The ethics of Hercules

by Robert Chenault Givler

The Rise of Mechanistic Psychology

Ever since William James employed the phrase “the stream of thought” to describe mental phenomena, the whole trend of psychology has been altered. Not only did the wide-spread use of that phrase result in the giving up of many traditional beliefs in regard to things mental, but it also stimulated the most profitable investigations in psychological science. One of the most ancient of the beliefs which it demolished was the belief in Ideas as eternal, external, and immutable. According to the notion of a stream of consciousness (itself a variable conception), ideas are sensory images which show individual variations, which never are exactly repeated, and which have meaning only when they refer or lead to some concrete reality. This view, which finally replaced the ancient Platonic conception, is now held by practically all psychologists. Moreover, the influence of James’ teaching was such as to show that will, intellect, feeling, and the like were not separable parts of a mind (i. e., faculties) which were capable of acting independently, but were merely handy words to indicate the various qualities of the stream of thought. The stream flows swiftly,—call that impulsiveness; it flows again broadly and deeply with many glancing eddies,—call that deliberation; it flows once more with swift descent and foam,—call that strong feeling. Nevertheless, the stream of thought is one stream, and mental phenomena one and all specify its labile and fluid consistency. And now let us see to what further developments this striking conception has led.

Obviously, the astute, enquiring person at once asks, “What makes this stream of thought? To what is its flowing character due?” At first it might seem that one must despair of any satisfactory reply. One feels as did William Harvey, almost hopeless in his quest after the secret of the circulation of the blood. But just as Harvey boldly experimented with his eye on the critical features of his problem, so have a multitude of keen investigators devised test after test to discover the laws of mental phenomena. And while we cannot yet say that “Science has laid her doomful hand” upon all of the intricate secrets of mind, nevertheless, it is becoming more and more certain that the stream of thought is just as much a bodily function as is the breath-stream and the blood-stream. Strangely enough, this conception is not brand-new. It was Aristotle who said, “If the eye were an organism, vision would be its soul.” Similar thinking is revealed in our modern view that mind is a function of the body, and that it depends upon the body for its existence. It “is generated by the body as the result of its immediate contacts with the environment, in much the same way as electricity may be generated by a turbine that has been placed in the midst of a tumbling waterfall.” Moreover, the stream-like character of thought, the play of feeling, the linger and strain of deliberation and expectation are due to the manner in which the storage battery of the brain releases energy, and to the way in which the muscles and glands transform it. William James wrote in 1890, “All consciousness is motor,” that is, it is dependent upon the expression mechanisms of the body; and today we have demonstrated the fundamental rôle of the muscles and glands of the body in “the transformation of the common energies of nature into the special energies of mind.”

It can be seen at once that such a philosophy of mind furnishes the most striking and far-reaching ethical implications. If what we call our mental life turns out upon close inspection to be dependent upon bodily functions, it follows that conduct and thought differ only in the degree to which the body is excited to activity (molar motion). In a word, conduct is overt (visible), while thought is covert (invisible), behavior. Edwin Holt, in the “Freudian Wish,” speaks of thought (‘wish’ as he terms it there) as “a course of action which the living body executes or is prepared to execute with regard to some object or some fact of the environment.” (pp. 56-7.) John Dewey voices a similar tendency in his “Human Nature and Conduct” when he says that bodily habits do our thinking. (Italics mine.) “The habit of walking is expressed in what a man sees when he keeps still, even in dreams.” (p. 37.) Thus the old idols are tumbled to the ground. Over the doorway of the Germanic Museum at Harvard is the inscription: “Es ist der Geist der sich den Koerper baut.” Complete reversal of such an animistic and subjectivistic sentiment is proposed by Dewey when he declares that a man stands erect, not because he wills to, but because he can. His willing is the result, and not the cause, of the muscular contractions which elevate the chest and keep it convex. The old dualism of mind and body, and the older superstition that mind rules matter, have both received their death-blows. In their place a complete mechanistic philosophy is now securely enthroned. It would thus seem likely that a natural history of virtue will not long hence be written.

Of all the vexed questions which psychologists have had to answer, perhaps none is more difficult than the question as to the place of language in the mental economy. What is language for? How did it originate? What is its relation to thinking? To overt activity? It is at once apparent that the answers to these questions are highly important to ethics, since the words good and bad, right and wrong, and the like, play such a prominent rôle in our judgments upon our fellow-men. Neither does it seem possible to understand why we employ these pairs of antonyms until we know what the single terms of the pairs signify. And while it will require several of the following chapters to give a satisfactory answer to some of the above questions, it is readily agreed that our judgments of value are employed principally for two purposes:—(1) to sort out some of the objects of the environment, e. g., by calling these good and those bad, etc., and (2) to indicate to other persons what kind of behavior is to be expected of us with regard to the objects thus designated. That is our common experience. If a man calls a shop a good shop, his future behavior toward it can be predicted. If he calls his neighbor vicious he can be expected not to leave his wheelbarrow or his lawn-mower out at night. Moreover, if we know what sort of things a man calls bad, virtuous, or right, his whole social philosophy can be plotted from the data provided by these particular judgments. To state it briefly, speech becomes an instrument for the transmission of meanings. Before we proceed further, let us see just what this involves in terms of bodily mechanisms.

