1
10
1
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/506365bfd993ae330dbb7a7db58c8a4c.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=LZimDkYeQHVxHg2jD7PrC115ecmFhdw7TklFc3s2inmIqlHJh6esGjApl-tVFBaxnTOZLiqixUy3KXJRuNsUgJhSY%7Efd5ikynLoFS2FW5aWM-xcJ2EfG0piQCjXzNQg9Os0FN0eVD6nh8SmISU30ppsZK60zcdZqTuuq6-nAEct2D6NYE5iCDJfddH7kZ-y-438yHuykxzPmcyxsAJ14Qg-76wat6d5WFFl9h8YQ41w-Y48j4RQwqMr4v4cRSuX0cEZ1k3eGjrPbJnOVVQ-szjmenKKSanqCyYSMgfLbPgjjXNri%7EyT6KGWbjvqB9cmWKya9mToIZFTpvcr5Sx6L6w__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
df43c61f976e091e5638ddbfc8d09491
PDF Text
Text
Theories of Mental Genesis.
197
8. Under the process of correlation, wherein real forces lose
lheir individuality, only abstract or general force abides.
Iriris may be called ideal force when contrasted with par
ticular real forces; it is cognized only by inference, and not
By immediate sensuous perception. It is a really-existent
Universal or generic entity — an Actuality whose manifesta
tion is the correlation of forces. The particular forces are
^its reality, but not their own; for their manifestation is their
S destruction, but both phases give evidence of the reality of the
Universal. In the entire round from one force through all
-the others back to the same force again, we have the succes
sive annulment of all the characteristic distinctions of the
several forces, and thus we have left force in general as the
pure negative might whose constitution or nature is self-made
by its activity in the play of forces. Its universal nature —
its ascent out of particularity — refusing to be limited to a
special form—appears in the negative side of the process,
wherein it perpetually annuls special characteristics. Its
positive affirmative side appears in the perpetual production
..of the special out of the negation of (old forms of) the same.
9. Wherein this Universal force, which is a self-determined,
.'differs from the thinking activity or Mind
is a
profitable inquiry. But the sole point we had in view here
was simply to show the new doctrine of Realism now arising
in place of the dismal nominalism and stifling conceptualism
in vogue.
THEORIES OF MENTAL GENESIS.
By John Weiss.
The later scientific method derives the conscience from
Selected experiences of the useful and agreeable. In the
finest minds the moral sense is only the clarified residue of
the experiences of people in learning to live safely and com
fortably with each other. It sums them up, but can add
nothing to them. It becomes, like a family resemblance, a
permanent trait acquired by inheritance. A fresh experience
may compel a fresh adjustment, and the moral sense can be
�198
Theories of Mental Genesis.
modified from without by a social exigency, but it has
attained to no independent power to force its own adjust
ment upon experience. It is never conscious of an exigency
of its own, which may transcend experience, and dictate to
it; such a faculty is as inconceivable as that a fountain
should rise higher than its source. Acts of moral heroism
are suggestions of an ultimate utility which persuade the
individual to sacrifice himself. But what is the origin of
such suggestions which contradict the average sense derived
from human experience ? The scientific method insists upon
its derivation of conscience from empirical observation, yet
proceeds to explain transcendent morals which reform the
race and abolish any wrong that average experience has
incorporated in its social system, by endowing certain indi
viduals with the capacity to conceive of a more beneficent
system, to anticipate the future, to sacrifice peace, the feel
ing of approbation, the immediate security of society, life
itself, for the sake of a finer idea of Right. These individuals
are moved thereto, perhaps, by seeing outrages, or by suffer
ing from them. But what impels a man who suffers from a
wrong which is upheld by society, to increase his suffering by
protesting against it in behalf of other men ? Every feeling
of the useful and the agreeable would counsel him to keep
his suffering and that of his fellows at a minimum. Expe
rience has gradually founded the system which surrounds
him: it can no more furnish him with the seeds of his revolt
than the nut of a beech can provide the acorn for an oak.
When the empirical method is held strictly to its own logic,
this absurdity is perceived, of something resulting from
objective experience different from all the objects which coni
stituted that experience. A state of morals at any epoch is
only the state of comfort, happiness, usefulness, and mutual
approbation of the majority; it is an average attained by
the exigencies of the people who are forced to live together.
Logically that average is insurmountable; but practically it
is constantly surmounted, and society is compelled to assume
a higher average by men of a forlorn hope who propose a
conception of religion, of worship, of human rights and happi
ness, which nowhere exists, and which could not therefore be
suggested by empirical sensations. They are frequently men
�j
Theories of Mental Genesis.
