Volume 3 / Part 4 — THE MONIST. (continued 2)

And let me here say, that Renan’s optimism was not based in any belief in a superhuman providence, or any dynamic or compulsory destiny in nature. It was his faith in the heart and brain of man. In his last work he reminds youth that their efforts at new abstractions and theologies are idle: the new notions will follow the old into extinction. “Dear children,” he says—

“Dear children, it is useless to give yourself so much headache to reach only a change of error. Let us die calm, in the communion of humanity, the religion of the future. The existence of the world is assured for a long time. The future of science is guaranteed, for in the great scientific book everything adds itself and nothing is lost. Error is not deep; no error lasts long. Be tranquil. Before a thousand years, let us hope, the earth will find means to supply its exhausted coal, and, in some degree, its diminished virtue. The resources of humanity are infinite. Eternal works accomplish themselves without loss to the fountain of living forces, ever rising again to the surface. Science, above all, will continue to astonish us by its revelations, substituting the infinite of time and space for a poor creationism that can no longer satisfy the imagination of a child. Religion also is true to the infinite. When God shall be complete, he will be just. I am convinced that virtue will find itself one day clearly to have been the better part. The merit is in affirming duty against the apparent evidences. [As for the future] denying not, affirming not, let us hope. Let us keep a place at our funerals for the music and the incense.”

It will be seen that Renan’s deity is the brother of man’s divinity. God is as dependent on man as man on God. Natural evil is God’s incompleteness: when man is complete God will be complete: there will be no more injustice.

But I must warn you that while this is the way in which Renan impresses me, he is not a man to be caught or held in any one theory. He is the many-sided man of our time. When I heard his lectures in his college, two years ago,—his French was so clear and expressive that even a limping listener could follow him tolerably,—he impressed me as a sort of Buddha. Buddha is supposed by some to have got his large form by sitting so long in contemplation, by others his size is regarded as a protest against the meagreness of ill-fed ascetics. The unfurrowed serenity of Buddha’s face, his infantine smile, were those of Renan, also the remembered music of his voice. This association has been extended to Renan’s spiritual nature by a letter of his to a friend, in his “Feuilles Détachées.” He is fascinated by the legends of Buddha and Krishna which describe them as multiplying themselves. When Buddha was born into this world, ten thousand women entreated to be his nurses, and Buddha multiplied himself into ten thousand babies. Each woman believed that she alone had nursed the true Buddha. In the legend of the god Krishna, he first appeared to some shepherdesses who were dancing. The beautiful god multiplied himself into as many forms as there were maidens, so that each believed, that she alone had danced with Krishna, and through life kept her heart sacred to him. Writing of these legends, Renan says:

“The ideal loses nothing by dividing itself: it is entire in each of its parts. We live that part of Krishna which we assimilate according to our genius. The ideal is for all partakers, like morsels modified to each taste. Each creates his divine dancer. One refinement I would introduce into the legend of Krishna, should I ever make it into a drama, or, better, a philosophic ballet: at the time when the shepherdesses believed they were singly dancing with Krishna, he should find that they were in reality dancing with different Krishnas. Each had made her Krishna to her fancy, and when they came to describe to each other their heavenly lover, they should find their visions in nowise alike; and nevertheless to each it was always Krishna.”

The legend which thus charmed Renan has many correspondences in religious history; in Christianity, for instance, where we to-day find a hundred and fifty sects, each believing that it alone has the true Christ for partner. But it applies to all great personalities, and to all spiritual influences. The finest spirits frame no systems, found no schools. They are akin to the sun and rain which nourish and paint innumerable and diverse growths. It was so with Emerson. Dean Stanley said that he heard many different preachers in America, but their sermons were generally by Emerson. It was preëminently the case with Renan. The Catholic, the Protestant, the idealist, the sceptic, the man of the world, the mystic, the conservative, the radical, provided they are unsophisticated like the shepherdesses, not champions of some sect or party, find that Renan has spoken better for them than they can for themselves; he knows their secret heart, is their partner by unbounded sympathies. Yet it is always the same Renan, full and entire in each and all of his manifestations.

Some time ago, when his friend Littré, the Positivist, was buried by his family with Catholic rites, the aspersoir passed round the grave, and came to Renan, who, like the rest, sprinkled holy water on the coffin. There were cries of “Shame” among the freethinkers present; but really it was the act of a man less sectarian than themselves. The same tenderness that could not wound the family parting for ever from their beloved, is visible in the gentleness with which he treats old beliefs, when it is a question of affection or sentiment, not of dogma and authority. They have died out of his mind utterly; he sees the creeds already in their graves; he no longer fears them, but is glad to soothe those who cling to their lifeless forms by speaking kindly of their virtues in the past. His “Life of Jesus” is, in large part, a wreath of immortelles laid on the tomb of a faith to him utterly dead,—that is, faith in a supernatural Christ. He once told me of a little island on the coast of his native Brittany, from which some medieval saint was supposed to have driven monstrous serpents, or worms. To that island the peasants still repair to get a little of the soil to use as a—vermifuge. To similarly small size had shrunk, in Renan’s view, the greatest dogmas and superstitions of Christendom. Others might still compliment them with fear and wrath, but Renan was tender to them because of their smallness. He was endlessly good-natured with his ignorant opponents, from whom he often received warning letters. Of one who wrote him simply the words, Remember, there is a Hell, he said that this monitor did not terrify him as much as he may have supposed. He (Renan) would be rather glad to know for certain that there was beyond the grave even a hell. And if he should go there he felt certain that he would be able to address to the deity such subtle arguments to prove that he ought not to remain there, but to be transferred to paradise; (only he feared his exhorter’s paradise would be very dull,) that he would presently be released.

One purpose of the “Life of Jesus” has been mentioned, but that work had also another and a higher aim. With a love like that of Mary Magdalene, in whose rapt vision Jesus rose from the tomb, to be transformed into a supernatural Christ, Renan sought to raise out of the grave of that supernatural Christ the human Jesus. He had travelled through Palestine, visited every spot associated with the great teacher, and drew the most realistic portraiture he could of the parents, home, friends, disciples, and daily life of Jesus. The outcry against that book was a confession by theology of its utter loss of the human personality of Jesus. There had been a time when the religious heart loved to dwell on the sweet humanities of Jesus. In the seventeenth century the poet, Thomas Dekker, wrote:

And such remembrance of Jesus, in his life among the people, his friendships, smiles and tears, are found in the sermons of Tillotson, South, Jeremy Taylor. But the descended God gradually consumed the humanity. In the last century it became a heresy to consider Jesus as a man. The man was crucified on a cross of dogmas; he lay dead and buried under a stony theology, until Renan rolled away the stone, raised him to life, clothed him with flesh and blood, invested him with beauty, and said once more to the Pharisee, the sceptic, the scoffer—Behold the man! For writing that book,—just after Strauss had shown the Christ of Christendom a mythological figure,—the churches should have clasped Renan’s knees. But for it they heaped him with abuse, declared that Jewish bankers had bribed him to write it, drove him from his professorship of Hebrew, reduced him to poverty. The Pope denounced him as “The European Blasphemer.” He has been terribly avenged in his own country, where every educated man has abandoned the church. And he lived to see the Christianity of England striving to gain a new hold on the people by following his brave gesture,—rationalising away the supernatural Christ, and exalting the humanity of Jesus as the sign of his divinity. The criticism of that work is not at all so destructive as that of many who have written in the generation that has elapsed since its appearance,—of Dr. Martineau, for instance, on whom Oxford has conferred a doctor’s degree. Indeed, in reading Renan’s “Life of Jesus” now, one is surprised by its concessions. He accepts the four Gospels as coming from the first century, a belief which even the learned theologians have abandoned. Some newspaper has said that Renan borrowed from Strauss; on the contrary, the fault of the book is that it did not borrow from Strauss, and from English authors, who had proved that the Gospels are all of the second century. That would have relieved him of the necessity of apologising for Jesus in some matters of which Jesus never heard, of which Paul in the first century knew nothing, as when he intimates that Jesus may have once lent himself to an amiable deception. No miracle was ever ascribed to Jesus by any writer of his own century. In several other respects Renan’s “Life of Jesus,” on its negative side, is behind the advance of research and criticism. But those are small details compared with the spirit and general purpose of the work. In this moment, when we are celebrating the discovery of a western world, we may well pay homage to the scholar who rediscovered and exhumed an eastern world, long buried under débris of mythology and rubbish of superstitions. This Renan has done in his series of works on the “Origins of Christianity,” beginning with the “Life of Jesus,” dealing with the “Apostles,” with “St. Paul,” with “Antichrist,” and other studies, leading up to his “History of the People of Israel.”

