The self and nature

Foreword

THE task of metaphysics, as I conceive it, is twofold. Accepting experience as a fragment of reality which is unimpeachably given to us, metaphysics undertakes first, to analyze and describe its omnipresent aspects and fundamental structure: its relation to the self, to the body, to nature, to knowledge; its changefulness; its spatiality; the spontaneity and causal determination of its elements; its relatedness. This is the more certain part of the study, where truth will reward any one who examines attentively and without prejudice, and who constructs with skill and fidelity the concepts which he uses to describe what he finds. But metaphysics has a second, a synthetic task: to project a total vision of the world. By following along the lines of the outward going relations of given experience, the philosopher seeks to discover the whole of which it is a part. As necessary materials for this purpose, he has to use the larger facts and broader generalizations of science, interpreting them, however, in the light of his analysis of experience. Hence, despite this dependence, metaphysics differs fundamentally from science in being radically empirical and critical, and in passing from the part to the whole. This is the less certain portion of the study, because it requires a freer use of hypothesis; yet the extension of experience which it demands is no different in kind or certainty, I believe, from

VI FOREWORD

that involved in any special science where the facts are not all open to inspection.

The method of metaphysics is, therefore, radical empiricism extended through the imagination. The source of all of our knowledge of reality is given experience — without a careful analysis of this, there can be no sound metaphysics. There are, however, within given experience itself motives for going beyond it, and for this, the use of the imagination is not only legitimate, but necessary. Yet the meaning and value of every concept employed either in the description of given experience or in its imaginative extension is literally equivalent to the images and concrete experiences from which it has been derived or into which it might lead.

In the present work I aim to study in a direct and simple fashion the great problems of metaphysical philosophy so conceived. Each of these problems receives independent treatment in a separate chapter, yet the work is, I believe, a consistent and fairly complete whole. The doctrine of the nature and unity of mind expounded in the early chapters, as the reader will discover, determines the point of view of the entire book.

Anybody familiar with the history and recent literature of philosophy will recognize how large a debt I owe both to the living and the dead. For the sake of simplicity and continuity of writing I have not made all the acknowledgments which I might have made in the body of my text. I wish therefore to make my chief acknowledgments here at the outset. Although I do not think that I am in total agreement with him anywhere, I am throughout indebted to

FOREWORD Vll

James for the radically empirical, dramatic conception of the universe which I accept. In the early chapters my inspiration for the view that sensations are a real part of the system of the physical world has been drawn chiefly from Berkeley and Mach and Bergson; in the chapter on Causality, for the derivation of law from spontaneity, I am directly dependent on Charles Peirce; my emotional and moral attitude towards nature, as expressed in the Conclusion, if not the same as Santayana's, is at least, I feel sure, colored by the Life of Reason and the personal teaching of its author. Although disagreeing with them on many topics, I am deeply indebted to my teachers Royce and Perry, and to Russell and Bradley and Ward for my method of approach at several points and for abundant suggestions. Finally, to my colleague and chief, Wenley, I owe much for inspiration and encouragement during the writing of the book.

Despite all these acknowledgments, a large part, of my work is, I believe, original. There is something especially new, I think, in my treatment of personal identity and the relation of the self to nature. The work is, at all events, a first-hand attempt to think through the great problems of philosophy. It has been for me a personal, an unavoidable quest, an intellectual adventure, upon which I now invite the reader to follow me.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Self and the Mind 3

II. Personal Identity 28

Chapter I

IN the intellectual adventure which lies before us we might start anywhere; but let us begin at the point nearest, — with ourselves.

What is the self ? Which of all the many things which I can find or know can I identify as myself ?

I certainly am not, for example, this gray and shape of table, this color and odor of fruit, this sound of typewriter. I am, to be sure, very intimately bound up in some way with these things; they are very close to me; yet they are not me. On the other hand, among the things which I can find, there are some which seem to be unquestionably a part of me : my interest in this search, the pleasure in the search as I proceed with it, the various thoughts and opinions which I find and somehow own or hold with reference to it. If,- at the moment, I were to suppose these things not to exist, I should be at a loss to find anything left of myself. And when I look back over my past and ask myself what I have meant to myself, I find that I have always meant certain instincts, purposes, choices; certain satisfactions and dissatisfactions; and certain opinions, thoughts, memories. Let us call all these things activities.

