Part 16 (1/2)
There is another consideration that affects parallelism alone. Since the theory credits each of the two series with a closed and sufficient causal sequence, each of which excludes the other, it does away with causality altogether. That the one line runs parallel with the other excludes the idea that a unique system of laws prevails, determining the character and course of each line. One of the two lines must certainly be dependent, and one must lead. Otherwise there can be no distinctness of laws in either.
Let us recall our ill.u.s.tration of the cloud shadows once more; the changing forms of the shadows correspond point for point with those of the clouds only because they are entirely dependent upon them. We may ill.u.s.trate it in this way: a parallel may be drawn to an ellipse, it also forms a closed curved line. But it is by no means again an ellipse, but is an entirely dependent figure without any formula or law of its own.
Parallelism must make one of its lines the leading one, which is guided and directed by an actual causal connection within itself. The other line may then run parallel with this, but its course must certainly be determined by the other. And as the line of corporeal processes, with its inviolable nexus of sequences, is not easily broken, parallelism, after many hard words against materialism, frequently returns to that again or becomes inconsistent. But if one says that the two aspects of phenomena are only the forms of one fundamental phenomenon, that means taking away actual causality from both alike, and leaving only a temporal sequence.
For then the actually real is the hidden something that throws the cloud-shadows to right and left. But in the sequence of shadows there is no causal connection, only a series of states succeeding one another in time, and this points to a causal connection elsewhere.
It is easy enough to find examples to prove that the mental in us influences the bodily. But the most convincing, deepest and most trustworthy of these are not the voluntary actions which are expressed in bodily movements, nor even the pa.s.sions and emotions, the joy which makes our blood circulate more quickly, and the shame which brings a flush to our foreheads, the suggestions which work through the mind towards the reviving, vitalising or healing of the body, but the cold and simple course of logical thought itself. Through logical thinking we have the power to correct the course of our conceptions, to inhibit, modify, or logically direct the natural course, as it would have been had it been brought about by our preceding physiological and psychical states, if they were dominant and uncontrolled. But if so, then we must also have the power, especially if it be widely true that physiological states correspond to psychical states, to influence, inhibit, modify the nerve-processes in our brain, or to liberate entirely new ones, namely, those that correspond to the corrected conceptions.
The law of the conservation of energy is here applied in as distorted a sense as we detected before in regard to the general theory of life. And what we said there holds good here also. That something which is in itself not energetic should determine processes and directions of energy is undoubtedly an absolute riddle. But to recognise this is less difficult than to accept the impossibilities which mechanism and automatism offer us here, even more p.r.o.nouncedly than in regard to the theory of life. Perhaps one of the familiar antinomies of Kant shows us the way, not, indeed, to find the solution of the riddle, but to recognise, so to speak, its geometrical position and a.s.sociations. We have already seen that inquiry into the causal conditions of processes lands us in contradictions of thought, which show us that we can never really penetrate into the actual state of the matter.
Perhaps we have here to do only with the obverse side of the problem dealt with there. There the chain of conditions could not be finished because it led on to infinity, where, however, it was required that it should be complete. Here again the chain is incomplete. In the previous case a solution is found through the nave proceeding of simply breaking the empirical connection of conditions and postulating beginnings in time. In this case, the admission of an _influxus physicus_ transforms consciousness almost unnoticed into a mechanically operative causality.
The proper att.i.tude in both cases is a critical one. We must admit that we cannot penetrate into the true state of the case, because the world is deeper than our knowledge, we must reject parallelism as being, like the _influxus physicus_, an unsatisfactory cutting of the critical knot, and we must frankly recognise the incontrovertible fact, never indeed seriously called in question, of the controlling power of the mind, even over the material.
The Supremacy of Mind.