In all these works there is not a line that is not interesting, alike to learned and unlearned. As some one has said, Renan could make Hebrew roots blossom with roses and lilies. But that super-fine art of his was carrying the cause of intellectual and religious emancipation. For these works concerned the constitution of Europe. This Great Britain, with all its physical freedom, is religiously a mere dependency of Judea. Here men were formerly burnt, until lately imprisoned, and even now denied equal advantages, not in accordance with what Englishmen think, but with the opinions of some ancient Jews. The voice of the Jews was the voice of God. But Judea, like the Grand Llama, could rule only while veiled. Renan unveiled it. He did it all the more effectually because in the literary and philosophic spirit. All the ages of Judea, from the first tribal groups to the movement of John the Baptist and Jesus, are assigned their exact place as successive chapters of human history, the natural origin of their mythology is explained, Jehovah takes his seat beside Jupiter and Brahma, Jesus is revered with Buddha and Zoroaster; and all this is done, not by mere opinion, but by impregnable facts, unwearied researches, inflexible veracity. It was also done lovingly. A superstition can survive combat, but not explanation. Renan did much to remove Christianity from the field of militant camps to the quiet province of literary investigation. In the Republic of Letters there is no arbitrary authority. The combat is left to salvation armies,—“theirs not to reason why.”

There is a large Renan literature. More than three hundred works represent the efforts of theology to get the resuscitated human Jesus back into his grave again. Renan’s accessible life-work is represented by about twenty-five volumes, of which some are philosophic diversions written amid the heavy labours of his College, and while collecting and preserving for scholars the whole body of Semitic inscriptions. For more than twenty years Renan has been training the young scholars of France—those who are to fashion France in the future, and influence mankind. Those acquainted with his larger works can realise his immense service in elevating the standard of criticism, and establishing the method of exact research and exact thought. But there are other works of Renan, notably his Philosophic Dramas, not yet translated, from which may be better gathered the great variety of his ability, the poetic play of his genius, and the charm of his personality, which some of us have personally felt, and which so won all hearts that even the priesthood have not raised discordant notes in the homage and emotion with which his nation has laid him in an honored grave.

Farewell, great heart, and great leader! On your coffin I laid a wreath of immortelles for friendship, for the homage of America, and for the sake of this free English Society. For your victory is ours also: your triumph is that of every independent mind on earth.

Moncure D. Conway.

INTUITION AND REASON.

The question whether we act more frequently from intuition or reason, and the question that follows it, which faculty is the more noble guide to conduct, would have no more interest for the general public than any other of the subjects which the metaphysician exercises his ingenuity upon,—than the question, for instance, whether we execute a greater number of analytic or of synthetic judgments in the course of the day,—were it not that there is an ancient opinion to the effect that reason and intuition are marks respectively of the manner of working of men’s and of women’s minds. The opinion is wholly unfounded, and could only have had its origin at a time when the psychology of the working of the human mind was thoroughly misunderstood. As the very terms in which the opinion is expressed make plain, it dates from the period when it was the custom to speak of the human mind as having a lot of separate “faculties” under its control, and of calling up now one and now another of them to do its bidding. It is time that the belief in the different quality of men’s and of women’s minds should follow the whole antiquated machinery of “faculties” into the limbo of old and worn-out fashions of thought and of speech.

This illusion, however, like most of the illusions that have had a firm foot-hold in their day, has a perfectly comprehensible reason for its existence. It is not true that men’s minds and women’s minds have a different way of working; but it is true that upon certain occasions (and by far, the greatest number of occasions) we all—men, women, and negroes alike—act from intuition, and that the circumstances of women’s lives have hitherto been such as to make their interests lie somewhat more exclusively in those regions in which conduct is intuitive than in those in which it is long thought out. It is not true that the Creator has made two separate kinds of mind for men and for women; but it is true that society, as at present constituted, offers two somewhat separate fields of interest for men and for women, and that the nature of their conduct is of necessity determined by the character of the action which is demanded of them.

What is the difference for the psychologist, between the mental state of a being who acts from reason, and of one who acts from intuition? It is not a difference of the kind of mind which controls him, but of the kind of knowledge upon which his present conduct is based. If one individual has got at his command a lot of general propositions bearing upon the case in hand, and if his familiarity with them is not such that they flow together without conscious effort, then he must laboriously piece them together, and think out the conclusions which they necessitate. If another individual, having led a different life, has had a lot of experiences which cover just such cases as this, and if he has been taught by thousands of instances that under these circumstances a certain course of conduct will nearly always lead to good results, then he can trust to his hands or his feet to execute that course of conduct without a moment’s aid from conscious reflection; he can go on with his novel, or whatever other pleasant occupation engages his attention, without the wear and tear of mind which is involved in consciously thinking about the circumstances in question.

Now the differences in the mental processes of men and women are exactly of this nature. They are differences dependent upon the fact that the knowledge at their command—that is, the stored up premises upon which action is based—is, to a certain extent, of a different kind, and got from different sources. So far as the knowledge is not of a different kind, the character of the action is not of a different kind. There is an immense number of conclusions which men and women alike “jump at,” every hour in the day; and some of them represent reasoning so fixedly instinctive, that even the closest attention does not enable us to drag it up into the light of consciousness. How many people know that a certain feeling of strain in the muscles which move the eyes is a sign of a certain distance of an object looked at, and a different feeling of strain, a sign of a different distance; and that when the eyes are fixed upon one point, objects in the lateral field of view are judged to be nearer or farther away than that point, according as the two disparate images which they cast upon the two retinas are, the right-hand one or the left hand one, the brighter? The common man knows that one object is near and the other far, but he is not conscious even of the feeling of strain, nor of the existence of double images; the physiological psychologist knows the unconscious syllogism by which he must reach his conclusion, but even he cannot, by any possibility, make it cease to be instinctive,—that is, make himself conscious of its different steps. On the other hand, no one, whether man or woman, can pass from one proposition in geometry to another by a process which is in any sense unconscious, though one person may be obliged to give a much more strained attention to what he is doing than another.

Now it is very possible that a greater number of the actions of women have their ground in unconscious causes than of the actions of men. The subjects upon which action is of vital concern to them have been different subjects, and hence their stored-up stock of knowledge is knowledge about different subjects. To the woman of the past, who was to a great extent confined to her own home, the temper of her house-mates was what her happiness depended upon more than anything else in the world. It was impossible that she should not acquire a keen intelligence in interpreting every slightest shade of expression upon the human face. But this sort of knowledge is always instinctive, whether it is practised by men or by women. If the eyes of the most reasonable man in the world should chance to show him a certain curve of the lip and a certain elevation of the posterior angle of the alæ of the nostrils on the face of the fair lady to whom he was talking, would he try to call to mind the pictures in Sir Charles Bell’s great work on expression and the general theorems in Darwin’s book on the same subject, and piecing this and that laboriously together, would he try to arrive at some just conclusion regarding the contents of the fair lady’s mind? Would he not, rather, instinctively change the subject of conversation, or even discreetly beat a retreat, long before he had time to think? Women’s interests have been so exclusively social that they have developed a sense for the physical expression of emotion which makes society for them a matter of complicated relations, of delicate susceptibility to play of feeling, which—except in the hyper-sensitive period of courtship—is not common among men. But there are men who are quite the equals of women in this respect; and if any man is markedly deficient in these qualities, we recognise him as belonging to a low and brutal type which is in process of extinction. If a woman on the other hand, goes into business, she does not fix the prices of her straw hats each morning in accordance with the feelings which straw hats awaken in her when she first looks at them, but in accordance with the fluctuations of the market. The President of a New Hampshire Street Railway did not carry through her improvements by her intuitions, but by a plain, common-sense weighing of reasons. Nor are all masculine occupations under the guidance of the reasoning faculty. If you go to a stove-man and ask him to mend your smoking chimney, does he do it by reason? Not a bit of it! There may be stove-men who have enough knowledge of the laws which regulate the movements of masses of hot air to be able to apply general principles to particular instances, but in the course of a long and checkered experience with stove-men, it has not been my lot to fall in with them. Their knowledge of chimneys, such as it is, is got by experience and applied by intuition, and nothing is farther from their minds than any trace of deductive reasoning. It is not that there are men’s minds and women’s minds, but that there are theoretical subjects and practical subjects, and that knowledge is not the same kind of knowledge in both.

Intuition, in the sense in which it is used when discussing male and female minds, is a word of double meaning: it covers those actions which we go through with by instinct, or inherited experience ingrained from the beginning in our nervous structure, and those which we perform automatically, or by individual experience become so familiar that it can act as a guide without the aid of conscious reflection. The relative distances of objects looked at we know instinctively; the trained musician with mind intent upon expression, reads his notes automatically; the beginner at the piano goes through a painful process of syllogism before each key is struck. All is, at bottom, reason; in one case it is conscious; in another it is unconscious, but can be forced into consciousness; in another, it is unconscious and cannot by any effort be made conscious. Because a woman’s interests lie more than a man’s in regions in which thought is instinctive and automatic, it does not follow that she has developed any peculiar powers of intuition. Nor is there any possibility that mothers should occasionally transmit their powers of intuition to favored sons, as Mr. Grant Allen, in the course of his apotheosis of the uneducated woman, has somewhere suggested; some men have poetic and æsthetic minds, and in regions of poetry and art mental activity is largely of the instinctive kind. It is different with powers of reasoning. Good powers of reasoning may be transmitted from mother to son, but that is merely saying metaphorically that a good firm texture of mind may be transmitted. Hume and James Mill are two men who are supposed to owe much to their mothers, but their peculiar powers are not usually considered to lie in regions of intuition. No mother has ever produced an intuitive mathematician. Nor would any one who knew anything about the higher mathematics for a moment suppose that when a great mathematician leaves out intermediate steps in a printed book, he had jumped at his conclusions by instinct. It is simply that, with his thorough knowledge of this particular subject, the intermediate steps have seemed to him too easy to set down. If his book is hard to read, it is simply because he has assumed a greater amount of learning in his readers than they are in possession of.

