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The Mind and the Brain

by Alfred Binet · English · Gutenberg #21077 · 399,751 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Mind and the Brain

Author: Alfred Binet


        
Release date: April 14, 2007 [eBook #21077]

Language: English

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Transcriber's Note:

   References are made to footnotes in other footnotes and index.
   The footnotes are serially numbered and placed at the end of
   each chapter. Consequently the references in the footnotes
   and index have been corrected to indicate the footnote number.




International Scientific Series.

Volume LXXXIX.

(The International Scientific Series)

Edited by F. Legge

THE MIND AND THE BRAIN

by

ALFRED BINET

Directeur du Laboratoire de Psychologie
à la Sorbonne

Being the Authorised Translation of

_L'Âme et le Corps_







London
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd
Dryden House, Gerrard Street, W.
1907



CONTENTS


BOOK I

THE DEFINITION OF MATTER


CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The distinction between mind and matter--Knowable not
homogeneous--Criterion employed, enumeration not concepts


CHAPTER II

OUR KNOWLEDGE OF EXTERNAL OBJECTS ONLY SENSATION

Modern theories of matter--Outer world only known to us by our
sensations--Instances--Mill's approval of proposition, and its
defects--Nervous system only intermediary between self and outer
world--The great X of Matter--Nervous system does not give us true
image--Müller's law of specificity of the nerves--The nervous system
itself a sensation--Relations of sensation with the unknowable the
affair of metaphysics


CHAPTER III

THE MECHANICAL THEORIES OF MATTER ARE ONLY SYMBOLS

Physicists vainly endeavour to reduce the rôle of
sensation--Mathematical, energetical, and mechanical theories of
universe--Mechanical model formed from sensation--Instance of
tuning-fork--No one sensation any right to hegemony over others


CHAPTER IV

ANSWERS TO SOME OBJECTIONS, AND SUMMARY

Objections of spiritualists--Of German authors who contend that
nervous system does give true image--Of metaphysicians--Common ground
of objection that nervous system not intermediary--Answer to
this--Summary of preceding chapters


BOOK II

THE DEFINITION OF MIND


CHAPTER I

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN COGNITION AND ITS OBJECT

Necessity for inventory of mental phenomena--Objects of cognition and
acts of cognition--Definition of consciousness


CHAPTER II

DEFINITION OF SENSATION

Sensation defined by experimental psychology--A state of
consciousness--Considered self-evident by Mill, Renouvier, and
Hume--Psycho-physical according to Reid and Hamilton--Reasons in
favour of last definition--Other opinions examined and refuted


CHAPTER III

DEFINITION OF THE IMAGE

Perception and ideation cannot be separated--Perception constituted by
addition of image to sensation--Hallucinations--Objections anticipated
and answered


CHAPTER IV

DEFINITION OF THE EMOTIONS

Contrary opinions as to nature of emotions--Emotion a phenomenon _sui
generis_--Intellectualist theory of emotion supported by Lange and
James--Is emotion only a perception? Is effort?--Question left
unanswered


CHAPTER V

DEFINITION OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS--THE RELATION SUBJECT-OBJECT

Can thoughts be divided into subject and object?--This division cannot
apply to the consciousness--Subject of cognition itself an
object--James' opinion examined--Opinion that subject is spiritual
substance and consciousness its faculty refuted


CHAPTER VI

DEFINITION OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS--CATEGORIES OF THE UNDERSTANDING

Principle of relativity doubted--Tables of categories: Aristotle, Kant,
and Renouvier--Kantian idealism--Phenomenism of Berkeley examined and
rejected--Argument of _a priorists_--The intelligence only an inactive
consciousness--Huxley's epiphenomenal consciousness--Is the
consciousness necessary?--Impossibility of answering this question


CHAPTER VII

DEFINITION OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS--THE SEPARABILITY OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS
FROM ITS OBJECT--DISCUSSION OF IDEALISM

Can the consciousness be separated from its object?--Idealists
consider the object a modality of the consciousness and thus
inseparable, from it--Futility of this doctrine--Object can exist
without consciousness


CHAPTER VIII

DEFINITION OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS--THE SEPARATION OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS
FROM ITS OBJECT--THE UNCONSCIOUS

Can ideas exist without consciousness?--No consciousness without an
object--Can the consciousness die?--Enfeeblement of consciousness how
accounted for--Doubling of consciousness in hysterics--Relations of
physiological phenomena to consciousness--Consciousness cannot become
unconscious and yet exist


CHAPTER IX

DEFINITIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY

Difficulty of defining psychology--Definition by substance--Psychology not
the science of the soul--Definition by enumeration: its error--Definition
by method contradicts idea of consciousness--Externospection and
introspection sometimes confused--Definition by content--Facts cannot be
divided into those of consciousness and of unconsciousness--Descartes'
definition of psychology insufficient--"Within and without" simile
unanalogous--Definition by point of view--Inconsistencies of Ebbinghaus'
contention--W. James' teleological theory--Definition by the peculiar
nature of mental laws only one possible: why?


BOOK III

THE UNION OF THE SOUL AND THE BODY


CHAPTER I

THE MIND HAS AN INCOMPLETE LIFE

Problem of union of mind and body stated--Axiom of heterogeneity must
be rejected--Phenomena of consciousness incomplete--Aristotle's
_relatum_ and _correlatum_ applied to the terms mind and matter


CHAPTER II

SPIRITUALISM AND IDEALISM

Spiritualist view that death cuts link between soul and
body--Explanation of link fatal to system--Consciousness cannot
exercise functions without objects of cognition--Idealism a
kaleidoscopic system--Four affirmations of idealism: their
inconsistency--Advantages of historical method


CHAPTER III

MATERIALISM AND PARALLELISM

Materialism oldest doctrine of all: many patristic authors lean
towards it--Modern form of, receives impulse from advance of physical
science--Karl Vogt's comparison of secretions of brain with that of
kidneys--All materialist doctrines opposed to principle of
heterogeneity--Modern materialism would make object generate
consciousness--Materialists cannot demonstrate how molecular
vibrations can be transformed into objects--Parallelism avoids issue
by declaring mind to be function of brain--Parallelists declare
physical and psychical life to be two parallel currents--Bain's
support of this--Objections to: most important that it postulates
consciousness as a complete whole


CHAPTER IV

MODERN THEORIES

Berkeley's idealism revived by Bergson, though with different
standpoint--Admirable nature of Bergson's exposition--Fallacy of, part
assigned to sensory nerves--Conscious sensations must be subsequent to
excitement of sensory nerves and dependent on their integrity


CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

Author's own theory only a hypothesis--Important conditions for
solution of problem--Manifestations of consciousness conditioned by
brain, but this last unconscious--Consciousness perceives only
external object--Specificity of nerves not absolute--Why repeated
excitements of nerve tend to become unconscious--Formation of habit
and "instinct"--Resemblance to and distinction of this from
parallelism--Advantages of new theory


CHAPTER VI

RECAPITULATION

Description of matter--Definition of mind--Objections to,
answered--Incomplete existence of mind--Other theories--Nervous system
must add its own effect to that of its excitant






BOOK I

THE DEFINITION OF MATTER




THE MIND AND THE BRAIN[1]


CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION


This book is a prolonged effort to establish a distinction between
what is called mind and what is called matter. Nothing is more simple
than to realise this distinction when you do not go deeply into it;
nothing is more difficult when you analyse it a little. At first
sight, it seems impossible to confuse things so far apart as a thought
and a block of stone; but on reflection this great contrast vanishes,
and other differences have to be sought which are less apparent and of
which one has not hitherto dreamed.

First let us say how the question presents itself to us. The fact
which we must take as a starting point, for it is independent of
every kind of theory, is that there exists something which is
"knowable." Not only science, but ordinary life and our everyday
conversation, imply that there are things that we know. It is with
regard to these things that we have to ask ourselves if some belong to
what we call the mind and others to what we call matter.

Let us suppose, by way of hypothesis, the knowable to be entirely and
absolutely homogeneous. In that case we should be obliged to set aside
the question as one already decided. Where everything is homogeneous,
there is no distinction to be drawn. But this hypothesis is, as we all
know, falsified by observation. The whole body of the knowable is
formed from an agglomeration of extremely varied elements, amongst
which it is easy to distinguish a large number of divisions. Things
may be classified according to their colour, their shape, their
weight, the pleasure they give us, their quality of being alive or
dead, and so on; one much given to classification would only be
troubled by the number of possible distinctions.

Since so many divisions are possible, at which shall we stop and say:
this is the one which corresponds exactly to the opposition of mind
and matter? The choice is not easy to make; for we shall see that
certain authors put the distinction between the physical and the
mental in one thing, others in another. Thus there have been a very
large number of distinctions proposed, and their number is much
greater than is generally thought. Since we propose to make ourselves
judges of these distinctions, since, in fact, we shall reject most of
them in order to suggest entirely new ones, it must be supposed that
we shall do so by means of a criterion. Otherwise, we should only be
acting fantastically. We should be saying peremptorily, "In my opinion
this is mental," and there would be no more ground for discussion
than, if the assertion were "I prefer the Romanticists to the
Classicists," or "I consider prose superior to poetry."

The criterion which I have employed, and which I did not analyse until
the unconscious use I had made of it revealed its existence to me, is
based on the two following rules:--

1. _A Rule of Method._--The distinction between mind and matter must
not only apply to the whole of the knowable, but must be the deepest
which can divide the knowable, and must further be one of a permanent
character. _A priori_, there is nothing to prove the existence of such
a distinction; it must be sought for and, when found, closely
examined.

2. _An Indication of the Direction in which the Search must be
Made._--Taking into account the position already taken up by the
majority of philosophers, the manifestation of mind, if it exists,
must be looked for in the domain of facts dealt with by psychology,
and the manifestation of matter in the domain explored by physicists.

I do not conceal from myself that there may be much that is arbitrary
in my own criterion; but this does not seem to me possible to avoid.
We must therefore appeal to psychology, and ask whether it is
cognisant of any phenomenon offering a violent, lasting, and
ineffaceable contrast with all the rest of the knowable.

_The Method of Concepts and the Method of Enumeration._--Many authors
are already engaged in this research, and employ a method which I
consider very bad and very dangerous--the method of concepts. This
consists in looking at real and concrete phenomena in their most
abstract form. For example, in studying the mind, they use this word
"mind" as a general idea which is supposed to contain all the
characteristics of psychical phenomena; but they do not wait to
enumerate these characteristics or to realise them, and they remain
satisfied with the extremely vague idea springing from an unanalysed
concept. Consequently they use the word "mind" with the imprudence of
a banker who should discount a trade bill without ascertaining
whether the payment of that particular piece of paper had been
provided for. This amounts to saying that the discussion of
philosophical problems takes especially a verbal aspect; and the more
complex the phenomena a concept thus handled, contains, the more
dangerous it is. A concept of the colour red has but a very simple
content, and by using it, this content can be very clearly
represented. But how can the immense meaning of the word "mind" be
realised every time that it is used? For example, to define mind and
to separate it from the rest of the knowable which is called matter,
the general mode of reasoning is as follows: all the knowable which is
apparent to our senses is essentially reduced to motion; "mind," that
something which lives, feels, and judges, is reduced to "thought." To
understand the difference between matter and mind, it is necessary to
ask one's self whether there exists any analogy in nature between
motion and thought. Now this analogy does not exist, and what we
comprehend, on the contrary, is their absolute opposition. Thought is
not a movement, and has nothing in common with a movement. A movement
is never anything else but a displacement, a transfer, a change of
place undergone by a particle of matter. What relation of similarity
exists between this geometrical fact and a desire, an emotion, a
sensation of bitterness? Far from being identical, these two facts
are as distinct as any facts can be, and their distinction is so deep
that it should be raised to the height of a principle, the principle
of heterogeneity.

This is almost exactly the reasoning that numbers of philosophers have
repeated for several years without giving proof of much originality.
This is what I term the metaphysics of concept, for it is a
speculation which consists in juggling with abstract ideas. The moment
that a philosopher opposes thought to movement, I ask myself under
what form he can think of a "thought," I suppose he must very
poetically and very vaguely represent to himself something light and
subtle which contrasts with the weight and grossness of material
bodies. And thus our philosopher is punished in the sinning part; his
contempt of the earthly has led him into an abuse of abstract
reasoning, and this abuse has made him the dupe of a very naïve
physical metaphor.

At bottom I have not much faith in the nobility of many of our
abstract ideas. In a former psychological study[2] I have shown that
many of our abstractions are nothing else than embryonic, and, above
all, loosely defined concrete ideas, which can satisfy only an
indolent mind, and are, consequently, full of snares.

The opposition between mind and matter appears to me to assume a very
different meaning if, instead of repeating ready-made formulas and
wasting time on the game of setting concept against concept, we take
the trouble to return to the study of nature, and begin by drawing up
an inventory of the respective phenomena of mind and matter, examining
with each of these phenomena the characteristics in which the
first-named differ from the second. It is this last method, more slow
but more sure than the other, that we shall follow; and we will
commence by the study of matter.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: _L'Ame et la Corps._--Disagreeable as it is to alter an
author's title, the words "Soul and Body" had to be abandoned because
of their different connotation in English. The title "Mind and Body"
was also preoccupied by Bain's work of that name in this series. The
title chosen has M. Binet's approval.--ED.]

[Footnote 2: _Étude experímentale de l'Intelligence._ Paris:
Schleicher.]




CHAPTER II

OUR KNOWLEDGE OF EXTERNAL OBJECTS IS ONLY SENSATIONS


Of late years numerous studies have been published on the conception
of matter, especially by physicists, chemists, and mathematicians.
Among these recent contributions to science I will quote the articles
of Duhem on the Evolution of Mechanics published in 1903 in the _Revue
générale des Sciences_, and other articles by the same author, in
1904, in the _Revue de Philosophie_. Duhem's views have attracted much
attention, and have dealt a serious blow at the whole theory of the
mechanics of matter. Let me also quote that excellent work of Dastre,
_La Vie et la Mort_, wherein the author makes so interesting an
application to biology of the new theories on energetics; the
discussion between Ostwald and Brillouin on matter, in which two rival
conceptions find themselves engaged in a veritable hand-to-hand
struggle (_Revue générale des Sciences_, Nov. and Dec. 1895); the
curious work of Dantec on _les Lois Naturelles_, in which the author
ingeniously points out the different sensorial districts into which
science is divided, although, through a defect in logic, he accepts
mechanics as the final explanation of things. And last, it is
impossible to pass over, in silence, the rare works of Lord Kelvin, so
full, for French readers, of unexpected suggestions, for they show us
the entirely practical and empirical value which the English attach to
mechanical models.

My object is not to go through these great studies in detail. It is
the part of mathematical and physical philosophers to develop their
ideas on the inmost nature of matter, while seeking to establish
theories capable of giving a satisfactory explanation of physical
phenomena. This is the point of view they take up by preference, and
no doubt they are right in so doing. The proper rôle of the natural
sciences is to look at phenomena taken by themselves and apart from
the observer.

My own intention, in setting forth these same theories on matter, is
to give prominence to a totally different point of view. Instead of
considering physical phenomena in themselves, we shall seek to know
what idea one ought to form of their nature when one takes into
account that they are observed phenomena. While the physicist
withdraws from consideration the part of the observer in the
verification of physical phenomena, our rôle is to renounce this
abstraction, to re-establish things in their original complexity, and
to ascertain in what the conception of matter consists when it is
borne in mind that all material phenomena are known only in their
relation to ourselves, to our bodies, our nerves, and our
intelligence.

This at once leads us to follow, in the exposition of the facts, an
order which the physicist abandons. Since we seek to know what is the
physical phenomenon we perceive, we must first enunciate this
proposition, which will govern the whole of our discussion: to wit--

_Of the outer world we know nothing except our sensations._

Before demonstrating this proposition, let us develop it by an example
which will at least give us some idea of its import. Let us take as
example one of those investigations in which, with the least possible
recourse to reasoning, the most perfected processes of observation are
employed, and in which one imagines that one is penetrating almost
into the very heart of nature. We are, let us suppose, dissecting an
animal. After killing it, we lay bare its viscera, examine their
colour, form, dimensions, and connections; then we dissect the organs
in order to ascertain their internal nature, their texture, structure,
and function; then, not content with ocular anatomy, we have recourse
to the perfected processes of histology: we take a fragment of the
tissues weighing a few milligrammes, we fix it, we mount it, we make
it into strips of no more than a thousandth of a millimetre thick, we
colour it and place it under the microscope, we examine it with the
most powerful lenses, we sketch it, and we explain it. All this work
of complicated and refined observation, sometimes lasting months and
years, results in a monograph containing minute descriptions of
organs, of cells, and of intra-cellular structures, the whole
represented and defined in words and pictures. Now, these descriptions
and drawings are the display of the various sensations which the
zoologist has experienced in the course of his labours; to those
sensations are added the very numerous interpretations derived from
the memory, reasoning, and often, also, from the imagination on the
part of the scholar, the last a source at once of errors and of
discoveries. But everything properly experimental in the work of the
zoologist proceeds from the sensations he has felt or might have felt,
and in the particular case treated of, these sensations are almost
solely visual.

This observation might be repeated with regard to all objects of the
outer world which enter into relation with us. Whether the knowledge
of them be of the common-place or of a scientific order matters
little. Sensation is its limit, and all objects are known to us by
the sensations they produce in us, and are known to us solely in this
manner. A landscape is nothing but a cluster of sensations. The
outward form of a body is simply sensation; and the innermost and most
delicate material structure, the last visible elements of a cell, for
example, are all, in so far as we observe them with the microscope,
nothing but sensation.

This being understood, the question is, why we have just
admitted--with the majority of authors--that we cannot really know a
single object as it is in itself, and in its own nature, otherwise
than by the intermediary of the sensations it provokes in us? This
comes back to saying that we here require explanations on the two
following points: why do we admit that we do not really perceive the
objects, but only something intermediate between them and us; and why
do we call this something intermediate a sensation? On this second
point I will offer, for the time being, one simple remark: we use the
term sensation for lack of any other to express the intermediate
character of our perception of objects; and this use does not, on our
part, imply any hypothesis. Especially do we leave completely in
suspense the question whether sensation is a material phenomenon or a
state of being of the mind. These are questions we will deal with
later. For the present it must be understood that the word sensation
is simply a term for the something intermediate between the object and
our faculty of cognition.[3] We have, therefore, simply to state why
we have admitted that the external perception of objects is produced
mediately or by procuration.

There are a few philosophers, and those not of the lowest rank, who have
thought that this intermediate character of all perception was so
evident that there was no need to insist further upon it. John Stuart
Mill, who was certainly and perhaps more than anything a careful
logician, commences an exposition of the idealist thesis to which he was
so much attached, by carelessly saying: "It goes without saying that
objects are known to us through the intermediary of our senses.... The
senses are equivalent to our sensations;"[4] and on those propositions
he rears his whole system, "It goes without saying ..." is a trifle
thoughtless. I certainly think he was wrong in not testing more
carefully the solidity of his starting point.

