An Introduction to Philosophy

by George Stuart Fullerton

III. PROBLEMS TOUCHING THE MIND

CHAPTER VIII

WHAT IS THE MIND?

30. PRIMITIVE NOTIONS OF MIND.—The soul or mind, that something to which we refer sensations and ideas of all sorts, is an object that men do not seem to know very clearly and definitely, though they feel so sure of its existence that they regard it as the height of folly to call it in question. That he has a mind, no man doubts; what his mind is, he may be quite unable to say.

We have seen (section 7) that children, when quite young, can hardly be said to recognize that they have minds at all. This does not mean that what is mental is not given in their experience. They know that they must open their eyes to see things, and must lay their hands upon them to feel them; they have had pains and pleasures, memories and fancies. In short, they have within their reach all the materials needed in framing a conception of the mind, and in drawing clearly the distinction between their minds and external things. Nevertheless, they are incapable of using these materials; their attention is engrossed with what is physical,—with their own bodies and the bodies of others, with the things that they can eat, with the toys with which they can play, and the like. It is only later that there emerges even a tolerably clear conception of a self or mind different from the physical and contrasted with it.

Primitive man is almost as material in his thinking as is the young child. Of this we have traces in many of the words which have come to be applied to the mind. Our word "spirit" is from the Latin spiritus, originally a breeze. The Latin word for the soul, the word used by the great philosophers all through the Middle Ages, anima (Greek, anemos), has the same significance. In the Greek New Testament, the word used for spirit (pneuma) carries a similar suggestion. When we are told in the Book of Genesis that "man became a living soul," we may read the word literally "a breath."

What more natural than that the man who is just awakening to a consciousness of that elusive entity the mind should confuse it with that breath which is the most striking outward and visible sign that distinguishes a living man from a dead one?

That those who first tried to give some scientific account of the soul or mind conceived it as a material thing, and that it was sufficiently common to identify it with the breath, we know from direct evidence. A glance at the Greek philosophy, to which we owe so much that is of value in our intellectual life, is sufficient to disclose how difficult it was for thinking men to attain to a higher conception.

Thus, Anaximenes of Miletus, who lived in the sixth century before Christ, says that "our soul, which is air, rules us." A little later, Heraclitus, a man much admired for the depth of his reflections, maintains that the soul is a fiery vapor, evidently identifying it with the warm breath of the living creature. In the fifth century, B.C., Anaxagoras, who accounts for the ordering of the elements into a system of things by referring to the activity of Mind or Reason, calls mind "the finest of things," and it seems clear that he did not conceive of it as very different in nature from the other elements which enter into the constitution of the world.

Democritus of Abdera (between 460 and 360 B.C.), that great investigator of nature and brilliant writer, developed a materialistic doctrine that admits the existence of nothing save atoms and empty space. He conceived the soul to consist of fine, smooth, round atoms, which are also atoms of fire. These atoms are distributed through the whole body, but function differently in different places—in the brain they give us thought, in the heart, anger, and in the liver, desire. Life lasts just so long as we breathe in and breathe out such atoms.