CHAPTER II
A PHYSIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION OF THE ANTAGONISM BETWEEN ALL SUCH WORDS AS “GOOD” AND “BAD,” AND “RIGHT” AND “WRONG”
“A word is the shadow of an act.”
Democritus.
It is a fact of the greatest significance that the words by which we convey our ideas of value always occur in pairs, one of which is the opposite of the other. In esthetics the beautiful is contrasted with the ugly, and the charming with the disgusting; in logic the true clashes with the false, and in philosophy the real with the unreal; in matters of public and private economy the cheap is antithetical to the expensive, and the generous to the miserly; while in ethics we constantly hear the words good and bad, right and wrong, virtuous and vicious employed to denote the opposition and contradiction of human interests and ideals. What is the ultimate reason why we thus employ such pairs of antonyms in our judgments of praise or blame, our expressions of desire or aversion, and in our estimations of merit or defect?
This modern question, upon which the founding of a true science of ethics depends, cannot be answered by any appeal to the speculative metaphysics of bygone generations. We have passed out of that period in which men were content with an explanation based on the Zoroastrian hypothesis of a world divided between the warring forces of light and darkness, while our ears are now equally unresponsive to the bi-polar principles of love and hate which Empedocles propounded. Even our recent Emerson’s “Law of Compensation,” born though it was of canny, scientific thinking, is not marked by the least sign of that finality which the answer we seek should possess. It is, indeed, our conviction that the presence of antonyms in human speech is not to be accounted for by the assumption of a theory concerning the world as a whole, but rather by an examination of some of the baldest facts of our everyday experience. Nay more, it is our declared purpose to show that the metaphysical and theological notions of Empedocles and Zoroaster are themselves to be explained by reference to the physics and the physiology of man,—in terms of the structure and functions of the human body. But before we can comprehend the significance of such a thesis, it is first necessary to understand some of the physiological mechanisms underlying thought and speech.
The Rise of Mechanistic Psychology
Ever since William James employed the phrase “the stream of thought” to describe mental phenomena, the whole trend of psychology has been altered. Not only did the wide-spread use of that phrase result in the giving up of many traditional beliefs in regard to things mental, but it also stimulated the most profitable investigations in psychological science. One of the most ancient of the beliefs which it demolished was the belief in Ideas as eternal, external, and immutable. According to the notion of a stream of consciousness (itself a variable conception), ideas are sensory images which show individual variations, which never are exactly repeated, and which have meaning only when they refer or lead to some concrete reality. This view, which finally replaced the ancient Platonic conception, is now held by practically all psychologists. Moreover, the influence of James’ teaching was such as to show that will, intellect, feeling, and the like were not separable parts of a mind (i. e., faculties) which were capable of acting independently, but were merely handy words to indicate the various qualities of the stream of thought. The stream flows swiftly,—call that impulsiveness; it flows again broadly and deeply with many glancing eddies,—call that deliberation; it flows once more with swift descent and foam,—call that strong feeling. Nevertheless, the stream of thought is one stream, and mental phenomena one and all specify its labile and fluid consistency. And now let us see to what further developments this striking conception has led.
Obviously, the astute, enquiring person at once asks, “What makes this stream of thought? To what is its flowing character due?” At first it might seem that one must despair of any satisfactory reply. One feels as did William Harvey, almost hopeless in his quest after the secret of the circulation of the blood. But just as Harvey boldly experimented with his eye on the critical features of his problem, so have a multitude of keen investigators devised test after test to discover the laws of mental phenomena. And while we cannot yet say that “Science has laid her doomful hand” upon all of the intricate secrets of mind, nevertheless, it is becoming more and more certain that the stream of thought is just as much a bodily function as is the breath-stream and the blood-stream. Strangely enough, this conception is not brand-new. It was Aristotle who said, “If the eye were an organism, vision would be its soul.” Similar thinking is revealed in our modern view that mind is a function of the body, and that it depends upon the body for its existence. It “is generated by the body as the result of its immediate contacts with the environment, in much the same way as electricity may be generated by a turbine that has been placed in the midst of a tumbling waterfall.” Moreover, the stream-like character of thought, the play of feeling, the linger and strain of deliberation and expectation are due to the manner in which the storage battery of the brain releases energy, and to the way in which the muscles and glands transform it. William James wrote in 1890, “All consciousness is motor,” that is, it is dependent upon the expression mechanisms of the body; and today we have demonstrated the fundamental rôle of the muscles and glands of the body in “the transformation of the common energies of nature into the special energies of mind.”
