Charles Augustus Strong

“ The word Ego, as commonly employed, designates two entirely distinct mental facts, which we may call the subject Ego and the empirical Ego. The subject Ego is identical with that abstraction of consciousness which may be distinguished in thought from the sensational and ideal content, but which cannot exist separately from it. The Ego in this sense possesses no physical substratum. Psychologically, it is the mere passive spectator of its momentary content, which it is powerless to act upon or alter in any way ”

“ It is doubtless true that the bare notion of causality contains no suggestion of such an equivalence. For all that, the demonstration of quantitative relations between successive events gives us a far more perfect understanding of their connection than the mere knowledge that they stand related as cause and effect. Once the possibility of such an understanding is suggested, it must, however seldom realizable, remain ever after the beau-ideal of the physicist. ”

“ It is entirely credible that a nervous impulse coming inwards along a sensory fibre should have a side-effect in the shape of a sensation; but why the physical energy embodied in the nerve-impulse should on that account be debarred from producing all the physical effects which it would have produced had there been no sensation, and why these in turn should not go on to produce all their natural effects in conformity with the laws of physics, it is difficult to understand. ”

“ In external voluntary action the idea of a movement does as a rule precede its actual execution. Yet even here the theory is inadequate, and overlooks the essential thing in volition. For the facts are not completely described when the idea of a movement is said to be succeeded in consciousness by the perception of the actual movement. In passing from one to the other we have the feeling of our own activity, which is as much an empirical fact as is a sensation or an idea. ”

“ The contraction of a muscle is nothing but a motion of matter; physical science must therefore assume it to be completely explicable as the result of prior material conditions.
The law of the conservation of energy is not a mere induction from experience, but a necessary presupposition of thought with regard to natural events. If it were only an induction drawn from the observation of non-organic processes, we might well anticipate an exception to its universality where matter borders upon mind. ”

“ In short, a consistent spiritualistic theory of the relations of mind and body is simply impossible, and we therefore turn to the only hypothesis which remains — the hypothesis according to which the physical series is the condition of the mental. This means that physical events take place independently, according to laws of their own, and that a few of them — namely, certain events in the cortex — are the indispensable condition for the occurrence of mental events. ”

“ But this whole theory is one tissue of false assumptions. Consciousness is in no sense such a bundle of juxtaposed presentations. Presentations are not objects, but events, which come into and pass out of existence, and during their brief life undergo continual changes. The percipient subject, above all, is not an observer, standing opposite its own presentations and passively contemplating them, but an inseparable segment of the network of psychic events themselves.
The objects of psychology are, in short, one and all conscious processes or events. ”

“ I have often explained why I regard an influxus physicus in the sense of Cartesian dualism as an impossibility, and believe the conception of a parallelism between mental and physical processes to be required by empirical psychology. . . . The Cartesian theory is untenable because it assumes a causal connection between entirely incomparable facts. A sensation can no more be explained by a motion than a motion by a sensation.
It goes without saying that an external movement as a physical process can only be explained by a previous physical process, as for example by a sensory excitation ”

“ Attention thus involves no activity of consciousness itself, but consists solely in changes taking place in the conscious content according to the laws of association, and is therefore perfectly intelligible on the parallelism theory.
But if consciousness has no power to interfere with the movement of our ideas, this is at least not true of the Ego, the most characteristic of all mental facts, which manifestly exerts a predominating influence in our mental life. What is to be made of the Ego upon the parallelism theory? ”

“ The answer is, that it is nothing more nor less than the antecedent mental image of the movement to be executed. We constantly receive nerve-impulses by the sensory nerves which have their source in the skin, joints, tendons, and muscles; these impulses fuse into an aggregate sensation which informs us about the varying positions of our limbs. Like other sensations, this leaves behind it a mental image, and it is this mental image, brought up as the last result of the play of association, which immediately precedes the external movement and constitutes the "feeling of innervation." ”

“ Nerve-physiologists, experimental psychologists, and scientific alienists employ it constantly as a sort of working hypothesis, and their right to employ it is beyond question. At the same time they cannot be too often reminded that it is only a brief, compendious phrase to express the empirical facts respecting the relations between body and mind — the fact of parallelism, the fact that the mental series is interrupted, and the fact that interference with the physical series is accompanied by alterations of the mental — not a theory aiming to explain these facts. ”

“ It is certain that every voluntary act is far more than a physico-chemical process; but equally certain that physical science, in explaining voluntary action, must attend solely to the physico-chemical process. ”

“ We must suppose, in short, that physical processes constitute a locked system, every subsequent state of which is fully accounted for by the immediately preceding state; that the nervous system is a highly complex mechanism for adapting the movements of an animal to environing conditions in a manner useful to the animal; and that consciousness is a parallel manifestation, concomitant to certain processes in the highest nerve-centres. ”

“ The will itself is nothing different from these self-produced processes. But what is meant by the word self-produced?
When we seek to explain an act of choice, and to say why this was chosen and not that, we find that the mental states which were actually present do not suffice for this purpose. The reason why a particular impulse determines an act never lies in the relative strength of the conflicting impulses alone, but also in that upon which their relative strength ultimately depends; namely, the total character of consciousness as determined by its past history. ”

