In conclusion, it may be asserted that “soul” when freed from all traces of traditional materialistic animism denotes the qualities of psycho-physical activities as far as these are organized into unity. Some bodies have souls preeminently as some conspicuously have fragrance, color, and solidity. To make this statement is to call attention to properties that characterize these bodies, not to import a mysterious non-natural entity or force. Were there not in actual existence properties of sensitivity and of marvel- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE ously comprehensive and delicate participative response characterizing living bodies, mythical notions about the nature of the soul would never have risen. The myths have lost whatever poetic quality they once had; when offered as science they are superstitious encumbrances. But the idiomatic non-doctrinal use of the word soul retains a sense of the realities concerned. To say empha¬ tically of a particular person that he has soul or a great soul is not to utter a platitude, applicable equally to all human beings. It expresses the conviction that the man or woman in question has in marked degree qualities of sensitive, rich and coordinated participation in all the situations of life. Thus works of art, music, poetry, painting, architecture, have soul, while others are dead, mechanical.
When the organization called soul is free, moving and operative, initial as well as terminal, it is spirit. Qualities are both static, substantial, and transitive. Spirit quick¬ ens; it is not only alive, but spirit gives life. Animals are spirited, but man is a living spirit. He lives in his works and his works do follow him. Soul is form, spirit informs. It is the moving function of that of which soul is the sub-, stance. Perhaps the words soul and spirit are so heavily laden with traditional mythology and sophisticated doc¬ trine that they must be surrendered; it may be impossible to recover for them in science and philosophy the reali¬ ties designated in idiomatic speech. But the realities are there, by whatever names they be called.
Old ideas do not die when the beliefs which have been explicitly associated with them disappear; they usually only change their clothes. Present notions about the organism are largely a survival, with changed vocabulary, NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND of old ideas about soul and body. The soul was conceived as inhabiting the body in an external way. Now the nervous system is conceived as a substitute, mysteriously within the body. But as the soul was “simple” and there¬ fore not diffused through the body, so the nervous system as the seat of mental events is narrowed down to the brain, and then to the cortex of the brain; while many physio¬ logical inquirers would doubtless feel enormously relieved if a specific portion of the cortex could be ascertained to be the seat of consciousness. Those who talk most of the organism, physiologists and psychologists, are often just those who display least sense of the intimate, delicate and subtle interdependence of all organic structures and processes with one another. The world seems mad in pre-occupation with what is specific, particular, discon¬ nected in medicine, politics, science, industry, education. In terms of a conscious control of inclusive wholes, search for those links which occupy key positions and which effect critical connections is indispensable. But recovery of sanity depends upon seeing and using these specifiable things as links functionally significant in a process. To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. And when thus seen they will be seen to be in, not as marbles are in a box but as events are in history, in a moving, growing never finished process. Until we have a procedure in actual practice which demon¬ strates this continuity, we shall continue to engage in appealing to some other specific thing, some other broken off affair, to restore connectedness and unity — calling the specific religion or reform or whatever specific is the fash- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE ionable cure of the period. Thus we increase the disease in the means used to cure it.2 In matters predominantly physical we know that all control depends upon conscious perception of relations obtaining between things, otherwise one cannot be used to affect the other. We have been marvellously success¬ ful in inventing and constructing external machines, because with respect to such things we take for granted that success occurs only upon the conscious plane — that of conscious perception of the relations which things sustain to one another. We know that locomotives and aeroplanes and telephones and power-plants do not arise from instinct or the subconscious but from deliberately ascertained perception of connections and orders of con¬ nections. Now after a period in which advance in these respects was complacently treated as proof and measure of progress, we have been forced to adopt pessimistic attitudes, and to wonder if this “progress” is to end in the deterioration of man and the possible destruction of civilization.
Clearly we have not carried the plane of conscious control, the direction of action by perception of connec¬ tions, far enough. We cannot separate organic life and mind from physical nature without also separating nature from life and mind. The separation has reached a point where intelligent persons are asking whether the end is to be catastrophe, the subjection of man to the industrial and military machines he has created. This situation confers peculiar poignancy upon the fact that just where connec¬ tions and interdependences are most numerous, intimate 2 See F. Matthias Alexander’s Man’s Supreme Inheritance, and Conscious Constructive Control.
