I.

Does the progress of Physical Science tend to give any advantage to the opinion of Necessity (or Determinism) over that of the Contingency of Events and the Freedom of the Will?

11th February 1873.

The general character and tendency of human thought is a topic the interest of which is not confined to professional philosophers. Though every one of us must, each for himself, accept some sort of a philosophy, good or had, and though the whole virtue of this philosophy depends on it being our own, yet none of us thinks it out entirely for himself. It is essential to our comfort that we should know whether we are going with the general stream of human thought or against it, and if it should turn out that the general stream flows in a direction different from the current of our private thought, though we may endeavour to explain it as the result of a widespread aberration of intellect, we would be more satisfied if we could obtain some evidence that it is not ourselves who are going astray.

In such an enquiry we need some fiducial point or standard of reference, by which we may ascertain the direction in which we are drifting. The books written by men of former ages who thought about the same questions would be of great use, if it were not that we are apt to derive a wrong impression from them if we approach them by a course of reading unknown to those for whom they were written.

There are certain questions, however, which form the pièces de resistance of philosophy, on which men of all ages have exhausted their arguments, and which are perfectly certain to furnish matter of debate to generations to come, and which may therefore serve to show how we are drifting. At a certain epoch of our adolescence those of us who are good for anything begin to get anxious about these questions, and unless the cares of this world utterly choke our metaphysical anxieties, we become developed into advocates of necessity or of free-will. What it is which determines for us which side we shall take must for the purpose of this essay be regarded as contingent. According to Mr. F. Galton, it is derived from structureless elements in our parents, which were probably never developed in their earthly existence, and which may have been handed down to them, still in the latent state, through untold generations. Much might be said in favour of such a congenital bias towards a particular scheme of philosophy; at the same time we must acknowledge that much of a man's mental history depends upon events occurring after his birth in time, and that he is on the whole more likely to espouse doctrines which, harmonise with the particular set of ideas to which he is induced, by the process of education, to confine his attention. What will be the probable effect if these ideas happen mainly to be those of modern physical science?

The intimate connexion between physical and metaphysical science is indicated even by their names. What are the chief requisites of a physical laboratory? Facilities for measuring space, time, and mass. What is the occupation of a metaphysician? Speculating on the modes of difference of co-existent things, on invariable sequences, and on the existence of matter.

He is nothing but a physicist disarmed of all his weapons,—a disembodied spirit trying to measure distances in terms of his own cubit, to form a chronology in which intervals of time are measured by the number of thoughts which they include, and to evolve a standard pound out of his own self-consciousness. Taking metaphysicians singly, we find again that as is their physics, so is their metaphysics. Descartes, with his perfect insight into geometrical truth, and his wonderful ingenuity in the imagination of mechanical contrivances, was far behind the other great men of his time with respect to the conception of matter as a receptacle of momentum and energy. His doctrine of the collision of bodies is ludicrously absurd. He admits, indeed, that the facts are against him, but explains them as the result either of the want of perfect hardness in the bodies, or of the action of the surrounding air. His inability to form that notion which we now call force is exemplified in his explanation of the hardness of bodies as the result of the quiescence of their parts.

“Neque profecto ullum glutinum possumus excogitare, quod particulas durorum corporum firmius inter se conjungat, quàm ipsarum quies.” Princip., Pars II. LV.

Descartes, in fact, was a firm believer that matter has but one essential property, namely extension, and his influence in preserving this pernicious heresy in existence extends even to very recent times. Spinoza’s idea of matter, as he receives it from the authorities, is exactly that of Descartes; and if he has added to it another essential function, namely thought, the new ingredient does not interfere with the old, and certainly does not bring the matter of Descartes into closer resemblance with that of Newton.

The influence of the physical ideas of Newton on philosophical thought deserves a careful study. It may be traced in a very direct way through Maclaurin and the Stewarts to the Scotch School, the members of which had all listened to the popular expositions of the Newtonian Philosophy in their respective colleges. In England, Boyle and Locke reflect Newtonian ideas with tolerable distinctness, though both have ideas of their own. Berkeley, on the other hand, though he is a master of the language of his time, is quite impervious to its ideas. Samuel Clarke is perhaps one of the best examples of the influence of Newton; while Roger Cotes, in spite of his clever exposition of Newton’s doctrines, must be condemned as one of the earliest heretics bred in the bosom of Newtonianism.

It is absolutely manifest from these and other instances that any development of physical science is likely to produce some modification of the methods and ideas of philosophers, provided that the physical ideas are expounded in such a way that the philosophers can understand them.

The principal developments of physical ideas in modern times have been—

1st. The idea of matter as the receptacle of momentum and energy. This we may attribute to Galileo and some of his contemporaries. This idea is fully expressed by Newton, under the form of Laws of Motion.

2d. The discussion of the relation between the fact of gravitation and the maxim that matter cannot act where it is not.

3d. The discoveries in Physical Optics, at the beginning of this century. These have produced much less effect outside the scientific world than might be expected. There are two reasons for this. In the first place it is difficult, especially in these days of the separation of technical from popular knowledge, to expound physical optics to persons not professedly mathematicians. The second reason is, that it is extremely easy to show such persons the phenomena, which are very beautiful in themselves, and this is often accepted as instruction in physical optics.

