But, on the other hand, nothing in all this could prevent us from giving an equally complete account of either Luther's or Shakespeare's spiritual history, an account in which every gleam of thought and emotion should find its place.The mind-history would run alongside of the body-history of each man, and each point in the one would correspond to, but not react upon, a point in the other.So the melody floats from the harp-string, but neither checks nor quickens its vibrations; so the shadow runs alongside the pedestrian, but in no way influences his steps.
Another inference, apparently more paradoxical still, needs to be made, though, as far as I am aware, Dr.Hodgson is the only writer who has explicitly drawn it.That inference is that feelings, not causing nerve-actions, cannot even cause each other.To ordinary common sense, felt pain is, as such, not only the cause of outward tears and cries, but also the cause of such inward events as sorrow, compunction, desire, or inventive thought.So the consciousness of good news is the direct producer of the feeling of joy, the awareness of premises that of the belief in conclusions.But according to the automaton-theory, each of the feelings mentioned is only the correlate of some nerve-movement whose cause lay wholly in a previous nerve-movement.
The first nerve-movement called up the second; whatever feeling was attached to the second consequently found itself following upon the feeling that was attached to the first.If, for example, good news was the consciousness correlated with the first movement, then joy turned out to be the correlate in consciousness of the second.But all the while the items of the nerve series were the only ones in causal continuity; the items of the conscious series, however inwardly rational their sequence, were simply juxtaposed.REASONS FOR THE THEORY.
The 'conscious automaton-theory,' as this conception is generally called, is thus a radical and simple conception of the manner in which certain facts may possibly occur.But between conception and belief, proof ought to lie.And when we ask, 'What proves that all this is more than a mere conception of the possible?' it is not easy to get a sufficient reply.If we start from the frog's spinal cord and reason by continuity, saying, as that acts so intelligently, though unconscious , so the higher centres, though conscious , may have the intelligence they show quite as mechanically based; we are immediately met by the exact counter-argument from continuity, an argument actually urged by such writers as Pflüger and Lewes, which starts from the acts of the hemispheres, and says: "As these owe their intelligence to the consciousness which we know to be there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord's acts must really be due to the invisible presence of a consciousness lower in degree." All arguments from continuity work in two ways, you can either level up or level down by their means; and it is clear that such arguments as these can eat each other up to all eternity.
There remains a sort of philosophic faith, bred like most faiths from an aesthetic demand.Mental and physical events are, on all hands, admitted to present the strongest contrast in the entire field of being.The chasm which yawns between them is less easily bridged over by the mind than any interval we know.Why, then, not call it an absolute chasm, and say not only that the two worlds are different, but that they are independent?
This gives us the comfort of all simple and absolute formulas, and it makes each chain homogeneous to our consideration.When talking of nervous tremors and bodily actions, we may feel secure against intrusion from an irrelevant mental world.When, on the other hand, we speak of feelings, we may with equal consistency use terms always of one denomination, and never be annoyed by what Aristotle calls 'slipping into another kind.' The desire on the part of men educated in laboratories not to have their physical reasonings mixed up with such incommensurable factors as feelings is certainly very strong.I have heard a most intelligent biologist say: "It is high time for scientific men to protest against the recognition of any such thing as consciousness in a scientific investigation." In a word, feeling constitutes the 'unscientific' half of existence, and any one who enjoys calling himself a 'scientist' will be too happy to purchase an untrammelled homogeneity of terms in the studies of his predilection, at the slight cost of admitting a dualism which, in the same breath that it allows to mind an independent status of being, banishes it to a limbo of causal inertness, from whence no intrusion or interruption on its part need ever be feared.
Over and above this great postulate that matters must be kept simple, there is, it must be confessed, still another highly abstract reason for denying causal efficacity to our feelings.We can form no positive image of the modus operandi of a volition or other thought affecting the cerebral molecules.
"Let us try to imagine an idea, say of food, producing a movement, say of carrying food to the mouth....What is the method of its action?
Does it assist the decomposition of the molecules of the gray matter, or does it retard the process, or does it alter the direction in which the shocks are distributed? Let us imagine the molecules of the gray matter combined in such a way that they will fall into simpler combinations on the impact of an incident force.Now suppose the incident force, in the shape of a shock from some other centre, to impinge upon these molecules.
By hypothesis it will decompose them, and they will fall into the simpler combination.How is the idea of food to prevent this decomposition? Manifestly it can do so only by increasing the force which binds the molecules together.
Good! Try to imagine the idea of a beefsteak binding two molecules together.
