Contemporary Mind - Some Modern Answers. J. W. N. Sullivan
possible directions; if, in order to get into a locked-up room, he were to buy ten thousand casual keys, and try them all; if, in order to have a house, he were to build a town, and leave all the other houses to wind and weather—assuredly no one would call such proceedings purposeful, and still less would anyone conjecture behind these proceedings a higher wisdom, unrevealed reasons, and superior prudence.”*
Nevertheless, the wastefulness of the process does not disprove the existence of design. We can only say that the design is carried out in a very singular manner, judged by human standards. It is an argument against the Great Designer of Christian theology, wholly benevolent, omniscient and omnipotent, but not, perhaps, against a Designer of limited power dealing with extremely intractable material. On the whole, we may conclude that the biological theory of evolution makes the old doctrine of a purposeless universe distinctly more plausible.
Another of the great fundamental problems, the problem of suffering, is a question concerning which science seems to have nothing to say. Such increased intensity and acuteness as the problem may have acquired may be referred to the greater sensibility, on the part of the mass of the people, that has come about in modern times, and this greater sensibility has only very indirectly been influenced by scientific advances. No problem in the history of mankind has proved more insoluble than the problem of evil.
The survival of bodily death is another of the age-old questions with which we are concerned, and to this question we may definitely say that science has made a contribution. But its contribution is ambiguous. On the one hand modern physiology has made the independent existence of the mind, apart from the body, distinctly less plausible than it was before. On the other hand psychical research, which may be classed as a very rudimentary and imperfect branch of science, has produced a certain amount of evidence for the independent existence of the mind. Evidence of this kind is entirely modern. In fact, the whole psychical research movement can be dated from 1847, when the Fox sisters started their “rappings.” These phenomena, if we are to believe the late confessions of the sisters themselves, were fraudulent, and the subsequent development of the movement has certainly been attended by an immense amount of fraud. It is difficult, however, to dismiss all the diverse phenomena lumped together under the name of “spiritualism” as fraudulent. But the best attested phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, etc., do not necessitate the hypothesis of a discarnate mind although, if we admit them, they certainly require us to oppose that there exist mental powers not taken into account by ordinary psychology. Even some of the material phenomena, such as “levitation” are difficult to explain away. In the best attested cases we can only maintain the purely “natural” explanation either by supposing that the medium was an almost unbelievably clever trickster, or else by supposing that the observers were almost unbelievably imbecile.
It is much easier to dismiss the evidence for discarnate minds, especially if we admit the existence of the extraordinary mental powers postulated by the phenomena of telepathy and clairvoyance. For it is then possible to construct hypotheses which will explain many, if not all, alleged “spirit communications” without invoking either discarnate minds or sheer fraud. It is possible, nevertheless, that there remains a modicum of phenomena which cannot be explained in this way. Dr. Broad, who has investigated these phenomena very carefully, does not believe that even these require us to assume discarnate minds and he presents us, as a minimum hypothesis, with his rather horrible theory of a “psychic factor,” something which is not itself a mind, but which can survive physical death and, in confunction with a living physical brain, form a temporary mind.
If the evidence of psychic research leaves survival doubtful, the evidence of physiology makes it still more doubtful. For we now realise how much closer even than has generally been assumed by common sense is the relation between mind and body. A man’s character, as well as his intellect, seems to be almost entirely at the mercy of his bodily functions. A benevolent saint can, it appears, be turned into a homicidal lunatic by a bodily operation. The man’s “true” character, which flourishes independently of his ductless glands, seems to be a myth. As the observed correlations between bodily changes and mental changes become more numerous, it becomes more difficult to believe in the existence of a mind independent of the body. Partial destruction of the body certainly seems to involve partial destruction of the mind. It is natural to conclude that the total destruction of the one involves the total destruction of the other. But it would be very rash to take this conclusion as proved. The established correlations between bodily states and mental states are still comparatively few in number. And even were the correlations made much more numerous it might still be possible to maintain that the mind is an independent entity using the body as its instrument. On the whole, however, the theory that the mind is wholly dependent on the body, and is destroyed with it, has been made somewhat more plausible by the advances in physiology.
Even if we believe that we live in a purposeless universe and that bodily death means total annihilation it is still true that happiness is a good thing and suffering a bad one. A man who believes that the whole human adventure is purposeless may still be ardently concerned with the welfare of the human race. He may be profoundly interested in the future and whole-souled in his endeavours to make that future better than the present. The fact that he believes the emergence of conscious thinking beings to be a meaningless episode between two eternities need not affect his practical activities or his motives for them. For many of our activities are entirely independent of our philosophy. They do not require to be rationalized; they are their own obvious justification. All the obvious cases of “doing good to others” fall into this class. It is only when we are not quite sure where the good lies that our philosophy has any bearings on the matter. Thus those who believe that the meaning of the present is to be found in the future, that we exist to make the world better for coming generations, are not disturbed by the theoretical purposelessness of the whole human adventure. The fact that science preaches the ultimate physical death of the universe does not alter their conviction that there ought to be as much happiness as possible in the meantime.
Nevertheless there are, and always have been, many people who have a strong desire to believe that the human adventure is not ultimately purposeless, however little influence this belief may have on their actions. They find it impossible to believe that the universe is so irrational an affair as it would appear to be on the “purposeless” theory. And some of them even claim to have an intuition that it is not so. These impulses have, of course, played a large part in framing religious systems and also many of the systems of philosophy. Such systems do not impose themselves; they do not “command assent.” There is no general agreement as to their validity. But these intuitions seem to have been shared by some of the greatest men that the race has produced, and it is possible to suppose, therefore, that they lie in the line of advance of the developing human consciousness. The most advanced forms of these intuitions are to be found in mysticism, and the mystical solution, when various solutions are investigated, seems to be the only really satisfactory alternative to the theory of a purposeless universe. It is from this point of view that mysticism is discussed in this book.
It is a commonplace to say that science is becoming more and more philosophical. This remark is somewhat misleading, for the scientific outlook has always, of course, presupposed a philosophy. But it is true that scientific men are becoming more conscious of the philosophy they assume. If we are to judge by the interviews contained in this book we see that the mathematical physicists, at any rate, are inclined to a form of philosophical idealism. They regard consciousness as fundamental; everything else is to be derived from it. Perhaps too much importance should not be attached to this fact. Scientific men are not usually profound students of philosophy, and it may be that they have accepted a philosophic outlook without being fully aware of what can be said for and against it. Still, the fact is significant, and suggests that a thorough investigation of the philosophic aspects of modern science is urgently required. In any case, it seems perfectly clear that a return to the naive materialism of the nineteenth century is impossible.
The contribution of modern scientific theory to the old problem of determinism versus freewill is more direct. Heisenberg’s principle of Indeterminacy states that sufficient knowledge for accurate prediction can never be obtained about the ultimate constituents of matter—electrons. In order to predict the future motion of an electron,