Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 4.djvu/321

 CONSCIOUSNESS

CONSCIOUSNESS

philosophies of coti.spioiisncss. tlfstiiu'd to be evolved along various liucs by r'iclitc, Hcholling, and Hart- luauu.

Such being in outline the history of modern specu- lation in regard to human consciousness, the question of primary interest here is: Viewed from the stand- point of Catholic theological and philosophical teach- ing, what estimate is to be formed of this modern psychological method, and of the modern science of the phenomena of consciousness? It seems to the present writer that the method of careful industrious observation of the activities of the mind, the accurate description and classification of the various forms of consciousness, and the effort to analyse complex men- tal products into their simplest elements, and to trace the laws of the growth and development of our several faculties, constitute a sound rational procedure which is as deserving of commendation as the emi)loyment of sound scientific method in any other branch of knowl- edge. Further, since the only natural means of acquiring information respecting the inner nature of the soul is by the investigation of its activities, the scientific study of the facts of consciousness is a necessarj^ pre- liminary at the present day to any satisfactory meta- physics of the soul. Assuredly no philosojihy of the human soul which ignores the results of scientific ob- servation and experiment applied to the phenomena of consciousness can to-day claim assent to its teach- ing with much hope of success. On the other hand, most English-speaking psychologists since the time of Locke, partly through excessive devotion to the study of these ])henomena, partly through contempt for metaphysics, seem to have fallen into the error of for- getting that the main ground for interest in the study of our mental activities lies in the hope that we may draw from them inferences as to the inner constitution of the being, subject, or agent from which these activi- ties proceed. This error has made the science of con- sciousness, in the hands of many writers, a "psychol- ogy without a .soul". This is, of course, no necessary consequence of the method. With respect to the rela- tion between the study of consciousness and philoso- phy in general, Catholic thinkers would, for the most part, hold that a diligent investigation of the various forms of our cognitive consciousness must be under- taken as one of the first steps in philosophy; that one's own conscious existence must be the idtimate fact in every jjhilosophical system; and that the veracity of our cognitive faculties, when carefully scrutinized, must be the ultimate postulate in every sovmd theory of cognition. But the prospect of constructing a gen- eral philosophy of consciousness on idealistic lines that will harmonize with sundry theological doctrines which the Church has stamped with her authority, does not seem promising. At the same time, although much of our dogmatic theology has been formulated in the technical language of the.-\ristotelean physics and metaphysics, and though it would be, to, say the Ira.vt, extremely difficult to disentangle the Divinely ri\caled religious element from th<" human and im- j HI feet vehicle by which it is communicated, yet it is must important to remember that the conceptions of .■\ristotelean metaphysics are no more part of Divine Revelation than are the hypotheses of .\ristotelean physics; and that the technical language with its philo- sophical associations and iiTiplications in which many of our theological doctrines an; clothed, is a human instrument, subject to alteration and correction.

Quantitative SciENrB of Con.sciousne.ss. — The term p/tt/rhophyairs is employed to denote a branch of experimental psychology which seeks to establish quantitative laws describing the general relations of intensity exhibited in various kinds of conscious states under certain conditions. Filaborate experiments and ingenious instruments have been devLsed by Weber, Fechner, Wundt, and others for the purpose of mea.suring the strength of the stimulus needed to

awaken the sensations of the several senses, the quan- tity of variation in the stimulus required to produce a consciously distinguishable sensation, and so to dis- cover a minimum increment or unit of consciousness; also to measure the exact duration of particular con- scious processes, the "reaction-time" or interval be- tween the stimulation of a sense-organ and the per- formance of a responsive movement, and similar facts. These results have been stated in certain approximate laws. The best established of these is the Weber- Fechner generalization, which enunciates the general fact that the stimulus of a sensation must be increased in geometrical progression in order that the intensity of the resulting sensation be augmented in arith- metical progression. The law is true, however, only of certain kinds of sensation and within limits. Whilst these attenijjts to reach quantitative measurement — characteristic of the exact sciences — in the study of consciousness have not been directly very fruitful in new results, they have nev'ertheless been indirectly valuable in stimulating the pursuit of greater accu- racy and precision in all methods of observing and registering the phenomena of consciousness.

Self-Consciousness. — .\ most important form of consciousness from both a philosophical and a |).sycho- logical point of view is self-consciousness. By this is understood the mind's consciousness of its operations as its own. Out of this cognition combined with inemorj^ of the past emerges the knowledge of our own abiding personality. We not only have conscious states like the lower animals, but we can reflect upon these states, recognize them as our own, and at the same time distinguish them from the permanent self of which they are the transitory modifications. Viewed as the form of consciousness by which we study our own states, this inner activity is called in- trospection. It is the chief instrument employed in the iiuilding up of the science of psychology, and it is one of the many diffcrenliw which separate the human from the animal mind. It has sometimes been spoken of as an "internal sense", the proper object of which is the phenomena of consciousness, as that of the external senses is the phenomena of physical na- ture. Introspection is, however, merely the function of the intellect applied to the observation of our own mental life. The peculiar reflective activity exhibited in all forms of self-consciousness has led modern psy- chologists who defend the spirituality of the soul, in- creasingly to insist on this ojieration of the human mind as a main argument against materialism. The cruder form of materialism advocated in the last cen- tury by Broussais, Vogt, Molescliott, and at times by Huxley, which maintained that thought is merely a "product", ".secretion", or "function" of the brain, is shown to be untenable by a brief consideration of any form of consciousness. All "secretions" and "l)roducts" of material agents of which we have ex- perience, are substances which occupy space, are ob- servable by the external senses, and continue to exist when unobserved. But all states of consciousness are non-spatial; they cannot be observed by the senses, and they e.xist only as we arc conscious of them — their esse is percipi. Similarly "functions" of material agents are, in the last resort, resolvable into move- ments of [lortions of matter. But states of conscious- ness are not movements any more than they are "secretions" of matter. The contention, however, that all states of consciousness, though not "secre- tions "or "products" of matter, are yet forms of activ- ity which have their ultimate source in the brain and are intrinsically and absolutely dependent on the lat- ter Ls not disposed of by this reasoning.

To meet this objection, attention is directed to the form of intellectual activity exhibited in reflective self-consciousness. In this process there is recogni- tion of complete identity between the knowing agent and the object which is known; the ego Ls at once sub-