The question whether intuition or reason is the nobler faculty is an exceedingly meaningless question. All knowledge which finds frequent occasion to be put in practice has a tendency to become first automatic and then instinctive. Human progress consists in making conscious action automatic as soon as it can be done with safety, and in setting free consciousness to attend to more and more complicated combinations of circumstances. After the musician has learned to read his notes mechanically, shall we urge him to go back to the period of conscious linking of note to key, because reason is a diviner gift than intuition? Is it desirable to turn the act of walking into a conscious fitting of muscular tension to variations in the position of the centre of gravity in order to distinguish ourselves the more effectually from the brutes that perish? Reason is merely intuition in its formative stage, and the sooner all our present reasoned convictions become mechanical, and conscious thought is set free to bring in more and more far reaching considerations to bear upon our actions (including in that term our conclusions), the sooner will a higher form of life be reached.

Wundt’s students have made some experiments in his laboratory in the last two or three years, which throw a great deal of light upon this question,—they have caught automatism in the very act of formation. It has been noticed that different observers differed very much in the reaction time which they assigned to the several senses,—that is, the time required, for instance, to hear the tap of a bell, and to press a button in response. Wundt’s students found that there are two different reaction times,—in one, time is taken to bring the tap of the bell into the focus of consciousness and to decide consciously what to do in response; in the other, the process is unconscious. The first is nearly twice as long as the second, and both are very constant quantities, for the same sense. The exact figures are, in seconds:

FULL. SHORT.

Sound .216 .127 N. Lange

” .235 .121 Belkin

” .230 .124 L. Lange

Light .290 .172 L. Lange

” .291 .182 Martius

It may be inferred from this that, even in the simplest matters intuition is very nearly twice as valuable a “faculty” as reason, as far as economy of time is concerned. (It would be interesting to determine the difference in fatigue.) But the interesting point is that the experimenter can teach himself to give either reaction time at his pleasure. If he thinks of his ears, he has a feeling of strain in them, and a long reaction time; if he directs his attention to his fingers (or if he thinks of indifferent matters) he is unconscious of what is going on, and his reaction time is short. It is plain that the more of these educated brain-reflexes we can produce, the fuller and more complicated lives we shall be capable of carrying on. It may also be assumed that the ideal human being is the one who has many brain-reflexes, but who is capable of bringing them all into consciousness upon occasion. Connections that we cannot make conscious are a frequent source of illusion. When we move the eye-ball about by the will, objects seem to remain stationary; but when, putting the finger on the under eyelid, we push the eye-ball up and down in the socket, we cannot help perceiving that objects are moving up and down. Prof. William James suggests as a good experiment that some one who has eyes that he is not afraid of injuring should do this pushing several hours a day, and see if he cannot force conscious reason to do her work and to make him see that the objects are not moving.

For perfectly regular circumstances,—that is, for the world of nature or of human character so far as is governed by fixed laws,—reflex action presents an immense economy of time and work. To provide against extraordinary emergencies, it would seem to be desirable that we should have the power of interposing consciousness in the chain which begins with stimulus and ends in action. Whenever a large number of considerations, or considerations of an abstract character, have to be weighed and balanced, then reason is the only sufficient guide.

That women have no deficiency in the power of putting this and that together, when this and that are pieces of knowledge which are in their possession, is absolutely proved by a single circumstance. Geometry is a branch of learning which is entirely built up out of abstract reason, pure and undefiled. Geometry is studied, in the United States, in high schools, and it must not be forgotten that there are in this country (according to the Report of the Bureau of Education) three times as many girls as boys who take the high school course. It cannot be said, therefore, (as is said of girls who go to college) that the girls who go to the high school are a selected lot; they are the very bone and fibre of the women who make up the country. Now if women could not reason, we ought to hear a great hue and cry from the teachers of the geometry classes about the difficulty of teaching that subject to girls, and the girls ought to lament and moan over the impossibility of getting safely through with their demonstrations. Is this the case? I have never met with a teacher of geometry who thought his boys did better than his girls,—I have met with several who thought the reverse. As long ago as 1865, Her Majesty’s Inspector of schools, after travelling through this country, said: “The teachers all tell me that the girls do fully as well as the boys in mathematics,—fully.” Nor are any sad effects noticeable upon health or spirits. Day after day an army of girls goes smiling into the class-room and comes smiling out, utterly unaware that an unnatural wrench has been given to their delicate minds, and that they are being rapidly transformed into monstrous products of over-reason.

If girls show no defect in reason in the class-room, neither do boys show any defect in intuition,—in fact, their intuition about stretched strings and lines on balls are usually better than those of girls. I have kept a record for many years of errors committed by boys and by girls, and I have not been able to detect any difference in their character. It is true that it was a boy who once failed to get a problem in trigonometry for a week, because it was not expressly stated in the book that the milestones to which the problem related were a mile apart. My intimate acquaintance with the character of his mind prevented me, however, from attributing this failure in intuition to his superior reasoning powers.

The simple matter is that a good mind has good reasons and good intuitions both. Both qualities are summed up in the expressive popular phrase, “having your wits about you.” If you are in full possession of your wits, you will trust to your instincts, when you must; to your acquired reflexes, when there is no sign of danger; and to your reason, when the question requires debate. It would be greatly for the good of the race if the common virtues should become more instinctive in men; and if women should be put into a position in which they can reflect more wisely upon the virtues which are only just in process of getting known to be such. The only reason that women do not guide themselves by far-reaching principles in their every-day conduct, is that they have not made themselves acquainted with the doctrines of political economy and of abstract ethics. When women are in full possession of the higher education, there is no danger that they will not put it into practice, so far as it leads to practice. The human mind is so constituted that it cannot help taking account of all its knowledge. Propositions merely learned by rote, or the truth of which it is not absolutely convinced of, it may leave one side, but not what it really knows. Nor is there any danger that woman will lose her powers of intuition. The knowledge and skill which she has acquired in social matters will not desert her because she has made herself familiar with the speculations of philosophers, and can turn to them for guidance in the intricate questions of conduct which the complexities of modern life give rise to. So long as a woman’s highest duty was to please her lord and master, her task was simple, but women are now awake to a sense of wider responsibilities. They are now aware that it is their highest duty to be the best possible kind of a human being, and to do whatever lies within their strength towards making the world the best possible kind of a world to live in. For this end they have urgent need of all the gifts that God has given them; and he who would cripple their reason on the ground that intuition is a pleasing and a poetic guide, would do them a grievous wrong.

Christine Ladd Franklin.

CRUELTY AND PITY IN WOMAN.

I. CRUELTY.

Spencer says⁠[24] that among savage nations the women are as perverse as the men, and that if they do not work so much evil it is because they are less able to do so. This is not entirely true; doubtless women among savages are much more inclined to cruelty than to pity, but, generally speaking, woman even at the very beginnings of human evolution is less cruel than man.

WOMAN AND WAR.

Woman, even among savage nations, is rarely a warrior. In the Antilles, the women watched over the safety of the islands whenever their husbands went to war with the neighboring islands; they were brave, strong, courageous, nearly equalling the men in their cleverness in handling weapons.⁠[25] Amongst the ancient Bretons, armies were always commanded by women. In Dahomey, the élite of the army is composed of a troop of six or seven thousand Amazons, who are very ferocious, particularly in the mutilation of dead bodies; women then become tigers, is a popular saying. Among the ancient Scots, women followed the army, and cruelly mutilated the prisoners. Among the Botocudos, when war breaks out between the tribes, the men fight the men with sticks, and the women fight the women, by scratching and by tearing the botoques (cylinders of wood) from their ears and lips.⁠[26] But these are all exceptional cases. Generally speaking, the savage woman plays a secondary part in war; she acts as an auxiliary, picks up arrows, throws stones from a distance, and carries the provisions etc.

REVENGE.

It is above all in revenge, that feminine cruelty shows itself the most terrible. Man is capable of destroying whole families or nations, to satisfy a particular revenge; but nothing equals the ingenuity of woman, in slowly tormenting her victim, in gloating over his sufferings and lengthening them out in order that her enjoyment of vengeance may endure as long as possible.

In Tasmania, when the black war broke out between the English and the aborigines, the Tasmanian women terribly tortured the prisoners, in order to avenge their companions who had been carried off by the English. We must also attribute to the desire for vengeance, the torments inflicted by the women upon prisoners of war among the Red Indians.

