Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics

Chapter 5

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CHAPTER IV.

_HUXLEYISM._

"_a force d"esprit tout lui paroit matiere._"

In one of his interesting "Lay Sermons," the most interesting perhaps of the whole interesting series, Professor Huxley, taking for his theme the "Physical Basis of Life," combats "the widely-spread conception of life as a something which works through matter, but is independent of it;"

affirming, on the contrary, "that matter and life are inseparably connected, and that there is one kind of matter which is common to all living beings." The preacher may be safely allowed to have satisfactorily made out the second portion of this affirmation. With his own singular felicity of ill.u.s.tration, he shows how all vegetable and animal tissues, without exception, from that of the brightly coloured lichen looking so like a mere mineral incrustation on the rock that bears it, to that of the painter who admires or the botanist who dissects it, are, however diverse in aspect, essentially one in composition and structure. He explains how the microscopic fungi cl.u.s.tering by millions within the body of a single fly, the giant pine of California towering to the height of a cathedral spire, the Indian fig-tree covering acres with its profound shadow, the animalcules of ocean"s lowest deep, minute enough to dance in myriads on the point of a needle, and the Finner whale, hugest of beasts, that disports its ninety feet of bone and blubber on ocean"s billowy heights, the flower that a girl wears in her hair, and the blood that courses through her veins, are, each and all, smaller or larger multiples or aggregates of one and the same structural unit, which, again, is invariably resolvable into the same identical elements. That unit, he tells us, is an atom or corpuscle composed of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon, which, and which alone, seem to be required by nature for laying withal the foundations of vitality, inasmuch as no substance from which any one of these ingredients is totally absent, ever exhibits any sign of life, while, on the other hand, not only are these four ingredients sufficient of themselves to form a substance capable of living, but they actually do with very little (when any) foreign admixture, form all substances whatsoever that are ever found vivified. All such substances, he informs us, are but varieties of _protoplasm_, differing indeed from each other in texture, colour, and general appearance, even as a diamond differs from granite, yet all being equally protoplasm, just as a diamond and a block of granite are equally stones, or as heart of oak and the outer case of a nettle"s sting are equally wood. The human ovum, he gives us to understand, is in its earliest stage but a single particle of protoplasm; the human foetus but an aggregation of such particles, variously modified; the human body perfectly matured, but a larger aggregation of such particles still further modified.

He proceeds to point out, as following from these premises, that a solution of smelling salts, together with an infinitesimal quant.i.ty of certain other salts, contains all the elements that enter into the composition of protoplasm, and consequently of whatever substance the very highest animal requires for sustenance. He does not, however, leave us to suppose that any abundance of the fluid in question would avail aught to save a hungry creature of any sort from starving, but continues his exposition to the following effect. Not only is there no animal, there is not even any vegetable organism, to which the elements of food can serve as food, as long as they remain elementary. It is indispensable that hydrogen and oxygen should combine to form water, nitrogen and hydrogen to form ammonia, carbon and oxygen to form carbonic acid; and even then, even at a table groaning under whole hogsheads of these primitive compounds, there is no single animal that would not find itself at a Barmecide feast. There are many plants likewise, which in the midst of such uncongenial plenty would be equally without a drop to drink; but there are also mult.i.tudes of others which, without the aid of any more elaborated nutriment, would be able to grow into a million, nay million million fold of their original bulk.

Provided there be in the seed or germ of any of these latter one single particle of living protoplasm to begin with, that single particle may convert into animated protoplasm an indefinite quant.i.ty of inanimate ammonia, carbonic acid, and water. The protoplasm thus created in the first instance, and created, let us suppose, in the form of a lichen or a fungus, is converted by decay into vegetable mould, in which gra.s.s may take root and grow, and which, in that case, will be converted into herbaceous protoplasm; which, being eaten by sheep or oxen, becomes ovine or bovine protoplasm, commonly called mutton or beef; which, again, being eaten by man, becomes human protoplasm, and, if eaten by a philosopher, becomes part of a ma.s.s of protoplasm capable of investigating and of expounding in lectures or lay sermons, the changes which itself and its several components have undergone.

So far we advance with willing steps like dutiful disciples along the path of knowledge indicated by our distinguished biological teacher, who here, however, pulls us up short by suddenly intimating that he sees no break in the series of transubstantiations whereby precisely such oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon as he is lecturing upon, have become metamorphosed into him, the lecturer, and us, the lectured audience, and cannot "understand why the language which is applicable to any one term of the series should not be used in regard to any of the others." Oxygen and hydrogen, he reminds us, are gases, whose particles, at and also much below 32 Fahrenheit, tend to rush away from each other with great force; and this tendency we call a property of each gas. Let oxygen and hydrogen be mixed in certain proportions, and an electric spark pa.s.sed through them, and they will disappear, and a quant.i.ty of water equal in weight to the sum of their weights will appear in their place. But amongst the properties of the water will be some, the direct opposites of those of its components; watery particles, for example, at any temperature not higher than 32 Fahrenheit, tending not to rush asunder, but to cohere into definite geometrical shapes or to build up frosty imitations of vegetable foliage. And let the water be brought into conjunction with ammonia and carbonic acid, and the three will, under certain conditions, give rise to protoplasm, which again, if subjected to a certain succession of processes, will rise by successive stages from protoplasm that gives no other signs of life than those of feeding and reproducing its kind, to protoplasm endowed with the power of spontaneous motion, and finally to protoplasm that thinks and reasons, speculates and philosophises. Now why should any of the various phenomena of life exhibited by these varieties of protoplasm be supposed to be of a different cla.s.s from the appearances of activity exhibited by any of the varieties of lifeless matter? What reason is there why, for instance, thought should not be termed a property of thinking protoplasm, just as congelation is a property of water, and centrifugience of gas? Professor Huxley protests that he is aware of no reason. We call, he says, the several strange phenomena which are peculiar to water, "the properties of water, and do not hesitate to believe that in some way or other they result from the properties of the component elements of water. We do not a.s.sume that something called _aquosity_ entered into and took possession of the oxide of hydrogen as soon as it was formed, and then guided the aqueous particles to their places in the facets of the crystal or among the leaflets of the h.o.a.r frost. On the contrary, we live in the hope and faith that, by the advance of molecular physics, we shall by-and-by be able to see our way as clearly from the const.i.tuents of water to the properties of water, as we are now able to deduce the operations of a watch from the form of its parts or the manner in which they are put together." Why, then, when carbonic acid, water, and ammonia disappear, and an equivalent weight of the matter of life makes its appearance in their place, should we a.s.sume the existence in the living matter of a something which has no representative or correlative in the unliving matter that gave rise to it? Why imagine that into the newly formed hydro-nitrogenised oxide of carbon a something called vitality entered and took possession? "What better philosophical status has vitality than aquosity?" "If scientific language is to possess a definite and constant signification, we are,"