In the first place, this limit set to our knowledge of the objects
which stimulate our sensations is only accepted without difficulty by
well-informed persons; it much astonishes the uninstructed when first
explained to them. And this astonishment, although it may seem so, is
not a point that can be neglected, for it proves that, in the first
and simple state of our knowledge, we believe we directly perceive
objects as they are. Now, if we, the cultured class, have, for the
most part,[5] abandoned this primitive belief, we have only done so on
certain implicit conditions, of which we must take cognisance. This is
what I shall now demonstrate as clearly as I can.

Take the case of an unlearned person. To prove to him that he knows
sensations alone and not the bodies which excite them, a very striking
argument may be employed which requires no subtle reasoning and which
appeals to his observation. This is to inform him, supposing he is not
aware of the fact, that, every time he has the perception of an
exterior object, there is something interposed between the object and
himself, and that that something is his nervous system.

If we were not acquainted with the existence of our nervous system, we
should unhesitatingly admit that our perception of objects consisted
in some sort of motion towards the places in which they were fixed.
Now, a number of experiments prove to us that objects are known to us
as excitants of our nervous system which only act on this system by
entering into communication, or coming into contact with, its terminal
extremities. They then produce, in the interior of this system, a
peculiar modification which we are not yet able to define. It is this
modification which follows the course of the nerves and is carried to
the central parts of the system. The speed of the propagation of this
nerve modification has been measured by certain precise experiments in
psychometry; the journey is made slowly, at the rate of 20 to 30
metres per second, and it is of interest that this rate of speed lets
us know at what moment and, consequently, by what organic excitement,
the phenomenon of consciousness is produced. This happens when the
cerebral centres are affected; the phenomenon of consciousness is
therefore posterior to the fact of the physical excitement.

I believe it has required a long series of accepted observations for
us to have arrived at this idea, now so natural in appearance, that
the modifications produced within our nervous system are the only
states of which we can have a direct consciousness; and as
experimental demonstration is always limited, there can be no absolute
certainty that things never happen otherwise, that we never go outside
ourselves, and that neither our consciousness nor our nervous influx
can exteriorise itself, shoot beyond our material organs, and travel
afar in pursuit of objects in order to know or to modify them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Before going further, we must make our terminology more precise. We
have just seen the necessity of drawing a distinction between the
sensations of which we are conscious and the unknown cause which
produces these sensations by acting on our nervous systems. This
exciting cause I have several times termed, in order to be understood,
the external object. But under the name of external object are
currently designated groups of sensations, such as those which make up
for us a chair, a tree, an animal, or any kind of body. I see a dog
pass in the street. I call this dog an external object; but, as this
dog is formed, for me who am looking at it, of my sensations, and as
these sensations are states of my nervous centres, it happens that the
term external object has two meanings. Sometimes it designates our
sensations; at another, the exciting cause of our sensations. To avoid
all confusion we will call this exciting cause, which is unknown to
us, the _X_ of matter.

It is, however, not entirely unknown, for we at least know two facts
with regard to it. We know, first, that this _X_ exists, and in the
second place, that its image must not be sought in the sensations it
excites in us. How can we doubt, we say, that it exists? The same
external observation proves to us at once that there exists an object
distinct from our nerves, and that our nerves separate us from it. I
insist on this point, for the reason that some authors, after having
unreservedly admitted that our knowledge is confined to sensations,
have subsequently been hard put to it to demonstrate the reality of
the excitant distinct from the sensations.[6] Of this we need no
demonstration, and the testimony of our senses suffices. We have seen
the excitant, and it is like a friend who should pass before us in
disguise so well costumed and made up that we can attribute to his
real self nothing of what we see of him, but yet we know that it is
he.

And, in fact, let us remember what it is that we have argued
upon--viz. on an observation. I look at my hand, and I see an object
approaching it which gives me a sensation of feeling. I at first say
that this object is an excitant. It is pointed out to me that I am in
error. This object, which appears to me outside my nervous system, is
composed, I am told, of sensations. Be it so, I have the right to
answer; but if all that I perceive is sensation, my nervous system
itself is a sensation; if it is only that, it is no longer an
intermediary between the excitant and myself, and it is the fact that
we perceive things as they are. For it to be possible to prove that I
perceive, not the object, but that _tertium quid_ which is sensation,
it has to be admitted that the nervous system is a reality external to
sensation and that objects which assume, in relation to it, the rôle
of excitants and of which we perceive the existence, are likewise
realities external to sensation.

This is what is demonstrated by abstract reasoning, and this reasoning
is further supported by a common-sense argument. The outer world
cannot be summarised in a few nervous systems suspended like spiders
in empty space. The existence of a nervous system implies that of a
body in which it is lodged. This body must have complicated organs;
its limbs presuppose the soil on which the animal rests, its lungs the
existence of oxygen vivifying its blood, its digestive tube, aliments
which it digests and assimilates to its substance, and so on. We may
indeed admit that this outer world is not, in itself, exactly as we
perceive it; but we are compelled to recognise that it exists by the
same right as the nervous system, in order to put it in its proper
place.

The second fact of observation is that the sensations we feel do not
give us the true image of the material _X_ which produces them. The
modification made in our substance by this force _X_ does not
necessarily resemble in its nature the nature of that force. This is
an assertion opposed to our natural opinions, and must consequently be
demonstrated. It is generally proved by the experiments which reveal
what is called "the law of the specific energy of the nerves." This is
an important law in physiology discovered by Müller two centuries ago,
and consequences of a philosophical order are attached to it. The
facts on which this law is based are these. It is observed that, if
the sensory nerves are agitated by an excitant which remains constant,
the sensations received by the patient differ according to the nerve
affected. Thus, the terminals of an electric current applied to the
ball of the eye give the sensation of a small luminous spark; to the
auditory apparatus, the current causes a crackling sound; to the hand,
the sensation of a shock; to the tongue, a metallic flavour.
Conversely, excitants wholly different, but affecting the same nerve,
give similar sensations; whether a ray of light is projected into the
eye, or the eyeball be excited by the pressure of a finger; whether an
electric current is directed into the eye, or, by a surgical
operation, the optic nerve is severed by a bistoury, the effect is
always the same, in the sense that the patient always receives a
sensation of light. To sum up, in addition to the natural excitant of
our sensory nerves, there are two which can produce the same sensory
effects, that is to say, the mechanical and the electrical excitants.
Whence it has been concluded that the peculiar nature of the sensation
felt depends much less on the nature of the excitant producing it than
on that of the sensory organ which collects it, the nerve which
propagates it, or the centre which receives it. It would perhaps be
going a little too far to affirm that the external object has no kind
of resemblance to the sensations it gives us. It is safer to say that
we are ignorant of the degree in which the two resemble or differ from
each other.

On thinking it over, it will be found that this contains a very great
mystery, for this power of distinction (_specificité_) of our nerves
is not connected with any detail observable in their structure. It is
very probably the receiving centres which are specific. It is owing to
them and to their mechanism that we ought to feel, from the same
excitant, a sensation of sound or one of colour, that is to say,
impressions which appear, when compared, as the most different in the
world. Now, so far as we can make out, the histological structure of
our auditory centre is the same as that of our visual centre. Both are
a collection of cells diverse in form, multipolar, and maintained by
a conjunctive pellicule (_stroma_). The structure of the fibres and
cells varies slightly in the motor and sensory regions, but no means
have yet been discovered of perceiving a settled difference between
the nerve-cells of the optic centre and those of the auditory centre.
There should be a difference, as our mind demands it; but our eye
fails to note it.

Let us suppose, however, that to-morrow, or several centuries hence,
an improved _technique_ should show us a material difference between
the visual and the auditory neurone. There is no absurdity in this
supposition; it is a possible discovery, since it is of the order of
material facts. Such a discovery, however, would lead us very far, for
what terribly complicates this problem is that we cannot directly know
the structure of our nervous system. Though close to us, though, so to
speak, inside us, it is not known to us otherwise than is the object
we hold in our hands, the ground we tread, or the landscape which
forms our horizon.

For us it is but a sensation, a real sensation when we observe it in
the dissection of an animal, or the autopsy of one of our own kind; an
imaginary and transposed sensation, when we are studying anatomy by
means of an anatomical chart; but still a sensation. It is by the
intermediary of our nervous system that we have to perceive and
imagine what a nervous system is like; consequently we are ignorant as
to the modification impressed on our perceptions and imaginations by
this intermediary, the nature of which we are unable to grasp.

Therefore, when we attempt to understand the inmost nature of the
outer world, we stand before it as before absolute darkness. There
probably exists in nature, outside of ourselves, neither colour,
odour, force, resistance, space, nor anything that we know as
sensation. Light is produced by the excitement of the optic nerve, and
it shines only in our brain; as to the excitement itself, there is
nothing to prove that it is luminous; outside of us is profound
darkness, or even worse, since darkness is the correlation of light.
In the same way, all the sonorous excitements which assail us, the
creakings of machines, the sounds of nature, the words and cries of
our fellows are produced by excitements of our acoustic nerve; it is
in our brain that noise is produced, outside there reigns a dead
silence. The same may be said of all our other senses.

Not one of our senses, absolutely none, is the revealer of external
reality. From this point of view there is no higher and no lower
sense. The sensations of sight, apparently so objective and so
searching, no more take us out of ourselves than do the sensations of
taste which are localised in the tongue.

In short, our nervous system, which enables us to communicate with
objects, prevents us, on the other hand, from knowing their nature. It
is an organ of relation with the outer world; it is also, for us, a
cause of isolation. We never go outside ourselves. We are walled in.
And all we can say of matter and of the outer world is, that it is
revealed to us solely by the sensations it affords us, that it is the
unknown cause of our sensations, the inaccessible excitant of our
organs of the senses, and that the ideas we are able to form as to the
nature and the properties of that excitant, are necessarily derived
from our sensations, and are subjective to the same degree as those
sensations themselves.

But we must make haste to add that this point of view is the one which
is reached when we regard the relations of sensation with its unknown
cause the great _X_ of matter.[7] Positive science and practical life
do not take for an objective this relation of sensation with the
Unknowable; they leave this to metaphysics. They distribute themselves
over the study of sensation and examine the reciprocal relations of
sensations with sensations. Those last, condemned as misleading
appearances when we seek in them the expression of the Unknowable,
lose this illusory character when we consider them in their reciprocal
relations. Then they constitute for us reality, the whole of reality
and the only object of human knowledge. The world is but an assembly
of present, past, and possible sensations; the affair of science is to
analyse and co-ordinate them by separating their accidental from their
constant relations.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: _Connaissance._--The word cognition is used throughout as
the English equivalent of this, except in places where the context
shows that it means acquaintance merely.--ED.]

[Footnote 4: J. S. MILL, _An Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's
Philosophy_, pp. 5 and 6. London. 1865.]

[Footnote 5: A few subtle philosophers have returned to it, as I shall
show later in chapter iv.]

[Footnote 6: Thus, the perplexity in which John Stuart Mill finds
himself is very curious. Having admitted unreservedly that our
knowledge is confined to sensations, he is powerless to set up a
reality outside this, and acknowledges that the principle of causality
cannot legitimately be used to prove that our sensations have a cause
which is not a sensation, because this principle cannot be applied
outside the world of phenomena.]

[Footnote 7: See p. 18, _sup_.--ED.]




CHAPTER III

THE MECHANICAL THEORIES OF MATTER ARE ONLY SYMBOLS


If we keep firmly in mind the preceding conclusion--a conclusion which
is neither exclusively my own, nor very new--we shall find a certain
satisfaction in watching the discussions of physicists on the essence
of matter, on the nature of force and of energy, and on the relations
of ponderable and imponderable matter. We all know how hot is the
fight raging on this question. At the present time it is increasing in
intensity, in consequence of the disturbance imported into existing
theories by the new discoveries of radio-activity.[8] We psychologists
can look on very calmly at these discussions, with that selfish
pleasure we unavowedly feel when we see people fighting while
ourselves safe from knocks. We have, in fact, the feeling that, come
what may from the discussions on the essence of matter, there can be
no going beyond the truth that matter is an excitant of our nervous
system, and is only known in connection with, the perception we have
of this last.

If we open a work on physics or physiology we shall note with
astonishment how the above considerations are misunderstood. Observers
of nature who seek, and rightly, to give the maximum of exactness to
their observations, show that they are obsessed by one constant
prejudice: they mistrust sensation.

A great part of their efforts consists, by what they say, in reducing
the rôle of sensation to its fitting part in science; and the
invention of mechanical aids to observation is constantly held up as a
means of remedying the imperfection of our senses. In physics the
thermometer replaces the sensation of heat that our skin--our hand,
for example--experiences by the measurable elevation of a column of
mercury, and the scale-pan of a precise balance takes the place of the
vague sensation of trifling weights; in physiology a registering
apparatus replaces the sensation of the pulse which the doctor feels
with the end of his forefinger by a line on paper traced with
indelible ink, of which the duration and the intensity, as well as the
varied combinations of these two elements, can be measured line by
line.

Learned men who pride themselves on their philosophical attainments
vaunt in very eloquent words the superiority of the physical
instrument over mere sensation. Evidently, however, the earnestness of
this eulogy leads them astray. The most perfect registering apparatus
must, in the long-run, after its most scientific operations, address
itself to our senses and produce in us some small sensation. The
reading of the height reached by the column of mercury in a
thermometer when heated is accomplished by a visual sensation, and it
is by the sight that the movements of the balance are controlled; and
that the traces of the sphygmograph are analysed. We may readily admit
to physicists and physiologists all the advantages of these apparatus.
This is not the question. It simply proves that there are sensations
and sensations, and that certain of these are better and more precise
than others. The visual sensation of relation in space seems to be
_par excellence_ the scientific sensation which it is sought to
substitute for all the rest. But, after all, it is but a sensation.

Let us recognise that there is, in all this contempt on the part of
physicists for sensation, only differences in language, and that a
paraphrase would suffice to correct them without leaving any trace. Be
it so. But something graver remains. When one is convinced that our
knowledge of the outer world is limited to sensations, we can no
longer understand how it is possible to give oneself up, as physicists
do, to speculations upon the constitution of matter.

Up to the present there have been three principal ways of explaining
the physical phenomena of the universe. The first, the most abstract,
and the furthest from reality, is above all verbal. It consists in the
use of formulas in which the quality of the phenomena is replaced by
their magnitude, in which this magnitude, ascertained by the most
precise processes of measurement, becomes the object of abstract
reasoning which allows its modifications to be foreseen under given
experimental conditions. This is pure mathematics, a formal science
depending upon logic. Another conception, less restricted than the
above, and of fairly recent date, consists in treating all
manifestations of nature as forms of energy. This term "energy" has a
very vague content. At the most it expresses but two things: first, it
is based on a faint recollection of muscular force, and it reminds one
dimly of the sensation experienced when clenching the fists; and,
secondly, it betrays a kind of very natural respect for the forces of
nature which, in all the images man has made of them, constantly
appear superior to his own. We may say "the energy of nature;" but we
should never say, what would be experimentally correct; "the weakness
of nature." The word "weakness" we reserve for ourselves. Apart from
these undecided suggestions, the term energy is quite the proper term
to designate phenomena, the intimate nature of which we do not seek to
penetrate, but of which we only wish to ascertain the laws and measure
the degrees.

A third conception, more imaginative and bolder than the others, is
the mechanical or kinetic theory. This last absolutely desires that we
should represent to ourselves, that we should imagine, how phenomena
really take place; and in seeking for the property of nature the most
clearly perceived, the easiest to define and analyse, and the most apt
to lend itself to measurement and calculation, it has chosen motion.
Consequently all the properties of matter have been reduced to this
one, and in spite of the apparent contradiction of our senses, it has
been supposed that the most varied phenomena are produced, in the last
resort, by the displacement of material particles. Thus, sound, light,
heat, electricity, and even the nervous influx would be due to
vibratory movements, varying only by their direction and their
periods, and all nature is thus explained as a problem of animated
geometry. This last theory, which has proved very fertile in
explanations of the most delicate phenomena of sound and light, has so
strongly impressed many minds that it has led them to declare that
the explanation of phenomena by the laws of mechanics alone has the
character of a scientific explanation. Even recently, it seemed heresy
to combat these ideas.

Still more recently, however, a revulsion of opinion has taken place.
Against the physicists, the mathematicians in particular have risen
up, and taking their stand on science, have demonstrated that all the
mechanisms invented have crowds of defects. First, in each particular
case, there is such a complication that that which is defined is much
more simple than the definition; then there is such a want of unity
that quite special mechanisms adapted to each phenomenal detail have
to be imagined; and, lastly--most serious argument of all--so much
comprehensiveness and suppleness is employed, that no experimental law
is found which cannot be understood mechanically, and no fact of
observation which shows an error in the mechanical explanation--a sure
proof that this mode of explanation has no meaning.

My way of combating the mechanical theory starts from a totally
different point of view. Psychology has every right to say a few words
here, as upon the value of every kind of scientific theory; for it is
acquainted with the nature of the mental needs of which these theories
are the expression and which these theories seek to satisfy. It has
not yet been sufficiently noticed that psychology does not allow
itself to be confined, like physics or sociology, within the logical
table of human knowledge, for it has, by a unique privilege, a right
of supervision over the other sciences. We shall see that the
psychological discussion of mechanics has a wider range than that of
the mathematicians.

Since our cognition cannot go beyond sensation, shall we first recall
what meaning can be given to an explanation of the inmost nature of
matter? It can only be an artifice, a symbol, or a process convenient
for classification in order to combine the very different qualities of
things in one unifying synthesis--a process having nearly the same
theoretical value as a _memoria technica_, which, by substituting
letters for figures, helps us to retain the latter in our minds. This
does not mean that figures are, in fact, letters, but it is a
conventional substitution which has a practical advantage. What
_memoria technica_ is to the ordinary memory, the theory of mechanics
should be for our needed unification.

Unfortunately, this is not so. The excuse we are trying to make for
the mechanicians is illusory. There is no mistaking their ambition,
Notwithstanding the prudence of some and the equivocations in which
others have rejoiced, they have drawn their definition in the absolute
and not in the relative. To take their conceptions literally, they
have thought the movement of matter to be something existing outside
our eye, our hands, and our sense; in a word, something _noumenal_, as
Kant would have said. The proof that this is their real idea, is that
movement is presented to us as the true outer and explanatory cause of
our sensations, the external excitement to our nerves. The most
elementary works on physics are impregnated with this disconcerting
conception. If we open a description of acoustics, we read that sound
and noise are subjective states which have no reality outside our
auditory apparatus; that they are sensations produced by an external
cause, which is the vibratory movement of sonorous bodies--whence the
conclusion that this vibratory movement is not itself a sensation. Or,
shall we take another proof, still more convincing. This is the
vibratory and silent movement which is invoked by physicists to
explain the peculiarities of subjective sensation; so that the
interferences, the pulsations of sound, and, in fine, the whole
physiology of the ear, is treated as a problem in kinematics, and is
explained by the composition of movements.