We cannot doubt that the activities are an essential part of the self; but are they the whole self ? For there are certain things which I stumble upon when I search for the self about which the question may fairly be raised whether they belong to the self or not. They are often attributed to it. They are such things as strains in the joints and muscles when I move, beatings of heart and shivering when I am afraid, tensions in the forehead and neck when I think — in fact all that part of existence which I call my body, especially when my activities have results there. Another set of things which seem to be myself are my images. These, too, accompany most, if not all, of my activities. My strivings are always inwrought with strains; my desires are always hugging some image of shape and color; my pleasures and pains are penetrated with organic pressures and touches; my thoughts and memories are constantly interwoven with pictures of their objects. And this intimate relation of all these doubtful things to the activities is, I think, the ground of our identification of them with the self. In themselves, they do not belong to the self; but because of their inseparable connection with it, they are effectively a part of it.

The result of our search for the self was the discovery of the activities. Besides these, we came upon certain things which are so closely knit into the activities that the latter never exist separate from them. Hence they, too, while strictly not the self, may nevertheless be called by its name. Then there were the other things which we found in our search, colors and shapes and sounds, with which the self is never confused because never in so intimate a connection. But even they, although separable, are nevertheless bound tight to it. The mere fact that I could find them is evidence of this tie. I find myself connected with all found things in a way which does not exist between me and things which I do not find. I find, of course, thoughts of these latter things, a thought of my reader and of New York, for example; but what these thoughts mean, the things themselves, I do not find. The things which I both mean and can find — the blue of sky and sound of typewriter, for example — are all in contact with one another and with the self, with the thought that means and the pleasure that is taken in them; but between the things which I mean and cannot now find and those which I do find there is no such contact. The blue of sky and as much of the typewriter as I see make a whole with my feelings and desires from which the part of the typewriter which I do not see and my reader and London are excluded. There is, of course, a connection between what I see of the typewriter and what I do not see; but this connection is not itself seen. There is, therefore, a contact of the self with things which are no part of it; with these it makes a whole from which all things which it cannot at the moment find are excluded. Let us call this whole of things findable a mind or consciousness. This whole is often called a self, but improperly; for the self, as we have seen, is only one part of it. Let us call everything in such a whole which is not self, content. Since the relation between the two parts of the mind is so intimate, it is not surprising that the distinction between them has not always been recognized. I never find myself without some contact with content, and, since I cannot find anything without coming into contact with it and so making a whole out of it and myself, I never can find any content separate from the self.

The account of the self which we have given may be deemed inadequate for several reasons.

First, one may object that we have described the " me," the objective self, not the " I " or true subject. Our supposition that we could find the self at all may be declared false. How, it is often said, can I find myself; how can the subject become its own object? And if somehow the subject can become its own object and so be found by itself, perhaps its mode of discovery and of knowledge must be different from the mode of discovery and of knowledge of other things; it may be a mistake to suppose that we can search for the self, as we have done, just as we should search for other things.

The basis of this objection is, I believe, a false doctrine of the unity of the self, an exaggeration of that unity. In finding the self, the rinding act is not, to be sure, itself found; yet every other part of the self is found. At any moment the self is a whole complexity of interwoven acts; yet there is sufficient independence among them to permit of the direction of one upon another. In other words, a part of the self discovers the rest. And this discovery does not involve, as is often supposed, that the part discovered be a merely remembered self; for the act of discovery may be contemporaneous with the acts discovered. At the moment of discovery I am at once the act of discovery and the other acts. This is undoubtedly a difficult situation, as every psychologist knows, and is the source of all the uncertainties in the theory of the self. A content is easy to find; not so an activity; for the diremption of the self, the setting of one activity over against another involves, since the self tends towards integration, the unclearness of one of the acts: either the introspected act becomes indistinct, or else the attitude of introspection becomes unsteady and is relaxed. Yet this difficulty is not insurmountable and we do actually find our activities.