he considers, "logically bound to apply to protoplasm or the physical basis of life the same conceptions as those which are held to be legitimate elsewhere." Wherefore, he concludes, that "if the phenomena exhibited by water are its properties, so are those presented by protoplasm _its_ properties," and that if it be correct to describe "the properties of water as resulting from the nature and disposition of its component molecules," there can be no "intelligible ground for refusing to say that the properties of protoplasm result from the nature and disposition of its molecules."

Here, however, our lay preacher candidly warns us that by the vast majority of his clerical brethren this doctrine would be denounced as rankest heresy, and that whoever accepts it is placing his foot on the first rung of a ladder which, in most people"s estimation, is the "reverse of Jacob"s, and leads to the antipodes of heaven." He frankly owns that the terms of his propositions are distinctly materialistic: nay, that whoever commits himself to them will be temporarily landed in "gross materialism." Not the less, however, does he, mingling consolation with admonition, recommend us to plunge boldly into the materialistic slough, promising to point out a way of escape from it, and insisting, indeed, that through it lies the only path to genuine spiritualistic truth.

In p.r.o.nouncing this to be exceedingly evil counsel, as with the most unfeigned respect for its author I feel bound at once to do, it might not be necessary for me to undertake a detailed topographical survey of the path alluded to. It might, perhaps, suffice to specify the conclusions to which the path is represented as leading, in order to show that those conclusions cannot possibly be reached by any such route. By Professor Huxley himself they are thus described:--We know nothing of matter "except as a name for the unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our own consciousness," nor of spirit, except that "it also is a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of consciousness. In other words matter and spirit are but names for the imaginary _substrata_ of groups of natural phenomena."

But if matter be not a thing, but a name, and a name too not for a real, but only an imaginary thing, one perfect certainty is that matter cannot possibly be composed either wholly or in part of molecules, and, by necessary consequence, that life cannot possibly be "the product of any disposition of material molecules," nor the phenomena of life be "expressions of molecular changes in the matter of life." Of the particular Huxleian doctrine which we are considering, the two moieties are absolutely irreconcileable; so that on the a.s.sumption that either moiety were true, the truth of that moiety would be decisive against the other. If matter have no real, and only a nominal existence, life, which is undeniably a reality, cannot be a property of matter. If life, being an undisputed reality, be a property of matter, matter must needs be a reality also, and not merely a name. Any one, however, who, like myself, is thoroughly convinced that both halves of the doctrine are equally and utterly erroneous, is precluded from employing one for the refutation of the other, and in order to prove, as I shall now attempt to do, that life is in no sense either a product or a property of matter, must resort for the purpose to independent reasoning.

I commence by defining one of the princ.i.p.al terms occurring in the debate. When in scientific discourse we speak of anything as a property of an object, we mean thereby not simply that it is a thing belonging to the object, but also that it is a thing without which the object could not subsist. We mean that it is one of the const.i.tuents inherent in and inseparable from the object, whose union gives to the object its distinctive character. When we call fluidity at one temperature, solidity at another, and vaporisation at a third, properties of water, we mean that matter which did not liquefy, congeal, and evaporate at different temperatures would not be water. The habits of exhibiting these phenomena, in conjunction with certain other habits, make up the aquosity or wateriness of water. They are parts of water"s nature, and, in the absence of any one of them, water would not be its own self, and could not exist. But in no such sense, nor in any sense whatever, is the life or vitality whereby what we are accustomed to call animated are distinguished from inanimate objects, essential to the existence of the species of matter termed matter of life or protoplasm. Take from water its aquosity, and water ceases to be water; but you may take away vitality from protoplasm, and yet leave protoplasm as much protoplasm as before. Vitality, therefore, evidently bears to protoplasm a quite different relation from that which aquosity bears to water. Protoplasm can do perfectly well without the one, but water cannot for a moment dispense with the other. Protoplasm, whether living or lifeless, is equally itself; but unaqueous water is unmitigated gibberish. But if protoplasm, although deprived of its vitality, still remains protoplasm, vitality plainly is not indispensable to protoplasm, is not therefore a _property_ of protoplasm.

And that it is not a _product_ of protoplasm, or a result of any particular arrangement of protoplasmic particles or molecules, is not less easily or unanswerably demonstrable. For if it were, as long as the particular molecular arrangement remained unaltered, life would necessarily be in attendance; an amputated joint would, until decomposition set in, be as much alive as the trunk from which it had been lopped, even as water poured from a jug into a gla.s.s is quite as much liquid as the water remaining in the jug. There would be no such thing as dead meat, which was not putrid as well as dead, any more than water can freeze without changing from a fluid to a solid; and there would moreover be production antecedent in origin to its own producer.

The force of the last at least of these objections is not to be resisted. Water, ammonia, and carbonic acid cannot, it is admitted, combine to form protoplasm, unless a principle of life preside over the operation. Unless under those auspices the combination never takes place. At present, whenever a.s.suming its presidential functions, the principle of life seems to be invariably embodied in a portion of pre-existing protoplasm; but there certainly was a time when the fact was otherwise. Time was, as geology places beyond all doubt, when our globe and its appurtenances consisted wholly of inorganic matter, and possessed not one single animal or vegetable inhabitant. In order, then, that any protoplasm or the substance of any organism should have been brought into existence in the first instance, life plainly must have been already existent. It must at one time have been possible for life, without being previously embodied, to mould and vivify inert matter; and it must needs have been by unembodied life that inorganic matter was first organised and animated. There is no possible alternative to this conclusion, except that of supposing that death may have given birth to life--that absolutely lifeless and inert matter may have spontaneously exerted itself with all the marvellous energy requisite for its conversion into living matter, exerting for the purpose powers which, under the conditions of the case, it could not have acquired without exercising before it acquired them. Whoever declines to swallow such absurdity has no choice but to admit that unembodied life must have been the original manufacturer of protoplasm: but to admit this, and yet to suppose that when now-a-days embodied life is observed to give birth to new embodied life, the credit of the operation belongs not to the life itself but to its protoplasmic embodiment, is much the same as to suppose that when a tailor, dressed in clothes of his own making, makes a second suit of clothes, this latter is the product not of the tailor himself but of the clothes he is wearing.

