Physiology v. metaphysics in relation to mind / by Walter Hayle Walshe.

  • Walter Hayle Walshe
Date:
1884
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Physiology v. metaphysics in relation to mind / by Walter Hayle Walshe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    mystic reveries on the “ ego which exists beneath or rather outside consciousness .... a noumenon * an indescribable something safely located out of space and time, as such not subject to the mutabilities of these phenomenal spheres and of whose ontologic existence we are made aware by its phenomenal projections or effects in consciousness.”! The first clauses of this definition seem pure assumption, soaring aloft beyond the comprehension of ordinary mor- tals ; the latter (granting the premise of the so-called “ noumenon”) seems a mystified version of a necessary inference. Even Kant himself admits the total concept to be incapable of scientific proof; and of any other form of alleged proof—the so-called transcendental—what is the practical weight? Such “ proof,” inasmuch as it transcends experience can never advance beyond the unreality of sub- jective formulation, can never attain the reality appertain- ing to objective demonstration. Nay, Kant admits more than this : he grants nothing can really be proved by meta- physics concerning the attributes, or even the existence, of the soul; while holding that inasmuch as its reality cannot, on the other hand, be disproved, such reality may, for moral purposes, be assumed. So that this sublimest of the world's thinkers is obliged in ultimate analysis to admit that ordinary common sense may prove as successful in wrestling with the problem as the vastest inborn intellectual potentiality intensified by prolonged culture. Reaching next the modified or hybrid metaphysical and physiological school of the present day (the former element largely predominant), we find one of its most eminent re- presentatives—Bain—seeming to teach that, whatever it is, the soul has but loose connection with the body. “ The body might,” he assures us, “ have its bodily functions with- out the soul, and the soul might have its psychical functions * The “ noumenon ” is an “ intelligible object—that is, one which, if it is to be cognised at all, must be so in and through the tuiderstandmg without ‘AXi'jsensitous medium (Kant’s Prolegomena, translated by Bax, p. Ixxxvii.) This “ Ding an sich,” “ thing in itself,” or “noumenon,” is held to be the antithesis of the sensuous phenomenon, but the actual relationship of the two was to Kant himself, has been to his disciples, and will presumably prove to the end of time to his successors, the great stumbling-block in the way of thinking out Kant’s whole system. t Graham, Creed of Science, pp. 153-4. Kant, again, sometimes uses the phrase “the thinking self” as synonymous with soul; and speaks of the doctrine of body and the doctrine of soul—the first deal- ing with extended^ and the second with thinking
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