Consciousness

The desire on the part of men educated in laboratories not to have their physical reasonings mixed up with such incommensurable factors as feelings is certainly very strong. Nothing is commoner than to hear them speak of conscious events as something so essentially vague and shadowy as even doubtfully to exist at all. I have heard a most intelligent [p. 3] biologist say: "It is high time for scientific men to protest against the recognition of any such thing as consciousness in a scientific investigation". In a word, feeling constitutes the "unscientific" half of existence, and any one who enjoys calling himself a "scientist" will be too happy to purchase an untrammeled homogeneity of terms in the studies of his predilection, at the slight cost of admitting a dualism which, in the same breath that it allows to mind an independent status of being, banishes it to a limbo of causal inertness, from whence no intrusion or interruption on its part need ever be feared.

therefore admits no witness but that of life or consciousness 100 LETTER XI. Objection to miracle 104 Miracle is bad science, but very good philosophy 106 My own intellectual attitude towards miracle 112 Infirmity of the critical or sceptical understanding 118 Swedeuborg an out-and-out realist 124 LETTEE XII. Creation a spontaneous work 125 Nature unreal and impersonal 127 It is a functioning of Divine Love towards our spiritual manhood 130 The educative use of our natural experience 132 Genesis of this absurd cosmological " Nothing " 134 Creation as a letter an immense fallacy 136 Creation has no locus in, quo but the human consciousness 138 Its sole and total method : Redemption 140 LETTER XIII. God the sole subject in creation, man the sole object 141 Creation only a philosophic name for our natural redemption . . . 144 What do we mean by the term Nature ? 146 Nature a strictly subjective, or metaphysical existence 148 Concrete uses of the word 150

Evolution relatively a spiritual flower ; involution its natural stem 224 Science essentially ministerial, not magisterial to the mind 226 Nature neither begins nor ends anything 228 LETTEE XVIII. The forte and foible of science 229 Nature's first lesson to the intellect 231 Difference between physical and natural existence 232 The philosopher has no call to look at nature outwardly 234 Science has no perception of the spiritual ends of nature, and therefore confounds nature with physics 236 It claims that natural existence is identical with spiritual being . . . 240 Professor Huxley as a philosopher 242 "What protoplasm symbolizes to the intellect 244 Physicism a providential gospel 246 LETTER XIX. Swedenborg's philosophy of nature 247 Good and evil the mere earth of the finite consciousness 250 Heaven and hell have only a subjective truth 252 Subjective genesis of hell in man 254 Hell is always heaven to the evil man but when he is forced not to do evil 256

The matter covered by both these words is Humanity and the totality of its conditions, nothing short of the entire world of phenomenal expeirience, — mineral, vegetable, animal, and human, — " Nature " culminating in, whilst " Society " starts from, the moral and religious conscious-j -^ ness of man. This is why Tsaid the system could hospitably house anything that naturalistic evolutionism might ever have to say about man; for, according to both doctrines, man's morality and religion, his consciousness of self and his moral, conscience, are natural products like everything! ^ else we see. Now, for Mr. James, the consciousness of self and the conscience are the hinges on which the process of creation turns, as it slowl; revolves from its formative and natural to it redeemed and spiritual position of equilibrium What I say will still be dark and unreal enough to those who know nothing of the original; but the exercise of a little patience Will erelong make things clear.

" jin morality that being takes wholly, and in religion •it takes partly, the form of a lie. ' Let us consider the matter naively and mythically, so as to understand. Remember, that for Mr. James a mere resistless " bang " is no creative process at all, and that a real creation means nothing short of a real bringing to life of the essential nothingness, whicMis the eternal antithesis to God, — a work, therefore, upon that nothingness actually performed. Well, then, God must work upon the void; but how can the trackless void be wrought upon? It must first be vivified and quickened into some kind of substantiality of its own, and made exisA • tential and phenomenal instead of merely logical; and essential that it was, before any further fashioning of it can take place. God then must, in the first instance, make a being that has the void for its other parent, and involves nothingness in itself. ] To make a long story short, then, God's first pro- ^ duct is a Nature subject to self-consciousness or self- ^ hood, — that is, a Nature essentially good, as being divine, but the several members whereof appropriate the goodness, and egoistically and atheistically^

What science wants is a context to make the trance-phenomena continuous with other physiological and psychological facts. Curious to ascertain whether there were continuity between the medium-trance and the ordinary hypnotic trance, I made some observations ad hoc upon Mrs. P. My first two attempts to hypnotize her were unsuccessful. Between the second time and the third, I suggested to her "Control" in the medium-trance that he should make her a mesmeric subject for me. He agreed. (A suggestion of this sort made by the operator in one hypnotic trance would probably have some effect on the next.) She became partially hypnotized on the third trial; but the effect was so slight that I ascribe it rather to the effect of repetition than to the suggestion made. By the fifth trial she had become a pretty good hypnotic subject, as far as muscular phenomena and automatic imitations of speech and gesture go; but I could not affect her consciousness, or otherwise get her beyond this

But the slightest reflection shows that phenomena have absolutely no power to influence our ideas until they have first impressed our senses and our brain. The bare existence of a past fact is no ground for our remembering it. Unless we have seen it, or somehow undergone it, we shall never know of its having been. The experiences of the body are thus one of the conditions of the faculty of memory being what it is. And a very small amount of reflection on facts shows that one part of the body, namely, the brain, is the part whose experiences are directly concerned. If the nervous communication be cut off between the brain and other parts, the experiences of those other parts are non-existent for the mind. The eye is blind, the ear deaf, the hand insensible and motionless. And conversely, if the brain be injured, consciousness is abolished or altered, even although every other organ in the body be ready to play its normal part.

But actions originally prompted by conscious intelligence may grow so automatic by dint of habit as to be apparently unconsciously performed. Standing, walking, buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking, even saying one’s prayers, may be done when the mind is absorbed in other things. The performances of animal instinct seem semi-automatic, and the reflex acts of self-preservation certainly are so. Yet they resemble intelligent acts in bringing about the same ends at which the animals’ consciousness, on other occasions, deliberately aims. Shall the study of such machine-like yet purposive acts as these be included in Psychology?

phenomenally given thoughts as products of deeper-lying entities (whether the latter be named 'Soul,' 'Transcendental Ego,' 'Ideas,' or 'Elementary Units of Consciousness') are metaphysical. This book consequently rejects both the associationist and the spiritualist theories; and in this strictly positivistic point of view

motor zone. Motor Aphasia. The sight-centre. Mental blindness. The hearing-centre. Sensory Aphasia. Centres for smell and taste. The touch-centre. Man's Consciousness limited to the hemispheres. The restitution of function. Final correction of the Meynert scheme. Conclusions. CHAPTER III. ON SOME GENERAL CONDITIONS