Thus, irrespectively of whatever grounds there may be for believing that life still _does_, it is incontestable that life once _did_, exist apart from protoplasm; and that protoplasm both may and continually does exist apart from what is commonly understood by life, must be obvious to every one who is aware that protoplasm is the substance of which all plants and all animals are composed, and has observed also that plants and animals are in the habit of dying. That matter and life are inseparably connected cannot, therefore, it would seem, be a.s.serted except in total disregard of the teachings both of reason and observation, and "the popular conception of life as a something which works through matter but is independent of it," would seem to be as true as it is popular. If the only choice allowed to us be between "the old notion of an Archaeus governing and directing blind matter," and the new conception of life as the product of a certain disposition of material molecules, the absolute certainty that the latter conception is wrong, may be fairly urged as equivalent to certainty, equally absolute, that the former notion is right.

How far soever it may be true that, as Professor Huxley says, "the progress of physical science means, and has in all ages meant, the extension of the province of matter and causation," it is certainly not true that, as he proceeds to predict, the same province will ever be extended sufficiently to banish from the region of human thought not "spontaneity" simply, but likewise "spirit." In one direction at least, limits are clearly discernible which scientific investigation need not hope to overleap. How much soever we may eventually discover of the changes whereby inorganic matter becomes gradually adapted for the reception of life, physical science can never teach us what or whence is the life that eventually takes possession of the finished receptacle.

Possibly we at length may, as Professor Huxley doubts not that we by-and-by shall, see how it is that the properties peculiar to water have resulted from the properties peculiar to the gases whose junction const.i.tutes water; and similarly how the characteristic properties of protoplasm have sprung from properties in the water, ammonia, and carbonic acid that have united to form protoplasm; but knowing all this, we shall not be a hair"s breadth nearer to the more recondite knowledge up to which it is expected to lead. To extract the genesis of life from any data that completest acquaintance with the stages and processes of protoplasmic growth can furnish, is a truly hopeless problem. Given the plan of a house, with samples of its brick and mortar, to find the name and nationality of the householder, would be child"s play in comparison. Life, as we have seen, is not the offspring of protoplasm, but something which has been superinduced upon, and may be separated from, the protoplasm that serves as its material basis. It is, therefore, distinct from the matter which it animates, and, being thus immaterial, cannot possibly become better known by any a.n.a.lysis of matter.

Of this emphatically vital question Professor Huxley, as has been already intimated, takes a diametrically opposite view. He does not merely, in sufficiently explicit terms, deny that there is any intrinsic difference between matter and spirit, and affirm the two to be, in spite of appearances, essentially identical. If this were all, I at any rate should not be ent.i.tled to object, for I shall myself presently have occasion to use very similar language, although attaching to it a widely different meaning from that with which it is used by Professor Huxley.

But the latter goes on to avow his belief that the human body, like every other living body, is a machine, all the operations of which will sooner or later be explained on physical principles, insomuch that we shall eventually arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness, even as we have already arrived at a mechanical equivalent of heat. He considers that with the same propriety with which the amount of heat which a pound weight produces by falling through the distance of a foot, may be called its equivalent in one sense, may the amount of feeling which the pound produces by falling through a foot of distance on a gouty big toe, be called its equivalent in another sense, to wit, that of consciousness. Yet he protests against these tenets being deemed materialistic, which, he declares, they certainly neither are nor can be, for that while he himself certainly holds them, he as certainly is not himself a materialist. Professor Huxley is among the last to be suspected of talking anything, as Monsieur Jourdain did prose, without knowing it. He knows perfectly well that he has here been talking materialism, but he insists that his materialism is only another form of idealism. He seeks to evade the seemingly inevitable deduction from his premises by representing both matter and spirit as mere names, and names, too, not for real things, but for fanciful hypotheses which may be spoken of indifferently in materialistic or in spiritualistic terms, thought in the one case being treated as a form of matter, and matter in the other as a form of thought. The ident.i.ty of matter and spirit is, in short, represented by him as consisting in this: that the existence of both is merely nominal, or at best merely ideal.

Ordinary folk may perhaps be somewhat slow to derive from this compromising theory all the comfort which its author deems it capable of affording. Most of us may, probably, be inclined to think that we might as well have been left to fret in the frying-pan of materialism as be cast headlong into idealistic fire, to no better end than that of being there fused body and soul together, and sublimated into inapprehensible nothingness. Our immediate concern, however, is not with the pleasantness of the theory, but with its truth; in proceeding to test which we shall probably find that there is as little warrant for idealising matter after this fashion as we have already seen that there is for materialising mind.

The originator of the theory about to be examined, or rather, perhaps, of a somewhat different theory out of which this has been developed--not to say perverted--may, without much inaccuracy, be p.r.o.nounced to be Descartes. He it was who, perceiving that we are surrounded on all sides by illusions of all sorts, that not only is there no authority or testimony implicitly to be depended on, but that our senses likewise often play the traitor, and that we can never be perfectly sure whether we are really seeing, hearing, or feeling, or merely thinking or dreaming that we see, hear, or feel, and looking anxiously around for one single point at least on which complete confidence might be placed, discovered such a point in thought. Whatever else we may doubt about, we cannot, he justly argued, doubt that there are thoughts. If it were possible to doubt this, our very doubt would be thought, const.i.tuting and presenting as evidence the very existence doubted of. Our thoughts, then, are unquestionably real existences. They may be delusive, but they cannot possibly be fict.i.tious.

