Cobwebs of Thought Part 1

Cobwebs of Thought.

by Arachne.

MOTTO.

"The first philosophers, whether Chaldeans or Egyptians, said there must be something within us which produces our thought. That something must be very subtle: it is breath; it is fire, it is ether; it is a quintessence; it is a slender likeness; it is an intelechia; it is a number; it is harmony; lastly, according to the divine Plato, it is a compound of the _same_ and the _other_! It is atoms which think in us, said Epicurus after Democritus. But, my friend, how does an atom think? Acknowledge that thou knowest nothing of the matter."

--VOLTAIRE.

I.

OUR IGNORANCE OF OURSELVES.

Self-a.n.a.lysis, apart from its scientific uses, has seldom rewarded those who have practised it. To probe into the inner world of motive and desire has proved of small benefit to any one, whether hermit, monk or nun, indeed it has been altogether mischievous in result, unless the mind that probed, was especially healthy. Bitter has been the dissatisfaction, both with the process, and with what came of it, for being miserably superficial it could lead to no real knowledge of self, but simply centred self on self, producing instead of self-knowledge, self-consciousness, and often the beginnings of mental disease.

For fruitful self a.n.a.lysis it is apparently necessary then to have a clear, definite aim outside self--such as achieving the gain of some special piece of knowledge, and we find such definite aims in psychology, and certain systems of philosophy--Greek, English, and German, in Plato Locke, Kant, and in the meditations of Descartes, and many others. Self-a.n.a.lysis is the basis of psychological knowledge, but the science has been chiefly used to explain the methods by which we obtain knowledge of the outer world in relation to ourselves. When a philosopher centres self on self, in order to know self as a result of introspection, the results have been disastrous, and have contributed nothing to knowledge, properly so-called. If religious self-examination has its dangers, so also has philosophical self-a.n.a.lysis for its own sake. It is a fascinating study for those who care for thought for thought's sake--the so-called Hamlets of the world, who are for ever revolving round the axes of their own ideas and dreams, and who never progress towards any clear issue. Amiel's "Vie Intime" is a study of this kind. It adds nothing to any clear knowledge of self, absorbing and interesting as the record is. It is suggestive to a great degree, and in that lies its value, but it is as vague, as it is sad. It appeals deeply to those who live apart in a world of their own, in thoughtful imaginative reverie, but its effects on the mind were deplored even by Amiel himself in words which are acutely pathetic. The pain which consumed him arose from the concentration of self on self. Self was monopolised by self, self-consciousness was produced, though without a touch of selfish egoism.

Out of this self-conscious introspection, grew that sterility of soul and mind, that dwindling of capacity, and individuality, which Amiel felt was taking place within him. A constant, aimless, inevitable habit of self-introspection was killing his mental life, before the end came physically.

Another philosophical victim to the same habit was John Stuart Mill, at one time of his life. His father a.n.a.lysed almost everything, except himself, and John Stuart Mill had grown up in this logical atmosphere of a.n.a.lysis, and to much profit as his works show. But when he turned the microscope on his own states of feeling, and on the aims of his life, the result was melancholia--almost disease of mind. His grandly developed faculty of a.n.a.lysis when devoted to definite knowledge outside himself, produced splendid results, as in his Logic, and his Essays, but when he a.n.a.lysed himself, he gained no additional knowledge, but a strange morbid horror that all possible musical changes might be exhausted, and that there might be no means of creating fresh ones. He also feared that should all the reforms he, and others, worked for, be accomplished, the lives of the reformers would become meaningless and blank, since they were working for means, not ends in themselves. Out of this hopeless mental condition there was only one outlet possible, and that was to leave self-a.n.a.lysis of this sort alone for ever, and to throw himself into its direct contrary, the unconscious life of the emotions. John Stuart Mill did this, and it saved him. In Wordsworth's poetry he found sanity and healing. Happily for him that was not the age of Browning's "Fifine at the Fair." Had he fallen in with dialectical a.n.a.lysis in the garb of poetry, it must have killed him!

