Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics / With Some of Their Applications

by William Thomas Thornton

We may perhaps hereafter have occasion to note how Descartes, having thus secured one firm foothold and solid resting-place, outwent the farthest stretch of Archimedean ambition by using it, not as a fulcrum from whence to move the world, but as a site for logical foundations whereon he might, if he had persevered, have raised the superstructure of an universe at once mental and material.[32] Intermediately, however, we have to observe how two pre-eminent disciples of the Cartesian school have perverted the fundamental proposition of their great master by treating its converse as its synonyme. Descartes having demonstrated that all thought is existence, Bishop Berkeley and Professor Huxley infer that all existence is thought. So says the Professor in so many words, and to precisely the same effect is the more diffuse language of the Bishop, where, speaking of 'all the choir of heaven and furniture of earth, of all the bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world,' he declares that their esse is percipi, that their 'being' consists in their being 'perceived or known,' and that unless they were actually perceived by, or existed in, some created or uncreate mind, they could not possibly exist at all.

The reasoning in support of these assertions is in substance as follows:—We know nothing of any material object except by the sensations which it produces in our minds. What we are accustomed to call the qualities of an object are nothing else but the mental sensations of various kinds which the object produces within us. Some of these qualities, such as extension, figure, solidity, motion, and number, are classed as primary; others, as, for instance, smell, taste, colour, sound, as secondary. Now that these latter have no existence apart from mind can readily be shown thus. If I prick my finger with a needle, the pain I suffer in consequence is surely in myself, not in the needle, nor anywhere else but in myself. If an orange be placed on my open hand, my sensation of touching it is in myself, not in the orange. If the orange could feel, what it would feel would be a hand, while what I am feeling is an orange. Nor are my sensations of pain and touch merely confined to myself; they are also confined to a particular part of myself, viz., to the brain, the seat of my consciousness, which it is, and not the finger or hand, that really feels when the one is hurt, or when anything comes in harmless contact with the other. To prove this, let the fine nervous threads, which, running up the whole length of the arm, connect the skin of the finger with the spinal marrow and brain, be cut through close to the spinal cord, and no pain will be felt, whatever injury be done: while if the ends which remain in connection with the cord be pricked, the sensation of pricking in the finger will arise just as distinctly as before. Or let a walking-stick be held firmly by the handle, and its other end be touched, and the tactile sensation will be experienced as if at the end of the stick, where, however, it plainly cannot be. It is the mind alone which feels, but which, by a peculiar faculty of localisation or extradition, seems to remove a feeling exclusively its own, not only to the outside of itself, but to the outside also of the walls of its fleshly tenement. And as it is with pain or touch, so it is with every sensation with which any of the so-called secondary qualities of matter are identical. If I look at, or smell, or taste a blood orange, the sensation of colour, or scent, or flavour I receive is entirely and exclusively my own, the orange remaining quite unconscious of its own redness, or fragrance, or sweetness, and not, indeed, possessing in itself any real qualities of the kind. For to take redness as an example; how does the sensation of it or of any other colour arise? The waves of a certain very attenuated medium, the particles of which are vibrating with vast rapidity but with very different velocities, strike upon an object and are thrown off in all directions. Of the particles which vibrate with any particular velocity, some are gathered by the optical apparatus of the eye, and deflected so as to impinge on the retina and on the fibres of the optic nerve therewith connected, producing in these fibres a change which is followed by other changes in the brain, which, again, by virtue of some inscrutable union between the brain and the mind, create a feeling or consciousness of colour. What the particular colour shall be, depends either on the rate of motion in the vibrating medium or on the character of the retina; and if, while the former remained the same, the other were to be altered, or if two persons, with differently formed retinas, and one of the two colour-blind, were to be looking, what had first seemed red might now seem green, or what seemed red to one spectator might seem green to the other. But as the same object cannot itself be both red and green at the same time, it follows that what are called its redness and greenness are not in it, but in the spectator. Similarly, the sounds which an object appears to give forth neither are nor ever were in it: they originate in the mind of the hearer, and have not, and never have had any existence elsewhere. 'If the whole body were an eye, where,' asks St. Paul, 'were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?' and Professor Huxley more than meets the drift of the Apostle's questions by pronouncing it 'impossible to imagine but that if the universe contained only blind and deaf beings, darkness and silence would reign everywhere.'

