The Mind and the Brain

What, then, is the mind? And what share remains to it in all these phenomena, from which it seems we are endeavouring to oust it? The mind is in that special activity which is engaged in sensation, image, idea, emotion, and effort. For a sensation to be produced; there must be, as I said a little time ago, two elements: the something felt—a tree, a house, an animal, a titillation, an odour,—and also the fact of feeling this something, the consciousness of it, the judgment passed on it, the reasoning applied to it—in other terms, the categories which comprehend it. From this point of view, the dualism contained in sensation is clearly expressed. Sensation as a thing felt, that is, the physical part, or matter; sensation as the fact of feeling or of judging, that is, the mind.

Mark the language I use. We say that matter is the something felt; but we do not say for the sake of symmetry, that the mind is the something which feels. I have used a more cautious, and, I think, a more just formula, which places the mind in the fact of feeling. Let me repeat again, at the risk of appearing too subtle: the mind is the act of consciousness; it is not a subject which has consciousness. For a subject, let it be noted, a subject which feels, is an object of cognition—it forms part of the other group of elements, the group of sensations. In practice we represent by mind a fragment of our own biography, and by dint of pains we attribute to this fragment the faculty of having a consciousness; we make it the subject of the relation subject-object. But this fragment, being constituted of memories and sensations, does not exactly represent the mind, and does not correspond to our definition; it would rather represent the mind sensationalised or materialised.

From this follows the curious consequence that the mind is endowed with an incomplete existence; it is like form, which can only be realised by its application to matter of some kind. One may fancy a sensation continuing to exist, to live and to provoke movements, even after ceasing to be perceived. Those who are not uncompromising idealists readily admit this independence of the objects with regard to our consciousness, but the converse is not true. It is impossible to understand a consciousness existing without an object, a perception without a sensation to be perceived, an attention without a point of application, an empty wish which should have nothing to wish for; in a word, a spiritual activity acting without matter on which to act, or more briefly still—mind without matter. Mind and matter are correlative terms; and, on this point, I firmly believe that Aristotle was much closer to the truth than many modern thinkers.

I have convinced myself that the definition of mind at which we have just arrived is, in its exactness and soberness, the only one which permits psychology to be distinguished from the sciences nearest to it. You know that it has been discovered in our days that there exists a great difficulty in effecting this delimitation. The definitions of psychology hitherto proposed nearly all have the defect of not agreeing with the one thing defined. Time fails us to review them all, but I shall point out one at least, because our discussion on this particular formula will serve as a preparation for taking in hand the last question that remains to be examined—the relation of the mind to the body.

According to the definition I am aiming at, psychology would be the science of internal facts, while the other sciences deal with the external. Psychology, it has also been said, has as its instrument introspection, while the natural sciences work with the eye, the touch, the ear—that is to say, with the senses of extrospection.

To this distinction, I reply that in all sciences there exist but two things: sensations and the consciousness which accompanies them. A sensation may belong to the inner or the outer world through accidental reasons, without any change in its nature; the sensation of the outer world is the social sensation which we share with our fellows. If the excitant which provokes it is included in our nervous system, it is the sensation which becomes individual, hidden to all except ourselves, and constituting a microcosm by the side of a macrocosm. What importance can this have, since all the difference depends on the position occupied by the excitant?

But we are persistently told: there are in reality two ways of arriving at the cognition of objects—from within and from without. These two ways are as opposite as the right and wrong side of a stuff. It is in this sense that psychology is the science of the within and looks at the wrong side, while the natural sciences reckon, weigh, and measure the right side. And this is so true, they add, that the same phenomenon absolutely appears under two forms radically different from each other according as they are looked at from one or the other of the two points of view. Every one of our thoughts, they point out to us, is in correlation with a particular state of our cerebral matter; our thought is the subjective and mental face, the corresponding cerebral process is the objective and material face.

Though this dualism is frequently presented as an observed truth, I think it is possible to show its error. Take an example: I look at the plain before me, and see a flock of sheep pass through it. At the same time an observer, armed with a microscope à la Jules Verne, looks into my brain and observes there a certain molecular dance which accompanies my visual perception. Thus, on the one hand, is my representation; on the other, a dynamic state of the nerve cells. This is what constitutes the right and the wrong sides of the stuff. We are told, "See how little resemblance there is in this; a representation is a psychical, and a movement of molecules a material, thing."

But I, on the contrary, think there is a great resemblance. When I see the flock passing, I have a visual perception. The observer who, by the hypothesis, is at that moment looking into my brain, also experiences a visual perception. Granted, they are not the same perception. How could they be the same? I am looking at the sheep, he is looking at the interior of my brain; it is not astonishing that, looking at objects so different, we should receive images also very different. But, notwithstanding their difference of object—that is, of content—there are here two visual perceptions composed in the same way; and I do not see by what right it can be said that one represents a material, the other a physical, phenomenon. In reality, each of these perceptions has a two-fold and psycho-physical value—physical in regard to the object to which it applies, and psychical inasmuch as it is an act of perception, that is to say, of consciousness. For one is just as much psychical as the other, and as much material, for a flock of sheep is as material a thing as is my brain. If we keep this conclusion in our minds, when we come to make a critical examination of certain philosophical systems, we shall easily see the mistake they make.