199
| who conceive these things from afar, without the stimulus of
| personal suffering, quite removed from that into calm regions
I of meditation. They emerge from the solitudes of thought
| to proclaim the advent of a fresher and more just society:
i but the sense of justice, the instinct of order, devastates the
things that men hold dearest, and, if the thinkers are obsti
nate, demands their life as a sacrifice to existing order. One
thing is “ said by them of olden time ” ; but these men, the
products of no time at all, step out of a purer conception, and
■are heard, “ But I say unto you.” What an unaccountable
I j phrase if morals are nothing but the silt which time brings
-down and deposits. There must be somewhere existing an
11 Absolute Righteousness, the inspirer of every more righteous
future, as there must exist a Plan of Absolute Intelligence,
the continuous cause of every developing epoch of creation.
The hero of Right and Absolute Religion is not maddened
by suffering into forgetfulness of self, but possessed by a
higher Self which his fortunate structure invites into him and
to which he responds. Or, shall we suppose that his struc
ture develops an exceptional Self? At any rate, the empirical
method does not account for him, because he is essentially
different from all the materials and sensations which it has
to work with to produce notions of utility and social appro
bation. We may concede that such results may be derived
from such materials; but the burden of showing the genesis
■of prophets and reformers rests with those who would restrict
us to these materials alone.
\
In Mr. Huxley’s book, entitled “ More Criticisms on Dar
win,” I find the following paragraph: “ Assuming the posi
tion of the absolute moralists, let it be granted that there is
w *a perception of right and wrong innate in every man. This
means simply, that when certain ideas are presented to his
mind the feeling of approbation arises, and when certain
�200
Theories of Mental Genesis.
duty is to earn the approbation of your conscience, or moral
sense; to fail in your duty is to feel its disapprobation.” Of
course: but the question is of simple perception of an idea
of a right act and of a wrong act; the idea of doing either
personally is not involved. So that there can be an absolute
perception of an act as right or as wrong, pure and simple,
without any mixture of personal satisfaction or pain. The un
biased moral sense can simply recognize right and wrong, as
the mind perceives that two and two make four; both recog
nitions are an organic necessity. If the recognition of a right
thing is reflected on, then approval of it arises: a feeling
closely bordering upon the mental satisfaction which accompanies the perception of truths and facts of the exact sciences.
But the pleasure and pain of self-approbation and disappro
bation cannot arise until the Self transfers or fails to transfer
its moral perception into private action.
So that there is something in man besides the “ something
which enables him to be conscious of these particular pleas
ures and pains.”
Now the origin of this moral Something is a distinct
question. It may have descended from obscure traits of
anticipatory moral action which reign in the animal world.
Transferred into human and social circumstances, they may
have filtered through a developing sense of the useful and
the salutary, till they were deposited in average habits of
behavior. But these traits reach at length in the finest brains
a capacity of being self-perceived as immutable morality, dis
tinct from motives of utility, or of pleasure and pain, whether
they travelled manward by those routes or not. There is no
objection to the theory that they did, until it undertakes to
insist that they have not emerged from those routes upon a
broad land of a Conscience which transcends all selfish feelings, to sacrifice them to a more arduous Right yet unattained, whose attainment may involve the hero of Conscience
in ruin.
The latest scientific method derives the Imagination, as it
does the Conscience, from accumulated sensations. But its
language here struggles painfully to bring its phrases up to
the level of the whole function of Imagination. It is quite
inadequate to say that a brain well compacted with images
X
jl
<i
J
|
V’j
X
g
|j
S
J
f.|
'M
I
!
j
�Theories of Mental Genesis.
201
derived from natural objects, spontaneously creates the asso
ciations between them and human moods, passions, and
emotions; that a sense of symmetry and beauty, a feeling for
landscapes, a power to evolve them out of the crude assem
blage of natural features, a gift of constructing all the sensa
tions derived from life and nature into the sublimity of poetry
and song, results from the number and variety of these sen
sations taken into a temperament of sensibility, where they
are moulded, fused by personal passion, and express cerebral
felicity of structure. These phrases mix up the raw mate
rial in which the poet, artist and composer work with other
phrases which are assumptions that it also generates their
working faculty. That is the very point involved. No doubt
the poet has received a multiplicity and variety of sensa
tions. The difference between him and other men is first a
capacity to receive them ; second, a capacity to transform
them into his own personality; third, a capacity to express
them, thus transmuted, with a rhythmical flow that involves
the whole of Nature and man in its course, and converts Na
ture into a metaphor of his private vitality. No number of
empirical sensations derived from Nature, no experience of
mankind, no recollection of its history, can account for this
result. A brain of rare structure incorporates a world, but
gives it back to us another world; or, rather, the world’s
secret is fathomed and betrayed: we see it not as it always
seemed to us, but lifted into a passionate and symmetrical
vitality, which transcends every empirical sensation, and is,
in fact, its reason for being: and that is something which
nere sensation cannot supply. Held to strict logic, the mate‘ialist has no right even to the phrases he employs in speakng of this subject.
j H. Taine says that there is a fixed rule “for converting into
ne another the ideas of a positivist, a pantheist, a spiritualit, a mystic, a poet, a head given to images, and a head given
to formulas. We may mark all the steps which lead simple
philosophical conception to its extreme or violent state,” as
in the passage which he quotes from Sartor Resartus, begin
ning, “generation after generation takes to itself the Form of
a Body, and, forth issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heav
en’s mission appears.” “ Take the world as science shows
�202
Theories of Mental Genesis.
it,” continues Taine, “ it is a regular group, or, if you will, a
series which has a law; according to science it is nothing
more. As from the law we deduce the series, you may say
that the law engenders it, and consider this law as a force.
