ARTICLE II.

IS SOUL A BASELESS HYPOTHESIS?

BY THE REV. JAMES T. BIXBY, PH.D., YONKERS, NEW YORK.

"THE constant element of every observation of nature," says Langel," is that we are the observing consciousness of an unconscious world. Among these outward objects we trace similarities; we classify them by various likenesses, one to another. But we can find nothing there that is like the inward self. The farther this self carries its irrepressible surveys, its ordering conquests, the more it opposes, to all that it meets, the point of its own tenacious unity. By whatever name it be called, through whatever phases it may run, it feels that it is something else than plant or mineral."

What is the source of this difference? What is it that enables us, nay, compels us, to speak ceaselessly of self, consciousness, mind, and will?

Philosophy and religion have answered (believing that not only faith, but sound logic required and justified such a solution), "That which constituteth thee what thou art, O man, is a soul, an active, intelligent, immaterial power, different from ordinary matter and force. Thy intelligence is its intelligence, thy will is its will. Through matter and force thou canst express thoughts, but it is this soul that entertains thoughts. Through thy material organs thou movest and actest, but in the soul is the feeling, the will, the knowledge, that starts and guides these actions and movements, by laws that matter knows not, to ends of which it is all unconscious. Nay! though the elements overwhelm thee, the sea drown thee, the moun

Les Problèmes de l'Ame.

tain crush thee, yet art thou greater even in thy defeat than thy vanquisher. For thou alone knowest what is done."

Such is the lofty distinction, the unique prerogative, with which the attributes of conscious mind invest its possessor. But in these latter days all this would be changed. The same tendencies of thought that would explain the phenomena of life as but more complex and refined results of the laws of matter and motion, would include in the same physical theory the higher phenomena

of mind.

Consciousness, these physical theorizers would tell us, is but a function of matter, one of its many modes of motion. Sensation is an impression on a nerve. Hope, fear, and aspiration are but subtler vibrations of the gray stuff within the skull. The thinking being is a mechanical automaton, to which consciousness is but an accidental, inessential accompaniment, each mental state being determined by some physical change and governed by some physical law. "The soul," bluntly says Büchner, "is the product of a peculiar combination of matter." "Will," in his view, "is the necessary result of the strongest motive." Maudsley describes memory as, "the organic registration of the effects of impressions on the brain substance." Ideas, according to him, are formed by the cerebral cells out of the residual force of sensory vibrations. The self or the Ego is an abstraction.

Herbert Spencer tells us that sensations, emotions, thought, are transformations of heat, light, electricity, in the brain-cells.

Similarly says Professor Huxley, in one of his lectures, "The thoughts to which I am giving utterance and your thoughts regarding them, are the expressions of molecular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our vital phenomena." And Professor Tyndall tells us, that "if the molecules of the human body were gathered first hand from nature and put together in the same relative

positions as those which they occupy in the body; if they have the self-same forms and distributions of motions, this organized concourse of molecules," he inclines to believe, "would stand before us a sentient, thinking being."

Such is the result of the modern physical theory of mind. What now are the arguments that are supposed to teach this view of mind? 1st. First and foremost, the fact that mind is never known by us to exist except in combination with a material body or organism, more particularly with the brain and nervous system. 2d. The general fact, of which such numberless illustrations are to be given, that the mental manifestations stand in significant relations to their physical supports.

The soul without the brain, is, for earthly purposes at least, helpless. It is dependent for its energies upon changes in the body. In proportion to the size, weight, firmness, depth of the furrows, and quantity of phosphorus in the brain, so does the intelligence vary. Through the whole series of animal life there exists a gradual elevation of intellectual power corresponding to the increase in the size and weight and development of the brain. In insane patients, there is, in nine cases out of ten, as dissection has shown, some disease, injury, or loss in the brain. An anatomist, by injuring the peduncles of the cerebellum and certain points of the brain, can make an animal move constantly in any direction he chooses,-to right or left, forward or back, or round and round. Similar aberrant movements from similar brain injuries have been noticed in man. Professor Ferrier, by a long and carefully conducted series of experiments upon animals, has shown that all the principal sensory and motor faculties have special seats in the middle lobes of the brain, wherein they are localized, and that, by artificial lesions, any one of these powers may be destroyed at will by the experimenter; or, by artificial stimulation at the brain surface, acts and movements are produced such as usually occur through the stimulus of external objects and sense impressions.

Again, by removing layer after layer of the upper parts of the brain in animals of strong vitality, such as chickens and rabbits, their intelligence has been in a similar degree reduced till, at last, though still living, they seemed to have lost all sense. But nourished by artificial feeding, the brain has sometimes grown again, and, as it has redeveloped, the sense and mental activity of the animal has reappeared in the same ratio. Malnutrition of the left frontal convolution destroys or injures the recollection of words. A blow on the head will not only momentarily destroy consciousness, but often permanently disorder the mind. In a case given by Dr. Beattie, the patient lost all his knowledge of Greek. In a case narrated by Dr. Carpenter, a youth had all knowledge of the music he had learned knocked out of him by a blow on the head. Attacks of apoplexy, epilepsy, or fever similarly disorder oftentimes the memory and the intelligence. Even when the brain remains apparently in all its integrity, slight material disorders will injure the mind. Inflammation in its substance causes delirium. Any considerable pressure upon it will produce unconsciousness; and a very slight pressure, even that of a drop of water or blood, continuing for a length of time, may engender weakness of memory or loss of mind. Contrariwise, there are instances in the annals of science in which the accidental loss of a portion of the brain gave a musical faculty, unknown before; in another case, an attack of cholera changed a cross-grained, stolid man into one with lively. fancy and literary capacity; and, in a third case, an injury to the head brought back the recollection of a language used in infancy but long since forgotten.

And just as the action of the mind in general is dependent on the state of the brain, so in particular, there is no mental process which is not accompanied or preceded by its appropriate physical process. "That no idea or fancy arises save as a result of some physical force expended in producing it, is fast becoming," says Herbert Spencer, "a commonplace of science."

In view of these facts, must we not recognize, it is urged, that the brain is a machine in which the energies of heat, electricity, chemical affinity, and so on, are converted into mental states? If, under certain conditions, motion is transformed into heat, as we now know it to be, why may it not, asks Strauss, be transformed into sensation? The vibration of the nerve and the sensation always accompany one another. The chemical change and the thought are ever co-present in the brain. Why not look upon them, then, as cause and effect to one another, or as opposite sides or states of one and the same thing? What use is there, in the hypothesis of the soul, or call to believe longer in it?

Such is, I think, a brief but fair presentation of the chief arguments for the physical nature of the mind. The similarities and close connections between body and soul, matter and mind, which by it are shown to exist, are, indeed, very striking, and worthy of consideration and explanation. But the materialistic interpretation fails to satisfy more than a part, and that the minor part, of the elements of the problem. There are differences, most noteworthy, radical, and irreducible, which put their veto upon any such explanation.

Put the material by the side of the mental, and compare them. Compare the reasonings of a geometrician and the blackboard he draws upon; the affection of a mother and the heat of a fire; the moral resolution of a rejecter of bribes and a magnetic repulsion; nay, take the simplest state of consciousness and compare it with the attendant oxidation of tissue or nervous vibration, and what wide and numberless incongruities separate them! As Alexander Bain, in his "Body and Mind," admits, “Mental states and bodily states are utterly contrasted; they cannot be compared; they have nothing in common except the most general of attributes, degree and order in kind."

1. The phenomena of matter are outward; they may be perceived simultaneously by several observers, and