Elizabeth of Russia, betrayed by her lover, obliged him to marry a deformed dwarf, and to pass his wedding night in an ice palace, where the furniture and the bed were all of ice. The next morning, attended by her Court, she went to present the newly wedded pair with a bouquet. She found them, stretched out upon their bed of ice, nearly frozen. She then banished her rival to Siberia first causing her ears and nose to be cut off.

A wealthy Russian Prince, in love with a very beautiful peasant girl of fifteen, took her to live with him for five years; at the end of which time, wishing to contract an alliance, he paid her a sum of money in dower and obliged her to marry a peasant. The young girl made no sign for ten years, until the death of her husband; but after the lapse of that period, a rising having taken place among the peasantry against the nobles, she excited them and led a body of peasants to the castle of her ancient lover, had him taken and dragged into his izba, harnessed him to the plough instead of the oxen, and for three days obliged him thus to work, lashing him with the whip each time that he fell to the ground. At night she led him to the stable and made him lie down with the oxen; compelling him to eat fodder with the beasts and making merry over his sorry plight. This amusement lasted for three days, at the end of which time, the man fell dead in one of the furrows he was ploughing.⁠[27]

A Russian, an idle and worthless fellow who had let his wife suffer hunger, proposed to her that she should be sold as a slave to the Sultan. After some hesitation, she accepted and they started off; but when they had gone about half the way, the husband having fallen asleep intoxicated, the idea came into her mind to sell him for a slave, in her place. She then tied him on the horse, started off again on the road and arriving at the place of rendezvous, she delivered her husband to the merchant, and remained to watch the Turk push the half-awakened man into the boat, laughing whilst he showered blows upon him.⁠[28]

A young Russian peasant woman lived with a small land-owner, who betrayed her; at last she took refuge with a band of brigands, who treated her like a queen. One day she caused two of them to capture her old lover, and had him brought to the camp where she used him as a kind of living foot-stool: when she sat down she covered him with a carpet and put her feet upon him, and when she wanted to go out she made him carry her on his shoulders.

CRUELTY TO THE HELPLESS.

Woman sometimes displays the same amount of ingenuity in tormenting the helpless creatures who may be in her power. I do not know, says Bourgavel, any one more perfidious, immoral, or perverse than the New Caledonian woman. In certain portions of Australia women are mortal foes to each other. When the men wish to punish any one of them, they turn her over to her companions, who inflict upon her horrible tortures.⁠[29] Sitting on her body, they cut her flesh with sharpened stones.

In Tasmania, as amongst the ancient Saxons, the unfaithful wife was punished by her companions; she was not killed, but she was tortured for a long time with sharp pointed stones or knives, in all parts of her body.

Women have often been cruel mistresses to their slaves. A lady in Guiana, being envious of a very handsome mulatto slave, had her branded on the mouth, cheeks and forehead. In the case of another slave, who was also very beautiful, she had the tendon of Achilles cut thus causing her to become a deformed and crippled monster.⁠[30]

It is a notorious fact that Roman and Greek ladies often inflicted most terrible punishments on their slaves, and that it was more particularly towards the female slaves, the ancillæ, that the cruelty of their mistresses was shown. The Roman ladies, if, while they were having their hair dressed, they were vexed with their attendants, used to thrust pins into their arms and breasts. Darwin relates that at Rio Janeiro, an old lady possessed a kind of thumb screw which she had had made expressly to crush the fingers of her slaves.

EPIDEMIC CRUELTY.

During periods of great national excitement, such as revolutions, feminine cruelty shows how far it can go.

The women, writes M. Du Camp, were the fiercest heroines of the Commune; it was a woman who incited the assassination of the Dominicans. When the hostages were shot, they surpassed the men in cruelty; they taunted them with not knowing how to kill. When employed to seek out the insurgents they were implacable; when acting as infirmarians, they killed the wounded by giving them brandy to drink.

At the time of the French Revolution, on the days of execution, writes M. Legouvé,⁠[31] the front rows nearest the guillotine were reserved for the women of the political clubs. They even hung on to the boards of the scaffold, in order the better to witness the death throes of the condemned, and drowned the cries of the victims by their peals of laughter.

II. PITY.

But again we find a series of contradictory facts, which bear witness that the sentiment of pity also is much keener in woman than in man.

Even with animals, we observe this phenomenon. Hens often separate two young cocks who are fighting together. Sir George Le Grand Jacob has observed females of the wild goat (Steinbock) raise with their heads he-goats that had been shot, support them and help them to escape. Romanes relates, that sometimes the female gibbon, takes great care of all the members of the troop when they are wounded, even if they are not related.⁠[32]

The savage woman also is very often kind and good. It is notorious that the explorers of savage countries have often escaped serious perils, thanks to the kindness of the native women. Australasian women have often revealed to European travellers the plots laid against them by the men of their tribe: they have even risked their own lives for that purpose.⁠[33] Stanley, at the island of Bambyrch, on the Nyanza, was roughly greeted by the natives, who were desirous of exterminating his expedition; but a woman came to warn him and to advise him to perform a certain ceremony with the King Shekka by which he would acquire his friendship. In Senegambia an old woman, meeting Mungo Park, who was half dead of starvation and had just been despoiled by a negro king, gave him food, and went away without waiting to be thanked. Another time the same traveller, being left with nothing but his saddle, was hospitably entertained by some women, whom he heard chant these words as he fell asleep: “The winds roared and the rain beat, the poor white man came and sat down under our tree, he had no mother to give him milk, no wife to grind him corn. Let us take pity on the white man, he has no mother, etc., etc.”⁠[34] Michelet says that woman was the first physician; and certainly she fulfils the office of infirmarian among many savage peoples, the Esquimaux, the Mincopies, etc. etc.

In war the Samoan woman often interferes to make peace between the belligerents. Among the Khonds, also, when two tribes quarrel, the women sometimes make peace, calling in the intervention of a third tribe. Quite recently, among the Montenegrins and Albanians, fierce strife broke out between different families, but in these fights, if a man took refuge with a woman and she covered him with her apron, he was safe. Among the Bedouin Arabs a woman can save the life of the condemned man who implores her protection. So it also was among the Roman Vestals, when in the streets they accidentally met a man condemned to death; it was required, however, that the meeting should be evidently a chance one, for it was feared that the privilege might be carried too far. Among civilised nations this sentiment of pity becomes naturally more developed. Christianity owed a great deal of its success among women to the fact, that it knew how to make use of their pity, by organising those associations of women which are its greatest ornament. From the earliest years after the death of Jesus, in the cenobitic form of society lived by the disciples of the Messiah, they made use of the charitable sentiment of childless widows and created the order of Deaconesses, which was devoted to the care of the poor and the sick.⁠[35] Legouvé says: “Women offered their services to Christianity like a volunteer battalion consecrated to charitable work. In the Apostles’ time their mission was one of sympathy and watchfulness, a mother’s vocation; in the time of the Martyrs they remained womanly in their modesty, while exhibiting a manly courage; in the time of the Doctors, whilst orators speak and learned men write, women continue to love and console.”⁠[36]

This Christian tradition has survived and is still powerful, thanks to the deeply laid sentiment of pity in the heart of woman. “Private charity in Paris,” writes M. du Camp,⁠[37] “is almost entirely in the hands of women. There are in Paris women of the world, young and beautiful, born for pleasure, accustomed to every luxury, who visit the poor, nurse the sick, rock little motherless children, and all this they do simply without a word of self-praise.”

The society of “Les Dames du Calvaire,” in Paris, is composed of widows, who, without binding themselves by religious vows, engage to nurse the sick gathered into the hospitals of the association, poor outcasts attacked by loathsome diseases—cancer, for example. Women of wealth and belonging to great families often obtain admission to this society. Female religious orders are rarely contemplative; they are nearly always charitable in aim. “The Daughters of Charity” possess establishments all over the known world; they migrate, says M. du Camp, “like benevolent birds, carrying with them the principle of self-sacrifice and the love of those that suffer. In all countries I have visited, among sects most antagonistic to their religion, I have beheld them at work; their faces shadowed by the immense cap, which resembles the wings of a white swan; instructing children, visiting the sick, caring for the plague-stricken, blessed by our sailors whom they nurse in the French hospitals in foreign lands.”⁠[38]

Pity in woman is sometimes so powerful a sentiment that it supplies the place in her of a higher faculty, intelligence. It was thus that a humble servant-maid, without learning, who could neither read nor write, founded one of the most prominent nursing sisterhoods in France, “Les petites Soeurs des Pauvres,” which to-day numbers 3,400 sisters, and possesses 207 houses, where more than 25,000 old men are received and cared for. In the first half of this century there was such misery in Brittany that the old men were literally abandoned by all. Jeanne Jugau, whose earnings hardly sufficed to maintain herself, took in one, then two, then a number of them, without a thought of her own poverty, slaving might and main for their support. Two women, Virginie Tredaniel and Marie Catherine, helped her; a priest, Le Pailleur, took the direction of their work, and in a short time the order was founded, and grew apace. There, where genius might have failed, the love and pity of a servant-maid succeeded.