If you are an artist, you will seize in the aggregate the force,
the series of effects, and the fine regular manner in which
the force produces the series.” In this connection Taine evi
dently recalls the novels of Balzac, who develops the charac
ter of various human passions as primitive forces, which
appear in objective facts of men and women, who are to be
observed, without praise or dispraise, as beings who develop
organically their whole moral disposition, and whose joy or
grief may be inferred according to the judicious rule laid
down by Hegel, that every work of art depends for its moral
upon the person who is studying it. Elsewhere Taine shows
how Thackeray, for instance, violates this rule. “To my
■mind,” continues Taine, “this sympathetic representation is
of all the most exact and complete; knowledge is limited as
long as it does not arrive at this, and it is complete when
it has arrived there. But beyond, there commence the phan
toms which the mind creates, and by which it dupes itself.
If you have a little imagination, you will make of this force
a distinct existence, situated beyond the reach of experience,
spiritual, the principle and the substance of concrete things.”
By the simple intensification of this quality, the metaphysi
cian and the mystic are evolved. But notice here how Taine
has smuggled in the phrase, “ if you have a little imagina
tion,” as if that faculty were something excrementitious,
whose products are what alimentation abandons and expels.
It occurs to us to inquire, at the lowest, if imagination may
not be a mode of force: if so, it must be taken into the
account of mental development, where it appears to be some
thing quite as positive as any passion which Balzac describes.
It is then a legitimate object whose products cannot be re
jected merely because they deposit in the mind a sense of
Spirit. They push out a horizon filled with images and cor
respondences which are different from visible things, and
which those things, left to themselves, could not procreate,
any more than a garden of flowers could impregnate itself.
A viewless wind must stir the celibate stalks—a ranging bee
�Theories of Mental Genesis.
203
must make its geometric cell an excuse for these promiscuous
Carriages. Here is the point where the scientific method,
which is complemented by Taine’s artistic method, fails to
account for all the facts that a universe provides. As soon
as the word Spirit appears, or phrases hinting at the Invisi
ble put in their claim, or a capacity that transcends inherited
effects is supposed, the empirical method disclaims it all, as
Conscience is explained to be the cumulative result of expe
riences of utility. Yet the scientific method itself is indebted
to the faculty of imagination. That is a twofold faculty: it
performs two functions.
First, it anticipates subsequent epochs of scientific inter
pretation by incessant proclamations of the essential unity of
all things. Its instinct is for similarities; it floats at so great
a height that objects appear blended, but the horizon from
that height is so enlarged that a hemisphere of objects is
spread out. It selects on one meridian the counterpart of an
object upon another, though it may skulk, and imitate the
color of its neighborhood, hoping not to be swooped upon
and assimilated. Its prey runs in forests and multiplies in
all seas. The ocean is a saucer, and its bottom scarce skin
deep. And the distances which lie within the galaxy are
sanded with the gold dust of its imagery. The firmament is
a solid floor on which this sense of unity can walk.
This instinct appears first in poetry, where Nature is rifled
of all the features that can correspond to our emotions, or
serve as symbols of our thought.
‘•The forest is my loyal friend;
Like God it useth me.”
And like God we use the forest. Its million leaves dance
in the anticipation which our mind has that this “sense
sublime of something interfused” will turn out to be the
^identity of law and object, of the creature and the Creator,
of the scenery and the seer. And all the images of the Poet,
so far from being the bastards of an irresponsible impulse
rwhich ravishes an idiotic universe, are the healthy children
I of the only realism that dare aspire to his feathered hand.
See it tremble in moments of conception ! God remembers
His rapture. There is not an object which is not a passion—
�204
Theories of Mental Genesis.
not a passion which does not overtake itself in objects. What
is my thought like ? Whatever it be like, that is my thought,
or else it could not be like it. How irrational and fantastic
seems this conclusion to which the imagination leaps with
the faith of a child in his “ make believe” ! How futile this
hysteric passion which mounts to the eyelid and inundates
the cheek at the happy rashness of some image that abol
ishes time and space, and makes the dirty earth a lens' We
put our eye to it. Thou Deity, our eyes have met!
There is no sense in this transubstantiation of poetry, ex
cept to the senseless communicants, until the epoch of scien
tific Synthesis arrives, and the imagination is justified in
ransacking the' universe for symbols. Synthesis is imagina
tion secularized. I mean that every one of the old symbols
*
the old confidences with Nature, the old obscure sympathies,
the artless pretences that objects are personal and vital, and
all related through the observer, are now proved to be the
mind’s expectation that there is but one kind of intellect, but
one object, and but one law or mode of divine manifestation.
