David Jayne Hill

“ Unconscious ante-natal elements were the fountain from whose secret springs personality emerged with its rational powers and ancestral similitude. Either a miracle is wrought with every first sensation, breaking the sequence of causation that connects child with parent, or the promise and potency of a human spirit were centred in the embryonic organism. Unless every analogy of nature is violated, what we call the soul had its being long before it came to consciousness. ”

“ This sense of unity does, indeed, come and go with our food and breath, and, so far as sense can testify, ceases when we sleep and when we die, for as an ancient sage has said, "Sleep is the image of death." But while we sleep the psychic elements that consciousness unifies in our waking hours do not cease to be. ”

“ The ether is as real as ponderable matter. We are enabled to analyze the light of stars which were never beheld by human eye. Until we know more of what we call "matter" and "energy" than we do at present, who will be so adventurous as to say that the last vehicle to which psychic action can be transferred, and the only medium to which the unity of consciousness can be attached, are the ponderable but unstable compounds that constitute the living brain? It is true that experience here finds its limit and before our eager vision the curtain falls. ”

“ If we carry back beyond the threshold of verifiable knowledge the same ideas of causation, order, continuity, and development which dominate in the realm of inductive science, we find it impossible ever to lose the conception of being, or to reduce it to that of non-being, or to eliminate from it the idea of energy on the one hand and intelligence on the other. If our thought ever obtains a resting-place without violating the laws of thought, it must be in the ultimate idea of One Self-existing Reality, the primal fountain whence all multiform and dependent beings have their source. ”

“ We called attention to the fact that consciousness is the sense of unity of psychic elements, supported by the unity of the organism, and illustrated it by showing that there are three ways in which this unity may be lost, so that a new consciousness supervenes. The conclusion from all this evidently is, that, while psychic elements are manifested to us directly only through consciousness, they exist as its pre-conditions; and, therefore, are not to be denied existence beyond the sphere of consciousness. ”

“ The truth is, that there are no known objects-of-consciousness without consciousness-of-objects, and there is no consciousness-of-objects without objects-of-consciousness. In other words, a human being is at the same time a conscious intelligence and a living organism furnished with sense-organs. ”

“ Consciousness is a complex phenomenon, not a simple state. It is made up of elements or factors which become consciousness in their union, but are not consciousness in their isolation. A single ray of light does not produce a visual image, but a great number of rays of light, arranged in a given order, do produce such an image. In like manner, the psychic aspect of a single brain-cell is not a consciousness, but the psychic aspects of a great many cerebral cells, unified through the organic unity of an organized brain,, become a consciousness. ”

“ That causative action should ever arise from nothing, that chaos should ever beget a cosmos, that the motion-of-objects should ever transform itself into the sense-of-motion and this into the consciousness-of-motion,—are propositions that set at naught every canon of scientific thinking. The doctrine of evolution, which has been applied so successfully to the morphology and descent of organisms, seems to apply equally to the morphology and descent of mind; for organic and psychic changes, neurosis and psychosis, run pari passu wherever we can trace them. ”

“ In his book on Les Maladies de la Personnalité, Ribot enumerates the types of what may be called the dissolution of personality, or the disruption of the unity of consciousness. They are as follows: — (1) Alienation, in which the consciousness of the body is completely changed. A new state serves as the basis of a new psychic life, or manner of feeling, perceiving, and thinking, whence results a new memory. The old life is reduced to an almost unconscious state and has become to the new consciousness an “alien,” a stranger, whom the new person does not even know. ”

“ The whole significance of a nervous system consists in this, that it focusses energy in such a manner that its psychic concomitants acquire unity. The incarrying nerves furnish appropriate conductors for those modes of molecular energy which stimulate the several senses; so that light, sound, and impact are brought to consciousness at the centres where they are converged. Thus man becomes a microcosm in which the extended world mirrors itself within the limits which are set by his present constitution. ”

“ The very essence of intellect is discrimination. But this proceeds to no great length without assimilation, that is, the apprehension of similarity. The whole fabric of knowledge consists in the sum of apprehended resemblances and differences. ”

“ All this must be conceded if it can really be proved that consciousness is simply a mode of motion. The proofs of it, according to Hertzen, are both indirect and direct. The indirect proof is, that, as motion is for us a series of changing sensations, these sensations can be nothing else than motion. The direct proof is, that all our states of consciousness have a measurable duration and every psychic act has a time-relation. But every process that has duration can be nothing else than motion. Therefore every psychic activity must be a motion, and consciousness is the sum of these activities. ”

“ Evolution along lines of ascending life, upon which we must all agree, seems to imply the existence of plan and purpose, of means and end, of rational agency and intelligent finality. If all physical movements (kinesis) are accompanied with psychic concomitants (metakinesis) , and these may have foci in human consciousness, it would be very bold to say that they have no other focus, that is, that there is no superhuman or cosmic consciousness. And, as we know nothing of the area through which energy is extended, who can say where such a focus may not be? ”

“ It consists in a substitution of one personality for another, as when a man regards himself as a woman, or a laborer declares himself to be a king. This seems to be the concomitant of the hypertrophy of a fixed idea, a conception become so ineradicable that it cannot be co-ordinated with the normal psychic life. It appears that this aberration of consciousness is often only functional, not strictly organic, for hypnotized subjects can be made to change sex, or behave like persons other than themselves by mere suggestion. ”