Another heroine of charity, though of a different type, was Jeanne Garnier. She was perpetually haunted by a desire to do good, to help and succour the unfortunate. M. du Camp has portrayed her character in a most graphic manner: impulsive, prone from childhood to adopt extreme measures, while in the convent she was given to rebellious and untractable conduct, for which she was sent away. When she was twenty years old she married; the love she bore her husband and two sons was deep and ardent. Three years after her marriage she had the unspeakable grief of losing both husband and sons at one fell stroke. After this occurrence her life had but one aim, ceaselessly and untiringly to succour and help the sorrowful. One day she was told that a woman, disfigured by a cutaneous disease, was lying in an attic in Lyons, abandoned by every one. She went at once to her, ministered to her, and every day went to wash her sores. Thus was suggested to her the founding of the association of “Les Dames du Calvaire,” of which we have already spoken, and the idea of pressing into the service of the sick, widows who found themselves in the same position as herself. She was not rich, but being an untiring and determined worker, capable of attacking the same person ten times a day, she obtained money. When they had to convey the sick to the new hospital, there was among them one woman so horribly disfigured by burns that no conveyance could be found whose driver was willing to take her. Jeanne Garnier then took her on her own shoulders and carried her there herself. The association of “Les Dames du Calvaire” was not the only charitable work which owes its existence to her. She conceived a great many other plans, of which many were carried out, for she never ceased working, up to the moment of her death, which occurred at forty-two years of age, of exhaustion.

In the United States, where woman enjoys much greater freedom than in Europe, she makes an excellent use of her liberty. In fact, all associations of women have a charitable end in view; and these societies not being subjected to the severe rules of Catholic religious orders, and not requiring from their members so absolute a renunciation of the pleasures of life, exhibit the most perfect and most modern form of charitable associations, which have been known up to the present day. The first woman’s club that was founded in that country, the Sorosis, has for its object the amelioration of the condition of shop-girls: it has also founded asylums for homeless children. The Temperance Union, founded by women, seeks to stem the tide of intemperance. The Women’s League has obtained the admission of women on commissioners boards for schools and hospitals. The College Settlement Girls, composed of female graduates from universities, carry help into the purlieus of the city.⁠[39]

CRUELTY, PITY, AND THE MATERNAL SENTIMENT.

Is woman kind or cruel? Can we reconcile these two series of facts, so contradictory in themselves? That is the question which now comes before us. Let us seek, first of all, the origin and the genesis of feminine cruelty. We have seen women exhibiting great ingenuity in torturing; she does not wish to destroy her enemies, but to torment and torture them; she seeks to protract their pain as long as possible, and to lengthen out her enjoyment of vengeance. On this point woman goes much further than man: for among savages men do not amuse themselves by prolonging the miseries of their enemies; they rather wreak their vengeance by killing them at one stroke. Savages often make a wholesale carnage, massacring whole tribes and nations. But it is always the woman who practices the art of killing a man by inches, over a slow fire, as it were. Thus we find that the redskins give their prisoners of war over to their women. Notice, even at the present day, the difference between the quarrels of men and women. Women scratch each other, tear out the hair, fly at the eyes of their adversaries, trying to inflict some painful wound: men give blows and stabs; they strive to disable or stun their enemy, or to destroy him. There is the same difference but on a smaller scale. This aptitude in inflicting pain is an outgrowth of weakness. We know from the Darwinian theory of natural selection, and from the struggle for life, that every living being must be provided with a certain number of means of defense and offense, and amongst these means must be classed many instincts and sentiments which spring from natural selection, adaptation, and heredity. The cruelty of woman is one of these instincts and sentiments. Woman not being powerful enough to destroy her enemies, had to seek for the means of defending herself, by wounding their more delicate organs, by inflicting such acute pain as would serve to disable them. This tendency to protect one’s self by such means has become instinctive by heredity; and so much the more since the woman who was able thus to defend herself, had at the outset of man’s evolution a far better chance of survival.

All this is so true, that we find other weak creatures also to be cruel. Children take pleasure in tormenting insects, birds, or little dogs, and are very cruel to each other. I knew a child who used to cut his nails like the teeth of a saw, in order to inflict more painful scratches on his companions. Humming birds, says Brehm, are the smallest and the cruelest of birds. When they are attacked by a more powerful enemy they try to peck out his eyes with their long, sharp beaks. The struggle for life and natural selection has provided their weakness with this means of defense, and they are even cruel to each other when they fight, to such an extent has the sentiment of cruelty in them become instinctive.

And now we must seek for the genesis of the other phenomenon, pity. It is a notorious fact, that maternity being the great function of woman, through the whole order of animal life, with the exception of some few fishes, it is always the female who is thus the benefactress of the race. Maternity is always an altruistic function; in the inferior orders this altruism is a purely physical act, and consists merely in a material sacrifice; (the detaching of a portion of the maternal body, under the form of bud, or egg;) in the higher orders, this altruism becomes psychical and consists in a conscious sacrifice of self and of vitality in the interests of the race.

What then is the essential nature of these altruistic sacrifices? Maternity is protection given to weakness; for the infant is above all other created things a being requiring succour.

It is thus that, the images relating to the state of weakness being in great numbers strongly impressed on the mind of woman, when one of them presents itself to her, by the law of association it awakens all those maternal sentiments whose function it is to help the weak. At first, motherhood only extends from a woman’s own children to those of others; this is the first stage of pity, such as we find it in the animals and among many undeveloped savage peoples. Afterwards in a region of higher psychical development the sentiment of pity broadens till it embraces a wider group, the sick, the aged, those condemned to death; for all those unfortunates who claim the pity of woman are the weak appealing for help to the strong. It is only the weak who can inspire pity. Thus pity, in woman, is but the outgrowth of the maternal sentiment applied to a larger class of helpless people. “Woman,” says M. du Camp, “may bind herself by the religious vow of chastity; but she is a born mother and remains a mother, even though circumstances may have broken the physical law of her sex. The Little Sisters of the Poor, call their pensioners ‘the good little old men,’ and themselves ‘the good little sisters,’ their superior ‘the good little mother.’ With them everybody is good and little; all these expressions are the reflection of maternal love.”

We must mention also, that one cause of a livelier sense of pity in woman, is her own weakness and her lower intellect. “Anger,” writes A. Bain, “the passion for war, are bound up with activity and strength; conditions of weakness and of repose are favorable to the softer sentiments.” Strong men who display great muscular or mental activity, and who often experience the satisfactions arising from power, only realise with extreme difficulty the feelings of the weak; for, as H. Spencer remarks,⁠[40] “to feel pity for any suffering which we witness, we must have experienced it ourselves to the same extent or in an approximate degree.” Thus healthy persons become, after a serious sickness, more feeling than they formerly were for those who are suffering; women are continually in a state of ill-health.

Besides which women have not been involved in the struggle for life, as have men during the whole process of evolution: this struggle for life implying, as it does, the necessity of pursuing one’s own object irrespective of the ills which it may entail on the unhappy competitors, and often rendering a man insensible to the sorrows of those around him. To this we add, that love for man has not been without influence in developing the sense of pity in woman. The main characteristic of the love of woman towards man, is self-abnegation and devotion; woman finds her happiness in devotion to the man she loves and in making for him the most painful sacrifices. Read the “Letters of Heloise,” the “Life of Carlyle,” or the “Life of Mme. de Lespinasse.” Each woman, carries hidden in her heart, an inexhaustible treasure of devotion which heredity has added to through all the centuries, during which woman has lived in contact with man and sought to win his good-will, displaying an affection and an ardent zeal in his behalf; nothing then is easier than to spend this treasure on the unhappy, when she has not found the man on whom to lavish it.

The close relationship between pity, maternity, and love, is also shown by this fact, that the heroines of charity are almost always widows without sons, or unmarried women. When a woman has a husband or sons to love and cherish, she does not feel the same tenderness towards the suffering; this goes to prove that if these two sentiments are interchangeable, they are but two different forms of the same thing.

PITY AND CRUELTY.

We are now in a position to answer the question: Is woman kind or cruel? Pity and cruelty coexist together in her; we might call this state in woman a state of unstable equilibrium; to-day she is kind, divinely good, charitable; to-morrow she will be perverse and cruel. On one side her feebleness renders her cruel, and her impulsive nature prevents her from repressing the outbursts of anger and of vengeance; on the other hand, the gentle habits of maternal affection, her lower intelligence, and even the weakness of her nature develop in her kindly sentiments. Woman may experience the strongest feelings of maternal affection at the sight of a helpless creature; but that will not prevent her from cruelly persecuting a rival, especially if she has been wounded in her sentiments of wife or mother. Thus woman, who is the natural protector of the weak, treats them oftentimes with a cruelty of which man is totally incapable. Woman loves, hates, consoles, inflicts pain, according as she finds herself in the presence of a friend, an enemy, a helpless being, or of a rival.

