PART III INTERPRETATION OF THEORY
CHAPTER EIGHT The Nature of Man
Thus far we have been able to elucidate our problems without raising metaphysical questions. It has been sufficient to draw light from history and from the critical analysis of various forms of religious experience. Some of the psychological and historical data are vague, but in so far as our analysis and history have been correct we have thus far appealed only to fact. And it is certainly of very great importance that so much of religious life and thought should (if our facts are correct) be open to validation in this purely empirical manner.
If this much of our argument is accepted it establishes a wide basis of agreement for a vivid and valuable co-operative religious life without the attaining of agreement on further philosophical questions concerning the divine transcendence and the destiny of the soul. Yet these questions of religious belief call for an answer, partly because differences of opinion upon them hinder perfect co-operation of religious people, partly for their intrinsic interest, but chiefly because there are certain values enshrined in a rational, positive faith in these doctrines which are lost if we feel logically forced to surrender them. So we turn our attention now to an inquiry into these further questions of the interpretation of our religious experience. We shall deal first with that of immortality, although the positive grounds of belief in it rest on a prior belief in the divine transcendence. The reason for this apparently reversed procedure is that, in considering the possibility of immortality, [ p. 810 ] we shall be chiefly concerned with an analysis of the nature of personality; and this must necessarily be undertaken before we pass on to any further consideration of that element within personality which we have seen to be the foundation of the idea of God.
The primitive belief in the soul and its survival of the body was, as we have seen, a piece of primitive psychology usually unconnected with belief in moral and religious rewards. The soul itself was simply a refined form of matter, such as breath or shade, and its life in and around the grave or in some special abode of the dead was generally pictured as poor and dull. The early Hebrews shared these typical primitive beliefs, as witnessed by many Old Testament passages. A typical description is contained in the following prophetic address to the king of Babylon:
Sheol from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak and say unto thee. Art thou also become weak as we? art thou become like unto us? [1]
Neither is the lot of the righteous any better, as is indicated by the following lines from a hymn of praise attributed to the good king Hezekiah: “For the grave cannot praise thee, death cannot celebrate thee: they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth. The living, the living, he shall praise thee as I do this day.” [2]
That no religious significance attached to the afterlife is strongly indicated in the latter passage and in many others. Indeed, as the tone of Hebrew religion rises the belief in the future life fades. Many passages echo the pessimism of Job:” So man lieth down and riseth not: till the heavens be no more they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.” [3] [ p. 211 ] The whole significance of religion is attached to the life on earth. Man reaps his full reward here for his good and evil deeds. The problem of evil, as we saw in an earlier chapter,[^4] was largely met by the survival of the primitive notion of collective responsibility. When this false ethic was condemned by later prophets and the notion of individual responsibility gained ascendancy it could still be assumed, as by Job’s comforters, that if an apparently righteous man suffered it indicated that he was really a secret sinner. However, as confidence in the power and goodness of Jehovah grows there begin to appear passages asserting a faith, or at least a hope, that God had something better than the silence of the grave in store for his faithful servants. “The fool and the brutish together perish, . . . They are appointed as a flock for Sheol; . . . But God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol: for he shall receive me.” [4]
Yet, even when we have made the most of such passages as this, we still are forced to recognize that the religion of the Old Testament at its best was a religion without a faith in immortality. And the religion of the Old Testament prophets, it must be acknowledged, was one of the most significant and fruitful of all’ human history. However, lest too much be inferred from this, it must be remembered how inadequate was their conception of the problem of evil. In spite of the abandonment of the notion of collective responsibility, they were so much concerned with what they believed to be God’s dealings with the nation as a whole that they were often blind to the injustices suffered by individuals. He was surely not a very good observer who wrote: “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, not his seed begging bread.” [5] The Hebrews’ trust in Jehovah was for this life and it was for his provision of material goods that they chiefly praised him.
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But as the tragedy of the nation deepened in captivity upon captivity, and as the sense of Jehovah’s care became less material and more a matter of inner spiritual strength, the conviction grew not only that God had some better lot in preparation for his people as a whole, but that all his deserving children should live to share it. Thus, in the wisdom literature and in the apocalyptic literature of the time between the Old and New Testaments, there is a steady growth of the faith in immortality. This was not conceived as a mere spiritual survival. The Hebrews nowhere developed a belief in the necessary immortality of the soul. It was rather to a resurrection of the body that they looked, and to a new and glorified earthly life. The belief was not universal. It was rejected by the Sadducees at the time of Jesus, but accepted by the Pharisees. What is important, however, is that it is not a philosophical conception nor one based on theoretical grounds, but a distinctly religious conception growing out of a sublime faith in the goodness and power of God.
It is this faith, somewhat modified by Greek philosophy, that was later incorptorated into Christianity. Though opposed to the Pharisees for their rigidity and exclusiveness, Jesus defended their teaching in this respect. And he rested his own conviction squarely on his conception of the nature of God. “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” [6]
The early Greeks, like the Hebrews, shared the primitive conception of the survival of the soul, and for them too it was a dismal state of being. ‘‘ I would sooner be the hireling servant of the most penurious man alive,” says Achilles,” than the ruler over all the kingdoms of the dead.” [7] But in the classical period this primitive belief gives way, on the one hand to skepticism, particularly among the followers of Democritus [ p. 213 ] and Epicurus, and on the other hand to a high belief in the immortality of the soul. Among the philosophers this latter doctrine owed its adoption to Socrates and Plato, but they in turn had been influenced by the mystery religions which were spreading the belief among the common people.
The earliest influence of this kind in Greece was the Eleusinian mysteries, but the chief, undoubtedly, was the cult of Dionysus,[8] especially as developed by the Orphic sects. In its Phrygian home this was a wild and horrid orgy by which the worshiper achieved an ecstatic condition in which he believed he obtained union with the god and thus a share in his immortal life. This suggestion was taken up, purified, reinterpreted and ennobled by the Orphic brotherhoods, among the early leaders of which, if not the founder, was the philosopher Pythagoras. The experience of ecstasy suggested the soul’s independence of the body, and the idea of its union with the god suggested its divine origin. Its present state was then interpreted by the Orphic religion as due to a prenatal sinful defilement, and its salvation was to be achieved by the ceremonial purifications of the cult.