4th. The development of the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy. This has produced a far greater effect on the thinking world outside that of technical thermodynamics.

As the doctrine of the conservation of matter gave a definiteness to statements regarding the immateriality of the soul, so the doctrine of the conservation of energy, when applied to living beings, leads to the conclusion that the soul of an animal is not, like the mainspring of a watch, the motive power of the body, but that its function is rather that of a steersman of a vessel,—not to produce, but to regulate and direct the animal powers.

5th. The discoveries in Electricity and Magnetism labour under the same disadvantages as those in Light. It is difficult to present the ideas in an adequate manner to laymen, and it is easy to show them wonderful experiments.

6th. On the other hand, recent developments of Molecular Science seem likely to have a powerful effect on the world of thought. The doctrine that visible bodies apparently at rest are made up of parts, each of which is moving with the velocity of a cannon ball, and yet never departing to a visible extent from its mean place, is sufficiently startling to attract the attention of an unprofessional man.

But I think the most important effect of molecular science on our way of thinking will be that it forces on our attention the distinction between two kinds of knowledge, which we may call for convenience the Dynamical and Statistical.

The statistical method of investigating social questions has Laplace for its most scientific and Buckle for its most popular expounder. Persons are grouped according to some characteristic, and the number of persons forming the group is set down under that characteristic. This is the raw material from which the statist endeavours to deduce general theorems in sociology. Other students of human nature proceed on a different plan. They observe individual men, ascertain their history, analyse their motives, and compare their expectation of what they will do with their actual conduct. This may be called the dynamical method of study as applied to man. However imperfect the dynamical study of man may be in practice, it evidently is the only perfect method in principle, and its shortcomings arise from the limitation of our powers rather than from a faulty method of procedure. If we betake ourselves to the statistical method, we do so confessing that we are unable to follow the details of each individual case, and expecting that the effects of widespread causes, though very different in each individual, will produce an average result on the whole nation, from a study of which we may estimate the character and propensities of an imaginary being called the Mean Man.

How, if the molecular theory of the constitution of bodies is true, all our knowledge of matter is of the statistical kind. A constituent molecule of a body has properties very different from those of the body to which it belongs. Besides its immutability and other recondite properties, it has a velocity which is different from that which we attribute to the body as a whole.

The smallest portion of a body which we can discern consists of a vast number of such molecules, and all that we can learn about this group of molecules is statistical information. We can determine the motion of the centre of gravity of the group, but not that of any one of its members for the time being, and these members themselves are continually passing from one group to another in a manner confessedly beyond our power of tracing them.

Hence those uniformities which we observe in our experiments with quantities of matter containing millions of millions of molecules are uniformities of the same kind as those explained by Laplace and wondered at by Buckle, arising from the slumping together of multitudes of cases, each of which is by no means uniform with the others.

The discussion of statistical matter is within the province of human reason, and valid consequences may be deduced from it by legitimate methods; but there are certain peculiarities in the very form of the results which indicate that they belong to a different department of knowledge from the domain of exact science. They are not symmetrical functions of the time. It makes all the difference in the world whether we suppose the inquiry to be historical or prophetical—whether our object is to deduce the past state or the future state of things from the known present state. In astronomy, the two problems differ only in the sign of t, the time; in the theory of the diffusion of matter, heat, or motion, the prophetical problem is always capable of solution; but the historical one, except in singular cases, is insoluble. There may be other cases in which the past, but not the future, may be deducible from the present. Perhaps the process by which we remember past events, by submitting our memory to analysis, may be a case of this kind.

Much light may be thrown on some of these questions by the consideration of stability and instability. angle When the state of things is such that an infinitely small variation of the present state will alter only by an infinitely small quantity the state at some future time, the condition of the system, whether at rest or in motion, is said to be stable; but when an infinitely small variation in the present state may bring about a finite difference in the state of the system in a finite time, the condition of the system is said to be unstable.

It is manifest that the existence of unstable conditions renders impossible the prediction of future events, if our knowledge of the present state is only approximate, and not accurate.

It has been well pointed out by Professor Balfour Stewart that physical stability is the characteristic of those systems from the contemplation of which determinists draw their arguments, and physical stability that of those living bodies, and moral instability that of those developable souls, which furnish to consciousness the conviction of free will.

Having thus pointed out some of the relations of physical science to the question, we are the better prepared to inquire what is meant by determination and what by free will.

No one, I suppose, would assign to free will a more than infinitesimal range. No leopard can change his spots, nor can any one by merely wishing it, or, as some say, willing it, introduce discontinuity into his course of existence. Our free will at the best is like that of Lucretius’s atoms,—which at quite uncertain times and places deviate in an uncertain manner from their course. In the course of this our mortal life we more or less frequently find ourselves on a physical or moral watershed, where an imperceptible deviation is sufficient to determine into which of two valleys we shall descend. The doctrine of free will asserts that in some such cases the Ego alone is the determining cause. The doctrine of Determinism asserts that in every case, without exception, the result is determined by the previous conditions of the subject, whether bodily or mental, and that Ego is mistaken in supposing himself in any way the cause of the actual result, as both what he is pleased to call decisions and the resultant action are corresponding events due to the same fixed laws. Now, when we speak of causes and effects, we always imply some person who knows the causes and deduces the effects. Who is this person? Is he a man, or is he the Deity?

