Life and Matter: A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's "Riddle of the Universe"

by Sir Oliver Lodge

The mode in which biological speculation as to the probable development of living out of dead matter, and the general relation of protoplasm to physics and chemistry, can be surmised or provisionally granted, without thereby concurring in any destructive criticism of other facts and experiences, is explained in Chapter X. on "Life," further on: and there I emphasise my agreement with parts of the speculative contentions of Professor Haeckel on the positive side.

Soul and Body.

Let us consider what are the facts scientifically known concerning the interaction between mind and matter. Fundamentally they amount to this: that a complex piece of matter, called the brain, is the organ or instrument of mind and consciousness; that if it be stimulated mental activity results; that if it be injured or destroyed no manifestation of mental activity is possible. Moreover, it is assumed, and need not be doubted, that a portion of brain substance is consumed, oxidised let us say, in every act of mentation: using that term in the vaguest and most general sense, and including in it unconscious as well as conscious operations.

Suppose we grant all this, what then? We have granted that brain is the means whereby mind is made manifest on this material plane, it is the instrument through which alone we know it, but we have not granted that mind is limited to its material manifestation; nor can we maintain that without matter the things we call mind, intelligence, consciousness, have no sort of existence. Mind may be incorporate or incarnate in matter, but it may also transcend it; it is through the region of ideas and the intervention of mind that we have become aware of the existence of matter. It is injudicious to discard our primary and fundamental awareness for what is after all an instinctive inference or interpretation of certain sensations.

The realities underlying those sensations are only known to us by inference, but they have an independent existence: in their inmost nature they may be quite other than what they seem, and are in no way dependent upon our perception of them. So, also, our actual personality may be something considerably unlike that conception of it which is based on our present terrestrial consciousness—a form of consciousness suited to, and developed by, our temporary existence here, but not necessarily more than a fraction of our total self.

Take an analogy: the eye is the organ of vision; by it we perceive light. Stimulate the retina in any way, and we are conscious of the sensation of light; injure or destroy the eye, and vision becomes imperfect or impossible. If eyes did not exist we should probably know nothing about light, and we might be tempted to say that light did not exist. In a sense, to a blind race, light would not exist—that is to say, there would be no sensation of light, there would be no sight; but the underlying physical cause of that sensation—the ripples in the ether—would be there all the time. And it is these ethereal ripples which a physicist understands by the term "light." It is quite conceivable that a race of blind physicists would be able to devise experimental means whereby they could make experiments on what to us is luminous radiation, just as we now make experiments on electric waves, for which we have no sense organ. It would be absurd for a psychologist to inform them that light did not exist because sight did not. The term might have to be reconsidered and redefined; indeed, most likely a polysyllabic term would be employed, as is unfortunately usual when a thing of which the race in general has no intimate knowledge requires nomenclature. But the thing would be there, though its mode of manifestation would be different; a term like "vision" might still be employed, to signify our mode of perceiving and experiencing the agency which now manifests itself to us through our eyes; and plants might grow by the aid of that agency just as they do now.

So, also, brain is truly the organ of mind and consciousness, and to a brainless race these terms, and all other terms, would be meaningless; but no one is at liberty to assert, on the strength of that fact, that the realities underlying our use of those terms have no existence apart from terrestrial brains. Nor can we say with any security that the stuff called "brain" is the only conceivable machinery which they are able to utilise: though it is true that we know of no other. Yet it would seem that such a proposition must be held by a materialist, or by what can be implied by the term "monist," used in its narrowest and most unphilosophic sense—a sense which would be better expressed by the term materialistic-monist, with a limitation of the term matter to the terrestrial chemical elements and their combinations, i.e., to that form of substance to which the human race has grown accustomed—a sense which tends to exclude ethereal and other generalisations and unknown possibilities such as would occur to a philosophic monist of the widest kind.

For that it may ultimately be discovered that there is some intimate and necessary connection between a generalised form of matter and some lofty variety of mind is not to be denied; though also it cannot be asserted. It has been surmised, for instance, that just as the corpuscles and atoms of matter, in their intricate movements and relations, combine to form the brain cell of a human being; so the cosmic bodies, the planets and suns and other groupings of the ether, may perhaps combine to form something corresponding as it were to the brain cell of some transcendent Mind. The idea is to be found in Newton. The thing is a mere guess, it is not an impossibility, and it cannot be excluded from a philosophic system by any negative statement based on scientific fact. In some such sense as that, matter and mind may be, for all we know, eternally and necessarily connected; they can be different aspects of some fundamental unity; and a lofty kind of monism can be true, just as a lofty kind of pantheism can be true. But the miserable degraded monism and lower pantheism, which limits the term "god" to that part of existence of which we are now aware—sometimes, indeed, to a fraction only of that—which limits the term "mind" to that of which we are ourselves conscious, and the term "matter" to the dust of the earth and the other visible bodies, is a system of thought appropriate, perhaps, to a fertile and energetic portion of the nineteenth century, but not likely to survive as a system of perennial truth.

The term "organ" itself should have given pause to anyone desirous of promulgating a scheme such as that.

"Organ" is a name popularly given to an instrument of music. Without it, or some other instrument, no material manifestation or display of music is possible; it is an instrument for the incarnation of music—the means whereby it interacts with the material world and throws the air and so our ears into vibration, it is the means whereby we apprehend it. Injure the organ and the music is imperfect; destroy it and it ceases to be possible. But is it to be asserted on the strength of that fact that the term "music" has no significance apart from its material manifestation? Have the ideas of Sir Edward Elgar no reality apart from their record on paper and reproduction by an orchestra? It is true that without suitable instruments and a suitable sense organ we should know nothing of music, but it cannot be supposed that its underlying essence would be therefore extinct or non-existent and meaningless. Can there not be in the universe a multitude of things which matter as we know it is incompetent to express? Is it not the complaint of every genius that his material is intractable, that it is difficult to coerce matter as he knows it into the service of mind as he is conscious of it, and that his conceptions transcend his powers of expression?