We may perhaps hereafter have occasion to note how Descartes, having thus secured one firm foothold and solid resting-place, outwent the farthest stretch of Archimedean ambition by using it, not as a fulcrum from whence to move the world, but as a site for logical foundations whereon he might, if he had persevered, have raised the superstructure of an universe at once mental and material.[32] Intermediately, however, we have to observe how two pre-eminent disciples of the Cartesian school have perverted the fundamental proposition of their great master by treating its converse as its synonyme. Descartes having demonstrated that all thought is existence, Bishop Berkeley and Professor Huxley infer that all existence is thought. So says the Professor in so many words, and to precisely the same effect is the more diffuse language of the Bishop, where, speaking of "all the choir of heaven and furniture of earth, of all the bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world,"

he declares that their _esse_ is _percipi_, that their "being" consists in their being "perceived or known," and that unless they were actually perceived by, or existed in, some created or uncreate mind, they could not possibly exist at all.

The reasoning in support of these a.s.sertions is in substance as follows:--We know nothing of any material object except by the sensations which it produces in our minds. What we are accustomed to call the _qualities_ of an object are nothing else but the mental sensations of various kinds which the object produces within us. Some of these qualities, such as extension, figure, solidity, motion, and number, are cla.s.sed as primary; others, as, for instance, smell, taste, colour, sound, as secondary. Now that these latter have no existence apart from mind can readily be shown thus. If I p.r.i.c.k my finger with a needle, the pain I suffer in consequence is surely in myself, not in the needle, nor anywhere else but in myself. If an orange be placed on my open hand, my sensation of touching it is in myself, not in the orange.

If the orange could feel, what it would feel would be a hand, while what I am feeling is an orange. Nor are my sensations of pain and touch merely confined to myself; they are also confined to a particular part of myself, viz., to the brain, the seat of my consciousness, which it is, and not the finger or hand, that really feels when the one is hurt, or when anything comes in harmless contact with the other. To prove this, let the fine nervous threads, which, running up the whole length of the arm, connect the skin of the finger with the spinal marrow and brain, be cut through close to the spinal cord, and no pain will be felt, whatever injury be done: while if the ends which remain in connection with the cord be p.r.i.c.ked, the sensation of p.r.i.c.king in the finger will arise just as distinctly as before. Or let a walking-stick be held firmly by the handle, and its other end be touched, and the tactile sensation will be experienced as if at the end of the stick, where, however, it plainly cannot be. It is the mind alone which feels, but which, by a peculiar faculty of localisation or extradition, seems to remove a feeling exclusively its own, not only to the outside of itself, but to the outside also of the walls of its fleshly tenement.

And as it is with pain or touch, so it is with every sensation with which any of the so-called secondary qualities of matter are identical.

If I look at, or smell, or taste a blood orange, the sensation of colour, or scent, or flavour I receive is entirely and exclusively my own, the orange remaining quite unconscious of its own redness, or fragrance, or sweetness, and not, indeed, possessing in itself any real qualities of the kind. For to take redness as an example; how does the sensation of it or of any other colour arise? The waves of a certain very attenuated medium, the particles of which are vibrating with vast rapidity but with very different velocities, strike upon an object and are thrown off in all directions. Of the particles which vibrate with any particular velocity, some are gathered by the optical apparatus of the eye, and deflected so as to impinge on the retina and on the fibres of the optic nerve therewith connected, producing in these fibres a change which is followed by other changes in the brain, which, again, by virtue of some inscrutable union between the brain and the mind, create a feeling or consciousness of colour. What the particular colour shall be, depends either on the rate of motion in the vibrating medium or on the character of the retina; and if, while the former remained the same, the other were to be altered, or if two persons, with differently formed retinas, and one of the two colour-blind, were to be looking, what had first seemed red might now seem green, or what seemed red to one spectator might seem green to the other. But as the same object cannot itself be both red and green at the same time, it follows that what are called its redness and greenness are not in it, but in the spectator.

Similarly, the sounds which an object appears to give forth neither are nor ever were in it: they originate in the mind of the hearer, and have not, and never have had any existence elsewhere. "If the whole body were an eye, where," asks St. Paul, "were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?" and Professor Huxley more than meets the drift of the Apostle"s questions by p.r.o.nouncing it "impossible to imagine but that if the universe contained only blind and deaf beings, darkness and silence would reign everywhere."

And as with the secondary qualities of matter, so, on the same showing, must it be with the primary. If colour, taste, scent, and the like, exist nowhere but in the mind, so neither do extension, solidity, and the like. If the former could not exist unless there were intelligent minds to perceive them, then neither could the latter. For, by extension and its cognates, we understand simply relations which we conceive to exist between certain qualities of objects identical with certain of our own visual and tactile sensations, or between these and our consciousness of muscular effort; but inasmuch as all sensations and all consciousness are purely mental, and exist nowhere but in the mind, it follows necessarily that ideas of relation between different sensations, or between sensations and consciousness, must also be purely mental, and non-existent save in the mind. All the qualities of matter, therefore, primary as well as secondary, are alike conceptions of the mind, and consequently could not exist without a mind for them to be conceived by and to exist in. But if the qualities did not exist, then matter, which cannot be conceived otherwise than as an a.s.semblage of qualities, could not exist either. Wherefore in respect of matter itself, as well as of the qualities of matter, _esse_ is _percipi_, essence is perception, to be is to be perceived. Wherefore, finally, if there were no mind to perceive matter, matter could not exist. Q. E.

D.[33]

