The function of individualized mind in furthering experi¬ ment and invention and the directed reconstruction of events, together with the discovery that objects of senti¬ ment and fancy, although rejected by the order of events in space and time, may form the contents of an inner and private realm, finds its legitimate outcome in the conception of experiencing, and in the discrimination of experiencing into a diversity of states and processes. To the Greeks, experience was the outcome of accumulation of practical acts, sufferings and perception gradually built up into the skill of the carpenter, shoemaker, pilot, farmer, general, and politician. There was nothing merely per¬ sonal or subjective about it; it was a consolidation, effected by nature, of particular natural occurrences into actualizain pathological cases, in delusions and insanities and social eccentricities, do we readily become aware of it; even in such cases it required long discipline to force attentive observation back upon the self. It is easier to attribute such things to invasion and possession from without, as by demons and devils. Yet till we understand opera¬ tions of the self as the tool of tools, the means in all use of means, specifying its differential activities in their distinc¬ tive consequences in varying qualities of what is experi¬ enced, science is incomplete and the use made of it is at the mercy of an unknown factor, so that the ultimate and important consequence is in so far a matter of accident.
Intentions and efforts bring forth the opposite of what was intended and striven for, and the result is confusion and catastrophe. Thus we are brought to a consideration of the psycho-physical mechanism and functioning of indi¬ vidual centres of action.
CHAPTER SEVEN A series of cultural experiences exhibits a series of di¬ verging conceptions of the relation of mind to nature in general and to the organic body in particular. Greek experience included affairs that rewarded without want and struggle the contemplation of free men; they enjoyed a civic life full and rich with an equable adaptation to natural surroundings. Such a life seemed to be upon the whole for those in its full possession a gracious culmina¬ tion of nature; the organic body was the medium through which the culmination took place. Since any created thing is subject to natural contingency, death was not a problem; a being who is generated shares while he may in mind and eternal forms, and then piously merges with the forces which generated him. But life does not always exist in this happy equilibrium: it is onerous and devastat¬ ing, civil life corrupt and harsh. Under such circum¬ stances, a spirit which believes that it was created in the image of a divine eternal spirit, in whose everlastingness it properly shares, finds itself an alien and pilgrim in a strange and fallen world. Its presence in that world and its residence in a material body which is a part of that world are an enigma. Again the scene shifts. Nature is conceived to be wholly mechanical. The existence within nature and as part of it of a body possessed of life, mani¬ festing thought and enjoying consciousness is a mystery.
This series of experiences with their corresponding philosophies display characteristic factors in the problem of life and mind in relation to body. To the Greeks, all life was psyche, for it was self-movement and only soul moves itself. That there should be self-movement in a world in which movement was also up-and-down, to-andfro, circular, was indeed interesting but not strange or untoward. Evidence of the fact of self-movement is directly had in perception; even plants exhibit it in a degree and hence have soul, which although only vegeta¬ tive is a natural condition of animal soul and rational mind. Organic body occupies a distinctive position in the hierarchy of being; it is the highest actuality of nature’s physical potentialities, and it is in turn the poten¬ tiality of mind. Greek thought, as well as Greek religion, Greek sculpture and recreation, is piously attentive to the human body.
In Pauline Christianity and its successors, the body is earthly, fleshly, lustful and passionate; spirit is Godlike, everlasting; flesh is corruptible; spirit incorruptible. The body was conceived in terms of a moral disparagement colored by supernatural religion. Since the body is material, the dyslogy extends to all that is material; the metaphysical discount put upon matter by Plato and Aristotle becomes in ascetic thought a moral and essential discount. Sin roots in the will; but occasions for sin come from the lusts of the body; appetites and desires spring from the body, distract attention from spiritual things; concupiscence, anger, pride, love of money and luxury, worldly ambition, result. Technically, the frame¬ work of Aristotelian thought is retained by the scholas¬ tics; St. Thomas Aquinas repeats his formulae concern¬ ing life and the body almost word for word. But actually and substantially this formal relationship has been distorted and corrupted through the seduction of spirit by flesh manifest in the fall of man and nature by Adam’s sin.