Synthesis builds a hive for imagination to dwell in ; the
structures planned by the original Geometer are filled with
myriad meadows of sweets distilled to sweetness.
This leads me to say that, secondly, the imagination some
times anticipates, at any existing epoch of information, a
subsequent epoch, when all the facts collected up to that date
justify the anticipation. They are interpreted by a law,
or by a mode of Force which put them forth. They arrive at
length in sufficient number, and in relations obvious enough,
to vindicate the previous divining of the imagination. Hardly
a great man, from Pythagoras downward, can be mentioned',
who did not have fore-feelings of the genuine scientific direc»
tion, in Number and mathematical relation, in the qualities
of Motion and their application to planetary phenomena, in
the sphericity of the earth and stars, in the law of musical
intervals, in the applications of the arc and conic sections, in
the position of the earth in the solar system. Before the facts
were in, the method was surmised; sometimes the law itselF
was hinted at, and imperfectly formulated. Now, no uncon
scious cerebration, or automatic sorting of impressions de
rived from the number and similarity of facts, can promulgate
�Theories of Mental Genesis.
205
or anticipate a law, because that is something essentially dis
tinct from Object. There may be simultaneousness in the
Lppearance of law and object; we may admit that the two
are really one, a moment in which identity appears, a focus
of correlation. But there is not any feature of this intimacy
which can proclaim itself; that is not done for a long time,
nor until an independent mental faculty appears of such a
divining nature that it is not at any epoch a common human
faculty. It is the result of rare structural qualifications, which
recur to Creation with the gift that made creation possible,
with a power to repeat by a sense of Cause the logic that
caused, to create a mental synthesis that sweeps all observa
tion into the unity of a Law, to show that all the sciences are
Protean moods of one eternal moment of correlation, to speak
at length in human language the plan which without speak
ing planned. That ineffable creative word becomes flesh in
the divinings of imagination. They precede any collection or
arrangements of objects, just as infinite Will must have pre
ceded its own going into objects. Or, if Will and Object be
continually identical, it is not in consequence of Object. We
cannot eradicate or explain away that aboriginal habit of the
scientific imagination to ask Why ? as the child does; and
to answer, Because! as the child does. “ Of such is the king
dom of Heaven.” Object cannot ask nor answer, because it
cannot originate. But the intellect does not wait till all the
facts are in, any more than the divine Mind did in order that
the facts might be created.
Luther said, “ the principle of marriage runs through all
creation, and flowers as well as animals are male and female,”
before botany was dreamed of, or the principle of vegetable
life divined. This was an anticipation as remarkable as that
of Swedenborg, who clearly posited the nebular hypothesis
before he or any other man had an inch of standing ground
to show for it.
Now, if at any epoch the finest brains—those, namely,
whose synthetic method is rarefied by imagination—are only
deposited by empirical contact with the world, so that their
state of intelligence is nothing but juxtaposition of facts, and
their structure nothing but a result of microscopic packing of
sensations, such brains could not discharge the functions of
�206
Theories of Mental Genesis.
which they are conscious. The problem is to build a brain.
Let us build it after the fashion of the materialist. The animal
kingdom slowly elaborated the cerebral matter, and roughly
mapped out the relation of its parts. Nature, cautiously
feeling her way from species to species, from simple to com
plex forms, from a dot of plasma to the complicated lobes
which respond to external circumstances and record them,
contributes the whole of the process to the progenitors of man
kind. What had their brain become by that time ? It was an
agglutination of sensations. What must have been the re
sult of the first sensible impression which was made upon the
earliest rudimental nerve-matter? That question is answered
by the discovery that the nerve-matter was a part of the ob
jective world which produced the impression. It did not lose
or modify its character by being eliminated from that world ;
it was still one of its discrete forms, and identical in sub
stance. Then the object which impressed it and the impres
sion were identical. The object was the sensation. There is
no infinitesimal rift into which you can thrust your surmise
of a difference and pry apart a sameness into duality; that
is, into the supposition of an object to impress and an object
to be impressed—one to become by means of that impression
something different in kind from the object that impresses.
Brood upon that primitive relation of plasma to all the rest
of elemental matter. You cannot hatch it into a different
kind of vitality by merely saying that plasma was a more
highly organized matter. You cannot establish a schism in
matter by determining grades of organization. Every grade
preserves, prolongs, embodies the original identity in which
it was contained; just as oxygen by aerating the blood im
presses it with the character of oxygen, but does not liberate
it from the materiality which they both share. A nerve
sensation is not a leap from Object into Subject.
If it is not, as.the materialist alleges, then it makes no dif
ference how many sensations the accumulating brain receives
and registers. Their number cannot change their quality.
