Part 15 (1/2)
”Individuality” in a less marked manner belongs to them all, and where it exists it is a distinctly original thing, which cannot be derived from its antecedents. No psyche is simply derivable from other psyches. What a child receives from its parents by ”heredity” are factors which, taken together, amount to more than the mere sum of them. The synthesis of these is at once the creation of something new and peculiar, and what has been handed down is merely the building material. This can be felt in an intensified and striking degree in regard to ”p.r.o.nounced individuality,”
but careful study will disclose the fact that there are no men quite alike. This kind of ”creative synthesis,” that is, the underivability of the individual, was the element of truth in the mythologies of ”creationism” held by the Church fathers, or in the theory of the ”pre-existence of the soul” maintained by Plato and others.
And from this point of view we must safeguard what has already been said in regard to the culture and gradual development of our psychical inner nature. It is true that the ”soul” does not spring up ready-made in the developing body, lying dormant in it, and only requiring to waken up gradually. It really becomes. But the becoming is a self-realisation. It is not true that it is put together and built up bit by bit by experience, so that a different being might develop if the experiences were different.
It is undoubtedly dependent upon experience, impressions, and circ.u.mstances, and without these its development would be impossible. But these impressions act as a stimulus, developing only what is previously inherent. They do not themselves create anything. A characteristic predetermination restricts the development to comparatively narrow limits.
And this is identical with the individuality itself. A man may turn out very different according to circ.u.mstances, education, influences. But he would nevertheless recognise ”himself” under any circ.u.mstances. He will never become anything of which he had not the possibility within him from the very beginning, any more than the rose will become a violet if it is nurtured with a different kind of manure.
Genius.
We cannot venture to say much about genius and the mystery of it. In it and its creative power something of the spirit, the nature of the spirit, seems to look up at us, as we might think of it in itself and apart from the limits of existence in time and s.p.a.ce. It is usually most obvious and most accessible to us in the domain of art. But it has its place too in the realm of science. And it is most of all genius, and therefore most inaccessible to us ordinary mortals, in the domain of religion.
Mysticism.
Even ”p.r.o.nounced individuality” ”has an element of mysticism” in it-of the non-rational, which we feel the more distinctly the more decidedly we reject all attempts to make it rational again through crude or subtle mythologies. This is much more true of genius, artistic insight, and inspiration. But these are much too delicate to be exposed to the buffeting of controversy, much more so the dark and mysterious boundary region in the life of the human spirit which we know under the name of mysticism in the true sense, without inverted commas. It is not a subject that is adapted for systematic treatment. Where it has been subjected to it, everything becomes crude and repulsive, a mere caricature of pure mysticism like the recrudescent occultism of to-day. Therefore it is enough simply to call the attention of the sympathetic reader to it and then to pa.s.s it by. In face of the witness borne to it by all that is finest and deepest in history, especially in the history of religion, naturalism is powerless.
Mind and Spirit. The Human and the Animal Soul.
What is the relation between the human and the animal mind? This has always been a vital question in the conflict between naturalism and the religious outlook. And as in the whole problem of the psychical so here the interest on both sides has been mainly concentrated on the question of ”mortality” or ”immortality.” Man is immortal because he has a soul.
Animals ”have no souls.” ”Animals also have souls, differing only in degree but not in substantial nature from the soul of man: as they are mortal, man must be so too.” ”Animals have minds: the merely psychical pa.s.ses away with the body. But man has spirit in addition. It is imperishable.” These and many other a.s.sertions were made on one side or the other. And both sides made precisely the same mistake: they made the belief in the immortality of our true nature dependent upon a proof that the soul has a physical ”substantial nature,” which is to be regarded as an indestructible substance, a kind of spiritual atom. And on the other hand they overlooked the gist of the whole matter, the true starting-point, which cannot be overlooked if the religious outlook is not to be brought into discredit. It is undoubtedly a fundamental postulate, and one which the religious outlook cannot give up, that the human spirit is more than all creatures, and is in quite a different order from stars, plants, and animals. But absolutely the first necessity from the point of view of the religious outlook is to establish the incomparable value of the human spirit; the question of its ”substantial nature” is in itself a matter of entire indifference. The religious outlook observes that man can will good and can pray, and no other creature can do this. And it sees that this makes the difference between two worlds. Whether the bodily and mental physics in both these worlds is the same or different, is to it a matter rather of curiosity than of importance.
What occurs or does not occur within the animal mind is, as a matter of fact, wholly hidden from us. We have no way of determining this except by a.n.a.logy with ourselves, and therefore our idea of it is necessarily anthropomorphic. And apologists are undoubtedly right when they maintain that this is far too much the case. To reach a more unprejudiced att.i.tude towards the customary anthropomorphisation of animals, it is profitable to study Wundt's lectures on ”The Human and the Animal Mind” (see especially Lecture XX.). Perhaps it is true that, notwithstanding all the much-praised cleverness, intelligence and teachableness of elephants, dogs, and chimpanzees, they are incapable of forming ”general ideas,”
”rules,” and ”laws,” of forming judgments in the strict sense, and constructive syllogisms, that they have only a.s.sociations of ideas, and expectations of similar experience, but no thinking in conceptual terms, and cannot perceive anything general or necessary, that they recognise _a posteriori_ but not _a priori_, as Leibnitz supposed, and that they form only perceptual inferences, not judgments from experience. But it is not easy to see that this contributes anything of importance to our problem.
