Part 10

Yet while mechanics is not applicable to mental facts, the realm of mentality is by no means to be surrendered to indeterminism. Mr. Peirce describes the domain of mind as the absence of law and the prevalence of absolute chance, of an indetermined and indeterminable sporting. This is not so. While the fact must be recognised that the nature of the mind is not something mechanical, its action is nevertheless determined by laws—not by mechanical laws, but by psychical and mental laws. These psychical and mental laws are in one respect of exactly the same nature as mechanical laws; they describe the samenesses of certain facts of reality. And the facts of the ideal domain of thought, the facts of subjectivity, are no less real than the grosser facts of mechanical motion, which are the facts of objectivity.

The term mechanical is often used in the sense of “lacking life or spirit” (“Century Dictionary,” p. 3679). This is justifiable in so far only as when we speak of mechanical phenomena we do not mean psychical or any other phenomena. It is true that that which makes this or that idea respond to a certain stimulus is not a mechanical but a mental quality, but the action itself, in so far as it is a motion, is and remains mechanical. Thus it happens that the laws of mechanics, far from being anti-spiritual, are the means by which we learn to understand and objectively to represent the action of mental phenomena.

In this connection attention may be called to the efforts of modern logicians to construct thinking machines which will perform the work of mental operations in a purely mechanical way. You propose the problem by adjusting certain indicators; then you turn the crank, and the machine does the rest. The results will come out with unfailing exactness.

The attempt made to construct thinking machines cannot as yet be called successful. Nevertheless they are not impossibilities. Calculating machines of various constructions are in practical use and doing satisfactory work, not only in addition and subtraction but also in multiplication and division, and even in extracting roots and in raising numbers to higher powers. Calculations are undoubtedly one kind of thought, and if calculations can be performed by machines, there is no theoretical reason why we should not be able to construct logical machines, which shall perform the operations of deductive and even of inductive thought with perfect accuracy.

CONCLUSION.

Determinism does not make freedom impossible and natural laws do not suppress the spontaneity of nature.

Natural laws are not a power forcing a certain mode of action upon things; they are not an oppression of nature. Natural laws are simply a description of nature as nature is. There is no “must” in nature in the sense of compulsion, as if there were two things, (1) a master (i. e. the law) giving a command, and (2) a slave (i. e. the single facts) obeying the command. The situation is not dualistic, but monistic. There is an “is” in nature, and this “is” is constant. There is a certain sameness in nature. In spite of all changes it remains the same; and thus even the apparent irregularities preserve throughout an unvarying consistency. The facts of nature express the character of nature; they are nature herself. Briefly, the “is” of nature (if we are permitted to personify her) does not describe that which nature must do, but that which nature wills to do; it describes how she acts spontaneously, of her own free will, in conformity with her innermost being and consistently with her permanent character.

The main difference that obtains between the actions of inanimate nature so-called and rational beings is not the absence and presence of spontaneity, (for spontaneity is in both,) but the absence and presence of mind: and mind is not only the subjectivity of existence; mind is not merely sentiency, i. e. the awareness of feelings; mind is the representative symbolism of subjectivity.

There are sufficient reasons to assume that all objective existence, which appears to us as matter in motion, possesses a subjectivity, the nature of which depends upon the mode of the interaction of its elements. This subjectivity appears in organised substance as feeling and develops naturally into mind.

The essence of nature, accordingly, is not materiality, but spirituality. Materiality is the character of nature as it affects sentient beings; but its innermost self, as it were, its subjectivity, its psychical aspect is revealed in the appearance of the spirit-life of rational beings—of minds.

While we fully recognise the spirituality of nature as nature’s innermost essence and as an ineradicable feature of reality, we cannot with Mr. Peirce place mind at the beginning of the world. There is a great difference between spirituality and mind. One is the source and condition of the other. One is permanent, the other is transient. One is the abstract view of a universal quality of the world, eternal and everlasting, as much indestructible as matter and energy; the other is an individual formation that originates, grows, and develops; that can be broken and built again; that dies with the body and rises again in new generations; that decays, as the foliage of the trees falls in winter, yet reappears, as the verdure reappears in spring; for the life of nature is immortal.

