George John Romanes

“ To me it has always seemed that the doctrine of the Unknowable, in so far as it differs from the doctrine of the Unknown, is highly unphilosophical. By what right can it be affirmed that Deity, if He exists, may not reveal the fact of His existence to-morrow—and this to the whole human race without the possibility of doubt? Or, if there be a God, who is to say that there certainly cannot be a future life, in which each individual man may have unquestionable proof of Theism? ”

“ That is to say, we regard society as an eject, and the more that a man studies the thought and conduct of society, the more does he become convinced that we are right in so regarding it. Of course this eject is manifestly unlike that which we form of another individual mind: it is much more general, vague, and so far unlike the pattern of our own subjectivity that even to ascribe to it the important attribute of personality is felt, as we have just seen, to approach the grotesque. ”

“ For if mind is supposed, on no matter how small a scale, to be a cause of motion, the fundamental axiom of science is impugned. This fundamental axiom is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed—that just as motion can produce nothing but motion, so, conversely, motion can be produced by nothing but motion. Regarded, therefore, from the stand-point of physical science, the theory of spiritualism is in precisely the same case as the theory of materialism: that is to say, if the supposed causation takes place, it can only be supposed to do so by way of miracle. ”

“ Helmholtz tells me all that he knows about the physics and physiology of the process, both beyond and within my brain. But I feel that, even if Helmholtz were able to tell me very much more than he can, so long as he is dealing with these objective explanations, he is at work only upon the outer skin of the whole matter. The great reality is the mind of Beethoven communicating to my mind through the complex intervention of three different brains with their neuro-muscular systems, and an endless variety of aërial vibrations proceeding from a pianoforte. ”

“ Whether there be such a thing as an absolute world outside of thought, whether there be such things as matter and material atoms existing in themselves before any mind begins to perceive or think about them, is not the question before us. ”

“ For aught that any one of its constituent personalities can prove to the contrary, this social organism may possess self-conscious personality of the most vivid character: its constituent human minds may be born into it and die out of it as do the constituent cells of the human body: it may feel the throes of war and famine, rejoice in the comforts of peace and plenty: it may appreciate the growth of civilization as its passage from childhood to maturity. ”

“ We cannot think any of the facts of external nature without presupposing the existence of a mind which thinks them; and therefore, so far at least as we are concerned, mind is necessarily prior to everything else. It is for us the only mode of existence which is real in its own right; and to it, as to a standard, all other modes of existence which may be inferred must be referred. Therefore, if we say that mind is a function of motion, we are only saying, in somewhat confused terminology, that mind is a function of itself.
Such, then, I take to be a general refutation of materialism. ”

“ And I think that we of to-day, when we look to the teaching of this martyr of science, will find that in his theory alone do we meet with what I may term a philosophically adequate conception of Deity. If the advance of natural science is now steadily leading us to the conclusion that there is no motion without mind, must we not see how the independent conclusion of mental science is thus independently confirmed—the conclusion, I mean, that there is no being without knowing? ”

“ Materialism, therefore, is logically bound to argue in this way: We cannot conceive of a conscious idea, or mental change, as in any way affecting the course of a cerebral reflex, or material change; while, on the other hand, our knowledge of the conservation of energy teaches us as an axiom that the cerebral changes must determine each other in their sequence as in a continuous series. Nowhere can we suppose the physical process to be interrupted or diverted by the psychical process; and therefore we must conclude that thought and volition really play no part whatever in determining action. ”

“ If we thus unite in a higher synthesis the elements both of spiritualism and of materialism, we obtain a product which satisfies every fact of feeling on the one hand, and of observation on the other. We have only to suppose that the antithesis between mind and motion—subject and object—is itself phenomenal or apparent: not absolute or real. We [Pg 84] have only to suppose that the seeming duality is relative to our modes of apprehension: and, therefore, that any change taking place in the mind, and any corresponding change taking place in the brain, are really not two changes, but one change. ”

“ Or, in other words, unless psychologists will expressly consent to rear their science on the basis provided by the philosophical theory of Monism, there is nothing to save it from logical disintegration; apart from this basis, the whole science is, so to speak, built in the air, like an unsubstantial structure of clouds. Psychologists, I repeat, habitually ignore this fact, and constantly speak of feeling and intelligence as true causes of adjustive action ”