It can be seen at once that such a philosophy of mind furnishes the most striking and far-reaching ethical implications. If what we call our mental life turns out upon close inspection to be dependent upon bodily functions, it follows that conduct and thought differ only in the degree to which the body is excited to activity (molar motion). In a word, conduct is overt (visible), while thought is covert (invisible), behavior. Edwin Holt, in the “Freudian Wish,” speaks of thought (‘wish’ as he terms it there) as “a course of action which the living body executes or is prepared to execute with regard to some object or some fact of the environment.” (pp. 56-7.) John Dewey voices a similar tendency in his “Human Nature and Conduct” when he says that bodily habits do our thinking. (Italics mine.) “The habit of walking is expressed in what a man sees when he keeps still, even in dreams.” (p. 37.) Thus the old idols are tumbled to the ground. Over the doorway of the Germanic Museum at Harvard is the inscription: “Es ist der Geist der sich den Koerper baut.” Complete reversal of such an animistic and subjectivistic sentiment is proposed by Dewey when he declares that a man stands erect, not because he wills to, but because he can. His willing is the result, and not the cause, of the muscular contractions which elevate the chest and keep it convex. The old dualism of mind and body, and the older superstition that mind rules matter, have both received their death-blows. In their place a complete mechanistic philosophy is now securely enthroned. It would thus seem likely that a natural history of virtue will not long hence be written.
Of all the vexed questions which psychologists have had to answer, perhaps none is more difficult than the question as to the place of language in the mental economy. What is language for? How did it originate? What is its relation to thinking? To overt activity? It is at once apparent that the answers to these questions are highly important to ethics, since the words good and bad, right and wrong, and the like, play such a prominent rôle in our judgments upon our fellow-men. Neither does it seem possible to understand why we employ these pairs of antonyms until we know what the single terms of the pairs signify. And while it will require several of the following chapters to give a satisfactory answer to some of the above questions, it is readily agreed that our judgments of value are employed principally for two purposes:—(1) to sort out some of the objects of the environment, e. g., by calling these good and those bad, etc., and (2) to indicate to other persons what kind of behavior is to be expected of us with regard to the objects thus designated. That is our common experience. If a man calls a shop a good shop, his future behavior toward it can be predicted. If he calls his neighbor vicious he can be expected not to leave his wheelbarrow or his lawn-mower out at night. Moreover, if we know what sort of things a man calls bad, virtuous, or right, his whole social philosophy can be plotted from the data provided by these particular judgments. To state it briefly, speech becomes an instrument for the transmission of meanings. Before we proceed further, let us see just what this involves in terms of bodily mechanisms.
A Mechanistic Interpretation of the Meaning of Words
To the superficial observer of a man who declares that something is cheap, or beautiful, or good, the sight of his lips moving and the sound of the words as they are produced might appear to be the whole phenomenon. Nevertheless, if anyone were to look carefully behind the scenes of this performance, one would find a much more elaborate play being enacted than is apparent on the surface. Just as we know now from the findings of the physiologist that when the eye sees, far more structures than the retina are affected, and just as we are now certain that when the ear hears, many more organs than the ear-drum and cochlea take part in the response to the stimulus, so we are convinced that when the words we speak have a meaning, a neuro-muscular drama of a very elaborate character is being silently performed within our skin.