Although in the foregoing summary of an argument to which not Berkeley and Huxley alone, but others of the deepest and acutest thinkers that this country has produced, have contributed, I have strenuously laboured to state all its points as convincingly as the obligations of brevity would permit, I am not myself by any means convinced by it. On the contrary, although to say so may seem to imply a considerable overstock of modest a.s.surance, still I do say that whatever portion of it is sound is irrelevant, and that whatever portion is relevant is not sound. So much of it as relates to the nature of the qualities of matter, is, however interesting or otherwise important, very little, if at all, to the purpose. No doubt if I p.r.i.c.k my finger with a needle, or--to take in preference an ill.u.s.tration employed by Locke--if my fingers ache in consequence of my handling snow, it would be supremely ridiculous to talk of the pain I feel being in the snow; yet not a whit more ridiculous than to call the snow itself white or cold, if, by so speaking, I mean that anything in the slightest degree resembling my sensation of either snowy whiteness or snowy coldness resides in the snow itself. And as of coldness and whiteness, so of all the other so-styled secondary qualities. If I smell a rose, or listen to a piano, the rose or the piano is quite insensible to the scent or sounds by which my sense is ravished. And of primary qualities, also, precisely the same thing may with equal confidence be alleged. A stone which I perceive to be large, round, hard, and either rotating or motionless, has no more perception of its own extension, figure, solidity, motion, or rest than a s...o...b..ll has of its colour or temperature. But all this, though perfectly true, has nothing to do with the question, which is not _what_ qualities of matter are, but _where_ they are, and whether they can exist anywhere but in mind; and this question, I submit, is distinctly begged by those who a.s.sume, as is done throughout the reasoning under examination, that our _sensations_ with regard to material objects, and the _qualities_ of those objects, are synonymous and convertible terms. Incontestably, sensations are affections of the mind which neither have nor can have any existence outside the mind. If, then, the qualities of objects are identical with the sensations which arise in the mind concerning those objects, why, of course, the qualities likewise can exist nowhere but in the mind. On narrowly scrutinising, however, the supposed ident.i.ty, we shall find that it involves somewhat reckless confusion of diametrical opposites. When I look at or smell a rose, or eat a beefsteak, or listen to a piano, the sensations which thereupon arise within me, whether immediately or subsequently, either are the results of my seeing, smelling, eating, or hearing, or they are not. To say that they are not is equivalent to saying that an object need not be within reach of the perceptive faculties in order to be perceived; that I may see or smell a rose, though there be no rose to be seen or smelt; may dine sumptuously off empty dishes, and be raised to the seventh heaven of delight by the audible strains of a music which is not being executed. _Fortunati nimium_--only too lucky would mankind be, did this turn out to be a correct theory, affording as it would a solution of every social problem, and serving as a panacea for every social evil. Psychology would then be the only science worth attention, for of whatever things proficiency in that branch of study had qualified any one to form mental images, of those same things would he simultaneously become possessor in full property. Whoever had succeeded in training himself to imagine vigorously might at once have, do, or be whatever it pleased him to imagine, becoming _ipso facto_, as the Stoics used to say an acquirer of virtue does, "rich, beautiful, a king." Woe betide any one, however, who, as long as the cosmical const.i.tution remains what it is, shall attempt to put the theory into practice, and desisting from all those animal functions, involving intercourse with a real or imaginary external world, which are vulgarly supposed essential to animal existence, shall obstinately restrict himself to the sensations which he believes the mind to be, without any such intercourse, capable of creating for the body"s sustenance and delectation. The physical extinction inevitably consequent on such devotion to principle would speedily render all the devotees physically incapable of testifying in behalf of their peculiar opinion, and, clearing them away, would leave no witnesses surviving but such as were signifying by deeds if not in words their hearty adherence to the popular belief. Practically, then, there may be a.s.sumed to be entire unanimity of a.s.sent to the truism that for our senses to be affected by the presence of external objects, the objects must needs be present to affect them. On all hands it is in effect admitted that in some mode or other external objects exist, but if so, and if the sensations resulting from operations performed by the bodily organs with external objects would not have resulted unless the objects had been present to operate or to be operated upon, clearly there must be resident in, or inseparably bound up with, the objects a power or powers of producing sensation in conscious mind. But the power of producing sensation, and sensation itself, are not one and the same thing, but two separate and distinct things, intrinsically distinct and locally separate. The feeling, agreeable or painful, according to its intensity, which heat occasions, is not the same thing as the heat by which it is occasioned. The twofold taste, sweet to a healthy, bitter to a distempered palate, of one and the same aliment, cannot be identical with the single property of the aliment whereby the taste is produced.

In the sense of seeming red to a spectator with normally constructed eyes, and green to one who is colour-blind, a ruby or a Siberian crab is at once both red and green, but the two colours which it causes to be perceived cannot be identical with the peculiar structure, or whatever else it be, whereby the ruby or Siberian crab communicates to circ.u.mambient ether the one self-same motion that terminates in different impressions on differently constructed eyes. In these and in all cases of the kind the feeling is in the mind, the source of the feeling in matter. The one is a perception, the other a quality, and to mistake the quality, not merely for a perception, but for the very perception to which the quality gives rise; and to infer thence that the quality must likewise be in the mind, is an instance as glaring as can well be imagined of that most heinous of logical offences, the confounding of cause with effect.

By what steps Berkeley was led, and has since led so many after him, into so grave an error, he has himself acquainted us. Thus it is that he argues: By sensible things can be meant only such as can be perceived immediately by sense: and sensible _qualities_ are of course sensible _things_. But the only perceptions of sense are sensations, and all perceptions are purely mental. Wherefore, sensible qualities being, as such, perceptible immediately by the senses, must be sensations, and being sensations must be perceptions, and being perceptions they are of course purely mental, and existent nowhere save in the mind. Carefully, however, as Berkeley fancied he was picking his way, he really had tripped, and that fatally, at the second step. He calls the qualities of objects _sensible_ things; but sensible they are not according to his definition, for they are not capable of being immediately perceived by the senses. It is not sense which perceives, but reason which infers them. The senses, as Berkeley elsewhere repeatedly and earnestly insists, receive nothing from objects but sensations, and these they communicate to the mind without accompanying them by the slightest hint as to whence they originally came. The senses suggest nothing as to any qualities resident in or appertaining to an object corresponding with the sensations derived from the object. The existence of such qualities is an inference of reason which, taking for granted that sensations, in common with all other occurrences, must have causes, and observing that certain of them commonly occur in the presence of certain objects, and never occur in the absence of those objects, infers that the causes of the sensations must exist in the objects. To the causes thus inferred the name of qualities is given, to distinguish them from the sensations whereof they are causes; and the Berkeleian transgression consists in overlooking the distinction between things so diametrically opposite.