A Mechanistic Interpretation of the Meaning of Words

To the superficial observer of a man who declares that something is cheap, or beautiful, or good, the sight of his lips moving and the sound of the words as they are produced might appear to be the whole phenomenon. Nevertheless, if anyone were to look carefully behind the scenes of this performance, one would find a much more elaborate play being enacted than is apparent on the surface. Just as we know now from the findings of the physiologist that when the eye sees, far more structures than the retina are affected, and just as we are now certain that when the ear hears, many more organs than the ear-drum and cochlea take part in the response to the stimulus, so we are convinced that when the words we speak have a meaning, a neuro-muscular drama of a very elaborate character is being silently performed within our skin.

Novelists and story-tellers of all ages seem to have intuited this truth in their portrayal of human emotions. They speak of “pent-up anger,” of “stifled sorrow,” and they describe often in minute detail the course of a passion that in seeking to get adequate expression causes the face to flush, the hand to clench, or the body as a whole to be violently agitated. The Iliad and the Odyssey abound in descriptions of this sort, and every novelist since the days of Homer has felt the need of such portrayals in order to make his characters understood. Indeed, the cultivation of this technique is the essence of dramatic art. But mark, that such emotions are aroused not only when a person is confronted by the physical facts of battle, murder, or sudden death, for example, but also by the bare mention of the words or phrases which appropriately describe such catastrophes. The more carefully such a person is observed, the plainer will it become that the agitation which his body is covertly manifesting would, if it were unhindered in its free expression, result in an elaborate pantomine appropriate to the events described by the story-teller. In other words, the emotions which a thrilling narrative arouses are substitutes for the overt activity which the auditor might be expected to manifest were he actually a participant in the scene described. When, then, we say that a dramatic situation moves us, the description is absolutely accurate. Indeed, from the most credible scientific evidence we possess, the emotions which are thus aroused are characterized by all the organic stresses and strains which are present in the most violent overt activity of which we are capable. We inwardly writhe and tussle, we half-start one kind of positive behavior, only to find it checked by the initiation of its opposite,—in a word, we display on a small scale all the conduct appropriate to the situation. And this elaborate arousal to activity is, we undertake to say, precisely what gives every dramatic scene or narrative its meaning.

Dr. George W. Crile has coined the appropriate phrase “action-pattern” to describe the mechanism involved in the cases just cited. Crile’s “action-pattern” is, indeed, practically identical with Holt’s “specific response,” and with Titchener’s “motor set,” of which phrases the latter two are today familiar to most students of psychology. Briefly, this action-pattern is simply a more or less fixed way in which some part of the body produces a movement. It depends principally upon the physical structure of the part, as well as upon its muscle and nerve supply, and secondly upon the habits of movement which external stimuli have repeatedly produced in it. Thus every healthy leg has acquired the action-patterns of walking and running, and some legs have in addition the patterns of kicking, or of “stepping on the gas” in open level country. What we call the most skilful parts of the body are those which have the greatest number of action-patterns. The hands, lips, eyes, and tongue could on this point be properly called the reservoirs of intelligence. Certainly in the evolution of man they have played the strategical part. Moreover, it is supposedly these action-patterns, these habits of movement, which are aroused whenever we are said to remember or imagine, to cogitate or ponder; and this is, I take it, what Dewey implies when he says that bodily habits do our thinking. I have elsewhere shown[2] how one action-pattern of the human hand performs yeoman service in this respect, and it would not be difficult to demonstrate that every action-pattern is capable of generating a multitude of thoughts. When, then, we say that a novelist or poet has portrayed a moving, tragic scene, we shall now understand that he has re-aroused in us bodily habits which we started to acquire when we first became acquainted with grief.

While we do not claim that all cases of meaning involve such wide-spread and imperative bodily disturbances as those which occur in connection with tragic or erotic situations, it is nevertheless a valid inference that words which stimulate us to no activity whatsoever mean nothing to us. Certain it is, at least, that the more meaningful or significant any word is, the more does it stir up latent tendencies to action throughout our whole organism. Political and religious slogans are telling examples of this. “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!” “Remember the Maine!” and “For God, for Country, and for Yale!” have been for some persons phrases of the maximal philosophic content. Moreover, the same word may arouse different meanings (or action-patterns) in different people, depending not only on how the word is spoken, but also on the mood of the auditor. It is a matter of common observation that the shout of “Fire!” calls forth by no means the same responses from an insured landlord as it evokes from an uninsured tenant, while the mention of water will stimulate one sort of reflex action in a thirsty man, and quite another sort in a man who has just been rescued from drowning.