An Introduction to Philosophy by George Stuart Fullerton (bookreader TXT) 📖

atom is not directly perceivable, and we may assign to its motions a space so small that no one could possibly perceive it as space, as a something with part out of part, a something with a here and a there. But, as has been before pointed out (section 26), this does not prevent us from believing the atom and the space in which it moves to be real, and we can represent them to ourselves as we can the things and the spaces with which we have to do in common life.

It is with time just as it is with space. We can perceive an inch to have parts; we cannot perceive a thousandth of an inch to have parts, if we can perceive it at all; but we can represent it to ourselves as extended, that is, we can let an experience which is extended stand for it, and can dwell upon the parts of that. We can perceive a second to have duration; we cannot perceive a thousandth of a second to have duration; but we can conceive it as having duration, i.e. we can let some experience of duration stand for it and serve as its representative.

It is, then, reasonable to speak of the space covered by the vibration of an atom, and it is equally reasonable to speak of the time taken up by its vibration. It is not necessary to believe that the duration that we actually experience as a second must itself be capable of being divided up into the number of parts indicated by the denominator of the fraction that we use in indicating such a time, and that each of these parts must be perceived as duration.

There is, then, a sense in which we may affirm that time is infinitely divisible. But we must remember that apparent time—the time presented in any single experience of duration—is never infinitely divisible; and that real time, in any save a relative sense of the word, is not a single experience of duration at all. It is a recognition of the fact that experiences of duration may be substituted for each other without assignable limit.

(4) But what shall we say to the last problem—to the question how we can be conscious of time at all, when the parts of time are all successive? How can we even have a consciousness of "crude" time, of apparent time, of duration in any sense of the word, when duration must be made up of moments no two of which can exist together and no one of which alone can constitute time? The past is not now, the future is not yet, the present is a mere point, as we are told, and cannot have parts. If we are conscious of time as past, present, and future, must we not be conscious of a series as a series when every member of it save one is nonexistent? Can a man be conscious of the nonexistent?

The difficulty does seem a serious one, and yet I venture to affirm that, if we examine it carefully, we shall see that it is a difficulty of our own devising. The argument quietly makes an assumption—and makes it gratuitously—with which any consciousness of duration is incompatible, and then asks us how there can be such a thing as a consciousness of duration.

The assumption is that we can be conscious only of the existent, and this, written out a little more at length, reads as follows: we can be conscious only of the now existent, or, in other words of the present. Of course, this determines from the outset that we cannot be conscious of the past and the future, of duration.

The past and the future are, to be sure, nonexistent from the point of view of the present; but it should be remarked as well that the present is nonexistent from the point of view of the past or the future. If we are talking of time at all we are talking of that no two parts of which are simultaneous; it would be absurd to speak of a past that existed simultaneously with the present, just as it would be absurd to speak of a present existing simultaneously with the past. But we should not deny to past, present, and future, respectively, their appropriate existence; nor is it by any means self-evident that there cannot be a consciousness of past, present, and future as such.

We fall in with the assumption, it seems, because we know very well that we are not directly conscious of a remote past and a remote future. We represent these to ourselves by means of some proxy—we have present memories of times long past and present anticipations of what will be in the time to come. Moreover, we use the word "present" very loosely; we say the present year, the present day, the present hour, the present minute, or the present second. When we use the word thus loosely, there seems no reason for believing that there should be such a thing as a direct consciousness that extends beyond the present. It appears reasonable to say: No one can be conscious save of the present.

It should be remembered, however, that the generous present of common discourse is by no means identical with the ideal point between past and future dealt with in the argument under discussion. We all say: I now see that the cloud is moving; I now see that the snow is falling. But there can be no moving, no falling, no change, in the timeless "now" with which we have been concerned. Is there any evidence whatever that we are shut up, for all our immediate knowledge, to such a "now"? There is none whatever.

The fact is that this timeless "now" is a product of reflective thought and not a something of which we are directly conscious. It is an ideal point in the real time of which this chapter has treated, the time that is in a certain sense infinitely divisible. It is first cousin to the ideal mathematical point, the mere limit between two lines, a something not perceptible to any sense. We have a tendency to carry over to it what we recognize to be true of the very different present of common discourse, a present which we distinguish from past and future in a somewhat loose way, but a present in which there certainly is the consciousness of change, of duration. And when we do this, we dig for ourselves a pit into which we proceed to fall.

