In the Horseherd such language was excusable, but for philosophers to talk in the same style is strange, to say the least. How can such an assertion be made without any proof whatever, without even a few words to explain what is meant by the term "mind"? The German like the English language swarms with words that may be used interchangeably, though each of them has its own shade of meaning. If we translate Geist (Spirit) as mind, then we must consider that “spirit,” in such expressions as “He has yielded up his spirit,” means the same as the principle of life or physical life. The same is true of “spirit” in such a phrase as “his spirit has departed.” But easy as it is to distinguish between [pg 110] spirit in the sense of the breath of life, and spirit in the sense of mind, the exact definition of such words as intellect, reason, understanding, thought, consciousness, or self-consciousness becomes very difficult, to say nothing of soul and feeling in their various activities. These words are used in both English and German so confusedly that we often hesitate merely to touch them. Now if we say that the mind is a development, and is not a prius, what idea ought it to suggest? Does this mean the principle of life, or the understanding, or the reason, or consciousness? We suffer here from a real and very dangerous embarras de richesse. The words are often intended to signify the same things, only viewed under different aspects. But as there were various words, it was believed that they must also signify various things. Different philosophers have further advanced different definitions of these words, until it was finally supposed that each of these names must be borne by a separate subject, while some of them originally only signified activities of one and the same substance. Understanding, reason, and thought originally expressed properties or activities, the activities of understanding, of perceiving, of thinking, and their elevation to nouns was simply psychological mythology, which has prevailed, and still prevails just as extensively as the physical mythology of the ancient Aryan peoples.
It would be most useful if we could lay aside all these mouldy and decayed expressions, and introduce [pg 111] a word that simply means what is not understood by body, the subject, in opposition to the objective world. It would by no means follow that what is not body must therefore exist independent of the body. It would first of all only declare that beside the objective body perceived by the senses, there is also something subjective, which the five senses cannot perceive. The best name for this appears to me still to be the Vedantic term Âtman, which I translate into “the Self” (neuter), because our language will scarcely allow the phrase “the Self” (masculine). “Soul” has a too tender quality to be the equivalent of Âtman.
This Self is something that exists for itself and not for others. While everything that is purely corporeal only exists for us men, inasmuch as it is perceived, the Self exists by reason of the fact that it perceives. While the Esse of all objects is a percipi, a something perceived, which has come into knowledge, the Esse of the self is a percipere, a perceiving, a knowing, that is, the Self can only be thought of as self-knowing. The Self exists even when it does not yet clearly know itself, but it is not the real Self until it knows itself; and it requires long and earnest thought for the Self to know or recognise itself as different from the ego or the body. But if the Self has once come to itself, the darkness or the phenomenal appearance which the Vedânta philosophers called Avidyâ (not knowing, ignorance), or also Mâyâ (appearance, or illusion), vanishes.
The origin of this ignorance, this illusion, or the world of appearance, is a question which no human being will ever solve. There are questions which must be set aside as simply ultra vires by every reasonable philosophy. We know that we cannot hear certain tones, cannot see certain colours; why not then understand that we cannot comprehend certain things? The Vedânta philosophers consider the Avidyâ (ignorance) as inexplicable, and this was no doubt originally implied in the name which they gave it. Their aim was, to prove the temporal existence of such an Avidyâ, not to discover its origin; and then in the Vidyâ, the Vedânta philosophy, to set forth the means by which the Avidyâ could be destroyed. How or when the Self came into this ignorance, Avidyâ, or Mâyâ (illusion, or the phenomenal world), the Vedânta philosophers no more sought to explain than we seek to explain how the Self comes into the body, the bodily senses, and the phenomenal world which they perceive. We begin our philosophy with what is given us, that is, with a Self, that in its embodiment knows everything that befalls the body; that for a time is blended with the body, till it attains a true self-knowledge, and then, even in life, or later in death, by liberation from its phenomenal existence, or from the body, again comes to itself.
How this body, with its senses that convey and present to us the phenomenal world, originated or developed, is a question that belongs to biology. So [pg 113] far as is possible to the human understanding, this question has been solved by the cell theory. The other question is the development of what we call mind, that is, the subjective knowledge of the phenomenal world. To this the body, as it exists and lives, and the organs of sense, as they exist, are essential. We know that all sense-perceptions depend upon bodily vibrations, i.e. the nerves; and if we wish to make plain the transition of impressions to conscious ideas, we can best do so through the assumption of the Self as a witness or accessory to the nerve-vibrations. This, however, is only an image, not an explanation, for an explanation belongs to the Utopia of philosophy. How it happens that atoms think, atomists do not know, and no one should imagine that so-called Darwinism has helped or can help us even one step farther. Whatever some Darwinians may say, nothing can be simpler than the frank admission of ignorance on this point on the part of Darwin. The frank and modest expressions of this great but sober thinker are generally passed over in silence, or are even controverted as signs of a temporary weakness. To me, on the contrary, they are very valuable, and very characteristic of Darwin.
In one place[40] he says, “I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental power any more than I have with that of life itself.” In another place[41] [pg 114] he speaks still more plainly and says, “In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms is as hopeless an inquiry as how life first originated.” Let no one suppose, therefore, that all gates and doors can be opened with the word “evolution” or the name Darwin. It is easy to say with Drummond, “Evolution is revolutionising the world of nature and of thought, and within living memory has opened up avenues into the past and vistas into the future such as science has never witnessed before.”[42] Those are bold words, but what do they mean or prove? DuBois-Reymond has said long before, “How consciousness can arise from the co-operation of atoms is beyond our comprehension.” In the Contemporary Review, November, 1871,[43] Huxley speaks just as decidedly as Darwin in the name of biology, “I really know nothing whatever, and never hope to know anything, of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected.” Molecules and atoms are objects of knowledge. If we ascribe knowledge to them, they immediately become the monads of Leibnitz; you may evolve out of them what you have first involved into them. Knowledge belongs to the Self alone, call it what we will. The nerve-fibres might vibrate as often as they pleased, millions and millions of times in a second; they would never produce the sensation of red if there were no Self as the receiver and illuminator, the translator of these vibrations of [pg 115] ether; this Self, that alone receives, alone illumines, alone knows, and of which we can say nothing more than what the Indian philosophers call sak-kid-ânanda, that it exists, that it perceives, and as they add, that it is blessed, i.e. that it is complete in itself, serene and eternal.