Add to moral fear of the flesh, interest in resurrection into the next world for external bliss or woe, and there is present a fullfledged antithesis of spirit and matter. In spite of this antithesis, however, they are conjoined in the body of man. Spirit is simple, one, permanent and indissoluble; matter is multiple, subject to change and dissolution. The possibility of the conjunction of two such opposite things formed a problem. But it would have been a remote, technical problem of no interest save to a few speculative thinkers, were it not given concrete¬ ness by the notion of an immortality to be spent in bliss or in woe unutterable, and the dependence of this ulti¬ mate destiny upon a life in which lust of the flesh along with the world of ambition and the devil of pride, was a standing temptation to sin and thereby an occasion of eternal damnation.
As long as the Aristotelian metaphysical doctrine persisted that nature is an ordered series from lower to higher of potentialities and actualizations, it was possible to conceive of the organic body as normally the highest term in a physical series and the lowest term in a psychical series. It occupied just that intermediate position where, in being the actualization of the poten¬ tialities of physical qualities, body was also potentiality for manifestation of their ideal actualities. Aside from moral and religious questions, there was in medieval thought no special problem attaching to the relation of mind and body. It was just one case of the universal principle of potentiality as the substrate of ideal actuality. But when the time came when the moral and religious of the forms which it has assumed almost unnecessary. Thinkers may start out with a naive assumption of minds connected with separate individuals. But developments soon show the inadequacy of such “minds” to carry the burden of science and objective institutions, like the family and state. The consequence was revealed to be sceptical, disintegrative, malicious. A transcendental supra-empirical self, making human, or “finite,” selves its medium of manifestation, was the logical recourse. Such a conception is an inevitable conclusion, when the value of liberation and utilization of individual capacity in science, art, industry, and politics is a demonstrated em¬ pirical fact; and when at the same time, individuality instead of being conceived as historic, intermediate, temporally relative and instrumental, is conceived of as original, eternal and absolute. When concrete recon¬ structions of natural and social objects are thought of as a single and constitutive act, they inevitably become super¬ natural or transcendental. When the movement ter¬ minates, as in the later philosophy of Josiah Royce, with a “community of selves,” the circle has returned to the empi¬ rical fact with which it might properly have started out; but the intervening insertion of a transcendent ego re¬ mains as a plague. It isolates the community of selves from natural existence and in order to get nature again in connection with mind, is compelled to reduce it to a system of volitions, feelings and thoughts.
It remains to mention another historic factor which helps account for the vogue of subjectivism in art and literature, through which it found its way more or less into common belief. Comte several times recurs to the idea that idiocy represents an excess of objectivism, a subordination of feelings and impressions to objects as given, while madness marks an excess of subjectivism.
Still more significant is his added remark, that madness has to be construed historically and sociologically. Under primitive conditions all the larger ideas about nature are reveries constructed in the interest of emotions. Myths were fancies, but they were not insanities because they were the only reply to the challenge of nature which ex¬ isting instrumentalities permitted. Assertion of similar ideas today is insanity, because available intellectual resources and agencies make possible and require radically different adjustments. To entertain and believe fancies which once were spontaneous and general is today a sign of failure, of mental disequilibration. Inability to employ the methods of forming and checking beliefs which are available at a given time, whatever be the source of that inability, constitutes a disorientation. These considera¬ tions are not introduced to make the offensive insinuation that philosophic subjectivism is a mode of insanity, and philosophic realism a mode of idiocy. The purpose is to suggest that while the tendency to revery, to intellectual somnambulism, is universal, the use made of revery — which may roughly stand for the subjective element in mind— depends upon contemporary conditions. In one situa¬ tion fancy generates stories which are consistent with desire and are attractive. These are connected with ceremonies to which, in addition to their immediate good, external efficiency is imputed. They become nuclei about which observations and ideas continually gather; they are centres of mental as well as emotional systematizations.
