The Mind and the Brain

CHAPTER IV

DEFINITION OF THE EMOTIONS

After sensations and images, we have to name among the phenomena of consciousness, the whole series of affective states—our pleasures and our pains, our joys and our griefs, our sentiments, our emotions, and our passions. It is universally admitted that these states are of a mental nature, for several reasons. (1) We never objectivate them as we do our sensations, but we constantly consider them as indwelling or subjective states. This rule, however, allows an exception for the pleasure and the pain termed physical, which are often localised in particular parts of our bodies, although the position attributed to them is less precise than with indifferent sensations. (2) We do not alienate them as we do our indifferent sensations. The sensations of weight, of colour, and of form serve us for the construction of bodies which appear to us as perceived by us, but as being other than ourselves. On the contrary, we constantly and without hesitation refer our emotional states to our Ego. It is I who suffer, we say, I who complain, I who hope. It is true that this attribution is not absolutely characteristic of mental phenomena, for it happens that we put a part of our Ego into material objects, such as our bodies, and even into objects separate from our bodies, and whose sole relation to us is that of a legal proprietorship. We must guard against the somewhat frequent error of identifying the Ego with the psychical.

These two reasons sufficiently explain the tendency to see only psychological states in the emotional ones; and, in fact, those authors who have sought to oppose mind to matter have not failed to introduce emotion into their parallel as representing the essence of mind. On this point I will recall the fine ironical image used by Tyndall, the illustrious English physicist, to show the abyss which separates thought from the molecular states of the brain. "Let us suppose," he says, "that the sentiment love, for example, corresponds to a right-hand spiral movement of the molecules of the brain and the sentiment hatred to a left-hand spiral movement. We should then know that when we love, a movement is produced in one direction, and when we hate, in another. But the Why would remain without an answer."

The question of knowing what place in our metaphysical theory we ought to secure for emotion seems difficult to resolve, and we even find some pleasure in leaving it in suspense, in order that it may be understood that a metaphysician is not compelled to explain everything. Besides, the difficulties which atop us here are peculiarly of a psychological order. They proceed from the fact that studies on the nature of the emotions are still very little advanced. The physical conditions of these states are pretty well known, and their psychical and social effects have been abundantly described; but very little is known as to what distinguishes an emotion from a thought.

Two principal opinions may be upheld in the actual state of our acquaintance with the psychology of the feelings. When we endeavour to penetrate their essential and final nature, we have a choice between two contrary theories.

The first and traditional one consists in seeing in emotion a phenomenon sui generis; this is very simple, and leaves nothing more to be said.

The second bears the name of the intellectualist theory. It consists in expunging the characteristic of the affective states. We consider them as derivative forms of particular modes of cognition, and they are only "confused intelligence." This intellectualist thesis is of early date; it will be found in Herbart, who, by-the-by, gave it a peculiar form, by causing the play of images to intervene in the formation of the feelings. However, this particular point is of slight Importance. The intellectualist theory is more vast than Herbartism; it exists in all doctrines in which the characteristic difference between thought and feeling is expunged and feeling is brought back to thought. One of the clearest means of so doing consists in only seeing in the feeling the fact of perceiving something. To perceive is, in fact, the property of intelligence; to reason, to imagine, to judge, to understand, is always, in a certain sense, to perceive. It has been imagined that emotion is nothing else than a perception of a certain kind, an intellectual act strictly comparable to the contemplation of a landscape. Only, in the place of a landscape with placid features you must put a storm, a cataclysm of nature; and, instead of supposing this storm outside us, let it burst within us, let it reach us, not by the outer senses of sight and condition, but by the inner senses. What we then perceive will be an emotion.

Such is the theory that two authors—W. James and Lange—happened to discover almost at the same time, Lange treating it as a physiologist and W. James as a philosopher. Their theory, at first sight, appears singular, like everything which runs counter to our mental habits. It lays down that the symptoms which we all till now have considered as the physiological consequence, the translation, and the distant effects of the emotions, constitute their essential base. These effects are: the expression of the physiognomy, the gesture, the cry, and the speech; or the reflex action on the circulation, the pallor or blushing, the heat mounting to the head, or the cold of the shiver which passes over the body. Or it is the heart, which hastens or slackens its beats, or makes them irregular, or enfeebles, or augments them. Or the respiration, which changes its rhythm, or increases, or is suspended. Or else it is the secretion of the saliva or of the sweat, which flows in abundance or dries up. Or the muscular force, which is increased or decays. Or the almost undefinable organic troubles revealed to us by the singing in the ears, constriction of the epigastrium, the jerks, the trembling, vertigo, or nausea—all this collection of organic troubles which comes more or less confusedly to our consciousness under the form of tactile, muscular, thermal, and other sensations. Until now this category of phenomena has been somewhat neglected, because we saw in it effects and consequences of which the rôle in emotion itself seemed slight, since, if they could have been suppressed, it was supposed that emotion would still remain. The new theory commences by changing the order of events. It places the physical symptoms of the emotions at the very beginning, and considers them the direct effects of the external excitant, which is expressed by this elegant formula: "It used to be said, 'I perceive a danger; I am frightened, I tremble.' Now we must say, 'I tremble before a danger, first, and it is after having trembled that I am frightened.'" This is not a change in order only; it is something much more serious. The change is directed to the nature of emotion. It is considered to exist in the organic derangements indicated above. These derangements are the basis of emotion, its physical basis, and to be moved is to perceive them. Take away from the consciousness this physical reflex, and emotion ceases. It is no longer anything but an idea.