Novelists and story-tellers of all ages seem to have intuited this truth in their portrayal of human emotions. They speak of “pent-up anger,” of “stifled sorrow,” and they describe often in minute detail the course of a passion that in seeking to get adequate expression causes the face to flush, the hand to clench, or the body as a whole to be violently agitated. The Iliad and the Odyssey abound in descriptions of this sort, and every novelist since the days of Homer has felt the need of such portrayals in order to make his characters understood. Indeed, the cultivation of this technique is the essence of dramatic art. But mark, that such emotions are aroused not only when a person is confronted by the physical facts of battle, murder, or sudden death, for example, but also by the bare mention of the words or phrases which appropriately describe such catastrophes. The more carefully such a person is observed, the plainer will it become that the agitation which his body is covertly manifesting would, if it were unhindered in its free expression, result in an elaborate pantomine appropriate to the events described by the story-teller. In other words, the emotions which a thrilling narrative arouses are substitutes for the overt activity which the auditor might be expected to manifest were he actually a participant in the scene described. When, then, we say that a dramatic situation moves us, the description is absolutely accurate. Indeed, from the most credible scientific evidence we possess, the emotions which are thus aroused are characterized by all the organic stresses and strains which are present in the most violent overt activity of which we are capable. We inwardly writhe and tussle, we half-start one kind of positive behavior, only to find it checked by the initiation of its opposite,—in a word, we display on a small scale all the conduct appropriate to the situation. And this elaborate arousal to activity is, we undertake to say, precisely what gives every dramatic scene or narrative its meaning.
Dr. George W. Crile has coined the appropriate phrase “action-pattern” to describe the mechanism involved in the cases just cited. Crile’s “action-pattern” is, indeed, practically identical with Holt’s “specific response,” and with Titchener’s “motor set,” of which phrases the latter two are today familiar to most students of psychology. Briefly, this action-pattern is simply a more or less fixed way in which some part of the body produces a movement. It depends principally upon the physical structure of the part, as well as upon its muscle and nerve supply, and secondly upon the habits of movement which external stimuli have repeatedly produced in it. Thus every healthy leg has acquired the action-patterns of walking and running, and some legs have in addition the patterns of kicking, or of “stepping on the gas” in open level country. What we call the most skilful parts of the body are those which have the greatest number of action-patterns. The hands, lips, eyes, and tongue could on this point be properly called the reservoirs of intelligence. Certainly in the evolution of man they have played the strategical part. Moreover, it is supposedly these action-patterns, these habits of movement, which are aroused whenever we are said to remember or imagine, to cogitate or ponder; and this is, I take it, what Dewey implies when he says that bodily habits do our thinking. I have elsewhere shown[2] how one action-pattern of the human hand performs yeoman service in this respect, and it would not be difficult to demonstrate that every action-pattern is capable of generating a multitude of thoughts. When, then, we say that a novelist or poet has portrayed a moving, tragic scene, we shall now understand that he has re-aroused in us bodily habits which we started to acquire when we first became acquainted with grief.
While we do not claim that all cases of meaning involve such wide-spread and imperative bodily disturbances as those which occur in connection with tragic or erotic situations, it is nevertheless a valid inference that words which stimulate us to no activity whatsoever mean nothing to us. Certain it is, at least, that the more meaningful or significant any word is, the more does it stir up latent tendencies to action throughout our whole organism. Political and religious slogans are telling examples of this. “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!” “Remember the Maine!” and “For God, for Country, and for Yale!” have been for some persons phrases of the maximal philosophic content. Moreover, the same word may arouse different meanings (or action-patterns) in different people, depending not only on how the word is spoken, but also on the mood of the auditor. It is a matter of common observation that the shout of “Fire!” calls forth by no means the same responses from an insured landlord as it evokes from an uninsured tenant, while the mention of water will stimulate one sort of reflex action in a thirsty man, and quite another sort in a man who has just been rescued from drowning.
It is plain, then, that if physiological science has achieved the least light upon the problems of psychology, the meaning which any word or phrase possesses is not something that the sound of the word or its written symbol is endowed with, or something that filters through from any Platonic realm of ideas, but the meaning of any word is given to it by the person who speaks or hears it. Moreover, this endowment of meaning is implicit in the arousal of action tendencies at the time when the word is spoken or heard. In the example recently cited, the word “fire” had a different meaning for the insured landlord from what it had for the uninsured tenant because the habits of precaution which the former had acquired established a different motor attitude toward fire than did the procrastination of the latter. Consequently, the shouting and the conflagration were stimuli in the presence of which the landlord could be calm, while the tenant could not.
