The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Issue 5/Psychogenesis

by David Jayne Hill

 

THE

 

PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.

 

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PSYCHOGENESIS.

EVERY unsophisticated man is a natural realist, that is, he believes, on the one hand, in the reality of the extended, space-occupying objects which make up the material world; and, on the other, in the reality of those feelings, ideas and volitions which are the contents of his personal consciousness and make up his mental world. The materialist and the idealist alike are the products of reflection aiming at the reduction of all phenomena to a fundamental unity, which reason seems to require. The distinction between objects-of-consciousness and consciousness-of-objects cannot be obliterated, however, by any legitimate process. We have, then, these two phases of reality firmly fixed in the field of thought. The materialist says that unconscious objects-of-consciousness generate consciousness-of-objects. The idealist says that consciousness-of-objects sufficiently explains objects-of-consciousness. Either thesis may appear plausible from different points of view. Both stand in need of explicit confirmation. The truth is, that there are no known objects-of-consciousness without consciousness-of-objects, and there is no consciousness-of-objects without objects-of-consciousness. In other words, a human being is at the same time a conscious intelligence and a living organism furnished with sense-organs. In him two correlated series of phenomena are co-existent, the phenomena of consciousness, which with Mr. Huxley we may call "psychoses"; and the phenomena of organic movement, which we may call "neuroses." So far as observation extends, we have reason to believe that there are no "psychoses" (mental phenomena) without corresponding "neuroses" (organic phenomena). And yet it is impossible to translate any psychosis into any neurosis, or to say that this organic movement has become this phase of consciousness. Nor is it possible to say that this neurosis has produced that psychosis, as we may say that these two movements in space have combined to produce that movement in space. We evidently have here two orders of reality, one an order of consciousness-of-objects, the other an order of objects-of-consciousness. The problem of psychogenesis is, to trace the origin and development of this consciousness-of-objects.

 

The Localization of Mental Action.

Every known mental manifestation is associated with organic movement, and in man both mind and its expressive movements are centred in the cerebro-spinal portion of the nervous system, and especially in its encephalic ganglia, the brain. This complex and important organ has received within recent years the minute and prolonged attention of investigators both from an anatomical and a physiological point of view. Its topography has been carefully represented by means of accurate charts and models, its histological components have been examined by means of improved methods of section and coloration under microscopes of high power, its functions have been studied in the lower animals by every means at the disposal of science, and in man by post-mortem examination of sound and pathological cases as well as in lesions of the living. As a result of these investigations, a new and suggestive body of evidence is in existence regarding the localization of function. It is found that specific areas, more or less distinctly circumscribed, are specialized for motor and sensor functions, and that each sense has its own appropriate tract of stimulation. It is true that, as early geographers differ in their report of newly discovered countries, investigators in this newly explored territory vary in their results; still, there is a consensus on many important points, and, what is more significant, there is now unanimity among the specialists as regards functional limitation. Interesting as many of the details might be, it is impossible to give even a summary of them in this essay. It is sufficient for our purpose to show the bearing of the facts of localization of function upon the problem of psychogenesis. The first proposition derived from these facts is, that psychosis and neurosis are phenomena having common space-relations. The second is, that they are manifested in distinct tracts of organic tissue and are, therefore, not only correlated generally but specifically in the organism. The third inference is, that these specifically correlated psychoses and neuroses result from a differentiation of function that accompanies a differentiation of the tissue in which they have their seat; or, in other words, that, as parts of the brain are developed and adapted to specific uses, the correlated psychic manifestations, although not identical either with their substance or their activities, are also developed and adapted in a corresponding manner.

 

Unconscious Cerebration.

While it may be said that every psychosis is accompanied by a correlated neurosis, it cannot be maintained that every neural change is attended with consciousness. The nutritive processes in the tissues of the brain during sleep have no mental concomitants. Other changes of a more complex character are also unattended with conscious phenomena. Unconscious cerebration occurs in which very complicated acts, including those, perhaps, of ideation, are perfectly performed. It is now established that the paths of reflex action, traversed by external stimuli reappearing as motions, are continuous; that is, that the afferent nerves terminate in ganglia whence originate the efferent nerves by which the muscles are set in motion. This statement is subject, however, to the qualification that no nerve seems to be strictly continuous, but to consist in a series of elements through which motion has continuity. The in-carrying and out-carrying tracts of nerves are woven into a complex central network, so that stimulus may traverse the whole system. The central connections may be so traversed as to produce an exceedingly complicated series of outward movements, as in the feats of somnambulists, or the still more wonderful performances of hypnotic subjects, without any trace being left in the memory of the conscious subject, and probably without any accompaniment of consciousness at the time of the action. It is even conceivable, so large is the provision for automatism in the nervous system of man, that a person might live for months, or even years, in a perfectly unconscious condition, the bodily organism answering periodically to the sense-stimulations entering and producing movements along the pre-established lines of least resistance ordained by previous habit, and causing such actions as those of eating, drinking, turning, rising, and perhaps even those of walking. These considerations have led certain writers to regard consciousness as an "epi-phenomenon," a kind of appendix to the book of life added to the completed volume, a sort of afterthought suggested too late for insertion in the text. Perhaps, however, we might find a deeper truth in the allegory if we should say that consciousness is a generously devised epitome in which the great argument of the book is briefly summarized.