And as with the secondary qualities of matter, so, on the same showing, must it be with the primary. If colour, taste, scent, and the like, exist nowhere but in the mind, so neither do extension, solidity, and the like. If the former could not exist unless there were intelligent minds to perceive them, then neither could the latter. For, by extension and its cognates, we understand simply relations which we conceive to exist between certain qualities of objects identical with certain of our own visual and tactile sensations, or between these and our consciousness of muscular effort; but inasmuch as all sensations and all consciousness are purely mental, and exist nowhere but in the mind, it follows necessarily that ideas of relation between different sensations, or between sensations and consciousness, must also be purely mental, and non-existent save in the mind. All the qualities of matter, therefore, primary as well as secondary, are alike conceptions of the mind, and consequently could not exist without a mind for them to be conceived by and to exist in. But if the qualities did not exist, then matter, which cannot be conceived otherwise than as an assemblage of qualities, could not exist either. Wherefore in respect of matter itself, as well as of the qualities of matter, esse is percipi, essence is perception, to be is to be perceived. Wherefore, finally, if there were no mind to perceive matter, matter could not exist. Q. E. D.[33]

Although in the foregoing summary of an argument to which not Berkeley and Huxley alone, but others of the deepest and acutest thinkers that this country has produced, have contributed, I have strenuously laboured to state all its points as convincingly as the obligations of brevity would permit, I am not myself by any means convinced by it. On the contrary, although to say so may seem to imply a considerable overstock of modest assurance, still I do say that whatever portion of it is sound is irrelevant, and that whatever portion is relevant is not sound. So much of it as relates to the nature of the qualities of matter, is, however interesting or otherwise important, very little, if at all, to the purpose. No doubt if I prick my finger with a needle, or—to take in preference an illustration employed by Locke—if my fingers ache in consequence of my handling snow, it would be supremely ridiculous to talk of the pain I feel being in the snow; yet not a whit more ridiculous than to call the snow itself white or cold, if, by so speaking, I mean that anything in the slightest degree resembling my sensation of either snowy whiteness or snowy coldness resides in the snow itself. And as of coldness and whiteness, so of all the other so-styled secondary qualities. If I smell a rose, or listen to a piano, the rose or the piano is quite insensible to the scent or sounds by which my sense is ravished. And of primary qualities, also, precisely the same thing may with equal confidence be alleged. A stone which I perceive to be large, round, hard, and either rotating or motionless, has no more perception of its own extension, figure, solidity, motion, or rest than a snowball has of its colour or temperature. But all this, though perfectly true, has nothing to do with the question, which is not what qualities of matter are, but where they are, and whether they can exist anywhere but in mind; and this question, I submit, is distinctly begged by those who assume, as is done throughout the reasoning under examination, that our sensations with regard to material objects, and the qualities of those objects, are synonymous and convertible terms. Incontestably, sensations are affections of the mind which neither have nor can have any existence outside the mind. If, then, the qualities of objects are identical with the sensations which arise in the mind concerning those objects, why, of course, the qualities likewise can exist nowhere but in the mind. On narrowly scrutinising, however, the supposed identity, we shall find that it involves somewhat reckless confusion of diametrical opposites. When I look at or smell a rose, or eat a beefsteak, or listen to a piano, the sensations which thereupon arise within me, whether immediately or subsequently, either are the results of my seeing, smelling, eating, or hearing, or they are not. To say that they are not is equivalent to saying that an object need not be within reach of the perceptive faculties in order to be perceived; that I may see or smell a rose, though there be no rose to be seen or smelt; may dine sumptuously off empty dishes, and be raised to the seventh heaven of delight by the audible strains of a music which is not being executed. Fortunati nimium—only too lucky would mankind be, did this turn out to be a correct theory, affording as it would a solution of every social problem, and serving as a panacea for every social evil. Psychology would then be the only science worth attention, for of whatever things proficiency in that branch of study had qualified any one to form mental images, of those same things would he simultaneously become possessor in full property. Whoever had succeeded in training himself to imagine vigorously might at once have, do, or be whatever it pleased him to imagine, becoming ipso facto, as the Stoics used to say an acquirer of virtue does, 'rich, beautiful, a king.' Woe betide any one, however, who, as long as the cosmical constitution remains what it is, shall attempt to put the theory into practice, and desisting from all those animal functions, involving intercourse with a real or imaginary external world, which are vulgarly supposed essential to animal existence, shall obstinately restrict himself to the sensations which he believes the mind to be, without any such intercourse, capable of creating for the body's sustenance and delectation. The physical extinction inevitably consequent on such devotion to principle would speedily render all the devotees physically incapable of testifying in behalf of their peculiar opinion, and, clearing them away, would leave no witnesses surviving but such as were signifying by deeds if not in words their hearty adherence to the popular belief. Practically, then, there may be assumed to be entire unanimity of assent to the truism that for our senses to be affected by the presence of external objects, the objects must needs be present to affect them. On all hands it is in effect admitted that in some mode or other external objects exist, but if so, and if the sensations resulting from operations performed by the bodily organs with external objects would not have resulted unless the objects had been present to operate or to be operated upon, clearly there must be resident in, or inseparably bound up with, the objects a power or powers of producing sensation in conscious mind. But the power of producing sensation, and sensation itself, are not one and the same thing, but two separate and distinct things, intrinsically distinct and locally separate. The feeling, agreeable or painful, according to its intensity, which heat occasions, is not the same thing as the heat by which it is occasioned. The twofold taste, sweet to a healthy, bitter to a distempered palate, of one and the same aliment, cannot be identical with the single property of the aliment whereby the taste is produced. In the sense of seeming red to a spectator with normally constructed eyes, and green to one who is colour-blind, a ruby or a Siberian crab is at once both red and green, but the two colours which it causes to be perceived cannot be identical with the peculiar structure, or whatever else it be, whereby the ruby or Siberian crab communicates to circumambient ether the one self-same motion that terminates in different impressions on differently constructed eyes. In these and in all cases of the kind the feeling is in the mind, the source of the feeling in matter. The one is a perception, the other a quality, and to mistake the quality, not merely for a perception, but for the very perception to which the quality gives rise; and to infer thence that the quality must likewise be in the mind, is an instance as glaring as can well be imagined of that most heinous of logical offences, the confounding of cause with effect.

