Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

By the ego of which he treats, I understand him to mean all that we can arrive at by an analysis of what takes place in the body and its functions, and of "what is given in consciousness." This phrase—"what is given in consciousness"—reveals to us his purpose to reduce consciousness from a self-conviction and cognition of one's own existence to a mere passing group of feelings, which constitute "the ever-changing states of consciousness" that we "call mind." So that, when we speak of mind, we mean and can mean nothing more than certain states of feeling produced in our brains by perpetually changing impressions. We do not and can not mean that there is a person who perceives and holds ideas suggested by external objects through the action of his nervous system. All that we know about any ego, any mental I, is that there is a physical structure, pervaded by certain physical forces, that produce "consecutive states," which Mr. Spencer calls "mental states"; and the aggregate of the feelings and ideas which thus constitute the mental states is the only ego of which any continued existence can be predicated. But even these aggregates of feelings and ideas have, according to this philosopher, no principle of cohesion holding them together as a whole; and, therefore, all that we can assume as having any continuously surviving and durable existence is the changing states produced by the action through us of a certain unknowable power, statically conditioned in our nervous organism, which is pervaded by a dynamically conditioned portion of that unknowable power which is operating everywhere in nature, and is called "energy."[149]

So far as this theory is based upon the existence of a physical organism, whose functions liberate from the food supplied to it certain forces, which are distributed by the activities of the organism, we may accept it as a statement of what actually takes place in the form of physical phenomena. But when we follow the physical phenomena of the diffused energy into its action upon the brain, by the transmission of an impulse, we must stop with the effect of that impulse upon a corporeal organ, or we must go further and find a something which receives into itself and appropriates to itself the idea the elements of which the impulse has transmitted. The presence of that something in ourselves may be illustrated by its absence from a mechanism in which we know that it does not exist, but which appears superficially to be animated by an intelligent principle possessing volition. We stand, for example, before one of those automatic machines which perform actions that seem to be guided by a living spirit. They are mere physical organisms, constructed without the principle of life that inhabits animal organisms, but they are so admirably contrived for the production of certain limited but complex movements that they suggest the presence of a spiritual being acting as we ourselves act. But the least reflection upon what we see makes us aware that there is nothing before us but a mechanical organism, in which the artisan who made it has availed himself of certain forces of nature and properties of matter, whereby he uses a portion of the energy that pervades the universe. There is nothing within the machine to which this energy communicates ideas that are to be the subject of its future voluntary operation. All is comprehended in a fixed mechanical operation of certain machinery, and, when we have analyzed and understood the physical phenomena, we can follow them no further, because there is no translation of the physical energy into mental phenomena. But in ourselves there is such a translation, and we must follow it into the mental phenomena. So following it, we find ourselves in the presence of a something which has a self-conscious individuality, and which, by a mysterious bond of connection, is so united with a physical organism that it is capable of receiving, appropriating, and preserving the ideas which the physical organism was designed to produce in it.

My objection to Mr. Spencer's system of psychology may be summed up in what I shall now say upon his chief position, which is that "an idea is the psychical side of what, on its physical side, is an involved set of molecular changes, propagated through an involved set of nervous plexuses." Translated into what I take to be his meaning, the assertion, or hypothesis, is this: An idea is the mental cognition of an external object, as, for example, a tree. When we are looking at or thinking of a tree, we have a mental cognition of a tree; and this idea of a tree is said to be the psychical side of that which on its physical side has been transmitted to our brain by molecular changes through our visual nerves. The idea of the tree is the psychical correlative of a wave of molecular motion diffused through our organs of vision; and the conception of a tree thus becomes a possible conception. But why did not the learned philosopher follow the wave of molecular motion until he found the impression of the object which the visual organs have transmitted to the brain, or the nerve-center, translated into a thought by an intelligent being, capable, by its own organization, of having that thought? Why does he speak of an idea as the psychical side of what, on its physical side, is one and the same thing? Obviously, because he meant to ignore the psychical or mental existence as an independent existence, or as any existence at all. Now, there is no way in which the psychical side and the physical side can be bridged over, excepting by the hypothesis that the mind is an entity of a peculiar nature, different in structure from the bodily organism, but capable, by the connection between them, of receiving and transmuting into thought the impressions which the waves of molecular motion transmit to the brain from the external object. To say that the set of plexuses, or networks, which hold together the waves of molecular motion, constitute the potentiality of the idea and make possible future ideas like it, explains nothing. The potentiality of the idea, or the possibility of ideas like it, depends upon the existence of a something which is capable of conceiving the idea, holding it, and reproducing it to itself, after the waves of molecular motion cease. I call this a process of translation, or transmutation, because there is no other convenient term for it. It is a process analogous to the physical assimilation of food by the organs of physical digestion, with this difference, however, that the action of the mental organism in the assimilation of ideas is the action of a spiritual and intellectual organism upon materials that are brought within its reach by the means of communication with the external world afforded by the physical senses and the nervous system. The image of the tree produced upon the retina of the eye by the lines of light that proceed from every point of that object is the food which the mind assimilates and transmutes into the idea of the tree; and this may remain as a permanent mental perception or cognition, although the object itself may have been seen but once. If seen many times, the various aspects in which it has been seen are transmuted into so many distinct ideas. If many kinds of trees, of different shapes and dimensions, have been seen, the varieties become a part of our consciousness in the several degrees of their precise resemblances and differences which we happen to have observed, when the different impressions were produced upon the retina. Can there be any doubt that this is the process by which the infant begins to acquire ideas of external objects, and that, as adolescence goes on and the powers of sense expand with the growth and exercise of the physical organs, there is a corresponding growth and expansion of the mental powers?

