WHAT IS THE MIND?

30. PRIMITIVE NOTIONS OF MIND.—The soul or mind, that something to which we refer sensations and ideas of all sorts, is an object that men do not seem to know very clearly and definitely, though they feel so sure of its existence that they regard it as the height of folly to call it in question. That he has a mind, no man doubts; what his mind is, he may be quite unable to say.

We have seen (section 7) that children, when quite young, can hardly be said to recognize that they have minds at all. This does not mean that what is mental is not given in their experience. They know that they must open their eyes to see things, and must lay their hands upon them to feel them; they have had pains and pleasures, memories and fancies. In short, they have within their reach all the materials needed in framing a conception of the mind, and in drawing clearly the distinction between their minds and external things. Nevertheless, they are incapable of using these materials; their attention is engrossed with what is physical,—with their own bodies and the bodies of others, with the things that they can eat, with the toys with which they can play, and the like. It is only later that there emerges even a tolerably clear conception of a self or mind different from the physical and contrasted with it.

Primitive man is almost as material in his thinking as is the young child. Of this we have traces in many of the words which have come to be applied to the mind. Our word "spirit" is from the Latin spiritus, originally a breeze. The Latin word for the soul, the word used by the great philosophers all through the Middle Ages, anima (Greek, anemos), has the same significance. In the Greek New Testament, the word used for spirit (pneuma) carries a similar suggestion. When we are told in the Book of Genesis that "man became a living soul," we may read the word literally "a breath."

What more natural than that the man who is just awakening to a consciousness of that elusive entity the mind should confuse it with that breath which is the most striking outward and visible sign that distinguishes a living man from a dead one?

That those who first tried to give some scientific account of the soul or mind conceived it as a material thing, and that it was sufficiently common to identify it with the breath, we know from direct evidence. A glance at the Greek philosophy, to which we owe so much that is of value in our intellectual life, is sufficient to disclose how difficult it was for thinking men to attain to a higher conception.

Thus, Anaximenes of Miletus, who lived in the sixth century before Christ, says that "our soul, which is air, rules us." A little later, Heraclitus, a man much admired for the depth of his reflections, maintains that the soul is a fiery vapor, evidently identifying it with the warm breath of the living creature. In the fifth century, B.C., Anaxagoras, who accounts for the ordering of the elements into a system of things by referring to the activity of Mind or Reason, calls mind "the finest of things," and it seems clear that he did not conceive of it as very different in nature from the other elements which enter into the constitution of the world.

Democritus of Abdera (between 460 and 360 B.C.), that great investigator of nature and brilliant writer, developed a materialistic doctrine that admits the existence of nothing save atoms and empty space. He conceived the soul to consist of fine, smooth, round atoms, which are also atoms of fire. These atoms are distributed through the whole body, but function differently in different places—in the brain they give us thought, in the heart, anger, and in the liver, desire. Life lasts just so long as we breathe in and breathe out such atoms.

The doctrine of Democritus was taken up by Epicurus, who founded his school three hundred years before Christ—a school which lived and prospered for a very long time. Those who are interested in seeing how a materialistic psychology can be carried out in detail by an ingenious mind should read the curious account of the mind presented in his great poem, "On Nature," by the Roman poet Lucretius, an ardent Epicurean, who wrote in the first century B.C.

The school which we commonly think of contrasting with the Epicurean, and one which was founded at about the same time, is that of the Stoics. Certainly the Stoics differed in many things from the Epicureans; their view of the world, and of the life of man, was a much nobler one; but they were uncompromising materialists, nevertheless, and identified the soul with the warm breath that animates man.

31. THE MIND AS IMMATERIAL.—It is scarcely too much to say that the Greek philosophy as a whole impresses the modern mind as representing the thought of a people to whom it was not unnatural to think of the mind as being a breath, a fire, a collection of atoms, a something material. To be sure, we cannot accuse those twin stars that must ever remain the glory of literature and science, Plato and Aristotle, of being materialists. Plato (427-347, B.C.) distributes, it is true, the three-fold soul, which he allows man, in various parts of the human body, in a way that at least suggests the Democritean distribution of mind-atoms. The lowest soul is confined beneath the diaphragm; the one next in rank has its seat in the chest; and the highest, the rational soul, is enthroned in the head. However, he has said quite enough about this last to indicate clearly that he conceived it to be free from all taint of materiality.

As for Aristotle (384-322, B.C.), who also distinguished between the lower psychical functions and the higher, we find him sometimes speaking of soul and body in such a way as to lead men to ask themselves whether he is really speaking of two things at all; but when he specifically treats of the nous or reason, he insists upon its complete detachment from everything material. Man's reason is not subjected to the fate of the lower psychical functions, which, as the "form" of the body, perish with the body; it enters from without, and it endures after the body has passed away. It is interesting to note, however, an occasional lapse even in Aristotle. When he comes to speak of the relation to the world of the Divine Mind, the First Cause of Motion, which he conceives as pure Reason, he represents it as touching the world, although it remains itself untouched. We seem to find here just a flavor—an inconsistent one—of the material.