“ You do so because you consider yourself obliged in reason to do it, but if you supply causation at all, why not furnish such a cause as reason has impressed upon you, and which is inherent in your mind—a cause which stands still, an original cause? ”

“ If it would be detrimental to the theory of natural selection that any one isolated structure—such as the tail of a rattlesnake—should be adapted to perform a function useless to the animal possessing it, how utterly destructive of that theory would be the fact that all the phenomena of mind have been elaborated as functions of nerve-tissue without any one of them ever having been of any use either to the individual or to the species. ”

“ For, according to Monism, all matter in motion is mind; and, therefore, matter in motion is merely the objective revelation, to us and for us, of that which in its subjective aspect—or in its ultimate reality—is mind. ”

“ It becomes opposed to common sense because we all feel it is practically impossible to believe that the world would now have been exactly what it is even if consciousness, thought, and volition had never appeared upon the scene—that railway trains would have been running filled with mindless passengers, or that telephones would have been invented by brains that could not think to speak to ears that could not hear. ”

“ Now, if we fix our attention merely on this matter of complexity, and refuse to be led astray by obviously false analogies of a more special kind, I think there can be no question that the macrocosm does furnish amply sufficient opportunity, as it were, for the presence of subjectivity, even if it be assumed that subjectivity can only be yielded by an order of complexity analogous to that of a nervous system. For, considering the material and dynamical system of the universe as a whole, it is obvious that the complexity presented is greater than that of any of its parts. ”

“ What we know on the side of mind as logical sequence, is on the side of the nervous system nothing more than a passage of nervous energy through one series of cells and fibres rather than through another: what we recognize as truth is merely the fact of the brain vibrating in tune with Nature.
Such being the intimate relation between nerve-action and mind-action, it has become the scientifically orthodox teaching that the two stand to one another in the relation of cause to effect. ”

“ It is not true that the mind is always the passive slave of causes, known to it as motives. The human mind is itself a causal agent, having the same kind of priority within the microcosm as the World-eject has in the macrocosm. Therefore its motives are in large part matters of its own creation. In the intricate workings of its own internal machinery innumerable patterns of thought are turned out, some of which it selects as good, while others it rejects as bad; but no one of which could have come into being at all without this causal agency of the mind itself. ”

“ Because science, by its theory of evolution, appears to be in a fair way of explaining the genesis of these things by natural causes, theists are taking alarm; it is felt by them that if morality can be fully explained by utility, and religion by superstition, the reality of both is destroyed. But Monism teaches that such a view is entirely erroneous. For, according to Monism, the natural causation of morality and religion has nothing whatever to do with the ultimate truth of either. The natural causation is merely a record of physical processes, serving to manifest the psychical processes. ”

“ I will therefore merely observe, in general terms, that although we are still very far from understanding the operations of the brain in thought, there can be no longer any question that in these operations of the brain we have what I may term the objective machinery of thought. 'Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently,' said Hobbes. ”

“ Thus, upon the whole, if we identify the principle of causation with the principle of mind—as we are bound to do by the theory of Monism—we thereby draw a great and fundamental distinction between causation as this occurs in the external world, and as it occurs within the limits of our own subjectivity. ”

“ Howsoever complex we may suppose the flux and reflux of forces to be within the structure of a living brain, it is no more possible for any one of the forces concerned to escape from brain to mind, than it would be for such an escape to occur in a steam-engine or a watch; the doctrine of the conservation of energy forms an insuperable bar to the supposition that any equation in the region of physics can be left unsatisfied, in order to pass over and satisfy some other equation in the region of psychics. ”

“ For where the question becomes one not as to the fact of the association but as to its nature, philosophy, which must have regard to the facts of mind no less than to those of matter, must pronounce that the hypothesis is untenable; for the hypothesis of this association being one of causality acting from neurosis to psychosis, cannot be accepted without doing violence, not merely to our faculty of reason, but to our very idea of causation itself. ”

