Mind-energy, lectures and essays

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I Life and Consciousness 3

The great problems — Philosophical systems — Lings of facts — Consciousness, memory, anticipation — What beings are conscious ? — The faculty of choosing — Consciousness awake and consciousness slumbering — Consciousness and unf oreseeability — The mechanism of free action — The tensions of duration — The evolution of life — Man — The creative activity — The meaning of joy — The moral life — The social life — The beyond.

II

THE SOUL AND THE BODY A Lecture delivered in Paris, at Foi et Vie, April 28, 19 12.

The subject of my lecture is " The Soul and the Body." When I say that by this I mean Matter and Mind, you may fear that I am about to embark on a general disquisition concerning all that exists and even, it may be, a great deal that does not exist. But be reassured — it is not my intention to try to discover the fundamental nature of matter, much less the fundamental nature of mind. It is possible to distinguish two things from one another, and to a certain point to determine their relations, without needing to know the nature of each of them. It is impossible for me at this moment to be acquainted with all of the people now around me, yet I distinguish myself from them and also see the place they occupy in relation to me. So in the case of the body and the soul; to define the essence of each would be a long and arduous undertaking; but it is easier to know what unites and what separates them, for their union and separation are facts of experience.

First, then, what does the simple and direct experience of common sense tell us on this point? Each of us is a body, subject to the same laws as all other portions of matter. When pushed, we advance; when pulled, we recoil; when lifted up and let go, we fall. But, besides these movements which are mechanically provoked by an external cause, there are others which seem to come from within and which cut across the first kind by their unforeseen character: they are called " voluntary." What is the cause of them? It is what each of us denotes by the words " I " or " me." And what is the "I"? Something which appears, rightly or wrongly, to overflow every part of the body which is joined to it, passing beyond it in space as well as in time. In space, for the body of each of us is confined within the distinct surfaces which bound it, whilst by our faculty of perception, and more especially of seeing, we radiate far beyond our bodies, even to the stars. In time, for the body is matter, matter is in the present, and, if it be true that the past leaves there traces of itself, they are not traces of the past except for a consciousness perceiving them and interpreting what it perceives by the light of what it remembers. This consciousness retains the past, enrolls what time unrolls, and with it prepares a future which it will itself help to create. Indeed, the voluntary act, of which I have just spoken, is nothing but a group of movements learnt in previous experience, and inflected in a direction each time new by a conscious force whose main purpose appears to be the ceaseless bringing of something new into the world. Yes, it creates something new outside itself, since it outlines in space unforeseen, unforeseeable movements. And also it creates something new inside itself, since the voluntary action reacts on him who wills it, modifies in some degree the character of the person from whom it emanates, and accomplishes, by a kind of miracle, that creation of self by itself which seems to be the very object of human life. To sum up, then, besides the body which is confined to the present moment in time and limited to the place it occupies in space, which behaves automatically and reacts mechanically to external influences, we apprehend something which is much more extended than the body in space and which endures through time, something which requires from, or imposes on, the body movements no longer automatic and foreseen, but unforeseeable and free. This thing, which overflows the body on all sides and which creates acts by new-creating itself, is the " I," the "soul," the "mind" — mind being precisely a force which can draw from itself more than it contains, yield more than it receives, give more than it has. This is what I believe I see. Such is the appearance.

Some one may say to me: "Very good, but it is only an appearance. " Look closer. Listen to what science says. " In the first place, you will yourself acknowledge that this ' soul ' is never seen at work without a body. Its body accompanies it from birth to death, and even supposing the soul be really distinct from the body, everything happens as though it were inseparably united to it. Your consciousness vanishes if you inhale chloroform, it is heightened if you drink alcohol or coffee. A slight intoxication may set up troubles profoundly affecting intelligence, sensibility and will. A lasting intoxication, such as certain infectious diseases leave behind, will produce insanity. If it be true that the autopsy does not invariably disclose lesions in the brain of the insane, at least it often does, and even when there is no visible lesion, it is probable that a chemical change in the tissues has caused the disease. Let us go further: science can localize in definite convolutions of the brain definite functions of the mind, such as the faculty of performing voluntary movements, of which you spoke just now. Lesions of particular points in the Rolandic area, between the frontal and the parietal lobes, involve the loss of movements of the arm, of the leg, of the face, of the tongue, according to the exact spot affected. Even memory, which you consider an essential function of the mind, has been partly localized. At the foot of the third left frontal convolution are seated the memories of the movements of the articulation of speech; in one region between the first and second left temporal convolutions is preserved the memory of the sound of words; at the posterior part of the second left parietal convolution are deposited the visual images of words, and of letters, etc.