 

The Physiological Conditions of Consciousness.

If only some neural changes are attended with consciousness, it is necessary to ask under what conditions it arises. Richet, in his Psychologie Generale, enumerates the following physiological conditions of consciousness: (1) Circulation of the blood. The cessation or interruption of the circulation isfollowed by a syncope of consciousness. A moment's pressure of the great arteries supplying blood to the brain renders the subject unconscious. (2) Respiration. The psychic effects of asphyxia are well known. At the end of the first minute, there is an increasing distress. At the end of the second minute, an intense pain supervenes with suffocation accompanied by convulsive and epileptiform movements. In the midst of this overwhelming agitation intelligence remains unmodified. But soon external objects are no longer perceived; vision is disturbed, ideas become more and more confused, then consciousness is lost. The convulsive reflex movements still continue but become less and less frequent and at the end of the fourth minute they also cease. (3) Nutrition. The cerebral cells are renewed by the aliment contained in the blood. Hunger and thirst are psychic notifications of its changed condition. Although consciousness continues long after the supply of aliment has been withdrawn, delirium at last sets in, ideas become incoherent, sensibility is modified, and at last, death ensues. It seems as if the separate centres, and even the separate cells, have a life of their own which endures after the bond that unites them in rational co-ordination has been broken. (4) Temperature. Consciousness is manifested only within certain very narrow limits of heat. For the warm-blooded animals the normal temperature of the blood does not vary much. For man it is about 98° F. At a few degrees above this, delirium appears and, if the temperature still rises, consciousness is soon lost. Excepting in the hibernating animals, which endure a low degree of cold, still not without the loss of consciousness, life itself ceases when the temperature of the blood falls much below the normal. But long before life becomes extinct, consciousness disappears and all spontaneous movements cease. The daily variation in the temperature of human blood, in health, is only about five degrees. (5) Age. All living tissues are subject to a common law. They are born, grow old and die. This process is constantly going on in every living man. The nervous tissues are no exception. The brain, like a tree withered at the top, may lose its vitality long before the other parts of the organism have yielded to the law of death. Or it may put forth its signs of vitality when trunk and roots give no promise of longer life, like the pine-tree whose evergreens wave triumphantly on the breeze above the scars of the lightning's stroke. (6) Sleep. One of the conditions of the existence of the nervous system is the intermittence of its action. No living creature can continue always awake. Sleep is the universally necessary period of repose and rehabilitation. It is a question whether, viewed from its psychic side, it implies the abolition or only the iminution of consciousness. Locke maintained the former, Hamilton the latter thesis. The truth probably is that consciousness may be represented under the similitude of a conical figure. To be wide awake, is to be aware of all that can be embraced by its largest circumference, the base; to be fast asleep, is to be aware of nothing, or the contents of its smallest circumference, really a circumference no longer except by courtesy, the point which constitutes its apex. Between these extremes there is room for every possible degree of consciousness as testified to by the personal experience of various witnesses. But all testimony upon the continuity of consciousness is subject to the important qualification that, if there were a lapse of consciousness for a period of any length whatever, it would not be an element of conscious memory. In cases of syncope the thread of conscious experience is resumed exactly where it was broken off, so that a sentence, begun before a railroad accident, has been completed weeks after its occurrence, the injured person in the meantime lying apparently lifeless in a hospital. That some persons believe themselves to be continuously conscious, even during sleep, is, therefore, a fact easily explained. It seems paradoxical to say that we are conscious of our unconsciousness, but this is not the position of him who denies continuity so much as of him who assumes that if we were unconscious we would be conscious of it. The only true test must be objective, and judging by this we must conclude that, although insomnia may be protracted in abnormal cases, it is never manifested in normal experience as a strictly continuous consciousness, and even in abnormal cases is by no means so complete as the patient fancies. The foregoing are the leading physiological conditions of consciousness. It needs only to be added that the integrity of the cerebral organ in general is essential for normal consciousness. Whatever tends to destroy this, whether the agent be toxic or mechanical, disturbs the unity and harmony of the psychic life and, if carried to an extreme, ends in the cessation of consciousness altogether, so far as objective tests can determine.

 

The Identification of Consciousness and Motion.

