Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Vol. 1 of 3)

by Thomas Brown

Footnotes

[60] Gray de Principiis Cogitandi, Lib. I. v. 1–5.

[61] On the Active Powers, Essay III. c. 1.

[62] Cowper's Task, book i.

[LECTURE XVIII.]

ON THE MORE DEFINITE EXTERNAL AFFECTIONS OF MIND IN GENERAL.

In my Lecture yesterday, after some further elucidation of the triple division which we formed of the mental phenomena, as external or sensitive affections of the mind, intellectual states of the mind,—emotions,—I proceeded to consider the first of these divisions, of which the characteristic distinction is, that the phenomena included in it have their causes or immediate antecedents external to the mind itself. In this division, I comprehended, together with the feelings which are universally ascribed to certain organs of sense, many feelings, which, though unquestionably originating in states of our bodily organs, as much as our other sensations, are yet commonly ranked as a different order—such as our various appetites, or rather that elementary uneasiness which is only a part, but still an essential part of our appetites, and which is easily distinguishable from the mere desire, which is the other element; since, however rapid the succession of them may be, we are yet conscious of them as successive. The particular uneasiness, it is evident, must have been felt as a sensation before the desire of that which is to relieve the uneasiness could have arisen. To the same class, too, I referred the various organic feelings, which constitute the animal pleasure of good health, when every corporeal function is exercised in just degree; and in a particular manner, our muscular feelings, whether of mere general lassitude or alacrity; or those fainter differences of feelings which arise in our various motions and attitudes, from the different muscles that are exercised, or from the greater or less contraction of the same muscles. These muscular feelings, though they may be almost unnoticed by us, during the influence of stronger sensations, are yet sufficiently powerful, when we attend to them, to render us, independently of sight and touch, in a great measure sensible of the position of our body in general, and of its various parts; and comparatively indistinct as they are, they become,—in many cases, as in the acquired perceptions of vision, for example, and equally too, as I conceive, in various other instances, in which little attention has been paid to them by philosophers,—elements of some of the nicest and most accurate judgments which we form.

It is, however, to that widest and most important order of our external affections, which comprehends the feelings more commonly termed sensations, and universally ascribed to particular organs of sense, that we have now to proceed. In these, we find the rude elements of all our knowledge, the materials on which the mind is ever operating, and without which, it seems to us almost impossible to conceive that it could ever have operated at all, or could, even in its absolute inactivity, have been conscious of its own inert existence.

This order of our external feelings comprehends all those states of mind, however various they may be, which immediately succeed the changes of state, produced, in any of our organs of sense, by the presence of certain external bodies. The mental affections are themselves,—as I have said,—commonly termed sensations; but we have no verb, in our language, which exactly denotes what is expressed in the substantive noun. To feel is, in its two senses, either much more limited or much more general, being confined, in its restricted meaning, to the sensations of one organ, that of touch,—and as a more general word, being applicable to all the varieties of our consciousness, as much as to those particular varieties, which are immediately successive to the affections of our organs of sense. We are said, in this wider use of the term, to feel indignation, love, surprise, as readily as we are said to feel the warmth of a fire, or the coldness of snow.

In defining our sensations, to be those mental affections, which are immediately successive to certain organic affections, produced by the action of external things, it is very evident, that I have made two assumptions,—first of the existence of external things, that affect our organs of sense; and, secondly of organs of sense, that are affected by external things;—unless, indeed, the assumption of the existence of organs of sense be considered,—as in philosophic truth it unquestionably is—only another form of the assumption of the existence of external things, since, in relation to the sentient mind, the organs thus supposed to exist, are, in strictness of language, external, as much as the objects supposed to act upon them. All of which we are truly conscious, in sensation, is the mental affection, the last link of the series, in the supposed process; what we term our perceptions of organs of sense, or of other external things that act upon these—our ideas, for example, of a brain or an eye, a house or a mountain, being as truly states of our own percipient mind, and nothing but states of our own mind, as our feeling of joy or sorrow, hope or fear, love or hate,—to which we never think of giving an existence, nor a direct and immediate cause of existence, out of ourselves. By the very constitution of our nature, however, or by the influence of associations as irresistible as intuition itself,—it is impossible for us not to feel this essential reality in the causes of one set of our mental affections, in the same manner as it is impossible for us to ascribe it to another set. The brain, the eye, the house, the mountain, we believe, and cannot but believe, to have external existence, independent of our own; the joy and sorrow, hope and fear, love and hate, we believe, and cannot but believe, to be merely states of our own mind, occasioned by other former states of mind, and dependent, therefore, for their continuance, on our own continued existence only. Even in our wildest dreams,—in which we imagine all things that are possible, and almost all things which are impossible; we never consider our joy or sorrow, as directly indicative of any thing separate from ourselves, and independent of us,