From the standpoint we have now reached we can look back once more on those troublesome naturalistic insinuations as to the dependence of the mind upon the body, which we have already considered. It is evident to us all that our mental development and the fate of our inner life are closely bound up with the states and changes of the body. And it did not need the attacks and insinuations of naturalism to point this out. But the reasons brought forward by naturalism are not convincing, and all the weighty facts it adduces could be balanced by facts equally weighty on the other side. We have already shown that the apparently dangerous doctrine of localisation is far from being seriously prejudicial. But if the dependence of the mind upon the body be great, that of the body upon the mind is greater still. Even Kant wrote tersely and drily about ”the power of our mind through mere will to be master over our morbid feelings.” And every one who has a will knows how much strict self-discipline and firm willing can achieve even with a frail and wretched body, and handicapped by exhaustion and weakness. Joy heals, care wastes away, and both may kill. The influence which ”blood” and ”bile” or any other predisposition may have upon temperament and character can be obviated or modified through education, or transformed and guided into new channels through strong psychical impressions and experiences, most of all by great experiences in the domain of morals and religion. No one doubts the reality of those great internal revolutions of which religion is well aware, which arise purely from the mind, and are able to rid us of all natural bonds and burdens. This mysterious region of the influence of the mind in modifying bodily states or producing new ones is in these days being more and more opened up. That grief can turn the hair grey and disgust bring out eruptions on the skin has long been known. But new and often marvellous facts are being continually added to our knowledge through curious experiments with suggestion, hypnosis, and auto-suggestion. And we are no longer far from believing that through exaltations, forced states of mind a.s.sociated with auto-suggestion, many phenomena, such as ”stigmata,” for instance, which have hitherto been over hastily relegated to the domain of pious legend, may possibly have a ”scientific” background.
”The Unconscious”.
But one has a repugnance to descending into this strange region. And religion, with its clear and lofty mood, can never have either taste for or relations.h.i.+p with considerations which so easily take an ”occult” turn.
Nor is its mysticism concerned with physiologies. But it is instructive and noteworthy that the old idealistic faith, ”It is the mind that builds up the body for itself,” is becoming stronger again in all kinds of philosophies and physiologies of ”the unconscious,” as a reaction from the onesidedness of the mechanistic theories, and that it draws its chief support from the dependence of nervous and other bodily processes upon the psychical, which is being continually brought into greater and greater prominence. The moderate and luminous views of the younger Fichte, who probably also first introduced the now current term ”the unconscious,”
must be at least briefly mentioned. According to him, the impulse towards the development of form which is inherent in everything living, and which builds up the organism from the germ to the complete whole, by forcing the chemical and physical processes into particular paths, is identical with the psychical itself. In instincts, the unconscious purposive actions of the lower animals in particular, he sees only a special mode of this at first unconscious psychical nature, which, building up organ after organ, makes use in doing so of all the physical laws and energies, and is at first wholly immersed in purely physiological processes. It is only after the body has been developed, and presents a relatively independent system capable of performing the necessary functions of daily life, that it rises beyond itself and gradually unfolds to conscious psychical life in increasing self-realisation. Edward von Hartmann has attempted to apply this principle of the unconscious as a principle of all cosmic existence.
And wherever, among the younger generation of biologists, one has broken away from the fascinations of the mechanistic theory, he has usually turned to ”psychical” co-operating factors.
Is there Ageing of the Mind?
Naturalism is also only apparently right in a.s.serting that the mind ages with the body. To learn the answer which all idealism gives to this comfortless theory, it is well to read Schleiermacher's ”Monologues,” and especially the chapter ”Youth and Age.” The arguments put forward by naturalism, the blunting of the senses, the failing of the memory, are well known. But here again there are luminous facts on the other side which are much more true. It is no wonder that a mind ages if it has never taken life seriously, never consolidated itself to individual and definite being through education and self-culture, through a deepening of morality, and has gained for itself no content of lasting worth. How could he do otherwise than become poor, dull and lifeless, as the excitability of his organ diminishes and its susceptibility to external impressions disappears? But did Goethe become old? Did not Schleiermacher, frail and ailing as he was by nature, prove the truth of what he wrote in his youth, that there is no ageing of the mind?
The whole problem, in its highest aspects, is a question of will and faith. If I know mind and the nature of mind, and believe in it, I believe with Schleiermacher in eternal youth. If I do not believe in it, then I have given away the best of all means for warding off old age. For the mind can only hold itself erect while trusting in itself. And this is the best argument in the whole business.