So far our inquiry has developed only negative results, showing the limits beyond which consciousness is not manifested. This is far from being what we require for a positive explanation of psychic phenomena. In his Grundlinien einer allgemeinen Psychologie, Hertzen, of Lausanne, has endeavored to present the positive condition of consciousness. He says: “Consciousness is connected exclusively with the disintegrating phase of central nervous action.” He offers the following laws of relation: (1) “The intensity of consciousness is in direct ratio to the intensity of functional disintegration.” (2) “The intensity of consciousness is in inverse ratio to the ease and quickness of the central translation of stimulus into action.” This last corresponds to the diminishing sensibility in the growth of habit, or the law of increasing automatism. What we do easily and quickly we soon do unconsciously. Thus, we learn to walk, to read, to spell, to write with a minimum of consciousness. A transaction that is difficult and new gives us much thought, perhaps worry, a feeling of resistance among our ideas corresponding to the disintegration of cerebral tissue noted by the physician in the copious waste products eliminated from the body. But precisely what this metabolism is by which the disintegration of cerebral tissue becomes the condition of consciousness Hertzen is far from disclosing. He identifies psychic activity with motion, — the molecular motion produced by the decomposition of nerve-cells. He says: “We may liken the brain to a hall provided with a multitude of gas-lights, but illuminated by only a relatively constant number of burning jets, which, however, are not always the same; on the contrary, they change every instant: as some are extinguished, others are lighted; all are never lighted together; from time to time all are dark” (p. 98). Just as light is a mode of motion, this writer maintains, so also is consciousness. We may not be able to display to the eye the configurations that represent its varied phases, but it may be proved, he thinks, that consciousness is a mode of motion; and, having done this, having co-ordinated it with light, heat, electricity and the other molecular forces, we are no more required to show what kind of a motion corresponds to love and what to hate, for example, than to describe the form of a wave of red light or construct a diagram exhibiting the secret of electrical repulsion. All this must be conceded if it can really be proved that consciousness is simply a mode of motion. The proofs of it, according to Hertzen, are both indirect and direct. The indirect proof is, that, as motion is for us a series of changing sensations, these sensations can be nothing else than motion. The direct proof is, that all our states of consciousness have a measurable duration and every psychic act has a time-relation. But every process that has duration can be nothing else than motion. Therefore every psychic activity must be a motion, and consciousness is the sum of these activities. We may well regard this facile resolution of consciousness into motion with serious reserve. This simple solution of the problem succeeds only by ignoring the central difficulty, — the translation of objects-of-consciousness into consciousness-of-objects. Motion is, indeed, known to us as a relation of change among our objects-of-consciousness, but this does not justify us in affirming that consciousness-of-objects is also motion. The duration of mental states, it is true, implies the existence of motion as the measure of that duration, that is, in the neurosis to which the psychosis corresponds. But Hertzen’s explanation identifies neurosis and psychosis, for he says that the consciousness-of-motion is simply that motion which he calls consciousness. This identifies subject and object as absolutely as Hegel did, and resolves all being into thought. It may be said, however, that Hertzen identifies consciousness with a particular kind of motion, but this is to exclude the knowledge of any other kind; for the consciousness-of-motion being simply the motion-of-consciousness, only the motion-of-consciousness is in the field. This turns out to be a very old-fashioned solution of the problem, for it is nothing else than subjective idealism in a new guise. We know objects because we are those objects. “Motion” is used as a convenient middle term for the unification of the consciousness-of-motion with consciousness itself. To recur to Hertzen’s comparison of the brain to a hall with a multitude of gas-lights, we may say that each light, if its molecular motion were of the kind that is identical with consciousness, would simply be conscious of itself, not of the other lights. If molecular motions in the brain are identical with consciousness, they also would be conscious of themselves, but not of one another or of anything else. There would still be wanting a being that could know and compare them together. But such a being, possessing a consciousness-of-objects, would be other than the objects-of-consciousness. If it be said that such a being may be found in the higher centres of the brain, it must be answered that these in turn would be conscious of themselves but of nothing else. Hence, in the last analysis, objective knowledge is shut out. But nothing is more certain than that objects-of-knowledge are other than the knowledge-of-objects. Correlative, they may be; identical, they cannot be. If they were identical, not only would knowledge be motion, but motion would be knowledge.

 

The Psychic Life of Micro-organisms.

We may find some aid in comprehending the origin of psychic phenomena by an examination of their simplest forms and lowest terms. In adult man they are exhibited in their reatest complexity. In the child they are more rudimentary, but still they are highly complex. No period of human infancy discloses their simplest forms. We cannot trace their development from the embryonic stage. But we can follow the thread of analogy suggested by embryology. Every human child, on the physical side, is developed from a pair of unicellular organisms, one of which seems to have no other part to perform than to quicken the development of the other in certain specific ways. What are the psychic manifestations of unicellular beings? The question may seem to be a vain one, but Binet has undertaken to answer it in his little book on The Psychic Life of Micro-organisms.