“While o'er our limbs sleep's soft dominion spread,

What tho' our soul fantastic measures trod,

O'er fairy fields; or mourn'd along the gloom

Of pathless woods; or down the craggy steep

Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool;

Or scaled the cliff,—or danced on hollow winds,

With antic shapes, wild natives of the brain;”

it was still only the cliff, the wood, the pool, which we considered as external: the sorrow with which we mourned along our gloomy track, the pain with which we swam the turbid water, the horror which we felt at the antic shapes, with which we mingled in the ghostly dance, were felt to be wholly in ourselves, and constituted, while they lasted, the very feeling of our own existence.—The belief of an external world is, however, to come afterwards under our full examination:—It is sufficient, for the present, to know, that in the period after infancy, to which alone our memory extends, we are led, irresistibly, to believe in it; and that the belief of it, therefore, in whatever manner it may have originated in the imperfect perceptions of our infancy, is now, when those perceptions are mature, so completely beyond the power of argument to overcome, that it exists, as strongly, in those who reason against it, as in those who reason for it;—that the reference to a direct external cause, however, does not accompany every feeling of our mind, but is confined to a certain number of that long succession of feelings, which forms the varied consciousness of our life,—and that the feelings, with respect to which this reference is made, are the class of sensations, which, when combined with this reference, have commonly been distinguished by the name of perceptions. That we have no perfect evidence of the external existence thus ascribed by us,—independently of our own irresistible belief of it, may be allowed to the sceptic; and the reasoning of Doctor Reid on the subject, as far as he proceeds beyond the assertion of this irresistible belief, and attempts, what has been commonly regarded as a confutation of the scepticism on this point,—by representing it as proceeding on a mistake, with respect to the nature of our ideas,—is itself, as we shall afterwards find, nugatory and fallacious. But still, notwithstanding the errors of philosophers with respect to it, the belief itself is, in the circumstances in which we now exist, so truly a part of our constitution, that to contend against it in argument would be to admit its validity, since it would be to suppose the existence of some one whom we are fairly undertaking to instruct or to confute.

In what circumstance the intuitive belief,—if, as I have said, the belief be in any case intuitive,—arises; or rather, in how large a proportion of cases, in which the reference seems primary and immediate, it is, more probably, the effect of secondary associations transferred from sense to sense, will appear better after the minute analysis on which we are to enter, of the different tribes of our sensations.

In referring to the particular class of sensations, and consequently to an external cause, a certain number only of the affections of our mind, there can be no doubt, that we proceed now, in the mature state of our knowledge, with more accuracy, than we could have attained, in that early period of life, when our original feelings were more recent. We have now a clearer and more definite belief of an external world, and of objects of sensations separate from our sensations themselves; without which general belief, previously obtained, we should as little have ascribed to an external organic cause many of our feelings, which we now ascribe to one—our sensations of sound and fragrance, for example,—as we now ascribe to such an immediate external cause, our emotions of joy or sorrow. A still more important acquisition, is our knowledge of our own organic frame, by which we are enabled, in a great measure, to verify our sensations,—to produce them, as it were at pleasure, when their external objects are before us, and in this way to correct the feelings, which have risen spontaneously, by those, which we ourselves produce. Thus, when, in reverie, our conceptions become peculiarly vivid, and the objects of our thought seem almost to exist in our presence; if only we stretch out our hand, or fix our eyes on the forms that are permanently before us, the illusion vanishes. Our organ of touch or of sight, is not affected in the same manner, as if the object that charms us in our musing dream, were really present; and we class the feeling, therefore, as a conception,—not as a sensation,—which, but for the opportunity of this correction, we should unquestionably, in many instances, have done.