And yet "Know thyself" has always been considered supremely excellent advice, as true for our time, as for the age of Socrates. It certainly is disregarded by most of us, as fully as it was by many of the Greeks, whom Socrates interrogated so ruthlessly. Is there then a sort of self-a.n.a.lysis, which can be carried out for its own sake, and which can be, at the same time, of vital use? Is all self-a.n.a.lysis when practised for its own sake necessarily harmful, and unprofitable? It is time to ask these questions if we are ever to know how to a.n.a.lyse ourselves with profit, if we are ever to know ourselves. And we none of us do. As students, we are content with every other knowledge but this. After all the self probing of the religious and philosophical, during long centuries, what have we learned? Truly to ourselves, we are enigmas. To know everything else except the self that knows, what a strange position! But it is our condition. The one thing that we do not know--that we feel as if we never could know is the Self in us.

Our characters, our powers, our natures, our being--what are they? Our faculties--what can we do? And what can we not do? What is the reason of this faculty, or that want of faculty? We have never reached an understanding of ourselves, which makes us not only know, but perceive what we are capable of knowing; which makes us aware, not only that we can do something, but why we can do it. We are an unknown quant.i.ty to ourselves. We can calculate on a given action in a machine, but we cannot calculate on our own, much less on our moods. If we would but take half the trouble to understand ourselves that we take to study a science or art--if we could learn to depend on the sequence of our own thoughts as an engineer can on the sequence of movements in his steam engine--if we could dig, and penetrate into the depths of our own being, as a miner penetrates into a seam of coal--we might then cultivate with some profit our own special lines of thought, our own gifts, that portion of individuality, which we each possess. But it is so difficult to get to know it--we are always on the surface of ourselves. What power will unearth our self and make us really know what we are and what we can do? It is because we do not know ourselves, that we fail so hopelessly to give the things which are of incalculably real worth to the world, such as fresh individuality, and reality of character. Among millions of beings how few exist who possess strong original minds! We are _not_ individual for the most part, and we are _not_ real. Our lives _are_ buried lives; we are unconscious absorbers, and reproducers, under other words of that which we have imbibed elsewhere. We need not only fresh expressions of old statements, but actually new ideas, and new conceptions. (The fresh _subjects_ people talk about, are really fresh _conceptions_ of subjects.) We shall never get this bloom of freshness, and this sense of reality and individuality of view unless we cultivate their soil--to have fresh ideas, we must encourage the right atmosphere in which alone they can live. We must not let our own personality, however slight, be suppressed, or be discouraged, or interfered with by a more powerful, or a more excellent personality.

Individuality is so weak and pliable a thing in most of us that it is very easily checked--it requires watchfulness and care, and not to be overborne, for the smallest individual thought of a mind of any originality, is more worth to the world than any re-expression of the thought of some other mind, however great.

Even the "best hundred books" may have a disastrous effect upon us.

They may kill some aspirations, if they kindle others. Persons of mature age may surely at some time have made the discovery that much has been lost through the dominating influence of a superior mind.

Many persons, for instance, have felt the great influence of Carlyle, and Ruskin, in their youth. Carlyle could do incalculable good to some minds by his ethics of work, but irremediable harm to others; minds have actually become stunted and sterile through that part of his teaching, which was unsuited to them. Carlyle's temperament checked their proper development. Youth has a beautiful capacity for trust and belief, and it accepts everything as equal in goodness and truth from an author it reverences. The young do not know enough of themselves, and they do not trust enough to their own instincts to discriminate.

They are dominated and unconsciously suppressed. Ruskin, in his ethical views of art, and strange doctrines about some old masters, has done nearly as much harm to susceptible minds as Carlyle. Ruskin restricted and perverted their art ideals on certain lines as Carlyle crushed ethical discrimination. Mind have been kept imprisoned for years, and their development on the lines nature intended them to take, has been arrested, by the want of belief in their own initiative. What was inevitable for Ruskin's unique mind was yet wrong for readers, who agreed to all his theories under the influence of his fascinating personality, and through the power of his individuality.

