THE UNITY OF MAN

CHAPTER IV

THE UNITY OF MIND AND BODY-INTRODUCTION

IT is the unity of mind and body which it has been the special mission of physiological psychology to bring out. And the assertion of such unity certainly means, to begin with, that, for the present world at least, the intellectual and moral and spiritual life has its bodily conditions. This is to be said neither boastingly nor cynically. It is to be faced as a simple fact. We have bodies, and we cannot set ourselves free from them.

I. ASCETIC TREATMENT OF BODILY CONDITIONS

The long sad history of asceticism in all lands shows how real the religious life has felt this connection with the body to be, and at the same time how fiercely it has resented it. Men have remained, in this question of asceticism, quite too largely on the mythological plane, without any clear sense of a real nature and unity of things. The scientific

spirit, which demands a careful study of detailed connections and conditions, has had little enough to do with this blind, fierce struggle; and, in consequence, the ascetic has every. where, on the one hand, failed to take any sensible account of the effects of ordinary bodily conditions; and, on the other hand, paradoxically enough, has exalted the effects of certain abnormal bodily conditions into higher spiritual attainments. These historical results of religious asceticism certainly cannot be held to commend the method of ignoring bodily conditions. The plain lesson of modern science here would seem to be, that, if the spirit is ever to master the body, it must know its laws and take account of its conditions; these are the very instruments of its mastery. So, and only so, has science made nature serve it.

One can quite understand the reluctance of the spiritual life to admit the closeness of its connection with the physical. It seems itself to be lowered thereby. But it gets no freedom and power by vehemently denying the fact, and ignoring the resulting conditions. Rather, its superiority must be shown, its freedom and power declared, as has been 1 Cf. Royce, Op. cit., pp. 125, 126.

implied, by patient study of the laws of this body and of its connection with the spirit, and by steady fulfilment of the conditions by which alone mastery can come. It is a false and abstract spiritualism, therefore, that hesitates clearly to recognize or to affirm the bodily conditions of the spiritual life. Let us frankly admit that much of the dissatisfaction of the moral and spiritual life results from a wholly unnecessary and senseless disregard of bodily conditions. The emphasis of modern psychology upon the close connection of body and mind, thus, compels the thoughtful man to a study of the bodily conditions of true living.

II. NOT A MATERIALISTIC POSITION

But, from the religious point of view, it is exactly this emphasis of modern psychology and of allied views in biology which seems to many to make impossible any independent or enduring life of the spirit at all. A genuinely religious view of the world seems to them precluded by the known facts of biology and of physiological psychology. The difficulty is a very real one to-day, in the case of hundreds of students and of many others.

If, therefore, we leave aside for the present the deeper question of a final idealistic view of the world, we shall still need to show that this bodily connection and its implied conditions involve no denial of the spiritual life itself.

The precise difficulty felt is this: the affirmation of bodily conditions for the spiritual life seems to many, even of those uninfluenced by modern psychological views, virtually to assert that the material facts are primary, the spiritual secondary; that the body is the real independent variable, and that psychical states are in truth but results of bodily or brain states, and hence, that at least no continued life of the spirit could be affirmed after the destruction of the brain.

In answer to the difficulty, one might content himself with simply calling attention to the fact that so distinguished a psychologist, for example, as Professor James, with all that modern biology and psychology have to say distinctly in mind, expressly asserts that not only is there no scientific reason for denying the independent reality of the spirit now, but there is also none for denying the possibility of its continued existence after the body. The spiritual life is certainly not pre

cluded, then, by modern psychology1. And it is a misconception of its teachings that asserts this.

But the difficulty is for many so serious, that it is probably worth while to see for ourselves just where the misconception lies. And, fortunately, some present general admissions of scientists make the way here much shorter, even from a dualistic point of view, than it could have been some years ago. It is a most noteworthy fact that materialism as a philosophical theory has practically vanished even from the ranks of natural scientists; that modern science expressly denies that it is materialistic. It has been driven to take this position, not because it could not show how brain states could pass into psychical states, for it cannot be said to understand the final how anywhere; but because, to affirm that brain states were the true causes of psychical states, would deny its fundamental doctrine of the conservation of energy. It would be to affirm that what was simply a mode of motion in the brain disappeared as such altogether, and reappeared as something not at all a mode of

1 See James, Human Immortality, pp. 7–30.

2 See Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy, PP. 74 ff.