If we take a firm stand on this living and perceiving Self (for kid is not so much thinking as perceiving, or knowing), there can then be no question that it is present not only in men, but in animals as well; only let us beware of the inference that what we mean by human mind, that is, understanding and reasoning thought, is a necessary function of all living organisms, and is possessed also by a goose or a chicken. It is just the same with the perceiving Self as it is with the cell. To the eye they are all alike. To express it figuratively, one cell has a ticket to Cologne, another to Paris, a third to London. Each reaches its destination, and then remains stationary, and no power on earth can make it advance beyond the place to which it is ticketed, that is, its original destination, its fundamental eternal idea. It is just the same with the perceiving Self. It is true that the Self sees, hears, and thinks. As there are animals that cannot see, that cannot hear, so there are animals—and this class includes the whole of them—that cannot speak. It is true that the speaking animals, that is men, have passed the former stations on a fast train; but they did not leave the train, nor have they anything in common with those who remained [pg 116] behind at previous stations, least of all can we consider them as the offspring of those that remained behind. This is only a simile, and should not provoke ridicule. Of course it will be said that those who can journey to Cologne may go on to Paris, and once in Paris may easily cross the Channel. We must not ride a comparison to death, but always adhere to the facts. Why does not grass grow as high as a poplar, why is care taken, as Goethe says, that no tree grows up to the sky? A strawberry might grow as large as a cucumber or a pumpkin, but it does not. Who draws the line? It is true, too, that along every line slight deviations take place right and left. Nearly each year we hear of an abnormally large strawberry, and no doubt abnormally small ones could be found as well. But in spite of all, the normal remains. And whence comes it, if not from the same hand or the same source which we compared with the ticket agent at the railway station, in whom all who are familiar with the history of philosophy will again readily recognise the Greek Logos?
These comparisons should at least be so far useful as to disclose the confusion of thought, when, for instance, Mr. Romanes holds that it is not only comprehensible, but the conclusion is unavoidable, that the human mind has sprung from the minds of the higher quadrumana on the line of natural genesis. The human mind may mean every possible thing; the question therefore arises if he refers only to consciousness, [pg 117] or to understanding and reason. In the second place the human mind is not something subsisting by itself, but can only be the mind of an individual man. We cannot be too careful in these discussions—otherwise we only end by substituting bare abstractions for concrete things. We do not know the human mind as anything concrete at all, only as an abstraction, and in that case only as the mind of one man, or of many men. How can it then be thought that my mind or the mind of Darwin sprang from the minds of the higher quadrumana. We may say such things, but what meaning can we attach to them? The same misconception exists here, if I am not mistaken, as in the statement, that the human body springs from the bodies of the higher quadrupeds—a misconception to which we have already referred. That has absolutely no sense if we only hold firmly, that every organised body was originally a cell, or originates in a cell, and that each cell, even in its most complicated, manifold, and perfect form, always is, and remains, an individual. It is useless therefore to talk of a descent of the human mind from the minds of the higher quadrupeds, for no intelligible meaning can be discovered in it; we should have to fall back on a miscarriage, and to set up this miscarriage as the mother of all men, and without a legitimate father. Such are the wanderings of a wrong method of thought, even if it struts about in kingly robes.
Above all things we must settle what we are really [pg 118] to understand by the mind of the higher quadrupeds as distinguished from the human mind. What is there lacking in these animal minds to make them human? And what do they possess, or what are they, that they should claim equal birth with man? How much obscurity there is in these matters among the best animal psychologists is seen when, for instance, we compare the assertions of Romanes with those of Lloyd Morgan. While the former sets up a natural genesis of the human mind from animal mind as being indisputable and as not being thinkable in any other way, the latter, his greatest admirer, says, “Believing, as I do, that conception is beyond the power of my favourite and clever dog, I am forced to believe that his mind differs generically from my own.”[44] Undoubtedly by “generically” is meant, according to his genus or his genesis. But in spite of this, the same savant says in another place, that he cannot allow that there is a difference in kind, that is in genere, between the human mind and the mind of a dog. If men would only define their words, such contradictions would in time become impossible.
What men and animals have in common is the Self, and this so-called Self consists first of all in perception. This perception belongs, as has been said, to those things which are given us, and not to those which can be explained. It is a property of the eternal Self, as of light, to shine, to illumine itself, that is, to know. Its knowing is its being, and its [pg 119] being is its knowing, or its self-consciousness. If we take the Self as we find it, not merely in itself, but embodied, we must attribute to it, besides its own self-consciousness, a consciousness of the conditions of the body; but of course we must not imagine that we can make this embodiment in any way conceivable to us. It is so—that is all that we can say, just as in an earlier consideration of the embodiment and multiplication of the eternal Logos we had to accept this as a datum, without being able to come any nearer to the fact by conceptions, or even by mere analogies. This is where the task of the psychologist begins. Grant the self-consciousness of the individual, although still very obscure; grant the sentient perception; everything else that we call mind is the result of a development, which we must follow historically in order to understand that it could not come about in any other way. But where are the facts, where the monuments, where the trustworthy documents, from which we can draw our knowledge of this wonderful development?