If he is man,—that is to say, a person who can make observations with a certain finite degree of accuracy,—we have seen that it is only in certain cases that he can predict results with even approximate correctness.

If he is the Deity, I object to any argument founded on a supposed acquaintance with the conditions of Divine foreknowledge.

The subject of the essay is the relation to determinism, not of theology, metaphysics, or mathematics, but of physical science,—the science which depends for its material on the observation and measurement of visible things, but which aims at the development of doctrines whose consistency with each other shall be apparent to our reason.

It is a metaphysical doctrine that from the same antecedents follow the same consequents. No one can gainsay this. But it is not of much use in a world like this, in which the same antecedents never again concur, and nothing ever happens twice. Indeed, for aught we know, one of the antecedents might be the precise date and place of the event, in which case experience would go for nothing. The metaphysical axiom would be of use only to a being possessed of the knowledge of contingent events, scientia simplicis intelligentiœ,—a degree of knowledge to which mere omniscience of all facts, scientia visionis, is but ignorance.

The physical axiom which has a somewhat similar aspect is “That from like antecedents follow like consequents.” But here we have passed from sameness to likeness, from absolute accuracy to a more or less rough approximation. There are certain classes of phenomena, as I have said, in which a small error in the data only introduces a small error in the result. Such are, among others, the larger phenomena of the Solar System, and those in which the more elementary laws in Dynamics contribute the greater part of the result. The course of events in these cases is stable.

There are other classes of phenomena which are more complicated, and in which cases of instability may occur, the number of such cases increasing, in an exceedingly rapid manner, as the number of variables increases. Thus, to take a case from a branch of science which comes next to astronomy itself as a manifestation of order: In the refraction of light, the direction of the refracted ray depends on that of the incident ray, so that in general, if the one direction be slightly altered, the other also will be slightly altered. In doubly refracting media there are two refracting rays, but it is true of each of them that like causes produce like effects. But if the direction of the ray within a biaxial crystal is nearly but not exactly coincident with that of the ray-axis of the crystal, a small change in direction will produce a great change in the direction of the emergent ray. Of course, this arises from a singularity in the properties of the ray-axis, and there are only two ray-axes among the infinite number of possible directions of lines in the crystal; but it is to be expected that in phenomena of higher complexity there will be a far greater number of singularities, near which the axiom about like causes producing like effects ceases to be true. Thus the conditions under which gun-cotton explodes are far from being well known; but the aim of chemists is not so much to predict the time at which gun-cotton will go off of itself, as to find a kind of gun-cotton which, when placed in certain circumstances, has never yet exploded, and this even when slight irregularities both in the manufacture and in the storage are taken account of by trying numerous and long continued experiments.

In all such cases there is one common circumstance,—the system has a quantity of potential energy, which is capable of being transformed into motion, but which cannot begin to be so transformed till the system has reached a certain configuration, to attain which requires an expenditure of work, which in certain cases may be infinitesimally small, and in general bears no definite proportion to the energy developed in consequence thereof. For example, the rock loosed by frost and balanced on a singular point of the mountain-side, the little spark which kindles the great forest, the little word which sets the world a fighting, the little scruple which prevents a man from doing his will, the little spore which blights all the potatoes, the little gemmule which makes us philosophers or idiots. Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points: the higher the rank, the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being, may produce results of the greatest importance. All great results produced by human endeavour depend on taking advantage of these singular states when they occur.

The man of tact says “the right word at the right time,” and, “a word spoken in due season how good is it!” The man of no tact is like vinegar upon nitre when he sings his songs to a heavy heart. The ill-timed admonition hardens the heart, and the good resolution, taken when it is sure to be broken, becomes macadamised into pavement for the abyss.

It appears then that in our own nature there are more singular points,—where prediction, except from absolutely perfect data, and guided by the omniscience of contingency, becomes impossible,—than there are in any lower organisation. But singular points are by their very nature isolated, and form no appreciable fraction of the continuous course of our existence. Hence predictions of human conduct may be made in many cases. First, with respect to those who have no character at all, especially when considered in crowds, after the statistical method. Second, with respect to individuals of confirmed character, with respect to actions of the kind for which their character is confirmed.

If, therefore, those cultivators of physical science from whom the intelligent public deduce their conception of the physicist, and whose style is recognised as marking with a scientific stamp the doctrines they promulgate, are led in pursuit of the arcana of science to the study of the singularities and instabilities, rather than the continuities and stabilities of things, the promotion of natural knowledge may tend to remove that prejudice in favour of determinism which seems to arise from assuming that the physical science of the future is a mere magnified image of that of the past.

II.

On Modified Aspects of Pain.

31st October 1876.