By the commission of such a sin the most powerful intellect becomes inevitably committed to further enormities. Except by neglecting to distinguish between sight and hearing, the effects, and light and sound, their respective causes, it would surely have been impossible for Professor Huxley to come to the strange conclusion that if all living beings were blind and deaf, "darkness and silence would everywhere reign." Had he not himself previously explained that light and sound are peculiar motions communicated to the vibrating particles of an universally diffused ether, which motions, on reaching the eye or ear, produce impressions, which, after various modifications, result eventually in seeing or hearing? How these motions are communicated to the ether matters not. Only it is indispensable to note that they are not communicated by the percipient owner of the eye or ear, so that the fact of there being no percipient present cannot possibly furnish any reason why the motions should not go on all the same. But as long as they did go on there would necessarily be light and sound; for the motions are themselves light and sound. If, on returning to his study in which, an hour before, he had left a candle burning and a clock ticking, Professor Huxley should perceive from the appearance of candle and clock that they had gone on burning and ticking during his absence, would he doubt that they had likewise gone on producing the motions const.i.tuting and termed light and sound, notwithstanding that no eyes or ears had been present to see or hear? But if he did not doubt this, how could he any more doubt that, although all sentient creatures suddenly became eyeless and earless, the sun might go on shining, and the wind roaring, and the sea bellowing as before?

Akin to the inadvertence which, as I presume to think, has led Professor Huxley thus to misconceive _secondary_ qualities, is an inattention to the differences between our ideas, or mental pictures, and the originals whereof those pictures are copies, which seems to me seriously to vitiate his reasoning with regard to _primary_ qualities. With admirable perspicuity he shows[34] how it is that our notions of primary qualities are formed; how the mind, by _localising_ on distinct points of the sensory surface of the body its various, tactile sensations, obtains the idea of extension, or s.p.a.ce in two dimensions, of figure, number, and motion: how the power, combined with consciousness of the power, of moving the hand in all directions over any substance it is in contact with, adds the idea of geometrical solidity, or of s.p.a.ce in three dimensions: how the ideas thus formed with the aid of the sense of touch are confirmed by, and blended with, others derived from visual sensations and muscular movements of the eye: and, finally, how the idea of mechanical solidity, or impenetrability, arises from experience of resistance to our muscular exertions. All these details, however, interesting as they are, are nevertheless quite out of place. What we are at present concerned with is the nature of the things themselves, not the nature of our knowledge of them. No question that this latter is purely mental. If figure, motion, and solidity were really, as Professor Huxley says, each of them nothing but a perception of the relation of two or more sensations to one another, no question but that, since the mind is the sole seat of perception, they could exist nowhere else. But if all these suppositions be incorrect, if, as we have seen, there be in matter and apart from mind, potentialities of producing sensations, it follows that, in matter, and outside of mind, there must be relations between different potentialities, and there must, moreover, be limits to, and there may be changes in, those relations. Wherefore, since there is in matter a potentiality of imparting to the mind those sensations whence it derives its ideas of place and distance, and since figure is but a "limitation of distance," and motion but a "change of place," it necessarily follows that there is in matter a potentiality of conveying to the mind those sensations whence it derives its ideas of figure and motion. And a similar remark applies equally to solidity, and to every other so-called quality of matter. All of them are substantive potentialities of producing in the mind those sensations whence our ideas of themselves (the qualities) are derived. No doubt all these qualities would be _inconceivable_ in the absence of a mind by which they might be _conceived_, but it is not necessary that, in order to _be_, they should be _conceived_. In discussions of any abstruseness we cannot be too precise in our use of words, and we shall inevitably be going astray here if we allow ourselves for a moment to forget that a quality and the conception of that quality are not one single thing, but two things. Can it be seriously supposed that if all the conscious creatures, of every description, by which the universe is peopled, were to fall temporarily into complete stupor, the material universe would, at the commencement of the trance, be deprived of its extension, solidity, figure, and all its other const.i.tuent properties, recovering them again as soon as its inhabitants woke up again? Can it be doubted that, on the contrary, all potentialities resident in its material composition would pursue the even tenor of their way just as if nothing had happened; performing, during the temporary absence of external percipient minds, precisely those operations which, as soon as consciousness returned to those minds, would be followed by the perceptions of sight, hearing, and touch? But if so, then plainly it is exceedingly derogatory to matter to charge it with such absolute dependence on external support that its very being consists in being perceived from without. That matter cannot exist without mind I cheerfully admit, or rather most earnestly affirm, proposing presently to explain in what sense I make the affirmation. Meanwhile let it suffice to have ascertained that the mental service with which matter cannot dispense, whatever else it be, is at any rate not, as the whole Berkeleian school so positively insist, that of mental testimony to its existence.

Let us pause here for a moment to report progress. We have seen, on the one hand, that unless mind and matter have been eternally coexistent, mind must have preceded matter, and that it is idle, therefore, to expect, by any researches into matter, to discover how mind (or life) originated. We have seen that from a materialism which represents mind as in any sense a property or product of matter there is no possible outlet to an idealism which represents matter as owing its being to mind. To see this is simply to see that the builder of a house cannot possibly have been born in the house he has himself built. On the other hand, we have seen that the idealism which represents being or existence as consisting of perception is utterly incompatible with materialism of any sort or kind, unless, indeed, with a materialistic nihilism wherein would be no room for a solitary molecule, still less for any molecular structure, and least of all for that motion of molecular structures into which consistent materialists are logically bound to attempt to resolve all natural phenomena. We have, in short, seen that materialism and idealism, in the senses in which those terms are commonly used, are utterly incapable of amalgamation, or indeed of even being harmoniously approximated, without being first deprived of all the characteristic traits which at present ent.i.tle them to their distinguishing appellations.

To which of the two belongs the larger share of blame for this implacable hostility is easily determined. Materialism, in dealing with mental phenomena, begins by setting chronology at defiance; but between idealism and the phenomena of matter there is no such aboriginal incongruity. From principles common to every form of idealism a theory is deducible which, while frankly acknowledging the reality of matter, may, with perfect consistency, maintain that reality to be mental--although mental in the sense of being, not a perception by, but a metamorphosis of, mind. Of such a theory the outlines seem to me to have been sketched, and the foundations partly laid, by Descartes, and it cannot be otherwise than interesting to inquire in what manner and how far so consummate an artificer advanced in the work, and where and wherefore he suddenly stopped short in it.