Mr. Peirce, regarding determinism as that view which does not recognise the freedom of will, has an original and in our conception a wrong view on the one hand of natural laws, which are to him mere habits acquired by the world, and on the other hand of chance, or arbitrary sportiveness, (i. e. that which is not determinable by law,) which he identifies with mind and with the spontaneity of freedom. Mind is to him the beginning of all. Mind remains mind, according to his view, so long as it is irregular, producing out of its own undetermined being sporadic effects without order or consistency. As soon as mind takes to habits, it grows mechanical; by creating regularity it disappears; and the result is matter in motion according to mechanical laws. Matter, accordingly, is said to be “effete mind.” Law in our view is the divinity of nature; according to Mr. Peirce it is the termination of nature’s irregularities: it comes to suppress her freedom and to supplant her mentality by mechanicalism. An element of pure chance, however, survives, which, appears in the free will of man, in miracles, and in nature’s irregularities, and this element of pure chance will remain until in the infinitely distant future, mind becomes crystallised into an absolutely perfect, rational, and symmetrical system. Such is in brief Mr. Peirce’s view of the rôle played by mind in the world-process.

Mr. Peirce’s views of chance and law seem to come to the rescue of certain theological dogmas, which represent the world-order as the product of a divine mind. We doubt very much whether Mr. Peirce’s position be tenable even from the standpoint of the scientific theologian. For the order of the world, as it appears in natural laws, must be, and is recognised even by the theist, as part and parcel of God’s eternal being. The scientist who formulates _sub specie aeternitatis_ certain facts of nature, say the “how” of gravitating bodies, describes a certain quality of God himself; he describes something that is immutable, eternal, everlasting; it is not the whole of God, but it is certainly one feature of Jahveh, of that which is, was, and will be as it is.

In contradistinction to Mr. Peirce, we recognise, that the regularity of the whole is preserved in the specificalness of its individual particulars, that there are samenesses in this world of changes and diversities, and that if all reality is regarded as being essentially the same throughout, all the diversities and apparent irregularities can very well be explained as resulting from peculiar forms, combinations, and relations. Furthermore, we recognise that natural laws are compatible with the spontaneity of nature and that the necessity with which a free man acts according to his character, does not reverse his freedom of will.

Nature is self-acting throughout; nature is free; even inanimate nature is spontaneous. But a higher freedom rises with the appearance of mind. And there are degrees of this higher freedom which can be determined with great exactness, for they correspond to the range of the mentality of each creature. Mentality develops by the observation of samenesses, and it reaches rationality by the recognition of natural laws. The recognition of natural laws is a view of some natural phenomena in their eternal aspect, and we call them truths. So much is natural law and freedom interconnected that the recognition of natural laws widens the range of freedom; and obedience to them raises man out of his dependence upon his surroundings to a state of dominion over the creation in which he becomes the master of natural forces.

What a deep significance lies in the saying of the apostle: “The truth shall make you free!”

EDITOR.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] The adjective “like” is an abbreviation of “alike”; and “a-like” (M.E. _alyke_, A.S. _gelic_, O.H.G. _galih_, M.H.G. _gelich_, M.G. _gleich_) is a compound of the prefix a with _lic_ body, shape, figure.

[11] I am satisfied that logical identity is intended to mean sameness. I suppose that the word identity, being Latin and a kind of international term, appeared to logicians preferable to the Saxon word “sameness” or the German “Gleichheit.” We need not look for any deeper reason for the adoption of the term.

[12] Knowing that Mr. Peirce is one of the most prominent contributors to the _Century Dictionary_, I may be pardoned for surmising that, perhaps with the exception of the parenthesised word “(supposed)” he is the author of this passage and very likely of most of the other quotations of philosophical terms we have adduced from the same source.

[13] _Die Principien der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung_ by Johannes von Kries. See also Meinong’s review of the book (in _Gött. gel Anz._, No. 2, p. 56 et seqq.) and Ad. Nitsche’s article on the subject (in _Vierteljahrsschrift für wiss. Phil._ of 1892. XVI. 1, p. 26).

[14] By irregularity of detail we understand simply a lack of uniformity, but not exceptions to law. If irregularity be defined as exception to law, we should say, There is no irregularity in the world, while at the same time nothing is uniform: for every particle of the world is in its time and space relations and otherwise different from every other particle.

[15] Arbitrary, as used here, means capricious, uncertain, unreasonable. A man’s action is capricious if he is biassed by the present motive alone, without considering other motives which he would have under other circumstances. A deliberate man equalises, as it were, his actions by forming rules of conduct. An arbitrary man does not recognise rules or laws, made either by himself or by others.

LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE

I.

RECENT EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES IN GERMANY.

Since Darwin’s death, his theory, which in Germany more than elsewhere received its development, has but few decisive steps in advance to point to, even though the circle of its adherents has been enlarged and though in many respects and in special directions it has been rendered more complete and placed upon a firmer foundation. It is a gratifying fact, that most, if not all, of the recent discoveries in zoology, palæontology, and particularly in developmental history, are easily and completely reconcilable with the principles originally established; so that the views which we have reached on this subject have lost more and more the characters of a purely hypothetical fabric.

