Now our inner consciousness bears unmistakable witness to the existence within us of an abiding subject of our thoughts, feelings, and desires. In biology, the soul is revealed to us as a binding-principle, that obstructs dissolution of the organism, and a persistent type that maintains its identity amid an incessant flux of matter and flow of energy. Clearer still is testimony of introspective psychology, which reveals all our psychic activities and states as successive modifications of this permanent “I,” “self,” “personality,” or “mind,” according as we choose to express it. Human language proves this most forcibly; for the intramental facts and data of our conscious life simply cannot be so much as intelligibly expressed, much less, defined, or differentiated from the extramental facts of the physical world, without using terms that include a reference to this selfsame persistent subject of thought, feeling, and volition. Even inveterate phenomenalists, like Wundt, James, and Titchener, are obliged to submit to this inexorable linguistic law, in common with their unscientific brethren, the generality of mankind, although they do so only after futile attempts at a “scientific revision” of grammar, and with much grumbling over the “barbarous conceptions” of the gross-headed aborigines who invented human language. Be that as it may, no formulation of mental facts is possible except in terms that either denote or connote this permanent source and ground of human thought and feeling, as is apparent, for example, from such phrases as: “I think,” “I wish,” “I hear”; “mental states” (i. e. of the mind); psychic functions (i. e. of the psyche); subjective idealism (i. e. of the subject); a conscious act (from con-scire: “to know along with,” because in conscious acts the subject is known along with the object). The phenomenalists occasionally succeed, in their “most precise” passages, in omitting to mention the person, knower, or thinker behind thought, but they do so only at the cost of substituting personal pronouns, and of thus bringing back through the window what they have just ejected by way of the door. Our consciousness, therefore, makes us invincibly aware of the existence of a superficially variable, but radically unchangeable, subject of our mental life. It does not, however, tell us anything concerning the nature of this primary ground of thought, whether, for example, it is identical with the cerebral cortex, or something distinct therefrom, whether it is phenomenal or substantial, dynamic or entitive, spiritual or material. To decide these questions the unanalyzed factual data of internal experience do not suffice, but they do suffice to establish the reality of the ego or subject of thought. Later we shall see that the analysis of these data, when taken in conjunction with other facts, forces us to predicate of the soul such attributes as substantiality, simplicity, and spirituality, but here they are cited solely for their factual force and not for their logical implications.
The phenomenalistic schools of Interactionism and Psychophysical Parallelism deny the substantiality of the soul, and seek to resolve it into sourceless and subjectless processes. A phenomenal mind or soul, however, could not be the primary ground of mental life, for the simple reason that phenomena presuppose a supporting medium (otherwise they would be self-maintaining, and therefore, substantial). Now that which presupposes cannot be a primary principle, but only a secondary, or tertiary principle. Consequently, a functional mind could not be the primary and irreducible ground of mental life, but only that of which it is a function, whether that something is a material, or a spiritual substance. For the present, we are not interested in the nature of this ultimate substrate, we are content with the fact that it really exists. Phenomenalists (like Wundt, Paulsen, and James) are very inconsistent when they admit material molecules as the extended substrate of extramental or physical phenomena, while denying the existence of the mind or ego as the inextended substrate of intramental or psychic phenomena. All substance, whether material or spiritual, is inaccessible to the senses. Even material substrates are manifested only by their phenomena, being in themselves supersensible and “metaphysical.” If, then, the human understanding is inerrant in ascribing a material substrate to extramental phenomena, then it is equally inerrant in attributing to intramental phenomena the intimate substrate called mind, whether this substrate be a spiritual substance, or a material substance like the substrate of physical phenomena and that of organic life. As a matter of fact, the Psychophysical Parallelists actually do reduce mental phenomena to a material substrate (viz. the cerebral cortex). Their phenomenalism, which we will refute presently, is but a disingenuous attempt to gloss over their fundamental materialism. At all events, they are willing to admit an ultimate substantial ground of thought and volition, provided it is not claimed that this substrate is of a spiritual nature. The bare existence of some substrate, however, is all that we assert, for the present.