Let us go further still. You said that in space, as in time, the soul overflows the body to which it is joined. Let us consider space. It is true that sight and hearing go beyond the limits of the body. But why? Because vibrations from afar have impressed eye and ear and been transmitted to the brain; there, in the brain, the stimulation has become auditory or visual sensation; perception is therefore within the body and not spread abroad. Let us consider time. You claim that the mind embraces the past, whilst the body is confined within a present which recommences without ceasing. But we recall the past only because our body preserves the still present traces of it. The impressions made by objects on the brain abide there like the images on a sensitive plate, or the records on gramophone disks. Just as the disk repeats the melody when the apparatus is set working, so the brain revives the memory when the requisite shock is produced at the point where the impression is retained. So then, no more in time than in space does the soul overflow the body. But is there really a soul distinct from the body? We have just seen that changes, or, to be more exact, displacements and new groupings of molecules and atoms are continually going on in the brain. Some of these express themselves in what we call sensations, others in memories; without any doubt brain-changes correspond to all intellectual, sensible and voluntary facts. To them consciousness is superadded, a kind of phosphorescence ; it is like the luminous trail of the match we strike on the wall in the dark.

This phosphorescence, being, as it were, a selfillumination, begets strange internal optical illusions ; so consciousness imagines itself to be modifying, directing and producing the movements when in fact it is itself the result of them. The belief in free will consists in this. The truth is that could we look through the skull and observe the inner working of the brain with instruments magnifying some billion times more than our most powerful microscopes, if we then should witness the dance of the molecules, atoms and electrons of which the cerebral cortex is composed, and if in addition we possessed the rule for transposing the cerebral into the mental, — a dictionary, so to speak, which would enable us to translate each figure of the dance into the language of thought and feeling, — we should know, quite as well as the supposed ' soul/ what it was thinking, feeling and wishing, what it would be believing itself doing freely, though it would only be acting mechanically. We should know it, indeed, much better than it could know itself, for this so-called conscious * soul ' lights up only a small part of the intra-cerebral dance ; — the soul is only the assemblage of will-o-the-wisps which hover above certain privileged groups of atoms ; — whereas we should be observing all the groups of all the atoms, the whole intra-cerebral dance. Your * conscious soul ' is at most an effect which perceives effects : we should be seeing the effects and the causes."

This is what is sometimes said in the name of science. But is it not clear that if by " scientific " we mean what is observed or observable, demonstrated or demonstrable, then a theory such as we have just sketched is not scientific, for in the present state of science we cannot even have a notion of the possibility of verifying it? It is alleged, it is true, that the law of the conservation of energy is opposed to the idea that even the smallest quantity of force or movement is created in the universe, and that if things did not behave mechanically in the manner just stated, and if an efficient will could intervene to perform free actions, the law of the conservation of energy would be violated. But to reason thus is simply to beg the question, for the law of the conservation of energy, like all physical laws, is no more than a deduction from observations of physical phenomena; it expresses what happens in a domain wherein no one has ever held that there was caprice, choice or liberty; and what precisely we want to know is whether it can still be verified in the cases in which consciousness (which, after all, is a faculty of observation and which experiments in its own way) feels itself in possession of a free activity. Whatever is directly presented to the senses or to consciousness, whatever is an object of experience, whether external or internal, must be held to be real so long as it has not been proved to be a simple appearance. Now, that we feel ourselves free, that such is our immediate impression, is not in doubt.

On those who hold that the feeling is illusory, then, falls the onus of proof, — and they can prove nothing of the kind, since all they can do is to extend arbitrarily to voluntary actions a law verified in cases in which the will does not intervene. I quite agree that, if the will is capable of creating energy, the quantity created may be so small that it would not affect sensibly our instruments of measurement, Yet its effect might be enormous, like that of the spark which explodes a powder-magazine. I will not enter into a thorough investigation of this point. It is enough for me to say that when we consider the mechanism of voluntary movement in particular, the functioning of the nervous system in general, and in fact life itself in what is essential to it, we are led to the conclusion that the invariable contrivance of consciousness, from its most humble origin in elementary living forms, is to convert physical determinism to its own ends, or rather to elude the law of conservation of energy whilst obtaining from matter a fabrication of explosives, ever intenser and more utilizable. It will then require an almost negligible action, such as the slight pressure of the finger on the hair-trigger of a pistol, in order to liberate at the required moment, in the direction chosen, as great an amount as is wanted of accumulated energy. The glycogen lodged in the muscles is, in fact, a real explosive; by it voluntary movement is accomplished: to make and utilize explosives of this kind seems to be the unvarying and essential preoccupation of life, from its first apparition in protoplasmic masses, deformable at will, to its complete expansion in organisms capable of free actions. But I will not dwell further on what after all is only a parenthesis; I have dealt with the subject elsewhere. So I come back to what I said at first, that it is impossible to call a thesis scientific which is neither proved nor even suggested by experience.

