Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Vol. 1 of 3)

by Thomas Brown

Of such hypotheses, we considered three,—the doctrine of the Peripatetics as to perception by species, or shadowy films, that flow from the object to the organ,—the Cartesian doctrine of the indirect subserviency of external objects, as the mere occasions on which the Deity himself, in every instance, produces in the mind the state which is termed perception,—and the particular doctrine of Malebranche, himself a zealous defender of that general doctrine of occasional causes, as to the perception of objects, or rather of the ideas of objects in the divine mind.

The only remaining hypothesis, which deserves to be noticed, is a very celebrated one, of Leibnitz, the doctrine of the pre-established harmony, which, I have no doubt, originated in the same false view of the necessity of some connecting link in causation; and was intended, therefore, like the others, to obviate the supposed difficulty of the action of matter on mind, and of mind on matter.

According to this doctrine, the body never acts on the mind, nor the mind on the body, but the motions of the one, and the feelings of the other, are absolutely independent, having as little influence on each other, as they have on any other mind and body. The mind feels pain, when the body is bruised, but, from the pre-established order of its own affections, it would have felt exactly the same pain, though the body, at that moment, had been resting upon roses. The arm, indeed, moves at the very moment, when the mind has willed its motion; but, it moves of itself, in consequence of its own pre-established order of movement, and would move, therefore, equally, at that very moment, though the mind had wished it to remain at rest. The exact correspondence of the motions and feelings, which we observe, arises merely from the exactness of the choice of the Deity, in uniting with a body, that was formed by Him, to have of itself, a certain order of independent motions, a mind, that was formed of itself to have a certain order of independent but corresponding feelings. In the unerring exactness of this choice, and mutual adaptation, consists the exquisiteness of the harmony. But, however exquisite, it is still a harmony only, without the slightest reciprocal action.

The mind, and its organic frame, are, in this system,—to borrow the illustration of it which is commonly used,—like two time-pieces, which have no connexion with each other, however accurately they may agree,—and each of which would indicate the hour, in the very same manner, though the other had been destroyed. In like manner, the soul of Leibnitz,—for the great theorist himself may surely be used to illustrate his own hypothesis,—would, though his body had been annihilated at birth, have felt and acted, as if with its bodily appendage,—studying the same works, inventing the same systems, and carrying on, with the same warfare of books and epistles, the same long course of indefatigable controversy;—and the body of this great philosopher, though his soul had been annihilated at birth, would not merely have gone through the same process of growth, eating, and digesting, and performing all its other ordinary animal functions,—but would have achieved for itself the same intellectual glory, without any consciousness of the works which it was writing and correcting,—would have argued, with equal strenuousness, for the principle of the sufficient reason,—claimed the honours of the differential calculus,—and laboured to prove this very system of the pre-established harmony, of which it would, certainly, in that case, have been one of the most illustrious examples.

To say of this hypothesis, which was the dream of a great mind,—but of a mind, I must confess, which was very fond of dreaming, and very apt to dream,—that it is a mere hypothesis, is to speak of it too favourably. Like the doctrine of occasional causes, it supposes a system of external things, of which, by the very principle of the hypothesis, there can be no evidence, and which is absolutely of no utility whatever, but as it enables a philosopher to talk, more justly, of pre-established harmonies, without the possibility, however, of knowing that he is talking more justly. If the mind would have exactly the same feelings as now,—the same pleasures, and pains, and perceptions of men and houses, and every thing external, though every thing external, comprehending of course the very organs of sense, had been annihilated ages of ages before itself existed, what reason can there be to suppose, that this useless system of bodily organs, and other external things, exist at present? The universal irresistible belief of mankind, to which philosophers of a different school might appeal, cannot be urged in this case, since the admission of it, as legitimate evidence, would at once, disprove the hypothesis. We do not more truly believe, that light exists, than we believe, that it affects us with vision, and that, if there had been no light, there would have been no sensation of colour. To assert the pre-established harmony, is, indeed, almost the same thing, as to affirm and deny the same proposition. It is to affirm, in the first place, positively, that matter exists, since the harmony, which it asserts, is of matter and mind; and then to affirm, as positively, that its existence is useless, that it cannot be perceived by us, and that we are, therefore, absolutely incapable of knowing whether it exists or not.