But though, in forming the class of our sensations, we derive many advantages from that full knowledge which the experience of many years has given, we purchase these by disadvantages which are perhaps as great, and which are greater, from the very circumstance, that it is absolutely out of our power to estimate their amount. What we consider as the immediate sensation, is not the simple mental state, as it originally followed that corporeal change, which now precedes it; but, at least in the most striking of all the tribes of our sensations, is a very different one. We have the authority of reason, a priori, as shewing no peculiar connexion of the points of the retina with one place of bodies more than with another; and we have the authority also of observation, in the celebrated case of the young man who was couched by Cheselden, and in other cases of the same peculiar species of blindness, in which the eyes, by a surgical operation, have been rendered for the first time capable of distinct vision, that if we had had no organ of sense but that of sight, and no instinctive judgment had been superadded to mere vision, we should not have had the power of distinguishing the magnitude and distant place of objects;—a mere expanse of colour being all which we should have perceived, if even colour itself could in these circumstances, have been perceived by us as expanded. Yet it is sufficient now, that rays of light, precisely the same in number, and in precisely the same direction, as those which at one period of our life, exhibited to us colour, and colour alone, should fall once more on the same small expanse of nerve, to give us instantly that boundlessness of vision, which, almost as if the fetters of our mortal frame were shaken off, lifts us from our dungeon, and makes us truly citizens, not of the earth only, but of the universe. Simple as the principle may now seem, which distinguishes our secondary or acquired perceptions of vision from those which were primary and immediate, it was long before the distinction was made; and till a period which—if we consider it in relation to those long ages of philosophic inquiry, or, rather, most unphilosophic argumentation, which had gone before—may be considered almost as in our own time, longitudinal distance was conceived to be as completely an original object of sight as the varieties of mere colour and brilliancy. There may, therefore—though we have not yet been able, and may never be able, to discover it,—be a corresponding difference in our other sensations, which now seem to us simple and immediate. In the case of sound, indeed, there is a very evident analogy to these visual acquired perceptions; since a constant reference to place mingles with our sensations of this class, in the same manner, though not so distinctly, as in our perceptions of sight. We perceive the sound, as it were near or at a distance, in one direction rather than in another; as, in the case of longitudinal distance in vision, we perceive colour at one distance rather than at another. Yet there is as little reason, from the nature of the organic changes themselves, to suppose, that different affections of our auditory nerves should originally give us different notions of distance, as that such notions should originally be produced by different affections of the retina: and, as in sight and hearing, so it is far from improbable, that, in all our senses, there may, by the reciprocal influence of these upon each other, or by the repeated lessons of individual experience in each, be a similar modification of the original simple feelings, which, in that first stage of existence that opened to us the world and its phenomena, each individual organ separately afforded. Our reasoning with respect to them, therefore, as original organs of sense, may, perhaps, be as false, as our chemical reasoning would be, were we to attempt to infer the properties of an uncombined acid, or alkali, from our observation of the very different properties of a neutral salt, into the composition of which we know that the acid or the alkali has entered.

If, indeed, it were in our power to be introduced to a society, like that of which Diderot speaks, in his Letter on the Deaf and Dumb, and to hold communication with them, all our doubts on this subject would be removed. “What a strange society,” says he, “would five persons make, each of them endowed with one only of our five different senses; and no two of the party with the same sense! There can be no doubt, that, differing, as they must differ, in all their views of nature, they would treat each other as madmen, and that each would look upon the others with all due contempt. It is, indeed, only an image of what is happening every moment in the world; we have but one sense, and we judge of every thing.”[63]—“There is, however,” he justly remarks, “one science, though but one science, in which the whole society of the different senses might agree,—the science which has relation to the properties of number. They might each arrive, by their separate abstractions, at the sublimest speculations of arithmetic and algebra; they might fathom the depths of analysis, and propose and resolve problems of the most complicated equations, as if they were all so many Diophantuses. It is perhaps,” he adds, “what the oyster is doing in its shell.”[64]