On the long route of developing mankind there is no station
where independent mentality may step on board. The train
stops for refreshment, wood, and water. But the food and the
fuel still correspond to their own motive power and digestive
�Theories of Mental Genesis.
207
ability. Stomach and food, brain and object, are convertible
expressions. All objective circumstances remain unaltered;
nerve-matter accumulates because sensations do. The first
word of human speech, the first musical cadence, the first
J smatter of the natural language of human emotions on the
[ face, the first prattling of social intercourse, the first fumbling
| for a tool of bone or flint, the first sparkle kindled in the dry
pith of the fennel — all these rudiments of society were only
the sensations of Sensation, the objectivity of Objects.
The brain was but another object set up by the concurrence
of objects, a self-registering world in the compass of a skulk
Even if the cerebral capacity should cease to expand, while
the perceptions continued to accumulate, it never can be
filled; for the method of packing them is economical of room.
If a drop of water is capable of containing 500,000,000 ani
malcules endowed with locomotive limbs, there must be room
> enough in any brain for any number of objective residues.
But so long as the world does not swerve from its own objeci tivity and change its climate, so long does the human brain
continue to be its odometer, or automatic tally.
“ The Holothuriae living in the South Sea, which feed upon
coral sand, spontaneously eject their lungs and intestine
(through the anus when they are transferred to clear sea
water ; then they construct new bowels corresponding to the
new conditions.” But Object does not transfer the human
brain into the element of Subject, so that it can void its assi
milative structure, and set up the liver, lungs and lights of
Subjectivity.
I think this is a correct presentation of the latest materialJ Ism, which derives all mental functions from an automatic
| /system of storage of objective impressions. But its advocates
fl Yhave not yet looked in the glass of their own theory. I have
tried to reduce it to the absurdity which lies latent in it. It
. . is this. It has nothing but objects to start from, nothing but
Ji them to accumulate, and yet it assumes to arrive at somep thing which is not object; for instance, its own capacity to
is make any assumption at all, and to deny that the capacity
* i, demonstrates independent mentality. It will deduce and preFrfi" sume; something which a skull commensurate with the sky,
i and crammed with objectivity, could never do. It will refuse
|
�208
Theories of Mental Genesis.
to a human being an independent personality: something
which nothing but such a personality could do. It started
with speechlessness, and had, of course, nothing but aggluti
nated dumbness to end with: yet it invents words, and com
mits to them its affirmations and denials; lends them to the
poet, who makes whole landscapes share the breath of their
life; turns them over to the prophet, who puts them in his
thwarts, casts loose from actual states, and pulls into the
possible and the desirable; yields them to the synthetic
imagination, and hears its own best guesses before it has pro
claimed them, and its own experimental method suggested
before objects could muster strong enough to raise a whim
per; consigns them to the moral sense, and is refuted by a
style of speech which transcends the latest moment of utility
and social advantage, pronounces in divine men their own
death-warrant, and sighs out selfishness upon a million
crosses. Was that bit of plasma, then, nothing but one
object more in a world full? or, was it an anvil upon which
objective impact flew into a spark? Now a myriad hammers
of the many-handed Cosmos crash through our skull, and we
see stars —abysses full of them! Is it an optical illusion?
They appear to attain orbits—they move in definite and har
monious relations—they create distance, deepen it with per
spective: flat objectivity is broken up as a thinkable Uni
verse comes pondering through.
Let me have recourse to an illustration.
A planetary motion is the result of two causes : first, a
force that acts in the direction of a tangent; second, a force
that attracts. What happens when the mind has observed
that there are these two forces? Something which discovers
their'laws. This may be an inductive process, derived from
prolonged and numerous calculations, adjustments, and cor
rections, based upon as many planetary directions as can be
observed. Then suppose we wish to ascertain the motion of
a planet which is submitted to the influence of these laws.
That is a deduction based upon calculation. There is an
astronomical duplication of the planetary facts, a mental re
hearsing of orbital motions. The facts recur to their Cause
through our intellect. Their mere objectivity is not compej
tent to achieve this result, which is something causative, and
�Theories of Mental Genesis.
209
therefore essentially different from themselves, which are
caused. They are occasions for addressing, stimulating and
developing in us a quality which is not themselves, not their
counterpart, but which is identical with the quality which
caused them. They stand between, and could as soon have
originated cause behind them as our causality beyond them.
What is the mental fact which takes place when this medi
ate Object recurs to Subject? Something besides cerebral
registering of the succession of sensations produced by the
phenomena. That only succeeds in confirming succession or
simultaneousness. We call the mental fact Deduction. But
that is only a word, and not an explanation. It does not put
us into possession of the actual occurrence when objects are
mentally fitted with the laws of their causes. It does not
explain the nature of that mental moment. To say that it is
the result of cerebral movement and waste, of changes in the
grey matter in the brain, does not explain it. That is only a
dynamical accessory.