What in fact does experience tell us? It tells us that the life of the soul, or, to use a term which does not appear to beg the question, the life of the mind, is bound to the life of the body, that there is solidarity between them, nothing more. But this point has never been contested by any one; it is a long way from that to maintain that the cerebral is the equivalent of the mental, that one might read in a brain whatever is taking place in the corresponding mind. A coat is solidary with the nail on which it hangs; it falls if the nail is removed; it sways if the nail is loose and shaken; it is torn or pierced if the nail is too pointed; it does not follow from all this that each detail of the nail corresponds to a detail of the coat, nor that the nail is the equivalent of the coat, still less that nail and coat are the same thing. So, too, the mind is undeniably attached to the brain, but from this it does not in the least follow that in the brain is pictured every detail of the mind, nor that the mind is a function of the brain. All that observation, experience, and consequently science, allows us to affirm is the existence of a certain relation between brain and mind.

What is this relation ? Ah ! We may indeed challenge philosophy here! Has it ever really given us what we had the right to expect ? To philosophy falls the task of studying the life of the soul in all its manifestations. Practised in introspection, the philosopher ought to descend within himself, and then, remounting to the surface, follow the gradual movement by which consciousness detends, extends and prepares to evolve in space. Watching this progressive materialization, marking the steps by which consciousness externalizes itself, at least he would obtain a vague intuition of what the insertion of mind in matter, the relation of body to soul, may be. No doubt it would be only a first glimmer, nothing more. But, had we only this glimmer, it would enable us to pick our way amongst the innumerable facts with which psychology and pathology deal. These facts, in their turn, correcting and completing what is incomplete or defective in the internal experience, would rectify the method of internal observation. Thus, by an indefinite series of comings and goings between two centres of observation, one situated within, the other without, we should obtain a solution more and more adequate to the problem, never perfect, as the solutions of metaphysicians too often claim to be, but always perfectible, like those of science. The first impulse would, it is true, have come from within; it is in the internal vision that we should have sought the chief enlightenment; and that is why the problem would remain what it must be, a problem of philosophy.

But metaphysicians do not readily descend from the heights whereon they love to dwell. Plato invited philosophers to turn towards the world of Ideals. Willingly they visit in that society, mixing only with well-dressed concepts, offering them opportunities to meet and inter-marry, exerting in that aristocratic circle a refined diplomacy. It goes against them to come into touch with minute facts> especially with such facts as mental maladies for example : they would be afraid of making their hands dirty. Briefly, the theory which science had the right to demand from philosophy — a theory elastic and perfectible, moulded on the totality of known facts — philosophy has either not wished or not known how to give.

Naturally enough, then, the scientist has said: " Since philosophy does not require me, by any facts and arguments, to restrict in any way or confine to any definite points the correspondence between the cerebral and the mental, I shall treat it, provisionally at any rate, as if it were perfect, as if in fact between the two there is exact equivalence or even identity. As a physiologist, with the methods at my disposal — merely external methods of observation and experiment — I see only the brain and can only deal with the brain. I shall therefore proceed as if thought was only a function of the brain; I shall thus be able to advance with more boldness, and have many more chances of making progress. When we do not know the limit of our right, it is well to begin by acting as though there were no limit; there will always be time to draw back." This is how the scientist has regarded it, and, could he dispense with philosophy, this is all that he would have thought and said.