The essential difference between the Greek and the Hebrew-Christian conceptions of immortality is that the former arose chiefly out of reflection on a mystical ecstasy and the latter out of reflection on the deeper problems of the moral life and a lofty conception of the divine goodness and power.[9] The result is that the Greek conception does not connect salvation directly with any inner change of the moral life. The sin from which it delivers is a generalized sense of sin attributed to the prenatal stage, and its mode of cleansing is [ p. 214 ] chiefly ceremonial. This is so in spite of the fact that the Orphics did prescribe an ethical rule of life and, especially in later times, required that their initiates be men of good character. The most important result of this difference in the origin of the belief, however, was that in defense of the doctrine the Greek philosophers appealed, not to their moral experience and their sense of loving communion with God and trust in his goodness, but to psychological grounds. These emphasized the distinction between soul and body, and suggested a necessary and universal immortality instead of a new life made possible by spiritual development attained in this life. It was the prestige of these Greek philosophical concepts that shaped the later development of the Christian doctrine and the general lines of the apologetic by which it has been defended.
For the Hebrew, the early Greek and the primitive alike the soul was but a fine form of matter. It was the great contribution of Socrates to have recognized that the distinction between the mental and the physical involves more than this. We cannot now endorse the form in which he stated the distinction, nor all the arguments with which he and his great disciple, Plato, supported it, nor all the implications they drew from it. But the fact that experience here presents us with an irreducible difference, which demands the drawing of some clear distinction in our thought, is one that no sound philosophy can ignore. The discovery was joyfully applied by Socrates to the elucidation of the new concept of the soul which the mysteries were popularizing and which his own mystical nature (indicated by his well known belief in his own guidance by a familiar spirit) inclined him to accept. In the Phaedo he jocularly replies to Crito’s question, “How shall we bury you?” with confident good humor: “As you please, only you must catch me first.” But then he reveals that this distinction between body and mind lies at the root [ p. 215 ] of his belief when he adds: “My friends, I cannot convince Crito that I am the Socrates who has been conversing with you and arranging his arguments in order. He thinks that I am the body which he will presently see a corpse, and he asks how he is to bury me.”
This discovery of Socrates was made in the realm of logic. It turns upon the fact that, while all physical events are transitory and particular, the mind grasps truths that are timeless and ideas that are general. All the more important arguments for immortality that Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates turn on this point. The arguments are vitiated by two false assumptions: first, that the capacity of the soul, or mind, to discover universal ideas and necessary truths while observing a world that apparently consists only of particular, temporal facts, can be explained only as a process of recollection of perfections experienced in a previous existence; second, that the distinction between the mental and the physical thus indicated must be one of “essence” or “substance,” and not merely a difference of process, activity or function. Aristotle, Plato’s great successor, gave up the former assumption, and also the latter so far as it concerned those parts of the soul which man shares in common with plants and animals — merely vital and sensitive processes. But he retained the distinction of substance as holding between the rational part of man’s soul and his body.[10] From this Aquinas drew the Scholastic doctrine of the immaterial, and therefore indivisible and indestructible, soul. And under the same influence Descartes put forward his theory of two substances — matter, which has extension but no thought or experience, and mind, which has thought or experience but is unextended.
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This dualism of substances, spiritual and material, which has its roots in Plato and came to full florescence in Descartes, was a plant that produced bitter fruit. It set the problem of the relation of body and mind in an insoluble form. How can an immaterial, unextended soul control the movements of a solid, material body? Or, in more modern terms, how can an idea, as a mere nonphysical content of consciousness, effect a physical change in even a single molecule of the brain? And, on the other hand, how can such a inind receive any impressions from a physical world, with which it has nothing in common, so as to be aware of its existence? The former of these two questions led to mechanistic materialism, in which matter or force was regarded as the only substantial and permanent reality, mind being a mere “epiphenomenon,” a strange by-product of the complicated chemistry of the brain, having no effect upon its changes.[11] The latter question led to idealism, on the ground that, since the physical world certainly is known by our minds, it must in its essential nature be really akin to them. But this simply obscured the real difference between the mental and the physical and destroyed the significance of individuality. It made the individual human mind appear merely an evanescent phase of a vast “ideal” world order. Thus idealists have divided on the question of the survival of human personality, Bradley and Bosanquet, for example, taking the negative, and Royce and Pringle-Pattison the affirmative.
Since the Cartesian two-substance theory has proved unworkable, and since the criticisms of Berkeley and Hume showed how shadowy the notion of substance, as distinct from its qualities, really is, there has been a strong tendency to [ p. 217 ] drop the term from philosophical discussion. We speak today of distinctions of quality, relation, process and function without attributing these to differences of substance. In regard to the nature of the soul this has led to a return to a theory of life and mind, in all their phases, akin to the Aristotelian theory of the vegetative and sensitive parts of the soul. Life, says Aristotle,[12] is self-originated nutrition, increase and decay; i.e., it is the “actuality” or function of the bodily organism. If the eye were a living being then seeing would be its soul; and similarly, the function of cutting is, as it were, the soul of the ax. So the soul of a man is defined by his capacities — of nutrition, sensitivity, reason and movement. This, put in modern terms, is to say that life, mind and soul together constitute the system of functions distinctive of the human organism, the term “function” here including the latent potentiality or capacity for these distinctive activities, as well as their actual operation. Thus mind, or soul, is defined in terms of process, not of substance. And this is certainly the predominant modern view. It is involved in the theory, adopted in this book, of personality as a system of volitional tendencies; and in different forms it is held by idealists, instrumentalists, and the various schools of realists, English, German and American.[13]
For Aristotle, the only one of the functions constituting the soul that is separable from the body is reason.[14] This he recognized as, in some very vague sense, immortal. But the psychological reasons he gives for distinguishing the generalizing capacity of reason from perception, memory, feeling and will no longer convince us. Even so strong an upholder of the spiritual nature of man as James Ward deplores this discontinuity.[15] [ p. 218 ] There is abundant evidence of the gradual evolution of the mental capacities of man. From the simplest feeling-responses of humble organisms to human abstract thought there is no break that is not explicable as a further differentiation of function among capacities present at a lower level. These developments of mental capacity are correlated with elaborations of brain structure. And this correlation occurs in such a way as to indicate that neural processes play essentially the same part in the higher mental activities as they do in the lower. These and many other physiological facts, such as the effects of brain injuries, of glandular secretions, of drugs, disease and blood supply, have sufficed to convince most students of the subject that the higher mental processes are just as much dependent on the physical organism as the lower.