Before we pass on to state some of the results of observation upon these infinitesimal beings, it may be well to point out the difficulties that have arisen from the supposition that living cells are wholly devoid of psychic life. Herbert Spencer, in his synthetic philosophy, has undertaken to unify our knowledge by analytically reducing conscious experience to its lowest terms and then building up synthetically an explanation of this experience. The lowest terms of consciousness he finds in sensation. But he begins his synthesis, not with sensations, as we might naturally expect, but with reflex actions primarily devoid of sensation. This inconsistency has led Siciliani, the Italian anthropologist, in his Psychogénie Moderne, to ask, “Why, after having arrived by the process of analysis at the elementary form of perception, that of difference, do you stop there; while you rise by the process of synthesis from reflex action as a point of departure? Why, in a word, does analytical psychology arrive at a conscious act, however rudimentary, while synthetic psychology starts from an unconscious and automatic activity?” (p. 84). This is a pertinent criticism, which applies equally to Romanes’s endeavor to trace the evolution of psychic phenomena, since he denies them altogether to the lowest beings in the zoölogical series, and marks their appearance, one after another, in the ascending scale of life, in what seems a very arbitrary manner.

The thesis of Binet supplies Spencer and Romanes with a more satisfactory starting-point. Binet maintains “that, in these simplest forms of life (the proto-organisms), we find manifestations of an intelligence which greatly transcends the phenomena of cellular irritability. Even on the very lowest rounds of the ladder of life, psychic manifestations,” he says, “are very much more complex than is believed” (p. 3). The lowest form of protozoön known to us is the Amœba. It appears to be a simple undifferentiated protoplasmic cell. “The following,” says Binet, “is what occurs when the Amœba, in its rampant course, happens to meet a foreign body. In the first place, if the foreign particle is not a nutritive substance, if it be gravel for instance, the Amœba does not ingest it; it thrusts it back with its pseudopodia. This little performance is very significant; for it proves that this microscopic cellule in some manner or other knows how to choose and distinguish alimentary substances from inert particles of sand. If the foreign substance can serve as nutriment, the Amœba engulfs it by a very simple process. Under the influence of the irritation caused by the foreign particle, the soft and viscous protoplasm of the Amœba projects itself forwards and spreads about the alimentary particle somewhat as an ocean-wave curves and breaks upon the beach; to carry out the simile that so well represents the process, this wave of protoplasm retreats, carrying with it the foreign body which it has encompassed. It is in this manner that the food is enveloped and introduced into the protoplasm; there it is digested and assimilated, disappearing slowly” (p. 41). Binet adds: “In a large number of species the prehension of food is preceded by another stage, the search for food, and in the case of living prey, by its capture. We shall not investigate these phenomena among all the Protozoa, but shall direct our attention especially to the ciliated Infusoria. Their habits are a remarkable study. If a drop of water containing Infusoria be placed under the microscope, organisms are seen swimming apidly about and traversing the liquid medium in which they are in every direction. Their movements are not simple; the Infusory guides itself while swimming about; it avoids obstacles; often it undertakes to force them aside; its movements seem to be designed to effect an end, which in most instances is the search for food; it approaches certain particles suspended in the liquid, it feels them with its cilia, it goes away and returns, all the while describing a zigzag course similar to the paths of captive fish in an aquarium; this latter comparison naturally occurs to the mind. In short, the act of locomotion, as seen in detached Infusoria, exhibits all the marks of voluntary movement” (p. 46). With one more short extract I shall conclude my citations. “There exist organisms which lead a life of habitual isolation but which understand how to unite for the purpose of attacking prey at the desired time, thus profiting by the superiority of numbers. The Bodo caudatus is a voracious Flagellate possessed of extraordinary audacity; it combines in troops to attack animalculæ one hundred times as large as itself, as the Colpods for instance, which are veritable giants when placed alongside of the Bodo. Like a horse attacked by a pack of wolves, the Colpod is soon rendered powerless; twenty, thirty, forty Bodos throw themselves upon him, eviscerate him and devour him completely” (p. 60). As a result of his investigations, Binet enumerates the following traits in these microorganisms: (1) the perception of the external object; (2) the choice made between a number of objects; (3) the perception of their position in space; and (4) movements calculated either to approach the body and seize it or to flee from it.

 

Organic and Functional Development.