This theory has at least the merit of originality. It also pleases one by its great clearness—an entirely intellectual clearness, we may say; for it renders emotion comprehensible by enunciating it in terms of cognition. It eliminates all difference which may exist between a perception and an emotion. Emotion is no longer anything but a certain kind of perception, the perception of the organic sensations.

This reduction, if admitted, would much facilitate the introduction of emotion into our system, which, being founded on the distinction between the consciousness and the object, is likewise an intellectualist system. The definition of emotion, as it is taught by W. James, seems expressly made for us who are seeking to resolve all intellectual states into physical impressions accompanied by consciousness.

By the side of emotion we may place, as demanding the same analytical study, the feeling of effort. We ought to inquire with effort, as has been done with emotion, what is the psychological nature of this phenomenon; and in the same way that there exists an intellectualist theory of the emotions, viz. that of James, who reduces all the history of the emotions to intelligence, so there exists an intellectualist theory of effort, which likewise tends to bring back, all will to intelligence. It is again the same author, that true genius, W. James, who has attempted this reduction. I do not know whether he has taken into account the parallelism of the two theories, but it is nevertheless evident. Effort, that basis of activity, that state of consciousness which so many psychologists have described as something sui generis, becomes to James a phenomenon of perception. It is the perception of sensations proceeding from the muscles, the tendons, the articulations, the skin, and from all the organs directly or indirectly concerned in the execution of movement. To be conscious of an effort would then be nothing else than to receive all these centripetal sensations; and what proves this is, that the consciousness of effort when most clearly manifested is accompanied by some muscular energy, some strong contraction, or some respiratory trouble, and yields if we render the respiration again regular and put the muscles back into repose.

To my great regret I can state nothing very clear regarding these problems. The attempt to intellectualise all psychical problems is infinitely interesting, and leads to a fairly clear conception, by which everything is explained by a mechanism reflected in a mirror, which is the consciousness. But we remain perplexed, and we ask ourselves whether this clearness of perception is not somewhat artificial, whether affectivity, emotivity, tendency, will, are really all reduced to perceptions, or whether they are not rather irreducible elements which should be added to the consciousness. Does not, for instance, desire represent a complement of the consciousness? Do not desire and consciousness together represent a something which does not belong to the physical domain and which forms the moral world? This question I leave unanswered.

CHAPTER V

DEFINITION OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS—THE RELATION SUBJECT-OBJECT

After having separated from the consciousness that which it is not, let us try to define what it is. This and the two following chapters are devoted to this study.

A theory has often been maintained with regard to the consciousness; namely, that it supposes a relation between two terms—a subject and an object, and that it consists exactly in the feeling of this relation. By subject is understood the something that has consciousness; the object is the something of which we are conscious. Every thought, we are told, implies subject and object, the representer and the represented, the sentiens and the sensum—the one active, the other passive, the active acting on the passive, the ego opposed to the non ego.

This opinion is almost legitimised by current language. When speaking of our states of consciousness, we generally say, "I am conscious; it is I who have consciousness," and we attribute to our I, to our Ego, to our personality, the rôle of subject. But this is not a peremptory argument in favour of the above opinion; it is only a presumption, and, closely examined, this presumption seems very weak.

Hitherto, when analysing the part of mind, we have employed non-committal terms: we have said that sensation implied consciousness, and not that sensation implied something which is conscious.23 The difference may appear too subtle, but it is not; it consists in taking from consciousness the notion of a subject being conscious and replacing it by the very act of consciousness.

