PROFESSOR STOKES, M.P., ON PERSONAL IDENTITY. Nv -E hope that the
President of the Royal Society intends to publish at length the lecture delivered at the Finsbury Polytechnic Institution on Sunday, of which the Times gave a short report in its Monday's issue. It is obvious that the lecture was one of great interest, though a great part of its drift has been so much condensed in the Times' notice of it as to diminish very much its value for those who were not present. Professor Stokes's main thesis seems to have been that neither is the intellectual part of man the mere product of molecular changes in the brain, nor, on the other hand, is physical organisation the mere cage or prison of the soul. Professor Stokes holds both the materialist hypothesis which makes the consciousness a blossom of the material organisation, and the psychic hypothesis which makes the material organisation a sort of bondage or confinement for the free spirit, to be inconsistent with the facts of life. He illustrated the error of the former view by remarking that after a great physical shock, such as a bricklayer is said to have received who was struck down and rendered unconscious for a time by a falling brickbat, the first thought on recovery of consciousness has been to complete the sentence which had been begun before the blow was received. Now, said Professor Stokes, the blow must have caused a great variety of important physical changes in the brain, yet the moment consciousness returned, the mind went on working in precisely the same groove of continuous purpose in which it was working before the blow fell. Could this be if the mind were nothing but the product of the molecular action of the brain P On the other hand, the notion that the body is rather a dead- weight than otherwise, which limits and confines the action of the soul, was regarded by Professor Stokes as subject to difficulties quite as great as the materialistic theory. We Are not told in the report what these difficulties are, but we think we could suggest some of Professor Stokes's objections. If it were so, there would, one would think, be a greater approach to freedom and activity of mind during the decay of bodily power which precedes the dissolution of the tie between soul and body, than there is in the full vigour of the mature body; yet this is found not to be the case. The health and strength of the body implies a more favourable condition for the vigorous action of the mind than its frailty and decay. It is not in extreme old age nor in illness that the mind usually acts with most freedom and power, but, on the contrary, in the maturity and highest vitality of the body. The mens sana is found more perfect in corpore nano, than in any decadent state of the body ; nor have we any evidence worth men- tioning that at the approach of death the mind can take a more lofty and stronger flight. All this suggests that the relation between mental power and physical power is not one either of mental effect to physical cause, or of a spiritual cause in a phase of conflict with an obstructing agency, but rather is the relation resulting from some deeper agency which contains in it, if we understand Professor Stokes's drift rightly, the principle of individuality, and determines both the form of character and the physical frame as well as the connection between them. Professor Stokes said that there were indications in Scripture " of a sort of energy lying deeper down than even the manifestation of life, on which the identity of man, and his existence, and the continuance of his existence, de- pended. Such a supposition as this was free from the difficulties of the two theories he had previously brought before them, the materialist theory and what he had called the psychic theory. It represented the action on the living body as the result of an energy, if he might say so, an energy which was in- dividualised ; and the process of life, thinking included, was the result of interaction between this fundamental in- dividualised energy and the organism. The supposition that our individual being depended on something lying deeper down than even thought itself, enabled us to understand, at any rate to conceive, how our individual selves might go on in another stage of existence, notwithstanding that our present bodies were utterly destroyed and went to corruption." It would be impossible, we think, to doubt that our individuality, that is, our character, depends on something " lying deeper down than thought itself," for all that determines the direction and the drift of thought, the passions, the affections, the purposes, the will, must be conceived as preceding, or at all events as coexist- ing with, thought, and giving it, so to speak, its sailing orders. It is not thought which usually determines character, but in an immense majority of cases, character which determines thought ; and it is impossible to conceive that which determines otherwise than as preceding that which is determined. And we quite agree with Professor Stokes that the individuality includes more or less the physical organisation. The desires, the tastes, the ambitions, the affections, the spiritual yearnings, are more or less profoundly involved in the character of the senses and the physical organisation. It is impossible to make the individuality depend solely, or even chiefly, upon the will itself, though that is the one element of character which is self-determining, and which can more or less modify