God and the World: A Survey of Thought

by Arthur William Robinson

CHAPTER IX

LATER SCIENCE (continued)

The leaders of the scientific thought of last century would have been vastly surprised if they could have foreseen the results of the investigations which were to be made into the constitution of matter and the nature of life; but not even these would have amazed them so much as would other investigations that were to be carried out in a yet deeper and more mysterious region of experience. Perhaps it was because science had been so busy about the more external things, that it had seemed to have no time to spare for the thorough consideration of that which is more truly vital to man than the matter which obeys or opposes him, or even than the physical life which enables him to act, in so far as he can, as its master. It was strange that the last thing to be thought of should be his own personality, himself; the innermost workings of his soul.

But if this profoundest problem has been neglected, it is to be neglected no longer. Psychology has already made good its claim to be respectfully regarded as one of the sciences. It is too early to speak with any great certainty of the results that it has achieved, though these are probably more substantial than is commonly supposed.

Anyhow, it will be best that, as before, we should give some characteristic statements of the investigators themselves, rather than attempt to make unauthorised summaries of our own.

And, first of all, Sir Oliver Lodge shall tell us what he understands by the Soul. "The soul is that controlling and guiding principle which is responsible for our personal expression and for the construction of the body, under the restrictions of physical condition and ancestry. In its higher developments it includes also feeling and intelligence and will, and is the storehouse of mental experience. The body is its instrument and organ, enabling it to receive and to convey physical impressions, and to affect and be affected by matter and energy."[[1]]

How the soul acts by means of the body is thus explained.

"The brain is the link between the psychical and the physical, which in themselves belong to different orders of being."[[2]]

"A portion of brain substance is consumed in every act of mentation."[[3]] "Destroy certain parts of brain completely, and connexion between the psychic and the material regions is for us severed. True; but cutting off or damaging communication is not the same as destroying or damaging the communicator; nor is smashing an organ equivalent to killing the organist."[[4]]

M. Bergson does not differ from this when he says that, "the soul—essentially action, will, liberty—is the creative force par excellence, the productive agent of novelty in the world." He goes on to speak of the way by which souls have been differentiated and raised to self-conscious existence. "The history of this great effort is the very history of the evolution of life on our planet. Certain lines of evolution seem to have failed. But on the line of evolution which leads to man the liberation has been accomplished and thus personalities have been able to constitute themselves."[[5]] Like many another, M. Bergson cannot bring himself to believe that death is to be the end of all that has been thus painfully achieved during this process of attainment. "When we see that consciousness is also memory, that one of its essential functions is to accumulate and preserve the past, that very probably the brain is an instrument of forgetfulness as much as one of remembrance, and that in pure consciousness nothing of the past is lost, the whole life of a conscious personality being an indivisible continuity; are we not led to suppose that the effect continues beyond, and that in this passage of consciousness through matter (the passage which at the tunnel's exit gives distinct personalities) consciousness is tempered like steel, and tests itself by clearly constituting personalities and preparing them, by the very effort which each of them is called upon to make, for a higher form of existence?"[[6]]

But the psychologist has yet more to tell us about the nature of personality. Although helped to distinctiveness of self-conscious expression by means of its experience of the struggle under present material conditions, it is not the whole of it that can be thus expressed. In fact its present physical embodiment is but partially adequate to the task. In other words, "cerebral life represents only a small part of the mental life." "One of the rôles of the brain is to limit the vision of the mind, to render its action more efficacious"[[7]]—more efficacious, that is to say, for such uses as are of value for survival and success under our existing conditions.

It is to Frederick Myers that we have chiefly owed the conception of the subliminal or subconscious mind. The full report of his researches is given in the two volumes of his work on "Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death" (1901). He it was who invented the word "telepathy" to express the fact that mental action can be exerted at a distance. And it was he who brought for the first time the phenomena of clairvoyance and apparitions under thorough examination by the employment of the most exacting tests. Along such lines he was led to the conclusion, now largely accepted, that the conscious self is only a fraction of the entire personality, the fraction being greater or less according to the magnitude of the individual.

By means of this subconscious part of our being we are, he held, brought into touch with one another and are capable of attaining a knowledge which may greatly transcend that which comes to us through our ordinary channels of communication. In the case of genius we watch the emergence of exceptional potentialities, which may serve as the promise and pledge of what the future has in store for us all. One day like some winged insect we shall pass to a condition beyond that of the life we now know, and then we may hope that what we "can regard as larval characters of special service in the present stage of existence," will prove to have been "destined to be discarded, or modified almost out of recognition, in proportion as a higher state is attained."[[8]]

This recognition of the existence within human nature of such capacities and powers, however imperfectly developed and understood, would greatly help us to deal with many mysteries of experience that have hitherto seemed completely beyond the purview of a strict scientific research. The American psychologist, William James, has done good service to this highest department of critical inquiry in his well-known work on "Varieties of Religious Experience." A single extract may suffice to illustrate his position, and to shew what may yet lie before those who are prepared to press on in the direction in which he was able to point.

"The further limits of our being plunge ... into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable' world.... So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account) we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world... When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men... I call this higher part of the universe by the name of God."[[9]]

[[1]] Man and the Universe, p. 78.

[[2]] P. 91.

[[3]] Life and Matter, p. 107.

[[4]] Man and the Universe, p. 93.

[[5]] Lecture at University College, October, 1911.

[[6]] Birmingham Lecture, May, 1911.

[[7]] Bergson. Presidential Address to Society for Psychical Research, May, 1913.

[[8]] Op. cit., I., p. 97.

[[9]] Pp. 515, f.