Part 8

The nineteenth century produced a thinker who revived the animistic idea in an improved form. He elaborated it into a system of philosophy, welding into it the discoveries of science, and leaving room for any further advance in that direction. At the same time he showed that his system was essentially religious, and indeed quite consistent with Christianity in its best interpretations. But his writings fell almost dead from the press, for he was before his time. The scientific men were materialists, and sneered at a system which recognised a spiritual world; while the orthodox Christians were scared by its evolutionary method and its acceptance of Darwinism when the latter arrived--for the philosophy preceded it--and also by the novelty of some of its ideas.

Gustav Theodor Fechner was born on April 19, 1801, at Gross-Särchen in what is now Silesia, then under the Elector of Saxony. He studied at Leipzig, and was appointed professor of Physics at the University there, in 1834. He conducted several scientific journals, wrote text-books, translated Biot's _Physics_ (4 vols.) Thénard's _Chemistry_ (6 vols.) and a work on cerebral pathology; also edited an eight-volume _Encyclopædia_ of which he wrote about a third himself, lectured, and made researches in electro-magnetism which injured his eyesight. His chief scientific work, _Elements of Psycho-Physics_, was published in 1859, additions being made in 1877 and 1882. "Fechner's Law", the fundamental law of psychophysics (that sensation varies in the ratio of the logarithm of impression) is now an internationally current term. Men like Paulsen and Wundt do not hesitate to call Fechner master. His chief philosophical work is _Zend-Avesta_ (3 vols.) published in 1851, and rearranged and condensed in _Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht_ (1879); but he published also many subsidiary volumes. Only one of his works has appeared in English--the small volume on _Life After Death_--and even this had to be brought out by an American publisher! Yet Fechner is, as Professor William James said, "a philosopher in the great sense ... little known as yet to English readers, but destined, I am persuaded, to wield more and more influence as time goes on". (_A Pluralistic Universe_, pp. 135, 149.) The prophecy is already beginning to come true.

Fechner always begins with the known and indisputable, arguing thence to the unknown. His method is thus analogical and scientific. It is the only method that a scientific generation will tolerate. Its results may be disputed, but so can the results of science. Even mathematics gives us no certainties, for something must always be taken for granted. In philosophising by analogy, we do at least keep in close touch with experience; we do not evaporate the world into an "unearthly ballet of bloodless categories". And if the analogies point mostly one way, with only weak ones pointing the other, the result may be at least acceptable as a working hypothesis, even if not "demonstrable".

Man is a living, thinking, feeling being. He is on the surface of a nearly spherical body, which he calls the earth, out of which his material part has arisen. The elements of his body are the same as those in the earth. His carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen are the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen of the coal measures, soils, atmosphere, oceans, of the earth. The calcium carbonate of his bones is the calcium carbonate of her rocks as seen in cliffs at Flamborough and Dover. He is bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh. Sometimes he calls her Mother Earth, and involuntarily speaks the truth in jest. In Siberia the Tartar word for the earth is "Mamma"--a curious fact. Indeed, the bond between the earth and her children is much closer than in the case of a human mother and her child; for we remain, all our lives, actually _part_ of the planet's mass. If our bodies were suddenly annihilated, the earth's gravitative attraction would be altered, and the whole solar system would have to readjust itself to the slight diminution. We belong to the earth. We are a film of cells on her skin. In Piccadilly and the Bowery (and Throgmorton and Wall Streets?) we are--alas!--an eczematous patch.

But here it may be objected that man is more than a mere body. Quite true. Man has experiences of an order different from the material one. You cannot express joy and sorrow by chemical equations or number of foot-pounds. Even if there is a material equivalent or necessary concomitant, of electrical or chemical change in cerebral tissue or what not, the fact of the non-material experience remains a reality. To indicate this side of human life, we call it the spiritual side. We say that man is matter and spirit, body and soul. This is quite justifiable and right, whether we can define the terms or not. Definition means explaining a word by means of others that are better known. And as we cannot get any closer to reality than our own experience, which _is_ reality to us, and as the two words conveniently classify two great departments of experience, we justifiably say that we are soul and body. Very well; the body, then, when we die, returns to the earth, from which indeed it has not been severed, except as being a point at which a special kind of activity was manifested. What then of the soul? Shall it not return to the earth-soul, as the body returns to the earth-body?

