I shall have frequent occasion to insist that the utmost healthful, that is, symmetrical, development of the individuality is the true aim of human society. This is directly due to the fact that self-consciousness, the “I” in its final analysis, depends on the unity and independence of the individual Will, which in a given moment of action can be One only. The cultivation of individuality is therefore the cultivation of the will, to direct and strengthen which must be the purpose of all education.
The Intellectual Process.—The chasm between the human and the brute mind widens when we come to look more closely at the various steps of the intellectual process, that is, at the method of reasoning. To be either clear or conscious, this must be carried on by general ideas, in themselves abstractions. For example, the so-called “syllogisms” of logic depend upon the relation of a general to a particular idea; and thinking can no more be conducted without this relation than talking without grammatical rules; though neither the formula of the syllogism nor the rules of grammar are consciously present to the mind.
The logical process is everywhere and at all times the same, in the sage or the savage, the sane or the insane. To reach any conclusion, the mind must work in accordance with its method. This is purely mechanical. An English philosopher (Jevons) invented a “logical machine,” which worked as well as the human brain. The logical process has been formulated by a mathematician (Boole) in a simple equation of the second degree. It must consist of subject and predicate, of general and particular. But the process has nothing to do with the proceeds. A mill grinds equally well wheat, tares, and poisonberries. Not upon the fact that the pepsin digests, but that it digests proper aliments, depends the health of the body. So the content of the intellectual operation, not its form, is of good or harm, and merits the attention of ethnographer or historian.
The Mechanical Action of Mind.—The Germans have a saying, framed first by their writer, Lichtenstein, known as “the Magician of the North,” that “we do not think. Thinking merely goes on within us”; just as our stomachs digest and our glands excrete. Another one of their authors originated the once-celebrated apothegm, “Without phosphorus there is no thought.”
The aim of both expressions is to put pointedly the principle that the intellectual process is of a mechanico-chemical character, a mere bodily function, to be classed with digestion or circulation. This opinion has of late years been warmly espoused in the United States.
That intellectual actions are governed by fixed laws was long ago said and demonstrated by Quetelet in his remarkable studies of vital statistics. That the development of thought proceeds “under the rule of an iron necessity” is the ripened conviction of that profound student of man, Bastian. We must accept it as the verdict of science.
What, then, becomes of individuality, personality, free-will? Must we, as the great dramatist said, “confess ourselves the slaves of chance, the flies of every wind that blows?”
Not yet. That we are subject to our surroundings and our history; that our forefathers, though dead, have not relaxed their parental grasp; that time, clime, and spot master thought and deed, is all true. But above all is Volition, Will, a final, insoluble, personal power, the one irrefragable proof of separate existence, not itself translatable into Force, but the director, initiator, of all vital forces.
The “Psychic Cells.”—Mind brings man into kinship with all organic life. Long ago Aristotle said if one would explain the human soul, he must accomplish it through learning the souls of all other beings.
The physiologist explains mental phenomena as the function of specialised cell-life. He points out the cells, strange triangular masses in the cortex of the brain, with long processes and spiny branches, touching but never uniting. In the lower animals the network is simple, the branches short; as mental capacity advances, they become more complex and longer.