What kind of reality do physicists then allow to the displacements of
matter? Where do they place them, since they recognise otherwise that
the essence of matter is unknown to us? Are we to suppose that,
outside the world of _noumena_, outside the world of phenomena and
sensations, there exists a third world, an intermediary between the
two former, the world of atoms and that of mechanics?

A short examination will, moreover, suffice to show of what this
mechanical model is formed which is presented to us as constituting
the essence of matter. This can be nothing else than the sensations,
since we are incapable of perceiving or imagining anything else. It is
the sensations of sight, of touch, and even of the muscular sense.
Motion is a fact seen by the eye, felt by the hand; it enters into us
by the perception we have of the solid masses visible to the naked eye
which exist in our field of observation, of their movements and their
equilibrium and the displacement we ourselves effect with our bodies.
Here is the sensory origin, very humble and very gross, of all the
mechanics of the atoms. Here is the stuff of which our lofty
conception is formed. Our mind can, it is true, by a work of
purification, strip movement of most of its concrete qualities,
separate it even from the perception of the object in motion, and make
of it a something or other ideal and diagrammatic; but there will
still remain a residuum of visual, tactile, and muscular sensations,
and consequently it is still nothing else than a subjective state,
bound to the structure of our organs. We are, for the rest, so
wrapped up in sensations that none of our boldest conceptions can
break through the circle.

But it is not the notion of movement alone which proceeds from
sensation. There is also that of exteriority, of space, of position,
and, by opposition, that of external or psychological events. Without
declaring it to be certain, I will remind you that it is infinitely
probable that these notions are derived from our muscular experience.
Free motion, arrested motion, the effort, the speed, and the direction
of motion, such are the sensorial elements, which, in all probability,
constitute the foundation of our ideas on space and its properties.
And those are so many subjective notions which we have no right to
treat as objects belonging to the outer world.

What is more remarkable, also, is that even the ideas of object, of
body, and of matter, are derived from visual and tactile sensations
which have been illegitimately set up as entities. We have come, in
fact, to consider matter as a being separate from sensations, superior
to our sensations, distinct from the properties which enable us to
know it, and binding together these properties, as it were, in a
sheaf. Here again is a conception at the base of visualisation and
muscularisation; it consists in referring to the visual and other
sensations, raised for the occasion to the dignity of external and
permanent causes, the other sensations which are considered as the
effects of the first named upon our organs of sense.

It demands a great effort to clear our minds of these familiar
conceptions which, it is plain are nothing but naïve realism. Yes! the
mechanical conception of the universe is nothing but naïve realism.

To recapitulate our idea, and, to make it more plain by an
illustration, here is a tuning-fork on the table before me. With a
vigorous stroke of the bow I set it vibrating. The two prongs
separate, oscillate rapidly, and a sound of a certain tone is heard. I
connect this tuning-fork, by means of electric wires, with a Déprez
recording apparatus which records the vibrations on the blackened
surface of a revolving cylinder; and we can thus, by an examination of
the trace made under our eyes, ascertain all the details of the
movement which animates it. We see, parallel to each other, two
different orders of phenomena; the visual phenomena which show us that
the tuning-fork is vibrating, and the auditory phenomena which convey
to us the fact that it is making a sound.

The physicist, asked for an explanation of all this, will answer: "It
is the vibration of the tuning-fork which, transmitted by the air, is
carried to our auditory apparatus, causes a vibration in the
tympanum, the movements of which are communicated to the small bones
of the middle ear, thence (abridging details) to the terminations of
the auditory nerve, and so produces in us the subjective sensation of
sound." Well, in so saying, the physicist commits an error of
interpretation; outside our ears there exists something we do not know
which excites them; this something cannot be the vibratory movement of
the tuning-fork, for this vibratory movement which we can see is
likewise a subjective sensation; it no more exists outside our sight
than sound exists outside our ears. In any case, it is as absurd to
explain a sensation of sound by one of sight, as a sensation of sight
by one of sound.

One would be neither further from nor nearer to the truth if we
answered that physicist as follows: "You give the preponderance to
your eye; I myself give it to my ear. This tuning-fork appears to you
to vibrate. Wrong! This is how the thing occurs. This tuning-fork
produces a sound which, by exciting our retina, gives us a sense of
movement. This visual sensation of vibration is a purely subjective
one, the external cause of the phenomenon is the sound. The outer
world is a concert of sounds which rises in the immensity of space.
Matter is noise and nothingness is silence."

This theory of the above experiment is not absurd; but, as a matter
of fact, it is probable that no one would or could accept it, except
verbally for amusement, as a challenge, or for the pleasure of talking
metaphysics. The reason is that all our evolution, for causes which
would take too long to detail, has established the hegemony of certain
of our senses over the others. We have, above all, become visual and
manual beings. It is the eye and the hand which give us the
perceptions of the outer world of which we almost exclusively make use
in our sciences; and we are now almost incapable of representing to
ourselves the foundation of phenomena otherwise than by means of these
organs. Thus all the preceding experiment from the stroke of the bow
to the final noise presents itself to us in visual terms, and further,
these terms are not confined to a series of detached sensations.

Visual sensation combines with the tactile and muscular sensations,
and forms sensorial constructions which succeed each, other, continue,
and arrange themselves logically: in lieu of sensations, there are
objects and relations of space between these objects, and the actions
which connect them, and the phenomena which pass from one to the
other. All that is only sensation, if you will; but merely as the
agglutinated molecules of cement and of stone are a palace.

Thus the whole series of visual events which compose our experiment
with the tuning-fork can be coherently explained. One understands that
It is the movement of my hand equipped with the bow which is
communicated to the tuning-fork. One understands that this movement
passing into the fork has changed its form and rhythm, that the waves
produced by the fork transmit themselves, by the oscillations of the
air-molecules, to our tympanum, and so on. There is in all this series
of experiments an admirable continuity which fully satisfies our
minds. However much we might be convinced by the theoretical reasons
given above, that we have quite as much right to represent the same
series of events in an auditory form, we should be incapable of
realising that form to ourselves.

What would be the structure of the ear to any one who only knew it
through the sense of hearing? What would become of the tympanum, the
small bones, the cochlea, and the terminations of the acoustic nerve,
if it were only permitted to represent them in the language of sound?
It is very difficult to imagine.

Since, however, we are theorising, let us not be stopped by a few
difficulties of comprehension. Perhaps a little training might enable
us to overcome them. Perhaps musicians, who discern as much reality in
what one hears as in what one sees, would be more apt than other folk
to understand the necessary transposition. Some of them, in their
autobiographies, have made, by the way, very suggestive remarks on the
importance they attribute to sound: and, moreover, the musical world,
with its notes, its intervals, and its orchestration, lives and
develops in a manner totally independent of vibration.

Perhaps we can here quote one or two examples which may give us a
lead. To measure the length of a body instead of applying to it a
yard-wand, one might listen to its sound; for the pitch of the sound
given by two cords allows us to deduce their difference of length, and
even the absolute length of each. The chemical composition of a body
might be noted by its electric resistance and the latter verified by
the telephone; that is to say, by the ear. Or, to take a more subtle
example. We might make calculations with sounds of which we have
studied the harmonic relations as we do nowadays with figures. A sum
in rule of three might even be solved sonorously; for, given three
sounds, the ear can find a fourth which should have the same relation
to the third as the second to the first. Every musical ear performs
this operation easily; now, this fourth sound, what else is it but the
fourth term in a rule of three? And by taking into consideration the
number of its vibrations a numerical solution would be found to the
problem. This novel form of calculating machine might serve to fix
the price of woollen stuffs, to calculate brokerages and percentages,
and the solution would be obtained without the aid of figures, without
calculation, without visualisation, and by the ear alone.

By following up this idea, also, we might go a little further. We
might arrive at the conviction that our present science is human,
petty, and contingent; that it is closely linked with the structure of
our sensory organs; that this structure results from the evolution
which fashioned these organs; that this evolution has been an accident
of history; that in the future it may be different; and that,
consequently, by the side or in the stead of our modern science, the
work of our eyes and hands--and also of our words--there might have
been constituted, there may still be constituted, sciences entirely
and extraordinarily new--auditory, olfactory, and gustatory sciences,
and even others derived from other kinds of sensations which we can
neither foresee nor conceive because they are not, for the moment,
differentiated in us. Outside the matter we know, a very special
matter fashioned of vision and touch, there may exist other matter
with totally different properties.

But let us bring our dream to an end. The interest of our discussion
does not lie in the hypothetical substitution of hearing or any other
sense for sight. It lies in the complete suppression of all
explanation of the noumenal object in terms borrowed from the language
of sensation. And that is our last word. We must, by setting aside the
mechanical theory, free ourselves from a too narrow conception of the
constitution of matter. And this liberation will be to us a great
advantage which we shall soon reap. We shall avoid the error of
believing that mechanics is the only real thing and that all that
cannot be explained by mechanics must be incomprehensible. We shall
then gain more liberty of mind for understanding what the union of the
soul with the body[9] may be.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: I would draw attention to a recent volume by GUSTAVE LE
BON, on _Evolution de la Matière_, a work full of original and bold
ideas.]

[Footnote 9: See [Note 1] on p. 3.--ED.]




CHAPTER IV

ANSWERS TO SOME OBJECTIONS, AND SUMMARY


I have set forth the foregoing ideas by taking the road which to me
seemed the best. On reflection it has occurred to me that my manner of
exposition and demonstration may be criticised much more than my
conclusion. Now, as it is the conclusion alone which here is of
importance, it is expedient not to make it responsible for the
arguments by which I have supported it.

These arguments resolve themselves into the attestation that between
objects and our consciousness there exists an intermediary, our
nervous system. We have even established that the existence of this
intermediary is directly proved by observation, and from this I have
concluded that we do not directly perceive the object itself but a
_tertium quid_, which is our sensations.

Several objections to this might be made. Let us enumerate them.

1. It is not inconceivable that objects may act directly on our
consciousness without taking the intermediary of our nervous system.
Some authors, the spiritualists notably, believe in the possibility
of disembodied souls, and they admit by implication that these souls
remain in communication with the terrestrial world, witness our
actions, and hear our speech. Since they no longer have organs of
sense, we must suppose that these wandering souls, if they exist, can
directly perceive material objects. It is evident that such hypotheses
have, up till now, nothing scientific in them, and that the
demonstrations of them which are given raise a feeling of scepticism
more than anything else. Nevertheless, we have not the right to
exclude, by _a priori_ argument, the possibility of this category of
phenomena.

2. Several German authors have maintained in recent years, that if the
nervous system intervenes in the perception of external objects, it is
a faithful intermediary which should not work any change on those
physical actions which it gathers from outside to transmit to our
consciousness. From this, point of view colour would exist as colour,
outside our eyes, sound would exist as sound, and in a general way
there would not be, in matter, any mysterious property left, since we
should perceive matter as it is. This is a very unexpected
interpretation, by which men of science have come to acknowledge the
correctness of the common belief: they rehabilitate an opinion which
philosophers have till now turned to ridicule, under the name of
naïve realism. All which proves that the naïveté of some may be the
excessive refinement of others.

To establish scientifically this opinion they batter down the theory
of the specific energy of the nerves. I have recalled in a previous
page[10] of what this theory consists. I have shown that if, by
mechanical or electrical means, our different sensory nerves are
excited, notwithstanding the identity of the excitant, a different
sensation is provoked in each case--light when the optic nerve is
stimulated, sound when the acoustic, and so on. It is now answered to
this argument based on fact that the nature of these excitants must be
complex. It is not impossible, it is thought, that the electric force
contains within itself both luminous and sonorous actions; it is not
impossible that a mechanical excitement should change the electric
state of the nerve affected, and that, consequently, these subsidiary
effects explain how one and the same agent may, according to the
nerves employed, produce different effects.

3. After the spiritualists and the experimentalists, let us take the
metaphysicians. Among them one has always met with the most varying
specimens of opinions and with arguments for and against all possible
theories.

Thus it is, for example, with the external perception. Some have
supposed it indirect, others, on the contrary, that it acts directly
on the object. Those who uphold the direct theory are inspired by
Berkeley, who asserts that the sensitive qualities of the body have no
existence but in our own minds, and consist really in representative
ideas. This doctrine is expressly based on this argument--that thought
differs too much in nature from matter for one to be able to suppose
any link between these two substances. In this particular, some
authors often make an assertion without endeavouring to prove it. They
are satisfied with attesting, or even with supposing, that mind can
have no consciousness of anything but its own states. Other
philosophers, as I have said, maintain that "things which have a real
existence are the very things we perceive." It is Thomas Reid who has
upheld, in some passages of his writings at all events, the theory of
instantaneous perception, or intuition. It has also been defended by
Hamilton in a more explicit manner.[11] It has been taken up again in
recent years, by a profound and subtle philosopher, M. Bergson, who,
unable to admit that the nervous system is a _substratum of knowledge_
and serves us as a percipient, takes it to be solely a motor organ,
and urges that the sensory parts of the system--that is to say, the
centripetal, optic, acoustic, &c, nerves--do not call forth, when
excited, any kind of sensation, their sole purpose being to convey
disturbances from periphery to periphery, or, say, from external
objects to the muscles of the body. This hypothesis, surely a little
difficult to comprehend, places, if I mistake not, the mind, as a
power of perception and representation, within the interval comprised
between the external object and the body, so that the mind is in
direct contact with external objects and knows them as they are.

It will be noticed that these three interpretations, the
spiritualistic, the experimental, and the metaphysical, are in formal
opposition with that which I have set forth earlier in these pages.
They deny the supposition that the nervous system serves us as an
intermediary with nature, and that it transforms nature before
bringing it to our consciousness. And it might seem that by
contradicting my fundamental proposition, those three new hypotheses
must lead to a totally different conclusion.

Now, this is not so at all. The conclusion I have enunciated remains
entirely sound, notwithstanding this change in the starting point, and
for the following reason. It is easy to see that we cannot represent
to ourselves the inner structure of matter by using all our sensations
without distinction, because it is impossible to bring all these
sensations within one single and identical synthetic construction: for
this they are too dissimilar. Thus, we should try in vain to unite in
any kind of scheme a movement of molecules and an odour; these
elements are so heterogeneous that there is no way of joining them
together and combining them.

The physicists have more or less consciously perceived this, and, not
being able to overcome by a frontal attack the difficulty created by
the heterogeneity of our sensations, they have turned its flank. The
ingenious artifice they have devised consists in retaining only some
of these sensations, and in rejecting the remainder; the first being
considered as really representing the essence of matter, and the
latter as the effects of the former on our organs of sense; the first
being reputed to be true, we may say, and the second being reputed
false--that is subjective, that is not representing the _X_ of
matter.[12] I have refuted this argument by showing that all our
sensations without exception are subjective and equally false in
regard to the _X_ of matter, and that no one of them, consequently,
has any claim to explain the others.

Now, by a new interpretation; we are taught that all sensations are
equally true, and that all faithfully represent the great _X._ If they
be all equally true, it is absolutely the same as if they were all
false; no one sensation can have any privilege over the others, none
can be truer than the others, none can be capable of explaining the
others, none can usurp to itself the sole right of representing the
essence of matter; and we thus find ourselves, in this case, as in the
preceding, in presence of the insurmountable difficulty of creating a
synthesis with heterogeneous elements.

All that has been said above is summed up in the following points:--

1. Of the external world, we only know our sensations. All the
physical properties of matter resolve themselves for us into
sensations, present, past, or possible. We may not say that it is by
the intermediary, by the means of sensation, that we know these
properties, for that would mean that the properties are distinct from
the sensations. Objects are to us in reality only aggregates of
sensations.

2. The sensations belong to the different organs of the senses--sight,
hearing, touch, the muscular sense, &c. Whatever be the sense
affected, one sensation has the same rights as the others, from the
point of view of the cognition of external objects. It is impossible
to distinguish them into subjective and objective, by giving to this
distinction the meaning that certain sensations represent objects as
they are, while certain others simply represent our manner of feeling.
This is an illegitimate distinction, since all sensations have the
same physiological condition, the excitement of a sensory nerve, and
result from the properties of this nerve when stimulated.

3. Consequently, it is impossible for us to form a conception of
matter in terms of movement, and to explain by the modalities of
movement the properties of bodies; for this theory amounts to giving
to certain sensations, especially those of the muscular sense, the
hegemony over the others. We cannot explain, we have not the right to
explain, one sensation by another, and the mechanical theory of matter
has simply the value of a symbol.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 10: See p. 22, _sup._--ED.]

[Footnote 11: See J. S. MILL'S _Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's
Philosophy_, chap. x. p. 176, _et. seq._]

[Footnote 12: See p. 18, _sup._--ED.]




BOOK II

THE DEFINITION OF MIND




CHAPTER I

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN COGNITION[13] AND ITS OBJECT


After having thus studied matter and reduced it to sensations, we
shall apply the same method of analysis to mind, and inquire whether
mind possesses any characteristic which allows it to be distinguished
from matter.

Before going any further, let me clear up an ambiguity. All the first
part of this work has been devoted to the study of what is known to us
in and by sensation; and I have taken upon myself, without advancing
any kind of justifying reason, to call that which is known to us, by
this method, by the name of matter, thus losing sight of the fact that
matter only exists by contra-distinction and opposition to mind, and
that if mind did not exist, neither would matter. I have thus appeared
to prejudge the question to be resolved.

The whole of this terminology must now be considered as having simply
a conventional value, and must be set aside for the present. These
are the precise terms in which this question presents itself to my
mind. A part of the knowable consists in sensations. We must,
therefore, without troubling to style this aggregate of sensations
_matter_ rather than _mind_, make an analysis of the phenomena known
by the name of mind, and see whether they differ from the preceding
ones. Let us, therefore, make an inventory of mind. By the process of
enumeration, we find quoted as psychological phenomena, the
sensations, the perceptions, the ideas, the recollections, the
reasonings, the emotions, the desires, the imaginations, and the acts
of attention and of will. These appear to be, at the first glance, the
elements of mind; but, on reflection, one perceives that these
elements belong to two distinct categories, of which it is easy to
recognise the duality, although, in fact and in reality, these two
elements are constantly combined. The first of these elements may
receive the generic name of objects of cognition, or objects known,
and the second that of acts of cognition.

Here are a few examples of concrete facts, which only require a rapid
analysis to make their double nature plain. In a sensation which we
feel are two things: a particular state, or an object which one knows,
and the act of knowing it, of feeling it, of taking cognisance of it;
in other words, every sensation comprises an impression and a
cognition. In a recollection there is, in like manner, a certain image
of the past and the fact consisting in the taking cognisance of this
image. It is, in other terms, the distinction between the intelligence
and the object. Similarly, all reasoning has an object; there must be
matter on which to reason, whether this matter be supplied by the
facts or the ideas. Again, a desire, a volition, an act of reflection,
has need of a point of application. One does not will in the air, one
wills something; one does not reflect in the void, one reflects over a
fact or over some difficulty.