But the accurate investigations of developmental history have unquestionably furnished the most important material in proof of the theory in question, and the principles established in this department, in the main the results of the labors of German investigators (E. von Baer, Fritz Müller, E. Haeckel), have been verified in a truly surprising manner.

It is true that Darwin himself in no way undervalued the importance of the results of the studies in question, but how little the facts known at the time of the enunciation of his theory of natural selection sufficed, is most clearly proved by the fact that E. von Baer and Louis Agassiz, who at that time were perhaps the greatest authorities in embryology, assumed a hostile attitude towards the new Darwinian theory. Agassiz’s combination of the points of agreement of palæontology and embryology, his explanation of extinct forms as “prophetic types,” proved a veritable hindrance to the perception of the truth, and Carl Vogt, who was his co-worker at that time, appears to have been the last to set up any opposition to the “fundamental biogenetic principle,” that the development of the individual repeats in an abbreviated form the history of his race. Vogt, formerly the champion of advanced views, appears to-day as the leader of the small band of the opposition.

If we compare the recently published fourth edition of Haeckel’s _Anthropogeny_, 1891, and the eighth edition of his _History of Creation_, with the early editions, we cannot help remarking, with considerable astonishment, despite the enormous increase of fresh material, the fact that little in the old plans and principles of the work needs correction. Even the bold generalisations, the inference as to the identity of form of the original beginnings of all of the middle or higher classes of animals, the “Gastræa Theory” of Haeckel, at first so violently opposed, the stress laid upon the equivalence of the blastoderms in the various orders of animals, nay, even many of the animal genealogies, really only asserted as a working hypothesis, have stood the test beyond all expectation; although Du Bois-Reymond insinuated that the pedigrees of the heroes of Homer were more worthy of credit. To appreciate the complete victory of these ideas one need but refer to the discourse _On Recapitulation in Embryology_ with which A. Milnes Marshall opened the meeting of the Biological Section of the British Natural History Society at Leeds, September, 1890.

The very conspicuous irregularities in the formation of organised bodies, which formerly were regarded as monstrosities, or as the freaks and riddles of the formative instinct, the hare-lips, the cleft palates, cases of microcephaly, etc., or the conspicuous want of symmetry in the physical structure of the plaice and sole, formerly made use of by Mivart and Schimper as unassailable counterproofs of Darwin’s doctrines, have shaped themselves into the most decisive verifications of his theory; as in fact, generally, a number of the most splendid evidences of the correctness of the theory have, as the result of exact investigations in organic evolution, proceeded from the most obstinate of its supposed difficulties. Thus, for example, as proof that birds are far removed from the other classes of vertebrates, the circumstance had been cited that certain parts connected with the visual organs are in them situated at the side of the brain, instead of on the dorsal surface, as is the case with the other vertebrates. But a more exact observation has shown that this variation in formation is a secondary result, since in each previous period of development these same organs in the young birds lie, exactly as in the case of the other vertebrates, on the dorsal surface, and only shortly before leaving the egg do they move downward to the sides. In many cases where the development of parts preservable in fossil conditions is under consideration, as for instance portions of the skeleton, the hard integuments, and the teeth, a direct proof may, by comparison, be furnished of the truth of the fact of the correspondence of the embryological formations of living animals with the final and permanent forms of their extinct representatives, a fact which was indeed acknowledged by Agassiz and Vogt, but completely misunderstood. We need only to recall to mind the exact parallelism which Alexander Agassiz and Neumayer have demonstrated to exist in the case of echinoderms, Huxley, Marsh, and others in the formation of the wings of birds, the pelvis of birds, or the hoofs of horses, in order to stamp this view as one that cannot be refuted.

Nevertheless, those opposed to this view, as Carl Vogt, His, Heufen, and others, have not abandoned their position as a hopeless one, and in recent years have relied particularly upon those cases which Haeckel, and before him, Fritz Müller, characterised as a falsification (cenogenesis[16]) or a supplementary alteration and abbreviation of the natural process of development. “Nature is no falsifier,” these opponents proclaim with emphasis, and everything it does is correct and true, and “this false heart alone brings untruth and deceit into the true heaven,” they cry with Wallenstein. People who rely on verbal sophistries merely betray thereby their want of valid counter-arguments. A _mala fides_ on the part of nature can of course never be the subject of discussion among reasonable beings, but a deviation in the process of development of certain varieties from the typical path of the development of the remaining varieties of the species, is _felt_ as a falsification by every investigator who has thoroughly studied the regular processes, for the reason that it has a tendency to _obscure_ the original facts. Thus, for example, in the embryos of certain vertebrates the æsophagus is temporarily completely closed, as Balfour has observed in young sharks, Bles and Marshall in frogs; and this state of affairs may well be considered as a falsification, since an animate being with a closed æsophagus is a natural contradiction, which can never have existed and here happens as a supplementary and temporary process.