By what steps Berkeley was led, and has since led so many after him, into so grave an error, he has himself acquainted us. Thus it is that he argues: By sensible things can be meant only such as can be perceived immediately by sense: and sensible qualities are of course sensible things. But the only perceptions of sense are sensations, and all perceptions are purely mental. Wherefore, sensible qualities being, as such, perceptible immediately by the senses, must be sensations, and being sensations must be perceptions, and being perceptions they are of course purely mental, and existent nowhere save in the mind. Carefully, however, as Berkeley fancied he was picking his way, he really had tripped, and that fatally, at the second step. He calls the qualities of objects sensible things; but sensible they are not according to his definition, for they are not capable of being immediately perceived by the senses. It is not sense which perceives, but reason which infers them. The senses, as Berkeley elsewhere repeatedly and earnestly insists, receive nothing from objects but sensations, and these they communicate to the mind without accompanying them by the slightest hint as to whence they originally came. The senses suggest nothing as to any qualities resident in or appertaining to an object corresponding with the sensations derived from the object. The existence of such qualities is an inference of reason which, taking for granted that sensations, in common with all other occurrences, must have causes, and observing that certain of them commonly occur in the presence of certain objects, and never occur in the absence of those objects, infers that the causes of the sensations must exist in the objects. To the causes thus inferred the name of qualities is given, to distinguish them from the sensations whereof they are causes; and the Berkeleian transgression consists in overlooking the distinction between things so diametrically opposite.

