Norman Kemp Smith

“ Animism is not the source of the distinction between soul and body but only the first and crudest attempt to comprehend and define their interrelations. To say, as Tylor and Avenarius both do, that the real grounds for the conception of the soul lie in primitive thinking, and that all later attempts to develop it fail to strengthen the grounds upon which it was adopted by the savage mind, is a grotesque misrepresentation of the history of human thought. ”

“ But if the self has no conception of inner experience or of perception as something distinguishable from the objects apprehended, it could not invent the distinction by any amount of reflexion upon the spatial externality of objects to the bodies of others. Also, it is not clear why the spatial externality of objects to our own body should not in itself, without this roundabout argument through other selves, suffice to direct our attention to so fundamental a distinction as that between objects and the perception of them. ”

“ In overcoming the opposition of subject and object he very seriously misrepresents it. When, on the one hand, he identifies the opposition of subject and object with the distinction between character and content, by using these new and quite general terms, and by describing character and content as inseparable aspects of every experience, he escapes the duty of analysing the varied and complex forms in which they are related in special cases. ”

“ From this point of view Avenarius seeks to interpret the progress of philosophy as an inevitable development of animism through more and more subtilised forms of spiritualism back to naturalism. Philosophy, as it develops the conception of spirit, passes by completion of the dualism between it and all the objects of possible experience into agnosticism, and agnosticism, by elimination of the spiritualistic opposition of appearance and reality which it has unconsciously retained, returns to the naturalism of pure experience. ”

“ The language which he employs to express the distinction has been created in the course of philosophical inquiry and as such is thoroughly misleading. Primitive man and the child do not use so general a term as perception or experience. They say ‘I see the object’ or ‘I touch it,’ and thus always keep in view that complexity of relations by which soul and body, mind and object, are interconnected. And no better illustration of this fact could be obtained than the animistic conception of the soul as depicted by Tylor. ”

“ He shares Avenarius’ belief in a primitive state of pure and true experience. Though the starting-point of human experience is the ‘unaufgeschlossenes Ei des Glaubens,’ in which the whole truth of the Universe is contained in germ, “it was so unstable that it yielded to every idle suggestion, so uncertain of itself that it fell victim to every deceptive appearance, so little capable of grasping the parts simultaneously with the whole, that every attempt to enter more fully into the parts caused it to lose the meaning of the whole. ”

“ We may get back to a stage at which the child does not distinguish self and not-self, inner and outer, but the differentiating process by which its confused experience is articulated through these distinctions does not seem to be vitiated at some particular stage in its development, but rather constantly to advance towards a more and more definite, more and more exact, appreciation both of the opposition between self and not-self and of their interrelations. ”

“ As Tylor has shown, and as Avenarius himself admits, the soul is not pictured by primitive man as consisting of inner experiences, nor even as the subject or bearer of such experiences, but as a duplicate of the body, itself possessing sense-organs and therefore related to objects in the same manner as the physical organism. ”

“ At no stage is the development describable as a transition from a consistent and true experience to an impossible or illegitimate dualism. If at certain stages duality, such as that of soul and body in the animistic theories, is unduly emphasised, it can be said with equal truth that in the preceding stages the duality was unduly ignored. A duality that leads through animism to the idealism of Plato can only be reckoned an illegitimate development of thought by those who, like Avenarius, advocate a purely naturalistic interpretation of spiritual experience. ”

“ I should further contend that the subjectivist position is not a falsification of the attitude of naive realism but a necessary step on the way to its correction. Subjective idealism may not itself be true, but the facts upon which it is based suffice to prove that naïve realism is certainly false. In the end Avenarius’ own theory breaks down because of its irreconcilability with these physiological facts. As I have tried to prove in the previous article, he only escapes them by inconsistently accepting the extreme subjectivism involved in the parallelist position. ”

“ According to Avenarius this desertion of the attitude of pure experience and consequent development through spiritualism and agnosticism back to naturalism is not only inevitable, but also fruitful as leading to a naturalism which is conscious of its own meaning and so can never again be tempted to transcend possible experience. ”

“ The true originating cause of subjective idealism seems to me to be physiological. Subjective idealism was not definitely formulated until the physiology of the nervous system had been developed by Descartes and his contemporaries; [6] and the fundamental reason which inclined them to subjective idealism may perhaps be stated in the following simple manner. So long as the eyes can be regarded as windows through which the mind can look out, every observer may directly apprehend the real external objects. ”

“ Animism is a form of naive realism, and indeed its extremest form, and just for that reason it always makes use of spatial metaphors, conceiving the inner body as related to the outer body as an individual is related to the house which he inhabits or the clothes which he wears. ”

“ Just as various spectators may look out of different windows upon the same external landscape, so, the child holds, may animals and men look out through their eyes upon the actual real objects that constitute their common environment. ”

“ As the voice of each individual comes from within him, and as each individual locates certain feelings in organs which are as a rule inside the body, the perceptions are regarded as forming an inner world. ”

“ All other persons have an outer world which they perceive or experience and each has an inner world which consists of these perceptions or experiences. The introjectionist argument is then completed through application to the self. I have an outer world which I perceive or experience and an inner world which consists of these perceptions and experiences. ”

“ The mind must become thoroughly sophisticated by reflexion on philosophical problems before it can be brought to admit, even as a possibility, that the world immediately experienced is a merely subjective copy. ”

“ The conclusion now drawn is not that the world perceived is a mental copy of external reality but only that the perception of external objects is in the mind. Since the object which another person perceives is seen by us to lie outside him, we infer that there exists in him the perception of it. “Thus in consequence of introjection [we] find on the one side the parts of the environment as ‘things,’ and on the other side individuals who ‘apprehend’ the ‘things’ ”

“ But when it is discovered that the eyes are not exits but always only entrances, that they are not passages through which the mind may issue out but only channels through which currents pass into the brain, the mind then appears to be shut off from direct communion with the external objects, and to depend for all its knowledge on mental images which in a mysterious manner accompany the brain-states. ”

“ The relief which he felt in escaping both idealism and dualism by readoption of the realistic attitude of natural science and physiology he has described in his introduction to the Menschlicher Weltbegriff. ”