Spiritualism[51 - See [Note 43] (#x5_x_5_i81) on p. 191. (#x5_pgepubid00064)] rests on the conception that the mind can subsist and work in total independence of any tie to matter. It is true that, in details, spiritualists make some modification in this absolute principle in order to explain the perceptions of the senses and the execution of the orders of the will; but the duality, the independence, and the autonomy of the soul and the body remain, in any case, the peculiar dogma of the system. This dogma appears to me utterly false; the mind cannot exist without matter to which it is applied; and to the principle of heterogeneity, so often invoked to forbid all commerce between the two substances, I reply by appealing to intuition, which shows us the consciousness and its different forms, comparison, judgment, and reasoning, so closely connected with sensation that they cannot be imagined as existing with an isolated life.

Materialism, we know, argues quite differently; it imagines that a particular state of the nerve centres has the virtue of generating a psychical phenomenon, which represents, according to various metaphors, property, function, effect, and even secretion. Critics have often asked how, with matter in motion, a phenomenon of thought could be explained or fabricated. It is very probable that those who admit this material genesis of thought, represent it to themselves under the form of something subtle, like an electric spark, a puff of wind, a will-of-the-wisp, or an alcoholic flame. Materialists are not alone responsible for these inadequate metaphors, which proceed from a metaphysics constructed of concepts. Let us recollect exactly what a psychical phenomenon is. Let us banish the will-o'-the-wisps, replace them by a precise instance, and return to the visual perception we took as an example a little while back: without intending a pun, "revenons à nos moutons." These sheep which I see in the plain are as material, as real, as the cerebral movement which accompanies my perception. How, then, is it possible that this cerebral movement, a primary material fact, should engender this secondary material fact, this collection of complicated beings which form a flock?

Before going any further, let us invite another philosophical system to take a place within the circle of our discussion; for the same answer will suffice for it as well as for the preceding one, and it will be as well to deal with both at once. This new system, parallelism, in great favour at the present day, appears to me to be a materialism perfected especially in the direction of caution. To escape the mystery of the genesis of the mind from matter, this new system places them parallel to each other and side by side, we might almost say experimentally, so much do parallelists try to avoid talking metaphysics. But their position is untenable, and they likewise are the victims of the mirage of concepts; for they consider the mental as capable of being parallel to the physical without mingling with it, and of subsisting by itself and with a life of its own. Such a hypothesis is only possible by reason of the insufficient definition given to the mind. If it be recognised that the mind has an incomplete existence and is only realised by its incarnation in matter, the figure which is the basis of parallelism becomes indefensible. There is no longer on the one hand the physical, and on the other the mental, but on one side the physical and the mental combined, and on the other the same combination; which amounts to saying that the two faces to a reality, which it was thought had been made out to be so distinct, are identical. There are not two faces, but one face; and the monism, which certain metaphysicians struggle to arrive at by a mysterious reconciliation of the phenomenal duality within the unity of the noumenon, need not be sought so far afield, since we already discover it in the phenomenon itself.

The criticisms I have just pointed out to you, only too briefly, are to be found in several philosophers, confusedly in Berkeley, and with more precision in M. Bergson's book on Matière et Mémoire. The latter author, remarking that our brain and the outer world are to us images of the same order, refuses to admit that the brain, which is only a very small part of these images, can explain and contain the other and much larger part, which comprises the vast universe. This would amount to saying that the whole is comprised in the part. I believe that this objection is analogous to the one just stated with less ingenuity.

It is interesting to see how M. Bergson gets out of the difficulty which he himself raised. Being unwilling to bring forth from the molecular movement of the brain the representation of the world, or to superpose the representation on this movement as in the parallelist hypothesis, he has arrived at a theory, very ingenious but rather obscure, which consists in placing the image of the world outside the brain, this latter being reduced to a motor organ which executes the orders of the mind.

We thus have four philosophical theories, which, while trying to reconcile mind with matter, give to the representation a different position in regard to cerebral action. The spiritualist asserts the complete independence of the representation in relation to cerebral movement; the materialist places it after, the parallelist by the side of, the cerebral movement; M. Bergson puts it in front.

I must confess that the last of these systems, that of M. Bergson, presents many difficulties. As he does not localise the mind in the body, he is obliged to place our perception—that is to say, a part of ourselves—in the objects perceived; for example, in the stars when we are looking at them. The memory is lodged in distant planes of consciousness which are not otherwise defined. We understand with difficulty these emigrations, these crumblings into morsels of our mind. This would not matter if our author did not go so far as to maintain that the sensory nerves of the brain are not sensory nerves, and that the severance of them does not suppress sensations, but simply the motor efforts of these sensations. All the physiologist in me protests against the rashness of these interpretations.