We may, then, conclude that we are directly conscious of more than the present, in the sense in which Augustine used the word. We are conscious of time, of "crude" time, and from this we can pass to a knowledge of real time, and can determine its parts with precision.

[1] Book XI, Chapters 14 and 15.

III. PROBLEMS TOUCHING THE MIND CHAPTER VIII WHAT IS THE MIND?

30. PRIMITIVE NOTIONS OF MIND.—The soul or mind, that something to which we refer sensations and ideas of all sorts, is an object that men do not seem to know very clearly and definitely, though they feel so sure of its existence that they regard it as the height of folly to call it in question. That he has a mind, no man doubts; what his mind is, he may be quite unable to say.

We have seen (section 7) that children, when quite young, can hardly be said to recognize that they have minds at all. This does not mean that what is mental is not given in their experience. They know that they must open their eyes to see things, and must lay their hands upon them to feel them; they have had pains and pleasures, memories and fancies. In short, they have within their reach all the materials needed in framing a conception of the mind, and in drawing clearly the distinction between their minds and external things. Nevertheless, they are incapable of using these materials; their attention is engrossed with what is physical,—with their own bodies and the bodies of others, with the things that they can eat, with the toys with which they can play, and the like. It is only later that there emerges even a tolerably clear conception of a self or mind different from the physical and contrasted with it.

Primitive man is almost as material in his thinking as is the young child. Of this we have traces in many of the words which have come to be applied to the mind. Our word "spirit" is from the Latin spiritus, originally a breeze. The Latin word for the soul, the word used by the great philosophers all through the Middle Ages, anima (Greek, anemos), has the same significance. In the Greek New Testament, the word used for spirit (pneuma) carries a similar suggestion. When we are told in the Book of Genesis that "man became a living soul," we may read the word literally "a breath."

What more natural than that the man who is just awakening to a consciousness of that elusive entity the mind should confuse it with that breath which is the most striking outward and visible sign that distinguishes a living man from a dead one?

That those who first tried to give some scientific account of the soul or mind conceived it as a material thing, and that it was sufficiently common to identify it with the breath, we know from direct evidence. A glance at the Greek philosophy, to which we owe so much that is of value in our intellectual life, is sufficient to disclose how difficult it was for thinking men to attain to a higher conception.

Thus, Anaximenes of Miletus, who lived in the sixth century before Christ, says that "our soul, which is air, rules us." A little later, Heraclitus, a man much admired for the depth of his reflections, maintains that the soul is a fiery vapor, evidently identifying it with the warm breath of the living creature. In the fifth century, B.C., Anaxagoras, who accounts for the ordering of the elements into a system of things by referring to the activity of Mind or Reason, calls mind "the finest of things," and it seems clear that he did not conceive of it as very different in nature from the other elements which enter into the constitution of the world.

Democritus of Abdera (between 460 and 360 B.C.), that great investigator of nature and brilliant writer, developed a materialistic doctrine that admits the existence of nothing save atoms and empty space. He conceived the soul to consist of fine, smooth, round atoms, which are also atoms of fire. These atoms are distributed through the whole body, but function differently in different places—in the brain they give us thought, in the heart, anger, and in the liver, desire. Life lasts just so long as we breathe in and breathe out such atoms.

The doctrine of Democritus was taken up by Epicurus, who founded his school three hundred years before Christ—a school which lived and prospered for a very long time. Those who are interested in seeing how a materialistic psychology can be carried out in detail by an ingenious mind should read the curious account of the mind presented in his great poem, "On Nature," by the Roman poet Lucretius, an ardent Epicurean, who wrote in the first century B.C.

The school which we commonly think of contrasting with the Epicurean, and one which was founded at about the same time, is that of the Stoics. Certainly the Stoics differed in many things from the Epicureans; their view of the world, and of the life of man, was a much nobler one; but they were uncompromising materialists, nevertheless, and identified the soul with the warm breath that animates man.

31. THE MIND AS IMMATERIAL.—It is scarcely too much to say that the Greek philosophy as a whole impresses the modern mind as representing the thought of a people to whom it was not unnatural to think of the mind as being a breath, a fire, a collection of atoms, a something material. To be sure, we cannot accuse those twin stars that must ever remain the glory of literature and science, Plato and Aristotle, of being materialists. Plato (427-347, B.C.) distributes, it is true, the three-fold soul, which he allows man, in various parts of the human body, in a way that at least suggests the Democritean distribution of mind-atoms.