By the commission of such a sin the most powerful intellect becomes inevitably committed to further enormities. Except by neglecting to distinguish between sight and hearing, the effects, and light and sound, their respective causes, it would surely have been impossible for Professor Huxley to come to the strange conclusion that if all living beings were blind and deaf, 'darkness and silence would everywhere reign.' Had he not himself previously explained that light and sound are peculiar motions communicated to the vibrating particles of an universally diffused ether, which motions, on reaching the eye or ear, produce impressions, which, after various modifications, result eventually in seeing or hearing? How these motions are communicated to the ether matters not. Only it is indispensable to note that they are not communicated by the percipient owner of the eye or ear, so that the fact of there being no percipient present cannot possibly furnish any reason why the motions should not go on all the same. But as long as they did go on there would necessarily be light and sound; for the motions are themselves light and sound. If, on returning to his study in which, an hour before, he had left a candle burning and a clock ticking, Professor Huxley should perceive from the appearance of candle and clock that they had gone on burning and ticking during his absence, would he doubt that they had likewise gone on producing the motions constituting and termed light and sound, notwithstanding that no eyes or ears had been present to see or hear? But if he did not doubt this, how could he any more doubt that, although all sentient creatures suddenly became eyeless and earless, the sun might go on shining, and the wind roaring, and the sea bellowing as before?

Akin to the inadvertence which, as I presume to think, has led Professor Huxley thus to misconceive secondary qualities, is an inattention to the differences between our ideas, or mental pictures, and the originals whereof those pictures are copies, which seems to me seriously to vitiate his reasoning with regard to primary qualities. With admirable perspicuity he shows[34] how it is that our notions of primary qualities are formed; how the mind, by localising on distinct points of the sensory surface of the body its various, tactile sensations, obtains the idea of extension, or space in two dimensions, of figure, number, and motion: how the power, combined with consciousness of the power, of moving the hand in all directions over any substance it is in contact with, adds the idea of geometrical solidity, or of space in three dimensions: how the ideas thus formed with the aid of the sense of touch are confirmed by, and blended with, others derived from visual sensations and muscular movements of the eye: and, finally, how the idea of mechanical solidity, or impenetrability, arises from experience of resistance to our muscular exertions. All these details, however, interesting as they are, are nevertheless quite out of place. What we are at present concerned with is the nature of the things themselves, not the nature of our knowledge of them. No question that this latter is purely mental. If figure, motion, and solidity were really, as Professor Huxley says, each of them nothing but a perception of the relation of two or more sensations to one another, no question but that, since the mind is the sole seat of perception, they could exist nowhere else. But if all these suppositions be incorrect, if, as we have seen, there be in matter and apart from mind, potentialities of producing sensations, it follows that, in matter, and outside of mind, there must be relations between different potentialities, and there must, moreover, be limits to, and there may be changes in, those relations. Wherefore, since there is in matter a potentiality of imparting to the mind those sensations whence it derives its ideas of place and distance, and since figure is but a 'limitation of distance,' and motion but a 'change of place,' it necessarily follows that there is in matter a potentiality of conveying to the mind those sensations whence it derives its ideas of figure and motion. And a similar remark applies equally to solidity, and to every other so-called quality of matter. All of them are substantive potentialities of producing in the mind those sensations whence our ideas of themselves (the qualities) are derived. No doubt all these qualities would be inconceivable in the absence of a mind by which they might be conceived, but it is not necessary that, in order to be, they should be conceived. In discussions of any abstruseness we cannot be too precise in our use of words, and we shall inevitably be going astray here if we allow ourselves for a moment to forget that a quality and the conception of that quality are not one single thing, but two things. Can it be seriously supposed that if all the conscious creatures, of every description, by which the universe is peopled, were to fall temporarily into complete stupor, the material universe would, at the commencement of the trance, be deprived of its extension, solidity, figure, and all its other constituent properties, recovering them again as soon as its inhabitants woke up again? Can it be doubted that, on the contrary, all potentialities resident in its material composition would pursue the even tenor of their way just as if nothing had happened; performing, during the temporary absence of external percipient minds, precisely those operations which, as soon as consciousness returned to those minds, would be followed by the perceptions of sight, hearing, and touch? But if so, then plainly it is exceedingly derogatory to matter to charge it with such absolute dependence on external support that its very being consists in being perceived from without. That matter cannot exist without mind I cheerfully admit, or rather most earnestly affirm, proposing presently to explain in what sense I make the affirmation. Meanwhile let it suffice to have ascertained that the mental service with which matter cannot dispense, whatever else it be, is at any rate not, as the whole Berkeleian school so positively insist, that of mental testimony to its existence.