The objection may still be pressed that we have admitted the main contention of the objector; for we have provided for no finding of the finding activity itself. Does not this, the pure subject, remain the constant accompaniment of all our activities, forever undiscoverable by the ordinary means ? Well, as we have asserted, a given act of finding does not and cannot find itself; yet it can be found — by another act of rinding. Of course there will always be one act of finding which is not found ; otherwise there would be an infinite complexity in the self, which is not actual; yet any given act can always be found by another directed upon it. We should admit,, then, that at any moment the whole self cannot be found; that the ultimate act of finding is not itself found; but we deny that this last act is by nature different from any act of finding which we do discover; for the fact that any given act can be found, and when found has essentially the same nature as all other acts, is proof that there is no aspect of the self which is inscrutable or essentially different from all the rest.

And the admission that the ultimate act of finding is not itself found does not imply that it is known in some peculiar fashion different from the knowledge of other things. There is only one type of knowledge, that through concepts. The self is known when there exist concepts which represent it; the self is found when such concepts are in contact with, are realized in the activities which they mean. Now the ultimate judgment in which these concepts are embodied is not itself known; for, by hypothesis, there is no judgment directed upon it. It simply exists. The supposition that it must be known and, since it cannot be known in the ordinary fashion, that it must be known in some occult mode, is based on the dogma that an experience cannot be without being known, that its very essence somehow involves a knowledge of it. But, although most of our adult experiences are actually known, as will appear shortly, they nevertheless are in themselves simply what they are: blue and soft, cold, strife and peace.

The conception of the self which stands opposed to the one which we have been advocating is, of course, that of the so-called " pure ego." There exists, it is asserted, a something to which content and activities are given, an awareness or consciousness, without the accompaniment of which no experience can exist. This conception has received so much able criticism in recent times that it may seem superfluous to consider it again. A re-examination of it will, however, throw light on our subject. Let us review the supposed data for this theory.

First, there is a seeming complexity, a duplicity about every experience, even the simplest, which is the reason why we use the term experience to denote the elements of mind and are not content to refer to them as blue, green, hard, as mere qualities or whats. For example, blue as an element of mind seems to be something in addition to just blue — an experience or perception or consciousness of blue.

There can be no doubt of the fact referred to here; but the fact is insufficiently analyzed and is no proof of the existence of mere awareness. For the complexity of any content or activity is due to its involution in other activities. Blue, as an element of mind, is almost always suffused with some feeling, some interest; and even when there is no feeling attached to it, there is a recognition of it which penetrates it likewise and is not externally related to it. And when as philosophers we examine the mind, we cannot find any content or activity which does not forthwith become a known content or activity; so that, when we reflect upon this, we discover not only the original data but our own knowing of them also : a knowledge of the new whole, known blue, supervenes upon the mere blue to be known. But this knowledge is, of course, an activity, not a mysterious something distinct from all activity. It is this constant discovery of his own recognition of the elements of mind by the reflective act of the thinker which accounts for the doctrine of the pure ego, rather than, as James supposed, the discovery of some attendant muscular or organic sensation; the latter is far too irrelevant a thing to mislead thinkers of the rank of those who have embraced this doctrine. We admit therefore the duplicity — why not the multiplicity ? — of most of our experiences; but we deny that one of the threads of the skein is anything unique ; we assert rather that it is just an ordinary activity; usually it is knowledge.

IO THE SELF AND NATURE

A second datum for the theory of the pure ego is the following: There seems to be something which remains identical through the flux of different contents and activities; observe how, in the shift from this to that, there is something which abides throughout and seems to embrace the changing items; when the clock ticks, for example, there seems to be something which spans the successive sounds. But is the permanence here anything more or less than some relatively stable elements of the mind which contrast with those in flux ? Is it not they which, through their successive contact with the different inflowing elements, span the transition ? In particular, is not the attitude of recognition and expectation just the permanent element in question ? If, on the other hand, the point of this argument is to insist on the identity of the self and mind despite equally obvious change, we frankly admit that there is a problem; only we claim that its solution does not involve the existence of the pure ego, but is possible in terms of the nature of the mind as we have denned it, as we shall try to prove in our next chapter.

In the third place, one might claim that consciousness or awareness is different from its content because it may be more or less ; while the latter does not offer any differences in degree. There is, for example, a difference of degree between the present activity of my thinking and the sound of my heart-beat; yet the quality of both would be the same if the degree were reversed ; for the difference is in the awareness of these things, not in the things themselves. But surely the fact referred to here is nothing more or less than

THE SELF AND THE MIND II

what the psychologists call clearness, and clearness is an attribute of the elements of mind, not itself the mind. It is no doubt true that elements can have degrees of clearness only in the mind, acquiring these differences through their relations to one another there. Clearness has, furthermore, some close relation, as Titchener says, to the " existence or being of mental elements; their becoming, their existence more or less, their temporal course." Yet these facts prove again only that clearness is an attribute of the elements of mind, not that it is mind itself.