Many of the fiercest heroines of the Paris Commune, had been trained nurses during the war, and distinguished for their devotion to the sick. There is nothing astonishing in this, for contradiction in feeling is so often a psychical law that a great Italian philosopher, Robert Ardigò, has said that man is not a logical being.

We have noticed before that weakness is in part the cause of cruelty and partly also of pity, and this accounts for the co-existence of the two contrary sentiments. They coexist because they have a common origin. But this instability of equilibrium is lessened by evolution, and pity becomes stronger than cruelty. Among civilised nations the cruelty of women has become merely a moral attitude: the civilised woman, less powerful than her savage sister, no more subjects her enemies to physical pain, does not shed their blood; she contents herself with slandering them, turning them into ridicule, and humiliating them. The diminution of muscular strength is in itself favorable to the softening of female character.

Furthermore, sexual selection also helps in this; in the human race as civilisation advances the male assumes more and more the right of selection, and man shrinks instinctively from meeting in a woman a high development of the qualities which he himself possesses, for he wishes to dominate her and to be her superior. This explains to us the singular fact, which we notice every day, that of a savant marrying a stupid or unintelligent wife; this is why the normal man, as also the vicious, choose gentle and good women when they desire to found families. If sometimes the choice falls on a wicked woman, it is because the man desires to form a criminal co-partnership, such as was perhaps the normal condition of family life during the early days of human evolution. Many of the domestic tragedies which we witness to-day can be traced to no other cause than this penchant of the male, even of the vicious, to choose the woman who appears to be the most gentle. Women with their clear penetration and sure instincts have seized upon this inclination in man and made capital out of it with infinite ability: do we not see many young women simulate a gentleness, a sweetness, and kindness which they do not naturally possess in order to capture the good-will of men? Women have thus practised the habit of repressing their evil penchants, through interested motives, because they saw that men chose the most gentle among them as wives.

Besides sexual selection, physical grace plays a conspicuous part, as well as those psychical qualities which are associated with it. Man having set a high value on graceful demeanour, woman sought and still seeks with all her strength to adorn herself with it.

We know that by the law of association between the emotional states and their outward expression, which mutually correspond, each gesture, each attitude, and each graceful expression of the countenance has a tendency to throw the mind into some sweet and peaceful condition; this is why the culture of physical grace has been for woman an exercise of goodness. This fostering of physical beauty has had a beneficial influence on her moral character. We might say that as woman grew in beauty, she became better. Finally woman being in the present day more respected than in former times, she has less often the occasion to exercise her instinctive cruelty, which on this account is being gradually obliterated. Pity each day becomes more and more the normal state of the feminine mind, and cruelty the exception. In order to be cruel, a woman’s character must be perverted, as is the case in female criminals, whose vice exceeds that of man in similar circumstances. Or she must have received some deep provocation, wounding her profoundly in her deepest and tenderest sentiments, which has awakened the original cruelty slumbering latent in the depths of her heart.

We may thus predict that in the ages to come, woman will become entirely good.

Guillaume Ferrero.

FOOTNOTES:

PANPSYCHISM AND PANBIOTISM.

I. PROFESSOR HAECKEL’S PANPSYCHISM.

Professor Haeckel, in his article “Our Monism,”⁠[41] propounds the theory of Panpsychism, which he considers as an essential feature of Monism. He says:

“One highly important principle of my monism seems to me to be that I regard all matter as ensouled, that is to say, as endowed with feeling (pleasure and pain) and with motion, or, better, with the power of motion. As elementary (atomistic) attraction and repulsion these powers are asserted in every simplest chemical process, and on them is based also every other phenomenon, consequently also the highest developed soul-activity of man.

“Simplest example: sulphur and quicksilver rubbed together form cinnabar, a new body of entirely different properties. This is possible only on the supposition that the molecules (or atoms) of the two elements if brought within the proper distance, mutually feel each other, by attraction move toward each other; on the decomposition of a simple chemical compound the contrary takes place: repulsion. (Empedocles’s doctrine of ‘the love and hatred of atoms.’)”

Not being able to accept Professor Haeckel’s doctrine of Panpsychism, I propose what might best be called Panbiotism, briefly set forth in the maxim πᾶν βιωτόν; that is, everything is fraught with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live.

The word βιωτός is mostly used by Greek authors in the negative, as in the phrase βίον οὐ βιωτόν, an unlivable life, in the sense of a life unendurable or not worth living. Thus Sophocles and others. The word βιωτός is embodied in the term Panbiotism in its etymological sense of “livable.”

I am willing to concede to Professor Haeckel that all nature is alive. Indeed, I have most emphatically insisted on the doctrine that there is a spontaneity pervading all nature. (See “Fundamental Problems,” 2d ed., pp. 110 et seqq.)

By spontaneity is to be understood that kind of activity which springs from the nature of the being or thing which is active. A motion that is caused by pressure or push is not spontaneous; but a motion, the motive power of which resides in the moving object, is spontaneous. Thus a cart rolling down a hill by its own weight performs a spontaneous motion, but when drawn by horses moves, or rather is moved, by pull without any spontaneity.⁠[42] Now everything that exists is possessed of certain qualities; its existence is of some definite, peculiar kind, and this its peculiar kind is the character of the thing. In the character of a thing lies the source of its spontaneous actions. The spontaneous actions of the chemical elements depend upon their qualities, which always react under certain circumstances in a definite way, and under the same conditions in the same way. The action of sulphur and quicksilver lies in the nature of these elements. Their union is not passive, but active. They are not combined, but they do combine. He who observes and studies nature cannot be blind to the fact that an inalienable, intrinsic power is resident in every thing that exists. This is true not only of organised life, but also of the chemical elements as well as of gravitating masses. The motion of a falling stone can, no more than the actions of oxydising substances, be considered as ultimately due to an extraneous pressure that makes them move by push, or to a vis a tergo acting upon inert matter. These motions must be spontaneous; they are due to powers inherent in the nature of reality. They are self-motions, and in this sense we say that all nature is alive.

The term “life” is here used in a broader sense than ordinarily. It means spontaneity or self-motion, while in its common signification the term “life” is restricted only to the spontaneous action of organised beings, i. e. of plants and animals. In order to distinguish life in the broader sense from the narrower or common acceptance of the term, we call the latter “organised life.”

It is not impossible, and I consider it even as most probable, that the difference between Professor Haeckel and myself rests on a different usage of the term soul. But a vague or inconsistent usage of the term, unless we are especially careful in so defining it as to prevent misunderstandings, will inevitably beget errors. Thus the doctrine of Panpsychism is liable to lead to fantastic ideas, and to cause great confusion concerning the activity of what is generally called inanimate nature.

Soul (as I understand the term) is a system of sentient symbols.

The problem of the origin of the soul is solved as soon as we understand how feelings can acquire meaning.

Suppose we have some sentient substance exposed to the impressions of the surrounding world. The sense-impressions of the surrounding world leave traces in the sentient substance; these traces, which are structures of a certain form corresponding exactly to the various impressions, are preserved and constitute a predisposition to being very easily revived by impressions of the same kind. The revival of feeling in traces left in the sentient structure from former impressions is called memory. If a new impression of the same kind as the traces of the former impressions affects a sentient being, the new impression already finds a convenient path for its reception prepared. Its peculiar vibration fits in the old trace and thus runs along very easily in the memory-grooves of former impressions, reviving at the same time the feelings perceived at their original formation. The feeling thus caused is composed of several elements, which naturally melt into one: first, there is that kind of feeling which is produced by the present impression; secondly, there is the revival of former feelings or memory-sensations; and thirdly, there is a feeling of congruence resulting from the combination of these two. This third element is a new and a very important feature. We suppose that it is extremely insignificant in the beginning, but being a constantly growing factor, it rapidly increases in importance. The stronger and the more independent the memory-structures become, the more clearly will their congruence with fresh sense-impressions be felt as a congruence.

This feeling of congruence is the simplest form of what psychologists generally call “recognition.”

The recognition of a sense-impression, as being the same as some former sense-impression, adds to the feeling a new quality; it imparts meaning to it. This feeling of a special kind will now stand for something. In this way impressions upon sentient substance will, in the course of their natural development, simply by the repetition of similar and same impressions, come to indicate the presence of certain conditions that cause the impression. This act of indicating something, of symbolising the presence of a reality, of possessing meaning, is the birth of soul. Sense-impressions that have acquired meaning are called sensations. A sensation standing for a special object symbolises that object. Abstract ideas are symbols of a higher degree, but they remain symbols just the same. And it is the sentient symbols which constitute the soul.

Those actions which are regulated by the meanings of sentient symbols of which a soul consists should alone, according to a strict terminology, be called “psychical.” The falling stone, the chemical elements, when combining or separating, etc., are alive; there is a spontaneously acting power even in unorganised nature; but the actions of unorganised nature are not determined by the meaning of feelings, and, in truth, we have no reason to believe that their feelings—granting that they really do possess feelings of some kind—are freighted with even so much as the slightest inkling of significance. In a word, there is no soul in the stone; there is no mind in the water-fall; and there is nothing psychical in either oxygen or hydrogen. But there is soul wherever meaning can be found as the regulating motive of actions; there is purpose. And wherever purpose is, there is mind.

