Parallelism (philosophy)

“ In the present day the two theories of the relation of mind and body that divide the field between them and stand opposed to each other are interactionism and parallelism. I have used the word "interaction" a little above in a loose sense to indicate our common experience of the fact that we become conscious of certain changes brought about in our body, and that our purposes realize themselves in action. But every one who accepts this fact is not necessarily an interactionist. The latter is a man who holds a certain more or less definite theory as to what is implied by the fact. ”

“ He claims that to make mental phenomena effects or causes of bodily motions is to make them material.
Must, then, the parallelist abandon the argument for other minds? Not at all. The force of the argument lies in interpreting the phenomena presented by other bodies as one knows by experience the phenomena of one's own body must be interpreted. He who concludes that the relation between his own mind and his own body can best be described as a "parallelism," must judge that other men's minds are related to their bodies in the same way. He must treat his neighbor as he treats himself. ”

“ Problems not openly epistemological, such as whether the relation of changes in consciousness to physical changes is one of interaction, parallelism, or automatism have the same origin. What becomes of philosophy, consisting largely as it does of different answers to these questions, in case the assumptions which generate the questions have no empirical standing? Is it not time that philosophers turned from the attempt to determine the comparative merits of various replies to the questions to a consideration of the claims of the questions? ”

“ No more are we entitled to conclude, because the physical fact is hung on to a cerebral state, that there is any parallelism between the two series psychical and physiological. When philosophy pleads that the theory of parallelism is borne out by the results of positive science, it enters upon an unmistakably vicious circle ”

“ But we may here confine ourselves to the most general of the objections to the parallelistic theory. They apply to the general [pg 343] idea of parallelism itself, and affect the different standpoints of the parallelists in different degrees. The theory in no way corresponds to what we find in ourselves from direct experience. It is only with the greatest difficulty that we can convince ourselves that our arm moves only when and not because we will. ”

“ As a principle of methodical procedure, therefore, in those parts of Psychology which deal with the more passive and, as we may say, routine-like aspects of mental life, Parallelism is a useful and therefore a legitimate working hypothesis. ”

“ Very often, certain parallelists, after thinking they have discovered the duality of nature, endeavour to bring it back to unity by supposing that the two faces of the reality are as two effects of one unique reality, inaccessible to our senses and underlying appearances. ”

“ Moreover, they are dynamic with the same reality and teleologic for the same end. To correspond to something, as parallelism makes matter and mind correspond to each other, is not, and cannot be, simply to have a certain character, self-contained and generally static; it is, and apparently it must be, to have a constant call to action, a constant motive to go beyond self, and so to make one's nature mediative or instrumental. ”

“ Yet we may be sure that the facts upon which the doctrine of parallelism rests will never be set aside by any new discoveries, and will find their place in that final theory toward which we are slowly moving. ”

“ Parallelism, by establishing a fixed and invariable relation between the physical and the moral, ends by denying the rôle of this last, since the physical mechanism is sufficient to draw to itself all the effects which general belief attributes to the moral. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Psycho-physiological parallelism is partly a matter of pure definition, partly a matter of philosophical considerations. This school defines a psychic object as one belonging to a single subject, one individual only, while a physical object is one belonging to many subjects. ”

“ But, furthermore, looking and thinking through the theory of parallelism, we can see something of special significance for the doubter's world. Men often forget that new relations of things mean new things, or at least new characters for the old things. Thus, mind and matter, or man and nature, if become, or found to be, parallel, are no longer the mind and the matter, the spiritual man and the physical world, that they were. ”

“ Parallelism, or at least the inner meaning of it, simply imposes certain conditions on a still real causation. These conditions, too, necessarily involve a significant, even a revolutionary change in the nature and value of any cause, but beyond peradventure they are unavoidable conditions. Thus, every active thing having any part in the causation of the world must always be only one among other active things, each also with some part. Then, secondly, all active things must co-operate, in, if not actually through their differences working together and harmoniously for what is real. ”

“ If he imagines the lengths of the sides to change, he cannot exclude the con­scious­ness of the correlative change in the angle; and presently, when his mental power is sufficiently developed, he perceives that if he continues to lengthen the sides in imagination, the lines approach parallelism as the angle approaches zero: yielding a conception of the relations of parallel lines. Here the con­scious­ness has risen into the stage of definite conception. ”

“ Pairs of the third type are made up of words parallel in meaning. This class somewhat overlaps the second; many terms that are frequently confused are parallels, and parallelism is of course a cause of confusion.
Parallels are words that show likeness in meaning. Likeness, not sameness. Yet at one time actual sameness may have existed, and in many instances did. Nowadays this sameness has been lost, and the words have become differentiated. As a rule they still are closely related in thought; sometimes, however, the divergence between them is wide. ”

“ Now if we re-establish facts as they are, if we admit a parallelism between physical phenomena, on the one hand, and phenomena at once physical and psychical, on the other, the parallelist hypothesis loses every sort of meaning. It ceases to present to us the image of two phenomena of an absolutely different order, which are found coupled together like the two faces of a unity, the front and back of a page, the right and wrong side of a stuff. If there is anything material in the psychical part, the opposition of nature no longer exists between the two terms ”