In life, we sometimes find we have made a series of mistakes of this sort, before at last we get glimmerings of what we were intended to be, and we learn at last the need of having known ourselves, and the vital necessity of cultivating the atmosphere and colour of that mind of ours, which has been used merely as a tool to know everything else.

Spiritualists and Theosophists talk of a Dominant Self, and an Astral body, and of gleams of heavensent insight. Gleams of insight and dreams do come to us, and teach us truths, which "never can be proved," and without some such intuitions the soul of man would indeed be poor,

The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar.

But the value of the intuitions is relative to the soul which has them; they cannot be conveyed to any one else, or demonstrated; they can never become Truths valid to all minds. And these last are the truths we want if we would make some orderly progress towards a given issue. And so we resort after all, to science, to see if it can solve the intellectual riddle of our being. What can it do for us? If we would really know ourselves, we want a depth of self-a.n.a.lysis; not a pitiful search for motives, not the superficial probings of a moralist, not the boundless, limitless, self-absorbed speculations on the nature of self of the philosopher, not the sympathetic noting of each emotion that crosses the horizon of the soul--the introspection of the Poet; these will never teach us the reason why we think and feel on certain lines, and not on others--these will never explain to us what the mind is, that is in us--what that strange thing is, which we have tried so vainly to understand. And without this knowledge how worthless is the work of the moralist; of what practical use is it for him to endeavour to alter a man's character, when he does not even know the ingredients that const.i.tute character, still less the cause why character is good or bad. Mr. Robert Buchanan said in one of his essays: "I can advance no scientific knowledge for seeing a great genius in Robert Browning, or a fine painstaking talent in George Eliot, for thinking George Meredith almost alone in his power of expressing personal pa.s.sion, and Walt Whitman supreme in his power of conveying moral stimulation. I can take a skeleton to pieces scientifically, but not a living soul. I am helpless before Mr.

Swinburne, or any authentic poet, but quite at my ease before Macaulay or Professor Aytoun." Mr. Buchanan could presumably take the last two to pieces and a.n.a.lyse them as if they were skeletons; but before Swinburne, "the living soul," he is helpless. Now we want a scientific reason for all this; we want to a.n.a.lyse, not the skeleton, that has been done often enough, but "the living soul." We want to know the ingredients of character that const.i.tuted Mr. Buchanan's preferences.

What composition gave him his special temper and character? Why did his mind tend towards Robert Browning, and away from George Eliot? Why in short did his mind work in the way it did? The more original the mind, the more its investigation would repay us. But it must be self-investigation; what we want are facts of mind, mental data and in order to get them, we must investigate the living mind All the usual explanations of Temperament, Nature, Heredity, Education are the same difficulties, expressed in different words. Heredity is a circ.u.mstance, which has to be reckoned with, but we have to investigate, not circ.u.mstances, but results. Here is a living complex mind, no matter how I inherit it, here it is; now then, how does it work, what can I do with it? And then comes the further inevitable question--What is it? What is this thing, this me, which tends to feel and act in a certain direction--to admire spontaneously, this, and to despise with as perfect ease, that. What we need for scientific investigation into the ME is "to utilise minds so as to form a living laboratory" _Mind_ vivisection without torture, cruelty or the knife.

What we want to know definitely from science is: How does this thing which I call my mind work? Science regards mind as the sum of sensations, which are the necessary results of antecedent causes. It endeavours to know how and in what way these sensations can be trained and perfected. Nearly twenty years ago, a writer in the Psychological Journal "Mind"[1] Mr. J. Jacobs, attempted to form a Society for the purpose of experimental psychology. Thinkers and scientific men have carried out this work, but the general public has not been greatly interested or interested for any length of time. No such society exists among the English public. The greater number of enthusiastic students is to be found in Italy and America. But Germany has furnished great individual workers, such as Fechner, Helmholtz, and Wundt. Collective investigation was necessary to separate individual peculiarities from general laws. Science of course aims at changing the study of individual minds/into "a valid science of mind." Mr. J.

