Walter Hayle Walshe

“ If our science toils on in humble but trusting hope to fathom on material lines the mechanism of our mental operations, is its pursuit antagonistic to belief in an Almighty First Cause? [3] Is there really any fair ground for the inference, that because physiology strives to trace out and interpret the conditions of the connection between brain-substance and mind—ergo, those who labor in its field are of necessity atheists? ”

“ And this philosopher's well-known formula assumed: there exists a spiritual, non-extended, indivisible substance, an objective, immortal entity, superadded to and independent of brain, which thinks, feels, and wills—a substance cognizable by self-consciousness alone, and which is in fact the "thinking principle" or proper "soul." Mind thus becomes absolutely and wholly an extra-cerebral product, and the possible offspring of activity on the part of the "soul" alone. ”

“ How could aught but failure in solving the problems of mental philosophy be expected from a system, even though that system were sustained by surpassing intellectual force, that ignored the instrument, brain, by which the result, mind, is evolved? ”

“ We must prelude the inquiry into the direct work of physiology by a very rapid glance at the notions advanced by metaphysicians and theologians on the nature of mind and generation of thought. Our task throughout will be merely one of historical and very occasionally critical review. We lay no claim to originality of doctrine, but shall merely attempt in simple fashion to popularize knowledge, which, alike from its nature and from the manner of its handling, has been essentially limited to the few. ”

“ Such "proof," inasmuch as it transcends experience, can never advance beyond the unreality of subjective formulation, can never attain the reality appertaining to objective demonstration. Nay, Kant admits more than this: he grants nothing can really be proved by metaphysics concerning the attributes, or even the existence, of the soul; while holding that, inasmuch as its reality can not, on the other hand, be disproved, such reality may, for moral purposes, be assumed. ”

“ Nevertheless, the conspicuous failure of purely introspective philosophy, unaided by objective investigation, to establish its special psychic doctrines, does not, on the other hand, disprove the possible independent existence of soul as one of the factors of mind. Such existence may be, or may not be, a reality, for anything that metaphysics show or do not show. ”

“ Thus, setting aside the profanum vulgus of illogical and inaccurate writers, with whom the word is but a word, carrying with it no inkling even of definite signification, we find that with some philosophers the soul is a local, with others a universal, existence; by some limited to man, by others conceded to the lower animals; with certain thinkers an essence, with others a substance, with a third group a principle; with some an immaterial essence without form or extension, with others immaterial, yet possessed of these attributes of matter ”

“ To reject the help of introspection in analyzing the phenomena of mind would be as illogical, nay fatuous, on the part of the physiologist as the negation of the utility of all objective aid by the bulk of metaphysicians. ”

“ Not more widely divergent than the metaphysical notions of the nature of soul were the doctrines held as to the manner of intercourse between the soul and the body, the school of Aristotle holding that all objects enter into the soul by influx through the senses; the Cartesians, per contra, maintaining that it is the soul that sees and hears, that perception is a primary faculty, not of an organ, but of the soul ”

“ While, then, acknowledging in a spirit of homage savoring of of awe the abstract grandeur of the metaphysical intellect and the aims of its activity, he has earnestly but not irreverently inquired. Do you metaphysicians not deceive yourselves? ”

“ Now, metaphysicians (they who profess their ability to formulate an a priori theory of the ultimate elements of knowledge and nature of things) have held, as a class, that the act of thinking is in all its stages and all its factors a non-material process. And it does not involve any serious error to maintain that the formula under which this doctrine obtained the widest acceptance by philosophy, while it best satisfied the craving of ordinary people for some insight into the nature of their mental operations, originated with Descartes. ”

“ He is as ill adapted for reveling in trains of speculative abstraction, whereof the issue, purely subjective, can never reach the reality of objective demonstrativeness, as the metaphysician for peering through lenses many a weary day and night to verify a single fact, the present obvious value of which may be nil, but of which the future story may be written as the starting link of chains of important truths. ”

“ To the non-metaphysical mind it would indeed appear that the bootless speculations of the pure transcendentalist were calculated on the one hand to dishearten wayfarers on the road to truth by blocking the route with unintelligible mysticism, and on the other to postpone the discovery of a share of ligature's secrets by diverting any available mental power into a wrong channel. ”

“ Between the metaphysical contemplative mind and the scientific observant mind the antagonism is so profound that the union of the two qualities in the same individual, even in very different degrees of potentiality, is the rarest of intellectual endowments. ”

“ FEW physiologists, mixing in general society, can have failed to notice how common it is to hear their psychological brethren (if referred to at all) stigmatized as atheists; and this alike in coteries distinguished for pugnacious religious dogmatism, and in social circles where indifferentism marks the prevailing tone of thought. ”

“ Thus "Turkish graves are very shallow, sometimes not more than a foot in depth, the reason for this being that most old-fashioned Turks still retain the superstition that the soul does not leave the body until some time after burial, when it is drawn from the grave by the angel of death, who would find great difficulty in performing his task if the body was too deeply buried. ”

“ So that this sublimest of the world's thinkers is obliged in ultimate analysis to admit that ordinary common-sense may prove as successful in wrestling with the problem as the vastest inborn intellectual potentiality intensified by prolonged culture. ”

“ Further, philosophers who maintained each soul was formed specially for its own individual organism, varied in all conceivable ways as to the time and place of union of the two, while the parallel difficulty followed in settling the precise moment of somatic death at which separation of the two must occur. ”

“ Yet be their failures, while unflinchingly registered, freely forgiven; the obscurity of the problem to be solved, coupled with the imperfection of the instrument selected for its solution, has ever proved an obstacle to success, even when that instrument has been handled by the deepest thinkers and most devoted searchers after truth. ”

“ Now, metaphysical psychologists, though inquiring as boldly from their point of view into the genesis of mind, have contrariwise, with rarest exceptions, escaped and continued to escape this form of social obloquy. ”

“ Bain, seeming to teach that, whatever it is, the soul has but loose connection with the body. "The body might," he assures us, "have its bodily functions without the soul, and the soul might have its psychical functions in some other connection than our present bodies. ”

“ What success could be expected from an inquiry into the mechanism of respiration, from which all consideration of the structure, dynamics, and chemistry of the breathing-organs was purposely excluded? Conceive a man proceeding to investigate the respiratory process who had never seen a lung! ”

“ Charpentier. ↑ Atheist and atheism are words constantly used in total ignorance of their real meaning. An angry religionist, being asked for his definition of the term atheist, unhesitatingly replied, "I call any man an atheist who does not go to my church, or some one like it." ”