We often make sensation in general the subject of discussion, but it does not appear that we think much about particular sensations. If we did, we should have had more names for them. Most of the words which seem at first sight to be names of sensations are really used as names of objects which we suppose to be associated with the sensation, and to be indicated by it. All such words as hot and cold, flat and sharp, green, bright, bitter, frouzy, and so on, though they may sometimes excite in a very sympathetic mind a faint image of some actual sensation, call up much more vividly the idea of some external object or phenomenon. Language, in fact, has become far more an instrument for conveying information and for recording facts than for awakening sympathy; and even thought, in articulately speaking men, is occupied rather in methodising our perceptions than in chewing the cud of our sensations.

Of the few words which we have left to distinguish states of feeling, most of the better sort, such as pleasure, joy, happiness, are remarkably vague, so that the only available part of the vocabulary of sensations consists of the names of pains.

Such words as toothache, headache, heartache, certainly fulfil the condition of suggesting, at least to non-medical persons, a state of feeling rather than an objective phenomenon.

Now, whatever we may think, each for ourselves, at the time when we feel a pain or an ache, about consciousness or subjectivity, we are compelled, when we have to speak about it, or even to think about it, to view it from the outside, and to adopt the objective method of treatment.

A pain, then, in a sentient being other than ourselves is a condition which that being ordinarily endeavours to put a stop to, and the recurrence of which it tries to prevent; just as a pleasurable sensation is one which it endeavours to prolong, and afterwards to reproduce.

The psychologist has therefore to study pleasures and pains in their effects on a sentient being, just as the naturalist studies forces in their effects on the motion of a material system. The motion of the material system would go on in a determinate manner though no forces were in action. The actions of a living being, when not in a state of conscious effort, and often, indeed, even when it supposes itself to be exercising what it would call its will, go on in a manner determined by habits established by long custom, and transmitted from generation to generation, though varying slightly from individual to individual.

According to the simplest form of the Evolution theory, those individuals, tribes, or species, which have habits unfavourable to their success in the battle of life, die out, and help to improve the average quality of the remainder. This good old rule, however, this simple plan, though it might suffice for beings of great fecundity, would involve a great waste of life among higher and less prolific forms. Hence if any of these should come to have tastes and feelings, and if these should happen to be such as to repel them from pernicious courses and attract them into salutary ones, this would give them an advantage in the struggle for existence. Of course, there would be an equal chance that the tastes and feelings, when first developed, would be in favour of courses leading to destruction; but the individuals possessed by these tastes and feelings would be all the quicker exterminated for the good—that is to say, the more vigorous continuation—of the species.

The susceptibility to pleasure and pain must therefore be regarded as permitting a certain mitigation of the first covenant of the evolutionists, “This do and live;” the original severity of which was all the greater since the word “this” could be interpreted only by observing what actions were not followed by death.

By pursuing what we feel to be pleasant, and avoiding what we feel to be painful, we are following a course which was probably followed by many of our ancestors, and of which we know at least this much—that it did not bring them to such speedy destruction as to prevent them from leaving us as their descendants; and this is more than we can say for any absolutely new rule of life struck out by ourselves.

But it must be confessed that the monitions of pleasure and pain are not held in such high esteem by all men, as the view which we have just taken would seem to warrant. For though here and there we may find an isolated teacher who has inculcated the cultivation of all forms of pleasurable sensation, and the elimination of whatever is disagreeable, yet there has never been a state of society in which it has not been reckoned more honourable

than to run after pleasure and to shrink from pain.

And this brings me to the main point for our consideration. Why is it that in all times and countries the endurance of pain has been looked upon with great respect, and has been considered necessary, salutary, honourable, or meritorious? There is no difficulty, of course, about those cases in which a person undertakes some enterprise, good in itself, and in pursuance of this enterprise meets with various forms of suffering. These are only instances of the general maxim to despise evils of a lower order when they stand in the way of some good of a higher order.

The ability to endure suffering while engaged in a good work being recognised as a species of excellence, it is only natural that this kind of ability should become the subject of special cultivation. The aspirant to this form of virtue, therefore, voluntarily submits himself to suffering, not for the sake of any visible benefit to himself and others to be obtained by enduring that particular pain, but for the sake of discipline.

The aim of discipline is that he himself, and still more that others, may have confidence that he is able to endure suffering in a good cause, because he has already endured suffering merely to justify this confidence.

Practices of this kind have in some countries been developed to an extravagant degree, and may have given rise to various abnormal sentiments and maxims; but in the principle of educational discipline there is nothing but the soundest wisdom, for the only way in which an individual can acquire confidence that he can perform a given act when he wishes to do so is by previous practice; and when it is necessary for the public good that there should be a body of men, of each of whom we can be sure that he will act in a particular manner when the occasion for it arrives, it is absolutely necessary that they should be drilled to an exercise as like as possible to the action which is expected of them. But in all this the inconvenience or suffering which has to be endured is by no means regarded as good in itself. It is treated as a necessary concomitant of the act to be performed, just as muscular effort, which may sometimes arise to the intensity of a pain, is a necessary concomitant of an athletic exercise in which we may find pleasure.

Indeed the pleasurable or painful character of an elementary sensation or thought cannot be determined without taking into account all its surroundings. A sensation or a thought when separated from its surroundings may be disagreeable or painful; but when it occurs as a part of an act of perception, we may not recognize it as painful.