This, however, is not to say that the only factor involved in the occurrence of mental activity is the physiological. That the living and active brain is essential to knowledge of the sensory world and to the type of mental activity in which human beings are engaged in their physical impact on the world, seems to be true. That we have no knowledge of any purely mental activity to which the brain does not seem to be necessary may also be granted. But it does not follow that the physico-chemical organs we call body and brain are the sole factors involved at any stage of mental activity, even the lowest. And if there is another factor it may also be the case that it is capable of finding or developing some other medium of expression when permanently deprived of its customary medium, the living brain. It may be that a living organism involves, besides the system of physico-chemical processes we call its body, another and distinct system of processes which constitutes its life and mind. The living organism would then be a co-ordinated system of the two kinds of process, and the [ p. 219 ] dissolution of the one would not necessarily imply the entire dissolution of the other.
Whether this is a reasonable and probable view we shall have to inquire. It is certainly the case that the opinion of a Very large number of scientists and philosophers is at present against it; and the conclusion is drawn that human personality does not survive death. So our first task is to inquire into the reason for this state of affairs.
Materialism and mechanism in the old sense have ceased to trouble us. The new physics has destroyed them. Matter is no longer conceived as something permanent, occupying space, and real events are no longer something that happens to matter. Matter is itself simply a system of “events,” and these events, as Bertrand Russell says, “just happen, and do not happen ‘ to ’ matter or ‘ to ’ anything else.”[16] The modern physicist is too wary even to say that they happen to the “ether.” These events have an orderly way of happening, which science formulates as natural laws, but the apparent rigidity of these laws in physics and chemistry is only a statistical uniformity. A single atom is a manifold system of events and there are many millions of atoms in a pin’s head. The laws of mechanics hold only among these aggregates — among macroscopic events. Among the microscopic events that physics must postulate in explanation of the macroscopic there is irregularity and perhaps spontaneity.
Thus a physico-chemical theory of life and mind which gives full recognition to these modern physical theories, if it is still called “materialism” is a materialism with a difference. It allows for genuine chance variations in the order of nature. This opens the way for still greater departures from mechanism. It makes it entirely possible that new phenomena [ p. 220 ] thus developed may be subject to natural laws not deducible from those holding good of antecedent events. It thus makes it theoretically possible that vital and mental phenomena may manifest modes of behavior not even theoretically deducible from physics and chemistry, because of effects of new emergent factors upon microscopic events. It even makes it possible that microscopic events may be affected by some independent nonphysical factor and organic behavior be thus subjected to a higher type of control. The former view, since its rejection of mechanism still does not allow of any independent nonphysical factor, may be called physicalism.[17] The latter view, though unacceptable in many of its forms, finds reasonable empirical expression in a theory we shall call activism.,[18] As representative of a modern type of mechanism we may take Professor Cohen, who, while recognizing that such views are theoretically possible, thinks that there are good empirical grounds for rejecting them.
He bases the case for mechanism on three arguments:[19] (i) That the principle of continuity implies that, since life as we know it has been possible on earth only in recent geological times, it must have developed out of inorganic matter at a time when conditions were more favorable to such a development than they are now. The idea that any nonphysical factor could be involved he dismisses (quite unjustifiably, as will be shown later) as a theory of “supernatural creation.” But he admits that this argument alone does not disprove the theory we have called “physicalism,” which accepts” spontaneous generation” but insists that organismic behavior is not entirely subject to physico-chemical laws.
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(2) The rejection of this possibility, however, is urged by the argument “that the actual progress of biologic science along physico-chemical lines demonstrates the validity of that type of explanation.” It is admitted that mechanical explanation is far from complete and that many biologists are convinced that increasing knowledge indicates more and more clearly that there are limits to the physico-chemical explanation of biological phenomena, but it is claimed that the faith of the mechanist is abundantly justified by the past progress of his method.
(3) The third argument shares the weakness of the second. It is urged that if biology is to be a natural science it must assume its phenomena to be subject to causal laws subject to empirical, physical verification. This is precisely the argument the behaviorists have used for their procedure in psychology. But, of course, the question is begged in both cases. The real question is whether the phenomena of life and mind are such that they can ever be dealt with completely by the methods of natural science. The contention of all nonmechanists is that there are limits to natural science. The vitalist and the activist think that these are prescribed by the operation of an independent nonphysical agency. The physicalist thinks that it is sufficient to postulate that a certain indeterminacy in the physico-chemical system permits of the “emergence” of new forms, not strictly deducible from the laws found sufficient to describe the antecedent conditions. Such new forms, he points out, may have qualities and functions which can be described only in a new set of laws superimposed upon the others; and these new laws are subject to empirical verification. Yet science as a whole cannot be made complete, partly because of the complexity and variability of the new phenomena, and partly because the new laws cannot be deduced from those of the earlier stage.
It is obvious from these arguments that the case for mechanism is anything but conclusive. It is perhaps justified as [ p. 222 ] a methodological postulate in physiology, biochemistry and kindred sciences — though many workers in these fields regard it as a positive hindrance.[20] But as a metaphysic it is only a desperate flight from one absurdity[21] to another, or else the expression of a will to believe. In defense of this rather emphatic statement it is not necessary to quote the mass of evidence concerning the teleological character of biological phenomena and to point to the radical differences between the behavior of living organisms and that of inanimate things. Nor would it be sufficient to do so, for it is impossible to prove the negative proposition that in these cases no mechanistic explanation is possible. Science has often discovered physicochemical explanations where it seemed that there could be none. The real reason why the faith in mechanism is contrary to common sense is that it denies that feeling has any function in life and that knowledge makes any difference to conduct. It means that the experience of pain and pleasure has nothing to do with our behavior, that nature has elaborated sensation in the course of evolution all to no effect, that these things are mere accompaniments of the neural processes of living organisms and play no part in the causal order of the physical world; and yet the causal order of the physical world causes them! Such a theory ought, surely, to be the last resort of thought. Instead, we find not a single argument for it that a cautious advocate can claim as conclusive, and no facts suggesting it that are not balanced by equally suggestive facts on the other side.