The principal difficulties of the problem of the union between the mind and the body proceed from the two following facts, which seem incompatible. On the one hand, our thought is conditioned by a certain intra-cerebral movement of molecules and atoms; and, on the other hand, this same thought has no consciousness of this molecular movement. It does not know the path of the wave in our nerves; it does not suspect, for example, that the image of the objects is reversed in the retina, or that the excitements of the right eye for the most part go into the left hemisphere. In a word, it is no anatomist. It is a very curious thing that our consciousness enters into relation only with the extra-cerebral, the external objects, and the superficies of our bodies.

From this, this exact question suggests itself: a molecular wave must come as far as our visual cerebral centre for us to have the perception of the object before our eyes; how is it that our consciousness is unaware of this physiological event from which it depends, and is borne towards the distant object as if it sprang forth outside our nervous system?

Let us first remark, that if we do not perceive this wave, yet it must contain all we know of the external object, for it is evident that we only know of it that part of its properties which it transmits to our nerves and our nerve centres. All the known substance of the external object is, then, implied in this vibration; it is there, but it is not there by itself. The vibration is the work of two collaborators; it expresses at once the nature of the object which provokes it, and the nature of the nerve apparatus which transports it, as the furrow traced in the wax of the phonograph implies the joint action of an aërial vibration with a stylus, a cylinder, and, a clock-work apparatus.

I therefore suppose—and this is, I say it plainly, but an hypothesis—that if the nervous vibration so little resembles the external excitant which generates it, it is because the factor nervous system superadds its effect to the factor excitant. Let us imagine, now, that we have managed to separate these two effects, and we shall understand that then the nervous event so analysed might resemble only the object, or only the nervous system. Now, of these two effects, one is constant, that one which represents the action of the nervous system; there is another which varies with each new perception, and even with every moment of the same perception—that is to say, the object. It is not impossible to understand that the consciousness remains deaf to the constant and sensitive to the variable element. There is a law of consciousness which has often been described, and fresh applications of which are met with daily: this is, that the consciousness only maintains itself by change, whether this change results from the exterior by impressions received, or is produced from the interior by movements of the attention. Let us here apply this empirical law, and admit that it contains a first principle. It will then be possible for us to understand that the consciousness formed into a dialyser of the undulation may reject that constant element which expresses the contribution of the nervous system, and may lay bare the variable element which corresponds to the object: so that an intestinal movement of the cerebral substance, brought to light by this analytical consciousness, may become the perception of an object. By accepting this hypothesis, we restore to the sensory nerves and to the encephalic centres their property of being the substrata of representation, and avoid the objection made above against materialism and parallelism, that they did not explain how a cerebral movement, which is material, can engender the perception of an object which differs greatly from it and is yet as material as the movement itself. There is not here, properly speaking, either generation, transformation, or metamorphosis. The object to be perceived is contained in the nerve current. It is, as it were, rolled up in it; and it must be made to go forth from the wave to be seen. This last is the work of the consciousness.

notes

1

L'Ame et la Corps.—Disagreeable as it is to alter an author's title, the words "Soul and Body" had to be abandoned because of their different connotation in English. The title "Mind and Body" was also preoccupied by Bain's work of that name in this series. The title chosen has M. Binet's approval.—Ed.

2

Étude experímentale de l'Intelligence. Paris: Schleicher.

3

Connaissance.—The word cognition is used throughout as the English equivalent of this, except in places where the context shows that it means acquaintance merely.—Ed.

4

J. S. Mill, An Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy, pp. 5 and 6. London. 1865.

5

A few subtle philosophers have returned to it, as I shall show later in chapter iv.

6

Thus, the perplexity in which John Stuart Mill finds himself is very curious. Having admitted unreservedly that our knowledge is confined to sensations, he is powerless to set up a reality outside this, and acknowledges that the principle of causality cannot legitimately be used to prove that our sensations have a cause which is not a sensation, because this principle cannot be applied outside the world of phenomena.

7

See p. 18 (#x1_x_1_i91), sup.—Ed.

8

I would draw attention to a recent volume by Gustave Le Bon, on Evolution de la Matière, a work full of original and bold ideas.

9

See [Note 1] (#x1_x_1_i74) on p. 3 (#x1_pgepubid00018) .—Ed.

10

See p. 22 (#x1_x_1_i96), sup.—Ed.

11

See J. S. Mill's Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy, chap. x. p. 176, et. seq.

12

See p. 18 (#x1_x_1_i91), sup.—Ed.

13

See [Note 3] (#x2_x_2_i1), sup. on p. 15 (#x1_x_1_i86).—Ed.

14

The word "conscience" is one of those which has been used in the greatest number of different meanings. Let it be, at least, understood that I use it here in an intellectual and not a moral sense. I do not attach to the conscience the idea of a moral approbation or disapprobation, of a duty, of a remorse. The best example to illustrate conscience has, perhaps, been formed by Ladd. It is the contrast between a person awake and sleeping a dreamless sleep. The first has consciousness of a number of things; the latter has consciousness of nothing. Let me now add that we distinguish from consciousness that multitude of things of which one has consciousness of. Of these we make the object of consciousness. [Conscience has throughout been rendered "consciousness."—Ed.]

15