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visionary superstitions. Yet science in these regions has no reason to be dogmatic; her function hitherto can only be critical; and even for that, her data are scanty and her principles extremely general. The influences on the mental mood and faculty, produced by climate and seasons, by local environment and national type, by individual peculiarities, by the differences of age and sex, and by the alternation of night and day, of sleep and waking, are less questionable. It is easy no doubt to ignore or forget them: easy to remark how indefinable and incalculable they are. But that does not lessen their radical and inevitable impress in the determination of the whole character. “The sum of our existence, divided by reason, never comes out exact, but always leaves a marvellous remainder80.” Irrational this residue is, in the sense that it is inexplicable, and incommensurable with the well-known quantities of conscious and voluntarily organised life. But a scientific psychology, which is adequate to the real and concrete mind, should never lose sight of the fact that every one of its propositions in regard to the more advanced phases of intellectual development is thoroughly and in indefinable ways modified by these preconditions. When that is remembered, it will be obvious how complicated is the problem of adapting psychology for the application to education, and how dependent the solution of that problem is upon an experiential familiarity with the data of individual and national temperament and character.

The first stage in mental development is the establishment of regular and uniform relations between soul and [pg clvi] body: it is the differentiation of organs and the integration of function: the balance between sensation and movement, between the afferent and efferent processes of sensitivity. Given a potential soul, the problem is to make it actual in an individual body. It is the business of a physical psychology to describe in detail the steps by which the body we are attached to is made inward as our idea through the several organs and their nervous appurtenances: whereas a psychical physiology would conversely explain the corresponding processes for the expression of the emotions and for the objectification of the volitions. Thus soul inwardises (erinnert) or envelops body: which body “expresses” or develops soul. The actual soul is the unity of both, is the percipient individual. The solidarity or “communion” of body and soul is here the dominant fact: the soul sentient of changes in its peripheral organs, and transmitting emotion and volition into physical effect. It is on this psychical unity,—the unity which is the soul of the diversity of body—that all the subsequent developments of mind rest. Sensation is thus the prius—or basis—of all mental life: the organisation of soul in body and of body in soul. It is the process which historically has been prepared in the evolution of animal life from those undifferentiated forms where specialised organs are yet unknown, and which each individual has further to realise and complete for himself, by learning to see and hear, and use his limbs. At first, moreover, it begins from many separate centres and only through much collision and mutual compliance arrives at comparative uniformity and centralisation. The common basis of united sensibility supplied by the one organism has to be made real and effective, and it is so at first by sporadic and comparatively independent developments. If self-hood means reference [pg clvii] to self of what is prima facie not self, and projection of self therein, there is in primitive sensibility only the germ or possibility of self-hood. In the early phases of psychic development the centre is fluctuating and ill-defined, and it takes time and trouble to co-ordinate or unify the various starting-points of sensibility81.

This consolidation of inward life may be looked at either formally or concretely. Under the first head, it means the growth of a central unity of apperception. In the second case, it means a peculiar aggregate of ideas and sentiments. There is growing up within him what we may call the individuality of the individual,—an irrational, i.e. not consciously intelligent, nether-self or inner soul, a firm aggregation of hopes and wishes, of views and feelings, or rather of tendencies and temperament, of character hereditary and acquired. It is the law of the natural will or character which from an inaccessible background dominates our action,—which, because it is not realised and formulated in consciousness, behaves like a guardian spirit, or genius, or destiny within us. This genius is the sub-conscious unity of the sensitive life—the manner of man which unknown to ourselves we are,—and which influences us against our nominal or formal purposes. So far as this predominates, our ends, rough hew them how we will, are given by a force which is not really, i.e. with full consciousness, ours: by a mass of ingrained prejudice and unreasoned sympathies, of instincts and passions, of fancies and feelings, which have condensed and organised themselves into a natural power. As the child in the mother's womb is responsive to her psychic influences, so the development of a man's psychic life is guided by feelings centred in objects and agents [pg clviii] external to him, who form the genius presiding over his development. His soul, to that extent, is really in another: he himself is selfless, and when his stay is removed the principle of his life is gone82. He is but a bundle of impressions, held together by influences and ties which in years before consciousness proper began made him what he is. Such is the involuntary adaptation to example and environment, which establishes in the depths below personality a self which becomes hereafter the determinant of action. Early years, in which the human being is naturally susceptible, build up by imitation, by pliant obedience, an image, a system, reproducing the immediate surroundings. The soul, as yet selfless, and ready to accept any imprint, readily moulds itself into the likeness of an authoritative influence.