Let us pause here for a moment to report progress. We have seen, on the one hand, that unless mind and matter have been eternally coexistent, mind must have preceded matter, and that it is idle, therefore, to expect, by any researches into matter, to discover how mind (or life) originated. We have seen that from a materialism which represents mind as in any sense a property or product of matter there is no possible outlet to an idealism which represents matter as owing its being to mind. To see this is simply to see that the builder of a house cannot possibly have been born in the house he has himself built. On the other hand, we have seen that the idealism which represents being or existence as consisting of perception is utterly incompatible with materialism of any sort or kind, unless, indeed, with a materialistic nihilism wherein would be no room for a solitary molecule, still less for any molecular structure, and least of all for that motion of molecular structures into which consistent materialists are logically bound to attempt to resolve all natural phenomena. We have, in short, seen that materialism and idealism, in the senses in which those terms are commonly used, are utterly incapable of amalgamation, or indeed of even being harmoniously approximated, without being first deprived of all the characteristic traits which at present entitle them to their distinguishing appellations.

To which of the two belongs the larger share of blame for this implacable hostility is easily determined. Materialism, in dealing with mental phenomena, begins by setting chronology at defiance; but between idealism and the phenomena of matter there is no such aboriginal incongruity. From principles common to every form of idealism a theory is deducible which, while frankly acknowledging the reality of matter, may, with perfect consistency, maintain that reality to be mental—although mental in the sense of being, not a perception by, but a metamorphosis of, mind. Of such a theory the outlines seem to me to have been sketched, and the foundations partly laid, by Descartes, and it cannot be otherwise than interesting to inquire in what manner and how far so consummate an artificer advanced in the work, and where and wherefore he suddenly stopped short in it.

When Descartes, after convincing himself of the hollow pretentiousness of most human knowledge, proceeded to dig away the accumulated drift and sand of ages in quest of any clay or rock there might be below, the first indubitable verity he came to was thought, about whose reality there could, as already explained, be no possibility of doubt, inasmuch as any doubt concerning it, being itself thought, would be but an additional proof of it. On the bit of firm ground thus thoroughly tested, he proceeded to place a formula not less carefully verified, his famous 'Cogito, ergo sum'—'I think, therefore I am.' By many of his followers, however, this second verification of his is deemed to be by no means so satisfactory as it was by himself, Professor Huxley more especially taking vehement, though, as I make bold to add, somewhat gratuitous, exception to every single word of the most celebrated of Cartesian formulæ. No doubt the premiss of the formula assumes the conclusion, but it likewise includes as well as assumes it. No doubt, since 'I think' is but another way of saying 'I am thinking,' to say that 'I think' is to assume that 'I am;' nay, the same thing is equally assumed by the mere introduction of the pronoun 'I.' But Descartes was fully warranted in taking for granted the truth of his conclusion. For by previously showing incontestably that thought and consciousness are real existences, he had completely proved the premiss wherein his conclusion is included. What though, as Professor Huxley suggests, 'thought' may possibly 'be self-existent,' 'or a given thought the result of its antecedent thought, or of some external power'? Be thought what else it may, it must needs be, also, either an affection or an operation; if not performed, it must be felt; there must needs be, therefore, something by which it is either performed or felt, and that something cannot possibly be other than a thinking and conscious thing. As surely as thought is, so surely must there be a thinker. This is, in substance, affirmed even by many who deny it in terms, and Hume, in particular, when saying, as he somewhere does, that 'all we are conscious of is a series of perceptions,' denies and affirms it at one and the same time. For how can there be perception without a percipient? or how consciousness without a conscious entity? or how can that entity be conscious of feeling without being simultaneously conscious that it is itself which feels, without knowing, consequently, that it has a self, or without being warranted, if it possess the gift of speech, in declaring, in words even more emphatic than those of Descartes, 'I myself am'? And how, if these questions do not admit of reply, can Professor Huxley be warranted in declaring self and non-self to be mere 'hypotheses by which we account for the facts of consciousness,' and adding that of their existence we 'neither have, nor by any possibility can have' the same 'unquestionable and immediate certainty as we have of the states of consciousness which we consider to be their effects'? Surely the existence of self is one of the most direct and immediate subjects of consciousness; yet it does not depend for evidence on consciousness alone, but is as unanswerably demonstrable as that two straight lines cannot enclose space or that parallel lines cannot meet, or as any other mathematical negation. No ratiocinative deduction can be more incontestable than that, since I have thoughts, there must be an I to have them.