A final objection to our view would run somewhat as follows : The activities with which you have identified the self are manifold, whereas the self is one; desiring, feeling and thinking are different, but the same self desires and thinks and feels. Well, the self is certainly one, yet just as certainly a multiplicity; for it owns the many activities indefeasibly. Its oneness must therefore be compatible with its plurality. And it need not be anything besides or in addition to them. For the fact that we use the simple concept " I " or self does not prove that the self is distinct from its many acts; for we use this concept to denote the unity of the acts rather than the acts singly and to contrast them as members of this unity with " yours," which do not belong there. Just so, we speak of " the rose " in order to indicate it as a whole ; yet we do not imply that it is something in addition to its various parts — stem, root, petals and the rest.

It is plain from our discussions that the unity of the self is, next to the problem of what the self really is, the burning question in this field. This is a problem, moreover, the answer to which is of decisive importance in determining the answers to most other metaphysical problems. It is also clear that we cannot separate this problem from that of the unity of mind, of which the self is a part. For the self is intertwined with content and both together form a single whole. Hence we must first investigate the pattern of the entire web, the mind, before we can discover the minor design of the self. Let us proceed, then, to this larger problem. Throughout we shall have to confine ourselves to the broader aspects of the subject in their bearing on metaphysical topics. The unity of mind has two dimensions — contemporaneous and sequential: at any given moment the mind is one whole, and, in some fashion or other, the same as that which existed a moment before and throughout all moments of its existence. The two dimensions are interrelated, but we shall start with the first, leaving the other for our next chapter.

The mental unity which we are studying must be clearly distinguished from that which is studied by psychologists. They try to find the causes why this or that element is in the mind; the conditions for its existence there. The laws of « association and habit serve this end. Our task is a quite^ different one. ^We are not inquiring into the conditions for the existence of any element in the whole, but into the distinctive character of the whole, once- it exists. We are interested in its cross-sectional, not in its dynamic unity. Our interest is in the former rather than in the latter, partly because the latter has been studied with some success by psychologists, while the former has been largely neglected by them ; but chiefly because the former is of supreme importance for the solution of certain philosophical problems.

An examination of the mind readily reveals the fact that there are many types of unity there. One of these is usually taken to be fundamental. For if there are many unities in the mind, it is clear that there must be a basal one to weave the many themselves into a unity. I do not mean, of course, that the larger unity is independent of the smaller ones, but simply that it cannot be identical with any of them, and must have its own specific nature. We shall begin with a criticism of some of the more fundamental of the lesser unities to the end of discovering the fundamental one which they all imply.

One minor type of unity among mental elements is that of class. It is important to scrutinize this because it has recently been regarded as fundamental. The mind has been defined as a class of elements and the problem of mind described as that of finding the denning relation of the class. Now things form a class either because they resemble one another in some respect or, most generally of all, because they have a given relation to some term.

That the fundamental type of unity is not that of class denned in the first way is clear, because there is no unique point of resemblance which at once embraces all the elements of a mind and distinguishes them from every other mind. The elements of a mind form a multitude of exclusive or intersecting classes: the visual, auditory, tactual, clear and unclear, and so on, indefinitely. But no one of these classes unites them all. And those classes which do unite all the elements of a mind — such as the classes of all elements which are temporal or existent, for example — contain the elements of every mind. There is no class, denned through resemblance, to which all the elements of one mind belong and from which those of other minds are excluded. But even if minds have some elements in common, those which belong to a given mind are united among themselves in a way in which they are not united with some, at least, of the elements of other minds.