The application of this principle of the dependence of meaning upon action-patterns extends, however, to other situations than those in which emotional riots are observable. Indeed, we undertake to say that even such plain, concrete words as basket, horse, and river have a meaning because they arouse us to motor activities of one sort or another. It may well be, of course, that we start to think of a basket in terms of its color, or shape, or its cost; and of a horse in like terms; while we think of a river only in connection with its height during seasons of drought or flood: but eventually the basket will, by implying receptacle, lead in our imagination to the acts of filling and emptying; while the horse will be finally pulling our loads or carrying our weight on his back; and the river will be either waded or swum by us, or become related to our necessities or pastimes (our habits) in some other manner. And when we thus develop a specific action-pattern toward such an object, we are said to know what it means. It has long been a maxim in education that not until we know how to use and control our environment, do we become fully intelligent towards it. The theory and the fact of action-patterns gives unusual support to this particularly profitable maxim. Spinoza laid down the principle that the will and the intellect are one and the same, and this principle too has complete verification from mechanistic psychology. Thought is dependent upon bodily activity, and it does not matter for our present purpose whether that activity be overt or subtly concealed.
The question now arises: Does the meaning of abstract terms, of the terms we use in our judgments of value, consist in the same kind of motor tendencies as those which are aroused by concrete terms? From the following considerations I believe we can say that it does.
To begin with, abstract terms are one and all the result of the process of abstraction. This process consists in our picking out some common feature or quality from a great variety of objects, and giving it a name in order to fix it in our memory. For example, fire, the inside of ripe watermelon, and the outside of ripe cherries may all be called red. The concept, or abstract term, “red” can thereafter be used on occasion as a gestural sign for all these various objects when their color is being signified. Moreover, the process of abstracting these common qualities is itself a motor process. It is, physiologically speaking, the same sort of activity as collecting postage stamps or beetles’ wings. Indeed, the simplest perception of any concrete object, any red object, for example, involves motor activity of a highly elaborate character. When we look at such an object, not only is the retina of the eye stimulated, but various muscles and glands are simultaneously activated to an elaborate transformation of energy. Likewise, when we hear, taste, smell, or have any other perception, other characteristic transformations of energy are taking place through the arousal of action-patterns. Now we have just stated that abstract terms are derived from the multifarious perception of concrete objects. In what, then, does the meaning of abstract terms consist? It consists in their function of recalling some of the particular experiences from which they were derived. Such an abstract word as “red” has, then, a meaning for us simply because it arouses in any of its phases that particular action-pattern which all sorts of red things have stimulated in us.
This same principle may now be applied to show how even the meaning which attaches to the words we employ to convey judgments of value may be explained in physiological terms. For the highly abstract character which the words cheap, beautiful, and good seem at times to possess is simply due to the fact that at the mention of any such word we are simultaneously stimulated to so great a variety of actions that we are unable to follow any one of them through to its conclusion. When such a condition persists, the meaning is said to be vague.
It is, of course, not to be forgotten that every time we use a word, whether we read it, speak it, or hear it, the meaning it arouses is traceable to the fact that firm bonds have been established between the eye, ear, and throat mechanisms on the one hand, and related parts of the body which are involved on the other. This union of the reading-reflexes with the somatic-reflexes is provided for by a very simple mechanism called the conditioned reflex. By such a device, any two reflexes which have been aroused together frequently enough by external stimuli will ever thereafter tend to arouse each other. That is why the word “fire” which we all were taught to use to indicate a certain kind of object, will, even if spoken in a wilderness of snow, make us feel some of the effects which flame once produced upon us. Contrariwise, the blindfolded man will, by no other cue than the touch of his fingers, name such objects as carpet, leather, sandpaper, and nails. And from what we have already said about the source of the meaning of abstract terms being traceable to concrete experiences, we may now say that such words as cheap, beautiful, and good, one and all owe their significance to the fact that they too exhibit the law of the conditioned reflex both in their origin and in their maturity.
How the “All-or-none” Principle Helps to Disclose an Amazing Secret
It being thus apparent that words possess meaning because they arouse motor tendencies in us, let us now see what justification there is for the assertion previously made that these motor tendencies need not be at all visible as overt actions in order to perform their epistemological function. This justification is found in the all-or-none principle of nervous and muscular activity,—a principle having the most far-reaching consequences for both psychology and ethics. We are all familiar with the fact that less work is involved in lifting the arm leisurely to a horizontal position than in moving it through the same radius with a heavy weight held in the hand. However, we are not all familiar with the fact that in the case of the leisurely movement only a few of the myriad nerve and muscle fibers of the arm are being innervated, the rest being completely passive, while in the case of lifting the heavy weight, the proportion of fully active and inertly passive fibers is just the opposite. But this is exactly the case. According to the all-or-none principle discovered by Lucas and Adrian,[3] whenever a single nerve fiber functions at all, it acts in its maximum capacity. Never is such a fiber partially activated; in its all-or-none functioning it is as uncompromising as gravity. Consequently, even though the arm may feel uniformly flabby when it is indolently moved about, some few of its nerve and muscle fibers are working to their limit.
