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

know it, into two broad classes. They think of minds as being very different from material objects, and of the latter as being very different from minds. It does not occur to them to find in the one class room for the other, nor does it occur to them to think of both classes as "manifestations" or "aspects" of some one "underlying reality." In other words, the plain man to-day is a Dualist.

In the last chapter (section 52) I have called him a Naïve Realist; and here I shall call him a Naïve Dualist, for a man may regard mind and matter as quite distinct kinds of things, without trying to elevate his opinion, through reflection, into a philosophical doctrine. The reflective man may stand by the opinion of the plain man, merely trying to make less vague and indefinite the notions of matter and of mind. He then becomes a Philosophical Dualist. There are several varieties of this doctrine, and I shall consider them a little later (section 58).

But it is possible for one to be less profoundly impressed by the differences which characterize matter and mind. One may feel inclined to refer mental phenomena to matter, and to deny them the prominence accorded them by the dualist. On the other hand, one may be led by one's reflections to resolve material objects into mere ideas, and to claim that they can have no existence except in a mind. Finally, it is possible to hold that both minds and material things, as we know them, are only manifestations, phenomena, and that they must be referred to an ulterior "reality" or "substance." One may claim that they are "aspects" of the one reality, which is neither matter nor mind.

These doctrines are different forms of Monism. In whatever else they differ from one another, they agree in maintaining that the universe does not contain two kinds of things fundamentally different. Out of the duality of things as it seems to be revealed to the plain man they try to make some kind of a unity.

35. MATERIALISM.—The first of the forms of monism above mentioned is Materialism. It is not a doctrine to which the first impulse of the plain man leads him at the present time. Even those who have done no reading in philosophy have inherited many of their ways of looking at things from the thinkers who lived in the ages past, and whose opinions have become the common property of civilized men. For more than two thousand years the world and the mind have been discussed, and it is impossible for any of us to escape from the influence of those discussions and to look at things with the primitive simplicity of the wholly untutored.

But it was not always so. There was a time when men who were not savages, but possessed great intellectual vigor and much cultivation, found it easy and natural to be materialists. This I have spoken of before (section 30), but it will repay us to take up again a little more at length the clearest of the ancient forms of materialism, that of the Atomists, and to see what may be said for and against it.

Democritus of Abdera taught that nothing exists except atoms and empty space. The atoms, he maintained, differ from one another in size, shape, and position. In other respects they are alike. They have always been in motion. Perhaps he conceived of that motion as originally a fall through space, but there seems to be uncertainty upon this point. However, the atoms in motion collide with one another, and these collisions result in mechanical combinations from which spring into being world-systems.

According to this doctrine, nothing comes from nothing, and nothing can become nonexistent. All the changes which have ever taken place in the world are only changes in the position of material particles—they are regroupings of atoms. We cannot directly perceive them to be such, for our senses are too dull to make such fine observations, but our reason tells us that such is the case.

Where, in such a world as this, is there room for mind, and what can we mean by mind? Democritus finds a place for mind by conceiving it to consist of fine, smooth, round atoms, which are the same as the atoms which constitute fire. These are distributed through the whole body, and lie among the other atoms which compose it. They are inhaled with and exhaled into the outer air. While they are in the body their functions are different according as they are located in this organ or in that. In the brain they give rise to thought, in the heart to anger, and in the liver to desire.

I suppose no one would care, at the present time, to become a Democritean. The "Reason," which tells us that the mind consists of fine, round atoms, appears to have nothing but its bare word to offer us. But, apart from this, a peculiar difficulty seems to face us; even supposing there are atoms of fire in the brain, the heart, and the liver, what are the thought, anger, and desire, of which mention is made?

Shall we conceive of these last as atoms, as void space, or as the motion of atoms? There really seems to be no place in the world for them, and these are the mind so far as the mind appears to be revealed—they are mental phenomena. It does not seem that they are to be identified with anything that the Atomistic doctrine admits as existing. They are simply overlooked.

Is the modern materialism more satisfactory? About half a century ago there was in the scientific world something like a revival of materialistic thinking. It did not occur to any one to maintain that the mind consists of fine atoms disseminated through the body, but statements almost as crude were made. It was said, for example, that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.

It seems a gratuitous labor to criticise such statements as these in detail. There are no glands the secretions of which are not as unequivocally material as are the glands themselves. This means that such secretions can be captured and analyzed; the chemical elements of which they are composed can be enumerated. They are open to inspection in precisely the same way as are the glands which secrete them.