There may even be a pleasurable complex emotion into which the painful elementary sensation enters as an essential ingredient, so that if on any occasion the painful sensation is deficient, we feel that the pleasurable emotion is thereby marred and rendered incomplete.

There is another class of cases, however, in which the pain itself is the essential element. I mean penal suffering. The aim of punishment, when not vindictive, is to prevent the repetition of certain acts by associating with them penal consequences.

The painful consequences of an act may be associated with it by the way of natural consequence, or through the medium of some external punishing authority, or by the determination of the actor to punish himself.

When painful effects follow an act by way of natural consequence, they are not generally called punishment, because we do not attribute to nature any intention of punishing the particular act. But there can be no better instances of the conditions of efficacious punishment than those in which an act is so immediately and so certainly followed by a painful sensation, that the sensation becomes inseparably associated with the act, as in the case in which we touch red-hot iron. In such cases the act is hardly ever repeated.

When the connection between the act and the sensation is not so immediate, but has to be traced through the action of a voluntary punisher, as when an act of a boy or a dog is followed by an unpleasant skin-sensation inflicted by the master, the efficacy of the punishment still depends in a great degree on its promptness and certainty, for these are the conditions under which a permanent association can be effected between the act and the sensation.

Let us now consider the feelings with which punishment may be regarded by the recipient.

There may be beings in whom the feeling is simple—pure repugnance. There is a beast called the Tasmanian Devil, which is said to fight against any odds, however overpowering, as long as any of him can stick together. There is no hope of taming or subduing such a beast by force, and it is probable that he will soon become extinct.

But in the case of less indomitable beings, punishment may soon assume a less hateful aspect.

For even if it is not efficacious in changing the habits, as soon as it is recognised as a certain consequence of transgression, the execution of the punishment may be welcomed as a relief from the expectation of it, and the culprit may have a satisfaction in getting it over, as an honest man has. when he pays his debts.

If, however, he is really cured of the habit, he may look on the punishment as an operation by which he has not only paid in full for his past transgression, but has been free from the danger of falling into future transgressions.

Lastly, if his moral perceptions have been so far improved that he recognises that the action for which he was punished was really bad, he will sympathise more with the punisher than with his former self, and will admit not only the justice of his punishment as being according to law, but; the justice of the law according to which he was punished.

We come next to those cases in which there is no external punisher, but in which grief or sorrow is awakened within ourselves on account of what we have done.

Here, again, the effect may be very different according to the mode in which the sensation of grief is applied, and the result is rendered complicated on account of the identity between the punisher and the punished.

The legitimate application of the emotion of grief is of course to the wrong act, so as to associate the act and all that belongs to it with this painful emotion, and so diminish the tendency to repeat the act.

But the association may not be strong enough, or the emotion of grief may altogether miss its mark, and may concentrate attention on itself, and so become transformed into self-pity,—a very complex emotion, in which the sweet is so mingled with the bitter, that its ultimate effect on our conduct becomes very uncertain; the most probable result, however, being that on future occasions what should have been contrition passes still more easily into self-pity, and the whole performance assumes the character of a graceful play of feelings which we enjoy rather than suffer.

But though such perversions of feeling may occur, there is no doubt that men do make successful use of self-inflicted discipline as a means of influencing their own conduct. The lower degrees of such discipline are put in practice whenever we have to change our habits in the most minute particular. Without it we could not improve our pronunciation or our handwriting.

The great difficulty, however, in providing for the punishment being applied in the right quarter, when the punisher is identical with the punished person, has led to the adoption of various imperfect solutions of the problem of penance, in some of which the discipline is inflicted by the arms on some other part of the body, and in others hunger is brought into play by abstaining from food. But in no sacrament is the intention of the administrator of such vital importance as in self-penance. Spenser tells us how the Red-Cross Knight underwent discipline under the directions of Patience.

Here we see the advantage of allegory. In real life the poor man, instead of having Patience and Amendment as his good friends standing by his side, would have to conjure them up inside of him, and to apply the pincers with his own hand. But setting allegory aside, we can find here no exaltation of pain in itself. The pain is a necessary concomitant of the extirpation of evil habits from a conscious being. Amendment is the aim and end of the discipline, and the sole reason that he has to heat his pincers fiery whott is that the evil which he has to extirpe has crept close betwixt the marrow and the skin, and requires the actual cautery to prevent its creeping further.

Again, in the Collect for the first Sunday in Lent, we pray for “grace to use such abstinence,” that, our flesh being subdued to the spirit, we may ever obey “the godly motions” of Christ. Abstinence is to be used only as a help towards the subjugation of our lower nature, and the opening up of our higher nature to divine influence.

I have said nothing of the aspect of penal suffering as a satisfaction either of justice from the point of view of a ruler, or of vengeance from the point of view of an aggrieved person.