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 297 and pervasive, in living, psycho-physical activity, we most ignore unity and connection, and trust most unre¬ servedly in our deliberate beliefs to the isolated and specific — which signifies that in action we commit our¬ selves to the unconscious and subconscious, to blind instinct and impulse and routine, disguised and ration¬ alized by all sorts of honorific titles. Thus we are brought to the topic of consciousness.
CHAPTER EIGHT Existence, Ideas and Consciousness In the discussions of the last chapter the word “con¬ sciousness” was avoided. It is a word of unsettled signi¬ fication. Even apart from ambiguities in interpreta¬ tion, there is no consensus as to what things the word denotes. Two quite different affairs are usually desig¬ nated by it. On the one hand, it is employed to point out certain qualities in their immediate apparency, quali¬ ties of things of sentiency, such as are, from the psy¬ chological standpoint, usually termed feelings. The sum total of these immediate qualities present as literal ends or closures of natural processes constitute “consciousness” as an anoetic occurrence. This is consciousness wherever meanings do not exist; that is to say, apart from the exist¬ ence and employment of signs, or independently of com¬ munication. On the other hand, consciousness is used to denote meanings actually perceived, awareness of objects: being wide-awake, alert, attentive to the significance of events, present, past, future. It is a lexicographic matter } which will not be discussed, whether the word should be employed to denote two such different affairs. What is important is that the difference in the nature of the things denoted should be registered, and that false ingenu¬ ity should not be expended in reducing one to the other.
Our previous discussion enables us, it will appear, to place the two denotations. The existential starting point is immediate qualities. Even meanings taken not as meanings but as existential are grounded in immediate EXISTENCE AND IDEAS qualities, in sentiencies or “feelings,” of organic activities and receptivities. Meanings do not come into being without language, and language implies two selves in¬ volved in a conjoint or shared undertaking. Thus while its direct mechanism is found in the vocalizing and audit¬ ory apparatuses, this mechanism is in alliance with general organic behavior. Otherwise it becomes a mechanical routine not differing from the “speech” of parrot or a phonographic record. This alliance supplies language with the immediate qualitative “feel” that marks off signs immediately from one another in existence.
The same considerations define the “subconscious” of human thinking. Apart from language, from imputed and inferred meaning, we continually engage in an immense multitude of immediate organic selections, rejections, welcomings, expulsions, appropriations, withdrawals, shrinkings, expansions, elations and dejections, attacks, wardings off, of the most minute, vibratingly delicate nature. We are not aware of the qualities of many or most of these acts; we do not objectively distinguish and identify them. Yet they exist as feeling qualities, and have an enormous directive effect on our behavior. If for example, certain sensory qualities of which we are not cognitively aware cease to exist, we cannot stand or con¬ trol our posture and movements. In a thoroughly nor¬ mal organism, these “feelings” have an efficiency of operation which it is impossible for thought to match. Even our most highly intellectualized operations depend upon them as a “fringe” by which to guide our inferential movements. They give us our sense of rightness and wrongness, of what to select and emphasize and follow up, and what to drop, slur over and ignore, among the EXPERIENCE AND NATURE multitude of inchoate meanings that are presenting them¬ selves. They give us premonitions of approach to accept¬ able meanings, and warnings of getting off the track. Formulated discourse is mainly but a selected statement of what we wish to retain among all these incipient starts, following ups and breakings off. Except as a reader, a hearer repeats something of these organic movements, and thus “gets” their qualities, he does not get the sense of what is said; he does not really assent, even though he give cold approbation. These qualities are the stuff of “intuitions” and in actuality the difference between an “intuitive” and an analytic person is at most a matter of degree, of relative emphasis. The “reasoning” person is one who makes his “intuitions” mrn-p artir.nla.fPj more deliverable in speech, as explicit sequence of initial premises, jointures, and conclusions.
