Ants and Some Other Insects: An Inquiry Into the Psychic Powers of These Animals. Forel Auguste
brain-activity reflected in the mirror of consciousness appears therein subjectively as a summary synthesis, and the synthetical summation grows with the higher complications and abstractions acquired through habit and practice, so that details previously conscious (e. g., those involved in the act of reading) later become subconscious, and the whole takes on the semblance of a psychical unit.
Psychology, therefore, cannot restrict itself merely to a study of the phenomena of our superconsciousness by means of introspection, for the science would be impossible under such circumstances. Everybody would have only his own subjective psychology, after the manner of the old scholastic spiritualists, and would therefore be compelled to doubt the very existence of the external world and his fellow-men. Inference from analogy, scientific induction, the comparison of the experiences of our five senses, prove to us the existence of the outer world, our fellow-men and the psychology of the latter. They also prove to us that there is such a thing as comparative psychology, a psychology of animals. Finally our own psychology, without reference to our brain-activity, is an incomprehensible patchwork full of contradictions, a patchwork which above all things seems to contradict the law of the conservation of energy.
It follows, furthermore, from these really very simple reflections that a psychology that would ignore brain-activity, is a monstrous impossibility. The contents of our superconsciousness are continually influenced and conditioned by subconscious brain-activities. Without these latter it can never be understood. On the other hand, we understand the full value and the ground of the complex organisation of our brain only when we observe it in the inner light of consciousness, and when this observation is supplemented by a comparison of the consciousness of our fellow-men as this is rendered possible for us through spoken and written language by means of very detailed inferences from analogy. The mind must therefore be studied simultaneously from within and from without. Outside ourselves the mind can, to be sure, be studied only through analogy, but we are compelled to make use of this the only method which we possess.
Some one has said that language was given to man not so much for the expression as for the concealment of his thoughts. It is also well known that different men in all honesty attribute very different meanings to the same words. A savant, an artist, a peasant, a woman, a wild Wedda from Ceylon, interpret the same words very differently. Even the same individual interprets them differently according to his moods and their context. Hence it follows that to the psychologist and especially to the psychiatrist – and as such I am here speaking – the mimetic expression, glances and acts of a man often betray his true inner being better than his spoken language. Hence also the attitudes and behavior of animals have for us the value of a “language,” the psychological importance of which must not be underestimated. Moreover, the anatomy, physiology and pathology of the animal and human brain have yielded irrefutable proof that our mental faculties depend on the quality, quantity, and integrity of the living brain and are one with the same. It is just as impossible that there should exist a human brain without a mind, as a mind without a brain, and to every normal or pathological change in the mental activity, there corresponds a normal or pathological change of the neurocymic activity of the brain, i. e., of its nervous elements. Hence what we perceive introspectively in consciousness is cerebral activity.
As regards the relation of pure psychology (introspection) to the physiology of the brain (observation of brain-activity from without), we shall take the theory of identity for granted so long as it is in harmony with the facts. The word identity, or monism, implies that every psychic phenomenon is the same real thing as the molecular or neurocymic activity of the brain-cortex coinciding with it, but that this may be viewed from two standpoints. The phenomenon alone is dualistic, the thing itself is monistic. If this were otherwise there would result from the accession of the purely psychical to the physical, or cerebral, an excess of energy which would necessarily contradict the law of the conservation of energy. Such a contradiction, however, has never been demonstrated and would hold up to derision all scientific experience. In the manifestations of our brain-life, wonderful as they undoubtedly are, there is absolutely nothing which contradicts natural laws and justifies us in postulating the existence of a mythical, supernatural “psyche.”
On this account I speak of monistic identity and not of psycho-physical parallelism. A thing cannot be parallel with itself. Of course, psychologists of the modern school, when they make use of this term, desire merely to designate a supposed parallelism of phenomena without prejudice either to monism or dualism. Since, however, many central nervous processes are accessible neither to physiological nor to psychological observation, the phenomena accessible to us through these two methods of investigation are not in the least parallel, but separated from one another very unequally by intermediate processes. Moreover, inasmuch as the dualistic hypothesis is scientifically untenable, it is altogether proper to start out from the hypothesis of identity.
It is as clear as day that the same activity in the nervous system of an animal, or even in my own nervous system, observed by myself, first by means of physiological methods from without, and second, as reflecting itself in my consciousness, must appear to me to be totally different, and it would indeed be labor lost to try to convert the physiological into psychological qualities or vice versa. We cannot even convert one psychological quality into another, so far as the reality symbolised by both is concerned; e. g., the tone, the visual and tactile sensation, which a uniform, low, tuning-fork vibration produces on our three corresponding senses. Nevertheless, we may infer inductively that it is the same reality, the same vibration which is symbolised for us in these three qualitatively and totally different modes i. e., produces in us these three different psychical impressions which cannot be transformed into one another. These impressions depend on activities in different parts of the brain and are, of course, as such actually different from one another in the brain. We speak of psycho-physiological identity only when we mean, on the one hand, the cortical neurocyme which directly conditions the conscious phenomena known to us, on the other hand, the corresponding phenomena of consciousness.
And, in fact, a mind conceived as dualistic could only be devoid of energy or energy-containing. If it be conceived as devoid of energy (Wasmann), i. e., independent of the laws of energy, we have arrived at a belief in the miraculous, a belief which countenances the interference with and arbitrary suspension of the laws of nature. If it be conceived as energy-containing, one is merely playing upon words, for a mind which obeys the law of energy is only a portion of the cerebral activities arbitrarily severed from its connections and dubbed “psychic essence,” only that this may be forthwith discredited. Energy can only be transformed qualitatively, not quantitatively. A mind conceived as dualistic, if supposed to obey the law of energy, would have to be transformed completely into some other form of energy. But then it would no longer be dualistic, i. e., no longer essentially different from the brain-activities.
Bethe, Uexkull, and others would require us to hold fast to the physiological method, because it alone is exact and restricts itself to what can be weighed and measured. This, too, is an error which has been refuted from time immemorial. Only pure mathematics is exact, because in its operations it makes use solely of equations of abstract numbers. The concrete natural sciences can never be exact and are as unable to subsist without the inductive method of inference from analogy as a tree without its roots. Bethe and Uexkull do not seem to know that knowledge is merely relative. They demand absolute exactitude and cannot understand that such a thing is impossible. Besides, physiology has no reason to pride itself upon the peculiar exactitude of its methods and results.
Although we know that our whole psychology appears as the activity of our cerebrum in connection with the activities of more subordinate nerve-centers, the senses and the muscles, nevertheless for didactic purposes it may be divided into the psychology of cognition, of feeling and volition. Relatively speaking, this subdivision has an anatomico-physiological basis. Cognition depends, in the first instance, on the elaboration of sense-impressions by the brain; the will represents the psycho- or cerebrofugal resultants of cognition and the feelings together with their final transmission to the muscles. The feelings represent general conditions of excitation of a central nature united with elements of cognition and with cerebrofugal impulses, which are relatively differentiated and refined by the former, but have profound hereditary and phylogenetic origins and are relatively independent. There is a continual interaction of these three groups of brain-activities upon one another. Sense-impressions arouse the attention; this necessitates movements;