From such a society,—if, indeed, we could hold any communication with these profound algebraists, except in their common science of numbers,—we might undoubtedly learn, what are the direct immediate affections of mind, to which our senses individually give rise, and consequently, how much, while feeling has blended with feeling, they have reciprocally operated on each other. But, in our present circumstances, unaided by intercourse with such living abstractions, it is impossible for us to remove wholly this uncertainty, as to the kind and degree of influence, which experience may have had, in modifying our primary sensations. We may wish, indeed, to be able to distinguish our present feelings, from those which the same objects originally excited; but, since no memory can go back to the period, at which we did not perceive longitudinal distance, as it were, immediately by the eye, as little, we may suppose, can any memory go back to the period, when other sensations, less interesting than those of vision, were first excited. Could we trace the series of feelings, in a single mind,—as variously modified, in the progress from infancy to maturity,—we should know more of the intellectual and moral nature of man, than is probably ever to be revealed to his inquiry,—when in ages, as remote from that in which we live, and perhaps as much more enlightened, as our own age may be said to be in relation to the period of original darkness and barbarism, he is still to be searching into his own nature, with the same avidity as now, He must, indeed be a very dull observer, who has not felt, on looking at an infant, some desire to know the little processes of thought, that are going on in his curious and active mind; and who, on reflecting on the value, as an attainment in science, which the sagest philosopher would set on the consciousness of those acquisitions which infancy has already made, is not struck with that nearness, in which, in some points, extreme knowledge and extreme ignorance may almost be said to meet. What metaphysician is there, however subtile and profound in his analytical inquiries, and however successful in the analyses which he has made, who would not give all his past discovery, and all his hopes of future discovery, for the certainty of knowing with exactness what every infant feels? The full instruction, which such a view of our progressive feelings, from their very origin, in the first sensations of life, would afford, Nature, in her wisdom, however, has not communicated to us,—more than she has communicated to us the nature of that state of being, which awaits the soul after it has finished its career of mortality. Our existence seems, in our conception of it, never to have had a beginning. As far back as we can remember any event, there is always a period, that appears to us still farther back, the events of which we cannot distinguish; as, when we look toward the distant horizon, we see, less and less distinctly, in the long line which the sunshine of evening still illuminates, plains, and woods, and streams, and hills, more distant, half melting into air, beyond which our eye can find nothing,—though we are still certain, that other woods, and streams, and plains are there, and that it is only the imperfection of our sight, which seems to bound them as in another world. It is to man, when he thinks upon his own beginning, as if he felt himself in a world of enchantment, amid the shades and flowers of which he had been wandering, unconscious of the time at which he entered it, or of the objects that are awaiting him, when he shall have arrived at the close of that path, whose windings still lead him forward,—and knowing little more, than that he is himself happy, and that the unknown Being, who has raised this magnificent scene around him, must be the Friend of the mortal, whom he has deigned to admit into it.

“Well pleased he scans

The goodly prospect,—and, with inward smiles,

Treads the gay verdure of the painted plain,—

Beholds the azure canopy of heaven,

And living lamps, that over-arch his head,

With more than regal splendour,—bends his ear

To the full choir of water, air, and earth;

Nor heeds the pleasing error of his thought,

Nor doubts the painted green or azure arch,

Nor questions more the music's mingling sounds,

Than space, or motion, or eternal time;

So sweet he feels their influence to attract

His fixed soul, to brighten the dull glooms

Of care, and make the destined road of life

Delightful to his feet. So, fables tell,

The adventurous hero, bound on hard exploit,

Beholds with glad surprise, by secret spell

Of some kind sage, the patron of his toils,

A visionary paradise disclosed,

Amid the dubious wild;—With streams, and shades,

And airy songs, the enchanted landscape smiles,

Cheers his long labours, and renews his frame.”[65]