But even against the concrete special facts and the observable processes of diminution of psychical powers, and of the disappearance of the whole mental content, we could range other concrete and observable facts, which present the whole problem in quite a different light from that in which naturalism attempts to show it. They indicate that the matter is rather one of the rusting of the instrument to which the mind is bound than an actual decay of the mind itself, and that it is a withdrawing of the mind within itself, comparable rather to sleep than to decay. The remarkable power of calling up forgotten memories in hypnosis, the suddenly re-awakening memory a few minutes before death, in which sometimes the whole past life is unrolled with surprising clearness and detail, the flaming up anew of a rusty mind in moments of great excitement, the great clearing up of the mind before its departure, and many other facts of the same nature, are rather to be regarded as signs that in reality the mind never loses anything of what it has once experienced or possessed. It has only become buried under the surface. It has been withdrawn from the stage, but is stored up in safe treasure-chambers. And the whole stage may suddenly become filled with it again.
The simile of an instrument and the master who plays upon it, which is often used of the relation between body and mind, is in many respects a very imperfect one; for the master does not develop with and in his instrument. But in regard to the most oppressive arguments of naturalism, the influence of disease, of old age, of mental disturbances due to brain changes, the comparison serves our turn well enough, for undoubtedly the master is dependent upon his instrument; upon an organ which is going more and more out of tune, rusting, losing its pipes, his harmonies will become poorer, more imperfect. And if we think of the a.s.sociation between the two as further obstructed, the master becoming deaf, the stops confused, the relation between the notes and pipes altered, then what may still live within him in perfect and unclouded purity, and in undiminished richness, may present itself outwardly as confused and unintelligible, may even find only disconnected expression, and finally cease altogether; so that no conclusion would be possible except that the master himself had become different or poorer. The melancholy field of mental diseases perhaps yields proofs against naturalism to an even greater degree than for it. It is by no means the case that all mental diseases are invariably diseases of the brain, for even more frequently they are real sicknesses of the mind, which yield not to physical but to psychical remedies. And the fact that the mind can be ill, is a sad but emphatic proof that it goes its own way.
Immortality.
It is in a faith in a Beyond, and in the immortality of our true being, that what lies finely distributed through all religion sums itself up and comes to full blossoming: the certainty that world and existence are insufficient, and the strong desire to break through into the true being, of which at the best we have here only a foretaste and intuition. The doctrine of immortality stands by itself as a matter of great solemnity and deep rapture. If it is to be talked about, both speaker and hearers ought to be in an exalted mood. It is the conviction which, of all religious convictions, can be least striven for consciously; it must well forth from devotional personal experience of the spirit and its dignity, and thus can maintain itself without, and indeed against much reasoning.
To educate and cultivate it in us requires a discipline of meditation, of concentration, and of spiritual self-culture from within outwards. If we understood better what it meant to ”live in the spirit,” to develop the receptivity, fineness, and depth of our inner life, to listen to and cultivate what belongs to the spirit, to inform it with the worth and content of religion and morality, and to integrate it in the unity and completeness of a true personality, we should attain to the certainty that personal spirit is the fundamental value and meaning of all the confused play of evolution, and is to be estimated on quite a different scale from all other being which is driven hither and thither in the stream of Becoming and Pa.s.sing away, having no meaning or value because of which it must endure. And it would be well also if we understood better how to listen with keener senses to our intuitions, to the direct self-consciousness of the spirit in regard to itself, which sleeps in every mind, but which few remark and fewer still interpret. Here, where the gaze of self-examination reaches its horizon, and can only guess at what lies beyond, but can no longer interpret it, lie the true motives and reasons for our conviction of immortality. An apologetic cannot do more than clear away obstacles, nor need it do much more than has. .h.i.therto been done. It reminds us, as we have already seen, that the world which we know and study, and which includes ourselves, does not show its true nature to us; hidden depths lie behind appearances. And it gathers together and sums up all the great reasons for the independence and underivability of the spiritual as contrasted with the corporeal. The spiritual has revealed itself to us as a reality in itself, which cannot be explained in terms of the corporeal, and which has dominion over it. Its beginning and its end are wholly unfathomable. There is no practical meaning in discussing its ”origin” or its ”pa.s.sing away,” as we do with regard to the corporeal.