Next, let us inquire whether the elements of mind form a unique class through the relation of all to some unique thing. This is the path taken by most of the so-called new realists. The thing in question is supposed to be the brain, or the body if the psycho-physical relation is thought of as involving the entire organism. The elements of a mind are one at least in this respect, that they and they alone have the psycho-physical relation to a particular body. It is not necessary, for our present purpose, to define this relation; it is sufficient to indicate it as one which, however defined, must be admitted by all. Now we must grant, of course, that the elements of a given mind do have a relation to a particular brain or body which no other elements have; and that through this relation they are constituted into a unity. Yet, until we know definitely what the relation between mind and body is, we cannot know from its mere existence what kind of unity it constitutes. If I were told that several individuals stood in the filial relation to a certain man but knew nothing about that relation, I could form no idea of the unity which they composed; I could simply know that it

THE SELF AND THE MIND IS

existed. This the new realists recognize, because in defining mind through the psycho-physical relation they proceed on the basis of a definite notion of that relation — reaction. The mind, they say, is the class of elements selected out of the whole universe of things through the reactions of the body to them. Whatever a body reacts to forthwith becomes an element in a corresponding mind ; a mind is just the class of such elements. But you cannot define mind as the class of elements reacted to by a body, for this one reason at least, namely, that many of the elements do not exist previous to their existence as elements of mind, and so are incapable of being selected out through the body's action. It is absurd to think of the brain as reacting to feelings and memories in the same way that the organism reacts to light or heat. I do not mean, of course, that there is no psycho-physical process of memory or feeling; I mean that you cannot start with these things as given independent of the mind and then define their presence within the mind by means of the psycho-physical relation; above all, you cannot think of the brain as selecting them by reacting upon them. You cannot start with the universe of all elements undifferentiated into mental and non-mental, and then define the former as a group selected out of the whole through organic action, because a large share of the elements of mind do not exist at all except as mental elements.

But there are other reasons closer at hand for rejecting this method of describing the unity of mind. In the first place, the unity of mind is a fact of immediate experience, something patent to the direct inspection of mind; it can be known quite apart from any knowledge of the body or the brain. In the second place, when we do appeal to the testimony of the mind as to its own unity, we find that its unity is misrepresented if described as a class or collection. It is characteristic of a class or collection that when you take away or adjoin an element you alter only its numerical and ordinal properties. But this is not true of the mind. The loss or adjunction of an element produces changes both in the mind as a whole and in the individual elements of the whole. The sudden emergence of an acute pain, for example, will cause a disappearance of many elements from the mind and the suffusion of the remaining ones with a mood of dissatisfaction ; thoughts and purposes will take flight; a complex pattern will be reduced to a simple one; the relative clearness and un clearness of elements will be reversed; the body which was marginal will become focal and the once dominant ideas will be scattered to the background or disappear. Again, a class can be denned by a mere enumeration of the elements which compose it; but not so a mind. There is a mode of combination of one element with another, an interfusion, which no mere enumeration can describe. Wistfulness and violet color will not describe that suffusion of one by the other which characterizes the sensitive intuition of the flower. In short, the elements of a mind are a whole, not a mere class. No indication of the reactions of the body to elements of its environment can explain or describe this wholeness.

Another type of unity within the mind is that of meaning. Thus all the words on this page as I write them, as they become elements of my mind, are united with one another through the one thought which they convey, and with the keys of the typewriter through the apperceived causal relation between the striking and the printing. Similarly, each part of the machine, for one who knows the scheme of the whole, refers to or means every other part. Almost, if not all, the things in the room, books, pictures, chairs, tables, as elements of the mind, are meanings, items of experience which refer beyond themselves to other things. And meaning is a mode of union which seems to be uniquely characteristic of mind. Apart from mind things may perhaps have causal, spatial and other relations, but they do not mean one another. Only when they are apperceived in their relations to one another, so that one may suggest another to a mind, do they mean one another. For example, clouds may perhaps cause or be followed by rain independently of mind; but they can mean rain only to a mind which uses them as signs from which to infer rain. Yet meaning is not the fundamental unity of mind. In order for it to be this, each item of mind would have to mean every other item. Now each item may do this — for reflection ; there is surely some respect in which each may suggest every other. But before reflection there are countless elements which do not do this. The sight of the child in the street did not mean my elbow, yet both were present within the unity of my mind. And that meaning is not the essence of the unity of mind is also clear from the fact that an element of one mind may mean an element of another without thereby forming with it a single mind. For example, the sound of your voice means to me a certain emotion of yours, which can never be an element in my consciousness. Meaning is one of the characteristic modes of union between the elements of different minds; hence it cannot constitute the unique principle of union within a single mind.