Does it seem reasonable to maintain that thoughts and feelings are related to brains in this way? Does the chemist ever dream of collecting them in a test tube, and of drawing up for us a list of their constituent elements? When the brain is active, there are, to be sure, certain material products which pass into the blood and are finally eliminated from the body; but among these products no one would be more surprised than the materialist to discover pains and pleasures, memories and anticipations, desires and volitions. This talk of thought as a "secretion" we can afford to set aside.

Nor need we take much more seriously the seemingly more sober statement that thought is a "function" of the brain. There is, of course, a sense in which we all admit the statement; minds are not disembodied, and we have reason to believe that mind and brain are most intimately related. But the word "function" is used in a very broad and loose sense when it serves to indicate this relation; and one may employ it in this way without being a materialist at all. In a stricter sense of the word, the brain has no functions that may not be conceived as mechanical changes,—as the motion of atoms in space,—and to identify mental phenomena with these is inexcusable. It is not theoretically inconceivable that, with finer senses, we might directly perceive the motions of the atoms in another man's brain; it is inconceivable that we should thus directly perceive his melancholy or his joy; they belong to another world.

56. SPIRITUALISM.—The name Spiritualism is sometimes given to the doctrine that there is no existence which we may not properly call mind or spirit. It errs in the one direction as materialism errs in the other.

One must not confound with this doctrine that very different one, Spiritism, which teaches that a certain favored class of persons called mediums may bring back the spirits of the departed and enable us to hold communication with them. Such beliefs have always existed among the common people, but they have rarely interested philosophers. I shall have nothing to say of them in this book.

There have been various kinds of spiritualists. The name may be applied to the idealists, from Berkeley down to those of our day; at some of the varieties of their doctrine we have taken a glance (sections 49, 53). To these we need not recur; but there is one type of spiritualistic doctrine which is much discussed at the present day and which appears to appeal strongly to a number of scientific men. We must consider it for a moment.

We have examined Professor Clifford's doctrine of Mind-stuff (section 43). Clifford maintained that all the material things we perceive are our perceptions—they are in our consciousness, and are not properly external at all. But, believing, as he did, that all nature is animated, he held that every material thing, every perception, may be taken as a revelation of something not in our consciousness, of a mind or, at least, of a certain amount of mind-stuff. How shall we conceive the relation between what is in our mind and the something corresponding to it not in our mind?

We must, says Clifford, regard the latter as the reality of which the former is the appearance or manifestation. "What I perceive as your brain is really in itself your consciousness, is You; but then that which I call your brain, the material fact, is merely my perception."

This doctrine is Panpsychism, in the form in which it is usually brought to our attention. It holds that the only real existences are minds, and that physical phenomena must be regarded as the manifestations under which these real existences make us aware of their presence. The term panpsychism may, it is true, be used in a somewhat different sense. It may be employed merely to indicate the doctrine that all nature is animated, and without implying a theory as to the relation between bodies perceived and the minds supposed to accompany them.

What shall we say to panpsychism of the type represented by Clifford? It is, I think, sufficiently answered in the earlier chapters of this volume:—

(1) If I call material facts my perceptions, I do an injustice to the distinction between the physical and the mental (Chapter IV).

(2) If I say that all nature is animated, I extend illegitimately the argument for other minds (Chapter X).

(3) If I say that mind is the reality of which the brain is the appearance, I misconceive what is meant by the distinction between appearance and reality (Chapter V).

57. THE DOCTRINE OF THE ONE SUBSTANCE.—In the seventeenth century Descartes maintained that, although mind and matter may justly be regarded as two substances, yet it should be recognized that they are not really independent substances in the strictest sense of the word, but that there is only one substance, in this sense, and mind and matter are, as it were, its attributes.

His thought was that by attribute we mean that which is not independent, but must be referred to something else; by substance, we mean that which exists independently and is not referred to any other thing. It seemed to follow that there could be only one substance.

Spinoza modified Descartes' doctrine in that he refused to regard mind and matter as substances at all. He made them unequivocally attributes of the one and only substance, which he called God.

The thought which influenced Spinoza had impressed many minds before his time, and it has influenced many since. One need not follow him in naming the unitary something to which mind and matter are referred substance. One may call it Being, or Reality, or the Unknowable, or Energy, or the Absolute, or, perhaps, still something else. The doctrine has taken many forms, but he who reads with discrimination will see that the various forms have much in common.

They agree in maintaining that matter and mind, as they are revealed in our experience, are not to be regarded as,