“ The psychic life of other men can be known to us only through expressive movements of voice, gesture, and significant signs. The only mind that any man can know is strictly his own mind. All else is inference. ”

“ The philosophy based upon biological conceptions derives all life from pre-existent life, all thought from pre-existent thought, and finds no chaos because it reaches no limit to the sweep and operation of law. ”

“ The foregoing are the leading physiological conditions of consciousness. It needs only to be added that the integrity of the cerebral organ in general is essential for normal consciousness. Whatever tends to destroy this, whether the agent be toxic or mechanical, disturbs the unity and harmony of the psychic life and, if carried to an extreme, ends in the cessation of consciousness altogether, so far as objective tests can determine. ”

“ Thus we seem to find psychic phenomena associated with unicellular beings at the very basis of organic life. Lower we cannot go. The doctrine of biogenesis, or origin of living organisms from other living organisms only, which science at present accepts as the only one permitted by known facts, shuts us off from any further pursuit of the subject. We find a sense-of-objects even in proto-organisms. ”

“ All living tissues are subject to a common law. They are born, grow old and die. This process is constantly going on in every living man. The nervous tissues are no exception. The brain, like a tree withered at the top, may lose its vitality long before the other parts of the organism have yielded to the law of death. ”

“ As the spinal cord developed greater ganglia at one of its extremities, the more important of the psychic manifestations were passed on to these superior ganglia. Out of these developed the hind-brain, the mid-brain, the fore-brain, the total cerebrum in man, so that, as Goethe guessed, the skull is only the greatest of the vertebræ, and to the cellular contents of this crowning structure were at last transferred those neuroses which accompany human consciousness.
Consciousness is never strictly simple. ”

“ It is even conceivable, so large is the provision for automatism in the nervous system of man, that a person might live for months, or even years, in a perfectly unconscious condition, the bodily organism answering periodically to the sense-stimulations entering and producing movements along the pre-established lines of least resistance ordained by previous habit, and causing such actions as those of eating, drinking, turning, rising, and perhaps even those of walking. ”

“ What we do easily and quickly we soon do unconsciously. Thus, we learn to walk, to read, to spell, to write with a minimum of consciousness. A transaction that is difficult and new gives us much thought, perhaps worry, a feeling of resistance among our ideas corresponding to the disintegration of cerebral tissue noted by the physician in the copious waste products eliminated from the body. ”

“ The materialistic view, that matter becomes conscious without containing psychic elements, is an assumption without proof and without logical consistency. The idealistic view, that the world of objects is simply a fiction of conscious mind, is equally devoid of proof and probability. ”

“ While it may be said that every psychosis is accompanied by a correlated neurosis, it cannot be maintained that every neural change is attended with consciousness. The nutritive processes in the tissues of the brain during sleep have no mental concomitants. ”

“ First they exist in colonies, each individual of which is like every other; then in colonies whose members perform specific functions; finally in correlative organs in which the separate cells have been widely differentiated into bone, muscle, nerve or other tissues, each group specialized to the performance of a single function, the whole federated into an organism whose intricacy is so great and whose components are so numerous that it has been only quite lately discovered that the human body, in common with every animal body, is built up of these living aggregates. ”

“ It is also generally admitted that consciousness is something distinct from, nay, belonging to a wholly different phenomenal order from, energy. And it is further generally admitted that consciousness is nevertheless in some way closely, if not indissolubly, associated with special manifestations of energy in the nerve-centres of the brain. Now, we call manifestations of energy 'kinetic' manifestations, and we use the term 'kinesis' for physical manifestations of this order. ”

“ According to the monistic hypothesis, every mode of kinesis has its concomitant mode of metakinesis, and when the kinetic manifestations assume the form of the molecular processes in the human brain, the metakinetic manifestations assume the form of human consciousness. All matter is not conscious, because consciousness is the metakinetic concomitant of a highly specialized order of kinesis. ”

“ Although consciousness continues long after the supply of aliment has been withdrawn, delirium at last sets in, ideas become incoherent, sensibility is modified, and at last, death ensues. It seems as if the separate centres, and even the separate cells, have a life of their own which endures after the bond that unites them in rational co-ordination has been broken. (4) Temperature. Consciousness is manifested only within certain very narrow limits of heat. For the warm-blooded animals the normal temperature of the blood does not vary much. ”

“ It is now established that the paths of reflex action, traversed by external stimuli reappearing as motions, are continuous; that is, that the afferent nerves terminate in ganglia whence originate the efferent nerves by which the muscles are set in motion. This statement is subject, however, to the qualification that no nerve seems to be strictly continuous, but to consist in a series of elements through which motion has continuity. The in-carrying and out-carrying tracts of nerves are woven into a complex central network, so that stimulus may traverse the whole system. ”

“ It is cited to show how strong the conviction of men in all times has been that the mind of man neither arises as an uncaused phenomenon nor finds its cause in the movements of matter. A scientific writer of highly accredited authority, Professor Lloyd Morgan, of Bristol, in his late work on Animal Life and Intelligence, has stated a theory which does justice to the principle of causation, whatever may be said of it from other points of view. ”

“ Excepting in the hibernating animals, which endure a low degree of cold, still not without the loss of consciousness, life itself ceases when the temperature of the blood falls much below the normal. But long before life becomes extinct, consciousness disappears and all spontaneous movements cease. ”