Before leaving this topic, we wish to call attention to the fact that the subject of thought and desire is active as well as passive. Mind, in other words, is not merely a persistent medium wherein passive mental states are maintained, but an active and synthetic principle as well. Mental processes, like those of judgment, reasoning, and recognition, require a unitary and unifying principle, which actively examines and compares our impressions and thoughts, in order to discern their relations to one another and to itself. Materialistic psychology, in spite of the plain testimony of consciousness, is all for ignoring the mind in its active rôle as the percipient of the identities and discrepancies of thought, and for regarding mind as a mere complex of mental states or transient flux of fleeting imagery. It is well, then, to bear in mind the indubitable facts of internal experience, to which Cardinal Mercier calls attention. “English psychology,” he observes, “had attempted a kind of anatomy of consciousness. It made all consist in passive sensations or impressions. These impressions came together, fused, dissociated under the guidance of certain laws, principally those of similarity and dissimilarity. The whole process was entirely passive without the intervention of any active subject. It was psychology without a soul. Now that things are being examined a little more closely, psychologists find that there are a lot of conscious states that are without the slightest doubt active on the part of the subject. There are a number of mental states upon which the subject brings his attention to bear, and attention (from ad-tendere) means activity. Ordinarily we do not know the intensity of a sensation without comparing it with another preceding one. This work of comparison, or, as the English call it, discrimination, is necessarily activity. The Associationists had confounded the fact of coëxistence with the perception of similarity or dissimilarity. Supposing even that the coëxistence of two mental states were entirely passive, it still remains true that the notion of their similarity or dissimilarity requires an act of perception. It is absolutely impossible to conceive psychical life without an active subject which perceives itself as living, notes the impressions it receives, compares its acts, associates and dissociates them; in a word, there can be no psychology without a perceiving subject which psychologists call esprit, or with the English, ‘mind.’” (Op. cit., pp. 52-54—italics his.)
The conflict between phenomenalism and the clear testimony of consciousness is summed up in the following words of T. Fontaine: “If all things are phenomena, then we ourselves can be nothing more than events unknown to one another; in order, then, that such events may appear to us united, so that we may be able to declare their succession within us, it is necessary that something else besides them should exist; and this something else, this link that binds them together, this principle that is conscious of their succession, can be nothing else than a non-event or non-phenomenon, namely, a substance, an ego substantially distinct from sensations.” (“La sensation et la pensée,” p. 23.)
For the phenomenalists, mind is but a collective term for the phenomenal series of our transitory thoughts and feelings. With Wundt, they discard the substantial or entitive soul for a dynamic or functional one, “die aktuelle Seele.” (Cf. Grundz. der Phys. Psych., ed. 5th, III, p. 758 et seq.) Thought antecedes itself by becoming its own thinker; for Titchener tells us: “The passing thought would seem to be the thinker.” (“Pr. of Psych.,” I, p. 342.) We do not think, but thought thinks; John does not walk, but walking walks; aeroplanes do not fly, but flight flies; air does not vibrate, but vibration vibrates. The phenomenalist objectivates his subjective abstractions, divorces processes from their agents, and substantializes phenomena. The source of his error is a confusion of the ideal, with the real, order of things. Because it is possible for us to consider a thought apart from any determinate thinker, by means of a mental abstraction, he very falsely concludes that it is possible for a thought to exist without a concrete thinker. It would be obviously absurd to suppose that the so-called Grignard reaction could occur without definite reactants, merely because we can think of it without specifying any particular kind of alkyl halide; it would be preposterous to infer, from the fact that vibration can be considered independently of any concrete medium such as air, water, or ether, that therefore a pure vibration can exist without any vibrating medium; and it is equally absurd to project an abstraction like subjectless thought into the realm of existent reality. Abstractions are ideal entities of the mind; they can have no real existence outside the domain of thought. Hence to assign a real or extralogical existence to actions, modalities, and properties, in isolation from the concrete subjects, to which they belong, is a procedure that is not legitimate in any other world than Alice’s Wonderland, where, we are told, the Cheshire Cat left behind his notorious grin long after his benign countenance had faded from view. His faceless grin is a fitting comment on the neo-Kantian folly of those who, as L. Chiesa says, “speak of phenomena without substance, of sensations without subject, of thoughts without the Ego, to which they belong, imitating in this way the poets, who personify honor, virtue, beauty, etc. Now all this proceeds exclusively from a confusion of the subjective abstraction with the reality, and from the assumption that the phenomenon, for example, exists without substance, because we are able (by means of abstraction) to consider the former independently of the latter.” (“La Base del Realismo,” p. 39.) In other words, the mind is capable of separating (representatively, of course, and not physically) its own phenomena from itself, but this is no warrant for transferring the abstractions thus formed from the ideal, to the real, order of things.