This hypothesis of the progress of mental growth, paris passibus with the growth of the physical organism, brings me to the consideration of one of those specimens of Mr. Spencer's peculiar logic, in a passage in which he undertakes to disprove the existence of mind as anything more than what he calls the psychical side of physical impressions. He is treating of the impossibility of our "knowing" anything about the substance of mind; and he propounds this impossibility in the following logical formula:

...To know anything is to distinguish it as such or such—to class it as of this or that order. An object is said to be but little known when it is alien to objects of which we have had experience; and it is said to be well known when there is great community of attributes between it and objects of which we have had experience. Hence, by implication, an object is completely known when this recognized community is complete; and completely unknown when there is no recognized community at all. Manifestly, then, the smallest conceivable degree of knowledge implies at least two things between which some community is recognized. But, if so, how can we know the substance of mind? To know the substance of mind is to be conscious of some community between it and some other substance. If, with the idealist, we say that there exists no other substance, then, necessarily, as there is nothing with which the substance of mind can be even compared, much less assimilated, it remains unknown; while, if we hold with the realist that being is fundamentally divisible into that which is present to us as mind, and that which, lying outside of it, is not mind, then, as this proposition itself asserts a difference and not a likeness, it is equally clear that mind remains unclassable and therefore unknowable.

The answer to this supposed insuperable dilemma may be made by determining what we mean when we speak of knowing a thing. Definition of knowing is here essential, and the first inquiry we have to make is whether, in order to know mind, it is necessary to find and recognize some community between the substance of mind and some other substance? The statement is, on the one hand, that there exists no other substance with which the substance of mind can be compared, much less assimilated, and therefore there is no aid to be derived from resemblance; or, on the other hand, that, if being is fundamentally divisible into something which is mind and something which is not mind, we depend for a knowledge of mind on a difference, and not on a likeness, and we have no means of knowing that difference. Upon either proposition, mind remains unclassable and therefore unknowable.

It may be conceded that our knowledge of the properties and forms of matter consists in recognizing a community or a difference between things which belong to the same class, so that there is a comparison between things which are of the same substance. But what is to prevent us from classifying the substance of mind, when the fundamental idea of its substance is that it is something which resembles no other substance, but constitutes a class or description of being that stands entirely by itself, and in which, for a knowledge of its properties we distinguish its properties from those of any other substance? The only difficulty that arises here springs from the fact that we have but one word—substance—by which to speak of the two existences that we call mind and matter; just as we can only speak of an organism when we speak of the natural body and the spiritual body. But this use of the same term to express things which in our consciousness stand fundamentally opposed to each other does not prevent us from discriminating between the means by which we become conscious of the two things, or from classifying the knowledge which we have of mind as something distinct from the knowledge which we have of matter.

We must discriminate between the means by which the properties of matter become known to us and the means by which the properties of mind become known to us. In both cases there is knowledge, but it is knowledge of a different kind; it is obtained by different means; and we must therefore recognize a fundamental difference between the substance of mind and the substance of matter. It is true that our knowledge of the properties of matter and our knowledge of the properties of mind are alike in this, that in both cases it is knowledge by one and the same person; but the distinction is that, in the one case, I have knowledge of objects external to myself, and, in the other case, I have knowledge of myself as the person possessing knowledge of external objects. The knowledge that we have of ourselves is what most persons mean by consciousness, and it is what we should scientifically understand by that term, although consciousness is often used as synonymous with mental cognition of things external to ourselves, and as cognition of ourselves also.

I shall now quote from the chapter in which Mr. Spencer makes a special synthesis of reason, and in which he denies the existence of the commonly assumed hiatus between reason and instinct, maintaining that the former is the continuation of the latter, because, as he thinks, the highest forms of psychical activity arise little by little out of the lowest and can not be separated from them. The passage which I shall now analyze is this:

"Here seems to be the fittest place for pointing out how the general doctrine that has been developed supplies a reconciliation between the experience-hypothesis as commonly interpreted and the hypothesis which the transcendentalists oppose to it.