Note * — Chapter XI · A Sketch for a Psychology

The view that we are our bodies, more especially our nervous systems, more especially still the higher or more central co-ordinating parts of it, and that the mind is a system of impulses should not be described as Materialism. It might equally well be called Idealism. Neither term in this connection has any scientific, any strictly symbolic meaning or reference. Neither stands for any separable, observable group of things, or character in things. Each is primarily an emotive term used to incite or support certain emotional attitudes. Like all terms used in the vain attempt (vain because the question is nonsensical) to say what things are, instead of to say how they behave, they state nothing. Like all such terms they change in different hands from banners to bludgeons, being each for some people an emotive agent round which attitudes, aspirations, values are rallied, and for other people a weapon of offence by which persons supposed adverse to these attitudes, aspirations and values may, it is hoped, be discomfited. That the Materialist and the Idealist believe themselves to be holding views which are incompatible with one another is but an instance of a very widespread confusion between scientific statement and emotive appeal, with which we shall in later chapters be much concerned. The Mind-Body problem is strictly speaking no problem; it is an imbroglio due to failure to settle a real problem, namely, as to when we are making a statement and when merely inciting an attitude. A problem simpler here than in many cases, since the alleged statement is of an impossible form*, but complicated on both sides of the controversy by misunderstanding of the attitudes which the other side is concerned to maintain. For if mental events are recognised as identical with certain neural events, neither the attitudes which ensue towards them nor the attitudes they themselves will warrantably take up, are changed so much as either Idealists or Materialists have commonly supposed. To call anything mental or spiritual, as opposed to material, or to call anything material as opposed to mental, is only to point out a difference between the two kinds. The differences which can actually be detected between a mental event, such as a toothache, and a non-mental event, such as a sunspot, remain when we have identified the mental event with a neural change. So recognised, it loses none of its observable peculiarities, only certain alleged unstatable and ineffable attributes are removed. It remains unlike any event which is not mental; it is as unparalleled as before. It retains its privileges as the most interesting of all events, and our relations to one another and to the world remain essentially as they were before the recognition. The extreme ecstasies of the mystic, like the attitudes of the engineer towards a successful contrivance, remain just as much and just as little appropriate with regard to the humblest or the proudest of our acts. Thus the identification of the mind with a part of the working of the nervous system, need involve, theology apart, no disturbance of anyone’s attitude to the world, his fellow-men, or to himself. Theology, however, is still more implicit in current attitudes than traditional sceptics suspect.