We may then provisionally distinguish in an inventory of the mind a
something which is perceived, understood, desired, or willed, and,
beyond that, the fact of perceiving, of understanding, or desiring, or
of willing.

To illustrate this distinction by an example, I shall say that an
analogous separation can be effected in an act of vision, by showing
that the act of vision, which is a concrete operation, comprises two
distinct elements: the object seen and the eye which sees. But this
is, of course, only a rough comparison, of which we shall soon see the
imperfections when we are further advanced in the study of the
question.

To this activity which exists and manifests itself in the facts of
feeling, perceiving, &c., we can give a name in order to identify and
recognise it: we will call it the consciousness[14] (_la conscience_),
and we will call object everything which is not the act of
consciousness.

After this preliminary distinction, to which we shall often refer, we
will go over the principal manifestations of the mind, and we will
first study the objects of cognition, reserving for another chapter
the study of the acts of cognition--that is to say, of consciousness.
We will thus examine successively sensation, idea, emotion, and will.

It has been often maintained that the peculiar property of mind is to
perceive sensations. It has also been said that thought--that is, the
property of representing to one's self that which does not
exist--distinguishes mind from matter. Lastly, it has not failed to be
affirmed that one thing which the mind brings into the material world
is its power of emotion; and moralists, choosing somewhat arbitrarily
among certain emotions, have said that the mind is the creator of
goodness. We will endeavour to analyse these different affirmations.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 13: See [Note 3], _sup._ on p. 15.--ED.]

[Footnote 14: The word "_conscience_" is one of those which has been
used in the greatest number of different meanings. Let it be, at
least, understood that _I_ use it here in an intellectual and not a
moral sense. I do not attach to the conscience the idea of a moral
approbation or disapprobation, of a duty, of a remorse. The best
example to illustrate conscience has, perhaps, been formed by LADD. It
is the contrast between a person awake and sleeping a dreamless sleep.
The first has consciousness of a number of things; the latter has
consciousness of nothing. Let me now add that we distinguish from
consciousness that multitude of things of which one has consciousness
of. Of these we make the object of consciousness. [_Conscience_ has
throughout been rendered "consciousness."--ED.]]




CHAPTER II

DEFINITION OF SENSATION


When making the analysis of matter we impliedly admitted two
propositions: first, that sensation is the _tertium quid_ which is
interposed between the excitant of our sensory nerves and ourselves;
secondly, that the aggregate of our sensations is all we can know of
the outer world, so that it is correct to define this last as the
collection of our present, past, and possible sensations. It is not
claimed that the outer world is nothing else than this, but it is
claimed with good reason that the outer world is nothing else _to us_.

It would be possible to draw from the above considerations a clear
definition of sensation, and especially it would be possible to decide
henceforth from the foregoing whether sensation is a physical or a
mental phenomenon, and whether it belongs to matter or to mind. This
is the important point, the one which we now state, and which we will
endeavour to resolve. To make the question clearer, we will begin it
afresh, as if it were new, and as if the facts hitherto analysed did
not already prejudge the solution. Let us begin by giving a definition
of sensation from the point of view of experimental psychology.

Sensation, then, is the phenomenon which is produced and which one
experiences when an excitant has just acted on one of our organs of
sense. This phenomenon is therefore composed of two parts: an action
exercised from outside by some body or other on our nervous substance;
and, then, the fact of feeling this action.

This fact of feeling, this state of consciousness, is necessary to
constitute sensation; when it does not exist, it is preferable to give
the phenomenon another name, otherwise the fault is committed of
mixing up separate facts. Physiologists have, on this point, some
faults of terminology with which to reproach themselves: for they have
employed the word sensibility with too little of the critical spirit.
Sensibility, being capacity for sensation, presupposes, like sensation
itself, consciousness. It has, therefore, been wrong, in physiology,
to speak of the sensibility of the tissues and organs, which, like the
vegetable tissues or the animal organs of vegetative life, properly
speaking, feel nothing, but react by rapid or slow movements to the
excitements they are made to receive. Reaction, by a movement or any
kind of modification, to an excitement, does not constitute a
sensation unless consciousness is joined with it, and, consequently,
it would be wiser to give unfelt excitements and reactions the name of
excitability.

The clearest examples of sensation are furnished by the study of man,
and are taken from cases where we perceive an external object. The
object produces upon us an action, and this action is felt; only, in
such cases, the fact of sensation comprises but a very small part of
the event. It only corresponds, by definition, to the actual action of
the object. Analysis after analysis has shown that we constantly
perceive far beyond this actual action of objects. Our mind, as we
say, outruns our senses. To our sensations, images come to attach
themselves which result from sensations anteriorly felt in analogous
circumstances. These images produce in us an illusion, and we take
them for sensations, so that we think we perceive something which is
but a remembrance or an idea; the reason being that our mind cannot
remain in action in the presence of a sensation, but unceasingly
labours to throw light upon it, to sound it, and to arrive at its
meaning, and consequently alters it by adding to it. This addition is
so constant, so unavoidable, that the existence of an isolated
sensation which should be perceived without the attachment of images,
without modification or interpretation, is well-nigh unrealisable in
the consciousness of an adult. It is a myth.

Let us, however, imagine this isolation to be possible, and that we
have before us a sensation free from any other element. What is this
sensation? Does it belong to the domain of physical or of moral
things? Is it a state of matter or of mind?

I can neither doubt nor dispute that sensation is, in part, a
psychological phenomenon, since I have admitted, by the very
definition I have given of it, that sensation implies consciousness.
We must, therefore, acknowledge those who define it as _a state of
consciousness_ to be right, but it would be more correct to call it
the _consciousness of a state_, and it is with regard to the nature of
this state that the question presents itself. It is only this state
which we will now take into consideration. It is understood that
sensation contains both an impression and a cognition. Let us leave
till later the study of the act of cognition, and deal with the
impression. Is this impression now of a physical or a mental nature?
Both the two opposing opinions have been upheld. In this there is
nothing astonishing, for in metaphysics one finds the expression of
every possible opinion. But a large, an immense majority of
philosophers has declared in favour of the psychological nature of the
impression. Without even making the above distinction between the
impression and the act of cognition, it has been admitted that the
entire sensation, taken _en bloc_, is a psychological phenomenon, a
modification of our consciousness and a peculiar state of our minds.
Descartes has even employed this very explicit formula: "The objects
we perceive are within our understanding." It is curious to see how
little trouble authors take to demonstrate this opinion; they declare
it to be self-evident, which is a convenient way of avoiding all
proof. John Stuart Mill has no hesitation in affirming that: "The
mind, in perceiving external objects, can only take notice of its own
conditions." And Renouvier expresses the same arbitrary assertion with
greater obscurity when he writes: "The monad is constituted by this
relation: the connection of the subject with the object within the
subject."[15] In other words, it is laid down as an uncontrovertible
principle that "the mental can only enter into direct relations with
the mental." That is what may be called "the principle of Idealism."

This principle seems to me very disputable, and it is to me an
astonishing thing that the most resolute of sceptics--Hume, for
example--should have accepted it without hesitation. I shall first
enunciate my personal opinion, then make known another which only
differs from mine by a difference of words, and finally I will discuss
a third opinion, which seems to me radically wrong.

My personal opinion is that sensation is of a mixed nature. It is
psychical in so far as it implies an act of consciousness, and
physical otherwise. The impression on which the act of cognition
operates, that impression which is directly produced by the excitant
of the nervous system, seems to me, without any doubt, to be of an
entirely physical nature. This opinion, which I make mine own, has
only been upheld by very few philosophers--Thomas Reid perhaps, and
William Hamilton for certain; but neither has perceived its deep-lying
consequences.

What are the arguments on which I rely? They are of different orders,
and are arguments of fact and arguments of logic. I shall first appeal
to the natural conviction of those who have never ventured into
metaphysics. So long as no endeavour has been made to demonstrate the
contrary to them, they believe, with a natural and naïve belief, that
matter is that which is seen, touched and felt, and that,
consequently, matter and our senses are confounded. They would be
greatly astonished to be informed that when we appear to perceive the
outer world, we simply perceive our ideas; that when we take the train
for Lyons we enter into one state of consciousness in order to attain
another state of consciousness.

Now, the adherents of this natural and naïve opinion have, as they say
in the law, the right of possession (_possession d'état_); they are
not plaintiffs but defendants; it is not for them to prove they are in
the right, it has to be proved against them that they are in the
wrong. Until this proof is forthcoming they have a presumption in
their favour.

Are we here making use of the argument of common opinion of mankind,
of which ancient philosophy made so evident an abuse? Yes, and no.
Yes, for we here adopt the general opinion. No, for we only adopt it
till the contrary be proved. But who can exhibit this proof to the
contrary? On a close examination of the question, it will be perceived
that sensation, taken as an object of cognition, becomes confused with
the properties of physical nature, and is identified with them, both
by its mode of apparition and by its content. By its mode of
apparition, sensation holds itself out as independent of us, for it is
at every instant an unexpected revelation, a source of fresh
cognitions, and it offers a development which takes place without and
in spite of our will; while its laws of co-existence and of succession
declare to us the order and march of the material universe. Besides,
by its content, sensation is confounded with matter. When a
philosopher seeks to represent to himself the properties of a material
object,--of a brain, for example--in order to contrast them with the
properties of a psychical activity, it is the properties of sensation
that he describes as material; and, in fact, it is by sensation, and
sensation alone, that we know these properties. Sensation is so little
distinct from them that it is an error to consider it as a means, a
process, an instrument for the knowledge of matter. All that we know
of matter is not known in or by sensation, but constitutes sensation
itself; it is not by the aid of sensation that we know colour; colour
is a sensation, and the same may be said of form, resistance, and the
whole series of the properties of matter. They are only our sensations
clothed with external bodies. It is therefore absolutely legitimate to
consider a part of our sensations, the object part, as being of
physical nature. This is the opinion to which I adhere.

We come to the second opinion we have formulated. It is, in appearance
at least, very different from the first. Its supporters agree that the
entire sensation, taken _en bloc_ and unanalysed, is to be termed a
psychological phenomenon. In this case, the act of consciousness,
included in the sensation, continues to represent a psychical element.
They suppose, besides, that the object on which this act operates is
psychical; and finally, they suppose that this object or this
impression was provoked in us by a physical reality which is kept in
concealment, which we do not perceive, and which remains unknowable.

This opinion is nowise absurd in itself: but let us examine its
consequences. If we admit this thesis, that sensations are
manifestations of mind which, although provoked by material causes,
are of a purely mental nature, we are forced to the conclusion that we
know none of the properties of material bodies, since we do not enter
into relations with these bodies. The object we apprehend by
perception is, according to this hypothesis, solely mental. To draw
therefrom any notion on material objects, it would have to be supposed
that, by some mysterious action, the mental which we know resembles
the physical which we do not know, that it retains the reflection of
it, or even that it allows its colour and form to pass, like a
transparent pellicle applied on the contour of bodies. Here are
hypotheses very odd in their realism. Unless we accept them, how is it
comprehensible that we can know anything whatever of physical nature?
We should be forced to acknowledge, following the example of several
philosophers, that the perception of the physical is an illusion.

As a compensation, that which this system takes from matter it
attributes to mind, which turns our familiar conceptions upside down.
The qualities of sensation detached from matter will, when applied to
mind, change its physiognomy. There are sensations of extent, weight,
space, and form. If these sensations are turned into psychical events,
we shall have to grant to these events, to these manifestations of the
mind, the properties of extent, of weight, of form. We shall have to
say that mind is a resisting thing, and that it has colour.

It may be said that this fantasy of language is not very serious. So
be it. But then what remains of the dualism of mind and matter? It is
at least singularly compromised. We may continue to suppose that
matter exists, and even that it is matter which provokes in our mind
those events which we call our sensations; but we cannot know if by
its nature, its essence, this matter differs from that of mind, since
we shall be ignorant of all its properties. Our ignorance on this
point will be so complete that we shall not even be able to know
whether any state which we call mental may not be physical. The
distinction between physical and mental will have lost its _raison
d'être_, since the existence of the physical is necessary to give a
meaning to the existence of the mental. We are brought, whether we
like it or not, to an experimental monism, which is neither psychical
nor physical; panpsychism and panmaterialism will have the same
meaning.[16]

But this monism can be only transitory, for it is more in the words
than in the thing itself. It is brought about by the terminology
adopted, by the resolution to call mental all the phenomena that it is
possible to know. Luckily, our speculations are not at the mercy of
such trifling details as the details of language. Whatever names may
be given to this or that, it will remain none the less true that
nature will continue to present to us a contrast between phenomena
which are flints, pieces of iron, clods of earth, brains--and some
other phenomena which we call states of consciousness. Whatever be the
value of this dualism, it will have to be discussed even in the
hypothesis of panpsychism.[17] As for myself, I shall also continue to
make a distinction between what I have called objects of cognition and
acts of cognition, because this is the most general distinction that
can be traced in the immense field of our cognitions. There is no
other which succeeds, to the same degree, in dividing this field into
two, moreover, this distinction is derived directly from observation,
and does not depend for its validity on the physical or mental nature
of the objects. Here is, then, a duality, and this duality, even when
it does not bear the names physical and moral, should necessarily play
the same part, since it corresponds to the same distinction of fact.

In the end, nothing will be changed, and this second opinion must
gradually merge into the one first stated by me, and of which I take
the responsibility. We may, therefore, put it out of consideration.

I have mentioned a third opinion, stating that it appeared to me to be
radically false. Outwardly it is the same as the last; looked at
superficially it seems even confused with it; but, in reality it is of
a totally different nature. It supposes that sensation is an entirely
psychological phenomenon. Then, having laid down this thesis, it
undertakes to demonstrate it by asserting that sensation differs from
the physical fact, which amounts to supposing that we cannot know
anything but sensations, and that physical facts are known to us
directly and by another channel. This is where the contradiction comes
in. It is so apparent that one wonders how it has been overlooked by
so many excellent minds. In order to remove it, it will be sufficient
to recollect that we do not know anything other than sensations; it is
therefore impossible to make any distinction between the physical
object and the object of cognition contained in every sensation. The
line of demarcation between the physical and the moral cannot pass
this way, since it would separate facts which are identical.

We can, therefore, only deplore the error of all those who, to express
the difference between mind and matter, have sought a contrast between
sensation and physical facts. Physiologists, with hardly an exception,
have fallen into this error; when contemplating in imagination the
material working of the brain, they have thought that between the
movement of cerebral matter and sensation there was a gulf fixed. The
comparison, to have been correct, required to be presented in quite
another way. A parallel, for instance, should have been drawn between
a certain cerebral movement and the act of consciousness, and there
should have been said: "The cerebral motion is the physical
phenomenon, the act of consciousness the psychical." But this
distinction has not been made. It is sensation _en bloc_ which is
compared to the cerebral movement, as witness a few passages I will
quote as a matter of curiosity, which are borrowed from philosophers
and, especially, from physiologists.

While philosophers take as a principle of idealism, that the mental
can only know the mental, physiologists take, as a like principle,
the heterogeneity existing, or supposed to exist, between the nerve
impression and the sensation. "However much we may follow the
excitement through the whole length of the nerve," writes Lotze,[18]
"or cause it to change its form a thousand times and to metamorphose
itself into more and more delicate and subtle movements, we shall
never succeed in showing that a movement thus produced can, by its
very nature, cease to exist as movement and be reborn in the shape of
sensation...." It will be seen that it is on the opposition between
molecular movement and sensation, that Lotze insists. In like manner
Ferrier: "But how is it that the molecular modifications in the
cerebral cells coincide with the modifications of the consciousness;
how, for instance, do luminous vibrations falling upon the retina
excite the modification of consciousness called _visual sensation_?
These are problems we cannot solve. We may succeed in determining the
exact nature of the molecular changes which take place in the cerebral
cells when a sensation is felt, but this will not bring us an inch
nearer to the explanation of the fundamental nature of sensation."
Finally, Du Bois Reymond, in his famous discussion in 1880, on the
seven enigmas of the world, speaks somewhat as follows: "The
astronomical knowledge of the encephalon, that is, the most intimate
to which we can aspire, only reveals to us matter in motion. But no
arrangement nor motion of material particles can act as a bridge by
which we can cross over into the domain of intelligence.... What
imaginable link is there between certain movements of certain
molecules in my brain, on the one hand, and on the other hand
primitive, undefinable, undeniable facts such as: I have the sensation
of softness, I smell the odour of a rose, I hear the sound of an
organ, I see a red colour, &c...."

These three quotations show very conclusively that their authors
thought they could establish the heterogeneity of the two phenomena by
opposing matter to sensation. It must be recognised that they have
fallen into a singular error; for matter, whatever it may be, is for
us nothing but sensation; matter in motion, I have often repeated, is
only a quite special kind of sensation; the organic matter of the
brain, with its whirling movements of atoms, is only sensation.
Consequently, to oppose the molecular changes in the brain to the
sensation of red, blue, green, or to an undefined sensation of any
sort, is not crossing a gulf, and bringing together things which
cannot be compared, it is simply comparing one sensation to another
sensation.

There is evidently something equivocal in all this; and I pointed this
out when outlining and discussing the different theories of matter. It
consists in taking from among the whole body of sensations certain of
them which are considered to be special, and which are then invested
with the privilege of being more important than the rest and the
causes of all the others. This is about as illegitimate as to choose
among men a few individuals to whom is attributed the privilege of
commanding others by divine right. These privileged sensations which
belong to the sight, the touch, and the muscular sense, and which are
of large extent, are indeed extensive. They have been unduly
considered as objective and as representing matter because they are
better known and measurable, while the other sensations, the
unextensive sensations of the other senses, are considered as
subjective for the reasons that they are less known and less
measurable: and they are therefore looked on as connected with our
sensibility, our Ego, and are used to form the moral world.

We cannot subscribe to this way of establishing the contrast between
matter and thought, since it is simply a contrast between two
categories of sensations, and I have already asserted that the
partitioning-out of sensations into two groups having different
objective values, is arbitrary.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 15: CH. RENOUVIER et L. PRAT, _La Nouvelle Monadologie_, p.
148.]

[Footnote 16: An American author, MORTON PRINCE, lately remarked this:
_Philosophical Review_, July 1904, p. 450.]

[Footnote 17: This FLOURNOY recently has shown very wittily. See in
_Arch. de Psychol._, Nov. 1904, his article on Panpsychism.]

[Footnote 18: This extract, together with the two subsequent, are
borrowed from an excellent lecture by FLOURNOY, on _Métaphysique et
Physiologie_. Georg: Geneva, 1890.]




CHAPTER III

DEFINITION OF THE IMAGE


Going on with our inventory, after sensations come images, ideas, and
concepts; in fact, quite a collection of phenomena, which, are
generally considered as essentially psychological.

So long as one does not carefully analyse the value of ideas, one
remains under the impression that ideas form a world apart, which is
sharply distinguished from the physical world, and behaves towards it
as an antithesis. For is not conception the contrary of perception?
and is not the ideal in opposition to reality?

