THE FUTURE OF PESSIMISM.

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for a third party, for the man of philosophic mind with his larger and correcter vision, assigning to each function its right place, and preventing either order of worker from indecorously seeking to construct a perfect view of the whole out of his partial and fragmentary perception.

APPENDICES.

A.

MR. LEWES'S VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

MR. LEWES's important work The Physical Basis of Mind' appeared as the present volume was passing through the press; otherwise I should certainly have availed myself of some of the writer's conclusions. The reference to this work given in the foot-note on page 193, was written after I had read no more of the volume than the chapter there referred to. After a careful perusal of the whole treatise I feel it is due to Mr. Lewes to say that his theory of consciousness differs in appearance at least very considerably from that propounded by myself. He recognises mental phenomena (feeling or sensibility) as lying to a large extent, if not altogether, outside the limits of the personal consciousness. Thus he accepts the idea of cerebral reflexes (unconscious cerebration) with which he supposes perception and volition to be associated, and attributes feeling and volition to the lower centres in the spinal column.

Into the worth of the evidence brought forward in support of these views, I cannot here enter. What concerns us is the question whether such processes are strictly and absolutely unconscious. So far as I understand Mr. Lewes, these actions in the normal organism do somehow affect the personal consciousness, though the feelings or perceptions are not distinctly recognised. In this case, then, they are not absolutely unconscious, but only relatively so. Even supposing, however, that they are wholly detached from the personal consciousness, a further question arises whether they belong to some inferior sub-personal consciousness. That the spinal centres, for example, have a detached consciousness of their own

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is a supposition which is perfectly consistent with the view of consciousness taken in the present work. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Lewes does not discuss this question. It will thus be seen that Mr. Lewes's views, so far as they are clearly developed, do not necessarily involve what I conceive to be the essentially unpsychological and self-contradictory idea of unconscious mind.

In one other particular, however, Mr. Lewes does distinctly oppose the view of consciousness taken by me in this work. In his able discussion of the theory of animal automatism (problem III.) he argues that since feeling or sensibility is an invariable accompaniment of the action of nervous centres, it is more philosophical to regard the psychical and the physical event as two aspects of one reality, and consequently to view feeling as a coefficient, and not, with Professor Huxley, as a collateral result, of nervous process. I will frankly confess that had I read this criticism of the theory of automatism before writing the present work I should probably have put the teaching of the automatists less dogmatically than I have done (p. 202). At the same time, I must say that Mr. Lewes's argument appears to me to be far from a demonstration of his conclusion.

Without attempting to deal with the whole of this argument, I will simply point out what I regard as its principal defects. First of all, the alleged uniform connection of feeling (sensibility) with the action of nervous centres is not, I conceive, sufficiently proved. One of the arguments relied on here is the analogy of the lower (reflex) actions with the admittedly conscious ones. Here the writer seems to forget that the apparent spontaneity and new adaptation of means to ends manifested by decapitated animals may be accounted for as the result of organic connections depending on previous conscious co-ordinations and successive adaptations. Thus the close analogy might be explained without postulating present feeling. The other argument used is the identity of structure of all nervous centres. This physiological argument assumes, it is plain, that a psychical event, feeling, is as much a function of a nervous centre as the secretion of bile is a function of the liver. This is a considerable assumption, seeing that feeling, unlike bile, is not reducible to the same common terms as the organ (matter and motion). Yet waiving this difficulty, one may ask why Mr. Lewes should stop at the nervous centres and not rather predicate feeling of all parts of the nervous organism, e.g.

a motor nerve severed from its centre from which he expressly excludes it. So much as to the alleged invariable connexion of feeling and central function. It may be so, but it is not yet fully proved; and this being so, it seems to me that the negative testimony of consciousness must be regarded as to some extent discrediting the supposition.

Let us now pass to the second stage of Mr. Lewes's argument. Even if feeling were found to be invariably conjoined with the action of central organs this would not amount to a scientific proof of the identity of the two. Mr. Lewes would, no doubt, say that his idea of identity is simply a hypothesis. Yet is it not an essentially unverifiable hypothesis, and very much akin to all metempirical attempts to transcend experience? And further, if material processes are ever, in any of their forms, identical with feeling, would it not be more consistent to follow Hartmann and predicate a mental side of all physical facts? I do not know whether Mr. Lewes would be ready to carry his monism to this length. Yet this seems to me to be the only form of monism which is thoroughly intelligible, and which, moreover, can lay claim to a philosophical raison d'être, namely, the supposed need of resolving the mystery of the genesis of consciousness.

The automatist theory is not, then, I imagine, finally disproved by Mr. Lewes's line of reasoning. So far as this theory asserts that the chain of bodily events is distinctly conceivable (by help of the doctrine of the conservation of energy), as a self-sufficient physical process, it seems to me to be unassailable. Moreover, the facts of approximately unconscious secondary-automatic actions show how much the organism can do without the immediate interposition of the mental element. At the same time I admit that the automatist goes beyond the evidence if he asserts that all the higher actions of the organism could just as well take place without consciousness. It must be remembered that in no case is precisely the same nervous action at one time conscious, and at another time unconscious. In secondary automatic actions, and in the marvellous feats executed by Dr. Mesmet's now celebrated soldier in his abnormal states, we have every reason to suppose that the sum-total of the nervous conditions and processes somehow differs from that which underlies similar actions when consciously performed. In all such blind mimetic actions consciousness is clearly an antecedent, even though a remote antecedent. Hence