The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell (best large ereader .txt) 📖

people are not to blame for

unconscious motives, but only for conscious ones. In order,

therefore, to be wholly virtuous it is only necessary to repeat

virtuous formulas. We say: “I desire to be kind to my friends,

honourable in business, philanthropic towards the poor,

public-spirited in politics.” So long as we refuse to allow

ourselves, even in the watches of the night, to avow any contrary

desires, we may be bullies at home, shady in the City, skinflints

in paying wages and profiteers in dealing with the public; yet,

if only conscious motives are to count in moral valuation, we

shall remain model characters. This is an agreeable doctrine, and

it is not surprising that men are un willing to abandon it. But

moral considerations are the worst enemies of the scientific

spirit and we must dismiss them from our minds if we wish to

arrive at truth.

 

I believe—as I shall try to prove in a later lecture -that

desire, like force in mechanics, is of the nature of a convenient

fiction for describing shortly certain laws of behaviour. A

hungry animal is restless until it finds food; then it becomes

quiescent. The thing which will bring a restless condition to an

end is said to be what is desired. But only experience can show

what will have this sedative effect, and it is easy to make

mistakes. We feel dissatisfaction, and think that such and-such a

thing would remove it; but in thinking this, we are theorizing,

not observing a patent fact. Our theorizing is often mistaken,

and when it is mistaken there is a difference between what we

think we desire and what in fact will bring satisfaction. This is

such a common phenomenon that any theory of desire which fails to

account for it must be wrong.

 

What have been called “unconscious” desires have been brought

very much to the fore in recent years by psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis, as every one knows, is primarily a method of

understanding hysteria and certain forms of insanity*; but it has

been found that there is much in the lives of ordinary men and

women which bears a humiliating resemblance to the delusions of

the insane. The connection of dreams, irrational beliefs and

foolish actions with unconscious wishes has been brought to

light, though with some exaggeration, by Freud and Jung and their

followers. As regards the nature of these unconscious wishes, it

seems to me—though as a layman I speak with diffidence—that

many psycho-analysts are unduly narrow; no doubt the wishes they

emphasize exist, but others, e.g. for honour and power, are

equally operative and equally liable to concealment. This,

however, does not affect the value of their general theories from

the point of view of theoretic psychology, and it is from this

point of view that their results are important for the analysis

of mind.

 

* There is a wide field of “unconscious” phenomena which does not

depend upon psychoanalytic theories. Such occurrences as

automatic writing lead Dr. Morton Prince to say: “As I view this

question of the subconscious, far too much weight is given to the

point of awareness or not awareness of our conscious processes.

As a matter of fact, we find entirely identical phenomena, that

is, identical in every respect but one-that of awareness in which

sometimes we are aware of these conscious phenomena and sometimes

not”(p. 87 of “Subconscious Phenomena,” by various authors,

Rebman). Dr. Morton Price conceives that there may be

“consciousness” without “awareness.” But this is a difficult

view, and one which makes some definition of “consciousness”

imperative. For nay part, I cannot see how to separate

consciousness from awareness.

 

What, I think, is clearly established, is that a man’s actions

and beliefs may be wholly dominated by a desire of which he is

quite unconscious, and which he indignantly repudiates when it is

suggested to him. Such a desire is generally, in morbid cases, of

a sort which the patient would consider wicked; if he had to

admit that he had the desire, he would loathe himself. Yet it is

so strong that it must force an outlet for itself; hence it

becomes necessary to entertain whole systems of false beliefs in

order to hide the nature of what is desired. The resulting

delusions in very many cases disappear if the hysteric or lunatic

can be made to face the facts about himself. The consequence of

this is that the treatment of many forms of insanity has grown

more psychological and less physiological than it used to be.

Instead of looking for a physical defect in the brain, those who

treat delusions look for the repressed desire which has found

this contorted mode of expression. For those who do not wish to

plunge into the somewhat repulsive and often rather wild theories

of psychoanalytic pioneers, it will be worth while to read a

little book by Dr. Bernard Hart on “The Psychology of Insanity.”*

On this question of the mental as opposed to the physiological

study of the causes of insanity, Dr. Hart says:

 

* Cambridge, 1912; 2nd edition, 1914. The following references

are to the second edition.

 

“The psychological conception [of insanity] is based on the view

that mental processes can be directly studied without any

reference to the accompanying changes which are presumed to take

place in the brain, and that insanity may therefore be properly

attacked from the standpoint of psychology”(p. 9).

 

This illustrates a point which I am anxious to make clear from

the outset. Any attempt to classify modern views, such as I

propose to advocate, from the old standpoint of materialism and

idealism, is only misleading. In certain respects, the views

which I shall be setting forth approximate to materialism; in

certain others, they approximate to its opposite. On this

question of the study of delusions, the practical effect of the

modern theories, as Dr. Hart points out, is emancipation from the

materialist method. On the other hand, as he also points out (pp.