In like manner, what happens when an imaginative per
son, seeing some features of a landscape, or some combina
tions of light, sky, sea, color, at morn or sunset, invests the
scene with his own personality ? In fact, the combination
called a landscape exists nowhere; it is a pure ideal con
struction of his own. The scene without is only a palette or
a pot of paint. A poetic symbol, a simile which encloses a
trait of nature in the amber of thought or emotion, is a men
tal process unaccountable on any theory of empirical accu
mulation of sensations.
But we seldom find a materialist who is willing to accept a
statement of his method which shows that it really starts
with a term that is incapable of starting. Bald matter is im
potent to proceed except into fresh forms of matter; and even
that process requires that Force should be assumed. And
something has to make that assumption. That assuming
faculty cannot be merely a form of matter, for no thing can
step outside of itself and become what is not Thing. No
number of things can do that, though the sensations pro
duced by them accumulate for centuries. They may be irri
tants, as a drop of acid on a frog’s bare muscle after his head
is cut off; but they cannot conceive that they irritate, any
Vol. vi.—14
�210
Theories of Mental Genesis.
more than the frog can conceive that he is irritated. They
cannot formulate ■ their unconscious function of exciting our
senses.
What does the materialist say when his empirical method
is boned in this way, and sinks on the floor of creation a help
less huddle of Object, every articulation and vertebra of his
own mentality withdrawn from it? He disclaims the result,
cannot tolerate being defrauded of his own analytic and clas
sifying skill, and declares against materialism in that sense.
But it has no other sense. The moment he declares against
it, he declares in favor of an intellectual perception of an ob
jective sensation, that is, in favor of something which Object
cannot generate. His own idealism rises against its jailer,
and breaks out of prison in this declaration.
This ought to startle him into making a more distinct defini
tion of the word Matter than he has yet undertaken. He uses
that, and the word Object, in the ordinary sense; but he will
not recognize all that it connotes when it is pressed to ultimates. And it is astonishing that he can invent such >\ ords
as Vitality, Force, Correlation, to account for phases of ob
jects, elemental modes, conditions of existence, without feel
ing compromised. He is obliged to assume something which
is anterior to objects and their phenomena, anterior to the
sensations produced by them; he speaks of correlation, but
says nothing about something previous which does the corre
lating. If that something be another objective condition, a
more tenuous tenuity, it involves the necessity of something
still beyond, since mere condition cannot conditionate itself,
and no thing can do itself. So that, sooner or later, the
words employed by the empirical observer justify an ulti
mate ground of Being, an absolute Cause; and that, too, jus
tifies Cause in the observer, for Being goes into Object, and
not Object into Being.
Perhaps the materialist will take refuge in the Hegelian
phrase, “Matter is Being outside of Itself,” in order to endow
Matter with a causative capacity, and secure perpetual vital
ity to its plastic germs. Then he may suppose that objective
phenomena, in their gradual achievement of the human brain,
lent it their primitive endowment as Being outside of Itself,
and made of it another animate object. But what becomes
�Theories of Mental Genesis.
211
of Being outside of Itself when this object disappears, is dis
integrated, ceases to be a focus of Being ? It either must re
cur to Being in Itself, or must be correlated in some mode of
Force. Both suppositions make the human intellect only a
phenomenal phase of Absolute Being; it is only caused mat
ter, it is on the footing of every other object, its root imbibes
the identity of Object and Being, its self-consciousness is
only an increase of animateness, but not a differentiation of
it into Person. It invents the phrase, to be sure—claims to
have or be a self—and that the unconscious animal, reaching
man’s estate, comes to the line where consciousness begins;
man separates to that extent from the world of Object, be
cause Object has been Being all the time. But if it has been
Being all the time, one of two things must be true, either that
self-consciousness resided all along the route in organic ob
jects, or at no point of it at all; the reputed consciousness of
Self is only a phenomenon of Object.
Perhaps the materialist will thank us for such a reduction
of the Hegelian phrase to another form of Matter, because it
makes Soul and Person impossible on any terms; and per
haps the idealist, discontented with any style of the doctrine
of Evolution, will be driven to the notion that there is outside
of us an ocean of germinal soul-monads which become allied
with human structures.
There are insuperable objections, lying mainly in the direc
tion of the facts of inheritance, to this attempt at spiritual
ism. In the meantime, the Doctrine of Evolution cannot be
dispensed with. The burden does not rest upon us to in
dicate the point in time and the method of appearing of
independent mentality. But we can show that Object can
propagate only Object; nor that without something assumed
which Object cannot propagate.
Let us take, however, a word which the materialist is com
petent to invent and is obliged to use—Vitality. He must
assume it in spite of the objectivity of every point of his
empirical method. Then, in the interest of Idealism, we
suggest, taking a statement used by us in another place,
“whether there can be any germinal soul-substance except
the mysterious force which we call Vitality wherever we
see it in the human state. It went into creation allied with
�212
Theories of Mental Genesis.
all the germs which have subsequently taken form. It
carried everywhere a latent sensibility for the creative law
out of which it came. It swept along with a dim drift of the
Personality that first conceived and then put it on the way
to self-expression.. It mounted thus by the ascending scale
of animals, and its improvements in structure were prepara«
tions to reach and repeat Personality, to report the original
consciousness of the Creator that He was independent of
structure. At length it became detached from the walls of
the womb of creation, held only for nourishment by the cord
of structure till it could have a birth into individualism.