“ But since the distinction and the interrelation between the rational and the empirical forms the point of departure for the critical system, and this point of departure requires at the same time the moulding and shaping of the empirical by the rational and the rejection of the psychological appearance; a mere parallelism is altogether impossible, but an interrelation is included, and a task set for the effort and labor which constantly makes the rational penetrate the empirical. At the very outset we have the exclusion of the parallelism and the assertion of the interrelation. ”

“ It may stimulate those who are really competent to understand both terms in the comparison to tell us where the parallelism is real and where it is only apparent; and it may help to accustom ordinary readers to look for and expect resemblances in systems in which an earlier age would have seen nothing but contrasts. ”

“ The theory of psychophysical parallelism involves no doubt in the minds of the majority of its upholders the further assumption of some unity underlying both the physical and psychical series which may one day be discovered to be susceptible of scientific expression and interpretation. ”

“ All these objections certainly carry great weight, but they are not capable of killing the doctrine—they only scotch it. I think there is a radical vice in parallelism, which till now has not been sufficiently indicated, and I ask what can really remain of the whole edifice when this vice has been once exposed?
Parallelism implies a false idea, which we have already come across when discussing materialism. It is the idea that a phenomenon of consciousness constitutes one complete whole.
The error proceeds from the use of concepts which cause the reality to be lost sight of. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Poetic Parallelism is that beautiful, measured reduplication of thought, whereby the same sentiment or fact or promise is doubly expressed, the second time with a difference, still within the general scope of the first; the variation serving not only to cluster together beauties of speech, such as synonyms, contrasts, subservient natural images, and so forth, but to fix the general scope and outlook of the couplet or stanza, the one line hinting the limit to which the other may be assumed to submit, or defining the subject to which it also relates. ”

“ It follows that, if n states of the material universe are determinants of the material universe, then n states of a given man's mind are determinants of the whole material and mental universe—assuming, that is to say, that psycho-physical parallelism is true. ”

“ The parallelists on this point go very much further than the materialists; the latter at least concede that the consciousness is of some use, since they compared it to a function or a secretion, and, after all, a secretion is a useful liquid. The parallelists are so strongly convinced that mechanism is alone efficacious that they come to deny any rôle to thought. The consciousness for them has no purpose: yet it keeps company with its object. ”

“ The parallelist has not the same difficulty to face. He who holds that mental phenomena must not be built into the one series of causes and effects with physical phenomena may freely admit that physical phenomena form a closed series, an orderly system of their own, and he may yet find a place in the world for minds. ”

“ Then relations of activity, tying terms into series involving [Pg 45] change, tendency, resistance, and the causal order generally. Finally, the relation experienced between terms that form states of mind, and are immediately conscious of continuing each other. The organization of the Self as a system of memories, purposes, strivings, fulfilments or disappointments, is incidental to this most intimate of all relations, the terms of which seem in many cases actually to compenetrate and suffuse each other’s being. [27]
Philosophy has always turned on grammatical particles. ”

“ It is important that this parallelism should be recognized, that the unity of these truths may be finally accomplished in the living; therefore we repeat, Is this any more possible than that the full control of the soul should be at once possessed? ”

“ And, lastly, as something not formally asserted by parallelism but still far from incongruous with it and, as seems to me, even demanded by its inner meaning, all active things must be always acted upon as well as acting. ”

“ The doctrine of parallelism derogates from both, and leads to fatalism by attributing to God things which He has not done, and suppressing for man the necessary principle of all good, especially that of liberty. ”

“ Repetition embodies the principle of uniformity. Now we have found repetition to be a leading characteristic of parallelism; accordingly a close connection may be divined to exist between congruence and parallelism. Furthermore we have just elaborated in outline the principles of normality, pointing out how the property has its origin in the interplay of the relations of extension and cogredience. But—as we know from experience—a leading property of normality is symmetry, namely, symmetry round the normal. ”

“ The problem of Philosophy in dealing with these rival aspects of the world of experience then becomes that of deciding whether either of them can be adopted as the truth in isolation from the other. Or if neither is the whole truth, we must ask ourselves in what way the world can be at once One and Many, how the characters of systematic unity and of indefinite variety can be consistently thought of as belonging to the same Reality. Is Reality, we have to ask, One or is it Many, and if it is both, how are the unity and multiplicity connected? ”

“ Parallelism is the materialist doctrine of those forewarned folk, who have perceived the errors committed and endeavour to avoid them, while cherishing all that can be saved of the condemned doctrine. That which philosophers criticised in materialism was the misunderstanding of the principle of heterogeneity. The parallelists have seen this mistake, and have taken steps to respect this principle: we shall see in what way. They are especially prudent, and they excel in avoiding being compromised. They put forth their hypothesis as a provisional one, and they vaunt its convenience. ”

“ When the radical idea branches out into parallel ramifications, how can a consecutive series be formed of senses in their nature collateral? The shades of meaning sometimes pass imperceptibly into each other, so that though on one side they apparently differ, yet it is impossible to mark the point of contact. ”