My description applies very exactly, I think, to the facts. When we are engaged in a sensation, or when we perceive something, a phenomenon occurs which simply consists in having consciousness of a thing. If to this we add the idea of the subject, which has consciousness, we distort the event. At the very moment when it is taking place, it is not so complicated; we complicate it by adding to it the work of reflection. It is reflection which constructs the notion of the subject, and it is this which afterwards introduces this construction into the states of consciousness; in this way the state of consciousness, by receiving this notion of subject, acquires a character of duality it did not previously possess. There are, in short, two separate acts of consciousness, and one is made the subject of the other. "Primitively," says Rabier, "there is neither representative nor represented; there are sensations, representations, facts of consciousness, and that is all. Nothing is more exact, in my opinion, than this view of Condillac's:—that primitively, the inanimate statue is entirely the sensation that it feels. To itself it is all odour and all savour; it is nothing more, and this sensation includes no duality for the consciousness. It is of an absolute simplicity."

Two arguments may be advanced in favour of this opinion. The first is one of logic. We have divided all knowledge into two groups—objects of cognition, and acts of cognition. What is the subject of cognition? Does it form a new group? By no means; it forms part of the first group, of the object group; for it is something to be known.

Our second argument is one of fact. It consists in remembering that which in practice we understand by the subject of cognition; or rather, metaphorically we represent this subject to ourselves as an organ—the eye that sees or the hand that touches—and we represent to ourselves the relation subject-object in the shape of a material relation between two distinct bodies which are separated by an interval and between which some action is produced which unites them. Or else, confusing the subject and the Ego, which are nevertheless two different notions, we place the Ego in the consciousness of the muscular effort struggling against something which resists. Or, finally and still more frequently, we represent the subject to ourselves by confusing it with our own personality; it is a part of our biography, our name, our profession, our social status, our body, our past life foreshortened, our character, or, in a word, our civil personality, which becomes the subject of the relation subject-object. We artificially endow this personality with the faculty of having consciousness; and it results from this that the entity consciousness, so difficult to define and to imagine, profits by all this factitious addition and becomes a person, visible and even very large, in flesh and bone, distinct from the object of cognition, and capable of living a separate life.

It is not difficult to explain that all this clearness in the representation of ideas is acquired by a falsification of the facts. So sensorial a representation of consciousness is very unfaithful; for our biography does not represent what we have called acts of consciousness, but a large slice of our past experience—that is to say, a synthesis of bygone sensations and images, a synthesis of objects of consciousness; therefore a complete confusion between the acts of consciousness and their objects. The formation of the personality seems to me to have, above all, a legal and social importance.24 It is a peculiar grouping of states of consciousness imposed by our relations with other individuals. But, metaphysically, the subject thus understood is not distinguished from the object, and there is nothing to add to our distinction between the object and the act of consciousness.

Those who defend the existence of the subject point out that this subject properly constitutes the Ego, and that the distinction of the subject and the object corresponds to the distinction of the Ego and non-Ego, and furnishes the separation between the physical and the moral so long sought.

It is evidently very enticing to make of the Ego thus a primitive notion of the consciousness; but this view of the Ego as opposed to the non-Ego in no way corresponds to that of the mental and the physical. The notion of the Ego is much larger, much more extensible, than that of the mental; it is as encroaching as human pride, it grasps in its conquering talons all that belongs to us; for we do not, in life, make any great difference between what is we and what is ours—an insult to our dog, our dwelling, or our work wounds us as much as an insult to ourselves. The possessive pronoun expresses both possession and possessor. In fact, we consider our body as being ourselves.

Here, then, are numbers of material things introducing themselves into the category of mental things. If we wished to expel them and to reduce the domain of the Ego to the domain of the mental, we could only do so if we already possessed the criterion of what is essentially mental. The notion of the Ego cannot therefore supply us with this criterion.

Another opinion consists in making of the subject a spiritual substance, of which the consciousness becomes a faculty. By substance is understood an entity which possesses the two following principal characteristics, unity and identity, this latter merging into unity, for it is nothing else but the persistence of unity through the course of time. Certain philosophers have asserted that through intuition we can all establish that we are a spiritual substance. I am compelled to reject this idea, because I think the expression spiritual substance has no meaning; nothing but the sonorous value of six syllables. It has also been supposed, that there exists a corporeal substance hidden under the sensations, in which are implanted the qualities of bodies, as the various organs of a flower are in its calyx. I will return later to this conception of a material substance. That of a spiritual substance cannot be defended, and the chief and fatal argument I urge against it is, that we cannot represent it to our minds, we cannot think it, and we cannot see in these words "spiritual substance" any intelligible idea; for that which is mental is limited to "that which is of the consciousness." So soon as we endeavour to go beyond the fact of having consciousness to imagine a particular state which must be mental, one of two things happen; either we only grasp the void, or else we construct a material and persistent object in which we recognise psychical attributes. These are two conclusions which ought to be rejected.