The philosophic use of the term sensation does not necessarily imply, what, in its popular use, is considered almost as involved in it; and perhaps, therefore, it may not be superfluous to warn you, that it is not confined to feelings, which are pleasurable or painful, but extends to every mental affection, that is the immediate consequence of impression on our organs of sense,—of which mental states or affections, many, and, as I am inclined to think, by far the greater number, are of a kind, that cannot be termed either agreeable or disagreeable. Of the objects of sight, for example, which are of such very frequent occurrence, how few are there, at which we look, either with pleasure or with pain,—if we except that indirect pleasure, which, in particular cases, they may afford, as communicating to us information, that is valuable in itself, or as gratifying even our idlest curiosity. To take one of the most striking cases of this sort,—though we may derive, from the perusal of a work that interests us, the purest delight, it is a delight, resulting only from the conceptions, which the author, in consequence of the happy contrivance of symbolic characters, has been able to transfuse, as it were, from his own mind into ours; but, during all the time of the perusal, sensations, almost innumerable, have been excited in us, by the separate characters, with which the pages are covered, that have never mingled even the faintest direct pleasure, with the general emotion, which they, and they alone, have indirectly produced.

“I apprehend,” says Dr Reid, “that, besides the sensations, that are either agreeable or disagreeable, there is still a greater number that are indifferent. To these we give so little attention, that they have no name, and are immediately forgot, as if they had never been; and it requires attention to the operations of our minds, to be convinced of their existence. For this end, we may observe, that, to a good ear, every human voice is distinguishable from all others. Some voices are pleasant, some disagreeable; but the far greater part can neither be said to be one or the other. The same thing may be said of other sounds, and no less of tastes, smells, and colours; and if we consider, that our senses are in continual exercise while we are awake, that some sensation attends every object they present to us, and that familiar objects seldom raise any emotion, pleasant or painful,—we shall see reason, besides the agreeable and disagreeable, to admit a third class of sensations, that may be called indifferent. The sensations that are indifferent, are far from being useless. They serve as signs, to distinguish things that differ; and the information we have concerning things external, comes by their means. Thus, if a man had no ear to receive pleasure from the harmony or melody of sounds, he would still find the sense of hearing of great utility; though sounds gave him neither pleasure nor pain, of themselves, they would give him much useful information; and the like may be said of the sensations we have by all the other senses.”[66]

It is as signs, indeed, far more than as mere pleasures in themselves, that our sensations are to us of such inestimable value. Even in the case to which I before alluded, of the symbolic or arbitrary characters of a language, when we consider all the important purposes to which these are subservient, as raising us originally from absolute barbarism, and saving us from relapsing into it, there might be an appearance of paradox, indeed, but there would be perfect truth in asserting, that the sensations which are themselves indifferent, are more precious, even in relation to happiness itself, than the sensations which are themselves accompanied with lively delight, or rather, of which it is the very essence to be delightful. Happiness, though necessarily involving present pleasure, is the direct or indirect, and often the very distant result of feelings of every kind, pleasurable, painful, and indifferent. It is like the beautiful profusion of flowers, which adorn our summer fields. In our admiration of the foliage, and the blossoms, and the pure airs and sunshine, in which they seem to live, we almost forget the darkness of the soil in which their roots are spread. Yet how much should we err, if we were to consider them as deriving their chief nutriment from the beams that shine around them, in the warmth and light of which we have wandered with joy. That delightful radiance alone would have been of little efficacy, without the showers, from which, in those very wanderings, we have often sought shelter at noon; or at least without the dews, which were unheeded by us, as they fell silently and almost insensibly on our evening walk.

With the common division of our sensations into five classes,—those of smell, taste, hearing, sight, touch, we have been familiar, almost from our childhood; and though the classification may be far from perfect, in reference to our sensations themselves, considered simply as affections of the mind, it is sufficiently accurate, in reference to the mere organs of sense; for, though our sensations of heat and cold, in one very important respect, which is afterwards to be considered by us, have much less resemblance to the other sensations which we acquire by our organs of touch, or at least to sensations, which we are generally supposed to derive from that organ, than to sensations, which we receive by the medium of other organs, our sensations of smell and sound for example—still, as they arise from an affection of the same organ, they may be more conveniently referred to the same, than to any other class; since, if we quit that obvious line of distinction, which the difference of organs affords, we shall not find it easy to define them by other lines as precise.