After stating to you so many hypotheses, which have been formed on this subject, I need scarcely remark, what a fund of perpetual conjecture, and, therefore, of perpetual controversy, there is in the varied wonders of the external and internal universe, when it is so very difficult for a few philosophers to agree, as to what it is which gives rise to the simplest sensation of warmth, or fragrance, or colour. It might be thought, that, in the intellectual opera, if I may revert to that ingenious and lively allegory, of which I availed myself in one of my early Lectures, in treating of general physical inquiry,—as the whole spectacle which we behold, is passing within our minds, we are, in this instance at least, fairly behind the scenes, and see the mechanism of Nature truly as it is. But though we are really behind the scenes, and even, in one sense of the word, may be said to be ourselves the movers of the machinery, by which the whole representation is carried on, still the minute parts and arrangements of the complicated mechanism are concealed from our view, almost as completely as from the observation of the distant spectators. The primary springs and weights, indeed, by the agency of which Phaeton seemed to be carried off by the winds, are left visible to us; and we know, that when we touch a certain spring, it will put in motion a concealed set of wheels, or that when we pull a cord, it will act upon a system of pullies, which will ultimately produce a particular effect desired by us; but what is the number of wheels or pullies, and how they are arranged and adapted to each other so as to produce the effect,—are left to our penetration to divine. On this subject we have seen, that as many grave absurdities have been formed into systems, and honoured with commentaries and confutations, as in the opera of external nature, at which, in the quotation formerly made to you, the Pythagorases and Platos were supposed to be present. “It is not a system of cords and pullies which we put in motion,” says Aristotle, “—for to move such a heavy and distant mass would be beyond our power,—but only a number of little phantasms connected with them, which have the form, indeed, of cords and pullies, but not the substance, and which are light enough, therefore, to fly at our very touch.”—“We do not truly move any wheels,” says the great inventor of the System of Occasional Causes; “for, as we did not make the wheels, how can we know the principle on which their motion is to depend, or have such a command over them as to be capable of moving them? But when we touch a spring, it is the occasion on which the Mechanist himself, who is always present, though invisible, and who must know well how to move them, sets them instantly in motion.”—“We see the motion,” says Malebranche, “not by looking at the wheels or pullies,—for there is an impenetrable veil which hides them from us, but by looking at the Mechanist himself, who must see them, because He is the mover of them: and whose eye, in which they are imaged as he gazes on them, must be a living mirror of all which he moves.”—“It is not a spring that acts upon the wheels,” says Leibnitz; “though, when the spring is touched, the wheels begin to move immediately, and never begin to move at any other time. This coincidence, however, is not owing to any connexion of one with the other; for, though the spring were destroyed, the wheels would move exactly as at present, beginning and ceasing at the same precise moments. It is owing to a preestablished harmony of motion in the wheels and spring; by which arrangement the motion of the wheels, though completely independent of the other, always begins at the very moment when the spring is touched.”—“No,” exclaims Berkeley, “it is all illusion. The wheels, and cords, and weights, are not seen because they exist, but exist because they are seen; and, if the whole machinery is not absolutely annihilated when we shut our eyes, it is only because it finds shelter in the mind of some other Being whose eyes are never shut,—and are always open, therefore, at the time when ours are closing.”

From all this variety of conjectural speculations, the conclusion which you will perhaps have drawn most readily, is that which is too often the result of our researches in the History of Science,—that there may, as D'Alembert truly says, be a great deal of philosophizing, in which there is very little of philosophy.

I have now finished the remarks which I had to make on the very important class of our external affections of mind, as they may be considered simply; but it is not always simply that they exist; and, when they occur in combination with other feelings, the appearance which they assume is sometimes so different, as to lead to the erroneous belief, that the complex feeling is the result of a distinct power of the mind.

When, in my attempt to arrange the various feelings of which the mind is susceptible, I divided these into our external and internal affections, according as their causes are, in the one case, objects without the mind, and, in the other case, previous feelings, or affections of the mind itself: and subdivided this latter class of internal affections into the two orders of our intellectual states of mind, and our emotions; I warned you, that you were not to consider these as always arising separately, and as merely successive to each other;—that, in the same manner, as we may both see and smell a rose, so may we see, or compare, or remember, while under the influence of some or other of our emotions; though, at the same time, by analysis, or at least by a reflective process that is similar to analysis, we may be able to distinguish the emotion from the coexisting perception, or remembrance, or comparison,—as we are able, by a very easy analysis, in like manner, when we both see and smell a rose, to distinguish in our complex perception, the fragrance from the colour and form.