Such reflections as those of Plato and Aristotle bore fruit in later ages. When we come down to Plotinus the Neo-Platonist (204-269, A.D.), we have left the conception of the soul as a warm breath, or as composed of fine round atoms, far behind. It has become curiously abstract and incomprehensible. It is described as an immaterial substance This substance is, in a sense, in the body, or, at least, it is present to the body. But it is not in the body as material things are in this place or in that. It is as a whole in the whole body, and it is as a whole in every part of the body. Thus the soul may be regarded as divisible, since it is distributed throughout the body; but it must also be regarded as indivisible, since it is wholly in every part.

Let the man to whom such sentences as these mean anything rejoice in the meaning that he is able to read into them! If he can go as far as Plotinus, perhaps he can go as far as Cassiodorus (477-570, A.D.), and maintain that the soul is not merely as a whole in every part of the body, but is wholly in each of its own parts.

Upon reading such statements one's first impulse is to exclaim: How is it possible that men of sense should be led to speak in this irresponsible way? and when they do speak thus, is it conceivable that other men should seriously occupy themselves with what they say?

But if one has the historic sense, and knows something of the setting in which such doctrines come to the birth, one cannot regard it as remarkable that men of sense should urge them. No one coins them independently out of his own brain; little by little men are impelled along the path that leads to such conclusions. Plotinus was a careful student of the philosophers that preceded him. He saw that mind must be distinguished from matter, and he saw that what is given a location in space, in the usual sense of the words, is treated like a material thing. On the other hand, he had the common experience that we all have of a relation between mind and body. How do justice to this relation, and yet not materialize mind?

What he tried to do is clear, and it seems equally clear that he had good reason for trying to do it. But it appears to us now that what he actually did was to make of the mind or soul a something very like an inconsistent bit of matter, that is somehow in space, and yet not exactly in space, a something that can be in two places at once, a logical monstrosity. That his doctrine did not meet with instant rejection was due to the fact, already alluded to, that our experience of the mind is something rather dim and elusive. It is not easy for a man to say what it is, and, hence, it is not easy for a man to say what it is not.

The doctrine of Plotinus passed over to Saint Augustine, and from him it passed to the philosophers of the Middle Ages. How extremely difficult it has been for the world to get away from it at all, is made clearly evident in the writings of that remarkable man Descartes.

Descartes wrote in the seventeenth century. The long sleep of the Middle Ages was past, and the several sciences had sprung into a vigorous and independent life. It was not enough for Descartes to describe the relation of mind and body in the loose terms that had prevailed up to his time. He had made a careful study of anatomy, and he realized that the brain is a central organ to which messages are carried by the nerves from all parts of the body. He knew that an injury to the nerve might prevent the receipt of a message, i.e. he knew that a conscious sensation did not come into being until something happened in the brain.

Nor was he content merely to refer the mind to the brain in a general way. He found the "little pineal gland" in the midst of the brain to be in what he regarded as an admirable position to serve as the seat of the soul. To this convenient little central office he relegated it; and he describes in a way that may to-day well provoke a smile the movements that the soul imparts to the pineal gland, making it incline itself in this direction and in that, and making it push the "animal spirits," the fluid contained in the cavities of the brain, towards various "pores."

Thus he writes:[1] "Let us, then, conceive of the soul as having her chief seat in the little gland that is in the middle of the brain, whence she radiates to all the rest of the body by means of the spirits, the nerves, and even the blood, which, participating in the impressions of the spirits, can carry them through the arteries to all the members." And again: "Thus, when the soul wills to call anything to remembrance, this volition brings it about that the gland, inclining itself successively in different directions, pushes the spirits towards divers parts of the brain, until they find the part which has the traces that the object which one wishes to recollect has left there."

We must admit that Descartes' scientific studies led him to make this mind that sits in the little pineal gland something very material. It is spoken of as though it pushed the gland about; it is affected by the motions of the gland, as though it were a bit of matter. It seems to be a less inconsistent thing than the "all in the whole body" soul of Plotinus; but it appears to have purchased its comprehensibility at the expense of its immateriality.

Shall we say that Descartes frankly repudiated the doctrine that had obtained for so many centuries? We cannot say that; he still held to it. But how could he? The reader has perhaps remarked above that he speaks of the soul as having her chief seat in the pineal gland. It seems odd that he should do so, but he still held, even after he had come to his definite conclusions as to the soul's seat, to the ancient doctrine that the soul is united to all the parts of the body "conjointly." He could not wholly repudiate a venerable tradition.

We have seen, thus, that men first conceived of the mind as material and later came to rebel against such a conception. But we have seen, also, that the attempt to conceive it as immaterial was not wholly successful. It resulted in a something that we may describe as inconsistently material rather than as not material at all.

32. MODERN COMMON SENSE NOTIONS OF THE MIND.—Under this heading I mean to sum up the opinions as to the nature of the mind usually held by the intelligent persons about us to-day who make no claim to be regarded as philosophers. Is it not true that a great many of them believe:—

(1) That the mind is in the body?

(2) That it acts and reacts with matter?

(3) That it is a substance with attributes?

(4) That it is nonextended and immaterial?

I must remark at the outset that this collection of opinions is by no means something gathered by the plain man from his own experience. These opinions are the echoes of old philosophies. They are a heritage from the past, and have become the common property of all intelligent persons who are even moderately well-educated. Their sources have been indicated in the preceding sections; but most persons who cherish them have no idea of their origin.

Men are apt to suppose that these opinions seem reasonable to them merely for the reason that they find in their own experience evidence of their truth. But this is not so.

Have we not seen above how long it took men ............