Man has arisen out of the earth. And can the dead give birth to the living? Such an idea is self-contradictory. If the Earth has produced us, it cannot be really a mere dead lump, as nineteenth-century materialistic science regarded it. It must be alive. The fifteen hundred millions or so of human beings who live on its surface like microscopic insects on the body of an elephant, or like epidermis-cells on our own bodies, constitute in their total weight and size only an almost infinitesimal proportion of the earth's mass. The earth is 8,000 miles in diameter; if human beings were so numerous that they could only stand up, wedged together all over its surface, tropics and poles, land and water--the latter covers seven-tenths of it--they would only be like a skin 1/200,000th part of an inch thick, on a globe a yard in diameter. The total mass of all the living creatures on the earth's surface, including all animals and all vegetation, is almost inconceivably small, as compared with the mass of the earth. Is it not a trifle ludicrous to find some of these little creatures looking down so condescendingly on the remainder of the planet? Emerson was among the few who have seen the joke, for in _Hamatreya_ he satirises those who boast of possessing pieces of the earth:

Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds: And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough. Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet Clear of the grave.

And the earth sings:

They called me theirs, Who so controlled me; Yet every one Wished to stay, and is gone, How am I theirs, If they cannot hold me, But I hold them?

A very natural objection to the idea of the earth being full of life and mind--as my body is full of my life and my mind--is that the inorganic part of the planet presents no evidence of such. It does not act as if it were alive and conscious. But this begs the whole question. If you decide beforehand that all evidence for the existence of mind must be the sort of phenomena exhibited by the things we call living, the business is settled, and it is clear that the inorganic kingdom is without consciousness. There is then no sign of mind anywhere except in that infinitesimally thin and indeed discontinuous skin which is made up of living individuals on the earth's surface. But is it not somewhat presumptuous to dogmatise thus? Why should mind always manifest itself in the same way? Non-living matter does not show vital activities, but it does show other activities, quite systematic and non-chaotic and comprehensible ones. How could "dead" matter have any activity at all? Even Haeckel postulates a sort of mind in the atom, and we have heard of "mind-stuff" before, from an equally determined materialist. Indeed, how can we rationalise the behaviour of phosphorus in oxygen but by saying that the two elements like each other so well that they rush to combine whenever possible? If carbon has great "affinity," showing a tendency to combine with many atoms of other elements in various complicated ways--at least as regards its favourite types--it is reasonable to regard it as a much-loving element--the polygamous Solomon of the elements. If fluorine will have nothing to do with other substances--except under protest, when persuaded by Miss Hydrogen, whose gaiety and levity sometimes overcome its sulkiness, bringing it also into the society of calcium and one or two other metals--we must say that fluorine is unsociable, morbidly self-centred, or perhaps mystically disposed, like Thoreau, happy by his pond, alone. Chemical affinity is the loves of the elements.

Rising to the next grade of complexity above atoms, we find that molecular movements, visible in the apparently representative Brownian movements of particles, recall the fidget of a bunch of midges, and thereby suggest a sort of life. They disobey the second law of thermodynamics, rising in a lighter liquid, as midges rise in the tenuous air. Of course no one can deny that in the things we call living there are phenomena not seen elsewhere, and some of these are quite probably not understandable at all, in terms of measurement or imagery, as we can understand the Brownian movements by irregular bombardment of molecules. We cannot understand the relation between a supposed brain-change and the corresponding mental fact. The two orders of being seem disjunctive. Perhaps these things are too close to us to be understood; perhaps we cannot understand life and consciousness because we are ourselves alive and conscious--as we cannot lift ourselves by pulling at our boot tops, and cannot see our own faces because the eyes that see are _in_ the face that is to be seen. Still the distinction between life at its lowest and non-life at its highest (crystals?) is so small that we may yet effect a smooth transition--may somehow see a continuity which now eludes us. And it seems likely that this will be effected by an extension of the mind-idea down into the inorganic, rather than by any explanation of life by physical and chemical concepts.

Again, on the larger scale, may not cohesion, as well as chemical affinity, be a sort of affection; in this case a kind of wide social friendship--the "adhesive love" of Whitman, which is to supersede "amative love"--as against the fierce and narrow loves of the elements? A. C. Benson in _Joyous Gard_ (p. 128) quotes a geologist who says:

It is not by any means certain that stones do not have a certain obscure life of their own; I have sometimes thought that their marvellous cohesion may be a sign of life, and that if life were withdrawn, a mountain might in a moment become a heap of sliding sand.

