Problems of Life and Mind. Second series by George Henry Lewes (best contemporary novels TXT) 📕

Intellect, and we must change our symbols in changing our problem; here our only resource is to translate the subjective state into an imaginable objective process, which can only be expressed in terms of Matter and Motion. What we heard as Sound is then seen as Vibration. When we are optically or mentally contemplating vibrations and neural processes, we are supplanting one source of feeling by another, translating an event in another set of symbols. But we can no more hear the sound in seeing the vibrations, than a blind man can see the fly in the amber which he feels with his fingers, or than we can feel the amber he holds, while we are only looking at it. The phrase “material conditions of Feeling” sometimes designates the objective aspect of the subjective process, and sometimes the agencies in the external medium which co-operate with the organism in the production of the feelings. In each case there is an attempt to explain a feeling by intelligible symbols.

44. The Animal probably never attempts such explanation; satisfied with the facts, it is careless of their factors. Man is never satisfied: is restless in the search after factors; and having found them, seeks factors of these factors; so that Lichtenberg felicitously calls him “das rastlose Ursachenthier”—“the animal untiring in the search for causes.” And thus sciences arise: we translate experiences into geometrical, physical, chemical, physiological, and psychological terms—different symbols of the different modes of apprehending phenomena.

45. “I see an elephant.” In other words, I am affected in a certain way, and interpret my affection by previous similar experiences, expressing these in verbal symbols. But I want an explanation, and this the philosopher vouchsafes to me by translating my affection into his terms. He takes me into another sphere—tells me of an undulating Ether, the waves of which beat upon my retina—of lines of Light refracted by media and converged by lenses according to geometric laws—of the formation thereby of a tiny image of the gigantic elephant on my retina as on the plate of a camera-obscura—this, and much more, is what he sees in my visual feeling, and he bids me see it also. Grateful for the novel instruction, I am compelled to say that it does not alter my vision of the elephant, does not make the fact a whit clearer, does not indeed correspond with what I feel. It is outside knowledge, valuable, as all knowledge is, but supplementary. It is translation into another language. And when I come to examine the translation, I find it very imperfect. I ask my instructor: Is it the tiny image on my retina which I see, and not the big elephant on the grass? And how do I see this retinal image, which you explain to be upside down?—how is it carried from my retina to my mind? I have no consciousness of tiny reversed image, none of my retina, only of a fact of feeling, which I call “seeing an elephant.” The camera-obscura has no such feeling—it reflects the image, it does not see the object. Here my instructor, having reached the limit of his science,210 hands me over to the physiologist, who will translate the fact for me in terms not of Geometry, but of Anatomy and Physiology. The laws of Dioptrics cease at this point: the image they help to form on the retina is ruthlessly dispersed, and all its beautiful geometric construction is lost in a neural excitation, which is transmitted through semifluid channels of an optic tract to a semifluid ganglion, whence a thrill is shot through the whole brain, and is there transformed into a visual sensation. Again I fancy I have gained novel instruction of a valuable kind; but it does not affect my original experience that I am enabled to translate it into different terms; the less so because I cannot help the conviction that the translation is imperfect, leaving out the essential points. If a phrase be translated for me into French or German, I gain thereby an addition to my linguistic knowledge, but the experience thus variously expressed remains unaffected. When the fact is expressed in geometrical or physiological terms, the psychical process finds no adequate expression. Neither in the details, nor in the totals, do I recognize any of the qualities of my state of feeling in seeing the elephant. I do not see the geometrical process, I do not see the anatomical mechanism, I see the elephant, and am conscious only of that feeling. You may consider my organism geometrically or anatomically, and bring it thus within the circle of objective knowledge; but my subjective experience, my spiritual existence, that of which I am most deeply assured, demands another expression. Nay more, on closely scrutinizing your objective explanations, it is evident that a psychical process is implied throughout—such terms as undulations, refractions, media, lenses, retina, neural excitation, overtly refer, indeed, to the material objective aspect of the facts, but they are themselves the modes of Feeling by which the facts are apprehended, and would not exist as such without the “greeting of the spirit.”

46. What, then, is our conclusion? It is, that to make an adequate explanation of psychical processes by material conditions we must first establish an equivalence between the subjective and objective aspects; and, having taken this step, we must complete it by showing wherein the difference exists; having established this entity and diversity, we have solved the problem.

