Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/334

320 CHARLES S. MYERS : the first stepping-stone to bear the philosophic mind across to subjective contemplation. "I have a feeling of resist- ance," reasoned the primitive physicist, " when a moving object meets my body. This must be the cause of motion ; for, when this resistance or ' force ' is communicated to my body, the object loses its power of movement." Thus force, purely conceptual in its origin, became falsely endowed with all the qualities of a visible tangible substance, and, even so late as Schelling, was considered the material cause, instead of a sensory effect or equivalent of movement. The term ' cause ' came also to be employed in another connexion as identifying the last link that completes a chain of events and renders possible a familiar and hence an ap- parently simple phenomenon. Both uses of the word, have led to the same result the pursuit of the Ultimate Cause of Things, ra -n-pwra KOI air La, wherein the human mind has called in the Why of Metaphysic to supplement the unsatis- fying How of Natural Science. Natural Science can never offer more than a description of things. " Science," says Claude Bernard, " never ascends to first causes : and like that of all others, the first cause of life escapes us." Even the theory of evolution, which in its early days was regarded as the panacea of all ignorance, turns out to be a mere demonstration of the manner and not of the cause of working nature. So, too, while Kant's assertion that even a second Newton could never reveal how a blade of grass grows is likely some day to be dis- proved, the task of determining why it grew must remain ever outside the limits of Natural Science. Not only for this purpose has Metaphysic been invoked, but also for the purpose of explaining the nature of Mind. Psychologists have complained that Mind can no more pronounce on its own nature than a ray of light can see itself or a wave of sound can hear itself (16) ; and that, after every link in a given chain of molecular disturbances within the brain-cortex has been laid bare, not the slightest advance will have been made towards an interpretation of the thought or sensation which accompanied those disturbances. The position assumed by such writers and their teaching of the independence of objective and subjective psychology (i.e. of neurosis and psychosis) appear to arise from an insuffi- cient consideration of the nature of all natural knowledge. It is true that the states of consciousness during any process of psychosis are widely different from the states of con- sciousness ,by which are expressed the neuroses or the elements of that psychosis. But so, too, do the states