account of the nature
of a given mind is an account of the particular sort of mind it is at the time,
i.e., of the particular set of dispositions, capacities, powers, or abilities
which are what as a matter of course we list when called upon to describe that
particular mind. The events that constitute a mind's history doubtless are in
large part responsible for that mind's having come to be the particular sort of
mind it is now. But recital of them is no part of an account of what it now is.
The capacities that together constitute the nature of a mind are of three
comprehensive kinds. These may be denominated psycho-psychical, psycho-physical,
and physico-psychical, according, respectively, as the cause-event and the
effect-event entering in the description of a given capacity are, both of them,
psychical events; or, the cause-event psychical but the effect-event physical;
or the cause-event physical but the effect-event psychical.
In all three cases the state of affairs, in which the cause-event and the
effect-event are changes, is normally in part somatic and more specifically
cerebral; and in part psychical. Whether this is the case not only normally, but
also invariably and necessarily, is another question. Evidently, the possibility
or impossibility of survival after death depends in part on the answer to it.
However, if a mind continues to function after the death of its body, its
functioning would not then normally include exercise either of its physico-psychical
or of its psycho-physical capacities. That is, such awareness, if any, as a
discarnate mind had of physical events would be paranormal and more
specifically, "clairvoyant", i.e., without the intermediary of the bodily sense
organs; and such action, if any, as a discarnate mind exerted on physical
objects would likewise be paranormal and more specifically "psychokinetic,"
i.e., without the intermediary of muscular apparatus.
It should be noticed that the various dispositions or capacities that enter into
the nature of a mind constitute together a system rather than simply an
aggregate. For one thing, as Professor Broad has pointed out, some dispositions
are of a higher order than some others, in the sense that the former consist of
capacities to acquire the latter(3). An aptitude, as distinguished from e.g., a
skill, is a capacity to acquire a capacity. Again, possession of certain
capacities at a certain time is in some cases dependent on possession of certain
other capacities at that time.
(3) Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy, Vol. 1: 264-278.
A mind, then, is a set of capacities of the three generic kinds mentioned, qua
interrelated in the systematic manner which constitutes them a more or less
thoroughly integrated personality; and the mind, of which we say that it "has"
those capacities, is not something existentially independent of them, but "has"
them in the sense in which a week has days or an automobile has a motor. That a
mind exists during a certain period means that, during that period, ones or
others of the capacities, which together define the particular sort of mind it
is, function. That is, the existing of a mind of a particular description is the
series of actual occurrences which, as causally related one to another,
constitute exercisings of that mind's capacities. A mind's existing thus
consists not just of its having a particular nature, but of its having in
addition a history.
But further, just as a material object consists of various parts interrelated in
some particular manner, each of which is itself a material object whose nature
is analyzable into a set of capacities, though to a greater or less extent ones
different from those of the whole; so likewise a mind has parts, normally
connected with one another in a certain manner, each of which, like the whole,
analyzes into some particular complex of capacities, though capacities to some
extent different from those of the whole.
Moreover, in a mind as in a material object, some part of it may on occasion
become dissociated from the rest and perhaps function independently, although
then in a manner more or less different from that in which it functioned while
integrated with and censored by the rest. As Professor H. H. Price has remarked
somewhere, the unity of a mind is not a matter of all or none, but rather of
more or less. Each of the parts of a mind is itself a mind, or mindkin, of
sorts.
The foregoing account of what a mind is has revealed that a mind, and a physical
substance such as sugar or a physical object such as a tree, ultimately analyze
equally as complexes of systematically interrelated capacities. Had not the word
"substance" so chequered a philosophical history, we could say that a mind is as
truly a psychical substance as any material object is a physical substance. Let
us, however, avoid the misunderstandings this might lead to, and say that a
mind, no less than a tree or sugar, is a substantive - using this word as does W.
E. Johnson for the kind of entity to which the part of speech called a "noun"
corresponds.(4)
(4) Logic, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1921 Vol I:9. For a more elaborate account of
the conception of what a mind is, outlined above, the interested reader is
referred to Ch. 17 of the author's already cited Nature, Mind, and Death.
Evidently, the preceding analysis of the nature of a mind in terms of capacities
or dispositions applies not only to the intellectual or cognitive powers
sometimes specifically meant by the term "Mind," but also to the emotional,
affective, and conative capacities sometimes more particularly in view when the
terms "soul" or "spirit," instead of "mind," are used. In these pages,
therefore, the term "mind" will be used in the broad sense comprehensive of
"soul" and of "spirit," as well as of "intellect." That is, it will include
whatever constituents of the human personality are other than material in the
sense of this term defined in Chapt. V.
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