It is no wonder that myths long prevail. When the de¬ velopment of industry and tested inquiry makes it evident that the actual world will not accept them nor stand for them, their actuating springs remain in full force and the river of revery still flows. It may find public or communi¬ cated form in fiction recognized as such, in novel, drama and poetry which are enjoyed, although their objects are not believed in. Or they may remain private, and, with the play of desires and affections that produce them, con¬ stitute a new world enjoyed for its own sake — the “inner life.”
The popular factor in subjectivism, that which renders philosophic subjectivism intelligible enough to prevent its being regarded as mere vagary, seems to be a confused union of two considerations. On the one hand there is th e recognition, enforced by the course of events, of the con¬ structive power of mind as individual, its re-creative function in objects of industry, art, and politics. On the other hand there is the discovery and exploitation of the inner life, a new, readily accessible and cheaply enjoyed esthetic field. The tales that will not be believed when they are told and that cannot be told in forms sufficiently artistic to command the attention of others, may still be told to one’s self and afford relief, consolation and thrill. Products of fancy that cannot, because of the advance of knowledge, secure credence as reports of objective events, are castles in the air, but these castles are impregnable inner refuges.
The person who knows nothing of sensations or sensa, as the psychologist and epistemologist talk about them, is nevertheless aware that objects are other than bare things to which beliefs must subject themselves. He is aware that when things escape his power of control, they still generate “impressions” which he can entertain in all sorts of enjoyable and annoying ways. If he is devoid of ability to regulate conduct in actual employment of objects, this world of impressions will be one in which he loves to dwell. Its materials are pliable and exact no responsibility. He may be utterly innocent of the reduc¬ tion of objects by theorists into conjoined sensations and images; the notion that his table consists largely of images would be to him a wild vagary, contradictory of commonsense. But he knows very well that the incidents of life may produce fancies in him that are more exciting or more soothing than the incidents themselves. When there is neither the power to renounce revery nor to use it in any objective embodiment, we have a condition in which soil and atmosphere are prepared to find the spirit of subjec¬ tive idealism congenial, even if the technical facts adduced and the dialectic employed in its behalf are beyond reach.
Our statements, however, are one-sided, as far as the full scope of the “inner life” is concerned. It is the home of aspirations and ideals that are noble and that may in time receive fulfillment as well as of figments and airy nothings. It may be charged with infinite humor and tragedy. It affords a realm in which king and court fool, prince and pauper, meet as equals. It is subject-matter for the philosopher as well as for the rebuffed and wistful. Recall the contrast which Royce had drawn between the dominant externalism of the seventeenth century and the spirit of the eighteenth. “It is no matter whether you are a philosopher and write essays on ‘The Principles of Human Knowledge’ or whether you are a heroine in an eighteenth century novel, and write sentimental letters to a friend; you are part of the same movement. The spirit is dissatisfied with the mathematical order, and associations of spirit, soul, and body persisted in full vigor, while the classic metaphysics of the potential and actual fell into disrepute, the full burden of the question of the relation of body, nature and man, of mind, spirit, and matter, was concentrated in the particular problem of the relation of the body and soul. When men ceased to interpret and explain facts in terms of potentiality and actuality, and resorted to that of causality, mind and matter stood over against one another in stark unlike¬ ness; there were no intermediates to shade gradually the black of body into the white of spirit.
Moreover, both classic and medieval thought sup¬ plied influential empirical impetus to the new conception in spite of their theoretically divergent foundation. The old distinction between vegetative, animal and rational souls was, when applied to men, a formulation and justifi¬ cation of class divisions in Greek society. Slaves and mechanical artisans living on the nutritional, appetitive level were for practical purposes symbolized by the body — as obstructions to ideal ends and as solicitations to acts contrary to reason. The good citizen in peace and war was symbolized by the soul proper, amenable to reason, employing thought, but confining its operations after all to mundane matters, infected with matter. Scientific inquirers and philosophers alone exemplified pure reason, operating with ideal forms for the sake of the latter.