Nor have I attempted to discuss the process by which the suffering, real or apparent, of one may be a direct source of pleasure to another who has cultivated the spirit of cruelty. For I cannot think that pure cruelty, as distinct from combativeness, anger and love of power, is anything but a morbid growth of feeling, subject, of course, to the general laws of the growth of feeling, whatever they may be, but no more to be regarded as a subject for our discussion here than those forms of perverted feeling which induce dogs to gnaw off their own toes, or devotees to hold their arms above their heads till they can no longer bring them down again.

III.

(PSYCHOPHYSIK.)

5th February 1878.

Whence came we? whither are we going? and what should we do now? are three questions of some celebrity. We have come from somewhere between this and Orion; we are going at—kilomètres per second towards Hercules; and we must therefore observe stars in a direction at right angles to our path;—are the answers suggested twenty-five years ago. It seems to me that a change has come over the questions, so that they now read, What used I to believe about myself? what is it likely I shall have to believe about myself? and what should I believe about myself now?

I used to believe myself to be the Conscious Ego. I am told I shall have soon to believe myself to be a congeries of plastidule souls, and that I must at once study psychophysik in order to obtain a true knowledge of myself.

I propose, therefore, to talk of the Conscious Ego, of Plastidule souls, and of Psychophysik.

(1.) What is your name? is a still more celebrated question. The suggested answer, N. or M., recalls to the mathematician ideas and operations of the most heterogeneous kind. Let us consider some of them. The instructors of my youth would have expected me to answer—My name is the Conscious Ego, one and indivisible, the Subject, in relation to whom all other beings, material, human, or divine, are mere Objects. Whether the being of such Objects can be maintained or upheld apart from my continuous perception of them is the great question of Metaphysics.

Though nothing can rise to the dignity even of an Object, except in so far as it is perceived by me, I regard certain Objects as nearer in rank to me, the Subject, than others, because it is through them that other Objects are perceived. Indeed, I often catch myself, when thinking about my body or my mind, supposing that I am thinking about myself.

There are other objects within the sphere of our perceptions which resemble our bodies, though they are not ours. The actions of these objects are so far like our own that we not only attribute to these objects the power of thinking, but also the consciousness of knowing, feeling, desiring and willing. In short, we suppose that each of these objects, when he asserts himself to be the Conscious Ego, means what we do when we make a similar statement.

The late Professor Ferrier, in his “Metaphysic,” makes great use of this Alter Ego, and for his own purposes he treats him as a true Ego, whereas in Metaphysic he can never be more than an Object. This, however, is only a confusion of persons, not an actual division of the substance of the Ego. Our business to-night lies in the abysmal depths of Personality, and relates to the Unity of the Ego.

A great deal of what has been written on this subject relates to the continuity of the Ego in space and time, or in what corresponds in metaphysic to the space and time of physic. And first of Space. Has the Ego anything corresponding to Extension? Has he parts? and, if so, are these parts separable in fact or even in idea?

It has been maintained that he has no parts; that his state of consciousness at any instant is an inseparable whole, comparable, in respect of extension, to a mathematical point. According to this view, when I think I see an extensive prospect all at once before me, I am in reality either actually rolling my eye in an unconscious frenzy, or without any bodily motion I,—that is, the perceptive Ego,—am attending first to one minimum visible, and then to another, so that what is presented to me is like the idea which a blind man forms of the shape of an object by stroking it with the end of his stick. The evidence relates only to the position of points in the line traced by the end of his stick, but he fills in the rest of the surface in accordance with his notions of continuity and probability.

There is no department of psychophysik which has been so successfully studied as that which relates to vision. When we keep not only our eyes, but our attention, fixed on one small object, the field of conscious vision seems to contract, till only that object remains visible, and even it seems about to disappear. It generally happens, however, that the feeling of uneasiness which grows upon us causes at last a slight displacement of the eye, when suddenly a large extent of the field starts into visibility, and the edges of objects, especially those normal to the line of displacement, become obtrusively prominent. This experiment seems at first sight to indicate that the central spot of the retina has some exclusive privilege in the economy of vision. What it really shows is that changes in the mode of excitation are essential to perfect vision, and that vision cannot be maintained under an absolute sameness of excitation. On the other hand, by means of the instantaneous light of a single electric spark, we may read a whole sentence of print. Here we know that though the illumination lasts only for a few millionths of a second, the image on the retina lasts for a time amply sufficient for an expert reader to go over it letter by letter, and even to detect misprints. This experiment suggests certain speculations about memory, a faculty which is often supposed to be essential to the continuity of the Ego in time.

When men wish to have things remembered, they set up monuments, and write inscriptions and books,—they draw pictures and take photographs,—in order that these material things may help them, in time to come, to call up the thought of that which they were intended to commemorate.

In our own bodies we have records of past events. Old wounds may remind us of impressions made years ago, and ocular spectra remind us of impressions made seconds ago. Even in quiet meditation we sometimes find the ideas of visible objects accompanied with sensations hardly less vivid than those produced by real objects, and the memory of spoken words passes in a continuous manner, as the condition of our nerves becomes more exalted, first into a silent straining of the organs of speech, and then into an audible voice.

Beginners in music may practise on a dumb piano, and there is a silent process by which we may improve our pronunciation of foreign words.