Let us attempt this solution. When I speak to you, the spoken words are the same to you and to me. You hear what I hear, you apprehend what I apprehend. But there were muscular movements of articulation felt by me and not felt by you; to feel these you also must articulate the words; but so long as you merely hear the words, there is a difference in our states of feeling. Some of my movements you can see, others you can imagine; but this is not my feeling of them, it is your optical equivalent of my muscular feeling. On a similar assumption of equivalence, a neural process is made to stand for a logical process. In thinking a proposition, we are logically grouping verbal symbols representative of sensible experiences; and this is a quite peculiar state of Consciousness, wholly unlike what would arise in the mental or visual contemplation of the neural grouping, which is its physiological equivalent. But this diversity does not discredit the idea of their identity; and although some of my readers will protest against such an idea, and will affirm that the logical process is not a process taking place in the organism at all, but in a spirit which uses the organism as its instrument, I must be allowed in this exposition to consider the identity established, my purpose being to explain the diversity necessarily accompanying it. Therefore, I say, that although a logical process is identical with a neural process, it must appear differently when the modes of apprehending it are different. While you are thinking a logical proposition, grouping your verbal symbols, I, who mentally see the process, am grouping a totally different set of symbols: to you the proposition is a subjective state, i. e. a state of feeling, not an object of feeling: to become an object, it must be apprehended by objective modes: and this it can become to you as to me, when we see it as a process, or imagine it as a process. But obviously your state in seeing or imagining the process must be different from your state when the process itself is passing, since the modes of apprehension are so different. There may be every ground for concluding that a logical process has its correlative physical process, and that the two processes are merely two aspects of one event; but because we cannot apprehend the one aspect as we apprehend the other, cannot see the logical sequence as we see the physical sequence, this difference in our modes of apprehension compels us to separate the two, assigning one to the subjective, the other to the objective class. Between the sensible perception of an object and the reproduced image of the object there is chiefly a quantitative difference in the physiological and psychological processes: the image is a faint sensation. Yet this quantitative difference brings with it the qualitative distinction which is indicated in our calling the one a sensation, the other a thought. The consequence has been that while all philosophers have admitted the sensation to be—at least partly—a process in the bodily organism, the majority have maintained that the thought is no such process in the organism, but has its seat in a spirit independent of the organism.

47. The states of Feeling which are associated with other states characterized as objective because overtly referring to a Not-Self, we group under the head of Matter: we assign material conditions as their antecedents. Whereas states of Feeling which are not thus associated we group under the head of Mind, and assign internal conditions as their antecedents. Color and Taste are very different states of Feeling, yet both are spontaneously referred to external causes, because they are associated with visual and tactical states; whereas Hunger, Nausea, Hope, etc., have no such associations, and their material conditions are only theoretically assigned.

Our intelligible universe is constructed out of the elements of Feeling according to certain classifications, the broadest of which is that into external and internal, object and subject. The abstractions Matter and Mind once formed and fixed in representative symbols, are easily accredited as two different Reels. But the separation is ideal, and is really a distinction of Aspects. We know ourselves as Body-Mind; we do not know ourselves as Body and Mind, if by that be meant two coexistent independent Existents; and the illusion by which the two Aspects appear as two Reals may be made intelligible by the analysis of any ordinary proposition. For example, when we say “this fruit is sweet,” we express facts of Feeling—actual or anticipated—in abstract terms. The concrete facts are these: a colored feeling, a solid feeling, a sweet feeling, etc., have been associated together, and the colored, solid, sweet group is symbolized in the abstract term “fruit” But the color, solidity, and sweetness are also abstract terms, representing feelings associated in other groups, so that we find “fruit” which has no “sweetness”; and “sweetness” in other things besides “fruits.” Having thus separated ideally the “sweetness” from the “fruit”—which in the concrete sweet-fruit is not permissible—we easily come to imagine a real distinction. This is the case with the concrete living organism when we cease to consider it in its concrete reality, and fix our attention on its abstract terms—Body and Mind. We then think of Body apart from Mind, and believe in them as two Reals, though neither exists apart.

There is no state of consciousness in which object and subject are not indissolubly combined. There is no physical process which is not indissolubly bound up with the psychical modes of apprehending it. Every idea is either an image or a symbol—it has therefore objective reference, a material aspect. Every object is a synthesis of feelings—it has therefore subjective reference, a material aspect. Thus while all the evidence points to the identity of Object and Subject, there is ample evidence for the logical necessity of their ideal separation as Aspects. This I have explained as a case of the general principle which determines all distinctions—namely, the diversity in the modes of production of the products, which—subjectively—is diversity in the modes of apprehending them. The optico-tactical experiences are markedly different from the other experiences, as being more directly referred to the Not-Self which resists; and because these lend themselves to ideal constructions by means of images and symbols, it is these experiences into