But whatever may be the arbitrary division or arrangement which we may form either of our sensations themselves, or of the organs that are previously affected, the susceptibility of the mind, by which it is capable of being affected by the changes of state in our mere bodily organs, must be regarded as, in every sense of the word, of primary value in our mental constitution. To the individual, indeed, it may be said to be in itself all the things which are around him, however near or afar; because it is truly that, by which alone all things near or afar become known to him. It constitutes by this mutual relation, which it establishes, a power of more than magic agency, before which the great gulf, that appeared to separate forever the worlds of matter and of spirit, disappears,—which thus links together substances, that seemed, in their nature, incapable of any common bond of union,—and which, bringing the whole infinity of things, within the sphere of our own mind, communicates to it some faint semblance of the omnipresence of its Author. “What is that organ,”—says an eloquent French writer, speaking of the eye,—“what is that astonishing organ, in which all objects acquire, by turns, a successive existence,—where the spaces, the figures, and the motions, that surround me, are as it were created,—where the stars, that exist at the distance of a hundred millions of leagues, become a part of myself,—and where in a single half inch of diameter, is contained the universe?” This power of external sense, which first awakes us into life, continues, ever after, to watch, as it were, round the life which it awoke, lavishing on us perpetual varieties of instruction and delight; and if, from the simple pleasures, and simple elementary knowledge which it immediately affords, we trace its influence, through all the successive feelings to which it indirectly gives rise, it may be said to exist, by a sort of intellectual and moral transmutation, in the most refined and etherial of all our thoughts and emotions. What Grey says of it,—in the commencement of his beautiful fragment De Principiis Cogitandi, addressed to his friend West, is not too high a panegyric,—that every thing delightful and amiable, friendship and fancy, and wisdom itself, have their primary source in it.

“Non illa leves primordia motus

Quanquam parva, dabunt. Lætum vel amabile quicquid

Usquam oritur, trahit hinc ortum; nec surgit ad auras,

Quin ea conspirent simul, eventusque secundent.

Hinc variæ vitai artes, ac mollior usus,

Dulce et amicitiæ vinclum: Sapientia dia

Hinc roseum accendit lumen, vultuque sereno,

Humanas aperit mentes, nova gaudia monstrans.

Illa etiam, quæ te (mirum) noctesque diesque

Assidue fovit inspirans, linguamque sequentem

Temperat in numeros, atque horas mulcet inertes,

Aurea non alia si jactat origine Musa.”[67]

So much, indeed, of human knowledge, and of all that is valuable and delightful in human feeling, involves these elementary sensations, as it were in the very essence of the thoughts and feelings themselves, that one of the most acute of modern French metaphysicians, and, with scarcely an exception, all the philosophers of the French metaphysical school, who are his followers, have considered the whole variety of human consciousness, as mere sensation variously transformed; though, in stating the nature of this transformation, and the difference of the sensations as transformed from the primary forms of mere external feeling, they have not been so explicit, as the assertors of a system so paradoxical ought assuredly to have been. On the fallacies of this very prevalent theory of mind, however, which is afterwards to be examined by us fully, I need not at present make any remarks.

Though this excessive simplification of the phenomena of human thought and feeling is, however, far more than the phenomena truly allow, it is not the less certain, that all the varieties of our consciousness, though not mere transformations of external sense, are, when traced to their source, the results of sensation, in its various original forms. In inquiring into the phenomena of our senses, then, we begin our inquiry, where knowledge itself begins, and though the twilight, which hangs over this first opening of intellectual life, is perhaps only a presage, or a part of that obscurity which is to attend the whole track of human investigation, it still is twilight only, not absolute darkness. We can discover much, though we cannot discover all; and where absolute discovery is not allowed, there is still left to us a probability of conjecture, of which, in such limited circumstances, even philosophy may justly avail herself, without departing from her legitimate province.