Yes, and even in sand-grains there is cohesion of particles, and in the smallest particles huge numbers of molecules, and again--still smaller--atoms and electrons. Something elusive yet tremendously potent is still there, in the sand. It would be rash to call it dead and mindless. There seems more sense in admitting that there is something akin to what we know as life and mind in ourselves, permeating the material universe.

And if--to come back to our own planet--if the earth is a living organism, there will naturally be distribution of function, as there is in our own bodies. It would be absurd for the eye to deny life and perception to ear or skin just because their mode of activity is different. It is wiser to concede life and mind where-ever there is action. In the present state of affairs, not only do we get into difficulties by our rash assumption that there is no mind without protoplasm (_ohne Phosphor kein Gedanke_, as the old materialist too boldly said), but we find it impossible to draw the line between living and non-living. Drops of oil exhibit amoeboid movements, and at the lower end of life the slime-mass becomes so undifferentiated as to be very much in a borderland between the two states. Probably non-living substances gradate into living ones by imperceptible _differentiæ_, as man would be found to gradate back into an anthropoid ape or something of the kind if we could see all the stages. Nature does not make jumps. Where she seems to do so, it is only because we cannot see how she gets from one place to another distant one. But when we scrutinise the interspace, we see that there is a path. Nature does not jump. She glides.

It is on this line of thought that the disagreement between the schools represented by Sir Edward Schäfer and Dr Hans Driesch respectively may, perhaps, be happily resolved. No doubt each may have to make concessions. The mechanist must not claim that mind is _only_ an affair of nitrogenous colloids, for this would be a large assumption built on a very small foundation; no biologist, however much he knows about nitrogenous colloids, can in any conceivable sense explain his joy in a sunset or a symphony by reference to those substances. Physical causes have physical effects; to say that they cause anything non-physical (_i.e._ mental) is really talking nonsense. And, on the other hand, the vitalist must not deny consciousness to non-protoplasmic Nature. Negations are dangerous. It is extremely risky to say that a Matterhorn has less spiritual significance--in itself and for the whole, and not only for us--than a cretin who wanders useless and unbeautiful about its lower slopes. The activities of the two are different, that is all we are justified in saying. True, the Matterhorn's are more calculable and predictable, but that does not prove unconsciousness. Human action also is predictable to some extent. And the more wise and unified a man is--the nearer he approximates to ideal perfection--the more accurately we can predict his response to a given stimulus. We might almost argue, on these lines, that inorganic matter has a certain superiority; for it is not capricious. It knows what it wants to do, and does it; or at least--if this is going too far--it does things, and does them _as if_ it knew very well what it wanted to do. To the same conditions and stimuli it always responds in the same way, like reflex action in living beings, and like association in ordinary consciousness. Water always boils punctually at 100°C., and freezes at 0°C., if the pressure is 760mm. of mercury. "Canal" always makes me think of Panama and Mars--though to other people it might suggest Suez, their different experience having given them other association-couplings. But any one knowing me well, or knowing any one well, could say almost certainly what associations "canal" would have--what thought it will evoke. And the same thing is true, to a less extent, of our actions. If a man hits Jack Johnson, the latter will probably hit back. Still more certain is it that no one will hit him unless drunk or insane or in some sort of very exceptional circumstances. If, on the other hand, somebody hits me, the outcome is less certain. It will depend to a greater extent on the result of reflection and judgment--perhaps partly on my estimate of the other fellow's weight, age, training and science! Yet anyone knowing me well, and perceiving the main conditions, could predict with fair approach to accuracy what I should do. Yet I am undoubtedly a conscious being. Some actions of conscious beings, then, are predictable, if we know the conditions. Indeed, in the mass, human action is calculable with precision--witness the various kinds of insurance. Why then deny consciousness to the Matterhorn, because _all_ its actions are calculable and predictable? The difference is one of degree, not kind. And indeed _are_ all its actions predictable? The fact is, they are only hypothetically so. We say that they would be if we knew enough. But we might say the same of the actions of a man. The truth is, that if we say it of either we are arguing dangerously, from our ignorance and not from our knowledge. It is indeed as risky to say that we could predict the Matterhorn's actions _in toto_, as to say that we cannot predict the man's; for we are continually finding that matter does things which we did not formerly suspect--_e.g._ radio-activity. Clearly, we cannot predict all the activities of the Matterhorn: many may depend on undiscovered properties. So it seems that even if some human actions, such as Newton's discovery of the law of gravitation and Milton's _Paradise Lost_ and Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy and Raphael's Sistine Madonna, are strictly unpredictable, it still does not sufficiently differentiate us from the Matterhorn, which on its part also has its unpredictabilities.