Then the interplay of mind and organism began, with an in
herited advantage in favor of Vitality. Now Vitality, thus
developed and crystallized into personality, tends constantly
back towards its origin. The centrifugal movement through
all the animals is rectified by the centripetal movement in
man. The whole series of effects musters in him to recur to
an effecting Cause.”
Prof. Haeckel of Jena, in his Biological Studies, makes the
*
following statement: “ Protoplasm, or germinal matter, also
nailed cell-substance or primitive slime, is the single material
basis to which, without exception and absolutely, all so-called
vital phenomena ’ are radically bound. If the latter are re
garded as the result of a peculiar vital force independent of
the protoplasm, then necessarily also must the physical and
•chemical properties of every inorganic natural body be re
garded as the result of a peculiar force not bound up with its
.substance.”
Very well, why not? Even the vague motions, like the
incoherent simmer of a crowd of people on a great sqm re,
which take place in the molecules of the densest sub ance,
are dumb gropings of some Force, arrested for the present
in the substance, and not to be detected transgressing its. lim
its. But something is there which shares and testifies to a
universal tendency towards evolution into other substances
and into organic forms. Physical and chemical forces attest
the presence of Vitality, as well as the mental functions
which use the structural results of those forces. Something
* See Toledo Index, April 29, 1871.
�Theories of Mental Genesis.
fit, [
ift
ft!
1'1
b
»
Tfj
í|
213
independent of the material basis must have endowed it with
its movements and qualities. It certainly could not have
originated itself or its forces. Something anterior to the ma
lerial basis must include and transmit a tendency of Vitality
towards mental and moral functions, which are at once inde
pendent of the basis and yet closely allied to it.
Let us observe now if any contribution may be made to
idealism from another quarter. The empirical method has
not busied itself much with the phenomena of musical sensi
bility, though, to be consistent after including the imagina
tion in its genesis of mind from external sensations, it ought
to construct the sense of Harmony and the inventive genius
of the composer in the same way, since imagination plays so
large a part therein. Some physical facts which at first
threaten to support a pure empiric origin for mental func
tions, turn out upon cross-questioning to belong to the other
side of the case, and to contribute toward some more ideal
statement.
The German Helmholtz, who has made some profound
studies of the laws of Harmony, in his examination of the
structure of the human ear, found that the cochlea, or snailformed cavity, contained a fluid, across which three membranes
were thrown — an upper, middle, and under. In the middle
compartment he discovered innumerable microscopic disks,
lying next each other • like the keys of a piano : one end of
each of them is attached to the vessels of the auditory nerve,
the other end to the outstretched membranes. These disks
are the sensitive points which receive the vibrations of musi
cal instruments, and transmit them to the brain in the form
of notes and tones. A single string will give off different
vibrations from its upper and its middle section. Does the
ear solve the sound of a complex vibration made by these
waves of different length, or does it receive the sound as a
whole ? Answering this, Helmholtz says that the physical
ear funds the wave-forms into a sum of simple waves, which
is the result of their concurrence; since any wave-form you
please can be constructed out of a combination of simple
waves of different lengths. And as in the instruments, so in
the ear, the ground tone wakes the corresponding upper tone.
When vibrations play upon the disks in the ear, it is as if
�214
Theories of Mental Genesis.
they played upon banks of keys; and the first physical im
pressions are produced, sorted, combined, and then transmit
ted as so much seasoned material to be used in manufacturing
music. Then occurs the wonderful moment when Something
beyond these microscopic feelers digests the prey they catch
into human moods and emotions. What leaps the genius
takes, through and across what an unbridged abyss, upon
these stepping-stones of disks, to gather the waifs and strays
that float upon the manifold sea of Harmony! There is no
such startling proof that Nature has at length developed a
transcending Person in mankind; perhaps whole races
died for it, dissonances and partial chords, or constructed
upon vicious intervals, before Harmony could respond to its
own laws. At length an essential differentiation seems to
have taken place, an abstraction which compels sensations to
subserve its subtlest emotions. For at one end of this process
is nothing but the disks vibrating in their fluid: at the other
end is something rarely and radically different—the gamut of
the human heart, the symphony upreared by intellect and
feeling, the song exhaling into the mist that sheathes the
eye, the lyric whose silvery trumpets summon bravery and
nobleness from every drop of blood.