Thoughts have some characteristics of fancy, of freedom, even of
unreality, which are wanting to the prosaicness of heavy material
things. Thoughts sport with the relations of time and space; they fly
in a moment across the gulf between the most distant objects; they
travel back up the course of time; they bring near to us events
centuries away; they conceive objects which are unreal; they imagine
combinations which upset all physical laws, and, further, these
conceptions remain invisible to others as well as to ourselves. They
are outside the grip of reality, and constitute a world which becomes,
for any one with the smallest imagination, as great and as important
as the world called real. One may call in evidence the poets,
novelists, artists, and the dreamers of all kinds. When life becomes
too hard for us, we fly to the ideal world, there to seek
forgetfulness or compensation.

It is, therefore, easy to understand, that it should have been
proposed to carry into ideation the dichotomy between the physical and
the moral. Many excellent authors have made the domain of the mind
begin in the ideal. Matter is that which does not think. Descartes, in
his _Discours de la Méthode_ (4th part), remarking that he may pretend
"not to have a body, and that there is no world or place in which he
exists, but that he cannot pretend that he does not think," concludes
by saying that the mind is "a substance, all whose essence or nature
is merely to think, and which has no need of either place or any other
material thing, in order to exist;" in short, that "the soul is
absolutely distinct from the body."[19]

Let us, then, examine in what measure this separation between
perception and ideation can be legitimately established. If we accept
this separation, we must abandon the distinction I proposed between
acts and objects of cognition, or, at least, admit that this
distinction does not correspond to that between the physical and the
moral, since thoughts, images, recollections, and even the most
abstract conceptions, all constitute, in a certain sense, objects of
cognition. They are phenomena which, when analysed, are clearly
composed of two parts, an object and a cognition. Their logical
composition is, indeed, that of an external perception, and there is
in ideation exactly the same duality as in sensation. Consequently, if
we maintain the above distinction as a principle of classification for
all knowable phenomena, we shall be obliged to assign the same
position to ideas as to sensations.

The principal difference we notice between sensation and idea is, it
would seem, the character of unreality in the last named; but this
opposition has not the significance we imagine. Our mental vision
only assumes this wholly special character of unreality under
conditions in which it is unable to harmonise with the real vision.
Taine has well described the phases of the reduction of the image by
sensation: it is at the moment when it receives the shock of an image
which contradicts it, that the image appears as illusory.[20] Let us
suppose that we are sitting down dreaming and watching the passing by
of our images. If, at this moment, a sudden noise calls us back to
reality, the whole of our mental phantasmagoria disappears as if by
the wave of a magic wand, and it is by thus vanishing that the image
shows its falsity. It is false because it does not accord with the
present reality.

But, when we do not notice a disagreement between these two modes of
cognition, both alike give us the impression of reality. If I evoke a
reminiscence and dwell attentively on the details, I have the
impression that I am in face of the reality itself. "I feel as if I
were there still," is a common saying; and, among the recollections I
evoke, there are some which give me the same certitude as the
perception of the moment. Certain witnesses would write their
depositions with their blood. One does not see this every day; but
still one does see it.

Further, there are thousands of circumstances where the ideation is
neither in conflict with the perception nor isolated from it, but in
logical continuity with it. This continuity must even be considered as
the normal condition. We think in the direction of that which we
perceive. The image seems to prepare the adaptation of the individual
to his surroundings; it creates the foresight, the preparation of the
means, and, in a word, everything which constitutes for us a final
cause. Now, it is very necessary that the image appear real to be
usefully the substitute of the sensation past or to come.

Let us establish one thing more. Acting as a substitute, the image not
only appears as real as the sensation, it appears to be of the same
nature; and the proof is that they are confounded one with the other,
and that those who are not warned of the fact take one for the other.
Every time a body is perceived, as I previously explained, there are
images which affix themselves to the sensation unnoticed. We think we
perceive when we are really remembering or imagining. This addition of
the image to the sensation is not a petty and insignificant accessory;
it forms the major part, perhaps nine-tenths, of perception. Hence
arise the illusions of the senses, which are the result, not of
sensations but of ideas. From this also comes the difficulty of
knowing exactly what, under certain circumstances, is observation or
perception, where the fact perceived ends, and where conjecture
begins. Once acquainted with all these possibilities of errors, how
can we suppose a radical separation between the sensation and the
image?

Examined more closely, images appear to us to be divisible into as
many kinds as sensations: visual images correspond to visual
sensations, tactile to tactile, and so on with all the senses.

That which we experience in the form of sensation, we can experience
over again in the form of image, and the repetition, generally weaker
in intensity and poorer in details, may, under certain favourable
circumstances, acquire an exceptional intensity, and even equal
reality: as is shown by hallucinations. Here, certainly, are very
sound reasons for acknowledging that the images which are at the
bottom of our thoughts, and form the object of them, are the
repetition, the modification, the transposition, the analysis or the
synthesis of sensations experienced in the past, and possessing, in
consequence, all the characteristics of bodily states. I believe that
there is neither more nor less spirituality in the idea than in the
sensation. That which forms its spirituality is the implied act of
cognition; but its object is material.

I foresee a final objection: I shall be told that even when the
unreality of the image is not the rule, and appears only under certain
circumstances, it nevertheless exists. This is an important fact. It
has been argued from the unreality of dreams and hallucinations in
which we give a body to our ideas, that we do not in reality perceive
external bodies, but simply psychical states and modifications of our
souls. If our ideas consist--according to the hypothesis I uphold--in
physical impressions which are felt, we shall be told that these
particular impressions must participate in the nature of everything
physical; that they are real, and always real; that they cannot be
unreal, fictitious, and mendacious, and that, consequently, the
fictitious character of ideation becomes inexplicable.

Two words of answer are necessary to this curious argument, which is
nothing less than an effort to define the mental by the unreal, and to
suppose that an appearance cannot be physical. No doubt, we say, every
image, fantastical as it may seem as signification, is real in a
certain sense, since it is the perception of a physical impression;
but this physical nature of images does not prevent our making a
distinction between true and false images. To take an analogous
example: we are given a sheet of proofs to correct, we delete certain
redundant letters, and, although they are printed with the same type
as the other letters, we have the right to say they are false. Again,
in a musical air, we may hear a false note, though it is as real as
the others, since it has been played. This distinction between reality
and truth ought to be likewise applied to mental images. All are real,
but some are false. They are false when they do not accord with the
whole reality; they are true when they agree; and every image is
partly false because, being an image, it does not wholly accord with
the actual perceptions. It creates a belief in a perception which does
not occur; and by developing these ideas we could easily demonstrate
how many degrees of falsehood there are.

Physiologically, we may very easily reconcile the falsity of the image
with the physical character of the impression on which it is based.
The image results from a partial cerebral excitement, which sensation
results from an excitement which also acts upon the peripheral sensory
nerves, and corresponds to an external object--an excitant which the
image does not possess. This difference explains how it is that the
image, while resulting from a physical impression, may yet be in a
great number of cases declared false--that is to say, may be
recognised as in contradiction to the perceptions.

To other minds, perhaps, metaphysical reasoning will be more
satisfactory. For those, we propose to make a distinction between two
notions, Existence or Reality, on the one hand, and Truth, on the
other.

Existence or Reality is that of which we have an immediate
apprehension. This apprehension occurs in several ways. In perception,
in the first place. I perceive the reality of my body, of a table, the
sky, the earth, in proportion to my perception of them. They exist,
for if they did not, I could not perceive them. Another way of
understanding reality is conception or thought. However much I may
represent a thing to myself as imaginary, it nevertheless exists in a
certain manner, since I can represent it to myself. I therefore, in
this case, say that it is real or it exists. It is of course
understood, that in these definitions I am going against the ordinary
acceptation of the terms; I am taking the liberty of proposing new
meanings. This reality is, then, perceived in one case and conceived
in the other. Perceptibility or conceivability are, then, the two
forms which reality may assume. But _reality_ is not synonymous with
_truth_; notwithstanding the custom to the contrary, we may well
introduce a difference between these two terms. Reality is that which
is perceived or conceived; truth is that which accords with the whole
of our knowledge. Reality is a function of the senses or of ideation;
truth is a function of reasoning or of the reason.

For cognition to be complete, it requires the aid of all these
functions. And, in fact, what does conception by itself give? It
allows us to see if a thing is capable of representation. This is not
a common-place thing, I will observe in passing; for many things we
name are not capable of representation, and there is often a criticism
to be made; we think we are representing, and we are not. What is
capable of representation exists as a representation, but is it true?
Some philosophers have imagined so, but they are mistaken; what we
succeed in conceiving is alone possible.

Let us now take the Perceptible. Is what one perceives true? Yes, in
most cases it is so in fact; but an isolated perception may be false,
and disturbed by illusions of all kinds. It is all very well to say,
"I see, I touch." There is no certainty through the senses alone in
many circumstances that the truth has been grasped. If I am shown the
spirit of a person I know to be dead, I shall not, notwithstanding the
testimony of my eyes, believe it to be true, for this apparition would
upset all my system of cognitions.

Truth is that which, being deemed conceivable, and being really
perceived, has also the quality of finding its place, its relation,
and its confirmation in the whole mass of cognitions previously
acquired.

These distinctions,[21] if developed, would readily demonstrate that
the advantages of observation are not eclipsed by those of
speculation; and that those of speculation, in their turn, do not
interfere with those of observation. But we have not time to develop
these rules of logic; it will be sufficient to point out their
relation to the question of the reality of mental images. Here are my
conclusions in two words. Physical phenomena and images are always
real, since they are perceived or conceived; what is sometimes wanting
to them, and makes them false, is that they do not accord with the
rest of our cognitions.[22]

Thus, then, are all objections overruled, in my opinion at least. We
can now consider the world of ideas as a physical world; but it is
one of a peculiar nature, which is not, like the other, accessible to
all, and is subject to its own laws, which are laws of association. By
these very different characteristics, it separates itself so sharply
from the outer world that all endeavour to bring the two together
seems shocking; and it is very easy to understand that many minds
should wish to remain faithful to the conception that ideas form a
mental or moral world. No metaphysical reasoning could prevail against
this sentiment, and we must give up the idea of destroying it. But we
think we have shown that idea, like sensation, comprises at the same
time the physical and the mental.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 19: Let me say, in passing, that this separation that
DESCARTES thinks he can establish between perception and ideation, is
only conceivable on condition that it be not too closely examined, and
that no exact definition of ideation be given. If we remark, in fact,
that all thought is a reproduction, in some degree, of a sensation, we
arrive at this conclusion: that a thought operated by a soul distinct
from the body would be a thought completely void and without object,
it would be the thought of nothingness. It is not, therefore,
conceivable. Consequently the criterion, already so dangerous, which
DESCARTES constantly employs--to wit: that what we clearly conceive is
true--cannot apply to thought, if we take the trouble to analyse it
and to replace a purely verbal conception by intuition.]

[Footnote 20: I somewhat regret that TAINE fell into the common-place
idea of the opposition of the brain and thought; he took up again this
old idea without endeavouring to analyse it, and only made it his own
by the ornamentation of his style. And as his was a mind of powerful
systematisation, the error which he committed led him into much wider
consequences than the error of a more common mind would have done.]

[Footnote 21: I have just come across them again in an ingenious note
of C. L. HERRICK: _The Logical and Psychological Distinction between
the True and the Real_ (_Psych. Rev._, May 1904). I entirely agree
with this author. But it is not he who exercised a suggestion over my
mind; it was M. BERGSON. See _Matière et Mémoire_, p. 159.]

[Footnote 22: In order to remain brief, I have not thought fit to
allude in the text to a question of metaphysics which closely depends
on the one broached by me: the existence of an outer world.
Philosophers who define sensation as a modality of our Ego are much
embarrassed later in demonstrating the existence of an outer world.
Having first admitted that our perception of it is illusory, since,
when we think we perceive this world, we have simply the feeling of
the modalities of our Ego, they find themselves powerless to
demonstrate that this illusion corresponds to a truth, and invoke in
despair, for the purpose of their demonstration, instinct,
hallucination, or some _a priori_ law of the mind. The position we
have taken in the discussion is far more simple. Since every sensation
is a fragment of matter perceived by a mind, the aggregate of
sensations constitutes the aggregate of matter. There is in this no
deceptive appearance, and consequently no need to prove a reality
distinct from appearances. As to the argument drawn from dreams and
hallucinations which might be brought against this, I have shown how
it is set aside by a distinction between perceptibility and truth. It
is no longer a matter of perception, but of reasoning. In other words,
all that we see, even in dreams, is real, but is not in its due
place.]




CHAPTER IV

DEFINITION OF THE EMOTIONS


After sensations and images, we have to name among the phenomena of
consciousness, the whole series of affective states--our pleasures and
our pains, our joys and our griefs, our sentiments, our emotions, and
our passions. It is universally admitted that these states are of a
mental nature, for several reasons. (1) We never objectivate them as
we do our sensations, but we constantly consider them as indwelling or
subjective states. This rule, however, allows an exception for the
pleasure and the pain termed physical, which are often localised in
particular parts of our bodies, although the position attributed to
them is less precise than with indifferent sensations. (2) We do not
alienate them as we do our indifferent sensations. The sensations of
weight, of colour, and of form serve us for the construction of bodies
which appear to us as perceived by us, but as being other than
ourselves. On the contrary, we constantly and without hesitation refer
our emotional states to our _Ego_. It is I who suffer, we say, I who
complain, I who hope. It is true that this attribution is not
absolutely characteristic of mental phenomena, for it happens that we
put a part of our Ego into material objects, such as our bodies, and
even into objects separate from our bodies, and whose sole relation to
us is that of a legal proprietorship. We must guard against the
somewhat frequent error of identifying the Ego with the psychical.

These two reasons sufficiently explain the tendency to see only
psychological states in the emotional ones; and, in fact, those
authors who have sought to oppose mind to matter have not failed to
introduce emotion into their parallel as representing the essence of
mind. On this point I will recall the fine ironical image used by
Tyndall, the illustrious English physicist, to show the abyss which
separates thought from the molecular states of the brain. "Let us
suppose," he says, "that the sentiment love, for example, corresponds
to a right-hand spiral movement of the molecules of the brain and the
sentiment hatred to a left-hand spiral movement. We should then know
that when we love, a movement is produced in one direction, and when
we hate, in another. But the Why would remain without an answer."

The question of knowing what place in our metaphysical theory we ought
to secure for emotion seems difficult to resolve, and we even find
some pleasure in leaving it in suspense, in order that it may be
understood that a metaphysician is not compelled to explain
everything. Besides, the difficulties which atop us here are
peculiarly of a psychological order. They proceed from the fact that
studies on the nature of the emotions are still very little advanced.
The physical conditions of these states are pretty well known, and
their psychical and social effects have been abundantly described; but
very little is known as to what distinguishes an emotion from a
thought.

Two principal opinions may be upheld in the actual state of our
acquaintance with the psychology of the feelings. When we endeavour to
penetrate their essential and final nature, we have a choice between
two contrary theories.

The first and traditional one consists in seeing in emotion a
phenomenon _sui generis_; this is very simple, and leaves nothing more
to be said.

The second bears the name of the intellectualist theory. It consists
in expunging the characteristic of the affective states. We consider
them as derivative forms of particular modes of cognition, and they
are only "confused intelligence." This intellectualist thesis is of
early date; it will be found in Herbart, who, by-the-by, gave it a
peculiar form, by causing the play of images to intervene in the
formation of the feelings. However, this particular point is of slight
Importance. The intellectualist theory is more vast than Herbartism;
it exists in all doctrines in which the characteristic difference
between thought and feeling is expunged and feeling is brought back to
thought. One of the clearest means of so doing consists in only seeing
in the feeling the fact of perceiving something. To perceive is, in
fact, the property of intelligence; to reason, to imagine, to judge,
to understand, is always, in a certain sense, to perceive. It has been
imagined that emotion is nothing else than a perception of a certain
kind, an intellectual act strictly comparable to the contemplation of
a landscape. Only, in the place of a landscape with placid features
you must put a storm, a cataclysm of nature; and, instead of supposing
this storm outside us, let it burst within us, let it reach us, not by
the outer senses of sight and condition, but by the inner senses. What
we then perceive will be an emotion.

Such is the theory that two authors--W. James and Lange--happened to
discover almost at the same time, Lange treating it as a physiologist
and W. James as a philosopher. Their theory, at first sight, appears
singular, like everything which runs counter to our mental habits. It
lays down that the symptoms which we all till now have considered as
the physiological consequence, the translation, and the distant
effects of the emotions, constitute their essential base. These
effects are: the expression of the physiognomy, the gesture, the cry,
and the speech; or the reflex action on the circulation, the pallor or
blushing, the heat mounting to the head, or the cold of the shiver
which passes over the body. Or it is the heart, which hastens or
slackens its beats, or makes them irregular, or enfeebles, or augments
them. Or the respiration, which changes its rhythm, or increases, or
is suspended. Or else it is the secretion of the saliva or of the
sweat, which flows in abundance or dries up. Or the muscular force,
which is increased or decays. Or the almost undefinable organic
troubles revealed to us by the singing in the ears, constriction of
the epigastrium, the jerks, the trembling, vertigo, or nausea--all
this collection of organic troubles which comes more or less
confusedly to our consciousness under the form of tactile, muscular,
thermal, and other sensations. Until now this category of phenomena
has been somewhat neglected, because we saw in it effects and
consequences of which the rôle in emotion itself seemed slight, since,
if they could have been suppressed, it was supposed that emotion would
still remain. The new theory commences by changing the order of
events. It places the physical symptoms of the emotions at the very
beginning, and considers them the direct effects of the external
excitant, which is expressed by this elegant formula: "It used to be
said, 'I perceive a danger; I am frightened, I tremble.' Now we must
say, 'I tremble before a danger, first, and it is after having
trembled that I am frightened.'" This is not a change in order only;
it is something much more serious. The change is directed to the
nature of emotion. It is considered to exist in the organic
derangements indicated above. These derangements are the basis of
emotion, its physical basis, and to be moved is to perceive them. Take
away from the consciousness this physical reflex, and emotion ceases.
It is no longer anything but an idea.

This theory has at least the merit of originality. It also pleases one
by its great clearness--an entirely intellectual clearness, we may
say; for it renders emotion comprehensible by enunciating it in terms
of cognition. It eliminates all difference which may exist between a
perception and an emotion. Emotion is no longer anything but a certain
kind of perception, the perception of the organic sensations.

This reduction, if admitted, would much facilitate the introduction of
emotion into our system, which, being founded on the distinction
between the consciousness and the object, is likewise an
intellectualist system. The definition of emotion, as it is taught by
W. James, seems expressly made for us who are seeking to resolve all
intellectual states into physical impressions accompanied by
consciousness.