The type of theory we have called physicalism avoids the difficulties of mechanism. It recognizes that as we pass from [ p. 223 ] the less complex to the more complex type of entity — e.g., from the molecule to the plant cell and to the higher animal — new qualities and characteristics emerge which are not predictable from a knowledge of the earlier forms, and that these involve principles of interaction not reducible to the simpler law. It maintains the principle of continuity but so interprets this that, to quote a leading proponent, “its meaning . . . precludes reduction of the ‘ higher ’ to the ‘ lower ’ just as it precludes complete breaks and gaps.”[22] Yet it also maintains that the new and “higher” vital and mental processes are completely dependent for their occurrence on the forms previously attained by the older, or “lower,” physical processes. The vital and mental are not features of nature co-ordinate with the physical but are dependent upon it. The difference between the animate and the inanimate " is not that the former has something in addition to physico-chemical energy, but simply in the way in which physico-chemical energies are interconnected and operate, hence different consequences mark animate and inanimate activity respectively.”[23]
Now if it were merely the more complicated mechanical structure of a living organism that determined all the differences in its behavior this theory would still be mechanistic. It would still leave no room for the efficacy of purpose and intelligence and would involve the same absurdity we have pointed out above. But this is not Dewey’s view. It is the fact that the more complicated mechanical structure in some mysterious way acquires new” emergent” properties nowhere present before, such as sensory experience, pleasure and pain, that makes possible intelligent and purposive be [ p. 224 ] havior. Dewey is emphatic that these also belong to nature and, specifically, to the organism, and that the organism as a whole reacts to its environment. And, apparently because it is this new kind of whole,[24] its reactions are different in the striking way that characterizes animate organisms. The sensitivity of the plant cell and the simple reactions of lowly animals he is willing to call “psycho-physical.” Somewhere at this level feeling emerges. But he is emphatic that “psychophysical does not denote an abrogation of the physico-chemical; nor a peculiar mixture of something physical and something psychical.”[25]
Is this a tenable position? To clarify the issue we may take the specific example of the qualitative character (the conscious experience, not the neural process) known as pain. Does it play any effective part in behavior? If it does not, then we are left with the absurdity of mechanism. If it does, then either it directly affects physico-chemical process or it affects some nonphysico-chemical process which, in turn, affects physico-chemical process. The latter alternative is the one adopted by activism. The former is the one that appears to be involved in Dewey’s[26] position and, generally, in the type of theory we have called physicalism. But it certainly involves a radical departure from the ordinary conception of the physico-chemical. Whether the activist theory involves a similar difficulty we shall inquire later. But the notion that [ p. 225 ] a qualitative character, such as a pain or a color, can directly affect the course of a dynamic process, such as molecular change in a nerve cell, is precisely the unintelligibility that has caused so many scientific minds (since they have not seen a reasonable alternative) to relapse into the acceptance of mechanism.
On the ordinary conception of physical objects as dynamic agents completely describable in physico-chemical terms, physicalism is absurd. But Dewey’s position is saved from this absurdity by a radical reinterpretation of the physical world.[27] Matter, or the physical, is not itself an event or existence. Natural existence is a world of events. These events, at the lowest level we know them, are characterized by the external interactions we call physical. But natural existence involves much more than this and reveals its basic traits more fully in its later developed effects — i.e., in life and mind — than in the mere physical order. So a physical event is always a natural existence involving potentialities that are more than physical. And it is for this reason that a “red” or a “dry” quality may be able to exercise a selective power over patterns of energy organization.
Thus “natural existence” is regarded as containing the “potentialities” of feeling, willing and thinking, only waiting for the appropriate structure of physical events to “release” them. This is a metaphysical theory very closely akin to that which will later be presented as necessary also to activism. But Dewey insists upon the dependence of life, feeling and thought upon physical events in a way that is not necessitated by such a metaphysic. The recognition that there is something in natural events besides their physical character is covered by the vague word “potentialities,” and no inquiry is made as to whether any further light can be cast on these. The claim is made that somehow “natural events [ p. 226 ] having matter as a character. ‘ cause ’ life and mind.” [28] Yet it is admitted that this is so marvelous as to be miraculous.
That things should be able to pass from the plane of external pushing and pulling to that of revealing themselves to man, and thereby to themselves, and that the fruit of communication should be participation, sharing, is a wonder by the side of which transubstantiation pales.[29]
This marvel, however, would cease to be miraculous if we could discover in mental process an observable factor that is neither a physical process nor a physical quality, nor any mere relation between these. For then, without committing the metaphysical crime of inventing an entity to fill a gap in our theory, we would have something to point to as the factor that mediates between the quality (such as pain) and the physico-chemical process of the nervous system. We should have to admit that such a factor could be actually observed only by each person within himself, and that its presence could only be securely inferred in other persons and to a lesser degree in the higher animals. But there would be no reason to believe that it first came into being at the point in nature where we first find evidence of it, and that it must have been miraculously produced by natural events containing nothing akin to it. Since the “basic traits of natural existence” — to use Dewey’s term — must necessarily be recognized to include more than merely its physical characteristics, there would be every reason to believe that the nonphysical factor discovered in experience is one of them.
The question before us then is whether we can find, within experience, a nonphysical factor that is responsive to differences [ p. 227 ] of quality (such as red and pain) and that might be regarded as having an effect, in turn, upon physical processes. The best approaches to the solution of this problem, it seems to me, are those made by that school of realists who recognize a distinctive mental “act of awareness” as involved in all experience. Professor C. W. Morris describes this as “the theory of mind as intentional act”[30] and includes in this school Whitehead, Samuel Alexander, G. E. Moore, Broad, Laird, Stout, Brentano, Meinong and Husserl. Very similar views are held by some American critical realists, such as Lovejoy and Pratt. The essential feature of the activist position is therefore seen to be endorsed by a very eminent group of philosophers who, in other respects, hold diverse metaphysical theories. We can therefore with some confidence make it the basis of a theory of the connection between the qualitative and the dynamic characters of reality, i.e., between the data of actual experience (such as pain and color) and the physicochemical structures and processes whereby science explains them.