Now, atmospheric vibrations and the structure of the ear
enclosing the microscopic disks are the objects which provide
empirical sensations. The temperament, culture and inher
ited susceptibility of the musical composer’s brain collect
and organize these, sensations into the modes of harmony,
and reject all dissonance. But when, and by which of the two
parties in this transaction, was the earliest step taken toward
such a complicated result ? There was a time when there was
nothing but an atmosphere capable of vibrating, and nothing
but an ear capable of receiving the accidental throng of natu
ral noises. There was a time when the first fibre of a plant,
the first tense string of some creeping vine, twanged to some
chance touch: when the wood of the forest first revealed its
resonant capacity, when the dried reeds first sighed and whis
tled in the wind. This was all the appeal which Nature had
to make. Did it originate the sequence of melodies and con
struct the theory of harmony ? What is a dissonance ? Is it
merely a physical repugnance of the disks for interfering and
�Theories of Mental Genesis.
215
•contrarious vibrations ? Whence, then, the repugnance of the
«disks ? There are tribes of men whose ears have not been
furnished with it. There are civilized Indo-Germanic peo
ple who cannot tell a chord from a discord. It is not credible
that the crude objectivity of natural vibrations gradually
■selected out of Nature a harmonious ear. Nature has no
harmony which could effect such a selection ; she has never
¿sorted and combined and weeded out her noises. She is uni
sonous, monotonous, or full of jar and clash; she has no art
to reconcile the voices of the sea, the air, the birds of the for
est: each creature has its note and its key, and the air itself
is a Babel of cross-purposes. The empirical sensations pro
duced by modern music are drawn from things which vibrate
by a law that the things do not possess, and never could have
•suggested. Harmony has been imposed from within upon
their isolated qualities ; and an orchestra, so far from being
■an induction, is an intuition. The Composer listens to its
combinations before they are played. His subjectivity has
imparted to every instrument its peculiar quality by gradual
selection among the woods, reeds and metals of Nature, and
by discovery of the isolated shapes which correspond best to
.atmospheric conditions. His inductive experiments have been
presided over by a sense which no induction could have fur
nished. What, for instance, is the temperament of a piano
but a metaphysical compromise between the imperfections of
the material and the law of intervals ? Harmony, in short, is
a refutation which the materialist himself might welcome;
but it kills his theory as effectually as the poison poured into
the auditory tube, which made a ghost of Hamlet’s father.
It is much easier to tolerate the doctrine that a slice of meat,
well-assimilated, becomes the poet’s happy thought, than to
understand how wafts of common air could be transformed
into the mighty uplifting of the soul when the orb of music
passes over our fiat life, and draws emotion into every barren
•creek, and dashes its tonic against the heart. Physics must
allow an essential difference between a vibration and a welli cooked mutton chop; and it is in favor of the stimulating
and edifying quality of the chop. Music has been called the
image of motion. But when the ear is struck, something else
than a wave is propagated. It would be more just to say that
Music is imagination set in motion.
�216
Anti-Materialism.
The sea-tide writes its diary accurately enough in the sand
ripples. But air did not imprint these footsteps so massive
and deep that our own are lost as we try to follow ; yet there
is no dismay, for in the bosom of each trace lies home’s direc
tion,—by which we know that a Beethoven had just passed.
I claim, then, against a strictly logical empirical method,
three classes of facts. First, the authentic facts of the moral
sense whenever it appears as the transcender of the ripest
average utility. Second, the facts of the Imagination as the
anticipator of mental methods by pervading everything with
personality, by imputing Life to Object, or by occasional
direct suggestion. Third, the facts of the harmonic sense as
the reconciler of discrete and apparently sundered objects,
as the prophet and artist of Number and mathematical ratio,
as the unifier of all the contents of the soul into the acclaim
which rises when the law of Unity fills the scene. ■
Upon these facts I chiefly sustain myself against the the
ory, consistently explained, which derives all possible men
tal functions from the impacts of Objectivity.
*
ANTI-MATERIALISM
By G. S. Hall.
To a concise though popular restatement of the younger
* Fichte’s, Fontlage’s, and Leopold Schmidt’s construction of'
the ego as person, modified as he believes it to have been by
Lazarus and Lotze, the author joins a vigorous and original
polemic against “ materialism in natural science and theol
ogy” which he calls an “ absurd and therefore impossible
form of subjective idealism.” This he does in the interest of
speculative philosophy, which he would rescue from present
discredit and neglect, and to which he would restore an ulti
mate character as the mediating unity of theology and natu
ral science.
The barren abstractions of the absolute philosophy carried
thought into so rare an atmosphere that its utmost effort was
* Five Lectures on Philosophical Subjects, by Ludwig Weis. Berlin, 1871.
&
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Theories of mental genesis
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Weiss, John
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [St Louis]
Collation: 197-216 p. ; 24 cm.
Notes: From the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (Vol. VI, no. 3, 1872). From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[The R.P. Studley Company]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1872]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G5353
Subject
The topic of the resource
Objectivism
Philosophy
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Theories of mental genesis), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Conway Tracts
Objectivism (Philosophy)
Philosophy and Religion
Science and Religion