We can thus trace a continuous series of the instruments of memory, beginning at the tables of stone and going on to the tables of the heart; and we are tempted to ask whether all memorials are not of the same kind—a physical impression on a material system.

The last American invention of the past year is Edison’s Talking Phonograph. This instrument has an ear of its own, into which you may say your lesson, and a mouth of its own, which at any future time is ready to repeat that lesson.

The memory of this machine consists of tinfoil thin enough to be impressionable by the metal style which is set in motion by the voice, and yet thick enough to be retentive of these impressions, and at a proper time to communicate a corresponding motion to the style of the talking part of the machine.

Such is the heart of this instrument, by which it gets its speeches. Are our own hearts essentially different? We know what damage can be done to our memory by physical disturbances. We find ourselves quite unable to recall what we had often perused and reperused on the pages of memory. The page is lost out of our consciousness. Time goes on, and some day we find that the page with all that it contained has been restored to its place. Where was that page when it was out of our consciousness? Not surely in the Ego, unless there be an unconscious Ego. It must be out of the Ego, and therefore an Object. If this be so, it is of no great consequence to the dignity of the Ego, whether this particular object is purely spiritual or has a material substratum, just as history is history, whether or not it has a material substratum of paper and ink.

Memory is sometimes spoken of as if it were essential to individuality. When I wish to convince myself that I am the same person as a certain baby, I may do so by remembering as my own certain acts done by that baby. It may happen, however, that I cannot ascertain whether my present memory of these acts is due entirely to the direct impression made by these acts on me, or whether it is not mainly due to the frequent repetition of the story of these acts, as told to me afterwards by older persons.

But even if I were to find my memory to be all wrong, and that I am not that baby but a changeling, this would not touch my conviction that I who now am, am one.

The phenomenon of double consciousness, though not common, seems to be well established. A person has a double series of alternate states. In one the memory, education, accomplishments, and temper, are quite different from what they are in the other.

Instances have even been adduced of a man believing himself to be two or even three different individuals at the same time. But when we come to examine any particular case, we find that the man has nothing more than an erroneous opinion that he is entitled to the position and rights of the King, or of some other person, as well as his own, so that even in his own imagination he is no more than a person who holds several different offices at the same time.

(2.) The theory of Plastidule souls has been hinted at by several persons of whom Dr. Tyndall has spoken loudest. A much clearer utterance is that of Professor von Nägeli, of Munich, in an address delivered at the Munich meeting of the German Association in 1877.

Du Bois Reymond, in an address to the same body at Leipzig in 1872, had asserted—

“That in the first trace of pleasure which was felt by one of the simplest beings in the beginning of animal life upon our earth, an insuperable limit was marked; while upwards from this to the most elevated mental activity, and downwards from the vital force of the organic to the simple physical force, he nowhere finds another limit.”

To this Professor Nägeli replies—

“Experience shows that from the clearest consciousness of the thinker downwards, through the more imperfect consciousness of the child, to the unconsciousness of the embryo, and to the insensibility of the human ovum,—or through the more imperfect consciousness of undeveloped human races and of higher animals to the unconsciousness of lower animals and of sensitive plants, and to the insensibility of all other plants,—there exists a continuous gradation without definable limit, and that the same gradation continues from the life of the animal ovum and the vegetable cell downwards, through organised elementary and more or less lifeless forms (parts of the cell), to crystals and chemical molecules.”

Professor von Nägeli accepts the fact of sensation, appetency, and thought in the higher forms of life; but instead of trying to resolve it into a mechanical process, he levels up the discontinuity of the chain of being by attributing sensation not only to all organisms, but also to all cells, molecules, and atoms. This is what he says—

“Now, if the molecules possess anything which is ever so distantly related to sensation, and we cannot doubt it, since each one feels the presence, the certain condition, the peculiar forces of the other, and, accordingly, has the inclination to move, and under circumstances really begins to move—becomes alive as it were; moreover, since such molecules are the elements which cause pleasure and pain; if, therefore, the molecules feel something that is related to sensation, then this must be pleasure, if they can respond to attraction and repulsion, i.e. follow their inclination or disinclination; it must be displeasure if they are forced to execute some opposite movement, and it must be neither pleasure nor displeasure if they remain at rest.”

Professor von Nägeli is what Professor Huxley would call a mere biologist, or he would have known that the molecules, like the planets, move along like blessed gods. They cannot be disturbed from the path of their choice by the action of any forces, for they have a constant and perpetual will to render to every force precisely the amount of deflexion which is due to it. They must therefore enjoy a perpetuity of the highest and most unmixed pleasure, even when, as Professor Nägeli says, they are the cause of pain to us.

To attribute life, sensation, and thought to objects in which these attributes are not established by sufficient evidence is nothing more than the good old figure of Personification.

If certain bodies, like the sun and stars, move in a regular manner which we can predict, we may, if it pleases us, suppose that their nature is like that of the just man whom nothing can turn from the path of rectitude. If the motion of other bodies is less simple, so that we cannot account for it, we may suppose their nature to be tainted with that capriciousness which we observe in our fellow-men, and of which we are occasionally conscious in ourselves.

But the study of nature has always tended to show that what we formerly attributed to the caprice of bodies is only an instance of a regularity which is unbroken, but which cannot be traced by us till we acquire the requisite skill.