As to what parts of matter have separate spirits--where the Snowdon-spirit ends and the Moel Siabod spirit begins, and so on--we need not trouble much about that. This individualising of parts is a reasonable supposition, but it is not necessary to press it. Mr Maurice Hewlett has seen the _genius loci_ of a sunny woodland landscape translated into human idiom as an opulent Titianesque beauty (_Lore of Proserpine_), and Manfred sees or feels a spirit of the Alps; but these are details. The only thing that matters is the ensoulment of the earth as a whole. No doubt its spirit-part is divided up somehow, correspondent to its material conformation, as our spirits are divided from each other. The division, however, is not a hermetic sealing off. The universe is continuous. Indeed its parts are inter-penetrative, for every particle influences every other particle--and a thing cannot act where it is not. Similarly, human beings are found to have modes of communication other than those hitherto recognised by orthodox science, and are somehow able to influence others without regard to distance. We seem to be connected with each other in the unseen, subliminal, spiritual region. Our separateness is illusory. So with individualisations of earth-features. They have individual aspects, both on the physical and spiritual side; but they are part of the one earth and its one spirit, as we ourselves are. And that earth-spirit is part of the universe-spirit or God, as the human spirit is part of the earth-spirit.

It is perhaps difficult, at first, to think of the earth as having a life and consciousness of its own, for we are located at little points, and do not see it whole, nor do we see from the inside. We are like an eye which looks at the body of which it forms a part, and finds it difficult to believe in auditory, tactile, olfactory experience; more difficult still to conceive of pure thought, emotion, will. If the earth seems a dead lump, however, think of the human brain. It is a mere lump of whitish filaments, _seen from outside_. But its inner experience is the rich and infinitely detailed life of a human being. So also may the inner experience of the earth be incomparably richer than its outer appearance indicates to our external senses. Objectively, our brains are part of the earth: subjectively, _we see in ourselves a part of what the earth sees in itself_.

In thinking of the earth as an organised being, we must guard against the error of the ancients who called it an animal. It is not an animal. It is a Being of a higher character than any animal, for it includes all animals and all human beings, comprising in its spirit all their spiritual activities, and having its own activities as well. We are to it, as our blood-corpuscles are to us; and to think of the earth-spirit as being like our spirits would be equivalent to a blood-corpuscle thinking of its containing body as another corpuscle, only bigger. Whereas the truth is that a man has feelings and cognitions and purposes, and performs acts, which the corpuscles cannot in the least comprehend. (Somewhat similarly, a drop cannot have waves, or a small celestial body an atmosphere; the lower cannot have what the higher has, nor can it understand it.) The corpuscle may know or believe that its conscience or intuition is a sort of leakage down to it, of the mind or will of its greater self (the voice of its God), and that in so far as it does its duty according to its lights it is assisting the purposes of that higher Being of which it forms a part; and this faith is its highest wisdom. So with us. Human duty, done sincerely according to our lights, is furthering the purposes of the higher Being in whom we live and move. This faith is our highest wisdom concerning our relation to the earth-spirit. We see, then, that there is a good deal of sense in faith and intuition. They are rationally justified. By them we are dimly in touch with the over-soul on our inner side: not _really_ dimly, for the connection is close and real, but dimly to our normal consciousness. The connection _via_ intellect is an external, round-about affair, necessary and useful, but different. We need to cultivate both. This is the essence of the philosophy of Bergson. There is more than one way of receiving truth. Science is apt to overlook the intuitional way.

On this conscience-side or moral aspect, the Fechnerian idea is particularly fruitful and illuminating. The analogy of our own mind is once more the key--the mirror wherewith to view the greater landscape, the village wherefrom to draw inferences about nations. In childhood, the world is, as James said, a big, blooming, buzzing confusion: sensations pour in quite unconnected; the baby sees the moon, and stretches out an arm to grab it, thus learning that it is not grabable. It is only gradually that the child learns to associate sounds with sights; to know what sounds indicate its mother's presence or proximity, and what sounds its father's. Gradually, individual experiences get linked up and harmonised. Then other disjointednesses arise. Foolish impulses war against better judgment and parents' advice, and the youth's mind is "torn", as we say, very aptly describing the feeling. Growing older and wiser, his mind becomes more unified and consequently more calm. His powers are marshalled and directed consciously at a goal or goals. Wayward impulses are reined in. We feel that poise and strength and wisdom are attained: never perfectly and ideally, but at least to a considerable degree, as compared with the earlier state.