CONTENTS: - The Monist, Vol. 1, 1890-1891 - 111

CRITICAL NOTICES: Pikler's "The Psychology of the Belief in
Objective Existence"; Ferrier's "The Croonian Lectures on
Cerebral Localisation"; Jevons's "Pure Logic and other
Minor Works"; Marshall's "Principles of Economics, I";
Mackenzie's "An Introduction to Social Philosophy"; Fouillée's
"L'Evolutionnisme des Idées-Forces"; Koenig's "Die Entwicklung
des Causalproblems."

On Physiological Expression in Psychology. In opposition to the "subjective purism" in psychology advocated by Mr. Stout and Mr. Bradley. The mixture of the psychical with the physical is such as to prove that mental processes, however distinct from bodily processes, have never owned even a vocabulary of their own. Pleasure and pain are psychical states, but we cannot theorise fully upon them without adverting to their physical causes or conditions. The action of drugs proves that the physical constitution of the nerve-substance is a paramount condition of our sensibility, pleasurable or painful. By taking the organs of special sense in separation we can exhaust the modes of sensibility under each, and when we look minutely into the anatomy of the several organs, we obtain further helps to the subdivision and distinction of the individual sensations. Connected with the physics of the brain, apart from the nervous substance and its conditions, is the important state known as excitement, with its opposites quiescence, languor, repose, drowsiness, sleep, and insensibility. The theory of the Will must rely, in the first instance, upon subjective sequences, but the physical consequences of pleasure and pain are a two-fold activity—Expression and Volition, and for verification of any hypothesis as to priority between these two forms of the physical outcome of feeling, the sequence must be taken on the physical side alone. As regards the emotions, taken in themselves, the tracing of physical concomitance is unavoidable. In Psycho-physics the experiments are made upon the physical side, though not to the exclusion of subjective reference. A law relating to the seat of ideas obtained in the first instance through the senses, declares the nervous tracts to be the same in both, thus connecting Sense with Intellect. It has always been impossible to avoid describing ideas as modified repetitions of sensation, and employing for that purpose the materialism of the sense-organs. While eminently applicable to all the phenomena of mind at their elementary stage—Sensation, Intellect, Emotion, Will—physiological conditions cease to have the like bearing in the higher complications. In all that part of Association that states the order of recurrence of our ideas in Memory, subjective investigation is paramount and exclusive. But the state described as conscious intensity, excitement, mental concentration, attention, interest, is expressible both subjectively and physiologically. The constant application of spiritual remedies to bodily ailments is an important aspect of the union of mind and body, and their interaction in those instances is of great significance.

Apperception and the Movement of Attention. Thinking is action directed towards intellectual ends. Intellectual ends are attained by an appropriate combination of movements of attention. Attention and apperception, as this word is applied by Steinthal, reciprocally determine each other. The nature of attention is explained in accordance with the monoideism of M. Ribot, but contrary to his view it is declared to be a constant character of our mental life, although the monoideism is not always complete. Apperception is the process by which a mental system incorporates or tends to incorporate a new element. The effect of attention is largely dependent on the apperception which accompanies it, and of which it is an auxiliary process. The movement of attention fastening upon the presentation to be apperceived, fixes it in the focus of consciousness, until the appercipient system has finally succeeded or failed in assimilating it. The reason why one ideal group becomes appercipient in preference to the others lies mainly in its greater affinity with the presentation to be apperceived. The conditions determining the strength of apperceptive systems may be either extrinsic or intrinsic. The extrinsic consist in passing circumstances which from time to time favor its activity. The intrinsic conditions are inherent in the constitution of the system itself. Among the former are the co-operation of another system; the recovery or the intensity of its own previous action; the influence of organic sensation; its own freshness arising from previous repose. Of these the organic sensation is of fundamental importance. The influence of the cœnæsthesis pervades the whole mental life. Every specific kind of emotion is accompanied by a characteristic mode of organic reaction. The intrinsic conditions are the comprehensiveness of the system; its internal organisation, of which the philosophy of Hegel is cited as an example; the strength of the cohesion between its parts; the nature of the sensory material which enters predominantly into its composition, that is, the comparative excitability of ideas derived from different senses. The normal working of competition, co-operation, and conflict, may be illustrated by contrasting it with the pathological state called suggestibility, in which those processes are more or less completely in abeyance. The conditions which determine the train of ideas arise from the fact that attention, being a motor process, depends on feeling, which dependence cannot be separated from that on apperception. Feeling gives unity to mental process, and is a simple mode of consciousness resulting from the excitement of a multiplicity of elements, and it causes attention to be concentrated on the central presentation from which the wave of excitement is radiated. The essential characteristic of a train of thought, as distinguished from a mere train of ideas, is that the relation linking each idea to its predecessor forms also a source of the interest through which it attracts attention. The ground of the distinction is that thinking involves the activity of a proportional system as such, that is "a system adapted to apperceive objects in other respects most diverse from each other, merely because they agree in being capable of entering into certain relations." The modified working of the principle of association through the apperceptive activity of a proportional system, is proportional or analogical production, which may possibly operate in every instance of the suggestion of one idea by another. A reversion of attention to a previous link in a chain of ideas, giving rise to a modified repetition of it, is a distinctive feature of thinking. In a separate article will be dealt with the special part played by language, which from a psychological point of view is "a peculiar movement of attention having a peculiar influence on apperceptive process."