Thus we seem to find psychic phenomena associated with unicellular beings at the very basis of organic life. Lower we cannot go. The doctrine of biogenesis, or origin of living organisms from other living organisms only, which science at present accepts as the only one permitted by known facts, shuts us off from any further pursuit of the subject. We find a sense-of-objects even in proto-organisms. Metazoa are apparently developed from these Protozoa. First they exist in colonies, each individual of which is like every other; then in colonies whose members perform specific functions; finally in correlative organs in which the separate cells have been widely differentiated into bone, muscle, nerve or other tissues, each group specialized to the performance of a single function, the whole federated into an organism whose intricacy is so great and whose components are so numerous that it has been only quite lately discovered that the human body, in common with every animal body, is built up of these living aggregates. But in this highly developed product we do not find evidence that the psychic phenomena of proto-organisms are displayed by all the constituent cells. In the process of specialization certain functions have been delegated to particular groups of cells. Those of the nervous system have assumed and discharge the functions with which psychic phenomena are associated. As the single original row of nervous cells developed into a spinal cord, the psychic manifestations were handed over to that. As the spinal cord developed greater ganglia at one of its extremities, the more important of the psychic manifestations were passed on to these superior ganglia. Out of these developed the hind-brain, the mid-brain, the fore-brain, the total cerebrum in man, so that, as Goethe guessed, the skull is only the greatest of the vertebræ, and to the cellular contents of this crowning structure were at last transferred those neuroses which accompany human consciousness.

Consciousness is never strictly simple. Its very name implies the apprehension of at least two elements which are known together. The very essence of intellect is discrimination. But this proceeds to no great length without assimilation, that is, the apprehension of similarity. The whole fabric of knowledge consists in the sum of apprehended resemblances and differences. All thought is unification or differentiation. Its materials lie in the objects of consciousness. Its process consists in the consciousness of likeness and difference. Its laws are reducible to the principles of identity, contradiction and excluded middle. What we call “reason” is the unity which harmonizes diversity. Its categories are at once the forms of thoughts and of things, for otherwise thought and its objects would have no common bond and reason would know no necessity. Consciousness is this sense of unity. There may be sense-presentations without it, although the philosopher is not in a condition to experience them. A dog, a portion of whose cerebrum has been removed, may be excited by the presence of food; but he cannot co-ordinate his sense presentations. We may say that he is without consciousness. Consciousness is the string upon which the pearls of sense are strung. Break the string, and the pearls are scattered, but they do not cease to be. The string is broken when the co-ordinating centres in the brain are rendered inoperative by any cause. These centres are called the “seat” of consciousness. Still, we may not say that their movements are consciousness. Consciousness is that psychosis in which other psychoses are unified. It has, indeed, been questioned whether or not there may be a spinal consciousness as well as a cerebral consciousness. It is not improbable that this exists in those creatures that are not provided with a brain. It appears, however, that the “seat” of consciousness is always the higher co-ordinating centre, and that, in the process of development, this is transferred to successively added increments of the evolving organism. If this be true, in man the inferior centres of the nervous system have been made the unconscious mechanism through which reflex and voluntary actions are mediated, while consciousness, in its full-orbed splendor, is possible only in the superior regions of the brain.

 

The Dissolution of Personality.

Recent investigations have made it appear probable that there may be more than one consciousness in the same brain. In his book on Les Maladies de la Personnalité, Ribot enumerates the types of what may be called the dissolution of personality, or the disruption of the unity of consciousness. They are as follows: — (1) Alienation, in which the consciousness of the body is completely changed. A new state serves as the basis of a new psychic life, or manner of feeling, perceiving, and thinking, whence results a new memory. The old life is reduced to an almost unconscious state and has become to the new consciousness an “alien,” a stranger, whom the new person does not even know. (2) The second type is characterized by an alternation of two personalities, sometimes designated as “double consciousness.” The two personalities are often completely ignorant of each other. The periods of the domination of each phase of consciousness vary in duration, but alternate at intervals, sometimes fixed and sometimes not. The phenomena resemble what we might expect if two souls dwelt in one body with alternating mastery, and in earlier times such cases were interpreted as the obsession of superhuman beings. It is as if two different foci in the brain alternately became the points at which the mental life is converged and unified, each point of view wholly excluding all the mental scenery of the other. (3) The third type is more superficial and creates no absolute break of memory. It consists in a substitution of one personality for another, as when a man regards himself as a woman, or a laborer declares himself to be a king. This seems to be the concomitant of the hypertrophy of a fixed idea, a conception become so ineradicable that it cannot be co-ordinated with the normal psychic life. It appears that this aberration of consciousness is often only functional, not strictly organic, for hypnotized subjects can be made to change sex, or behave like persons other than themselves by mere suggestion. It is certain, however, that even suggestion is correlated with a neurosis that enters into the general web of neural change, for a person directed in the hypnotic state to perform a certain act, — even an extraordinary, an absurd, or a criminal act, — will execute it at the proper time. The subject has no conscious recollection of the suggestion and often endeavors to account for this suggested performance as having some connection with his natural course of thought.