“ In the normal frog with nervous system intact, the after-effects of previous excitations preponderate among the conditions producing movement, and the movement seems uncaused because the visible stimuli form so small a part of the total cause. Just as the eye and ear enable the organism to be affected by objects not in immediate contact with it, so memory — the power of the brain to associate to an impression the image of another impression experienced with it before — enables the organism to adapt its movements to objects before they have as yet entered the field of sense. ”

“ But since natural selection explains the origin of the nervous apparatus, and since, given the apparatus, a definite complex of conditions necessarily evokes a definite external movement, it follows that every voluntary act, regarded solely on its physiological side, is completely explicable in accordance with the principles of physico-chemical science.
Approaching the problem from the psychological side, we find, if we look solely to the facts of consciousness, that what is given is not an individual substantive will, but only a great number of particular volitions. ”

“ The conservation of energy therefore forbids us to suppose that any physical energy is lost when sensory nerve-impulses give rise to a sensation, or that any energy comes into existence when a volition is followed by a nervous discharge into the muscles. We must rather suppose that the sensory nerve-impulses produce commotions in the cortical nerve-cells, and that these manifest themselves in consciousness in the form of a sensation ”

“ Physiologically considered, the voluntary act is the final outcome of a physico-chemical process taking place in the sensory-motor arc; that is, in the apparatus composed of sense-organs, centripetal nerves, brain, centrifugal nerves, and striate muscles. By means of this apparatus the innumerable stimuli which act upon the animal body elicit from it those external movements which are useful for its preservation. The sum of the stimuli, taken in connection with the structure and momentary condition of the nervous apparatus, must furnish a complete explanation of every resulting movement. ”

“ But if for argument's sake we nevertheless make it, and suppose that not only the molecular motions that go on in our brains but all motions of matter are accompanied by some kind of mental state; if, that is to say, we look upon the material world as only an outer shell covering an infinitude of conscious, semi-conscious, and unconscious mental states — it still remains true that these states are all mine; no provision has been made for the existence of another consciousness than my own ”

“ He inquires how those higher intellectual processes which Wundt groups together under the head of "apperception" are to be reconciled with the parallelism theory. It appears to be a fact that our ideas do not merely come and go of themselves, but that consciousness has the power to interpose and direct their movement, as a general directs the movements of troops, — joining, separating, and arranging them, holding back this and dismissing that, comparing one with another, selecting some from amongst the rest, and displaying now an increased, now a diminished activity. ”

“ What is more, it is a piece of very questionable metaphysics; for the doctrine that mental events depend for their existence, not upon the unknown reality that appears to us under the form of a material world, but upon these material appearances themselves, is indistinguishable from philosophical materialism, and open to all the objections that lie against that doctrine. ”

“ As every mental state, according to physiological psychology, consists ultimately of a complex of sensations, we have to inquire what is the special quality, intensity, and emotional tinge of the sensations that compose a volition, and in what manner they are combined. The most distinctive trait of volition is the feeling of activity. ”

“ The associative connections between sensory and motor presentations in the cortex allow, within physiological limits, of an infinitely wider range of individual variation. It is these associative connections, depending as they largely do upon the emotional coloring with which the presentations invest themselves for the individual consciousness, and not the latter in themselves alone, which determine the elective affinities exhibited by the self in the presence of conflicting ideas or motives. ”

“ But we cannot properly say that a physical cause produces a mental effect, or vice versa, because no such quantitative relations connect the cause with the effect as in the former case. We cannot speak of production, but only of invariable succession. ”

“ As in the progress of evolution the latter comes to be more and more clearly recognized as the decisive factor in voluntary action, we have in our volitions the peculiar consciousness of choice j the act no longer appears the passive outcome of a conflict of impulses, but an active decision between them. As in volition, so in attention what gives the decision is not the group of ideas actually present, but a latent factor which manifests itself in the consciousness of self. ”

“ We understand a physical event when we have analyzed it into the elementary processes that make it up. If we wish to explain these, we resolve them into others still more elementary, till we reach the simplest processes conceivable, namely such as are continuously imaginable. ”

“ It is unnecessary here to make more than a passing reference to the wealth of physiological facts, such, for example, as the effects upon the mental functions of injuries, poisons, intoxicants, hard labor, insufficient food, etc., which find a more natural explanation on the theory of parallelism than on that of common sense. ”

“ Now, while it is easy to conceive a physical basis for the sensational content of consciousness, it is difficult to conceive one for the activities of consciousness itself, and the question arises, how these are to be harmonized with the parallelism theory. ”

“ If I move my arm slowly and attend to my feelings, I am conscious of a peculiar impulse immediately preceding each muscular contraction, which I feel to be the cause of the latter. If I temporarily paralyze my arm by compression of the nerve and repeat the experiment, no muscle contracts, but I distinctly feel the impulse referred to. ”