Our discussion has thus plunged us into the intricate question of the relations of mind and matter, and we must pause to dwell on it for a while.
What is matter? Nobody can tell. It is that which resists when we push against it—a tactile or muscular sensation. It is that of which two portions cannot occupy the same space at the same time—a visual sensation. It is the source of certain sensations; and the most recent physical investigations points to its being composed of innumerable centres of force. But force manifesting itself in orderly and harmonious fashion is Reason. If, then, Reason is at the base of things, Matter ceases to be a bogey.
Still the fact remains that it is not I and it is not You, and the real cogency of the physiological argument against Free Will and the soul (which, as we saw, must stand or fall together) is that something done, perhaps by mere accident, to this Not-me, can, it appears, powerfully influence and change the Me in spite of all the will I can exert to the contrary. The fact that I, the innermost I, can be got at through my brain, means philosophically exactly the same as the old superstition according to which I can be got at by an enemy who sticks a waxen image of me full of pins and dissolves it before a fire. And normally (there seem to me good reasons for not going further than that), normally, it is only through Matter that the Me can be reached and influenced at all, even by the other Me’s in the universe. Now Matter, whatever else we may say about it, is certainly under the law of causation.
From the other, the spiritualistic, side of the argument, it has been sought to meet the above considerations by an interesting analogy. Matter (the brain in this case) may, it is urged, be regarded as the instrument by which, under present conditions, Thought manifests itself and acts. You can take a piano and put it out of tune or otherwise damage it, so as to render it incapable of conveying the real mind of the performer, who, nevertheless, remains quite unaffected. The soul is the invisible performer. You can damage the brain so that the soul can no longer express itself under the conditions of our present existence, but it is an entirely unwarrantable inference to say that you have thereby damaged or destroyed the soul itself. The analogy of physical energy will make this clear. You can make an engine work by the oxidization of coal, but this process can only loosely be described as the source of the energy which is manifested by the engine. All that one does by burning the coal is to turn potential energy into active or kinetic energy. When the engine goes to pieces, or the coal burns out, not a particle of energy is lost; it merely goes back into the shape of potential energy again.
I think this reply is substantially a sound and effective one. At the same time it must be allowed that the physiological argument is more subtle than is usually recognized by those who try to meet it as above. You may so damage a piano as to render it incapable of being properly played on—you may get from it the incoherent janglings of insanity, without affecting our belief in the existence of a real musician behind these unintelligible manifestations. But how if it can be shown that certain mechanical alterations will result, not in nonsense but, let us say, in bringing out mere Offenbach when the performer has always hitherto been wont to play Beethoven? A simple injury to the instrument, it may justly be argued, has no such vital significance as this change in the nature of the thing expressed. Shall we not have to conclude that the man really is the instrument, that the mind is a phenomenon accompanying the temporary combination of certain material constituents, lasting only as long as that combination shall endure and varying pro tanto with everything that causes it to vary?
Now, for my own part, I must confess that if mind with all its nobler manifestations such as Will, Love, Duty, and so forth, be a mere rainbow hovering above the cataract of material force, it does not seem to me worth while to discuss anything, for we, mere particles that glimmer for a moment, can never affect anything, and must soon be where nothing can any longer affect us. It is happily quite true as Santayana says in his Reason in Science,[133] that people who do not think about these matters at all may “know how to live cheerily and virtuously for life’s own sake” on the strength of the normal source of vitality which has made for its own ends from the beginning of things without the aid of our consciousness or criticism. But this consciousness, turning inward as well as outward, this questioning and speculative spirit, are themselves forms of vitality, phases in the gradual conquest of Nothingness (i.e. undifferentiated Being) by Life. We stunt and maim ourselves if we try to keep them aloof. It is true that in encouraging them we may often seem to be turning the terrible, two-edged weapon of Analysis against our own higher life. Be it so! We have taken that sword in hand; we have cut down with it a hundred forms of superstition and wrong; and the time to sheath it is not yet. Whatever dangers there may be in it, we must face those dangers; and though it may be left to another generation completely to overcome them, let that generation, at least, say of us that we did not drop our weapons on the field of battle, even if our own life-blood sometimes flowed upon the blade.[134]
Let us now return to that analogy of the piano and the unseen player and see if we can get some more light from it than has yet appeared. In view of the last considerations which were urged in this connexion—the possibility of effecting not merely the ruin of the instrument but the more vital change of the character of the music it will perform, we must slightly alter one of the terms of the comparison. The analogy will be a strikingly close and suggestive one if we bring into view the latest development in musical mechanism, the pianola. Suppose that the music-rolls of a pianola were made of different sizes and shapes according to the different classes of music. There would then, let us say, be one kind of roll for classical music, another for Italian opera, another for Palestrinian polyphony, another for music-hall ditties, and subvarieties of all these. Now let us suppose that each pianola were so constructed as to take some particular type of music easily, other types with more difficulty, and others, again, not at all, and let us assume that all these types are continually being presented for performance. The construction of the pianola will then correspond to the physical constitution of the brain. This constitution, in each case, is the material equivalent of the dominance of a particular kind of personality, or what we have called above aura. But the records which have lately been so much studied of cases of what is called ‘multiple personality’ tend to show that in each of us there are several distinct personalities—or if that word seems to beg an important question as to the unitary character of personality, let us say streams of consciousness—which are pressing for manifestation. The brain selects automatically among these, and normally keeps one particular type to the front. But just as a mechanical alteration in our hypothetical pianola might entirely change the type of music it would play, so a lesion or shock of any kind might change, more or less, the type of personality which a particular brain was fitted to express; and such cases are, of course, well known to occur.
But now we come to a fact than which none is better known, none more absolutely verifiable in experience, but to which there is nothing in the least analogous in the pianola or any other piece of mechanism taken by itself. I can, with time and toil, with patience and resolution, change the structure of my brain and make easy for it that which before was difficult or impossible. Within limits which cannot be defined (because human life is too short), I can even adapt it to the expression of a new type of personality. No musical instrument can do that to itself. One would have to call in for that purpose the initiating and controlling force of the man who made it.[135]
A conscious pianola, even if we supposed it to possess the endowment of memory, would only recognize itself as a succession of sensations. The hegemonic faculty, the sense of command and control, which Plato[136] laid his finger on, as indicating the difference between a human personality and a musical mechanism, and which Hermann Lotze,[137] in the full light of modern science, still thought valid for the same purpose, would be wanting. Man does not live in the moment. As Goethe wrote in some of his greatest lines—lines that read like hammer-strokes nailing up the charter of human right:—