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vol. 10, p. 115

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The Progress of Psychology

(Concluded.) By Edward W. Cox, Serjeant-At-Law, President of the Psychological Society of Great Britain.

The event of the past year that most interests psychology is the admirable address of the President of the British Association at the Sheffield Congress. Professor Allman devoted himself to a clear and precise narrative of recent progress in physiological research in the direction of the genesis of organic life. He asserted the important truth that all life—be it animal or vegetable —traced back to its first perceptible beginnings, is, if not identical, so intimately allied, that no distinction is apparent between one form of life and another. We examine the materials of which the shapes of all animated being are constructed, and it reduces itself to a jelly called protoplasm. Of this protoplasm the man, the lion, the eagle, the whale, the oak are builded, as also are the gnat and the mildew.

PSYCHOLOGY AT THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION.

This protoplasm is the ultimate particle and the first visible germ of everything that has life. Hear what the President says:—

From the facts which have been now brought to your notice there is but one legitimate eon elusion—that life is a property of protoplasm. In this assertion there is nothing that need startle us. The essential phenomena of living beings are not so widely separated from the phenomena of lifeless matter as to render it impossible to recognise any analogy between them; for even irritability, the one grand character of all living beings, is not more difficult to be conceived of as a property of matter than the physical phenomena of radial energy.

When, however, we say that lite is a property of protoplasm, we assert as much as we are justified in doing. Here we stand upon the boundary between life in its proper conception, as a group of phenomena having irritability as their common bond, and that other and higher group of phenomena which we designate as consciousness or thought, and which, however intimately connected with those of life, arc yet essentially distinct from them.

When a thought passes through the mind it is associated, as we have now abundant reason for believing, with some change in the protoplasm of the cerebral cells. Are we, therefore, justified in regarding thought as a property of the protoplasm of these cells in the sense in which we regard muscular contraction as a property of the protoplasm of muscle? or is it really a property residing in something far different, but which may yet need for its manifestation the activity of cerebral protoplasm?

If we could see any analogy between thought and any one of the admitted phenomena of matter, we should be justified in accepting the first of these conclusions as the simplest, and as affording a hypothesis most in accordance with the comprehensiveness of natural laws; but between thought and the physical phenomena of matter there is not only no analogy, but there is no conceivably analogy; and the obvious and continuous path which we have hitherto followed up in our reasonings from the phenomena of lifeless matter through those of living matter here comes suddenly to an end. The chasm between unconscious life and thought is deep and impassable, and no transitional phenomena can be found by which as by a bridge we may span it over; for even from irritability, to which, on a superficial view, consciousness may seem related, it is as absolutely distinct as it is from any of the ordinary phenomena of matter.

It has been argued that because physiological activity must be a property of every living cell, psychical activity must lie equally so; and the language of the metaphysician has been earned into biology, and the “cell soul” spoken of as a conception inseparable from that of life.

That psychical phenomena, however, characterised as they essentially are by consciousness, are not necessarily co-extensive with those of life, there cannot be a doubt. How far back in the scale of life consciousness may exist we have as yet no means of determining, nor is it necessary for our argument that we should.

I believe that Professor Huxley intended to apply his argument only to the phenomena of life in the stricter sense of the word. As such it is conclusive. But when it is pushed further, and extended to the phenomena of consciousness, it loses all its force. The analogy, perfectly valid in the former ease, here fails. The properties of the chemical compound are like those of its components, still physical properties. They come within the wide category of the universally accepted properties of matter, while those of consciousness belong to a category absolutely distinct—one which presents not a trace of a connection with any of those which physicists have agreed in assigning to matter as its proper characteristics. The argument thus breaks down, for its force depends on analogy alone, and here all analogy vanishes.

But have we, it may be asked, made in all this one step forward towards ail explanation of the phenomena of consciousness or the discovery of its source? Assuredly not. The power of conceiving of a substance different from that of matter is still beyond the limits of human intelligence, and the physical or objective conditions, which arc the concomitants of thought, are the only ones of which it is possible to know anything, and the only ones whose study is of value.

We are not, however, on that account forced to the conclusion that there is nothing in the universe but matter and force. The simplest, physical law is absolutely inconceivable by the highest of the brutes, and no one would be justified in assuming that man had already attained the limit of his powers. Whatever may be that mysterious bond which connects organisation with I psychical endowments, the one grand fact—a fact of inestimable importance—stands out clear and freed from all obscurity and doubt, that from the first dawn of intelligence there is with every advance in organisation a corresponding advance in mind. Mind as well as body is thus travelling onwards through higher and still higher phases; the great law of evolution is shaping the I destiny of our race; and though now we may at most but indicate some weak point in the generalisation which would refer consciousness as well as life to a common material source, who can say that in the far off future there may not yet be evolved other and higher faculties from which light may stream in upon the darkness, and reveal to man the great mystery of thought?

Thereupon is great joy among the votaries of materialism—meaning by this term those who deny the existence of anything other than the protoplasmic structure that grows, matures, decays, and dies, that is to say, is resolved into its elements. “There is an end,” they say, “to your psychological dream. Behold the stuff of which you arc formed! Lo, what life comes to! See here what you were, what you will be—a mere spoonful of jelly. No place for soul there. You cannot find it anywhere: in that piece of pulp. In your origin there is nothing to distinguish you from the caterpillar or the cabbage. Cease then to prate of soul, or spirit, or whatever you are pleased to call it. Your life is in the cell structure of which you are formed; yourself is but the collective sensation of the infinite small sensations of the infinite cells that have grown one out of the other by the expansion of that protoplasmic pulp, and death is only the disintegration or the collapse of those cells whose agglomerated lives made your life. Let soul henceforth be relegated to the region of dream. Let your Psychological d Society acknowledge the baselessness of its science, and retire from the vain endeavour to chase a phantom and prove the impossible.”

Such in substance is the argument drawn from the protoplasmic teachings of Professor Allman’s c address.

THE FORMATIVE POWER IN NATURE.

Has psychology an answer? Yes. A triumphant answer.

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Editor's notes

Sources

• 

  London Spiritualist, No. 378, November 21, 1879, pp. 247-51