The Mind and the Brain/Book I/Chapter IV

by Alfred Binet

CHAPTER IV

ANSWERS TO SOME OBJECTIONS, AND SUMMARY

I have set forth the foregoing ideas by taking the road which to me seemed the best. On reflection it has occurred to me that my manner of exposition and demonstration may be criticised much more than my conclusion. Now, as it is the conclusion alone which here is of importance, it is expedient not to make it responsible for the arguments by which I have supported it.

These arguments resolve themselves into the attestation that between objects and our consciousness there exists an intermediary, our nervous system. We have even established that the existence of this intermediary is directly proved by observation, and from this I have concluded that we do not directly perceive the object itself but a tertium quid, which is our sensations.

Several objections to this might be made. Let us enumerate them.

1. It is not inconceivable that objects may act directly on our consciousness without taking the intermediary of our nervous system. Some authors, the spiritualists notably, believe in the possibility of disembodied souls, and they admit by implication that these souls remain in communication with the terrestrial world, witness our actions, and hear our speech. Since they no longer have organs of sense, we must suppose that these wandering souls, if they exist, can directly perceive material objects. It is evident that such hypotheses have, up till now, nothing scientific in them, and that the demonstrations of them which are given raise a feeling of scepticism more than anything else. Nevertheless, we have not the right to exclude, by a priori argument, the possibility of this category of phenomena.

2. Several German authors have maintained in recent years, that if the nervous system intervenes in the perception of external objects, it is a faithful intermediary which should not work any change on those physical actions which it gathers from outside to transmit to our consciousness. From this point of view colour would exist as colour, outside our eyes, sound would exist as sound, and in a general way there would not be, in matter, any mysterious property left, since we should perceive matter as it is. This is a very unexpected interpretation, by which men of science have come to acknowledge the correctness of the common belief; they rehabilitate an opinion which philosophers have till now turned to ridicule, under the name of naïve realism. All which proves that the naïveté of some may be the excessive refinement of others.

To establish scientifically this opinion they batter down the theory of the specific energy of the nerves. I have recalled in a previous page^[1] of what this theory consists. I have shown that if, by mechanical or electrical means, our different sensory nerves are excited, notwithstanding the identity of the excitant, a different sensation is provoked in each case—light when the optic nerve is stimulated, sound when the acoustic, and so on. It is now answered to this argument based on fact that the nature of these excitants must be complex. It is not impossible, it is thought, that the electric force contains within itself both luminous and sonorous actions; it is not impossible that a mechanical excitement should change the electric state of the nerve affected, and that, consequently, these subsidiary effects explain how one and the same agent may, according to the nerves employed, produce different effects.

3. After the spiritualists and the experimentalists, let us take the metaphysicians. Among them one has always met with the most varying specimens of opinions and with arguments for and against all possible theories.

Thus it is, for example, with the external perception. Some have supposed it indirect, others, on the contrary, that it acts directly on the object. Those who uphold the direct theory are inspired by Berkeley, who asserts that the sensitive qualities of the body have no existence but in our own minds, and consist really in representative ideas. This doctrine is expressly based on this argument—that thought differs too much in nature from matter for one to be able to suppose any link between these two substances. In this particular, some authors often make an assertion without endeavouring to prove it. They are satisfied with attesting, or even with supposing, that mind can have no consciousness of anything but its own states. Other philosophers, as I have said, maintain that “things which have a real existence are the very things we perceive.” It is Thomas Reid who has upheld, in some passages of his writings at all events, the theory of instantaneous perception, or intuition. It has also been defended by Hamilton in a more explicit manner.^[2] It has been taken up again in recent years, by a profound and subtle philosopher, M. Bergson, who, unable to admit that the nervous system is a substratum of knowledge and serves us as a percipient, takes it to be solely a motor organ, and urges that the sensory parts of the system—that is to say, the centripetal, optic, acoustic, &c., nerves—do not call forth, when excited, any kind of sensation, their sole purpose being to convey disturbances from periphery to periphery, or, say, from external objects to the muscles of the body. This hypothesis, surely a little difficult to comprehend, places, if I mistake not, the mind, as a power of perception and representation, within the interval comprised between the external object and the body, so that the mind is in direct contact with external objects and knows them as they are.

It will be noticed that these three interpretations, the spiritualistic, the experimental, and the metaphysical, are in formal opposition with that which I have set forth earlier in these pages. They deny the supposition that the nervous system serves us as an intermediary with nature, and that it transforms nature before bringing it to our consciousness. And it might seem that by contradicting my fundamental proposition, these three new hypotheses must lead to a totally different conclusion.

Now, this is not so at all. The conclusion I have enunciated remains entirely sound, notwithstanding this change in the starting point, and for the following reason. It is easy to see that we cannot represent to ourselves the inner structure of matter by using all our sensations without distinction, because it is impossible to bring all these sensations within one single and identical synthetic construction: for this they are too dissimilar. Thus, we should try in vain to unite in any kind of scheme a movement of molecules and an odour; these elements are so heterogeneous that there is no way of joining them together and combining them.

The physicists have more or less consciously perceived this, and, not being able to overcome by a frontal attack the difficulty created by the heterogeneity of our sensations, they have turned its flank. The ingenious artifice they have devised consists in retaining only some of these sensations, and in rejecting the remainder; the first being considered as really representing the essence of matter, and the latter as the effects of the former on our organs of sense; the first being reputed to be true, we may say, and the second being reputed false—that is subjective, that is not representing the $X$ of matter.^[3] I have refuted this argument by showing that all our sensations without exception are subjective and equally false in regard to the $X$ of matter, and that no one of them, consequently, has any claim to explain the others.

Now, by a new interpretation, we are taught that all sensations are equally true, and that all faithfully represent the great $X$. If they be all equally true, it is absolutely the same as if they were all false; no one sensation can have any privilege over the others, none can be truer than the others, none can be capable of explaining the others, none can usurp to itself the sole right of representing the essence of matter; and we thus find ourselves, in this case, as in the preceding, in presence of the insurmountable difficulty of creating a synthesis with heterogeneous elements.

All that has been said above is summed up in the following points:—

1. Of the external world, we only know our sensations. All the physical properties of matter resolve themselves for us into sensations, present, past, or possible. We may not say that it is by the intermediary, by the means of sensation, that we know these properties, for that would mean that the properties are distinct from the sensations. Objects are to us in reality only aggregates of sensations.

2. The sensations belong to the different organs of the senses—sight, hearing, touch, the muscular sense, &c. Whatever be the sense affected, one sensation has the same rights as the others, from the point of view of the cognition of external objects. It is impossible to distinguish them into subjective and objective, by giving to this distinction the meaning that certain sensations represent objects as they are, while certain others simply represent our manner of feeling. This is an illegitimate distinction, since all sensations have the same physiological condition, the excitement of a sensory nerve, and result from the properties of this nerve when stimulated.

3. Consequently, it is impossible for us to form a conception of matter in terms of movement, and to explain by the modalities of movement the properties of bodies; for this theory amounts to giving to certain sensations, especially those of the muscular sense, the hegemony over the others. We cannot explain, we have not the right to explain, one sensation by another, and the mechanical theory of matter has simply the value of a symbol.

1. See p. 22, sup.—Ed.
2. See J. S. Mill's Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy, chap. x. p. 176, et. seq.
3. See p. 18, sup.—Ed.