38-9), imbecility and dementia still have to be considered

physiologically, as caused by defects in the brain. There is no

inconsistency in this If, as we maintain, mind and matter are

neither of them the actual stuff of reality, but different

convenient groupings of an underlying material, then, clearly,

the question whether, in regard to a given phenomenon, we are to

seek a physical or a mental cause, is merely one to be decided by

trial. Metaphysicians have argued endlessly as to the interaction

of mind and matter. The followers of Descartes held that mind and

matter are so different as to make any action of the one on the

other impossible. When I will to move my arm, they said, it is

not my will that operates on my arm, but God, who, by His

omnipotence, moves my arm whenever I want it moved. The modern

doctrine of psychophysical parallelism is not appreciably

different from this theory of the Cartesian school.

Psychophysical parallelism is the theory that mental and

physical events each have causes in their own sphere, but run on

side by side owing to the fact that every state of the brain

coexists with a definite state of the mind, and vice versa. This

view of the reciprocal causal independence of mind and matter has

no basis except in metaphysical theory.* For us, there is no

necessity to make any such assumption, which is very difficult to

harmonize with obvious facts. I receive a letter inviting me to

dinner: the letter is a physical fact, but my apprehension of its

meaning is mental. Here we have an effect of matter on mind. In

consequence of my apprehension of the meaning of the letter, I go

to the right place at the right time; here we have an effect of

mind on matter. I shall try to persuade you, in the course of

these lectures, that matter is not so material and mind not so

mental as is generally supposed. When we are speaking of matter,

it will seem as if we were inclining to idealism; when we are

speaking of mind, it will seem as if we were inclining to

materialism. Neither is the truth. Our world is to be constructed

out of what the American realists call “neutral” entities, which

have neither the hardness and indestructibility of matter, nor

the reference to objects which is supposed to characterize mind.

 

* It would seem, however, that Dr. Hart accepts this theory as 8

methodological precept. See his contribution to “Subconscious

Phenomena” (quoted above), especially pp. 121-2.

 

There is, it is true, one objection which might be felt, not

indeed to the action of matter on mind, but to the action of mind

on matter. The laws of physics, it may be urged, are apparently

adequate to explain everything that happens to matter, even when

it is matter in a man’s brain. This, however, is only a

hypothesis, not an established theory. There is no cogent

empirical reason for supposing that the laws determining the

motions of living bodies are exactly the same as those that apply

to dead matter. Sometimes, of course, they are clearly the same.

When a man falls from a precipice or slips on a piece of orange

peel, his body behaves as if it were devoid of life. These are

the occasions that make Bergson laugh. But when a man’s bodily

movements are what we call “voluntary,” they are, at any rate

prima facie, very different in their laws from the movements of

what is devoid of life. I do not wish to say dogmatically that

the difference is irreducible; I think it highly probable that it

is not. I say only that the study of the behaviour of living

bodies, in the present state of our knowledge, is distinct from

physics. The study of gases was originally quite distinct from

that of rigid bodies, and would never have advanced to its

present state if it had not been independently pursued. Nowadays

both the gas and the rigid body are manufactured out of a more

primitive and universal kind of matter. In like manner, as a

question of methodology, the laws of living bodies are to be

studied, in the first place, without any undue haste to

subordinate them to the laws of physics. Boyle’s law and the rest

had to be discovered before the kinetic theory of gases became

possible. But in psychology we are hardly yet at the stage of

Boyle’s law. Meanwhile we need not be held up by the bogey of the

universal rigid exactness of physics. This is, as yet, a mere

hypothesis, to be tested empirically without any preconceptions.

It may be true, or it may not. So far, that is all we can say.

 

Returning from this digression to our main topic, namely, the

criticism of “consciousness,” we observe that Freud and his

followers, though they have demonstrated beyond dispute the

immense importance of “unconscious” desires in determining our

actions and beliefs, have not attempted the task of telling us

what an “unconscious” desire actually is, and have thus invested

their doctrine with an air of mystery and mythology which forms a

large part of its popular attractiveness. They speak always as

though it were more normal for a desire to be conscious, and as

though a positive cause had to be assigned for its being

unconscious. Thus “the unconscious” becomes a sort of underground

prisoner, living in a dungeon, breaking in at long intervals upon

our daylight respectability with dark groans and maledictions and

strange atavistic lusts. The ordinary reader, almost inevitably,

thinks of this underground person as another consciousness,

prevented by what Freud calls the “censor” from making his voice

heard in company, except on rare and dreadful occasions when he

shouts so loud that every one hears him and there is a scandal.

Most of us like the idea that we could