CHAPTER VI

DEFINITION OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS—CATEGORIES OF THE UNDERSTANDING

It has often been said that the rôle of intelligence consists in uniting or grasping the relations of things. An important question, therefore, to put, is, if we know whereof these relations consist, and what is the rôle of the mind in the establishment of a relation?

It now and then happens to us to perceive an isolated object, without comparing it with any other, or endeavouring to find out whether it differs from or resembles another, or presents with any other a relation of cause to effect, or of sign to thing signified, or of co-existence in time and space. Thus, I may see a red colour, and occupy all the intellect at my disposal in the perception of this colour, seeing nothing but it, and thinking of nothing but it. Theoretically, this is not impossible to conceive, and, practically, I ask myself if these isolated and solitary acts of consciousness do not sometimes occur.

It certainly seems to me that I have noticed in myself moments of intellectual tonelessness, when in the country, during the vacation, I look at the ground, or the grass, without thinking of anything—or at least, of anything but what I am looking at, and without comparing my sensation with anything. I do not think we should admit in principle, as do many philosophers, that "we take no cognisance save of relations." This is the principle of relativity, to which so much attention has been given. Taken in this narrow sense, it seems to me in no way imperative for our thoughts. We admit that it is very often applied, but without feeling obliged to admit that it is of perpetual and necessary application.

These reserves once made, it remains to remark, that the objects we perceive very rarely present themselves in a state of perfect isolation. On the contrary, they are brought near to other objects by manifold relations of resemblance, of difference, or of connection in time or space; and, further, they are compared with the ideas which define them best. We do not have consciousness of an object, but of the relations existing between several objects. Relation is the new state produced by the fact that one perceives a plurality of objects, and perceives them in a group.

Show me two colours in juxtaposition, and I do not see two colours only, but, in addition, their resemblance in colour or value. Show me two lines, and I do not see only their respective lengths but their difference in length. Show me two points marked on a white sheet of paper, and I do not see only the colour, form, and dimension of the points, but their distance from each other. In our perceptions, as in our conceptions, we have perpetually to do with the relations between things. The more we reflect, the more we understand things, the more clearly we see their relations; the multiplication of relations is the measure of the depth of cognition.25

The nature of these relations is more difficult to ascertain than that of objects. It seems to be more subtle. When two sounds make themselves heard in succession, there is less difficulty in making the nature of these two sounds understood than the nature of the fact that one occurs before the other. It would appear that, in the perception of objects, our mind is passive and reduced to the state of reception, working like a registering machine or a sensitive surface, while in the perception of relations it assumes a more important part.

Two principal theories have been advanced, of which one puts the relations in the things perceived, and the other makes them a work of the mind. Let us begin with this last opinion. It consists in supposing that the relations are given to things by the mind itself. These relations have been termed categories. The question of categories plays an important part in the history of philosophy. Three great philosophers, Aristotle, Kant, and Renouvier have drawn up a list, or, as it is called, a table of them, and this table is very long. To give a slight idea of it, I will quote a few examples, such as time, space, being, resemblance, difference, causality, becoming, finality, &c.

By making the categories the peculiar possession of the mind, we attribute to these cognitions the essential characteristic of being anterior to sensation, or, as it is also termed, of existing a priori: we are taught that not only are they not derived from experience, nor taught us by observation, but further that they are presupposed by all observation, for they set up, in scholastic jargon, the conditions which make experience possible. They represent the personal contribution of the mind to the knowledge of nature, and, consequently, to admit them is to admit that the mind is not, in the presence of the world, reduced to the passive state of a tabula rasa, and that the faculties of the mind are not a transformation of sensation. Only these categories do not supplement sensation, they do not obviate it, nor allow it to be conjectured beforehand. They remain empty forms so long as they are not applied to experience; they are the rules of cognition and not the objects of cognition, the means of knowing and not the things known; they render knowledge possible, but do not of themselves constitute it, Experience through the senses still remains a necessary condition to the knowledge of the external world. It may be said that the senses give the matter of knowledge, and that the categories of the understanding give the form of it. Matter cannot exist without form, nor form without matter; it is the union of the two which produces cognition.

Such is the simplest idea that can be given of the Kantian theory of categories, or, if it is preferred to employ the term often used and much discussed, such is the theory of the Kantian idealism, This theory, I will say frankly, hardly harmonises with the ideas I have set forth up to this point. To begin with, let us scrutinise the relation which can exist between the subject and the object. We have seen that the existence of the subject is hardly admissible, for it could only be an object in disguise. Cognition is composed in reality of an object and an act of consciousness. Now, how can we know if this act of consciousness, by adding itself to the object, modifies it and causes it to appear other than it is?