An Introduction to Philosophy

by George Stuart Fullerton

(1) There can be no doubt that he refers the mind to the body in some way, although he may shake his head over the use of the word "in."

(2) As to whether the mind acts and reacts with matter, in any sense of the words analogous to that in which they are commonly used, there is a division in the camp. Some affirm such interaction; some deny it. The matter will be discussed in the next chapter.

(3) The psychologist—the more modern one—inclines to repudiate any substance or substratum of the sort accepted in the Middle Ages and believed in by many men now. To him the mind is the whole complex of mental phenomena in their interrelations. In other words, the mind is not an unknown and indescribable something that is merely inferred; it is something revealed in consciousness and open to observation.

(4) The psychologist is certainly not inclined to regard the mind or any idea belonging to it as material or as extended. But he does recognize implicitly, if not explicitly, that ideas are composite. To him, as to the plain man, the image held in the memory or imagination seems to be extended, and he can distinguish its parts. He does not do much towards clearing away the difficulty alluded to at the close of the last section. It remains for the metaphysician to do what he can with it, and to him we must turn if we wish light upon this obscure subject.

34. THE METAPHYSICIAN AND THE MIND.—I have reserved for the next chapter the first two points mentioned as belonging to the plain man's doctrine of the mind. In what sense the mind may be said to be in the body, and how it may be conceived to be related to the body, are topics that deserve to be treated by themselves in a chapter on "Mind and Body." Here I shall consider what the metaphysician has to say about the mind as substance, and about the mind as nonextended and immaterial.

It has been said that the Lockian substance is really an "unknowable." No one pretends to have experience of it; it is revealed to no sense; it is, indeed, a name for a mere nothing, for when we abstract from a thing, in thought, every single quality, we find that there is left to us nothing whatever.

We cannot say that the substance, in this sense of the word, is the reality of which the qualities are appearances. In Chapter V we saw just what we may legitimately mean by realities and appearances, and it was made clear that an unknowable of any sort cannot possibly be the reality to which this or that appearance is referred. Appearances and realities are experiences which are observed to be related in certain ways. That which is not open to observation at all, that of which we have, and can have, no experience, we have no reason to call the reality of anything. We have, in truth, no reason to talk about it at all, for we know nothing whatever about it; and when we do talk about it, it is because we are laboring under a delusion.

This is equally true whether we are concerned with the substance of material things or with the substance of minds. An "unknowable" is an "unknowable" in any case, and we may simply discard it. We lose nothing by so doing, for one cannot lose what one has never had, and what, by hypothesis, one can never have. The loss of a mere word should occasion us no regret.

Now, we have seen that we do not lose the world of real material things in rejecting the "Unknowable" (Chapter V). The things are complexes of qualities, of physical phenomena; and the more we know about these, the more do we know about real things.

But we have also seen (Chapter IV) that physical phenomena are not the only phenomena of which we have experience. We are conscious of mental phenomena as well, of the phenomena of the subjective order, of sensations and ideas. Why not admit that these constitute the mind, as physical phenomena constitute the things which belong to the external world?