The existence of the mental act of awareness, however, is not merely a hypothesis to be adopted on authority. Nor do those who believe in it regard it merely as a hypothetical entity invented to explain mental phenomena. They claim rather that it is a datum of experience. They point to the fact that when we see, feel, want and will we are distinctly aware, not only of the objects seen, wanted and so forth, but also of the fact that we are seeing, wanting, etc. There is no sharp distinction between such acts as seeing and wanting (i.e., between cognition and conation, or knowing and willing) , for every process of experiencing involves a process of striving and vice versa. Cognition and conation are not two distinct mental processes but two aspects of the one mental process. And it is this total mental process, involving experiencing and [ p. 228 ] willing, that we are more or less clearly aware of in all our mental life. These facts are matters of fairly general agreement. But those who deny the existence of the mental act, as distinct from the other contents of consciousness, claim that what they are aware of as their own seeing and willing (for example) is not a distinctive mental act but simply the general attitude of the organism as a whole toward its data. This general attitude, they claim, turns out upon closer examination to be known simply as the changing system of relations among the various sensory and affective data.[31]
Now there are two very good reasons why introspection often fails to convince people of the existence of the distinctive mental act. The first is that we are very apt to have the wrong sort of thing in mind when we look for it. It is not an object, such as a physical movement or a sensation of muscular strain or warmth; and when we engage in introspection it is these objects that catch our attention; and so we are apt to say nothing else is present. It is not something of which we can form an isolated mental image so as to have a correct idea of what to look for; and it is notoriously difficult to find anything of which we cannot first form a correct mental image. The second difficulty is connected with the nature of attention, if we attend to an object it becomes impossible at the same time to attend to our awareness of that object. Thus the person who seeks the act of awareness or will by introspective attention to the contents of his consciousness will inevitably attend less and less to the fact of his own awareness or will. Consequently introspection tends to confirm him in the theory that there is no such distinctive fact.
It is therefore the nonintrospective consciousness that is [ p. 229 ] most clearly aware of its own distinctive activity. That is why common sense never doubts the fact of mental activity until it tries to become scientifically introspective. The man who says he wants his dinner has no doubt that he knows the want as a given fact. And it is not the vague, uncomfortable feelings inside him that constitute the want, nor is it the smell coming from the kitchen, nor mental imagery of eating, nor feelings of incipient movements of the kind involved in seeking food. Neither is it any passive relation among all these data, or any particular movement or change of any of them, that constitutes the want. The want is an entirely unique fact that he feels as his own active tendency. It is, of course, inseparable from some of the other data. It is that which gathers them all into a whole and gives them their significance. In so far as it is a relation it is the kind of relation we call an act; and it is a unique kind of act, entirely distinct from the spatio-temporal change we call physicochemical action, or from any kind of merely qualitative change such as a change of sense data.
Just as clearly present to the normal consciousness is the act of seeing or of thinking. I see a white patch and I think it is a wall. And I have no more doubt of the existence of the seeing and thinking than I have of the white patch and the wall. If I try to introspect the seeing and thinking I find various data such as sensations of eyestrain and a dull feeling in the head, etc. But now I am aware of feeling these and I am certain that they do not themselves constitute the previous, or still present, seeing and thinking. Nor is the seeing or thinking any relation between these or any other data that enter into experience, unless it should be that unique relation in which they are brought together in a distinctive mental act.
Briefly to show that the mental act is more than a qualitative change and is different from a physico-chemical activity, [ p. 230 ] it should be enough to summarize the things it does: (1) It analytically discriminates one sensory or affective quality from another. (2) It apprehends the discriminated qualities together with the relation of difference and other nonspatiotemporal relations between them. (3) It distinguishes past and present and anticipates a future. (4) It responds to distinctions of value with an act of preference or choice; i.e., it wants this rather than that. (5) It responds to some given data, not simply as to what they are as given, but as symbolizing, indicating or meaning something that is not given. If all these reactions to qualitative data, such as colors and pains, are to be called “physico-chemical” then that term has lost its distinctive meaning. If not, then the organism does contain a factor that is nonphysico-chemical.[xxxx][xxxx] Our next problem, therefore, becomes that of the relation of the three features found together in organic life — the qualitative, the physico-chemical, and the nonphysico-chemical activity which we shall call mental.
Now this distinction of three features instead of just two — body and mind — leaves the qualitative feature neutral. What, for short, we shall call “the physical” is molecular structure and change and interchange of energy. The mental is the process and order of our striving, experiencing and thinking. The qualitative is the changing panorama of that which is experienced — e.g., color, sound and the felt “pushiness” or hardness-softness of matter; also Joy, pain, beauty and the pricks of conscience. Of these qualitative data the former group seems more closely associated with the physical and the latter with the mental activities. But it is impossible [ p. 231 ] to be sure, for example, that a purely physical entity would have color, or that a purely mental entity could feel the pricks of conscience; and it is also impossible to say whether there really are any purely mental or purely physical entities. But if we divide the qualities into two classes, the sensory-motor (color, sound, etc.) and the valuational (joy, pain, etc.) , then it seems that changes in the former depend upon physical changes, while changes in the latter depend upon mental changes. What is commonly called “physical " pain and unpleasantness is only an apparent exception to this rule for, while such sensations are always unpleasant or painful to the normal person, those with certain forms of insanity and abnormal mental attitudes known as masochism sometimes actually enjoy them.
Now, so far as our evidence goes, the correlation between physical change on the one hand, and change in sensory-motor quality (e.g., color and felt hardness) on the other, seems to be one-sided. One physical change seems to be fully accounted for in terms of other physical changes; and the changes of color, sound and so forth seem to be simply correlated with the physical without effect upon them. Between mental changes and changes in value experience, however, there seems to be a reciprocal relation. It is certainly the case that attention and will respond to changes in the value qualities of a situation; e.g., we tend to dwell upon and seek to maintain the pleasant and to avoid the painful. But it is also evident that changes of mental attitude affect the nature of the values experienced in any situation; whether we enjoy a certain play or approve of a certain moral judgment depends to a considerable extent upon the frame of mind with which we approach it; and yet value qualities are far from being entirely dependent upon our will, or we would always make everything pleasant and good. We may sum up the situation by saying that, although the value qualities experienced de [ p. 232 ] pend in part upon our frame of mind, yet in a given frame of mind they force themselves upon us as relentlessly as the sense qualities. Thus the total system of physical and mental activities acquires and presents to us an assortment of sensorymotor and value qualities, and the further course of our mental activity is forced to take account of them in selective responses.
These relationships involve an effective influence of the physical upon the mental activity, for the sensory-motor qualities to which the mental activity must selectively respond (attention, perception, etc.) depend upon the course of physical activity. Changes in value experience, however, depend chiefly upon the course of attentive effort; and these induce new choices and different efforts. We cannot say that the course of physical change determines the course of mental activity, because there seems to be a certain spontaneity about attentive effort and also because the nature of the values felt (to which response is made) depends upon those mental factors we have called the person’s “frame of mind” as well as upon the sensory-motor content. However, it certainly seems obvious that the physical activity, through its correlated qualities, exercises a large measure of indirect control over the mental and largely defines for it the problems to be faced and the limits of its capacity.