II. PLEASURE AND PAIN.

Professor Haeckel goes still farther in the application of his theory of Panpsychism: he speaks of the atoms not only as feeling each other, but also as having pleasure and pain. This indicates either that he is serious in his belief in the psychical nature of all things, or it proves how dangerous it is to introduce an allegorical expression the allegorical character of which is from the beginning lost sight of.

What are pleasure and pain?

Pleasure and pain are known to us by experience; they are feelings. Pleasure is an agreeable, pain a disagreeable feeling.

Pleasure and pain are different from sensation. Sensations are representative of certain somethings called objects. Pleasures and pains, however, are not representative, they are purely subjective states. There may be pleasurable or painful sensations, and there may be pain indicating the presence of pain-producing objects, but that does not concern us now. When speaking of pleasure and pain we do not refer to the representative value of feelings, but consider a merely subjective aspect, pleasure being the agreeableness, pain the disagreeableness of feeling.

Accordingly pleasure and pain presuppose the existence of an organised system of feelings. An isolated feeling, we have learned, is meaningless; it is still less pleasurable or painful. In order to agree or disagree, there must be something with which to agree or disagree. Therefore, although pleasure and pain are not symbols indicative of some objective presence, they can take place only in sentient organisms, in systems of feelings, in souls. Where these complex conditions, indicative of the presence of a soul, are absent, we have no right to speak of the presence of pleasure and pain.

We cannot interpret the phenomena of unorganised nature as being endowed with feelings of pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are psychical phenomena, and psychical phenomena can take place in souls only.

We might as well speak of the presence of positive and negative electricity in the cataract, the water-power of which is employed to produce electricity. Electricity is, in such a case, transformed water-power; but can we, for that reason, say that the motion of water is either positive or negative electricity?

All the motions of the objective world must be supposed to have their subjective correlates; but the simplest forms of objective phenomena cannot have those subjective correlates which, according to our experience, appear and have their conditions of appearance only in the most complex and highest developed forms of existence—in organised nature.

The physiological conditions of pleasure and pain are now just beginning to be investigated (see Goldscheider’s article in Dubois-Reymond’s Archiv, 1891), and most philosophical theories concerning the nature of pleasure and pain are mere assumptions. Almost all the views that are now current attempt an explanation by generalising the idea of pleasure and pain so as to regard the feelings of pleasure and pain as a universal feature of nature. This vicious method of generalisation at the cost of discrimination has produced much confusion in the world; and its influence is the more pernicious as average minds are easily satisfied with generalities.

Now, the theory of making pleasure and pain universal features of existence is a palpably erroneous theory; it is a wrong generalisation. It is true that sentient beings naturally seek pleasure and avoid pain. But are we allowed, according to the laws of logic, to transfer the special feature of the case to the whole class of all processes where a seeking and an avoiding can be observed? Certainly not. Because sentient beings are repelled by pain and attracted by pleasure, we cannot say that every repulsion is due to pain and that every attraction is due to pleasure.

The theory according to which pleasure and pain alone are the causes of attraction and repulsion we may fairly consider as a poetical license justifiable within certain narrow limits, and actually justified in so far as there is in every natural process some peculiar feature that is analogous to the feelings of sentient beings. This peculiar feature—viz. its subjectivity—is, as we have seen, not visible, not observable; yet it exists: it is that something which in the course of evolution becomes, in special combinations, first feeling and then consciousness. But for that reason it is not as yet either consciousness or feeling.

While on the one hand the theories of pleasure and pain that regard pleasure and pain as universal features of natural phenomena, are arrived at by a wrong method of generalisation, we find on the other hand they do not agree with facts. They neither explain nor account for the appearance or disappearance of real pleasures and pains such as take place in animal life.

Starting from merely theoretical considerations, Kant defines pleasure as a feeling of furtherance, pain, as a feeling of hindrance of life; and so prominent a physiologist and psychologist as Alexander Bain says that “States of pleasure are connected with an increase, states of pain, with an abatement of some or of all the vital functions.”

A consideration of the actual causes of our pleasures and pains will prove the incorrectness of these views, which are also due to wrong generalisations. An increase of the vital functions and a further growth, either of the organs or of the whole organism, is very often accompanied with pain. A growing tooth causes, as a rule, as much pain as a decaying tooth. And if by some drug the decay is hastened and the nerve is killed, there is, connected with the suppression and sometimes with the mere abatement of the vital function, an abatement of the pain also.

Feelings of pleasure and pain presuppose that habits have been formed in a sentient organism.

Pain is not always a hindrance of life, nor is every hindrance of life painful. Pain is not an abatement of the functions of life, not a decay, nor a destruction. But pain is always a disturbance of life and of the habits that have been formed.

Growth is, under certain circumstances, as much a disturbance as is decay. And decay, if it is simply an abatement or cessation of function, is not accompanied with pain.

While pain is always a disturbance of the functions of an organism, pleasure is simply the gratification of wants; functions and wants being formed by habits, we may briefly say that pleasure is agreement, pain disagreement, with habits.

There are natural wants and unnatural wants. There are habits beneficial to the furtherance of life, and there are habits injurious to the furtherance of life. The pleasure connected with the gratification of wants does not depend on its being a furtherance or a hindrance of life, but solely on the intensity of the want. And the intensity of the want, again, depends on the degree to which a habit has become inveterate.⁠[43]

The theory of pleasure and pain which regards pleasure as indicative of the growth, and pain, of the decay of life, leads ultimately to the ethics of hedonism, which identifies the good with the pleasurable. However, if our view of pleasure and pain be correct, it is apparent that the pleasure theory in ethics is wrong in its very foundation. The pleasurable would cease to be a criterion of goodness; for many things are pleasurable that are bad, and many things are painful that are good. Growth, development, progress, evolution have often been, nay must mostly be bought with great pain, tribulation, anxiety, and also with the renunciation of pleasures. On the other hand the fulness of pleasure is always a very dangerous symptom for any state of existence.

The seeking of pleasure and the avoiding of pain are certainly very questionable guides in determining what right conduct is. In adopting pleasure and pain as the principles of ethics, we adulterate the nature of morality; for morality exists and has been called into being simply to counteract the dangerous allurances of that which promises to produce pleasure and to avoid pain. Ethics has to teach us how to live, how to develop, how to grow, how to make our lives useful and serviceable. If ethics were simply a method of how to obtain the greatest amount of pleasure, we might better openly confess that there is no moral goodness but only pleasurableness, and consequently that morality is a chimera and ethics a farce.

A defender of the pleasure theory in ethics writes in reply to this criticism of his view: “To seek pleasure and to avoid pain is not wrong. Why shall we deprive men of their enjoyments?” Certainly, everyone has a right to enjoy himself; every one has a right to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. But seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is not as yet ethical. Under ordinary circumstances it is right enough to follow the natural impulses of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. But there are cases where seeking pleasure, be it for ourselves or for others, and avoiding pain, be it for ourselves or for others, become actual wrongs; not because present pleasures will lead to future pains, but because certain pleasures are a hindrance to the higher evolution of the soul.

It is often said that the renunciation of pleasures is richly made up for by the pleasures which are afforded in a more fully developed life. But this, in my opinion, is not true. The adult has rather less pleasures than the child, and the civilised or highly cultured man does not enjoy himself as much, as easily, and as cheaply as does the savage, the uncultured, the fool.

III. MR. THOMAS A. EDISON’S PANPSYCHISM.

Some time ago Mr. Thomas A. Edison was interviewed on the question, “What is life?” Mr. Edison answered the question; and his view is quite in accord with Professor Haeckel’s idea of panpsychism. The article appeared first in a daily newspaper. Being remarkable for its coincidence with the views of a great scientist, and coming from the pen of so interesting a man as the famous inventor of the phonograph, we deem it best to republish it in full, with Mr. Edison’s permission, who, at the same time, acknowledged the copy we sent him as correct.

This is the article:

INTELLIGENT ATOMS.

BY THOMAS A. EDISON.

My mind is not of a speculative order, it is essentially practical, and when I am making an experiment, I think only of getting something useful, of making electricity perform work.

I don’t soar; I keep down pretty close to earth. Of course there are problems in life I can’t help thinking about, but I don’t try to study them out. It is necessary that they should be studied, and men fitted for that work are doing it. I am not fitted for it. I leave the theoretical study of electricity to the physicists, confining my work to the practical application of the force. It is my belief, however, that every atom of matter is intelligent, deriving energy from the primordial germ. The intelligence of man is, I take it, the sum of the intelligences of the atoms of which he is composed. Every atom has an intelligent power of selection and is always striving to get into harmonious relation with other atoms. The human body is, I think, maintained in its integrity by the intelligent persistence of its atoms, or rather by an agreement between the atoms so to persist. When the harmonious adjustment is destroyed the man dies, and the atoms seek other relations.