But granting that the mental powers of atoms may be, for anything we know, of the very highest order, what step have we made towards linking our own mental powers with those of lower orders of being?

(3.) Let us suppose that a thinking man is built up of a number of thinking atoms. Have the thoughts of the man any relation to the thoughts of atoms or of one or more of them? Those who try to account by means of atoms for mental processes do so not by the thoughts of the atoms, but by their motions.

Hobbes, in the frontispiece of his Leviathan, shows us a monster like the wicker images of our British antecessors stuffed with men, and the whole method of his book is founded on an analogy between the body politic and the individual man.

Herbert Spencer has pushed the analogy both upwards and downwards as far as it will go, and further than it can go on all fours. He shows us how a society is an organism, and how an organism is a society,—how the lower forms of societies and organisms consist of a multitude of homogeneous parts, the functions of which are imperfectly differentiated, so that each can at a pinch undertake the office of any other; whereas the parts of higher forms of organisms and societies are exceedingly heterogeneous, and discharge more perfectly differentiated functions. Hence to the lower forms a breaking up may be a multiplication of the species, whereas to the higher forms it is death.

In a society, as in an organism, both the working and the thinking will be better done if undertaken by different members, provided that the thinking members can guide the working members, while the working members support the thinking members,—the workers retaining just enough intelligence to enable them to receive the guidance, and the thinkers retaining just enough working power to enable them to appropriate the pabulum presented to them by the workers.

Hence in the more highly developed systems the guiding powers may be concentrated into a smaller portion of the whole system, and may exercise a more undisputed power of guiding the rest, till in the highest organism we arrive at what is called Personal Government, and the organism may bear without abuse the grand old name of Individual. This result is brought about by all the members except one bartering their right of guiding themselves for the privilege of being guided, and so delegating to the one ruling member the functions of government. When the human society has lapsed into the condition of personal government, the consciousness of the head of the state may be expressed by him in the phrase, “L’état c'est moi;” but though the other members of the society may delegate to the head all their political powers, they cannot delegate their sensations or any other fact of consciousness, for these are the incommunicable attributes of that Ego to whom they belong.

I have now to confess that up to the present moment I have remained in ignorance of how I came to be, or, in the Spencerian language, how consciousness must arise. I was dimly aware that somewhere in the vast System of Philosophy this question had been settled, because the Evolutionists are all so calm about it; but in a hasty search for it I never suspected in how quiet and unostentatious a manner the origin of myself would be accounted for. I am indebted to Mr. Kirkman for pointing it out in his Philosophy without Assumptions. Here it is with Mr. Kirkman’s comment. Principles of Psychology, § 179, p. 403:—“These separate impressions are received by the senses—by different parts of the body. If they go no further than the places at which they are received, they are useless. Or if only some of them are brought into relation with one another, they are useless. That an effectual adjustment may be made, they must all be brought into relation with one another. But this implies some centre of communication common to them all, through which they severally pass; and, as they cannot pass through it simultaneously, they must pass through it in succession. So that as the external phenomena responded to become greater in number and more complicated in kind, the variety and rapidity of the changes to which this common centre of communication is subject must increase—there must result an unbroken series of these changes—there must arise a consciousness.”

On this Kirkman remarks: “He knew he could do it, and he did it!”—What was the evolution of light to this? The next Longinus will put that in before γενέσθω φω̂ς καὶ έγένετο φώς.

The opinions about my origin are as various as those about my nature. Canon Liddon tells me that I, was created out of nothing in the year 1831, though I cannot make out from what he says on what day of that year the event took place, or why my parents and not some one else found me under a gooseberry bush; or, indeed, why I should have any part or lot in family matters, from Adam’s first sin down to my father’s last name.

Mr. Francis Galton tells me that I am developed from structureless germs contributed not only by my two parents but by their remotest ancestors centuries ago. My existence, therefore, does not begin abruptly, but tails off as an exponential function of t does for negative values of that variable. My local existence, however, though at present confined within the periphractic region of my skin, was in former times discontinuous as regards space, being carried about by two, four, or more, distinct human beings.

Dr. Julius Müller tells me that by an analysis of my conscience I shall come to a very different result, namely, that I existed (if, indeed, the fact can be expressed by a past tense and not a pure aorist), in an extra-temporal state, and that in that state I freely determined myself to choose evil rather than good.

He does not say I can remember this transaction. The conviction I am to acquire of it is not to be an experimental or empirical consciousness, but a speculative or philosophical knowledge.

Since, according to Müller’s theory, this extra-temporal decision is perfectly free, and since it would be difficult to predicate freedom of a choice which is invariably on one side, he is obliged to assert that in the extra-temporal state some of our species must have chosen the better part. But he has also to maintain that all of us who are born into this world by ordinary generation have already chosen the worse part.

Hence, though he does not say so, he makes the extra-temporal fall a condition of our being born into this world. Whether those of us who make the better choice are born into some other world, or whether, so long as they remain unfallen, they continue in the extra-temporal state—a state certainly not higher but rather more undeveloped than that of time—Müller does not say.