By the side of emotion we may place, as demanding the same analytical
study, the feeling of effort. We ought to inquire with effort, as has
been done with emotion, what is the psychological nature of this
phenomenon; and in the same way that there exists an intellectualist
theory of the emotions, viz. that of James, who reduces all the
history of the emotions to intelligence, so there exists an
intellectualist theory of effort, which likewise tends to bring back,
all will to intelligence. It is again the same author, that true
genius, W. James, who has attempted this reduction. I do not know
whether he has taken into account the parallelism of the two theories,
but it is nevertheless evident. Effort, that basis of activity, that
state of consciousness which so many psychologists have described as
something _sui generis_, becomes to James a phenomenon of perception.
It is the perception of sensations proceeding from the muscles, the
tendons, the articulations, the skin, and from all the organs directly
or indirectly concerned in the execution of movement. To be conscious
of an effort would then be nothing else than to receive all these
centripetal sensations; and what proves this is, that the
consciousness of effort when most clearly manifested is accompanied by
some muscular energy, some strong contraction, or some respiratory
trouble, and yields if we render the respiration again regular and put
the muscles back into repose.

To my great regret I can state nothing very clear regarding these
problems. The attempt to intellectualise all psychical problems is
infinitely interesting, and leads to a fairly clear conception, by
which everything is explained by a mechanism reflected in a mirror,
which is the consciousness. But we remain perplexed, and we ask
ourselves whether this clearness of perception is not somewhat
artificial, whether affectivity, emotivity, tendency, will, are really
all reduced to perceptions, or whether they are not rather irreducible
elements which should be added to the consciousness. Does not, for
instance, desire represent a complement of the consciousness? Do not
desire and consciousness together represent a something which does not
belong to the physical domain and which forms the moral world? This
question I leave unanswered.




CHAPTER V

DEFINITION OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS--THE RELATION SUBJECT-OBJECT


After having separated from the consciousness that which it is not,
let us try to define what it is. This and the two following chapters
are devoted to this study.

A theory has often been maintained with regard to the consciousness;
namely, that it supposes a relation between two terms--a subject and
an object, and that it consists exactly in the feeling of this
relation. By subject is understood the something that has
consciousness; the object is the something of which we are conscious.
Every thought, we are told, implies subject and object, the
representer and the represented, the _sentiens_ and the _sensum_--the
one active, the other passive, the active acting on the passive, the
_ego_ opposed to the _non ego_.

This opinion is almost legitimised by current language. When speaking
of our states of consciousness, we generally say, "I am conscious; it
is I who have consciousness," and we attribute to our I, to our Ego,
to our personality, the rôle of subject. But this is not a peremptory
argument in favour of the above opinion; it is only a presumption,
and, closely examined, this presumption seems very weak.

Hitherto, when analysing the part of mind, we have employed
non-committal terms: we have said that sensation implied
consciousness, and not that sensation implied something which is
conscious.[23] The difference may appear too subtle, but it is not; it
consists in taking from consciousness the notion of a subject being
conscious and replacing it by the very act of consciousness.

My description applies very exactly, I think, to the facts. When we
are engaged in a sensation, or when we perceive something, a
phenomenon occurs which simply consists in having consciousness of a
thing. If to this we add the idea of the subject, which has
consciousness, we distort the event. At the very moment when it is
taking place, it is not so complicated; we complicate it by adding to
it the work of reflection. It is reflection which constructs the
notion of the subject, and it is this which afterwards introduces this
construction into the states of consciousness; in this way the state
of consciousness, by receiving this notion of subject, acquires a
character of duality it did not previously possess. There are, in
short, two separate acts of consciousness, and one is made the subject
of the other. "Primitively," says Rabier, "there is neither
representative nor represented; there are sensations, representations,
facts of consciousness, and that is all. Nothing is more exact, in my
opinion, than this view of Condillac's:--that primitively, the
inanimate statue is entirely the sensation that it feels. To itself it
is all odour and all savour; it is nothing more, and this sensation
includes no duality for the consciousness. It is of an absolute
simplicity."

Two arguments may be advanced in favour of this opinion. The first is
one of logic. We have divided all knowledge into two groups--objects
of cognition, and acts of cognition. What is the subject of cognition?
Does it form a new group? By no means; it forms part of the first
group, of the object group; for it is something to be known.

Our second argument is one of fact. It consists in remembering that
which in practice we understand by the subject of cognition; or
rather, metaphorically we represent this subject to ourselves as an
organ--the eye that sees or the hand that touches--and we represent to
ourselves the relation subject-object in the shape of a material
relation between two distinct bodies which are separated by an
interval and between which some action is produced which unites them.
Or else, confusing the subject and the Ego, which are nevertheless two
different notions, we place the Ego in the consciousness of the
muscular effort struggling against something which resists. Or,
finally and still more frequently, we represent the subject to
ourselves by confusing it with our own personality; it is a part of
our biography, our name, our profession, our social status, our body,
our past life foreshortened, our character, or, in a word, our civil
personality, which becomes the subject of the relation subject-object.
We artificially endow this personality with the faculty of having
consciousness; and it results from this that the entity consciousness,
so difficult to define and to imagine, profits by all this factitious
addition and becomes a person, visible and even very large, in flesh
and bone, distinct from the object of cognition, and capable of living
a separate life.

It is not difficult to explain that all this clearness in the
representation of ideas is acquired by a falsification of the facts.
So sensorial a representation of consciousness is very unfaithful;
for our biography does not represent what we have called acts of
consciousness, but a large slice of our past experience--that is to
say, a synthesis of bygone sensations and images, a synthesis of
objects of consciousness; therefore a complete confusion between the
acts of consciousness and their objects. The formation of the
personality seems to me to have, above all, a legal and social
importance.[24] It is a peculiar grouping of states of consciousness
imposed by our relations with other individuals. But, metaphysically,
the subject thus understood is not distinguished from the object, and
there is nothing to add to our distinction between the object and the
act of consciousness.

Those who defend the existence of the subject point out that this
subject properly constitutes the Ego, and that the distinction of the
subject and the object corresponds to the distinction of the Ego and
non-Ego, and furnishes the separation between the physical and the
moral so long sought.

It is evidently very enticing to make of the Ego thus a primitive
notion of the consciousness; but this view of the Ego as opposed to
the non-Ego in no way corresponds to that of the mental and the
physical. The notion of the Ego is much larger, much more extensible,
than that of the mental; it is as encroaching as human pride, it
grasps in its conquering talons all that belongs to us; for we do not,
in life, make any great difference between what is _we_ and what is
_ours_--an insult to our dog, our dwelling, or our work wounds us as
much as an insult to ourselves. The possessive pronoun expresses both
possession and possessor. In fact, we consider our body as being
ourselves.

Here, then, are numbers of material things introducing themselves into
the category of mental things. If we wished to expel them and to
reduce the domain of the Ego to the domain of the mental, we could
only do so if we already possessed the criterion of what is
essentially mental. The notion of the Ego cannot therefore supply us
with this criterion.

Another opinion consists in making of the subject a spiritual
substance, of which the consciousness becomes a faculty. By substance
is understood an entity which possesses the two following principal
characteristics, unity and identity, this latter merging into unity,
for it is nothing else but the persistence of unity through the course
of time. Certain philosophers have asserted that through intuition we
can all establish that we are a spiritual substance. I am compelled to
reject this idea, because I think the expression _spiritual substance_
has no meaning; nothing but the sonorous value of six syllables. It
has also been supposed, that there exists a corporeal substance hidden
under the sensations, in which are implanted the qualities of bodies,
as the various organs of a flower are in its calyx. I will return
later to this conception of a material substance. That of a spiritual
substance cannot be defended, and the chief and fatal argument I urge
against it is, that we cannot represent it to our minds, we cannot
think it, and we cannot see in these words "spiritual substance" any
intelligible idea; for that which is mental is limited to "that which
is of the consciousness." So soon as we endeavour to go beyond the
fact of having consciousness to imagine a particular state which must
be mental, one of two things happen; either we only grasp the void, or
else we construct a material and persistent object in which we
recognise psychical attributes. These are two conclusions which ought
to be rejected.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 23: This second method of expression, which I consider
inexact, is constantly found in DESCARTES. Different philosophers have
explicitly admitted that every act of cognition implies a relation
subject-object. This is one of the corner-stones of the neo-criticism
of RENOUVIER. He asserts that all representation is double-faced, and
that what is known to us presents itself in the character of both
representative and represented. He follows this up by describing
separately the phenomena and laws of the representative and of the
represented respectively.]

[Footnote 24: The preceding ten lines in the text I wrote after
reading a recent article of WILLIAM JAMES, who wishes to show that the
consciousness does not exist, but results simply from the relation or
the opposition raised between one part of our experience (the actual
experience, for instance, in the example of the perception of an
object) and another part, the remembrance of our person. But the
argument of JAMES goes too far; he is right in contesting the relation
subject-object, but not in contesting the existence of the
consciousness (W. JAMES: "Does consciousness exist?" in _J. of
Philosophy, &c._, Sept. 1904).]




CHAPTER VI

DEFINITION OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS--CATEGORIES OF THE UNDERSTANDING


It has often been said that the rôle of intelligence consists in
uniting or grasping the relations of things. An important question,
therefore, to put, is, if we know whereof these relations consist, and
what is the rôle of the mind in the establishment of a relation?

It now and then happens to us to perceive an isolated object, without
comparing it with any other, or endeavouring to find out whether it
differs from or resembles another, or presents with any other a
relation of cause to effect, or of sign to thing signified, or of
co-existence in time and space. Thus, I may see a red colour, and
occupy all the intellect at my disposal in the perception of this
colour, seeing nothing but it, and thinking of nothing but it.
Theoretically, this is not impossible to conceive, and, practically, I
ask myself if these isolated and solitary acts of consciousness do not
sometimes occur.

It certainly seems to me that I have noticed in myself moments of
intellectual tonelessness, when in the country, during the vacation,
I look at the ground, or the grass, without thinking of anything--or
at least, of anything but what I am looking at, and without comparing
my sensation with anything. I do not think we should admit in
principle, as do many philosophers, that "we take no cognisance save
of relations." This is the _principle of relativity_, to which so much
attention has been given. Taken in this narrow sense, it seems to me
in no way imperative for our thoughts. We admit that it is very often
applied, but without feeling obliged to admit that it is of perpetual
and necessary application.

These reserves once made, it remains to remark, that the objects we
perceive very rarely present themselves in a state of perfect
isolation. On the contrary, they are brought near to other objects by
manifold relations of resemblance, of difference, or of connection in
time or space; and, further, they are compared with the ideas which
define them best. We do not have consciousness of an object, but of
the relations existing between several objects. Relation is the new
state produced by the fact that one perceives a plurality of objects,
and perceives them in a group.

Show me two colours in juxtaposition, and I do not see two colours
only, but, in addition, their resemblance in colour or value. Show me
two lines, and I do not see only their respective lengths but their
difference in length. Show me two points marked on a white sheet of
paper, and I do not see only the colour, form, and dimension of the
points, but their distance from each other. In our perceptions, as in
our conceptions, we have perpetually to do with the relations between
things. The more we reflect, the more we understand things, the more
clearly we see their relations; the multiplication of relations is the
measure of the depth of cognition.[25]

The nature of these relations is more difficult to ascertain than that
of objects. It seems to be more subtle. When two sounds make
themselves heard in succession, there is less difficulty in making the
nature of these two sounds understood than the nature of the fact that
one occurs before the other. It would appear that, in the perception
of objects, our mind is passive and reduced to the state of reception,
working like a registering machine or a sensitive surface, while in
the perception of relations it assumes a more important part.

Two principal theories have been advanced, of which one puts the
relations in the things perceived, and the other makes them a work of
the mind. Let us begin with this last opinion. It consists in
supposing that the relations are given to things by the mind itself.
These relations have been termed categories. The question of
categories plays an important part in the history of philosophy. Three
great philosophers, Aristotle, Kant, and Renouvier have drawn up a
list, or, as it is called, a table of them, and this table is very
long. To give a slight idea of it, I will quote a few examples, such
as time, space, being, resemblance, difference, causality, becoming,
finality, &c.

By making the categories the peculiar possession of the mind, we
attribute to these cognitions the essential characteristic of being
anterior to sensation, or, as it is also termed, of existing _a
priori_: we are taught that not only are they not derived from
experience, nor taught us by observation, but further that they are
presupposed by all observation, for they set up, in scholastic jargon,
the conditions which make experience possible. They represent the
personal contribution of the mind to the knowledge of nature, and,
consequently, to admit them is to admit that the mind is not, in the
presence of the world, reduced to the passive state of a _tabula
rasa_, and that the faculties of the mind are not a transformation of
sensation. Only these categories do not supplement sensation, they do
not obviate it, nor allow it to be conjectured beforehand. They remain
empty forms so long as they are not applied to experience; they are
the rules of cognition and not the objects of cognition, the means of
knowing and not the things known; they render knowledge possible, but
do not of themselves constitute it, Experience through the senses
still remains a necessary condition to the knowledge of the external
world. It may be said that the senses give the matter of knowledge,
and that the categories of the understanding give the form of it.
Matter cannot exist without form, nor form without matter; it is the
union of the two which produces cognition.

Such is the simplest idea that can be given of the Kantian theory of
categories, or, if it is preferred to employ the term often used and
much discussed, such is the theory of the Kantian idealism, This
theory, I will say frankly, hardly harmonises with the ideas I have
set forth up to this point. To begin with, let us scrutinise the
relation which can exist between the subject and the object. We have
seen that the existence of the subject is hardly admissible, for it
could only be an object in disguise. Cognition is composed in reality
of an object and an act of consciousness. Now, how can we know if this
act of consciousness, by adding itself to the object, modifies it and
causes it to appear other than it is?

This appears to me an insoluble question, and probably, even, a
factitious one. The idea that an object can be modified in its nature
or in its aspect comes to us through the perception of bodies. We see
that, by attacking a metal with acids, this metal is modified, and
that by heating a body its colour and form become changed; or that by
electrifying a thread it acquires new properties; or that when we
place glasses before our eyes we change the visible aspect of objects;
or that, if we have inflammation of the eyelids, light is painful, and
so on. All these familiar experiments represent to us the varied
changes that a body perceived can undergo; but it must be carefully
remarked that in cases of this kind the alteration in the body is
produced by the action of a second body, that the effect is due to an
intercourse between two objects. On the contrary, when we take the
Kantian hypothesis, that the consciousness modifies that which it
perceives, we are attributing to the consciousness an action which has
been observed in the case of the objects, and are thus transporting
into one domain that which belongs to a different one; and we are
falling into the very common error which consists in losing sight of
the proper nature of the consciousness and making out of it an object.

If we set aside this incorrect assimilation, there no longer remains
any reason for refusing to admit that we perceive things as they are,
and that the consciousness, by adding itself to objects, does not
modify them.

Phenomena and appearances do not, then, strictly speaking, exist. Till
proof to the contrary, we shall admit that everything we perceive is
real, that we perceive things always as they are, or, in other words,
that we always perceive _noumena_.[26]

After having examined the relations of the consciousness with its
objects, let us see what concerns the perception, by the
consciousness, of the relations existing between these objects
themselves. The question is to ascertain whether the _a priorists_ are
right in admitting that the establishment of these relations is the
work of the consciousness. The rôle of synthetic power that is thus
attributed to consciousness is difficult to conceive unless we alter
the definition of consciousness to fit the case. In accordance with
the definition we have given and the idea we have of it, the
consciousness makes us acquainted with what a thing is, but it adds
nothing to it. It is not a power which begets objects, nor is it a
power which begets relations.

Let us carefully note the consequence at which we should arrive, if,
while admitting, on the one hand, that our consciousness lights up and
reveals the objects without creating them, we were, on the other hand,
to admit that it makes up for this passivity by creating relations
between objects. We dare not go so far as to say that this creation of
relations is arbitrary and corresponds in no way to reality; or that,
when we judge two neighbouring or similar objects, the relations of
contiguity and resemblance are pure inventions of our consciousness,
and that these objects are really neither contiguous nor similar.

It must therefore be supposed that the relation is already, in some
manner, attracted into the objects; it must be admitted that our
intelligence does not apply its categories haphazard or from the
caprice of the moment; and it must be admitted that it is led to apply
them because it has perceived in the objects themselves a sign and a
reason which are an invitation to this application, and its
justification. On this hypothesis, therefore, contiguity and
resemblance must exist in the things themselves, and must be
perceived; for without this we should run the risk of finding similar
that which is different, and contiguous that which has no relation of
time or space. Whence it results, evidently, that our consciousness
cannot create the connection completely, and then we are greatly
tempted to conclude that it only possesses the faculty of perceiving
it when it exists in the objects.[27]

According to this conception, the rôle of the consciousness in the
perception of a connection is that of a witness, as in the perception
of objects. The consciousness does not create, but it verifies.
Resemblance is a physical property of objects, like colour; and
contiguity is a physical property of objects, like form. The
connections between the objects form part of the group object and not
of the group consciousness, and they are just as independent of
consciousness as are the objects themselves.

Against this conclusion we must anticipate several objections. One of
them will probably consist in accentuating the difference existing
between the object and the connection from the dynamical point of
view. That the object may be passively contemplated by the
consciousness can be understood, it will be said; but the relation is
not only an object of perception--it is, further, a principle of
action, a power of suggestion, and an agent of change.

It might, then, he supposed that the consciousness here finds a
compensation for the rôle that has been withdrawn from it. If it is
not the thing that creates the relation, it will be said, at least it
is that which creates its efficacity of suggestion. Many psychologists
have supposed that a relation has the power of evocation only when it
has been perceived. The perception of resemblance precedes the action
of resemblance. It is consequently the consciousness which assembles
the ideas and gives them birth by perceiving their relations.

This error, for it is one, has long been wide-spread--indeed, it still
persists.[28] We have, however, no difficulty in understanding that
the perception of a resemblance between two terms supposes them to be
known; so long as only one of the terms is present to the
consciousness, this perception does not exist; it cannot therefore
possess the property of bringing to light the second term. Suggestion
is therefore distinct from recognition; it is when suggestion has
acted, when the resemblance in fact has brought the two terms
together, that the consciousness, taking cognisance of the work
accomplished, verifies the existence of a resemblance, and that this
resemblance explains the suggestion.

Second objection: we are told that the relations between the
objects--that is, the principal categories--must be of a mental
nature, because they are _a priori_. That they are _a priori_ means
that they are at once anterior and superior to the experience. Let us
see what this argument is worth.

It appears that it is somewhat misused. With regard to many of the
categories, we are content to lay down the necessity of an abstract
idea in order to explain the comprehension of a concrete one. It is
said, for example: how can it be perceived that two sensations are
successive, if we do not already possess the idea of time? The
argument is not very convincing, because, for every kind of concrete
perception it is possible to establish an abstract category.

It might be said of colour that it is impossible to perceive it unless
it is known beforehand what colour is; and so on for a heap of other
things. A more serious argument consists in saying that relations are
_a priori_ because they have a character of universality and of
necessity which is not explained by experience, this last being always
contingent and peculiar. But it is not necessary that a function
should be mental for it to be _a priori_. The identification of the _a
priori_ with the mental is entirely gratuitous. We should here draw a
distinction between the two senses of the _a priori_: anteriority and
superiority.