Meanings acquired in connection with the use of tools and of language exercise a profound influence upon organic feelings. In the reckoning of this account, are included the changes effected by all the consequences of attitude and habit due to all the consequences of tools and lan¬ guage in short, civilization. Evil communications cor¬ rupt (native) good manners of action, and hence pervert feeling and subconsciousness. The deification of the sub¬ conscious is legitimate only for those who never indulge in it animals and thoroughly healthy naive children — if there be any such. The subconscious of a civilized adult reflects all the habits he has acquired: that is to sav, all t_he_organic modifications he has undergone. And in so far as these involve mal-coordinations, fixations and segregations (as they assuredly come to do in a very short time for those living in complex “artificial” conditions), EXISTENCE AND IDEAS sensory appreciation is confused, perverted and falsified. It is most reliable in just those activities with respect to which it is least spoken of, and least reliable with respect to those things where it is fashionable most to laud it. That is, it operates most successfully in meanings asso¬ ciated with language that is highly technical, affairs remote from fundamental and exigent needs, as in mathe¬ matics, or philosophizing far away from concrete situa¬ tions, or in a highly cultivated fine art. It is surest to be wrong in connection with intimate matters of self- regulation in health, morals, social affairs — in matters most closely connected with basic needs and relationships. Where its use is popularly recommended it is most dan¬ gerous. To use feelings which are not the expression of a rectitude of organic action, rectitude that in civilized or artificial conditions is acquired only by taking thought, ( taking thought is radically different to just “thinking”), is to act like an animal without having the structural facilities of animal life. It has the fascina¬ tion of all easy surrender to fatality and may be eulo¬ gized as a return to nature, spontaneity, or to the quasi¬ divine. It has the charm of lazy and comfortable escape from responsibility; we die, but we die, like animals, upon the field, defeated and mayhap disheartened, but without knowing it.
In a practical sense, here is the heart of the mind-body problem. Activities which develop, appropriate and en¬ joy meanings bear the same actualizing relation to psycho¬ physical affairs that the latter bear to physical characters. They present the consequences of a wider range of inter¬ actions, that in which needs, efforts and satisfactions conditioned by association are operative. In this widened EXPERIENCE AND NATURE and deepened activity, there are both added resources and values, and added liabilities and defaults. The actualization of meanings furnishes psycho-physical quali¬ ties with their ulterior significance and worth. But it also confuses and perverts them. The effects of this cor¬ ruption are themselves embodied through habits in the psycho-physical, forming one-sided degraded and exces¬ sive susceptibilities; creating both disassociations and rigid fixations in the sensory register. These habitual effects become in turn spontaneous, natural, “instinctive;’ they form the platform of development and apprehension of further meanings, affecting every subsequent phase of personal and social life.1 Thus while the psycho-physical in man, apart from conscious meaning achieves nothing distinguished, the casual growth and incorporation of meanings cause the native need, adjustment and satisfaction to lose their im¬ mediate certainty and efficiency, and become subject to all kinds of aberrations. There then occur systematized withdrawals from intercourse and interaction, from what common sense calls “reality”: carefully cultivated and artificially protected fantasies of consolation and com¬ pensation; rigidly stereotyped beliefs not submitted to ob¬ jective tests; habits of learned ignorance or systematized ignorings of concrete relationships; organized fanaticisms; dogmatic traditions which socially are harshly intoler¬ ant and which intellectually are institutionalized para¬ noic systems; idealizations which instead of being imme¬ diate enjoyments of meanings, cut man off from nature and his fellows.
1 See the books of Mr. Alexander already referred to, p. 296.
EXISTENCE AND IDEAS In short, there is constituted what Walter Lippmann has well termed a secondary pseudo-environment, which affects every item of traffic and dealing with the primary environment. Thus the concrete problems of mind- body have their locus and import in the educational procedures by which a normal integration of meanings in organic functions shall be secured and perversions pre¬ vented; in the remedial operations of psychiatry, and in social arts and appliances that render intercourse substan¬ tial, balanced and flexible.
While on the psycho-physical level, consciousness de¬ notes the totality of actualized immediate qualitative differences, or “feelings,” it denotes, upon the plane of mind, actualized apprehensions of meanings, that is, ideas. There is thus an obvious difference between mind and consciousness; meaning and an idea. Mind denotes the whole system of meanings as they are em¬ bodied in the workings of organic life; consciousness in a being with language denotes awareness or perception of meanings; it is the perception of actual events, whether past, contemporary or future, in their meanings, the having of actual ideas. The greater part of mind is only implicit in any conscious act or state; the field of mind — of operative meanings — is enormously wider than that of consciousness. Mind is contextual and persistent; consciousness is focal and transitive. Mind is, so to speak, structural, substantial; a constant background and foreground; perceptive consciousness is process, a series of heres and nows. Mind is a constant^ luminosity; consciousness intermittent, a series of flashes of varying intensities. Consciousness is, as it were, the occasional interception of messages continually transmitted, _aa_& EXPERIENCE AND NATURE mechanical receiving device selects a few of the vibra¬ tions with which the air is filled and rentiers them andihle.
