An Introduction to Philosophy - George Stuart Fullerton (i can read book club TXT) 📗

qualities of things and, as it were, holding them together. It was believed in by philosophers who were quite ready to admit that they could not tell anything about it. For example, John Locke (1632-1704), the English philosopher, holds to it stoutly, and yet describes it as a mere "we know not what," whose function it is to hold together the bundles of qualities that constitute the things we know.

In the modern philosophy men still distinguish between substance and qualities. It is a useful distinction, and we could scarcely get on without it. But an increasing number of thoughtful persons repudiate the old notion of substance altogether.

We may, they say, understand by the word "substance" the whole group of qualities as a group—not merely the qualities that are revealed at a given time, but all those that we have reason to believe a fuller knowledge would reveal. In short, we may understand by it just what is left when the "we know not what" of the Lockian has been discarded.

This notion of substance we may call the more modern one; yet we can hardly say that it is the notion of the plain man. He does not make very clear to himself just what is in his thought, but I think we do him no injustice in maintaining that he is something of a Lockian, even if he has never heard of Locke. The Lockian substance is, as the reader has seen, a sort of "unknowable."

And now for the doctrine that the mind is nonextended and immaterial. With these affirmations we may heartily agree; but we must admit that the plain man enunciates them without having a very definite idea of what the mind is.

He regards as in his mind all his sensations and ideas, all his perceptions and mental images of things. Now, suppose I close my eyes and picture to myself a barber's pole. Where is the image? We say, in the mind. Is it extended? We feel impelled to answer, No. But it certainly seems to be extended; the white and the red upon it appear undeniably side by side. May I assert that this mental image has no extension whatever? Must I deny to it parts, or assert that its parts are not side by side?

It seems odd to maintain that a something as devoid of parts as is a mathematical point should yet appear to have parts and to be extended. On the other hand, if we allow the image to be extended, how can we refer it to a nonextended mind?

To such questions as these, I do not think that the plain man has an answer. That they can be answered, I shall try to show in the last section of this chapter. But one cannot answer them until one has attained to rather a clear conception of what is meant by the mind.

And until one has attained to such a conception, the statement that the mind is immaterial must remain rather vague and indefinite. As we saw above, even the Plotinic soul was inconsistently material rather than immaterial. It was not excluded from space; it was referred to space in an absurd way. The mind as common sense conceives it, is the successor of this Plotinic soul, and seems to keep a flavor of what is material after all. This will come out in the next chapter, where we shall discuss mind and body.

33. THE PSYCHOLOGIST AND THE MIND.—When we ask how the psychologist conceives of the mind, we must not forget that psychologists are many and that they differ more or less from each other in their opinions. When we say "the psychologist" believes this or that, we mean usually no more than that the opinion referred to is prevalent among men of that class, or that it is the opinion of those whom we regard as its more enlightened members.

Taking the words in this somewhat loose sense, I shall ask what the psychologist's opinion is touching the four points set forth in the preceding section. How far does he agree with the plain man?

(1) There can be no doubt that he refers the mind to the body in some way, although he may shake his head over the use of the word "in."

(2) As to whether the mind acts and reacts with matter, in any sense of the words analogous to that in which they are commonly used, there is a division in the camp. Some affirm such interaction; some deny it. The matter will be discussed in the next chapter.

(3) The psychologist—the more modern one—inclines to repudiate any substance or substratum of the sort accepted in the Middle Ages and believed in by many men now. To him the mind is the whole complex of mental phenomena in their interrelations. In other words, the mind is not an unknown and indescribable something that is merely inferred; it is something revealed in consciousness and open to observation.

(4) The psychologist is certainly not inclined to regard the mind or any idea belonging to it as material or as extended. But he does recognize implicitly, if not explicitly, that ideas are composite. To him, as to the plain man, the image held in the memory or imagination seems to be extended, and he can distinguish its parts. He does not do much towards clearing away the difficulty alluded to at the close of the last section. It remains for the metaphysician to do what he can with it, and to him we must turn if we wish light upon this obscure subject.

34. THE METAPHYSICIAN AND THE MIND.—I have reserved for the next chapter the first two points mentioned as belonging to the plain man's doctrine of the mind. In what sense the mind may be said to be in the body, and how it may be conceived to be related to the body, are topics that deserve to be treated by themselves in a chapter on "Mind and Body." Here I shall consider what the metaphysician has to say about the mind as substance, and about the mind as nonextended and immaterial.