When Descartes, after convincing himself of the hollow pretentiousness of most human knowledge, proceeded to dig away the acc.u.mulated drift and sand of ages in quest of any clay or rock there might be below, the first indubitable verity he came to was thought, about whose reality there could, as already explained, be no possibility of doubt, inasmuch as any doubt concerning it, being itself thought, would be but an additional proof of it. On the bit of firm ground thus thoroughly tested, he proceeded to place a formula not less carefully verified, his famous "Cogito, ergo sum"--"I think, therefore I am." By many of his followers, however, this second verification of his is deemed to be by no means so satisfactory as it was by himself, Professor Huxley more especially taking vehement, though, as I make bold to add, somewhat gratuitous, exception to every single word of the most celebrated of Cartesian formulae. No doubt the premiss of the formula a.s.sumes the conclusion, but it likewise includes as well as a.s.sumes it. No doubt, since "I think" is but another way of saying "I am thinking," to say that "I think" is to a.s.sume that "I am;" nay, the same thing is equally a.s.sumed by the mere introduction of the p.r.o.noun "I." But Descartes was fully warranted in taking for granted the truth of his conclusion. For by previously showing incontestably that thought and consciousness are real existences, he had completely proved the premiss wherein his conclusion is included. What though, as Professor Huxley suggests, "thought" may possibly "be self-existent," "or a given thought the result of its antecedent thought, or of some external power"? Be thought what else it may, it must needs be, also, either an affection or an operation; if not performed, it must be felt; there must needs be, therefore, something by which it is either performed or felt, and that something cannot possibly be other than a thinking and conscious thing.

As surely as thought is, so surely must there be a thinker. This is, in substance, affirmed even by many who deny it in terms, and Hume, in particular, when saying, as he somewhere does, that "all we are conscious of is a series of perceptions," denies and affirms it at one and the same time. For how can there be perception without a percipient?

or how consciousness without a conscious ent.i.ty? or how can that ent.i.ty be conscious of feeling without being simultaneously conscious that it is itself which feels, without knowing, consequently, that it has a self, or without being warranted, if it possess the gift of speech, in declaring, in words even more emphatic than those of Descartes, "I _myself_ am"? And how, if these questions do not admit of reply, can Professor Huxley be warranted in declaring self and non-self to be mere "hypotheses by which we account for the facts of consciousness," and adding that of their existence we "neither have, nor by any possibility can have" the same "unquestionable and immediate certainty as we have of the states of consciousness which we consider to be their effects"?

Surely the existence of self is one of the most direct and immediate subjects of consciousness; yet it does not depend for evidence on consciousness alone, but is as unanswerably demonstrable as that two straight lines cannot enclose s.p.a.ce or that parallel lines cannot meet, or as any other mathematical negation. No ratiocinative deduction can be more incontestable than that, since _I_ have thoughts, there must be an _I_ to have them.

Whoever thus a.s.sures himself of the existence of self obtains simultaneously equal a.s.surance of the existence of non-self; for feeling that his conscious self is not boundless, but is confined within limits, he cannot doubt that beyond those limits there must be s.p.a.ce, and, receiving continual sensations from without, he perceives that there are, in external s.p.a.ce, potentialities of imparting sensations. Thus, I repeat, Descartes in laying down the first principles of his philosophy created an intellectual basis for the external universe. Unfortunately, however, instead of proceeding to place its proper superstructure on the foundation thus laid, he wilfully stepped aside from what he had just p.r.o.nounced the only firm ground in existence, and undertook to raise a rival edifice on part of the formless void beyond. Deeply struck by the grand discoveries of his ill.u.s.trious contemporaries, Galileo and Harvey, and thence discovering for himself that the phenomena of remotest worlds and also the involuntary phenomena of our own bodily frames take place in accordance with forces of uniform operation, he leaped suddenly to the conclusion that those forces are purely mechanical. The circulation of the blood, he says, "is as much the necessary result of the structure of the parts one can see in the heart, and of the heat which one may feel there, and of the nature of the blood which may be experimentally ascertained, as is the motion of a clock the result of the force, situation, and figure of its wheels and of its weight." Nor, in his view, does the heart, by virtue of its structure and composition, merely cause the blood to circulate. "It also generates animal spirits," which, "ascending like a very subtle fluid, or very pure and vivid flame, into the brain as into a reservoir, pa.s.s thence into the nerves, where, according as they more or less enter, or tend to enter, they have the power of altering the figures of the muscles into which the nerves are inserted, and of so causing all the organs and limbs to move." He puts the case thus: Even as the ordinary movements of a water-clock or of a mill are kept up by the ordinary flow of the water, and even as "in the grottoes and fountains of royal gardens, the force wherewith the water issues from its reservoirs suffices to move various machines, and even to make them play instruments or p.r.o.nounce words according to the different disposition of the pipes which lead the water"--even so do pulsation, respiration, digestion, nutrition, and growth, and "other such actions as are natural and usual in the body," result naturally from the usual course of the animal spirits. Moreover, even as intruders upon the waterworks aforesaid unconsciously by their mere presence cause special movements to take place, even as, for example, "if they approach a bathing Diana, they tread on certain planks so arranged as to make her hide among the reeds, and, if they attempt to follow her, see approaching a Neptune who threatens with his trident, or rouse some other monster who vomits water into their faces"--even so do external objects, by their mere presence, act upon the organs of sense; even so do "the reception of light, sounds, odours, flavours, heat, and such like qualities in the organs of the external senses, the impression of the ideas of these in the intellect, the imagination, and the memory, the internal movements of the appet.i.tes and pa.s.sions, and the external movements which follow so aptly on the presentation of objects to the senses, or on the resuscitation of impressions by the memory," yea, even so do all these "functions proceed naturally from the arrangement of the bodily organs, neither more nor less than do the movements of a clock or other automaton from that of its weights and its wheels, without the aid of any other vegetative or sensitive soul or any other principle of motion or of life than the blood and the spirits agitated by the fire which burns continually within the heart, and which differs in no wise from the fire existing in inanimate bodies."[35]