Finally, we come to the vexed question of the influence of the mental activity on the physical. Can this be made any more intelligible than the idea of the direct effect of qualities like color upon physical processes? I think it can if we consider the nature of time and space. Time is not merely an abstract measurement; it is concrete activity. An inactive world would be a timeless world, and a timeless world an inactive world. Neither is space a mere abstract set of relations. Physical activity, says the physicist, is “space-time.” But, if so, it is not a marriage of two abstractions that produces [ p. 233 ] the concrete being of the physical world; it is the concrete being of temporal-activity, operating in the concrete being of the spatial continuum, that constitutes the units or fields of physical energy. These science discovers through their effect in displaying the varied sensory-motor qualities latent in the world plenum. Those activities that form physical energy are not themselves directly responsive to the qualities they display. They have spatio-temporal quantitative characters, and the laws of their occurrence can be formulated in these purely quantitative terms. But in certain parts of space at least there occur activities that have no measurable spatial quantity, though they do have temporal extensity. Mental activity is a change that occurs at a place (e.g., in a human brain) but is not, like physical energy, a change of place.[32] But it is responsive to the qualities displayed by the physical energy of that place.
Now it is a matter of observed fact that, where there is evidence of the existence of these active responses to sensory and other qualities, the course of physical activity occurs in a peculiar way. The transition of physical energy from its kinetic to potential form, and vice versa, is affected. Careful experiment seems to show that there is, in the metabolism of the living body, neither addition to nor subtraction from the total quantity of physical energy; but this energy is stored and released in organic process in a way not duplicated in the inorganic. The natural explanation is that this modification of the one kind of activity is due to the presence of the other. But this implies some common nature of the two. Here the most likely explanation, it seems to me, is a form of the neutral substance theory. This suggests that the two concrete activities are activities of the one concrete entity, the activities of which constitute the physical and men [ p. 234 ] tal world. We could then understand their interaction — how the “pushiness” of physical energy impresses itself upon the striving-experiencing processes of mental activity to create the awareness of a physical world; iind how the positive and negative volitional responses to positive and negative value qualities affect positively and negatively the metabolism of a living cell, so that it absorbs or emits physical energy.
This presupposes, of course, that these striving-experiencing processes go on in every living cell; and although we cannot prove it this is entirely probable. Single-celled organisms such as the amoeba show essentially the same evidence of feeling as do larger animals, though of course their feeling must be much simpler. And although the immobility of plant cells makes it well-nigh impossible to obtain evidence of feeling in them their metabolism is essentially so similar that there is no reason to believe them absolutely devoid of feeling. As for our own bodies, there is no reason to believe that feeling is confined to the cortical cells. Consciousness varies from the limelight of attention (involving probably the activity of a small proportion of cortical cells) to a vague background in which a mass of feeling is fused. This peculiar fact of attention can even make us apparently unconscious of experiences of which special psychological methods (such as hypnosis) may afterwards show we were not really unconscious. This negative effect of attention seems to be the explanation of all forms of psychic blindness. Sleep is probably a generalized and normally recurrent form of psychic blindness. There is thus no reason to regard feeling as the miraculous and peculiar prerogative of the cells of the higher animal cortex. It may much more reasonably be supposed to be operative through the whole range of life.
[ p. 235 ]
The metaphysic to which activism thus points might possibly be described as a neutral monism of substance [33] with a duality of process, rather than, as in Spinoza, a duality of attributes. One omnipresent concrete entity, which may well be space itself, exerts itself in two forms of activity, these operations constituting time. One of these two series of events (the physical) has a spatially quantitative character. It is a spatial change, a movement dispersing itself through space and producing a multiplicity of changing forms. The other is a feeling-response to the shock, or pushiness, of the spatially quantitative activities. It feels both these and a selective display of other qualities (e.g., color) latent in the spatial plenum, attention to some of these rather than others being apparently facilitated by the changing course of physical events. The content of perception is thus made to include both quantitative and qualitative characters selected and organized by the physical system and habits of attention of the organism.
The first of these two forms of activity has been going on for many millenniums; perhaps it has always been going on, but science cannot tell for certain. Concerning the second we know less, for it does not leave behind it mathematically calculable effects, except certain of its effects in modifying physical structures. These indicate that this second type of activity began a unique course of constructive modification of physical forms on this planet in the Pre-Cambrian period. Probably opportunity for the commencement on earth of this type of constructive activity, which we know as vital and men [ p. 236 ] tal, was afforded by the purely physical synthesis, in the peculiar conditions of the period, of some highly unstable carbon compounds, presenting distinctive qualities. If the new active response to these qualities elaborated a more complex structure, presenting further new qualities that called forth further response, we can understand how the constructive effort of life went on from that point.
The new control of physical process became an instrument for further control. Positive value experience presents itself when activity tends to be progressively and harmoniously constructive, and negative when it is the reverse. Mental activity responds to changes in value experience. Thus the activity that tends to be constructive is maintained, and is changed only when constructive achievement is no longer being obtained in that way. Then a new course is tried, and so the experimental activity of life, guided by its sense of value, goes on. The organism grows, and growth leads to multiplication. Multiplication leads to differentiation and new forms of development, culminating in the life of the present day.
In the multicellular life of the higher animals, and especially in man, there is elaborated a highly complex structure, not only physical but mental. The mental processes of man, quite obviously, do not consist simply of those of the individual cells of his body.[34] The facts of selective attention, with its degrees of consciousness, indicate that. This peculiar unity of the human consciousness, its capacity to fuse into a single uniform experience the activities involved in a multitude of cells,*[35] and its ability to select some experiences for vivid attention and to be blind to others, indicate the play of a system of mental activity between, as well as within, the cells. It [ p. 237 ] is this superimposed system of experience, it would appear, that constitutes our normal consciousness and obscures from us the vague and simple feeling-tone of the great mass of bodily cells.[36] And this system has its structure, its interlacing of active tendencies that affect each other. Its integrated order is the finest achievement of intelligence. Mental acts are not transitory. They establish a mental “set” which may constitute an abiding purposive tendency. This structure cannot be regarded as depending merely on the physical structure, though it is vitally affected by this latter. The mental structure is a system of acts, and each act is a new contribution to the total. Its effectiveness remains even after attention passes on and it is no longer explicitly conscious, as abnormal psychological phenomena have strikingly demonstrated. Personality is a system of will, and will is not merely a momentary willing, but the purposive set or tendency given to personality by the momentary act of willing. Personality thus possesses a nonphysical structure, built up during the course of life, and actively responsive to the kinds of value that it has experienced in life.