Jacobs wished a Society to be organised for the purpose of measuring mind, measuring our senses, and for testing our mental powers as accurately as weight and height are tested now, and also for experimenting on will practice. He believed it possible to train the will on one thing until we got it perfectly under control, and in so doing we should modify character immensely. If this proved possible, we ought to persevere until conduct becomes an art, education a principle, and mind is known as a science is known. Mr. Jacobs wanted systematic enquiries to be made into powers of attention, such as "Can we listen and read at the same time, and reproduce what we have read and heard." And into the faculties of observation and memory, with after images, and the capacity for following trains of reasoning, &c., &c., "When we read a novel, do we actually have pictures of the scenes before our minds?" Mr. Jacobs wished for enquiries into every kind of intelligence ordinary and extraordinary; out of all ingredients of character, out of early impressions, out of cla.s.sified emotions to build up an answer to the question: "Is there a science of mind?" Since he wrote, much has been done in experiment by the scientific. Children's minds are constantly being investigated, and the results given to the public. Mr. Galton has to some extent popularised this sort of investigation. But it is still generally unpopular. Novelists, and artists, leisured people, women, everyone could be of use, if they would investigate themselves, or offer their minds for investigation. But after all that the scientific French, German, American, Italian, and English workers have done, we are as yet only on the threshold of mind knowledge--of what we might know--if we had ardour enough to push self-a.n.a.lysis in to the remotest corner of the brain, noting down, comparing, tabulating the most involuntary and ethereal sublimities that appear to flit through the mind, the most subtle emotion that hardly finds expression in language. We must push on and on till we arrive at the knowledge of a mind science. Our scientific enquirers want, as we all do, more ardour, they are dulled by a cold, uninterested public. Psychologists now seem to despair of obtaining any large results from the science. Mr. E.W. Scripture in "The New Psychology" says, in 1897, "It cannot dissect the mind with a scalpel, it cannot hope to find a startling principle of mental life."

If psychological experiment could be presented somewhat apart from its technicalities, and if minds could play freely round its discoveries, how much more interesting it would be felt to be by the general public! The great experimental worker, Mr. J. Mck Cattell has given[2]

some clear idea of the results he obtained by a.n.a.lysing and measuring sensations. The physical processes, which accompany sensations of sound and light for instance, unlike as they must be to sensations, being facts of matter in motion, yet share with them this characteristic, that sensations also have each an _order in time_, the mental processes can be measured, equally with the physical. Of course measuring sensations is only measuring "the outside of the mind"--but it produces among others one very suggestive result: "that as time is relative, if all things moved much more slowly or quickly than at present, we should not feel any change at all. But if our objective measures of time moved twice as fast, whilst physiological movements and mental processes went on at the same rate as now, the days of our years would be seven score, instead of three score years and ten, yet we should not be any the older, or live any the longer. If on the other hand the rate of our physiological and mental motions was doubled and we lived exactly as many years as before, we should feel as if we lived twice as long and were twice as old as now." This is a suggestion for Mr. Well's "Antic.i.p.ations" Is evolution leading us in this direction or the other? Is it r.e.t.a.r.ding or "quickening the molecular arrangements of the nervous system?" Are we becoming "more delicately balanced so that physical changes proceed more quickly as thoughts become more comprehensive, feelings more intense, and will, stronger." Does the time it needs to think, feel, and will become less? And we may add are the physical and mental processes of the intelligent brain, quicker, or slower than the unintelligent? For if it is the sensitive quick witted organisation, which is destined to live twice as long as it does now, how will it bear the burden of such added years? Leaving aside inquiries into Time, and s.p.a.ce Sense--(and what enormous faculty our minds must have that can supply these)--let us go on to Mr. J. McKeen Cattell's a.n.a.lysis of memory--which is perhaps the most interesting of all to the student of mind--the a.n.a.lysis of memory, attention and a.s.sociation of ideas. Just as the eye can only see (attend to) a certain number of vibrations, for if the requisite amount is added to, the result is blankness, darkness, so the mind can only attend to a certain amount of complexity--add to the complexity and attention ceases, but, a certain degree of complexity is necessary to produce any conscious attention at all. In experiments with a Metronome and the ticking of a watch, it is found the attention at certain intervals gets weaker--from 2 to 3 seconds.