So much for the soul’s substantiality, but it is a simple, as well as a substantial, principle, that is to say, it is inextended, uncompounded, incorporeal, and not dispersed into quantitative parts or particles. In other words, it is not a composite of constituent elements or complex of integral parts, but something really distinct from the body and pertaining to a different order of reality than matter. This, as we have seen, does not necessarily mean that it is immaterial, in the sense of being intrinsically independent of matter. In a word, simplicity does not involve spirituality (absolute immateriality). Not only plant and animal souls, but even mineral entelechies, are simple, in the negative sense of excluding extension, corporeality and dispersal into quantitative parts, but they are, none the less, intrinsically dependent on matter and are therefore material principles.
That the soul or vital entelechy is really distinct from its material substrate is apparent from the perennial process of metabolism enacted in the living organism. In this process, matter is the variant and entelechy or specific type is the constant. Hence the two principles are not only distinct, but separable. Moreover, the soul’s rôle as a binding-principle that obstructs dissolution is incompatible with its dispersal into quantitative parts; for such a principle, far from being able to bind, would require binding itself, and could not, therefore, be the primary source of unification in the organism. Finally, the soul must be incorporeal; since, if it were a corporeal mass, it could not be “a formative power pervading the growing mass as a whole” (Wilson); for this would involve the penetration of one body by another. Consequently, the soul is a simple, inextended, incorporeal reality undispersed into quantitative parts.
Introspective psychology bears witness to the same truth; for consciousness reinforced by memory attests the substantial permanence of our personal identity. We both think and regulate our practical conduct in accordance with this sense of unchanging personal identity. All recognition of the past means simply this, that we perceive the substantial identity of our present, with our past, selves throughout all the experiences and vicissitudes of life. There is an inmost core of our being which is unchanging and which remains always identical with itself, in spite of the flow of thought and the metabolic changes of the life-cycle. It is this that gives us the sense of being always identically the same person, from infancy to maturity, and from maturity to old age. It is this that constitutes the thread of continuity which links our yesterdays with today, and makes us morally responsible for all the deliberate deeds of a lifetime. Courts of law do not acquit a criminal because he is in a different frame of mind from that which induced him to commit murder, nor do they excuse him on the score that metabolism has made him a different mass of flesh from that which perpetrated the crime. Such philosophies as phenomenalism and materialism are purely academic. Even their advocates dare not reduce them to consistent practice in everyday life.
Nor can the cases of alternating personalities be adduced as counterevidence. In the first place, these cases are psychopathic and not normal. In the second, they are due, not to a modification of personality itself, but to a modification in the perception of personality. Since this perception is, as we shall see, extrinsically dependent on cerebral imagery, any neuropathic affection is liable to modify the perception of personality by seriously disturbing the imagery, on which it depends. But (pace Wundt and James) the perception of personality is one thing, and personality itself quite another. Perception does not produce its objects, but presupposes them, and self-perception is no exception to this rule. Introspection, therefore, does not create our personality, but reveals and represents it. If then to the intuition of consciousness our personality appears as an unchanging principle that remains always substantially identical with itself, it follows that this perception must be terminated by something more durable than a flux of transient molecules or a stream of fleeting thought. Unless this perceptive act has for its object some unitary and uniformly persistent reality distinct from our composite, corruptible bodies, and not identified with our transitory thoughts, this sense of permanent personal identity would be utterly impossible. Materialism, which recognizes nothing more in man than a decaying organism, a mere vortex of fluent molecules, is at a loss to account for our consciousness of being always the same person. Phenomenalism, which identifies mind or self with the “thought-stream,” is equally impotent to account for this sense of our abiding sameness.
James’ attempt at a phenomenalistic explanation of the persistent continuity of self, on the assumption that each passing thought knows its receding predecessor and becomes known, in turn, by its successor, is puerile. To pass over other flaws, this absurd theory encounters an insuperable difficulty in sleep, which interrupts, for a considerable interval, the flow of conscious thought. Thought is a transient reality, which passes, so far as its actuality is concerned, and can only remain in the form of a permanent effect. Unless, therefore, there were some persistent medium in which the last waking thought could leave a permanent vestige of itself, the process of relaying the past could never be resumed, and we would lose our personal identity every twenty-four hours. The mind, or subject of thought, then, must be an abiding and unitary principle distinct from our composite bodies, and from our manifold and fleeting thoughts.