This being the case, it is readily apparent that the various qualities of muscular movement,—languid, intentional, unintentional, or deliberate,—have one and all a strictly quantitative basis. If a man’s smile spreads out into a grin, this change in the quality of his countenance is caused by the simple addition of fully functioning neuro-muscular units under the skin of his face. If the grin dwindles to the smile, and that again vanishes into a look only faintly reminiscent of pleasure, the opposite process of subtraction is then taking place. Consider now the further implications of this law of Lucas and Adrian. For the logical inference is that when we merely think of lifting our arm, but do not lift it visibly, an essential part of the arm-lifting mechanism has been nevertheless specifically stimulated to activity; it is only because not enough muscle fibers have been innervated to overcome the inertia of the limb that the arm does not rise. That is, indeed, our common experience. When we lie abed on a cold winter morning and speculate on the question of getting up, our imagination of the heroic deed is perfectly of a piece with the real business of shivering on the drafty floor. Indeed, according to the all-or-none principle, since even the slightest neuro-muscular activity is positive, the terms “overt” or “covert” as applied to action refer merely to what an observer can or cannot readily perceive. This principle can be justly applied to the problem of the meaning of words. The implication is sound that even though the action-patterns which are aroused by words are unfelt by us or invisible to an onlooker, these motor tendencies are just as truly positive physiological events, so far as they go, as are the most violent efforts we openly manifest. For the pattern of action is the same; the only difference is in the number of nerve and muscle fibers involved.
It was a motto of Jesus that “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Although the particular phrase, “in his heart,” is now regarded as too wild a hyperbole to be justified by the facts, yet the all-or-none principle furnishes an unsuspected substantiation of the essential truth of this motto with respect to certain individuals. We have long known that thinking did somehow lead to action,—that both the rogue and the philanthropist, the slanderer and the coquette often schemed and planned secretly for years without giving any outward hint of what their future behavior was to be. History is full of the trouble caused for those who had “no art to read the mind’s construction in the face” of him who could “smile and smile and be a villain.” And now the secret is out why for so many centuries it was believed that thought produced action and mind ruled matter. Thought is action, but action of so elusive a character as to be totally beyond the unaided eye to detect; and thought “leads” to action for the same reason that a spark can produce a conflagration and a hole in a dyke produce a flood. In all three cases the greater effect is due to the magnification of the exciting cause. The ancients held that mind ruled the body for the reason that, being ignorant of the fact of covert muscular responses, they assumed an incorporeal cause for a series of events whose end-term alone they were able to discern as embodied in the movements of matter.
It is thus finally apparent how by means of the law of the conditioned reflex and the all-or-none principle, both concrete and abstract terms serve not only as gestural signs, but also serve to imply and predict human activities. We have shown that every word which has a meaning ipso facto implies action. It matters not whether that action be sudden or violent, or merely one that is carried out on “low gear,” so to speak, by the neuro-muscular mechanisms of the body. Neither does it matter whether that action be precise or groping, specific or diffuse; if the word has a meaning it will be accompanied by an action-tendency, and that tendency will be added to the kinetic potentialities,—the character,—of the individual. For if it is the case that by the law of the conditioned reflex, words get meaning, it is equally to be asserted that by virtue of the all-or-none principle, they keep it. Moreover, Holt to the contrary notwithstanding, it is such demonstrable physiological principles as these, and not the mysterious Freudian categories, which are the keys whereby the secrets of mind will be unlocked.
Having thus dealt with the problem of how the neuro-muscular mechanisms of the body generate and maintain the meanings of words, let us now return to the original question of this chapter, namely, What is the ultimate reason why we employ such pairs of antonyms as “good” and “bad” in our judgments of praise or blame, our expressions of desire or aversion, and in our estimations of merit or defect? Our answer is that the felt opposition and contradiction of antonyms is due to the conflict of motor tendencies, and in support of this theory we cite a well-recognized physiological principle,—the law of reciprocal innervation.