Helmholtz's Theory of Space-Perception. The doctrine of "unconscious inference" is explicitly founded upon the general theory of knowledge formed by Helmholtz, which is identical with that of Kant, and Helmholtz's investigation into the genesis of space-perception applied to the problem which Kant did not consider, namely, the perception of particular or concrete spaces. The distinction made by the former between the inference from the data of sense and that in which the data are consciously known to be signs, by calling the inductive inferences of the sciences conscious, and those involved in external perception of world unconscious, is open to the charge of involving a contradiction. On the one hand, the theory of "unconscious inference" supports the empirical doctrine of perception only in consequence of calling the process an inference. On the other hand, to call the process "unconscious" is to restore the conception of immediacy which the idea of inference is supposed to exclude. This contradiction may not be insisted on, but, as the phenomena of binocular adjustment discussed in a previous article showed in the visual consciousness a quale which, with or without its relation to tactual and muscular extension, was other than plane dimension, Helmholtz must, unless this quale can be proved to be result of inference, limit the application of his theory to the synthetic connection between touch and sight. Parallax of motion, which consists of the different afferent movements or velocities of bodies in horizontal meridians, and situated at different distances from the observer, seems to do the same for monocular vision that adjustment and fusion do for binocular vision. The phenomena attending certain experiments in which the parallax of motion was observed "correspond exactly to the conception of those who hold that the representative of plane dimension in the retinal image decides the nature of all perceptions whose character is not presented in the image except as a visual sign, and hence that aught beyond magnitude must be the result of influence." An examination of Helmholtz's fundamental principle, "the denial of all pre-established harmony between the nature of impressions and the nature of the external world," confirms the view that the conception of space may be properly a visual one, requiring the superior constancy of touch to correct illusions growing out of the complexities of vision. If we limit visual phenomena as data to mere variations of kind and distinctness in color, we cannot account for such cases as the appearance and inversion of mathematical perspective, binocular localisation and translocation, and the distinct effect of the monocular parallax of motion, qualities which are dimensional in their nature. "While the complexities of space-perception make the co-operation of inferential agencies very probable, yet the spacial quality must be originally given somewhere in consciousness either as an object of perception or as a mental construction, in order to furnish a basis for inferences to its existence or its relations where they are not immediately cognised. This makes the developed conceptions of abstract and synthetic space a complex of inferences and intuitions."

The Principle of Induction. The ultimate major premiss of Induction according to Mill is the Law of Causation which, as he treats it, is a wide generalisation true of sequences just as other generalisations are true of the facts of space. Hence it is itself an induction like other inductions. What is wanted is "an axiom expressing in general terms what we do when we make a particular statement universal, which makes explicit the truth implied by the making of any generalisation whatever." The Law of Causation will be found to be a particular application of this wider axiom, and the axiom itself must be sought from the analysis of ordinary simple generalisations. When we connect truths together, or reason, we support an inferred judgment by some other assertion. That we should be able to reason at all involves that any fact, as B, should have some other fact, as C, to which it is always related; that is, "any fact precisely resembling this B, whatever its other attributes and concomitants may be, will be found in a precisely similar relation to a precisely similar C." A relation exists between two facts whenever the mind can at once distinguish the facts as two, and at the same time attend to them together and assert something of them considered together. We may speak of a relation between different aspects of the same existing thing. The three alternatives afforded by the axiom as ultimately stated correspond to the three cases in which A is the "sum of the conditions of B," or in any way a universal correlate of B; in which it is the cause of B in the popular sense of the term; and in which its connection with B is merely 'causal,' that is, "the Law of Causation is the Axiom of Reasoning as applied to the sequences of phenomena." Every fact observed stands in universal relation to some other fact. The judgment of that relation "is implied in the rudimentary inference which states only the particular fact observed and the particular fact now expected. It is explicit in the reason that is conscious of its own grounds and methods, and takes there the form of the universal judgment, or major premiss."

The Undying Germ-Plasm and the Immortal Soul. All unicellular beings such as the Protozoa and the simpler Algæ, Fungi, etc., reproduce themselves by means of simple fission, and consequently they are immortal. All the single individuals of a family of unicellular beings belong to each other, although they be isolated. Amongst certain infusoria they do, in fact, remain together and build up branching colonies. Later on, division of labor made its appearance and increased the dependence of the individuals upon one another, so that their individuality was to a great extent lost. By the development of this process, multicellular Metazoa arose from colonies of similar Protozoa, and at length culminated in the higher animals and man. All the cell-series are immortal, but they all must die because the structure which is built up by them collectively is mortal. The reproductive cells are the only kind adapted for existence outside the body, and from time to time some of the human reproductive cells succeed in conjugating, and from them a new individual arises. The whole structure of man is acquired with the one object in view of maintaining the series of reproductive cells, of which he is, so to speak, the slave. They are the most important and essential and also the undying parts of the organism. The series of reproductive cells thus possess the essential attributes of the human soul. If we compare the conception of the soul as held by various related religions, and take the characteristics invariably ascribed to the soul, we find that they hold also for the series of reproductive cells continually developing within the body. The ordinary conception of the fate of the soul after death agrees fundamentally with the result of observation on the prosperity of the series of germ-cells. That fate depends on conduct in the body, and the only possible definition of a good deed, that is approved by conscience, is one which will benefit the series of germ-cells arising from one individual, that is ourselves and our family, and further which will be of use to others with their own series of germ-cells, and that in proportion to the degree of connection or relationship. Thus, "the apparently enigmatical conception of the eternal soul is founded on the actual immortality and continuity of the germ-plasma." (London: Williams & Norgate.)

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS. January, 1891. Vol. I. No. 2.