Quite fairly it may be urged that the writer of pa.s.sages like these would, if writing in modern language, and with the aid of modern conceptions, have expressed himself much as Professor Huxley does when, declaring that the circulation of the blood and the regular movements of the respiratory, alimentary, and other internal organs are simply "affairs of mechanism, resulting from the structure and arrangement" of the bodily organs concerned, from "the contractility of those organs, and from the regulation of that contractility by an automatically acting nervous apparatus;" that muscular contractility and the automatic activity or irritability of the nerves are "purely the results of molecular mechanism;" and that "the modes of motion which const.i.tute the physical bases of light, sound, and heat are trans.m.u.ted by the sensory organs into affections of nervous matter," which affections become "a kind of physical ideas const.i.tuting a physical memory," and may be combined in a manner answering to a.s.sociation and imagination, or may give rise to muscular contractions in those reflex actions which are the mechanical representatives of volition." Quite fairly may a doctrine, capable of being thus translated, be described as leading "straight to materialism." Quite justly may its author be claimed by Huxley as joint professor of a materialistic creed. True, Descartes lodges within his human mechanism a _chose pensante_ or rational soul, whose princ.i.p.al seat is in the brain, and who is treated as corresponding to a hydraulic engineer stationed in the centre of waterworks for the purpose of increasing, slackening, or otherwise altering their movements. But this rational soul is a very needless appendage to either the Cartesian or the Huxleian system, wherein, if its post be not a literal sinecure, there is, at any rate, little or nothing for it to do which might not quite as well be done without it. The hydraulic engineer, sitting in his central office, has to wind up the whole machinery from time to time, and to turn now this tap, now that, when he wishes to set this or that particular machine in motion. But, as no one need be told, our _chose pensante_ has nothing to do with the winding up of our digestive, circulatory, or respiratory apparatus; and so far from internally arranging those other internal organs from the mere arrangement of whose parts, according to Descartes, the reception, conversion, and retention of sensations, and the movements, whether internal or external, thereupon consequent, naturally proceed, or from regulating the molecular mechanism, whence, according to Professor Huxley, results the automatic nervous activity which, in his opinion, governs the movements of the limbs not less absolutely than those of the intestines, it, nine times out of ten, neither knows nor suspects that any such organs or mechanism exist. If the functions above attributed to the human frame could be shown really to belong to it, pure, not to say cra.s.s, materialism, would require no further proof. Those particular functions undoubtedly take place without the cognisance of that particular sensitive soul which we call ourself, so that if no other sensitive soul take cognisance of them, they must needs be, not simply automatic performances, but performances of an automaton of such marvellous powers as to be quite equal to the performance likewise of whatever human operations are vulgarly cla.s.sed as mental. a.s.sume, however illogically, that motion is a function of matter, and from that premiss, whether true or false, the conclusion that thought likewise is a function of matter may be quite logically deduced. "That thought is as much a function of matter as motion is" must needs be conceded to Professor Huxley, who, therefore, if he could show that motion is really such a function, would be fully justified in adding, that "the distinction between spirit and matter vanishes," that "we lose spirit in matter."

Undeniably, then, of the Cartesian philosophy one moiety is, as Professor Huxley says, materialistic; but from the self-contradictions inseparable from every species of materialism the Cartesian variety is, of course, no more exempt than any other, and it has besides one self-contradiction peculiar to itself. A clock"s pendulum vibrates, and its hands move, not simply by reason of the situation and figure of its weight and wheels, but also because some intelligent person, by winding up the clock, has communicated an impulsive force to the weight and wheels. Waterworks perform all sorts of antics, not solely because the pipes are skilfully constructed and arranged with a view to such end, but because also an intelligent engineer has turned running water into the pipes. But the only intelligent agent to whom Descartes allows access to his corporeal machinery is one who not only has no notion how to apply a moving force except to some few portions of the machinery, but with regard to the other portions has most likely no suspicion that they even exist. But how in the absence of some other intelligence, of some other "vegetative or sensitive soul or principle of motion or of life," is it possible for the inert and inanimate heart to generate animal spirits?--how is it possible for death thus to give birth to life?--or, if the generative faculty be supposed to be the necessary result of a particular molecular structure, how is it that when the animal spirits become from any cause extinct, they are not immediately regenerated by the same molecular structure? or rather, how is it possible for animal spirits to become extinct as long as the molecular structure of which they are necessary concomitants remains unaltered? In these questions the old insuperable difficulties reappear in new forms, but on these we need not dwell. Apart from anti-materialistic arguments of general applicability, there is a mode of refutation specially adapted to the Cartesian form of materialism, which, besides flatly contradicting itself, contradicts not less flatly a twin system of unimpeachable veracity. Truth cannot be opposed to truth:--a doctrine cannot be true, even though propounded by Descartes and Huxley, if it conflict irreconcileably with doctrines which Descartes and Huxley have unanswerably demonstrated. Now one-half of Cartesian philosophy shows conclusively that amidst the countless infinity of human notions, the one single and solitary certainty of independent and self-evident authority is the existence of thought, and nothing else whatever, therefore, can be ent.i.tled to be regarded as absolutely certain which cannot be shown to rest mediately or immediately upon this. One thing which can, by strictest logical process, be shown so to rest, is the existence of a thinking self; and another is the existence of a non-self or external universe; but of this external universe we know scarcely anything beyond the bare fact that it exists. We know that outside the thinking self there are potentialities capable of somehow or other communicating sensations to the thinking self; but of the nature of these potentialities our senses teach us absolutely nothing, and the few particulars that reason is able to discover, are, with one single though very momentous exception, to which we are rapidly approaching, purely negative. We do know to a certain extent what qualities of objects are not. We know that they are not and cannot be in the least like the sensations which we call by the same names. We know that what we call the whiteness and coldness of snow or the hardness and weight of marble, can no more resemble the feelings we receive from looking at or handling snow or marble than the mental exaltation produced within us on hearing one of Bach"s fugues is like the organ on which, or the organist by whom, it is played. We know that of the pictures which our senses form for us not one can possibly be a correct likeness. We know that what we fancy we see in matter we do not see; that what we seem to feel we do not feel; that the apparent structure and composition of matter cannot therefore possibly be real. To this conviction we are irresistibly drawn by a chain of idealistic reasoning of which Descartes forged the first link, and every link of which will stand the severest strain. But if this be the teaching of an idealism occupying as its base the only morsel of solid ground to be found in the mental universe, what sc.r.a.p of footing is there left for an antagonistic materialism purporting to rest on what we can see and feel of a structure and composition which, as we have just satisfied ourselves, we cannot see or feel at all?

As plainly then as one half of Descartes" philosophy is materialistic, so plainly, that half, instead of a necessary outgrowth and exact correlative of the other or idealistic moiety is, on the contrary, the latter"s diametrical and implacable opponent. As plainly, therefore, as the one is true, must the other be false, and Cartesian idealism, in so far as its character has been exhi

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