A simple physical mechanism may be _a priori_, in the sense of
anteriority. A house is _a priori_, in regard to the lodgers it
receives; this book is _a priori_, in regard to its future readers.
There is no difficulty in imagining the structure of our nervous
system to be _a priori_, in regard to the excitements which are
propagated in it. A nerve cell is formed, with its protoplasm, its
nucleus and its nucleoli before being irritated; its properties
precede its functions. If it be possible to admit that as a
consequence of ancestral experiences the function has created the
organ, the latter is now formed, and this it is which in its turn
becomes anterior to the function. The notion of _a priori_ has
therefore nothing in it which is repugnant to physical nature.

Let us now take the _a priori_ in the sense of superiority. Certain
judgments of ours are, we are told, universal and necessary, and
through this double character go beyond the evidence of experience.
This is an exact fact which deserves to be explained, but it is not
indispensable to explain it by allowing to the consciousness a source
of special cognitions. The English school of philosophy have already
attacked this problem in connection with the origin of axioms. The
principle of their explanation lies in the virtue of what they have
termed "inseparable association." They have supposed that when an
association is often repeated it creates a habit of thought against
which no further strife is possible. The mechanism of association
itself should then add a special virtue to the contingency of facts. A
hundred repetitions of related facts, for example, would give rise to
so firm an association, that no further repetition would increase it.

I consider this explanation a very sound one in principle. It is right
to put into association something more than into experience. I would
only suggest a slight correction in detail. It is not the association
forged by repetition which has this virtue of conveying the idea of
necessity and universality, it is simply the uncontradicted
association. It has been objected, in fact, and with reason, to the
solution of Mill, that it insists on a long duration of experience,
while axioms appear to be of an irresistible and universal
truthfulness the moment they are conceived. And this is quite just. I
should prefer to lay down as a law that every representation appears
true, and that every link appears necessary and universal as soon as
it is formed. This is its character from the first. It preserves it so
long as no contradiction in fact, in reasoning, or in idea, comes to
destroy it.[29]

What seems to stand out most clearly after all these explanations is
the rôle which we ought to attribute to the consciousness. Two rival
theories have been maintained: that of the mirror-consciousness and
that of the focus-consciousness. It would seem--I merely say it would
seem--that the first of these best harmonises with the preceding
facts. For what seems most probable is, that the consciousness
illuminates and reveals but does not act. The theory of the
focus-consciousness adapts itself less to the mechanism of the
association of ideas.

From this we come quite naturally to see in the intelligence only an
inactive consciousness; at one moment it apprehends an object, and it
is a perception or an idea; at another time it perceives a connection,
and it is a judgment; at yet another, it perceives connections between
connections, and it is an act of reason. But however subtle the object
it contemplates may become, it does not depart from its contemplative
attitude, and cognition is but a consciousness.

One step further, and we should get so far as to admit that the
consciousness serves no purpose whatever, and that it is a useless
luxury, since, if all efficacious virtue is to be found in the
sensations and the ideas which we consider as material facts, the
consciousness which reveals them adds nothing to, takes nothing from
and modifies nothing in them; and everything would go on the same, nor
would anything in this world be changed, if one day the light of
consciousness were, by chance, to be put out. We might imagine a
collection of automatons forming a human society as complicated as,
and not different in appearance from, that of conscious beings; these
automatons would make the same gestures, utter the same words as
ourselves, would dispute, complain, cry, and make love like us; we
might even imagine them capable, like us, of psychology. This is the
thesis of the epiphenomenal consciousness which Huxley has boldly
carried to its uttermost conclusions.

I indicate here these possible conclusions, without discussing them.
It is a question I prefer to leave in suspense; it seems to me that
one can do nothing on this subject but form hypotheses.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 25: At the risk of being deemed too subtle, I ask whether we
are conscious of a relation between objects, or whether that which
occurs is not rather the perception of an object which has been
modified in its nature by its relation with another object.]

[Footnote 26: This conclusion may seem contradictory to that which I
enunciated when studying the constitution of matter. I then asserted
that we only know our sensations and not the excitants which produce
them. But these sensations are matter; they are matter modified by
other matter, viz. our nervous centres.

We therefore take up very distinctly an opposite standpoint to the
principle of _relativity_: in other terms, we reject the phenomenism
of Berkeley.

When we go into metaphysics we are continually astounded to see how
different conceptions of things which have a classic value are
independent of each other. In general, phenomenism is opposed to
substantialism, and it is supposed that those who do not accept the
former doctrine must accept the latter, while, on the contrary, those
who reject substantialism must be phenomenists. We know that it is in
this manner that Berkeley conquered corporeal substantialism and
taught phenomenism; while Hume, more radical than he, went so far as
to question the substantialism of mind. On reflection, it seems to me
that, after having rejected phenomenism, we are in no way constrained
to accept substance. By saying that we perceive things as they are,
and not through a deluding veil, we do not force ourselves to
acknowledge that we perceive the substance of bodies--that is to say,
that something which should be hidden beneath its qualities and should
be distinct from it. The distinction between the body and its
qualities is a thing useful in practice, but it answers to no
perception or observation. The body is only a group, a sheaf of
qualities. If the qualities seem unable to exist of themselves and to
require a subject, this is only a grammatical difficulty, which is due
to the fact that, while calling certain sensations qualities, we
suppose a subject to be necessary. On the other hand, the
representation which we make to ourselves of a material substance and
its rôle as the support of the qualities, is a very naïve and
mechanical representation, thanks to which certain sensations become
the supports of other and less important sensations. It would suffice
to insist on the detail of this representation and on its origin to
show its artificial character. The notion we have of the stability of
bodies and of the persistence of their identity, notwithstanding
certain superficial changes, is the reason for which I thought proper
to attribute a substance to them, that is to say, an invariable
element. But we can attain the same end without this useless
hypothesis; we have only to remark that the identity of the object
lies in the aggregate of its properties, including the name it bears.
If the majority of its properties, especially of those most important
to us, subsists without alteration, or if this alteration, though of
very great extent, takes place insensibly and by slow degrees, we
decide that the object remains the same. We have no need for that
purpose to give it a substance one and indestructible. Thus we are
neither adherents of phenomenism, nor of substantialism.]

[Footnote 27: I borrow from RABIER this argument, which has thoroughly
convinced me (see _Psychologie_, p. 281).]

[Footnote 28: PILON is the psychologist who has the most forcibly
demonstrated that resemblance acts before being perceived. I refer the
readers to my _Psychologie du Raisonnement_, where I have set forth
this little problem in detail.]

[Footnote 29: We think spontaneously of the general and the necessary.
It is this which serves as a basis for the suggestion and the
catchword (_réclame_), and it explains how minds of slender culture
always tend towards absolute assertions and hasty generalisations.]




CHAPTER VII

DEFINITION OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS--THE SEPARABILITY OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS
FROM ITS OBJECT--DISCUSSION OF IDEALISM


One last question suggests itself with regard to the consciousness. In
what measure is it separable from the object? Do the consciousness and
its object form two things or only one?

Under observation these two terms constantly show themselves united.
We experience a sensation and have consciousness of it; it is the same
fact expressed in two different ways. All facts of our perception thus
present themselves, and they are one. But our reason may outstrip our
observation. We are able to make a distinction between the two
elements _being_ and _being perceived_. This is not an experimental
but an ideological distinction, and an abstraction that language makes
easy.

Can we go further, and suppose one of the parts thus analysed capable
of existing without the other? Can sensation exist as physical
expression, as an object; without being illuminated by the
consciousness? Can the consciousness exist without having an object?

Let us first speak of the existence of the object when considered as
separated from the consciousness. The problem is highly complicated.

It has sometimes been connected with the idealist thesis according to
which the object of consciousness, being itself a modality of the
consciousness, cannot exist apart from it--that is to say, outside the
periods in which it is perceived. It would therefore result from this
that this separation between existence and perception might be made,
when it is admitted (contrary to the idealist hypothesis) that the
object perceived is material and the consciousness which perceives it
mental. In this case, it will be thought, there is no link of
solidarity between the consciousness and its continuity. But I am not
of that opinion. The union of the consciousness and its object is one
of fact, which presents itself outside any hypothesis on the nature of
the object. It is observation which demonstrates to us that we must
perceive an object to be assured of its existence; the reason,
moreover, confirms the necessity of this condition, which remains true
whatever may be the "stuff" of the object.

Having stated this, the question is simply to know whether this
observation of fact should be generalised or not. We may, it seems to
me, decline to generalise it without falling into a contradiction in
terms. It may be conceived that the objects which we are looking at
continue to exist, without change, during the moments when we have
lost sight of them. This seems reasonable enough, and is the opinion
of "common" sense.[30]

The English philosophers, Bain and Mill, have combated this
proposition with extraordinary ardour, like believers combating a
heresy. But notwithstanding their attacks it remains intelligible, and
the distinction between _being_ and _being perceived_ preserves its
logical legitimacy. This may be represented, or may be thought; but
can it be realised?

So far as regards external objects, I think we all, in fact, admit it.
We all admit a distinction, between the existence of the outer world
and the perception we have of it; its existence is one thing, and our
perception of it is another. The existence of the world continues
without interruption; our perception is continually interrupted by the
most fortuitous causes, such as change of position, or even the
blinking of the eyes; its existence is general, universal, independent
of time and space; our perception is partial, particular, local,
limited by the horizon of our senses, determined by the geographical
position of our bodies, riddled by the distractions of our
intelligence, deceived by the illusions of our minds, and above all
diminished by the infirmity of our intelligence, which is able to
comprehend so little of what it perceives. This is what we all admit
in practice; the smallest of our acts implies the belief in something
perceptible which is wider and more durable than our astonished
perceptions. I could not write these lines unless I implicitly
supposed that my inkstand, my paper, my pen, my room, and the
surrounding world subsist when I do not see them. It is a postulate of
practical life. It is also a postulate of science, which requires for
its explanations of phenomena the supposition in them of an indwelling
continuity. Natural science would become unintelligible if we were
forced to suppose that with every eclipse of our perceptions material
actions were suspended. There would be beginnings without sequences,
and ends without beginnings.

Let us note also that acquired notions on the working of our nervous
system allow us to give this postulate a most precise form: the
external object is distinct from the nervous system and from the
phenomena of perception which are produced when the nervous system is
excited; it is therefore very easy to understand that this object
continues to exist and to develop its properties, even when no brain
vibrates in its neighbourhood.

Might we not, with the view of strengthening this conclusion as to
the continuous existence of things, dispense with this postulate,
which seems to have the character of a grace, of an alms granted to
us? Might not this continuous existence of objects during the eclipses
of our acts of consciousness, be demonstrated? It does not seem to me
impossible. Let us suppose for a moment the correctness of the
idealist thesis: all our legitimate knowledge of objects is contained
within the narrow limits of actual sensation; then, we may ask, of
what use is the reason? What is the use of the memory? These functions
have precisely for their object the enlarging of the sphere of our
sensations, which is limited in two principal ways, by time and by
space. Thanks to the reason, we manage to see in some way that which
our senses are unable to perceive, either because it is too distant
from us, or because there are obstacles between us and the object, or
because it is a past event or an event which has not yet taken place
which is in question.

That the reason may be deceived is agreed. But will it be asserted
that it is always deceived? Shall we go so far as to believe that this
is an illegitimate mode of cognition? The idealist thesis, if
consistent, cannot refuse to extend itself to this extreme conclusion;
for a reasoned conclusion contains, when it has a meaning, a certain
assertion on the order of nature, and this assertion is not a
perception, since its precise object is to fill up the gaps in our
perceptions. Not being a perception, it must be rejected, if one is an
idealist.

The idealist will therefore keep strictly to the perception of the
moment, and this is so small a thing when deprived of all the
conjectures which enrich it, that the world, if reduced to this alone,
would be but the skeleton of a world. There would then be no more
science, no possibility of knowledge. But who could make up his mind
thus to shut himself up in perception?

I suppose, indeed, that there will here be quibbling. This objection
will be made: that in the hypothesis of a discontinuous existence of
things, reason may continue to do its work, provided the intervention
of a possible perception be supposed. Thus, I notice this morning, on
going into my garden, that the pond which was dry yesterday is full of
water. I conclude from this, "It has rained in the night." To be
consistent with idealism, one must simply add: "If some one had been
in the garden last night, he would have seen it rain." In this manner
one must re-establish every time the rights of perception.

Be it so. But let us notice that this addition has no more importance
than a prescribed formula in a notarial act; for instance, the
presence of a second notary prescribed by the law, but always
dispensed with in practice. This prescribed formula can always be
imagined or even understood. We shall be in accord with idealism by
the use of this easy little formula, "If some one had been there," or
even by saying, "For a universal consciousness...." The difference of
the realist and idealist theory becomes then purely verbal. This
amounts to saying that it disappears. But there is always much
verbalism in idealism.

One more objection: if this witness--the consciousness--suffices to
give objects a continuity of existence, we may content ourselves with
a less important witness. Why a man? The eyes of a mollusc would
suffice, or those of infusoria, or even of a particle of protoplasm:
living matter would become a condition of the existence of dead
matter. This, we must acknowledge, is a singular condition, and this
conclusion condemns the doctrine.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 30: That is to say, the sense of the multitude.--ED.]




CHAPTER VIII

DEFINITION OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS--THE SEPARATION OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS
FROM ITS OBJECT--THE UNCONSCIOUS


I ask myself whether it is possible, by going further along this road
of the separation between the consciousness and its object, to admit
that ideas may subsist during the periods when we are not conscious of
them. It is the problem of unconsciousness that I am here stating.

One of the most simple processes of reasoning consists in treating
ideas in the same manner as we have treated the external objects. We
have admitted that the consciousness is a thing superadded to the
external objects, like the light which lights up a landscape, but does
not constitute it and may be extinguished without destroying it. We
continue the same interpretation by saying that ideas prolong their
existence while they are not being thought, in the same way and for
the same motive that material bodies continue theirs while they are
not being perceived. All that it seems permissible to say is that this
conception is not unrealisable.

Let us now place ourselves at the point of view of the consciousness.
We have supposed up to the present the suppression of the
consciousness, and have seen that we can still imagine the object
continuing to exist. Is the converse possible? Let us suppose that the
object is suppressed. Can the consciousness then continue to exist? On
this last point it seems that doubt is not possible, and we must
answer in the negative. A consciousness without an object, an empty
consciousness, in consequence, cannot be conceived; it would be a
zero--a pure nothingness; it could not manifest itself. We might
admit, in strictness, that such a consciousness might exist virtually
as a power which is not exercised, a reserve, a potentiality, or a
possibility of being; but we cannot comprehend that this power can
realise or actualize itself. There is therefore no actual
consciousness without an object.

The problem we have just raised, that of the separability of the
elements which compose an act of consciousness, is continued by
another problem--that of unconsciousness. It is almost the same
problem, for to ask one's self what becomes of a known thing when we
separate from it the consciousness which at first accompanied it, is
to ask one's self in what an unconscious phenomenon consists.

We have, till now, considered the two principal forms of
unconsciousness--that in nature and that in thought. The first named
unconsciousness does not generally bear that name, but is rather
discussed under the name of idealism and realism. Whatever be their
names, these two kinds of unconsciousness are conceivable, and the
more so that they both belong to physical nature.

If we allow ourselves to be guided by the concept of separability, we
shall now find that we have exhausted the whole series of possible
problems, for we have examined all the possible separations between
the consciousness and its objects; but if we use another concept, that
of unconsciousness, we can go further and propound a new problem: can
the consciousness become unconscious? But it is proper first to make a
few distinctions. It is the rôle of metaphysics to make
distinctions.[31]

Unconsciousness presupposes a death of the consciousness; but this
death has its degrees, and before complete extinction we may conceive
it to undergo many attenuations. There is, first, the diminution of
consciousness.

Consciousness is a magnitude capable of increase and decrease, like
sensation itself. According to the individual, consciousness may have
a very large or a very small field, and may embrace at the same time a
variable number of objects. I can pay attention to several things at
the same time, but when I am tired it becomes more difficult to me. I
lose in extension, or, as is still said, the field of consciousness is
restricted. It may also lose not only in extent of surface, but in
depth. We have all of us observed in our own selves moments of obscure
consciousness when we understand dimly, and moments of luminous
consciousness which carry one almost to the very bottom of things. It
is difficult to consider those in the wrong who admit, with Leibnitz,
the existence of small states of consciousness. The lessening of the
consciousness is already our means of understanding the unconscious;
unconsciousness is the limit of this reduction.[32]

This singular fact has also been noticed, that, in the same individual
there may co-exist several kinds of consciousness which do not enter
into communication with each other and which are not acquainted with
each other. There is a principal consciousness which speaks, and, in
addition, accessory kinds of consciousness which do not speak, but
reveal their existence by the use of other modes of expression, of
which the most frequent is writing.

This doubling or fractionation of the consciousness and personality
have often been described in the case of hysterical subjects. They
sometimes occur quite spontaneously, but mostly they require a little
suggestion and cultivation. In any case, that they are produced in one
way or other proves that they are possible, and, for the theory, this
possibility is essential. Facts of this kind do not lead to a theory
of the unconscious, but they enable us to understand how certain
phenomena, unconscious in appearance, are conscious to themselves,
because they belong to states of consciousness which have been
separated from each other.

A third thesis, more difficult of comprehension than the other two,
supposes that the consciousness may be preserved in an unconscious
form. This is difficult to admit, because unconsciousness is the
negation of consciousness. It is like saying that light can be
preserved when darkness is produced, or that an object still exists
when, by the hypothesis, it has been radically destroyed. This idea
conveys no intelligible meaning, and there is no need to dwell on it.

We have not yet exhausted all the concepts whereby we may get to
unconsciousness. Here is another, the last I shall quote, without,
however, claiming that it is the last which exists. We might call it
the physiological concept, for it is the one which the physiologists
employ for choice. It is based upon the observation of the phenomena
which are produced in the nervous system during our acts of
consciousness; these phenomena precede consciousness as a rule, and
condition it. According to a convenient figure which has been long in
use, the relations of the physiological phenomenon to the
consciousness are represented as follows: the physiological phenomenon
consists in an excitement which, at one time, follows a direct and
short route from the door by which it enters the nervous system to the
door by which it makes its exit. In this case, it works like a simple
mechanical phenomenon; but sometimes it makes a longer journey, and
takes a circuitous road by which it passes into the higher nerve
centres, and it is at the moment when it takes this circuitous road
that the phenomenon of consciousness is produced. The use of this
figure does not prejudge any important question.

Going further, many contemporary authors do not content themselves
with the proposition that the consciousness is conditioned by the
nervous phenomenon, but suggest also that it is continually
accompanied by it. Every psychical fact of perception, of emotion, or
of idea should have, it is supposed, a physiological basis. It would
therefore be, taken in its entirety, psycho-physiological. This is
called the parallelist theory.