The impression produced by the ticking of the watch is less distinct, it seems to disappear and then is heard again. "This is not from fatigue in the sense organ," but apparently represents "a natural rhythm in consciousness or attention," which interferes with the accuracy of attention. What a suggestive fact this is! Have we not all at times, felt an inexplicable difficulty in listening and attending to certain speakers, which may perhaps be explained by a difference between the rhythm of our own consciousness, and that of the voice of the speaker. In a.s.sociation of Ideas the time that it takes for one idea to suggest another has been determined, but of course, it must be the average time, for people differ enormously in the speed in which ideas occur to them. It is impossible to allude here to more points, but in the same interesting article Mr. Mck Cattell considers it proved that "experimental methods can be applied to the study of mind, and that the positive results are significant," and he hopes, "one day, we shall have as accurate and complete a knowledge of mind as we have of the physical world." Beyond this knowledge of mind as a machine, the Psychologist goeth not. He ends, and what do we know more as to what mind is? Philosophy properly so-called, begins here or ought to begin. In science we experiment widely and constantly with mind and arrive at some knowledge of its workings and capacities; we learn occupation with the mind itself as a subject for observation, and we practise a self-a.n.a.lysis, which adds to the sum of general knowledge. Through this study we know more about our senses and their faculties, more of our own tendencies and idiosyncrasies, and in what direction they tend. We are on the way to solve some such problems as: "the influences of early impressions, the ingredients of character, the varying susceptibility to mental anguish, the conquest of the will," and many another. These are beginnings--there is much more to attain to, if we would know mind even scientifically, for we have only attacked its breast works, but we are on the right road, as we believe, towards this most interesting of all sciences--Mind Science.

From Philosophy we do not as yet know definitely that mind _is_, or what it is, or why it is. The psychologist accepts the word mind, but it is not accepted as a _philosophical_ term; it is called Consciousness, Being, Ego, and anything else but mind. Notwithstanding, we all feel what we mean by the word. Though the senses divide the non-ego, the world outside us, into five separate parcels, things seen, things heard, things smelt, things touched, things tasted, there is a faculty of unifying, a sensation of unity in us, which makes us conscious of all these separate sensations as forming a whole in any object which comes into our consciousness. Kant has given this unifying faculty, or sensation, a long name, which does not make it any clearer. What is this inner power, which unifies sensations and how does it come? In some way the mind supplies it to its mental states or consciousness. And _within_ us this unifying faculty, which we call Mind, is felt through the infinite number of modifications of sensations or mental states, for we are aware that what we call a mind exists in us. It is this consciousness of unity in complexity, which makes memory and ident.i.ty possible. The exploded idea of mental substance and its attributes, held by the School men, was probably suggested to them by the consciousness of this mental unity. In our mentality there is something which makes each one say "My mind," not "My minds." Now it is this unity of sensations, which is lost, and the mind with it, if the ego is divided as Professor W.

James divides it into many egos such as--the inner self--the complex self--the social self--the intellectual self--and so on. For how does that help us? It is the same unknown quant.i.ty in different circ.u.mstances. The self that ponders in thought, knows itself as the same that talks in society. The strange power of being able to a.n.a.lyse ourselves at all is one of the strangest things about us. What a world of difference lies between the unconscious self of the animal and this conscious self of man! Professor James' brilliantly written chapter of investigation into the self leaves us amused rather than enlightened.