I cannot regard the odor of decay but as the result of the efforts of the atoms to dissociate themselves; they want to get away and make new combinations. Man, therefore, may be regarded in some sort as a microcosm of atoms agreeing to constitute his life as long as order and discipline can be maintained. But, of course, there is dissatisfaction, rebellion and anarchy leading eventually to death, and through death to new forms of life. For life I regard as indestructible.

All matter lives, and everything that lives possesses intelligence. Consider growing corn, for example. An atom of oxygen comes flying along the air. It seeks combination with other atoms and goes to the corn, not by chance, but by intention. It is seized by other atoms that need oxygen, and is packed away in the corn where it can do its work. Now carbon, hydrogen and oxygen enter into the composition of every organic substance in one form of arrangement or another. The formula CHO, in fact, is almost universal.

Very well, then, why does a free atom of carbon select any particular one out of 50,000 or more possible positions unless it wants to? I cannot see how we can deny intelligence to this act of volition on the part of the atom. To say that one atom has an affinity for another is simply to use a big word. The atom is conscious if man is conscious, is intelligent if man is intelligent, exercises will-power if man does, is, in its own little way, all that man is. We are told by geologists that in the earliest periods no form of life could exist on the earth.

How do they know that? A crystal is devoid of this vital principle, they say, and yet certain kinds of atoms invariably arrange themselves in a particular way to form a crystal. They did that in geological periods antedating the appearance of any form of life and have been doing it ever since in precisely the same way. Some crystals form in branches like a fern. Why is there not life in the growth of a crystal? Was the vital principle specially created at some particular period of the earth’s history, or did it exist and control every atom of matter when the earth was molten? I cannot avoid the conclusion that all matter is composed of intelligent atoms and that life and mind are merely synonyms for the aggregation of atomic intelligence.

Of course there is a source of energy. Nature is a perpetual motion machine, and perpetual motion implies a sustaining and impelling force.

When I was in Berlin I met Du Bois-Reymond, and, wagging the end of my finger, I said to him, “What is that? What moves that finger?” He said he didn’t know; that investigators have for twenty-five years been trying to find out. If anybody could tell him what wagged this finger, the problem of life would be solved.

There are many forms of energy resulting from the combustion of coal under a boiler. Some of these forms we know something about in a practical way, but there may be many others we don’t know anything about.

Perhaps electricity will itself be superseded in time, who knows? Now, a beefsteak in the human stomach is equivalent to coal under a boiler. By oxidisation it excites energy that does work, but what form of energy is it? It is not steam pressure. It acts through the nerve-cells, performs work that can be measured in foot pounds, and can be transformed into electricity, but the actual nature of this force which produces this work—which makes effectual the mandate of the will—is unknown.

It is not magnetism, it doesn’t attract iron. It is not electricity—at least such a form of electricity as we are familiar with. Still, here it is necessary to be guarded, because so many different forms of electricity are known to science that it would be rash to say positively that we shall not class vital energy as a form of electrical energy. We cannot argue anything from difference in speed. Nerve-force may travel as fast as electricity, once it gets started. The apparent slowness may be in the brain. It may take an appreciable time for the brain to set the force going.

I made an experiment with a frog’s leg that indicates something of the kind. I took a leg that was susceptible to galvanic current. The vibration produced a note that was as high as a piccoto. While the leg was alive it responded to the electrical current; when it was dead it would not respond. After the frog’s leg had been lying in the laboratory three days I couldn’t make it squeal. The experiment was conclusive as to this point: The vital force in the nerves of the leg was capable of acting with speed enough to induce the vibration of the diaphragm necessary to produce sound.

Certainly this rate of speed is greater than physiologists appear to allow, and it seems reasonable that there is a close affinity between vital energy and electricity. I do not say they are identical; on the contrary I say they are very like. If one could learn to make vital energy directly without fuel, that is without beefsteak in the stomach, and in such manner that the human system could appropriate it, the elixir of life would no longer be a dream of alchemy. But we have not yet learned to make electricity directly, without the aid of fuel and steam.

I believe this is possible; indeed, I have been experimenting in this direction for some time past. But until we can learn to make electricity, like nature, out of disturbed air, I am afraid the more delicate task of manufacturing vital energy so that it can be bottled and sold at the family grocery store will have to be deferred.

Electricity, by the way, is properly merely a form of energy, and not a fluid. As for the ether which speculative science supposes to exist, I don’t know anything about it. Nobody has discovered anything of the kind. In order to make their theories hold together they have, it seems to me, created the ether. But the ether imagined by them is unthinkable to me. I don’t say I disagree with them, because I don’t pretend to have any theories of that kind, and am not competent to dispute with speculative scientists. All I can say is, my mind is unable to accept the theory. The ether, they say, is as rigid as steel and as soft as butter. I can’t catch on to that idea.

I believe that there are only two things in the universe—matter and energy. Matter I can understand to be intelligent, for man himself I regard as so much matter. Energy I know can take various forms, and manifest itself in various ways. I can understand also that it works not only upon, but through, matter. What this matter is, what this energy is, I do not know.

However, it is possible that it is simply matter and energy, and that any desire to know too much about the whole question should be diagnosed as a disease; such a disease as German doctors are said to have discovered among the students of their universities—the disease of asking questions.

THE NATURE OF INTELLIGENCE.

Mr. Thomas A. Edison’s article is full of suggestions which invite further discussion. We must here limit ourselves solely to those which touch the problem of Panpsychism and Panbiotism.

Any one who has read Mr. Edison’s article will be struck with the strange coincidence that obtains between his and Professor Haeckel’s views. The famous naturalist considers what he calls panpsychism as the corner-stone of his monism: he says that atoms possess souls; and in a similar way the famous inventor believes in the intelligence of atoms, he declares that atoms are endowed with minds. There is certainly a deep truth in this conception of nature; and yet we cannot accept it in the way it is presented by either Professor Haeckel or Mr. Edison.

With reference to Professor Haeckel’s views we have explained why atoms, the actions of which are not endowed with meaning, have no soul, and also why they cannot feel pleasure and pain. It remains for us to explain why atoms are not in possession of intelligence.

What is intelligence?

That reaction upon a stimulus which takes place in the way it does because of the presence of meaning, is called mental, or intelligent action; and the ability to adjust action to mental representations is intelligence.

Intelligence is a psychical quality, and the psychical process which is preparing to act with intelligence is called deliberation. Deliberation is the successive revival of several soul-structures, either of memories of former experiences, or of rules derived therefrom, or of advice formerly received, including also new combinations of these mental structures, and keeping in view the probable results of the intended action. In a word, deliberation is thought, and thought is an interaction among meaning-freighted feelings.

Among these ideas, which in so far as they can influence action (i. e. purposive motions) are called “motives,” the strongest one will determine the result. Now, any atom of non-organised matter, say an atom of hydrogen, acts (as we said above) with spontaneity. It is in this sense as much alive as is any ever so complex vegetable or animal substance. It is self-acting, and its action reveals the innermost nature of its being just as much as the action of the man shows the character of the man.

There is, however, a great difference between the action of animal beings whose action is regulated by the meanings of their feelings, which in their totality we call the soul, and the actions of inorganic matter, of crystals, minerals, gases, chemical elements, and gravitating masses, all of which we comprise under the name “inanimate nature.” The stone’s fall does not depend upon any representative feeling; it depends solely upon that quality of the stone which we popularly call its weight. Nor has the falling stone any choice whether to fall or not to fall. Under certain circumstances it falls. There is no act of deliberation preceding the fall. Nor has it any choice concerning the direction of its fall. The surrounding conditions, viz., its position with regard to the centre of the earth together with its mass, determine the process. The stone’s action can satisfactorily be explained without attributing to it psychical qualities. The stone possesses no soul; it is void of mentality; and although we believe that everything, organised or unorganised, is endowed with subjectivity (by which we understand the conditions of psychical life, or the potentiality of feeling and consciousness), this subjectivity can only be analogous to the blind impulse of the stone’s mass. If some other, psychical or mental, subjectivity were present, we should say that it apparently does not enter as a factor in the determination of the event. Accordingly such an assumption is gratuitous. There is subjectivity, but there is no intelligence. There is potentiality of feeling, but there is no consciousness. There is present the elementary condition of that something which is going to develop into mind, but there is no mind; there is no meaning-freighted awareness of the surrounding conditions.

Says Mr. Edison:

“The intelligence of man is, I take it, the sum of the intelligences of the atoms of which he is composed.”

The sum total of the intelligences of the atoms in a human body (if, in this connection, for the sake of argument, we grant that atoms are intelligent) would not as yet make up the intelligence of man. Suppose we are contemplating a mosaic picture or inscription. Are such compositions really only the sum of the little stones? Are they not rather a certain peculiar form in which these colored stones are arranged? It is not the sum of the stones that makes the picture, but the form of their composition. The picture is not contained in any single one of them, nor is it the whole number of all the single stones: it originates through their peculiar combination and consists of the form in which they are combined.