The nature of awareness of meanings cannot be conveyed in speech. As with other immediate quali¬ tative existences, words can only hint, point; the indication succeeding when it evokes an actual experi¬ ence of the thing in question. Such words as apparency, conspicuousness, outstandingness, vividness, clearness, in¬ cluding of course their opposites vague, dim, confused, may assist the evocation. To denote the characteris¬ tics of mind a thoroughly different set of names must be used: organization, order, coherence. The relation of mind to consciousness may be partially suggested by saying that while mind as a system of meanings is subject to disorganization, disequilibration, perturbation, there is no sense in referring to a particular state of awareness in its immediacy as either organized or disturbed. An idea is just what it is when it occurs. To call it composed or perturbed is to compare one state with another, a com¬ parison which by nature of the case can be made only indirectly on the basis of respective conditions and con¬ sequences. Emotional conditions do not occur as emo¬ tions, intrinsically defined as such; they occur as “tertiary” qualities of objects. Some cases of awareness or percep¬ tion are designated “emotions'' in retrospect or from with¬ out, as a child is instructed to term certain perceptual situations anger, or fear, or love, by way of informing him as to their consequences. Immediately, every per¬ ceptual awareness may be termed indifferently emotion, sensation, thought, desire: not that it is immediately any one of these things, or all of them combined, but that when it is taken in some reference, to conditions or to EXISTENCE AND IDEAS consequences or to both, it has, in that contextual refer¬ ence, the distinctive properties of emotion, sensation, thought or desire.
The relation between mind and consciousness may be indicated by a familiar happening. When we read a book, we are immediately conscious of meanings that present themselves, and vanish. These meanings exis¬ tentially occurring are ideas. But we are capable of get¬ ting ideas from what is read because of an organized system of meanings of which we are not at any one time completely aware. Our mathematical or political “mind” is the system of such meanings as possess and deter¬ mine our particular apprehensions or ideas, There is however, a continuum or spectrum between this con¬ taining system and the meanings which, being focal and urgent are the ideas of the moment. There is a context¬ ual field between the latter and those meanings which determine the habitual direction of our conscious thoughts and supply the organs for their formation. One great mistake in the orthodox psychological tradition is its exclusive preoccupation with sharp focalization to the neglect of the vague shading off from the foci into a field of increasing dimness.
Discrimination in favor of the clearly distinguished has a certain practical justification, for the vague and extensive background is present in every conscious experience and therefore does not define the character of any one in particular. It represents that which is being used and taken for granted, while the focal phase is that which is imminent and critical. But this fact affords no justifica¬ tion for neglect and denial in theory of the dim and total background consciousness of every distinct thought. If EXPERIENCE AND NATURE there were a sharp division between the ideas that are focal as we read a certain section of a book and what we have already read, if there were not carried along a sense of the latter, what we now read could not take the form of an idea. Indeed, the use of such words as context and background, fringe, etc., suggests something too external to meet the facts of the case. The larger system of meaning suffuses, interpenetrates, colors what is now and here uppermost; it gives them sense, feeling, as dis¬ tinct from signification.
Change the illustration from reading a book to seeing and hearing a drama. The emotional as well as intellec¬ tual meaning of each presented phase of a play depends upon the operative presence of a continuum of meanings. If we have to remember what has been said and done at any particular point, we are not aware of what is now said and done; while without its suffusive presence in what is now said and done we lack clew to its meaning. Thus the purport of past affairs is present in the momentary cross-sectional idea in a way which is more intimate, direct and pervasive than the way of recall. It is positively and integrally carried in and by the incidents now happening; these incidents are, in the degree of genuine dramatic quality, fulfillment of the meanings constituted by past events; they also give this system of meanings an unex¬ pected turn, and constitute a suspended and still indeter¬ minate meaning, which induces alertness, expectancy. It is this double relationship of continuation, promotion, carrying forward, and of arrest, deviation, need of supple¬ mentation, which defines that focalization of meanings which is consciousness, awareness, perception. Every case of consciousness is dramatic; drama is an enhance¬ ment of the conditions of consciousness.