If this account be true it does not necessarily follow that personality survives the destruction of the physical organism in a way in which it could live a new life. But it certainly makes such survival a practical possibility, and even a probability. [ p. 238 ] It means that when the physical organism ceases to function there still survives a mental organization, consisting of set tendencies to respond in certain fairly specific ways to the values that present themselves in certain typical situations. But these typical situations are, to a considerable extent, such as present themselves only through the related activity of the physical organism. This is true of the whole range of habits or tendencies that constitute what we have called the ego. To these tendencies the specific values that stimulate their responses can no longer appear. Thus the ego, the whole early structure of human personality and the whole system of nonphysical tendencies concerned simply with the physical organism, must remain inactive. But for the disinterested will the situation is different. This is a will to constructive activity of any kind possible, and responsive positively to values as felt and anticipated. The question is whether there is any kind of constructive activity open to this general active tendency and the more specific active tendencies that have developed out of it. These latter include the interests in the general development of personality both in ourselves and in all others with whom we are in communication, the interest in the imaginative creations of art, and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.
The question whether the formal structure of personality that survives the body must remain inactive, or can find stimulus and opportunity for a new life, therefore depends on the question whether it can discover any medium of creative activity and communication with other persons. The resources of the universe must indeed be poor if it cannot. Even the resources of the physical universe would seem to offer some scope. For mental activity, as we have seen, tends to modify to some extent the physical activity that occurs in the same place. So if it is able to modify to any extent the radiant energy that flows through it, and if other minds can [ p. 239 ] become sensitive to these modifications, then communication would be established. Social life, knowledge and art would then be possible. The community thus established would be a genuinely co-operative community, for the power of the divisive and hampering ego would have gone. The new community would be composed of personalities whose initial richness and power would depend on the degree of development that had taken place in this life, on the basis of the disinterested will, and whose great interest would be in the cooperative development of that fuller life for all which had begun here.
This theory of personality, of course, cannot be regarded as proved. If our analysis is correct it is a reasonable probability, and no more. But at least we can say that those alternative views — mechanism and physicalism — which, if true, would make personal survival possible only by a miracle, cannot be regarded as substantiated. It cannot be maintained that modern scientific knowledge, in physics, biology or psychology, has rendered the doctrine of personal immortality incredible or even improbable. In our analysis we have taken the facts and well established theories of all the sciences at their face value. Our inquiry has proceeded on purely empirical lines. We have sought to explain the interconnection of mental and physical phenomena with a minimum of hypothesis. And our conclusion has been drawn, by these empirical methods, from the facts, as their most likely result and explanation. Nevertheless, it must be recognized that it is not on this sort of empirical argument from science that the religious faith in immortality really rests, but on an inner moral conviction that that faith is implied in the goodness and power of God. Without such a faith any belief in immortality must be exceedingly weak. Our long excursion into the field of empirical scientific inquiry was made not so much to establish the validity of a faith in immortality as to disprove [ p. 240 ] the frequently repeated contention that science has discredited it. So we return now to a new examination of the real grounds out of which, in the great ethical religions, the belief has grown.
As shown in our discussion, at the beginning of this chapter, of the development of the belief in immortality, it grows out of faith in the goodness and power of God. This is its first premise — that God is good and is able to give good gifts to his children. The second premise is that life is good and the sine qua non of all good gifts. No ethical religion doubts the first premise, except in so far as it doubts the very existence and power of God. And these doubts of his existence and power arise chiefly from observation of evils which seem incompatible with his goodness. This question we take up in our next chapter, but here we may point out that, from the standpoint adopted in our present analysis and interpretation of religion, the question of the power of God is secondary to his goodness. We are seeking, not the God of some metaphysic, but the God of religious experience. And this God, the object and ground of that experience, we have found in the disinterested will to the good, which is felt as active within us and is the ultimate ground of all our religious experience and thought. So the primary fact, with which our knowledge of God begins, is that of his disinterested goodness. But as yet we have not inquired whether, in range and power, God is anything more than this particular element of human personality.[37] If he is not, then he is certainly not able to confer [ p. 241 ] immortality as a gift upon others and it is an open question whether the divine element in any of us is able even to maintain itself. But if this divine element in us is but the immanent operation of a divinity that far transcends us, then there can be little doubt of his power to continue in some form the distinctive constructive activity in which each finite personality consists, so far as that activity is good.
The question that still remains resides in the last phrase. How far is the activity or life of human personalities good? It is obvious that if the human life really is an active process initiated by a Will that far transcends it, then, in the course of its particular development, it has passed beyond the control of the originating Will and has developed tendencies contrary to it. It has thus produced evil as well as good. This sense of the evil of finite human life has found expression in some religious minds (particularly in India) in the conviction that it must eventually be brought to an end, that the human spirit must lose its individuality by returning to the unity of the eternal and absolute Spirit, attaining immortality by reabsorption into God, so that evil is blotted out and there remains only the eternal perfection that ever was.[38] This theory, however, is contrary to the nature of the good, as discovered in our earlier analysis, and must be rejected if that analysis is to stand. The good is not an eternal perfection, but is something progressively realized in constructive activity, and above all in that activity wherein personality is developed. We know God primarily as a will disinterestedly concerned with constructive achievement, wherein the development of the fullest life of finite personalities is found the most supremely good. Thus God, as we know him, is a being who seeks the completest life for all; and if it be in his power that these lives should go on to realize a still more abundant life [ p. 242 ] after their release from preoccupation with the affairs of this body, then it must certainly be his will that they should do so.
However, certain doubts of the possibility of continuation of any features of the life developed here, coupled with a sense of the obvious elements of evil in all personalities, have suggested to many minds that we should content our thought with the good to be realized in this world. Virtue, it is pointed out, is its own reward, and the good man seeks not so much his own continued enjoyment of life as the continuity of his influence for good in human society. This latter is assured so long as human society lasts, for, while evil is self-destructive in the long run, the good that men do tends to live after them in its influence upon the lives of others. This, it is argued, is all that the good man should desire for himself.[39] To this it may be replied that even if it were granted that this is all that the good man should desire for himself, it certainly is not all that he should seek for others. The essence of the good life is to seek the completest life for all. This is the very nature of the divine as found within us. And, in so far as that divine nature transcends the human in existence and power, it must seek to give life and give it more abundantly, here and hereafter. Else would the transcendent God be false to his own nature as it is revealed in us and would fail himself to perform the duty he imposes upon man.