The Physiological Explanation of the Opposition of Antonyms
Every freely moving part of the body, such as the leg, the arm, and the head, is equipped principally with two sets of muscles, called, from their functions, the flexors and the extensors. The flexors are those muscles which for example, upon contracting, draw the legs and the arms toward the body and fold them close to it, and which lower the head upon the chest; while the extensors stretch out the arms and legs, open wide the hands, and raise the head to an erect posture. Other parts of the body are similarly equipped for producing motions of an opposite character in the skeletal system.[4] The eyeballs are lowered by the use of a different muscle than that by which they are elevated; the muscle which depresses the wings of the nose is a direct antagonist of the other muscles which control the movements of this organ, and so on throughout the whole of our movable bodily structures. Moreover, when one such pair of muscles is contracted, the opposed member is normally relaxed, and vice versa; or, as the physiologist would say, the two muscles are reciprocally innervated.[5]
However, it must not be understood that this law refers only to the visible contractions of the muscles which produce the overt behavior of a man, for it equally explains the case where a very small number of nerve and muscle fibers are activated. That is to say, the law of all-or-none and the law of reciprocal innervation can both operate in the face or the hand at the same time. Indeed, we must not neglect to consider that all of the myriad fibers of our largest muscles are never simultaneously contracted; rather is it the rule that these fibers contract in relays,[6] thereby automatically saving us from the fatigue and exhaustion which would otherwise ensue. Moreover, the more intelligent and skilful we become, or, as we sometimes say, the more our head saves our heels, the fewer muscle fibers are required to generate and maintain any specific action-tendency. Consequently, then, the law of reciprocal innervation can be exhibited in the antagonism of extremely small muscular units, such as we have postulated to be involved in certain cases of meaning provided they be anatomically situated in the correct position for producing antagonistic strains. Now the experimental demonstration of the law of dynamogenesis at the hands of Richet, Charcot, etc., revealed that just such slight movements of an opposed character are produced when we merely “think” of up and down, right and left, in and out, and the like. In every case of this sort, some part of the movable, skeletal system performs overtly or covertly the appropriate movement, thereby giving meaning to the word. We may therefore, unless we read all signs incorrectly, safely affirm that whatever be the action-pattern which any abstract term arouses in us, the antonym of that term, if indeed it be its logical and physiological antonym, arouses action-patterns of an opposite character.
Our physiological explanation of the meaning of words and the contradiction of antonyms is now complete. For if, as we have previously shown, even abstract terms acquire and keep their meaning by virtue of the reflex tendencies which they arouse, it is likewise apparent that the basis of logical opposition and contradiction is to be found by an examination of the baldest facts of the physics and physiology of the human body. In brief, then, antonyms are those words whose utterance stimulates us so to react as to illustrate the law of reciprocal innervation. And this, moreover, is the only reason why cheap is the opposite of expensive, true the contradictory of false, and good the antithesis of bad.
Two words more, however, remain to be said. The first of these is, that the number of pairs of antonyms we have in our vocabulary signifies how many different pairs of antagonistic motor tendencies or action-patterns we could, were we fully aroused, overtly manifest. Since thought is either a rehearsal for, or a rumination upon, action, it is essentially a process which employs the same structures of the body as those which are activated in our buying and selling, our giving and taking, our toil and our play. The second word is, that if it be due strictly to our muscular architecture that antonyms occur in human speech, we can now safely affirm that any philosophy or religion which construes the universe as divided between the warring forces of light and darkness, or as everywhere illustrating the bi-polar principles of love and hate, is likewise based upon the law of the reciprocal innervation of antagonistic muscles. Such philosophies are, indeed, profound, since they attempt to inscribe on the firmament the drama of man’s limitations.
With this by way of introduction, we are now prepared to examine the various terms by which we are wont to convey our ideas of ethical value, in order to see just what the words “good,” “bad,” “right,” “wrong,” and the like really mean. And while the difficulties of such a task are admittedly great, yet the presumption is entirely in favor of the methods of mechanistic psychology to give a strictly scientific interpretation to the subject matter of ethics.