The claim of this class for inherent superiority was sym¬ bolized by nous, pure immaterial mind. In Hellenistic thought, the three-fold distinction became that of body, mind or soul and spirit; spirit being elevated above all world affairs and acts, even moral concerns, having purely “spiritual” (immaterial) and religious objects. This doctrine fell in with the sharp separation made in Christianity for practical moral purposes, between flesh and spirit, sin and salvation, rebellion and obedience. Thus the abstract and technical Cartesian dualism found prepared for it a rich empirical field with which to blend, and one which afforded its otherwise empty formalism concrete meaning and substance.
The formalism and unreality of the problem remains, however, in the theories which have been offered as its “solutions.” Theyrange from the materialism of Hobbes, the apparatus of soul, pineal glands, animal spirits of Descartes, to interactionism, pre-established harmony, occasionalism, parallelism, pan-psychic idealism, epiphenomenalism, and the elan vital — a portentious array-The diversity of solutions together with the dialectical character of each doctrine which render it impregnable to empirical attack, suggest that the trouble lies not so much in the solutions, as in the factors which determine state¬ ment of the problem. If this be so, the way out of the snarl is a reconsideration of the conceptions in virtue of which the problem exists. And these conceptions have primarily nothing to do with mind-body; they have to do with underlying metaphysical issues: — the denial of quality in general to natural events; the ignoring in par¬ ticular of temporal quality and the dogma of the superior reality of “causes.”
Empirically speaking, the most obvious difference between living and non-living things is that the activities of the former are characterized by needs, by efforts which are active demands to satisfy needs, and by satisfactions. In making this statement, the terms need, effort and satisfaction are primarily employed in a biological sense.
By need is meant a condition of tensional distribution of energies such that the body is in a condition of uneasy or unstable equilibrium. By demand or effort is meant the fact that this state is manifested in movements which modify environing bodies in ways which react upon the body, so that its characteristic pattern of active equilib¬ rium is restored. By satisfaction is meant this recovery of equilibrium pattern, consequent upon the changes of environment due to interactions with the active demands of the organism.
A plant needs water, carbon dioxide; upon occasion it needs to bear seeds. The need is neither an immaterial psychic force superimposed upon matter, nor is it merely a notional or conceptual distinction, introduced by thought after comparison of two different states of the organism, one of emptiness and one of repletion. It denotes a concrete state of events: a condition of tension in the distribution of energies such as involves pressure from points of high potential to those of low potential) which in turn effects distinctive changes such that the connection with the environment is altered, so that it acts differently upon the environment and is exposed to different influences from it. In this fact, taken by itself, there is nothing which marks off the plant from the physi¬ co-chemical activity of inanimate bodies. The latter also are subject to conditions of disturbed inner equilib¬ rium, which lead to activity in relation to surrounding things, and which terminate after a cycle of changes — a terminus termed saturation, corresponding to satisfac¬ tion in organic bodies.
The difference between the animate plant and the inanimate iron molecule is not that the former has something in addition to physico-chemical energy; it lies in the way in which physico-chemical energies are inter¬ connected and operate, whence different consequences mark inanimate and animate activity respectively. For with animate bodies, recovery or restoration of the equilib¬ rium pattern applies to the complex integrated course or history. In inanimate bodies as such, “saturation” occurs indifferently, not in such a way as to tend to main¬ tain a temporal pattern of activity. The interactions of the various constituent parts of a plant take place in such ways as to tend to continue a characteristically organized activity; they tend to utilize conserved consequences of past activities so as to adapt subsequent changes to the needs of the integral system to which they belong. Or¬ ganization is a fact, though it is not an original organiz¬ ing force. Iron as such exhibits characteristics of bias or selective reactions, but it shows no bias in favor of remaining simple iron; it had just as soon, so to speak, become iron-oxide. It shows no tendency in its inter¬ action with water to modify the interaction so that con¬ sequences will perpetuate the characteristics of pure iron.