This failure to recognize that individual personal immortality must be an object of the divine good will, so far as it is possible, is at bottom due to the interpretation of the good in terms of desire and to the fact that many good people have ceased to desire immortality. The common tendency to fall a little below our ideals makes us weary of the struggle. Disappointments [ p. 243 ] make us feel that we have overrated the joy of life; and we become ready, when our natural span is finished, to lay it down. We become more interested in the social process and the ideals we wish to see realized in it than in the thought of prolonging our own enjoyment of life. So the idea that our own task may at length be laid down, that our errors will in the long run meet their negation and the good we have done remain, has a satisfying appeal. In a somewhat world-weary mood it seems all that we really desire; and then, if we interpret the good in terms of desire, we may be inclined to say it is enough.
But the good is not to be measured by what we desire most; it is rather what we desire when we are at our best. At other times we desire the lesser good — as, often, we well know. The good is rather to be measured in terms of the more abundant life; and if we rightly understand it we shall see that it is good. It is not the ego that we should expect to survive, but the higher personality realized and developed through the conscious expression of the disinterested will. If this is so then the inner discord due to the conflicting tendencies of the higher and lower self will be over, for there will be nothing to which the egoistic habits can respond. The ego and its body are a stage in personal development that can be left behind. What would survive of the whole personality is that which is in true harmony with the divine; and it would go on to develop and share in the life of a new stage of the divine society. This is the hope that has come out of our empirical analysis of human personality. And it is the faith which has grown out of man’s deepest religious experience. Whether this faith is justifiable, however, depends upon the truth of its major premise — the superhuman reality of God.
Isa. 14:9-10. ↩︎
Isa. 38:18-19. ↩︎
Job 14:1s. ↩︎
Ps. 49:10, 14, 15 (R. V.) . ↩︎
Ps. 37.85. ↩︎
Mark 12:27. ↩︎
Odyssey , Bk. XI, 11 . 484 ff. ↩︎
The worship of Dionysus must have sown the first seed of belief in an immortal life of the soul.” — Erwin Rohde: Psyche, translated by W. B. Hillis (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1925) , p. 255. ↩︎
For an excellent exposition of the Greek mystery religions and their relation to Christian beliefs cf. S. Angus: The Mystery Religions and Christianity (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928) . ↩︎
De Anima» III, 5. ↩︎
Typical nineteenth century representatives of this view are Biichner, Spencer, Haeckel and Huxley. ↩︎
Loc. cit, ↩︎
C. W. Morris: Six Theories of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932) . ↩︎
Loc. cit. ↩︎
Psychological Principles, p. 5. ↩︎
Philosophy (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1927) , p. 278. ↩︎
Different but typical examples of this view are to be found in the realism of R. B. Perry (cf. his Present Philosophical Tendencies [New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912]) and in the instrumentalism of John Dewey. ↩︎
Theories of this kind seem to be historically derived from the “act psychology” of Brentano. ↩︎
Morris Cohen: Reason and Nature (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1931), pp. 243-48. ↩︎
E.g., J. S. Haldane: The Sciences and Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1929) . ↩︎
This term is not meant to be invidious, but to indicate the kind of theory that even the philosopher must abandon in his ordinary practical affairs. ↩︎
Dewey: Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York; Henry Holt & Co., 1938) . p. 23. ↩︎
Dewey: Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1925) , p. 253. This statement is made specifically of plant cells, but both plant and animal life are described in the same chapter as “psycho-physical.” ↩︎
Ibid., p. 256: “This pervasive operative presence of the whole in the part and of the part in the whole constitutes susceptibility — the capacity of feeling — whether or no this potentiality be actualized in plant life.” ↩︎
Ibid., p. 255. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 268: “Qualities actually become specifically effective however, in psycho-physical situations. Where animal susceptibility exists, a red or an odor or sound may instigate a determinate mode of action; it has selective power in maintenance of a certain pattern of energy organization. So striking is this fact that we might even define the difference between an inanimate body and a vital and psycho-physical one, by saying that the latter responds to qualities and the former does not.” (Italics mine.) ↩︎
See especially Experience and Nature, pp. 262, 271, 272. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 262. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 166. ↩︎
Six Theories of Mind, chap. 4. ↩︎
The two classical statements of this position are in Hume’s Treatise, 1:3:4 (“Of Personal Identity”) and William James’s essay, “ Does Consciousness Exist?” in his Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 191*) . Cf. also Perry: Present Philosophical Tendencies, chap, la, and Morris: Six Theories of Mind, chap. 4. ↩︎
The same may be said of many of its objects; e.g., a change of color occurs at a place, but is not a change of place. ↩︎
The term “substance,” as used here, docs not carry with it any of the traditional definitions. It is simply an entity postulated as ground of that relational order manifested by physical and mental processes which are empirically discontinuous. ↩︎
For a fuller discussion of this question see my Reality and Value, pp. 34 ft. ↩︎
As in the case of seeing white light when a complex light ray stimulates a large array of nerve endings, most of which are susceptible to one wave length only and, operating alone, would produce an experience of color. ↩︎
If, as Dewey suggests, the difference between an animate and an inanimate body is that the former responds to qualities while the latter does not, then it would seem to be necessary to assume that the unconscious physiological processes of the higher animal organism involve a great deal of feeling, however dim and vague, of which there is no explicit awareness. This is quite probable. The human (and other higher animal) consciousness is highly attentive; and attention excludes masses of feeling while concentrating on a few details. Cases of psychic blindness and similar abnormalities show that even strong feelings normally attended to can be shut out of the central stream of consciousness. Probably even sleep is only a generalized and normal case of periodic psychic blindness, resting the higher brain cells while simple feelingresponses still go on. There is thus good reason to believe that wherever there is life (vital process) there is some degree of feeling. ↩︎
If this be the whole nature and extent of the divine then it is obvious that there are, in one sense, as many gods as there are moral personalities. Yet in another sense — i.e., in quality, intent and meaning — God is one and the same in all of us. A comparable case is that of a book. The Gospel of Matthew, for example, is one book; yet it is, in another sense, many, for it is manifest and operative in millions of copies, each of which is a book. ↩︎
For an Occidental exposition of this type of view, cf. Bernard Bosanquet: Value and Destiny of the Individual (London: The Macmillan Co., 1913) . ↩︎
For a criticism of this type of theory cf. John Baillie: And the Life Everlasting (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933) , pp. 194-214. For a favorable exposition of it cf. R. W. Sellars: Religion Coming of Age (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1928), chap. ii. ↩︎