Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/44

36 We know of course that a great deal of consciousness depends upon brain-conditions. If we could make out these brain-conditions for given mental states, we should, to the extent we had done so, succeed in explaining the latter. We are able to explain many phenomena of consciousness in a general way. It is an explanation, though a very incomplete one, to say that a sufficient blow on the head puts an end to consciousness, to say that the sensations of sight or hearing or the power of speech can be eliminated by accidents of a given type to the brain. Well,—explanation is interesting. No one is obliged to take explanatory points of view if he does not wish to explain, but if he cares for the explanation of mental states he must assume that they are explainable. lie must look for causal connections wherever they can be found, and not conclude that on the whole he will not look for causal connections in precisely the region where, to a certain extent, they leap at the eyes.

Just why certain physical processes should have phenomena of consciousness as sequences no one pretends to say,—but the same mystery exists in all caudal relations. If one ask why the stream of consciousness continues to flow, why it didn't stop a minute ago instead of keeping on, one can only say it is because the heart con tinues to beat, the blood to circulate, and the brain to function. One can ask, if one has the courage, why the earth doesn't stop in its orbit, or why the sun doesn't stop shining. The fact simply is that consciousness keeps on in its dramatic and picturesque career, and if we wish to explain some details of that career, we look for laws of regularity between antecedent and consequent, and we assume, as a point of view that clears the ground and simplifies the problem, that consciousness is explainable in all respects, so far as the facts themselves are concerned. And whether one talks of antecedent and consequent or of parallel states seems hardly to matter at all.

In consciousness, such phenomena as the noon whistle of a neighboring factory, the sound of a man shoveling coal, a bicycle-bell, a piano across the street, the rattle of a wagon, may follow one after another. All sorts of sensations are continually starting up in consciousness in the most chaotic fashion. Any causal connection between them is out of the question. But this means that if sensations are explainable at all, they are explainable by something that is conceived as consisting of something else than psychic states. But if the mental states are conceived as depending upon physical states, and these latter as causally related, we get the mental states indirectly into a real series, and get rid of chance.

This is a point on which psychologists have done a good deal of hedging, no doubt because psychology is still open to the suspicion