It does not even help us in regard to the interesting question of a physical guarantee for the indestructibility of the soul. For even if the psychical acts of animals were fewer and less important than they are admitted to be, they have certainly sensations, images, feelings, pleasure, pain, and desire. All these are of a psychical nature, immaterial, and underivable from the material. And it is difficult to see, for instance, why the forming of judgments should be regarded as more durable and indestructible than sensation and desire. The difference lies higher than this,-not in the fact that man has a few ”capacities” more than the animal, but in the difference in principle, that the psychical in man can be developed to spirit, and that this is impossible anywhere else.
The very example that naturalism loves to cite in its own favour makes its error clear. It asks whether the difference, let us say, between a Fuegian and one of the higher mammals such as an ape, is not much less than that between a Fuegian and a European. This sounds obvious, if we measure simply by habits, morals, and possibly also the content of feeling and imagination in a ”savage” as we find him. And yet it is obviously false. I can _train_ a young ape or an elephant, can teach it to open wine-bottles and perform tricks. But I can _educate_ the child of the savage, can develop in him a mental life equal in fineness, depth, and energy, frequently more than equal, to that of the average European, as the mission to the Eskimos and to the Fuegians proves, and as Darwin frankly admitted. Psychical capacity is nothing more than raw material. It is in the possibility of raising this to the level of spirit, of using the raw material to its purpose, that the absolute difference, the impa.s.sable gulf between man and animals lies.
Even in animals there is a primitive thinking, rising above the level of blind instinct. But it can neither be schooled, nor is it capable of developing even the crudest beginnings of science. Even the animal has a sensory satisfaction in colour, form and tone (not nearly so much, however, as the theory of s.e.xual selection requires us to suppose). But art, even the most rudimentary self-expression of the spirit upon this basis, is wholly sealed to it. Even the animal possesses strong altruistic instincts, impulses towards companions.h.i.+p, pairing, and caring for its young, and some have seen in this the beginnings of morality. But morality is a matter of the spirit, which begins with the idea of duty and rises to the recognition of an ideal of life. Nowhere else do we see so directly and emphatically the incomparability of the natural-psychical and the spiritual as in the idea of duty and an ideal of life, although the contrast is equally great at all points of the spiritual life.
Finally and highest of all, we have the capacity of the human spirit to rise to religion and the greatest heights of feeling. In science and art, in morality and religion, the spirit possesses itself. And as such it is a unique and strange guest in this world, absolutely incomparable with anything beneath or around it. It may, perhaps, be true that the psychical difference between the ape and man is smaller than that between the ape and unicellular organisms (though we really can know nothing about that).
But nowhere in the animal world does the psychical overstep the limits of purely natural existence, of striving after and being prompted by the directly and purely natural ends of a vegetative and animal instinctive life, physical pleasure, self-preservation, and the maintenance of the species.
And there is more than this. However different the psychical equipment may be at different animal stages, it has one thing in common in them all, it is absolutely limited to what is given it by nature. An animal species may last for a million years. But it has no history. It is and remains the same history-less natural product. In this respect the animal is not a step in advance of the stone or the crystal. The only thing it can achieve is to express more or less perfectly the character of the species. This is the utmost height of its capacity. But for man this is only the starting-point, and the really human begins just there. What is implicit in him as _h.o.m.o sapiens_, a member of a zoological order, is nothing more than the natural basis upon which, in human and individual history, he may build up an entirely unique and new creation, an upper story: the world and life of the spirit.
It is also erroneous to regard the gradual development of the psychical capacities at the different levels of animal evolution as the development of and preparation for the human spirit. It is not the spirit, but the raw material of it, that is thus being prepared and developed. It is as if, in the history of colour manufacture, an ”evolution” of colour were taking place. The quality of the colour gradually becomes better and better. Each generation learns to make it purer and more brilliant. But the painting which is painted with the most brilliant colour cannot be regarded as a link in the evolutionary sequence, and is certainly not the crown and culmination of the pigment; the latter is only the gradual perfecting of a necessary preliminary condition.
It is only of secondary interest to point out the immense leaps in the evolution of colour and colour-technique, and especially the vast difference between the last stage and the one before it, or, to drop the metaphor, the enormous psychological differences between the animal and the human mind.
There is no doubt that an apologetic which interests itself in such matters would find abundant opportunity for work, and could find a powerful argument against a too hasty naturalism in the differences between animal and human psychical capacities, which have been recognised much more sanely and clearly through recent investigation than they usually were in earlier times. But the question has no special interest for us here.
Personality.