But he cannot, and he does not, dispense with philosophy. As philosophers have not provided the plastic theory adaptable to the twofold experience, internal and external, which science needs, the scientist has naturally accepted from the ancient metaphysic the ready-made and systematic doctrine which accorded best with the rule of method he had found it most useful to follow. There was really no choice. The only definite hypothesis which the metaphysics of the last three centuries has bequeathed us on this point is that of a strict parallelism between soul and body, the soul translating what the body does, or the body what the soul does, or both body and soul expressing, each in its own way, like translations of the same original in different languages, something which is neither the one nor the other. How had the philosophy of the seventeenth century been led to this conclusion? Certainly not by the study of the anatomy or physiology of the brain, sciences then hardly in existence, nor yet by the investigation of normal psychical life and mental disease. No, the hypothesis had been deduced, naturally enough, from the general principles of a metaphysics conceived, at least in a large measure, in order to give substance to the hopes of modern physics. The discoveries which followed the Renaissance, especially those of Kepler and Galileo, had revealed the possibility of bringing down some astronomical and physical problems to those of mechanics. Thence arose the idea that the whole material universe, organic and inorganic, might be an immense machine, governed by mathematical laws. And so, living bodies in general, the body of man in particular, must exactly fit into the machine, just as wheels in a clockwork mechanism; no one could do anything which was not pre-determined and mathematically calculable. Consequently, the human soul must be incapable of creating; if it exist, its successive states must be limited to translating into the language of thought and feeling the same things which the body expresses in extension and in movement. Descartes,

So MIND-ENERGY

it is true, did not go so far: with his profound sense of reality, he preferred to allow free will a place in the world, even at the price of a slight inconsistency. And if, with Spinoza and Leibniz, this restriction disappeared, swept away by the logic of the system, if these two philosophers formulated in all its strictness the hypothesis of a constant parallelism between states of the body and states of the soul, at least they refrained from representing the soul, as a simple reflexion of the body; they would just as well have said that the body was a reflexion of the soul. They had, however, prepared the way for a Cartesianism curtailed and narrowed, according to which the mental life was only an aspect of the cerebral life, the would-be " soul " being nothing but the collection of those particular cerebral phenomena to which consciousness supervenes like a phosphorescent glow. In fact, throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, we can follow the path of this progressive simplification of the Cartesian metaphysics. In the degree that it narrowed itself, it penetrated physiology, which naturally found it a philosophy well suited to give it the confidence in itself of which it had need. And it is thus that philosophers such as La Mettrie, Helvetius, Charles Bonnet, Cabanis, whose relationship to Cartesianism is well known, brought to the science of the nineteenth century what it could best utilize of the metaphysics of the seventeenth. Now, that scientists who today philosophize on the relation of the psychical to the physical should rally to the hypothesis of parallelism is comprehensible enough, — metaphysicians cannot be said to have offered them anything else. That scientists should prefer the parallelist theory to any other to be obtained by the same method of a priori construction is easy also to understand, — they find in it an encouragement to go forward. But should any of them come and tell us they are actually talking science, that it is experience that reveals a strict and complete parallelism between the cerebral and mental life — " Ah, no ! " we reply: " Undoubtedly you can hold this theory, as the metaphysician holds it, but then it is no longer the scientist in you who speaks, it is the metaphysician. You are simply returning what we have lent you. We are well acquainted with the doctrine you are offering us. It comes from our workshops. It is we, philosophers, who have made it; and it is old, very old ware. It is not, indeed, worth less on that account, but it is not worth more. Give it to us for what it is, and do not pass off as a result of science, as a theory modelled on facts and capable of being remodelled on them, a dotctrine which had taken, even before the dawn of our physiology and psychology, the perfect and definitive form which reveals a metaphysical construction."

Let me try then to formulate the relation of mental to cerebral activity, such as it appears when we set aside every preconceived idea in order to take account of only actually known facts. A formula of this kind, necessarily provisional, can only claim more or less probability. But at least the probability will be susceptible of growing greater, the formula of becoming more and more exact, in proportion as the knowledge of the facts grows wider.

A close examination of the life of the mind and of its physiological accompaniment leads me to believe that common sense is right and that there is infinitely more, in a human consciousness, than in the corresponding brain. This, in general, is the conclusion to which I have come. For the detailed argument which has led me to this conclusion I must refer to Matter and Memory, principally the second and third chapters. It seems to me that, were one able to look inside a brain in its full activity, follow the going and coming of the atoms and interpret all they were doing, he would doubtless know something of what was going on in the mind, but he would know very little. He would know so much of the state of the soul as can be expressed in bodily gestures and attitudes and movements, he would know all that it implies in the way of actions in the course of accomplishment or simply nascent; the rest would escape him. As regards the thoughts and feelings which were being unrolled within the consciousness, he would be in the situation of the spectator seeing distinctly all that the actors were doing on the stage, but not hearing a word of what they were saying. Certainly the movements of the actors, their gestures and attitudes, have their ground in the play they are acting and if we know the text, we can in some measure foresee the gesture; but the reverse is not true : knowledge of the gestures tells us very little of the play, for there is much more in a play than the pantomime of the players. So, I believe if our science of cerebral mechanism were perfect, and our psychology also perfect, we should be able to divine what is happening in the brain during a definite state of mind; but I equally believe that the reverse would be impossible, since for one single condition of the brain we should have the choice of a host of equally appropriate states of mind.