 

Recapitulation of Results.

Let us now summarize the results thus far obtained and try to interpret their signification. We started with the antithesis of objects-of-consciousness and consciousness-of-objects, which we represented by the terms “neurosis” and “psychosis.” We found that these antithetical terms embody a distinction that creates the problem of psychogenesis. We traced the progress that has been made in the localization of psychoses in the brain with whose neuroses they are connected as concomitants. We saw that not all, but only some, neuroses are attended with consciousness. We then examined the limits within which consciousness is manifested as indicated by the physiological effects of circulation, respiration, nutrition, temperature, age, and sleep. We next discussed the dependence of consciousness upon the disintegration of brain tissue and the hypothesis that it is simply a mode of motion, which we were compelled to reject. We then followed the indications of embryology and considered the manifestations of psychic life in micro-organisms. We found that there is a sense-of-objects even in the lowest of these. We called attention to the fact that consciousness is the sense of unity of psychic elements, supported by the unity of the organism, and illustrated it by showing that there are three ways in which this unity may be lost, so that a new consciousness supervenes. The conclusion from all this evidently is, that, while psychic elements are manifested to us directly only through consciousness, they exist as its pre-conditions; and, therefore, are not to be denied existence beyond the sphere of consciousness. This sense of unity does, indeed, come and go with our food and breath, and, so far as sense can testify, ceases when we sleep and when we die, for as an ancient sage has said, "Sleep is the image of death." But while we sleep the psychic elements that consciousness unifies in our waking hours do not cease to be. Who shall say that they shall cease to be in that last sleep whose morning never dawns on earthly hills? Unconscious we were born into this world, and its pain and chill were our first greeting. Unconscious ante-natal elements were the fountain from whose secret springs personality emerged with its rational powers and ancestral similitude. Either a miracle is wrought with every first sensation, breaking the sequence of causation that connects child with parent, or the promise and potency of a human spirit were centred in the embryonic organism. Unless every analogy of nature is violated, what we call the soul had its being long before it came to consciousness.

 

The Belief in Metempsychosis.

It may be that this is the truth that underlies the ancient doctrine of pre-existence and metempsychosis. It is almost startling to observe the extent to which this doctrine has been accepted. In a recent essay upon the subject, Professor Knight, of St. Andrews, says: "It has lain at the heart of all Indian speculation on the subject, time out of mind. It is one of the cardinal doctrines of the Vedas, and one of the roots of Buddhist belief. The ancient Egyptians held it. It is prominent in their great classic, the Book of the Dead. In Persia, it colored the whole stream of Zoroastrian thought. The Magi taught it. The Jews brought it with them from the captivity in Babylon. Many of the Essenes and Pharisees held it. Though foreign to the genius both of Judaism and Christianity, it has had its advocates (as Delitzsch puts it) as well in the synagogue as in the church. The Cabbala teaches it emphatically. The Apocrypha sanctions it, and it is to be found scattered throughout the Talmud. In Greece, Pythagoras proclaimed it, receiving the hint probably both from Egypt and the East; Empedocles taught it; Plato worked it out elaborately, not as a mythical doctrine embodying a moral truth, but as a philosophical theory or conviction. It passed over into the Neo-Platonic School at Alexandria. Philo held it. Plotinus and Porphyry in the third century, Jamblicus in the fourth, Hierocles and Proclus in the fifth, all advocated it in various ways; and an important modification of the Platonic doctrine took place amongst the Alexandrians, when Porphyry limited the range of metempsychosis, denying that the souls of men ever passed downwards to a lower than the human state. Many of the fathers of the Christian Church espoused it; notably Origen. It was one of the Gnostic doctrines. The Manichaeans received it, with much else, from their Zoroastrian predecessors. It was held by Nemesius, who emphatically declares that all the Greeks who believed in immortality believed also in metempsychosis. There are hints of it in Boethius. Though condemned, in its Origenistic form, by the Council of Constantinople in 551, it passed along the stream of Christian theology, and reappeared amongst the Scholastics in Erigena and Bonaventura. It was defended with much learning and acuteness by several of the Cambridge Platonists, especially by Henry More. Glanvill devotes a curious treatise to it, the Lux Orientalis. English clergy and Irish bishops were found ready to espouse it. Many English poets, from Henry Vaughan to Wordsworth, praise it. It appealed to Hume as more rational than the rival theories of creationism and traducianism. It has points of contact with the anthropology of Kant and Schelling.… Passing from the schools to the instinctive ideas of primitive men, or the conceptions now entertained by races half-civilized or wholly barbarous, a belief in transmigration will be found to be almost universal. It is inwoven with nearly all the mythology of the world. It appears in Mexico and Thibet, amongst negroes and the Hawaiian Islanders. It comes down from the Druids of ancient Gaul to the Tasmanians of to-day. The stream of opinion, whether instinctive, mystic, or rational, is continuous and broad; and if we could legitimately determine any question of belief by the number of its adherents, the quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, would apply to this more fitly than to any other" (Essays in Philosophy, pp. 323, 326).

