The Monist, Vol. 3, 1892-1893 : $b A quarterly magazineVarious
Philosophy
The Monist, Vol. 3, 1892-1893 : $b A quarterly magazine
Various
Philosophy -- Periodicals
There is, however, a great difference between the action of animal
beings whose action is regulated by the meanings of their feelings,
which in their totality we call the soul, and the actions of inorganic
matter, of crystals, minerals, gases, chemical elements, and gravitating
masses, all of which we comprise under the name “inanimate nature.”
The stone’s fall does not depend upon any representative feeling; it
depends solely upon that quality of the stone which we popularly call
its weight. Nor has the falling stone any choice whether to fall or
not to fall. Under certain circumstances it falls. There is no act of
deliberation preceding the fall. Nor has it any choice concerning the
direction of its fall. The surrounding conditions, viz., its position
with regard to the centre of the earth together with its mass, determine
the process. The stone’s action can satisfactorily be explained without
attributing to it psychical qualities. The stone possesses no soul;
it is void of mentality; and although we believe that everything,
organised or unorganised, is endowed with subjectivity (by which we
understand the conditions of psychical life, or the potentiality of
feeling and consciousness), this subjectivity can only be analogous
to the blind impulse of the stone’s mass. If some other, psychical or
mental, subjectivity were present, we should say that it apparently does
not enter as a factor in the determination of the event. Accordingly
such an assumption is gratuitous. There is subjectivity, but there
is no intelligence. There is potentiality of feeling, but there is
no consciousness. There is present the elementary condition of that
something which is going to develop into mind, but there is no mind;
there is no meaning-freighted awareness of the surrounding conditions.
Says Mr. Edison:
“The intelligence of man is, I take it, the sum of the
intelligences of the atoms of which he is composed.”
The sum total of the intelligences of the atoms in a human body (if,
in this connection, for the sake of argument, we grant that atoms are
intelligent) would not as yet make up the intelligence of man. Suppose we
are contemplating a mosaic picture or inscription. Are such compositions
really only the sum of the little stones? Are they not rather a certain
peculiar form in which these colored stones are arranged? It is not
the sum of the stones that makes the picture, but the form of their
composition. The picture is not contained in any single one of them, nor
is it the whole number of all the single stones: it originates through
their peculiar combination and consists of the form in which they are
combined.
Mr. Edison’s explanation of the soul, applied to this example of a mosaic
picture, would be as follows: Every little stone is in itself a little
mosaic picture. The whole picture of the mosaic is the sum of the little
pictures of the stones of which it is composed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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