At the close of the work of this Section and upon the invitation of Dr. Armstrong, a number of distinguished members in attendance joined freely in the discussion, to the great pleasure of the many specialists who were present. Among those participating were Professor Boltzmann of Vienna, Professor Hoeffding of Copenhagen, Professor Calkins of Wellesley, and Professor French of the University of Nebraska, to whom replies were made by the principal speakers, Messrs. Taylor and Ormond.
SHORT PAPERS
A short paper was contributed to the work of the Section by Professor W. P. Montague of Columbia University, on the "Physical Reality of Secondary Qualities." The speaker said that from the beginning of modern philosophy there has existed a strong tendency among all schools of thought—monists of the idealistic or materialistic types, as well as outspoken dualists—to treat the distinction between primary and secondary qualities as coincident, so far as it goes, with the distinction between physical and psychical. Colors, sounds, odors, etc., are regarded as purely subjective or mental in their nature, and as having no true membership in the physical order; while correlatively all special forms and relations have been in their turn extruded from the field of the psychical. Let it be noted that introspection offers little or nothing in support of this view. There is nothing, for example, about the color red that would make it appear more distinctively psychical or subjective than a figure or a motion. The perception of a square or a triangle is not a square or triangular perception; but neither is the perception of red or blue a red or blue perception. Now with the affective or emotional contents of experience the case is quite different.
A feeling of pain is a painful feeling, a consciousness of anger is an angry consciousness. Pains are more and less painful, according as we are more and less aware of them. With feelings and volitions esse is indeed percipi. Colors and other secondary qualities, however, do not seem thus to increase or diminish in their reality concomitantly with our perceptions of them. Red is red, neither more nor less, regardless of the amount to which we attend to it. And yet it remains true that, notwithstanding this seeming objectivity, the secondary qualities have long been contrasted with the primary, and classed along with the affective and volitional states as purely subjective facts. It has always seemed curious that a view so important as this in its consequences, and so radically at variance, not only with Pre-Cartesian philosophy, but also with our instinctive beliefs, should have won its way to the position of an accepted dogma; and the purpose of this paper was first to examine the grounds upon which this belief rests, and second to show that the problem of the independent reality of the physical world and the problem of the relation of physical and psychical appear in a clearer and more hopeful light when disentangled from the quite different problem of the relation of primary and secondary qualities.
There were two reasons why the older or Pre-Cartesian view of this question should give place to the modern doctrine. First, because of the rediscovery of the idea of mechanism, without which predictive science had been virtually impossible. The second reason for reducing the secondary qualities to a merely subjective status lay in the fact that they are much more dependent than the primary qualities upon the bodily organism of the one who perceives them. In closing Professor Montague said:—
"I wish in closing to point out two consequences of the view which I have been opposing. First, the present paradoxical status of the eternal world; second, the equally paradoxical status of the relation of that world to the world of mind. Berkeley was the first thinker clearly to perceive the unsubstantial nature of a world made up solely of primary qualities. Indeed, in the last analysis, a world of primary qualities, and nothing else, is a world of relations without terms, a geometrical fiction, the objective (or, for that matter, the subjective) existence of which the idealist would be right in denying. In Biology we have abandoned obscurantist methods, and no longer attribute the distinctive vital functions of growth and reproduction to a vital force or vital substance, but solely to the peculiar configuration of the material elements of a cell. Why may we not in psychology with equal propriety attribute the distinctively psychical functions of subjectivity or consciousness, not to the action of a hyper-psychical soul-substance, nor to the presence of a transcendental ego, but simply to that peculiar configuration of sensory elements which constitutes a what we call psychosis?"