EXISTENCE AND IDEAS It is impossible to tell what immediate consciousness is — not because there is some mystery in or behind it, but for the same reason that we cannot tell just what sweet or red immediately is: it is something had, not communicated and known. But words, as means of directing action, may evoke a situation in which the thing in question is had in some particularly illuminating way. It seems to me that anyone who installs himself in the midst of the unfolding of drama has the experience of consciousness in just this sort of way; in a way which enables him to give significance to descriptive and analy¬ tic terms otherwise meaningless. There must be a story, some whole, an integrated series of episodes. This con¬ nected whole is mind, as it extends beyond a particular process of consciousness and conditions it. There must also be now-occurring events, to which meanings are assigned in terms of a story taking place. Episodes do not mean what they would mean if occurring in some different story. They have to be perceived in terms of the story, as its forwardings and fulfillings. At the same time, until the play or story is ended, meanings given to events are of a sort which constantly evoke a meaning which was not absolutely anticipated or totally predicted: there is expectancy, but also surprise, novelty. As far as complete and assured prediction is possible, interest in the play lags; it ceases to be an observed drama, it is not subsequently in consciousness.
An oft-told tale repeated without change fails to engage perception; it liberates us for attention to another story where development of meanings is as yet incomplete and indeterminate, possessed of suspense and uncertainty. Thus while perceptions are existentially intermittent and EXPERIENCE AND NATURE discrete, like a series of signal flashes, or telegraphic clicks, yet they involve a continuum of meaning in process of formation. If we became convinced that a succession of flashes or clicks were not a series of terms with respect to one and the same unfolding meaning, we should not at¬ tend to them or be aware of them. If on the other hand, there are no variations to compel suspense, no unforseen movement in a new direction; if there is one unbroken luminosity, or one unbroken monotony of sound, there is no perception, no consciousness.
These considerations enable us to give a formal defini¬ tion of consciousness in relation to mind or meanings. Consciousness, an idea, is that phase of a system of mean¬ ings which at a given time is undergoing re-direction, transitive transformation. The current idealistic con¬ ception of consciousness as a power which modifies events, is an inverted statement of this fact. To treat conscious¬ ness as a power accomplishing the change, is but another instance of the common philosophic fallacy of converting an eventual function into an antecedent force or cause. Consciousness is the meaning of events in course of re¬ making; its “cause” is only the fact that this is one of the ways in which nature goes on. In a proximate sense of causality, namely as place in a series history, its causa¬ tion is the need and demand for filling out what is inde¬ terminate.
There is a counterpart realist doctrine, according to which consciousness is like the eye running over a field of ready-made objects, or a light which illuminates now this and now that portion of a given field. These analo¬ gies ignore the indeterminateness of meaning when there is awareness; they fail to consider a basic consideration, EXISTENCE AND IDEAS EXISTENCE AND IDEAS namely, that while there exists an antecedent stock of meanings, these are just the ones which we take for granted and use: the ones of which we are not and do not need to be conscious. The theory takes as the normal case of consciousness the case where there is a minimum of doubt and inquiry; the case where objects are most familiar and current, and so to speak vouch directly for themselves. It finds consciousness exem¬ plified in being aware of old and often used things (the articles of furniture which figure in most discussions of consciousness) rather than in case of thinking where reflective inquiry is needed in order to arrive at a meaning. It postulates, even though only implicitly, a pre-estab¬ lished harmony of the knower and things known, passing over the fact that such harmony is always an attained outcome of prior inferences and investigations. It assumes a knowing mind wholly guileless, and extraordi¬ narily competent, whose sole business is to behold and register objects just as what they are, and which is unswervingly devoted to its business.
It is hard to believe that such an amiable and optimis¬ tic view of the nature of mind could have obtained cur¬ rency, had it not been for a theology according to which God is perfect mind and man is created in the image of his maker. Even so, however, it could hardly have per¬ sisted when science displaced theology, had not science provided a number of cases which satisfy the requirement of the theory, and thereby given it a kind of empirical content and basis. That is, the development of science does present (a) the rise of cognitional interest to a point of prestige, and (b) it supplies eventually many cases of valid cognitive perceptions. Those who concern them- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE