Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and EssaysTyndall, John
Philosophy
Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and Essays
Tyndall, John
Science
long-run, resolvable into muscular contraction;” and so, “even those
manifestations of intellect, of feeling, and of will, which we rightly
name the higher faculties, are not excluded from this classification,
inasmuch as to every one _but the subject of them_, they are known only
as transitory changes in the relative positions of parts of the body.”
The concession is made here, we see that these manifestations are
differently known to the subject of them. But we may first object that,
if even that privileged “every one but the subject” were limited to a
knowledge of contractions, he would not know much. It is only because he
knows, first of all, a thinker and willer of contractions that these
themselves cease to be but passing externalities, and transitory
contingencies. Neither is it reasonable to assert an identity of nature
for contractions, and for that which they only represent. It would
hardly be fair to confound either the receiver or the sender of a
telegraphic message, with the movements which alone bore it, and without
which it would have been impossible. The sign is not the thing
signified, it is but the servant of the signifier—his own arbitrary
mark—and intelligible, in the first place, only to him. It is the
meaning, in all cases, that is alone vital; the sign is but an accident.
To convert the internality into the arbitrary externality that simply
expresses it, is for Mr. Huxley only an oversight. Your ideas are made
known to your neighbors by contractions, therefore your ideas are of the
same nature as contractions! Or, even to take it from the other side,
your neighbor perceives in you contractions only, and therefore your
ideas are contractions! Are not the vital elements here present the two
correspondent internalities, between which the contractions constitute
but an arbitrary chain of external communication, that is so now, but
may be otherwise again? The ringing of the bell at the window is not
precisely the dwarf within. Nor are Engineer Chappe’s “wooden arms and
elbow-joints jerking and fugling in the air,” to be identified with
Engineer Chappe himself. For the higher faculties, even for speech,
etc., assuredly Mr. Huxley might have well spared himself this
superfluous and inapplicable reference to contraction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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