If it did, it would have the marks of a living body, and would be called an organism. Iron as a genuine constit¬ uent of an organized body acts so as to tend to maintain the type of activity of the organism to which it belongs.
If we identify, as common speech does, the physical as such with the inanimate we need another word to denote the activity of organisms as such. Psycho-physical is an appropriate term. Thus employed, ‘ ‘psycho-physical” denotes the conjunctive presence in activity of needdemand-satisfaction, in the sense in which these terms have been defined. In the compound word, the prefix “psycho” denotes that physical activity has acquired additional properties, those of ability to procure a pecu¬ liar kind of interactive support of needs from surrounding media. Psycho-physical does not denote an abrogation of the physico-chemical; nor a peculiar mixture of some¬ thing physical and something psychical (as a centaur is half man and half horse); it denotes the possession of certain qualities and efficacies not displayed by the inanimate.
Thus conceived there is no problem of the relation of physical and psychic. There are specifiable empirical events marked by distinctive qualities and efficacies. There is first of all, organization with all which is implied thereby. The problem involved is one of definite factual inquiry. Under exactly what conditions does organiza¬ tion occur, and just what are its various modes and their consequences? We may not be able to answer these questions satisfactorily; but the difficulties are not those of a philosophical mystery, but such as attend any inquiry into highly complex affairs. Organization is an empirical trait of some events, no matter how specula¬ tive and dubious theories about it may be; especially no matter how false are certain doctrines about it which have had great vogue — namely, those doctrines which have construed it as evidence of a special force or entity called life or soul. Organization is so characteristic of the nature of some events in their sequential linkages that no theory about it can be as speculative or absurd as those which ignore or deny its genuine existence. Denial is never based on empirical evidence, but is a dialectical conclusion from a preconception that whatever appears later in time must be metaphysically unreal as compared with what is found earlier, or from a preconception that since the com¬ plex is controlled by means of the simpler, the latter is more “real.”
When ever the activities of the constituent parts of an organized pattern of activity are of such a nature as to conduce to the perpetuation of the patterned activity, there exists the basis of sensitivity. Each “part” of an organism is itself organized, and so of the “parts” of the part. Hence its selective bias in interactions with environ¬ ing things is exercised so as to maintain itself, while also maintaining the whole of which it is a member. The root-tips of a plant interact with chemical properties of the soil in such ways as to serve organized life activity; and in such ways as to exact from the rest of the organism their own share of requisite nutrition. 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. Responses are not merely selective, but are discriminatory, in behalf of some results rather than others. This discrimination is the essence of sensitivity. Thus with organization, bias becomes interest, and satisfac¬ tion a good or value and not a mere satiation of wants or repletion of deficiencies.
However it may be with plants and lower animals, in animals in which locomotion and distance-receptors exist, sensitivity and interest are realized as feeling, even though only as vague and massive uneasiness, comfort, vigor and exhaustion. A sessile organism requires no premoni¬ tions of what is to occur, nor cumulative embodiments of what has occurred. An organism with locomotion is as vitally connected with the remote as well as with the nearby; when locomotor organs are accompanied by dis¬ tance-receptors, response to the distant in space becomes increasingly prepotent and equivalent in effect to response to the future in time. A response toward what is distant is in effect an expectation or prediction of a later contact. Activities are differentiated into the preparatory, or antici¬ patory, and the fulfilling or consummatory. The resul¬ tant is a peculiar tension in which each immediate prepara¬ tory response is suffused with the consummatory tone of sex or food or security to which it contributes. Sensitiv¬ ity, the capacity, is then actualized as feeling; suscepti¬ bility to the useful and harmful in surroundings becomes premonitory, an occasion of eventual consequences within life.