As a rule such deviations from the normal course may be classified as consequences of a prolonged residence of the animal germs in the egg or in the womb, the result of which is that owing to the presence of an abundant quantity of nourishing yolk, or through direct connection with the circulatory system of the mother, they in the early stages of their development are relieved of the necessity of acquiring nourishment through their own efforts, and therefore all the contrivances necessary to that purpose may be dispensed with. For this reason we find the primitive processes of development, as Professor Sollas has lately shown, most frequently preserved in marine animals which have never changed nor abandoned their element in the course of the history of their species, in the case of which, therefore, no occasion could ever have arisen for supplementary changes in the process of their development. Much more frequently do we meet with this change in the case of fresh-water animals, for often the rapid currents of their elements, for example a river, will not suffer these to leave the egg in any very helpless larval condition, and in addition fresh water is subject to other unfavorable changes, as the drying up of streams. Also the larvæ of carnivorous animals, which from the very beginning of independent life need more strength to acquire their means of existence, are so completely developed in the richly provisioned eggs in which they take their form, that they emerge therefrom in an almost perfected state of being, as, for example, young sharks and cephalopods. In this kind of animal life, as well as in the case of forms which are brought forth alive from the parent, although they see the light of day much later, comparatively, there takes place not only a great abbreviation of the first stages of existence in the entering upon a more direct path of development, but also changes occur in the form of the original designs because of the limitation of room due to the presence of yolk in the egg, the reason for which is easy to perceive. In many other cases the mechanical cause of the change in development can be directly recognised; for example, in the case of, the tree-toad of the Antilles (_Hylodes marticinensis_), which, owing to the absence of pools lasting through the dry season, is obliged of necessity to remain in the egg during its tadpole stage, that is to say, to skip this stage, as it were; for which reason the formation of external gills in its case is entirely omitted.

The explanation of the origin of new organs seemed at first to afford an insuperable difficulty to the Darwinian theory, since, as Mivart objected, it was not possible to perceive how natural selection could be able to effect the formation of new organs unless they executed corresponding functions from the very beginning. This difficulty, however, has been completely overcome by the theory of altered functions (_Functionswechsel_) which was first proposed by Dorhn, and particularly in recent years by Kleinenberg. According to this theory, in all these cases we have simply to deal with a gradual change in form of already existing organs, which, originally being used to perform one set of functions, are modified so as to perform another. Thus the later developed organs of mastication and the feelers of insects were originally organs of locomotion, legs; and these in the still earlier stages of creeping motion performed appropriate functions as the crooked appendages of the body-rings. The wings of birds were, in their progenitors, forelegs; the tongue of air-breathing vertebrates originated from the fish-bladder, which before that was chiefly an organ of swimming.

The knowledge thus acquired of the natural connection of the processes of evolution also explains, according to Kleinenberg, why organs which are at present completely useless, must yet necessarily appear in the formation of the embryo; for example, the gill-openings in the higher classes of vertebrates, which have no functions to perform at any stage of vertebral development, and which furnished Meckel the first intimation of the fundamental biogenetic law. But as soon as it was explained that the gill-openings furnished the foundation of the development of later-appearing organs with actual functions to perform, it was rendered clear why they should continually recur; namely, because they form the indispensable links of a chain which extends from the dim past of the type in question down to the present time.

There is no doubt that profounder researches in evolutionary history will furnish still more important results: for instance, the more perfect elucidation of the pedigree of mammals; for in this province even our domestic animals are not sufficiently investigated. Every new effort in this direction, for example the recent work of Klever on the evolution of the teeth of the horse, and other investigations concerning the formation of special organs, has invariably shown that much in this field yet remains to be discovered. We have only to recall to mind the recent investigations relating to the development of the pineal gland, which in the last decennium have also led to the discovery of a rudimentary occipital eye, which seems to have actually existed and performed functions in numerous early representatives of the vertebrates, but to-day is simply a fact of history, and has given rise to an organ which Descartes considered as the seat of the soul. We may here also refer to the recent investigations concerning the earlier developmental stages of the duckbills, which have completely confirmed what the theory asserted in advance and required; namely, that they fill the vacancy between the egg-laying reptiles and the mammalia which bring forth their young alive.