and change the set of the whole stream of tendencies and aspira- tions. Let any man consider in what the individuality of himself or any of his most intimate friends chiefly consists, and he will very rarely find that it is solely, or even mainly, the set of his purposes, the attitude of his will. That enters very deeply, of course, into his individuality, but it is very seldom the most conspicuous feature, and never the only conspicuous feature in it. The individuality depends still more on the bias of nature, the proportion between a man's feelings and his intellect, the vividness of his sensations, the tenacity of his memory, the vehemence of his passions, the eagerness of his curiosity, the depth of his sympathies,—all matters which are more or less determined for him, and which his will, though it has the power to regulate and guide, has no power to revolutionise. Thus individuality is something far wider than thought, or even " will ;" and though " will " enters into it, almost as the direction of the helm enters into the course of the ship, nobody can deny that individuality includes elements which involve deeply the physical organisation no less than elements which are purely mental. Hence we agree with Professor Stokes that indi- viduality lies deeper than either the purely mental or the
purely physical elements of life, and we should be very willing to find reason to think, that the individuality moulds both the mental and the physical organisation and the relation between them, rather than that it is the product of the mental and physical organisation and of the relation between them. But as no one was ever conscious of the moulding of his own or any other mental and physical organisation, and of the relation between them, it must be more or less matter of inference from more general con- siderations, whether the individuality was first conceived so as to precede and determine the mental and physical con- ditions under which life commences, with the relation between them, or whether these conditions, and their reciprocal influence on each other, constitute the individuality. Of course those who believe that there is something more in human life than any materialist hypothesis will account for,— especially those who believe in free-will,—will be very much more inclined to take the former view, than those who accept evolution as explaining not only the method but the absolute causation of human life. It is impossible to believe in free- will without believing in a divine mind, for it is clear that material forces could never have broken loose from their own fetters and blossomed into freedom ; and the moment you believe in a divine origin for the will of man, it is impossible not to believe that the divine purpose has placed the evolution and training of human character as a whole above all the other purposes of our human life. So much, we think, then, may safely be said, that if the human will is free, as Professor Stokes evidently believes, the evolu- tion of the physical part of our life must have been more or less subordinated to the evolution of the moral and spiritual part of our life ; so that it is not unreasonable to conclude that there is some individualised energy, deeper than life itself, which has more or less controlled the development both of the mental and the physical organisation of every man, and the relation between them. We say " more or less controlled," because no one, of course, can say how far the laws which regulate the evolution of social relations may not inter- fere with, or even supersede, what we should regard as the evolution of individual character. No man in his senses denies the lineal transmission of good and evil tendencies from parent to child, or even the contagion of good and evil between mere companions and friends, which has so astounding an effect as well on the regeneration as on the corruption of social groups; and our knowledge of this truth renders it quite impossible to say that the divine purpose contemplates the evolution of individualised characters as a thing apart from the evolution of the whole social character of which they will form a part. Professor Stokes therefore would not dream of re- garding the individualised energies in which he finds the pro- bable basis both of mind and of physical organisation, as formed without reference to the ancestors from whom those who were about to be brought into existence had sprung, and the society and nation in which they were to be developed. Still, we think it may be said by all who believe in the free will of man and the providence of God, that human character cannot be regarded as the mere product of circum- stances and organism, but must be treated as stamping a new individuality on the life and the organism, by which in no small degree the character of that life and the power and elasticity of the organisation are controlled and directed. Professor Stokes believes that this individuality more or less evolves the bodily organisation, and cannot be left without a bodily organisation, even after our present bodily organisation falls into ruin or decay. To him the body is a constituent element of the individual, which will express itself in another, perhaps a less imperfect body, so soon as the old body disappears. That is certainly the suggestion of revela- tion, and appears to be quite consistent at least with reason, not to say of something which looks rather like the beginning of experience.
Previous page
