Psicologiaas!

Nature, Life, Mind
Psychology deals with the behaviour of living beings. Therefore, as every biological science, it is faced with the problem of the relation between animate and inanimate nature whether it is aware of and concerned with this problem or not. But to the psychologist, one special aspect of behaviour, in ordinary parlance called the mental, assumes paramount importance. Thisis not the place to discuss consciousness and mind as such. Later chapters will show the use we make of these concepts. But we will not reject at the outset a distinction which permeates our idiomatic speech as much as our scientific terminology. We all understand what is meant by the proposition that a prize-fighter was knocked out and did not recover consciousness for six minutes. We know thatduring these fatal six minutes the pugilist did not cease to live, but that he lost one particular aspect of behaviour, Furthermore we know that consciousness in general and each specific conscious function in particular, is closely bound up with processes in our central nervous system. Thus the central nervous system becomes, as it were, the nodal point where mind, life, and inanimate natureconverge. We can investigate the chemical constitution of the nervous tissue and will find no component that we have not found in inorganic nature; we can study the function of this tissue and will find that it has all the characteristics of living tissue; and finally there is this relation between the life function of the nervous system and consciousness.

Two Types of Solutions of the ProblemsInvolved in This Relation Rejected.

Anybody who would claim to have found a complete and true solution of our problems would expose himself to the just suspicion of being either an ass or a quack. These problems have occupied the best human minds for thousands of years, and therefore it is more than unlikely that a solution can be found by any, other way than a slow and gradual approach.What I think about the mode of this approach I shall again defer to a later part of the book.

Materialism.

But here I shall reject two types of solutions that have been offered. The first is the solution of crude materialism, which gained great momentum about the middle of the last century and found its most popular expression in a book that around 1900 was a best-seller and isnow practically forgotten. I mean Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe. I am not sure that the United States are not even now feeling the last ebbing wave of this flood which reached the shores of the New World long after its crest had passed from the Old. This materialistic solution is astonishingly simple. It says: The whole problem is illusory. There are no three kinds of substance or modes ofexistence, matter, life, and mind; there is only one, and that is matter, composed of blindly whirling atoms which, because of their great numbers and the long time at their disposal, form all sorts of combinations, and among them those we call animals and human beings. Thinking and feeling, why, they are just movements of atoms. Interfere with the matter of the brain and see what remains ofconsciousness. Although I have expressed this view very crudely, I believe that I have expressed it adequately, particularly when I add that this view is not only a scientific conviction, but as well, or even more so, a creed and a wish. It is the revolt of a generation that saw a strongly entrenched church hold on to dogmas which science, growing up like a young giant, had crushed - a generation that, bythe successful applications of science to technical problems, had become vainglorious and had lost that feeling of awe which should accompany all true knowledge. just as the victorious barbarians, be they vandals or Calvinists, destroyed thoroughly and passionately the creations most dear to their vanquished enemies, so our materialists developed a hatred of those parts of human philosophy that...