 

The Theory of "Metakinesis"

But we cannot terminate our inquiry by the acceptance of this ancient doctrine of pre-existence and transmigration. This is as much a matter of speculation as any other theory and is attended with embarrassments of a peculiar nature. It is cited to show how strong the conviction of men in all times has been that the mind of man neither arises as an uncaused phenomenon nor finds its cause in the movements of matter. A scientific writer of highly accredited authority, Professor Lloyd Morgan, of Bristol, in his late work on Animal Life and Intelligence, has stated a theory which does justice to the principle of causation, whatever may be said of it from other points of view. "It is generally admitted," he says, "that physical phenomena, including those which we call physiological, can be explained (or are explicable) in terms of energy. It is also generally admitted that consciousness is something distinct from, nay, belonging to a wholly different phenomenal order from, energy. And it is further generally admitted that consciousness is nevertheless in some way closely, if not indissolubly, associated with special manifestations of energy in the nerve-centres of the brain. Now, we call manifestations of energy 'kinetic' manifestations, and we use the term 'kinesis' for physical manifestations of this order. Similarly, we may call concomitant manifestations of the mental or conscious order 'metakinetic,' and may use the term 'metakinesis' for all manifestations belonging to this phenomenal order. According to the monistic hypothesis, every mode of kinesis has its concomitant mode of metakinesis, and when the kinetic manifestations assume the form of the molecular processes in the human brain, the metakinetic manifestations assume the form of human consciousness. All matter is not conscious, because consciousness is the metakinetic concomitant of a highly specialized order of kinesis. But every kinesis has an associated metakinesis; and parallel to the evolution of organic and neural kinesis there has been an evolution of metakinetic manifestations culminating in conscious thought" (p. 467).

This doctrine may be restated in other terms as follows: Being is essentially one, but has two aspects; one of these is known to us as physical energy (kinesis) and may be represented by the convex side of a curve; the other is known as a psychical concomitant (metakinesis) and may be represented by the concave side of the curve. Neither can exist without the other, any more than a line can be convex on one side without being concave on the other. They are correlated aspects of the same reality. At its lower stages of development, this reality does not manifest to us its psychic side, because that can be known only to a subject, that is, to a being in whom the psychic elements are converged and unified in a consciousness. But at that level of development where the psychic aspects of the modes of being are unified into a consciousness, this aspect of being becomes directly known. But it is never known except subjectively. The psychic life of other men can be known to us only through expressive movements of voice, gesture, and significant signs. The only mind that any man can know is strictly his own mind. All else is inference. But it is necessary inference, for we also convey our ideas through these same media and can explain the responses we receive only on the supposition that thought answers to thought and feeling to feeling. The genesis of a personal being consists, then, not in the transmutation of physical force into psychic states, as materialism represents, but in the concentration and unification of pre-existing psychic elements, which in their isolation are unconscious, into a conscious individual. Now my thesis is simply this:

Consciousness is a complex phenomenon, not a simple state. It is made up of elements or factors which become consciousness in their union, but are not consciousness in their isolation. A single ray of light does not produce a visual image, but a great number of rays of light, arranged in a given order, do produce such an image. In like manner, the psychic aspect of a single brain-cell is not a consciousness, but the psychic aspects of a great many cerebral cells, unified through the organic unity of an organized brain,, become a consciousness. This is accomplished through the biological processes which build up the living organism. The whole significance of a nervous system consists in this, that it focusses energy in such a manner that its psychic concomitants acquire unity. The incarrying nerves furnish appropriate conductors for those modes of molecular energy which stimulate the several senses; so that light, sound, and impact are brought to consciousness at the centres where they are converged. Thus man becomes a microcosm in which the extended world mirrors itself within the limits which are set by his present constitution. Thus also he becomes not only the interpreter, but the interpretation of the world.

 

Monistic Realism.

If this theory be regarded as merely an assumption, it stands upon no lower plane than all rival theories. The materialistic view, that matter becomes conscious without containing psychic elements, is an assumption without proof and without logical consistency. The idealistic view, that the world of objects is simply a fiction of conscious mind, is equally devoid of proof and probability. But the crucial question is, which assumption is most harmonious with the whole body of facts? If we carry back beyond the threshold of verifiable knowledge the same ideas of causation, order, continuity, and development which dominate in the realm of inductive science, we find it impossible ever to lose the conception of being, or to reduce it to that of non-being, or to eliminate from it the idea of energy on the one hand and intelligence on the other. If our thought ever obtains a resting-place without violating the laws of thought, it must be in the ultimate idea of One Self-existing Reality, the primal fountain whence all multiform and dependent beings have their source.