Note that I do not say that any state of mind can correspond to a given cerebral state. Suppose you have a frame, you cannot place any picture you like in it. The frame determines something of the picture, by eliminating beforehand all which have not the same shape and size. But, provided it is correct in these respects, the picture will fit the frame. So also with the brain and consciousness. Provided the comparatively simple actions — gestures, attitudes, movements — in which a complex mental state would be materialized, are such as the brain is ready for, the mental state will insert itself exactly into the cerebral state. But there are a multitude of different pictures which would fit the frame equally well; consequently the brain does not determine thought and, at least to a large extent, thought is independent of the brain.

The study of the facts will enable us to describe with increasing accuracy the particular aspect of mental life which alone, in my opinion, is delineated in cerebral activity. Is the mental fact our faculty of perceiving and feeling? Our body, inserted in the material world, receives stimulations, to which it must respond by appropriate movements; the brain, and indeed the cerebro-spinal system in general, is concerned with these movements, it holds the body ready for them; but perception itself is a wholly different thing. Is it our faculty of willing? The body carries out voluntary movements by means of certain mechanisms set up in the nervous system and waiting only for the signal to start them; the brain is the point where the signal is given and also where the mechanism is operated. The Rolandic zone, where voluntary movement has been localized, is in fact comparable to a signal-box, from which the signalman shunts the coming train to its proper line. It is a sort of commutator, by which a given external stimulus can be put in communication with any motor disposition whatever. But beside the organs of movement and the organ of choice, there is something different in kind — choice itself. Lastly, is it the faculty of thinking? When we think, it is seldom that we are not talking inwardly; we are outlining or preparing, if we are not actually making, the articulate movements by which our thought is expressed, and all these must be already delineated in the brain. But the cerebral mechanism of thought is not, in my view, limited to this. Besides these internal movements of articulation, which are moreover not indispensable, there is something much more subtle, which is essential. I mean those nascent movements which translate symbolically the thousand successive directions of the thought. Remember that real concrete living thought is something of which psychologists have so far told us very little, because it is very ill adapted to internal observation. What is usually studied under this head is not so much thought itself as an artificial imitation of it obtained by putting together images and ideas. But with images, and even with ideas, you can no more reconstitute thinking than with positions you can make movement. The idea is a halt of thought; it arises when the thinking, instead of continuing its own train, makes a pause or is reflected back on itself. It is like the heat that produces itself in the projectile which encounters an obstacle. But it was no more a part of our thought, whilst we were thinking, than the heat was to be found in the projectile before the stop. Try, for example, by piecing together the ideas

" heat," " production " and " projectile,', and intercalating the ideas " inwardness " and " reflexion " expressed in the words " in " and " itself," to reconstitute the thought I just expressed in the sentence " heat produces itself in the projectile." You will see that it is impossible, that the thought translated by the sentence is an indivisible movement, and that the ideas corresponding to each of the words are simply the images or concepts which would arise in the mind at each moment of the thinking if the thinking halted; but it does not halt. Put aside, then, artificial reconstructions of thinking; consider thinking itself; you will find directions rather than states, and you will see that thinking is essentially a continual and continuous change of inward direction, incessantly tending to translate itself by changes of outward direction, I mean by actions and gestures capable of outlining in space and of expressing metaphorically, as it were, the comings and goings of the mind. Of these movements, sketched out or even simply prepared, we are most often unaware, because we have no interest in knowing them; but we have to notice them when we try to seize hold of our thought in order to grasp it all living and make it pass, still living, into the soul of another. The words may then have been well chosen, they will not convey the whole of what we wish to make them say if we do not succeed by the rhythm, by the punctuation, by the relative lengths of the sentences and parts of the sentences, by a particular dancing of the sentence, in making the reader's mind, continuallyguided by a series of nascent movements, describe a curve of thought and feeling analogous to that we ourselves describe.