The step by which the universality or unity of the self is realised in the variety of its sensation is Habit. Habit gives us a definite standing-ground in the flux of single impressions: it is the identification of ourselves with what is most customary and familiar: an identification which takes place by practice and repetition. If it circumscribes us to one little province of being, it on the other frees us from the vague indeterminateness where we are at the mercy of every passing mood. It makes thus much of our potential selves our very own, our acquisition and permanent possession. It, above all, makes us free and at one with our bodily part, so that henceforth we start as a subjective unit of body and soul. We have now as the result of the anthropological process a self or ego, an individual consciousness able to reflect and compare, setting itself on one side (a soul [pg clix] in bodily organisation), and on the other setting an object of consciousness, or external world, a world of other things. All this presupposes that the soul has actualised itself by appropriating and acquiring as its expression and organ the physical sensibility which is its body. By restricting and establishing itself, it has gained a fixed standpoint. No doubt it has localised and confined itself, but it is no longer at the disposal of externals and accident: it has laid the foundation for higher developments.

(ii.) Anomalies of Psychical Life.

Psychology, as we have seen, goes for information regarding the earlier stages of mental growth to the child and the animal,—perhaps also to the savage. So too sociology founds certain conclusions upon the observations of savage customs and institutions, or on the earlier records of the race. In both cases with a limitation caused by the externality and fragmentariness of the facts and the need of interpreting them through our own conscious experiences. There is however another direction in which corresponding inquiries may be pursued; and where the danger of the conclusions arrived at, though not perhaps less real, is certainly of a different kind. In sociology we can observe—and almost experiment upon—the phenomena of the lapsed, degenerate and criminal classes. The advantage of such observation is that the object of study can be made to throw greater light on his own inner states. He is a little of the child and a little of the savage, but these aspects co-exist with other features which put him more on a level with the intelligent observer. Similar pathological [pg clx] regions are open to us in the case of psychology. There the anomalous and morbid conditions of mind co-exist with a certain amount of mature consciousness. So presented, they are thrown out into relief. They form the negative instances which serve to corroborate our positive inductions. The regularly concatenated and solid structure of normal mind is under abnormal and deranged conditions thrown into disorder, and its constituents are presented in their several isolation. Such phenomena are relapses into more rudimentary grades: but with the difference that they are set in the midst of a more advanced phase of intellectual life.

Even amongst candid and honest-minded students of psychology there is a certain reluctance to dabble in researches into the night-side of the mental range. Herbart is an instance of this shrinking. The region of the Unconscious seemed—and to many still seems—a region in which the charlatan and the dupe can and must play into each other's hands. Once in the whirl of spiritualist and crypto-psychical inquiry you could not tell how far you might be carried. The facts moreover were of a peculiar type. Dependent as they seemed to be on the frame of mind of observers and observed, they defied the ordinary criteria of detached and abstract observation. You can only observe them, it is urged, when you believe; scepticism destroys them. Now there is a widespread natural impatience against what Bacon has called “monodical” phenomena, phenomena i.e. which claim to come under a special law of their own, or to have a private and privileged sphere. And this impatience cuts the Gordian knot by a determination to treat all instances which oppose its hitherto ascertained laws as due to deception and fraud, or, at the best, to incompetent observation, confusions of memory, and superstitions of ignorance. Above all, [pg clxi] great interests of religion and personality seemed to connect themselves with these revelations—interests, at any rate, to which our common humanity thrills; it seemed as if, in this region beyond the customary range of the conscious and the seen, one might learn something of the deeper realities which lie in the unseen. But to feel that so much was at stake was naturally unfavourable to purely dispassionate observation.

The philosophers were found—as might have been expected—amongst those most strongly attracted by these problems. Even Kant had been fascinated by the spiritualism of Swedenborg, though he finally turned away sceptical. At least as early as 1806 Schelling had been interested by Ritter's researches into the question of telepathy, or the power of the human will to produce without mechanical means of conveyance an effect at a distance. He was looking forward to the rise of a Physica coelestis, or New Celestial Physics, which should justify the old magic. About the same date his brother Karl published an essay on Animal Magnetism. The novel phenomena of galvanism and its congeners suggested vast possibilities in the range of

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