It has been said that the Lockian substance is really an "unknowable." No one pretends to have experience of it; it is revealed to no sense; it is, indeed, a name for a mere nothing, for when we abstract from a thing, in thought, every single quality, we find that there is left to us nothing whatever.

We cannot say that the substance, in this sense of the word, is the reality of which the qualities are appearances. In Chapter V we saw just what we may legitimately mean by realities and appearances, and it was made clear that an unknowable of any sort cannot possibly be the reality to which this or that appearance is referred. Appearances and realities are experiences which are observed to be related in certain ways. That which is not open to observation at all, that of which we have, and can have, no experience, we have no reason to call the reality of anything. We have, in truth, no reason to talk about it at all, for we know nothing whatever about it; and when we do talk about it, it is because we are laboring under a delusion.

This is equally true whether we are concerned with the substance of material things or with the substance of minds. An "unknowable" is an "unknowable" in any case, and we may simply discard it. We lose nothing by so doing, for one cannot lose what one has never had, and what, by hypothesis, one can never have. The loss of a mere word should occasion us no regret.

Now, we have seen that we do not lose the world of real material things in rejecting the "Unknowable" (Chapter V). The things are complexes of qualities, of physical phenomena; and the more we know about these, the more do we know about real things.

But we have also seen (Chapter IV) that physical phenomena are not the only phenomena of which we have experience. We are conscious of mental phenomena as well, of the phenomena of the subjective order, of sensations and ideas. Why not admit that these constitute the mind, as physical phenomena constitute the things which belong to the external world?

He who says this says no more than that the mind is known and is knowable. It is what it is perceived to be; and the more we know of mental phenomena, the more do we know of the mind. Shall we call the mind as thus known a substance? That depends on the significance which we give to this word. It is better, perhaps, to avoid it, for it is fatally easy to slip into the old use of the word, and then to say, as men have said, that we do not know the mind as it is, but only as it appears to us to be—that we do not know the reality, but only its appearances.

And if we keep clearly before us the view of the mind which I am advocating, we shall find an easy way out of the difficulties that seem to confront us when we consider it as nonextended and immaterial.

Certain complexes of mental phenomena—for example, the barber's pole above alluded to—certainly appear to be extended. Are they really extended? If I imagine a tree a hundred feet high, is it really a hundred feet high? Has it any real size at all?

Our problem melts away when we realize what we mean by this "real size." In Chapter V, I have distinguished between apparent space and real space. Real space is, as was pointed out, the "plan" of the real physical world. To occupy any portion of real space, a thing must be a real external thing; that is, the experiences constituting it must belong to the objective order, they must not be of the class called mental. We all recognize this, in a way. We know that a real material foot rule cannot be applied to an imaginary tree. We say, How big did the tree seen in a dream seem; we do not say, How big was it really? If we did ask such a question, we should be puzzled to know where to look for an answer.

And this for a very good reason. He who asks: How big was that imaginary tree really? asks, in effect: How much real space did the unreal tree fill? The question is a foolish one. It assumes that phenomena not in the objective order are in the objective order. As well ask how a color smells or how a sound looks. When we are dealing with the material we are not dealing with the mental, and we must never forget this.

The tree imagined or seen in a dream seems extended. Its extension is apparent extension, and this apparent extension has no place in the external world whatever. But we must not confound this apparent extension with a real mathematical point, and call the tree nonextended in this sense. If we do this we are still in the old error—we have not gotten away from real space, but have substituted position in that space for extension in that space. Nothing mental can have even a position in real space. To do that it would have to be a real thing in the sense indicated.

Let us, then, agree with the plain man in affirming that the mind is nonextended, but let us avoid misconception. The mind is constituted of experiences of the subjective order. None of these are in space—real space. But some of them have apparent extension, and we must not overlook all that this implies.

Now for the mind as immaterial. We need not delay long over this point. If we mean by the mind the phenomena of the subjective order, and by what is material the phenomena of the objective order, surely we may and must say that the mind is immaterial. The two classes of phenomena separate themselves out at once.

[1] "The Passions," Articles 34 and 42.

CHAPTER IX MIND AND BODY

35. IS THE MIND IN THE BODY?—There was a time, as we have seen in the last chapter (section 30), when it