The Nature of Goodness

by George Herbert Palmer

Just above our unconscious mental modifications appear the reflex actions, or instincts. Here experience is translated into action before it reaches consciousness; that is, though the actions accomplish intelligent ends, there is no previous knowledge of the ends to be accomplished. A flash of light falls on my eye, and the lid closes. It seems a wise act. The brilliant light is too fierce. It might damage the delicate organ. Prudently, therefore, I draw the small curtain until the light has gone, then raise it and resume communication with the outer world. My action seems planned for protection. In reality there was no plan. Probably enough I did not perceive the flash; the lid, at any rate, would close equally well if I did not. In falling from a height I do not decide to sacrifice my arms rather than my body, and accordingly stretch them out. They stretch themselves, without intention on my part. How anything so blind yet so sagacious can occur will become clearer if we take an illustration from a widely different field.

To-day we are all a good deal dependent on the telephone; though, not being a patient man, I can seldom bring myself to use it. It has one irritating feature, the central office, or perhaps I might more accurately say, the central office girl. Whenever I try to communicate with my friend, I must first call up the central office, as it is briefly called and longly executed. Not until attention there has been with difficulty obtained can I come into connection with my friend; for through a human consciousness at that mediating point every message must pass. In that central office are accordingly three necessary things; viz., an incoming wire, a consciousness, and an outgoing wire; and I am helpless till all these three have been brought into cooperation. Really I have often thought life too short for the performance of such tasks. And apparently our Creator thought so at the beginning, when in contriving machinery for us he dispensed with the hindering factor of a central office operator. For applied to our previous example of a flash of light, the incoming message corresponds to the sensuous report of the flash, the outgoing message to the closure of the eye, and the unfortunate central office girl has disappeared. The afferent nerve reports directly to the efferent, without passing the message through consciousness. A fortune awaits him who will contrive a similar improvement for the telephone. A special sound sent into the switch-box must automatically, and without human intervention, oblige an indicated wire to take up the uttered words. The continuous arc thus established, without employment of the at present necessary girl, will exactly represent the exquisite machinery of reflex action which each of us bears about in his own brain. Here, as in our improved telephone, the announcement itself establishes the connections needful for farther transmission, without employing the judgment of any operating official.

By such means power is economized and action becomes extremely swift and sure. Promptness, too, being of the utmost importance for protective purposes, creatures which are rich in such instincts have a large practical advantage over those who lack them. It is often assumed that brutes alone are instinctive, and that man must deliberate over each occasion. But this is far from the fact. Probably at birth man has as many instincts as any other animal. And though as consciousness awakes and takes control, some of these become unnecessary and fall away, new ones—as will hereafter be shown—are continually established, and by them the heavy work of life is for the most part performed. Personal goodness cannot be rightly understood till we perceive how it is superposed on a broad reflex mechanism.

IV

But higher in the personal life than unconsciousness, higher than the reflex instincts, are the conscious experiences. By these, we for the first time became aware of what is going on within us and without. Messages sent from the outer world are stopped at a central office established in consciousness, looked over, and deciphered. We judge whether they require to be sent in one direction or another, or whether we may not rest in their simple cognizance. Every moment we receive a multitude of such messages. They are not always called for, but they come of themselves. My hand carelessly falling on the table reports in terms of touch. A person near me laughs, and I must hear. I see the flowers on the table; smell reports them too; while taste declares their leaves to be bitter and pungent. All this time the inner organs, with the processes of breathing, blood circulation, and nervous action, are announcing their acute or massive experiences. Continually, and not by our own choice, our minds are affected by the transactions around. Sensations occur—

"The eye, it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will."

These itemized experiences thus pouring in upon our passive selves are found to vary endlessly also in degree, time, and locality. Through such variations indeed they become itemized. "Therefore is space and therefore time," says Emerson, "that men may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and divisible."

V

Have we not, then, here reached the highest point of personal life, self-consciousness? No, that is a peak higher still, for this is but consciousness. Undoubtedly from consciousness self-consciousness grows, often appearing by degrees and being extremely difficult to discriminate. Yet the two are not the same. Possibly in marking the contrast between them I may be able to gain the collateral advantage of ridding myself of those disturbers of ethical discussion, the brutes. Whenever I am nearing an explanation of some moral intricacy one of my students is sure to come forward with a dog and to ask whether what I have said shows that dog to be a moral and responsible being. So I like to watch afar and banish the brutes betimes. Perhaps if I bestow a little attention on them at present, I may keep the creatures out of my pages for the future.

Many writers maintain that brutes differ from us precisely in this particular, that while they possess consciousness they have not self- consciousness. A brute, they say, has just such experiences as I have been describing: he tastes, smells, hears, sees, touches. All this he may do with greater intensity and precision than we. But he is entirely wrapped up in these separate sensations. The single experience holds his attention. He knows no other self than that; or, strictly speaking, he knows no self at all. It is the experience he knows, and not himself the experiencer. We say, "The cat feels herself warm;" but is it quite so? Does she feel herself, or does she feel warm? Which? If we may trust the writers to whom I have referred, we ought rather to say, "The cat feels warm" than that "she feels herself warm;" for this latter statement implies a distinction of which she is in no way aware. She does not set off her passing moods in contrast to a self who might be warm or cold, active or idle, hungry or satiated. The experience of the instant occupies her so entirely that in reality the cat ceases to be a cat and becomes for the moment just warm. So it is in all her seeming activities. When she chases a mouse we rightly say, "She is chasing a mouse," for then she is nothing else. Such a state of things is at least conceivable. We can imagine momentary experiences to be so engrossing that the animal is exclusively occupied with them, unable to note connections with past and future, or even with herself, their perceiver. Through very fullness of Consciousness brutes may be lacking in self-consciousness.