We cannot discuss this here, as we shall meet with it again in the
third part of this book. It has the advantage of leading to a very
simple definition of unconsciousness. The unconscious is that which is
purely physiological. We represent to ourselves the mechanical part of
the total phenomenon continuing to produce itself, in the absence of
the consciousness, as if this last continued to follow and illuminate
it.

Such are the principal conceptions that may be formed of the
unconscious. They are probably not the only ones, and our list is not
exhaustive.

After having indicated what the unconscious is, we will terminate by
pointing out what it is not and what it cannot be.

We think, or at least we have impliedly supposed in the preceding
definitions, that the unconscious is only something unknown, which may
have been known, or which might become known under certain conditions,
and which only differs from the known by the one characteristic of not
being actually known. If this notion be correct, one has really not
the right to arm this unconsciousness with formidable powers. It has
the power of the reality to which it corresponds, but its character
of unconsciousness adds nothing to this. It is the same with it as
with the science of the future. No scholar will hesitate to admit that
that science will be deeper and more refined than that already formed.
But it is not from the fact that it is unknown that it will deserve
its superiority: it is from the phenomena that it will embrace. To
give to that which is unconscious, as we here understand it, an
overwhelming superiority over the conscious as such, we must admit
that the consciousness is not only a useless luxury, but the
dethronement of the forces that it accompanies.

In the next place, I decline to admit that the consciousness itself
can become unconscious, and yet continue in some way under an
unconscious form. This would be, in my opinion, bringing together two
conceptions which contradict each other, and thus denying after having
affirmed. From the moment that the consciousness dies, there remains
nothing of it, unless it be the conditions of its appearance,
conditions which are distinct from itself. Between two moments of
consciousness separated by time or by a state of unconsciousness,
there does not and cannot exist any link. I feel incapable of
imagining of what this link could be composed, unless it were
material--that is to say, unless it were supplied from the class of
objects. I have already said that the substantialist thesis
endeavours to establish a continuity between one consciousness and
another separated by time, by supposing a something durable, of which
the consciousness would be a property of intermittent manifestation.
They would thus explain the interruptions of consciousness as the
interruptions in the light of a lamp. When the light is extinguished,
the lamp remains in darkness, but is still capable of being lighted.
Let us discard this metaphor, which may lead to illusion. The concept
of consciousness can furnish no link and no mental state which remains
when the consciousness is not made real; if this link exists, it is in
the permanence of the material objects and of the nervous organism
which allows the return of analogous conditions of matter.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 31: In metaphysics we reason, not on facts, but most often
on conceptions. Now just as facts are precise so conceptions are vague
in outline. Facts are like crystallised bodies, ideas like liquids and
gases. We think we have an idea, and it changes form without our
perceiving it. We fancy we recognise one idea, and it is but another,
which differs slightly from the preceding one. By means of
distinctions we ought to struggle against this flowing away and flight
of ideas.]

[Footnote 32: I think I have come across in ARISTOTLE the ingenious
idea that the enfeeblement of the consciousness and its disorder may
be due to the enfeeblement and disorder of the object. It is a theory
which is by no means improbable.]




CHAPTER IX

DEFINITIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY


Let us resume the study of the preceding ideas in another form. Since,
moreover, to define mind is at the same time to define psychology, let
us seek for the truth which we can glean from the definitions of this
science. Our object is not to discover an exact definition, but to
make use of those already existing.

To define psychology is to describe the features of the domain over
which this science holds sway, and at the same time to indicate the
boundaries which separate it from its neighbours. At first sight this
is an affair of geometric survey, presenting no kind of difficulty;
for psychology does not merge by insensible transitions into the
neighbouring sciences, as physics does with chemistry, for example, or
chemistry with biology.

To all the sciences of external nature psychology offers the violent
opposition of the moral to the physical world. It cannot be put in
line with the physical sciences. It occupies, on the contrary, a
position apart. It is the starting point, the most abstract and simple
of the moral sciences; and it bears the same relation to them that
mechanics does to the physical.

All this is doubtless true; and yet a very great difficulty has been
experienced in condensing into a clear definition the essence of
psychology. This is proved by the multiplicity of definitions
attempted. They are so many because none of them has proved completely
satisfactory. Their abundance shows their insufficiency. I will try to
introduce a little order into these attempts, and propose to
distribute the definitions of psychology into the following
categories:--

     1. The definition by substance; the metaphysical definition
          _par excellence_.

     2. The definition by enumeration.

     3.  "      "         method.

     4.  "      "         degree of certainty.

     5.  "      "         content.

     6.  "      "         point of view.

     7.  "      "         the peculiar nature of mental laws.

We will rapidly run through this series of efforts at definition, and
shall criticise and reject nearly the whole of them; for the last
alone seems exact--that is to say, in harmony with the ideas laid down
above.

Metaphysical definition has to-day taken a slightly archaistic turn.
Psychology used to be considered as the _science of the soul_. This
is quite abandoned. Modern authors have adopted the expression and
also the idea of Lange,[33] who was, I think, the first to declare
that we ought to cultivate a _soulless psychology_. This categorical
declaration caused an uproar, and a few ill-informed persons
interpreted it to mean that the new psychology which has spread in
France under cover of the name of Ribot, sought to deny the existence
of the soul, and was calculated to incline towards materialism. This
is an error.

It is very possible, indeed, that several adepts of the new or
experimental psychology may be materialists from inward conviction.
The exclusive cultivation of external facts, of phenomena termed
material, evidently tends--this is a mystery to none--to incline the
mind towards the metaphysical doctrine of materialism. But, after
making this avowal, it is right to add at once that psychology, as a
science of facts, is the vassal of no metaphysical doctrine. It is
neither spiritualist, materialist, nor monist, but a science of facts
solely. Ribot and his pupils have proclaimed this aloud at every
opportunity. Consequently it must be recognised that the rather
amphibological expression "soulless psychology" implies no negation of
the existence of the soul. It is--and this is quite a different
thing--rather an attitude of reserve in regard to this problem. We do
not solve this problem; we put it on one side.

And, certainly, we are right to do so. The soul, viewed as a
substance--that is, as a something distinct from psychical phenomena,
which, while being their cause and support, yet remains inaccessible
to our direct means of cognition--is only an hypothesis, and it cannot
serve as objective to a science of facts. This would imply a
contradiction in terms.

Unfortunately; we must confess that if it be right to relegate to
metaphysics the discussion on the concept of the soul, it does not
really suffice to purge our minds of all metaphysics; and a person who
believes himself to be a simple and strict experimentalist is often a
metaphysician without knowing it. These excommunications of
metaphysics also seem rather childish at the present day. There is
less risk than some years ago in declaring that: "Here metaphysics
commence and positive science ends, and I will go no further." There
is even a tendency in modern psychologists to interest themselves in
the highest philosophical problems, and to take up a certain position
with regard to them.

The second kind of definition is, we have said, that by enumeration.
It consists in placing before the eyes of the reader an assortment of
psychological phenomena and then saying: "These are the things
psychology studies." One will take readily as samples the ideas,
reasonings, emotions, and other manifestations of mental life. If this
is only a strictly provisional definition, a simple introduction to
the subject, we accept it literally. It may serve to give us a first
impression of things, and to refresh the memories of those who, by a
rather extraordinary chance, would not doubt that psychology studies
our thoughts. But whatever may be the number of these deeply ignorant
persons, they constitute, I think, a negligible quantity; and, after
these preliminaries, we must come to a real definition and not juggle
with the problem, which consists in indicating in what the spiritual
is distinguished from the material. Let us leave on one side,
therefore, the definitions by enumeration.

Now comes the definition by method. Numbers of authors have supposed
that it is by its method that psychology is distinguished from the
other sciences.

To the mind is attached the idea of the within, to nature the idea of
being without the mind, of constituting a "without" (_un dehors_). It
is a vague idea, but becomes precise in a good many metaphors, and has
given rise to several forms of speech. Since the days of Locke, we
have always spoken of the internal life of the mind as contrasted
with the external life, of subjective reality as contrasted with
objective reality; and in the same way we oppose the external senses
to the inner sense (the internal perception), which it has at times
been proposed to erect into a sixth sense. Though no longer quite the
Cartesian dualism, this is still a dualism.

It has also been said that psychology is the science of introspection,
and, in addition, that scientific psychology is a controlled
introspection. This science of the "internal facts of man" would thus
be distinguished from the other natural sciences which are formed by
the use of our outer senses, by external observation--that is to say,
to use a neologism, by externospection. This verbal symmetry may
satisfy for a moment minds given to words, but on reflection it is
perceived that the distinction between introspection and
externospection does not correspond to a fundamental and constant
difference in the nature of things or in the processes of cognition. I
acknowledge it with some regret, and thus place myself in
contradiction with myself; for I for a long time believed, and have
even said in print, that psychology is the science of introspection.
My error arose from my having made too many analyses of detail, and
not having mounted to a sufficiently wide-reaching conception.

The definition I have given of consciousness is the implied
condemnation of the above ideas. Consciousness, being nothing but an
act of revelation, has neither a within nor a without; it does not
correspond to a special domain which would be an inner one with regard
to another domain.

Every consideration on the position of things is borrowed from the
sphere of the object, and remains foreign to the sphere of the
consciousness. It is by an abuse of language that we speak of the
outer world in relation to the world of consciousness, and it is pure
imagination on the part of philosophers to have supposed that our
sensations are first perceived as internal states and states of
consciousness, and are subsequently projected without to form the
outer world. The notion of internal and external is only understood
for certain objects which we compare by position to certain others.

In fact, we find that the opposition between an external and an
internal series is generally founded on two characteristics: sensation
is considered external in relation to the idea, and an object of
cognition is considered as internal when it is accessible only to
ourselves. When these two characteristics are isolated from each
other, one may have doubts; but when they co-exist, then the
outwardness or inwardness appears fully evidenced. We see then that
this distinction has nothing to do with the value of consciousness,
and has nothing mental about it.

It is thus that our ideas are judged from internal events. It is our
microcosm opposed to the macrocosm. It is the individual opposed to
the social. Looking at an external object, we remain in communion with
our fellows, for we receive, or think we receive, identical
sensations. At all events, we receive corresponding sensations. On the
other hand, my thought is mine, and is known to me alone; it is my
sanctuary, my private closet, where others do not enter. Every one can
see what I see, but no one knows what I think.

But this difference in the accessibility of phenomena is not due to
their peculiar nature. It is connected with a different fact, with the
modes of excitement which call them forth. If the visual sensation is
common to all, it is because the exciting cause of the sensation is an
object external to our nervous systems, and acting at a distance on
all.[34] The tactile sensation is at the beginning more personal to
the one who experiences it, since it requires contact; and the lower
sensations are in this intimacy still in progress. And then, the same
object can give rise, in common-place circumstances, to a sensation
either common to all beings or special to one alone. The capsule of
antipyrine which I swallow is, before my doing so, visible to all
eyes; once in my mouth, I am the only one to perceive it. It is
therefore possible that the same sensation, according to the
displacements of the object which excites it, may make part of the
internal or of the external series; and as all psychic life is
sensation, even effort, and, as we are assured, emotion, it follows
that our argument extends to all the psychical elements.

Finally, the internal or external character of events, which might be
called their geographical position, is a characteristic which has no
influence upon the method destined to take cognisance of it. The
method remains one. Introspection does not represent a source of
cognition distinct from externospection, for the same faculties of the
mind--reason, attention, and reflection--act on sensation, the source
of the so-called external sciences, and on the idea, the source of the
so-called inner science. A fact can be studied by essentially the same
process, whether regarded by the eyes or depicted by the memory. The
consciousness changes its object and orientation, not its nature. It
is as if, with the same opera-glass, we looked in turn at the wall of
the room and through the window.

I can even quote on this point a significant fact: there are observers
who are organised in such a way that they especially observe by
memory. Placed before the sensorial phenomenon which strikes their
senses, they are sometimes amazed, as if hypnotised; they require to
get away from it to regain consciousness of themselves, to analyse the
fact, and to master it, and it is by means of the memory that they
study it, on condition, of course, of afterwards coming back to verify
their conclusions by a fresh observation from nature. Will it be said
that the physicist, the chemist, or the biologist who follows this
slow method, and who thus observes retroactively, practises physics
and biology by introspection? Evidently this would be ridiculous.

Conversely, introspection may, in certain cases, adopt the procedure
of externospection. No doubt it would be inexact to say that the
perception of one of our ideas always takes place through the same
mechanism as the perception of one of our sensations. To give an
account of what we think does not imply the same work as in the case
of what we see; for, generally, our thoughts and our images do not
appear to us spontaneously. They are first sought for by us, and are
only realised after having been wished for. We go from the vague to
the precise, from the confused to the clear; the direction of thought
precedes, then, its realisation in images; and the latter, being
expected, is necessarily comprehended when it is formed. But we may
come across curious circumstances in which it is the image which has
precedence over its appearance, and in that case it is exact to say
that this uninvoked image must be interpreted and recognised as if it
were an external object. In cases of this kind, there passes through
our mind something which surprises us. I see, by internal vision, a
face with a red nose, and I have to search my memory for a long time,
even for days, in order to give precision to the vague feeling that I
have seen it before, so as to finally say with confidence, "It is So
and So!" Or else I hear in my inner ear a certain voice, with a
metallic tone and authoritative inflections: this voice pronounces
scientific phrases, gives a series of lectures, but I know not to whom
it belongs, and it costs me a long effort to reach the interpretation:
it is the voice of M. Dastre! There is, then, a certain space of time,
more or less long, in which we can correctly assert that we are not
aware of what we are thinking; we are in the presence of a thought in
the same state of uncertainty as in that of an external, unknown, and
novel object. The labour of classification and of interpretation cast
upon us is of the same order; and, when this labour is effected
incorrectly, it may end in an illusion. Therefore illusions of
thought are quite as possible as illusions of the senses, though rarer
for the reasons above stated. But the question of frequency has no
theoretical importance.

I have shown elsewhere, by experiments on hysterics, that it is
possible by the intermediary of their insensibility to touch to
suggest ideas on the value of which the patients make mistakes. For
instance, you take the finger in which they have no sensation, you
touch it, you bend it. The patient, not seeing what is done, does not
feel it, but the tactile sensation unfelt by their principal
consciousness somehow awakes the visual image of the finger; this
enters into the field of consciousness, and most often is not
recognised by the subject, who describes the occurrence in his own
way; he claims, for instance, that he thinks of sticks or of columns.
In reality he does not know of what he is thinking, and we know better
than he. He is thinking of his finger, and does not recognise it.

All these examples show that the clearly defined characteristics into
which it is sought to divide extrospection and introspection do not
exist. There is, however, a reason for preserving the distinction,
because it presents a real interest for the psychology of the
individual. These two words introspection and extrospection admirably
convey the difference in the manner of thinking between those who
from preference look, and those who from preference reflect. On the
one hand, the observers, who are often men of action; on the other,
the speculators, who are often mystics. But it would be no more
legitimate by this means to separate psychology and physics than to
say, for instance, "There are two kinds of geology: one is the geology
of France, for one is acquainted with it without going from home, and
the other is that of the rest of the world, because in order to know
it one must cross the frontier."

We reject, therefore, the definition drawn from the difference of
method. At bottom there is no difference of method, but only
differences of process, of _technique_. The method is always the same,
for it is derived from the application of a certain number of laws to
the objects of cognition, and these laws remain the same in all
spheres of application.

Here is another difference of method which, if it were true, would
have an incalculable importance. Psychology, we are told, is a science
of direct and immediate experiment; it studies facts as they present
themselves to our consciousness, while the natural sciences are
sciences of indirect and mediate experiment, for they are compelled to
interpret the facts of consciousness and draw from them conclusions on
nature. It has also been said, in a more ambitious formula, "The
science of physical objects is relative; logical science is absolute."

Let us examine this by the rapid analysis of any perception taken at
haphazard. What I perceive directly, immediately, we are told, is not
the object, it is my state of consciousness; the object is inferred;
concluded, and taken cognisance of through the intermediary of my
state of consciousness. We only know it, says Lotze, _circa rem_. It
is therefore apprehended less immediately, and every natural science
employs a more roundabout method than that of psychology. This last,
by studying states of consciousness, which alone are known to us
directly, comprehends reality itself, absolute reality. "There is more
absolute reality," M. Rabier boldly says, "in the simple feeling that
a man, or even an animal, has of its pain when beaten than in all the
theories of physics, for, beyond these theories, it can be asked, what
are the things that exist. But it is an absurdity to ask one's self
if, beyond the pain of which one is conscious, there be not another
pain different from that one."[35]

Let us excuse in psychologists this petty and common whim for
exaggerating the merit of the science they pursue. But here the limit
is really passed, and no scholar will admit that the perception and
representation of a body, as it may take place in the brain of a
Berthelot, can present any inferiority as a cognition of the absolute,
to the pain felt by the snail I crush under my foot. Nobody except
metaphysicians will acknowledge that psychology is a more precise and
certain science than physics or chemistry.

The criterion furnished by the development of the respective sciences
would prove just the contrary. The observations of psychology are
always rather unprecise. Psychological phenomena, notwithstanding the
efforts of Fechner and his school, are not yet measured with the same
strictness and ease as the tangible reality. To speak plainly, the
psychologist who vaunts the superiority of his method, and only shows
inferior results, places himself in a somewhat ridiculous and
contradictory position; he deserves to be compared to those
spiritualists who claim the power of evoking the souls of the
illustrious dead and only get from them platitudes.

In the main the arguments of the metaphysicians given above appear to
me to contain a grave error. This consists in supposing that the
natural sciences study the reality hidden beneath sensation, and only
make use of this fact as of a sign which enables them to get back from
effect to cause. This is quite inexact. That the natural sciences are
limited by sensation is true; but they do not go outside it, they
effect their constructions with sensation alone. And the reason is
very simple: it is the only thing they know. To the metaphysical
psychologist, who claims sensation as his own property, saying, "But
this sensation is a state of my consciousness, it is mine, it is
myself," the physicist has the right to answer: "I beg your pardon!
this sensation is the external object that I am studying; it is my
column of mercury, my spring, my precipitate, my amoeba; I
comprehend these objects directly, and I want no other." Psychology
finds itself, therefore, exactly on the same footing as the other
sciences in the degree in which it studies sensations that it
considers as its own property. I have already said that the sensations
proper to psychology are hardly represented otherwise than by the
emotional sensations produced by the storms in the apparatus of
organic life.

We now come to the definitions by content. They have been numerous,
but we shall only quote a few. The most usual consists in saying, that
_Psychology studies the facts of consciousness_. This formula passes,
in general, as satisfactory. The little objection raised against it
is, that it excludes the unconscious facts which play so important a
part in explaining the totality of mental life; but it only requires
some usual phrase to repair this omission. One might add, for
instance, to the above formula: conscious facts and those which,
while unconscious under certain conditions, are yet conscious in
others.

This is not, however, the main difficulty, which is far more serious.
On close examination, it is seen that the term, _fact of
consciousness_, is very elastic, and that for a reason easy to state.
This is, that all facts which exist and are revealed to us reach us by
the testimony of the consciousness, and are, consequently, facts of
consciousness

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