That causative action should ever arise from nothing, that chaos should ever beget a cosmos, that the motion-of-objects should ever transform itself into the sense-of-motion and this into the consciousness-of-motion,—are propositions that set at naught every canon of scientific thinking. The doctrine of evolution, which has been applied so successfully to the morphology and descent of organisms, seems to apply equally to the morphology and descent of mind; for organic and psychic changes, neurosis and psychosis, run pari passu wherever we can trace them. The philosophy based upon merely mechanical conceptions regarded the cause of the world as a Deus ex machina, standing outside the finite order of events and acting in some inconceivable way upon a primeval chaos; which, by external touches, has been transformed into a cosmos. The philosophy based upon biological conceptions derives all life from pre-existent life, all thought from pre-existent thought, and finds no chaos because it reaches no limit to the sweep and operation of law. The former represented the Creative Power as outside of the world, wholly sundered from it, and transcendent only. The latter represents the Creative Power as in the world, immanent in man as well as transcendent over him, a Power "in whom we live and move and have our being," and "who is not far from every one of us," for we "are also his offspring."

 

Does Monism extinguish God and the Soul?

Two questions of the deepest interest this monistic doctrine may be required to answer: (1) Can we suppose in harmony with this view that to the unity of the world's energy there is any corresponding unity of world-consciousness? and (2) Can we believe consistently with this theory that when that unity of consciousness which we call human personality is once broken by death it can ever be restored? In simpler terms, does it exclude a conscious intelligence presiding over the universe? and does it admit the possibility that death is not an eternal sleep?

All thoughtful men will admit that, upon any hypothesis, scientific answers to these questions are hardly to be expected, because they lie beyond the sphere of present experience. It is perhaps sufficient to say that the order of ideas proposed in this essay is no more hostile to affirmative answers to both these questions than any other scheme of thought. Evolution along lines of ascending life, upon which we must all agree, seems to imply the existence of plan and purpose, of means and end, of rational agency and intelligent finality. If all physical movements (kinesis) are accompanied with psychic concomitants (metakinesis), and these may have foci in human consciousness, it would be very bold to say that they have no other focus, that is, that there is no superhuman or cosmic consciousness. And, as we know nothing of the area through which energy is extended, who can say where such a focus may not be? And who can affirm that, in an Infinite Being, the focus may not be everywhere? Or, since our geometry is built upon finite space-forms, who can say that it may not be without having any space-relation? If, indeed, this be a universe in which we dwell, and not a heap of isolated disjecta membra, is it not a necessity of thought that, the system of energy being totally inter-related, so also the psychic concomitants which the hypothesis requires must also have their unity?

The other question may be thrown into this form: If reason and justice and beneficence have had and do have place in human life and history, does not the principle of continuity require that they do not cease before their fulfilment is achieved? May we not then suppose that personal consciousness, new-born every morning and relinquished every night, may be resumed so long as its great purpose is unfulfilled? The whole process of psychic evolution is a continuous transfer of function from less to more refined, complicated, and specialized vehicles. Our most recent science has opened to us the reality of an invisible world. It is certain that there are vibrations at both ends of the spectrum of light which we do not apprehend, because our organs of sight are not adapted to them. The ether is as real as ponderable matter. We are enabled to analyze the light of stars which were never beheld by human eye. Until we know more of what we call "matter" and "energy" than we do at present, who will be so adventurous as to say that the last vehicle to which psychic action can be transferred, and the only medium to which the unity of consciousness can be attached, are the ponderable but unstable compounds that constitute the living brain? It is true that experience here finds its limit and before our eager vision the curtain falls. But perhaps the ancient wisdom was not far from the heart of truth which inspired the poet to sing:—

As large as is the unbounded Universe,
So large that little, hidden Spirit is!
The Heavens and Earth are in it! Fire and air
And sun and moon and stars, darkness and light,
It comprehends! Whatever maketh Man,
The present of him, and the past of him,
And what shall be of him,—all thoughts and things
Lie folded in the ethereal vast of it.

⁠And, if they say: What then is left of it
When eld upon the Body's City creeps,
And breaks and scatters it: and all its walls
Fall: and the Palace of the Heart is void,
Where dwell the being, the desire, the life,
This Royal Spirit's Kingship?

⁠Answer them:
By mortal years the Immortal grows not old!
The Âtman changes not! The Body's death
Kills not the soul! It hath its City, still,
Its Palace, and its hidden, proper life!

David J. Hill.

University of Rochester.