Against all arguments to the contrary, we should refuse to give up the word mind, whether it is considered vague or defective in any or every way. Mind in all its complexity, is what we have to investigate scientifically. Mind in all its complexity is what the philosopher has to explain, not mind, a.n.a.lysed into simple acts of consciousness. The hypnotist talks of double, treble and quadruple personalities with totally different characteristics "under suggestion," but it helps us little for we have not yet defined mind on its sane and normal sides.

Considering the acuteness and the sanity of the French mind, it is somewhat strange that the French psychologists should devote themselves chiefly to the study of the insane and hysterical.

Philosophy, though it gives us soaring thoughts, grand speculations, and metaphysical schemes, from Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, to Herbert Spencer, and Mr. Mallock, cannot give us any knowledge in which they mutually agree. Mr. Mallock sums up philosophy as a necessity to the mind. We _must_ believe in some theory of mind, some religion, some philosophy, else life is dreary and unlivable. This appears to be the result of his book "The Veil of the Temple," and this is simply the doctrine of utility. But no philosopher, can tell us why mind works on certain lines and not on others, because they cannot tell us definitely that they _know_ what mind is. Mind is a function of _Matter: Matter_ is a function of thought: Mind is Noumenon the unseen and unknown, as contrasted with Phenomena the seen and known; the universe, the creation of the mind; the mind, the product of the universe. All these ideas and many others so widely differing can none of them receive a demonstrable proof;--these contrary statements show how far we are from possessing any real knowledge of what mind is. After all that has been written, elaborated and imagined, do we actually _know_ more than Omar Khayam knew?

"There was the door to which I found no key; There was the veil through which I could not see; Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee There was--and then no more of Thee and Me."

Philosophy is still powerless to tell us what mind is; the self, the ego always vanishes as we seem to be nearing it, it always eludes our deepest probings--we only demonstrate our failure in regard to our knowledge of it. All this is true, but should we therefore despair? If we are born with the record on the brain of the inexorable desire to _know_, the very failure should stimulate us to further, and greater, and more fruitful questionings.

II.

CONTRASTS.

CARLYLE, GEORGE ELIOT, MAZZINI, BROWNING,

All contrasts drawn between writers, and thinkers should have for aim the setting forth of some striking and fundamental difference in thought, and it would be hard to find anywhere a greater and a more vivid contrast than that between Carlyle and George Eliot. For George Eliot's philosophy was centred in the well-being of the Race.

Carlyle's was summed up in the worth of the Individual.

George Eliot teaches in prose and still more in poetry that Personality, with its hopes, loves, faiths, aspirations, must all be relinquished, and its agonies and pains endured, should Humanity gain by the sacrifice and the endurance.

She considers the Individual as part of collective humanity, and that he does not live for himself, he has no continuance of personal life, he has no permanence, except as a living influence on the Race. This is the Positivist creed, the Racial Creed.

Beyond the influence that it exerts, spiritual personality is doomed.

It is not humanity in G.o.d but humanity in itself which is to exist from age to age, solely in the memory of succeeding generations.

"Oh may I join the Choir Invisible Of those immortal dead, who live again In minds made better by their presence."

Permanence and continuance and immortality are in the race alone.

George Eliot's strong accentuation of the race is the Gospel of annihilation to the individual. Yet the most personal and imaginative of poets has treated this lofty altruism in his strange, sad, beautiful poem of "The Pilgrims," with a fervour greater even than that of George Eliot.

Here are two stanzas:

"And ye shall die before your thrones be won.

Yea, and the changed world and the liberal sun Shall move and s.h.i.+ne without us and we lie Dead; but if she too move on earth and live, But if the old world with the old irons rent, Laugh and give thanks, shall we not be content?

Nay we shall rather live, we shall not die, Life being so little and Death so good to give."

"Pa.s.s on then and pa.s.s by us, and let us be.

For what life think ye after life to see?

And if the world fare better will ye know?

And if men triumph, who shall seek you and say?"

"Enough of light is this for one life's span.