“ And as the theory of Monism identifies the mind with this its own inherent system of causation—or regards a man's Will as the originator of a particular portion of general causality—it follows from the theory that a man is justly liable to moral praise or blame as the case may be: the moral sense no longer appears as a gigantic illusion: conscience is justified at the bar of reason. ”

“ But, on the other hand, it is not thus logically impossible for the mind to infer that it may be the cause of some of its own knowledge, or, in other words, that it may have in some measure the power of producing what it knows as motion. And when the mind does infer this, no logic on earth is able to touch the inference; the position of pure idealism is beyond the reach of argument. Nevertheless, it is opposed to the whole momentum of science. ”

“ On the contrary, if this were supposed, the supposition would amount to destroying the causal agency of my own mind, which, as we have just seen, must either be original or not at all.
The way, therefore, that the matter stands is this. In so far as the microcosm is a circumscribed system of being—a thinking substance, a personality—it is of the nature of a first cause, free to act in any direction as to its thinking and willing, even though its thinking should be irrational as to truth, and its willing impossible as to execution. ”

“ For we have seen how little it is that we understand of the one mode in which we certainly know that mind does exist; and if from this little we feel impelled to conclude that there is a mode of mind which is not restricted to brain, but co-extensive with motion, is consubstantial and co-eternal with all that was, and is, and is to come; have we not at least a suggestion, that high as the heavens are above the earth, so high above our thoughts may be the thoughts of such a mind as this? ”

“ Relatively to our consciousness, therefore, we have here two sets of changes, which appear to be very different in kind; yet we know that in an absolute sense they are one and the same: we know that the diversity in consciousness is created only by the difference in our mode of perceiving the same events—whether we see or whether we hear the vibration of the strings. Similarly, we may suppose that a vibration of nerve-strings and a process of thought are really one and the same event, which is dual or diverse only in relation to our modes of perceiving it. ”

“ A very small amount of thinking is enough to show that what I call my knowledge of the external world, is merely a knowledge of my own mental modifications. A step further and I find that my idea of causation as a principle in the external world is derived from my knowledge of this principle in the internal world. For I find that my idea of force and energy in the external world is a mere projection of the idea which I have of effort within the region of my own consciousness ”

“ In other words, as before stated, the Will is not supposed to be an agent; and, therefore, to this theory the doctrine of free-will and of determinism are alike irrelevant. We need not wait to prove that this important fact is habitually overlooked by materialists themselves, or that whenever a materialist espouses the cause of determinism, he is thereby and for the time being vacating his position as a materialist; for if, according to his theory, the Will is not an agent, he is merely impugning his own doctrines by consenting to discuss the conditions of its agency. ”

“ According to the theory of Theism as sanctioned by Monism, what we apprehend as natural causation is the obverse of a part of a summum genus—i.e. the part falling within human observation whose whole is the Absolute Volition. This Volition, being absolute, can nowhere meet with restraint; it is therefore absolutely free, and can never contradict itself. Thus, those circumscribed portions of it which we know as human minds—and which, on account of being so circumscribed, are free within themselves—do not in their freedom conflict with the Absolute Volition. ”

“ Hence the supreme importance to psychology of reconciling the hitherto rival theories of Spiritualism and Materialism in the higher synthesis which is furnished by the theory of Monism. For, obviously, in the absence of any philosophical justification of the Will as an agent, we are without any guarantee that all psychological inquiry is not a vain beating of the air. If, as Materialism necessarily implies, the Will is not a cause in Nature, there would be no reason in Nature for the agency either of feeling or of intelligence. ”

“ Doubtless, a materialist will answer that it is not fair to take our estimate of 'work done' in the world of mind as the real equivalent of the energy supposed to have passed over from the world of motion, seeing that our estimate is based, not on the quantitative amount of thought produced, but rather on its qualitative character with reference to the social requirements of the race. ”

“ Of course the reason why at first sight it is apt to appear, not only gratuitous, but even grotesque, is because in these days of physical science the minds of most of us are dominated by the unthinking persuasion that the principle of causality is the most ultimate principle which our minds can reach. Most of us accept this persuasion as almost of the nature of an axiom, and hence the mere suggestion that our own volitions are really uncaused appears to us of the nature of a self-evident absurdity. ”