MIXED MUSINGS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15664, 18 July 1914, Page 1 (Supplement)

MIXED MUSINGS.

BY J. GILES.

The soul is form and doth the body make. Spenser. If I ask the first intelligent man I meet whether he is of opinion that mind can move matter, he will probably reply : " Why, of course it can; if I have a mind to move my arm, I havo no difficulty iu doing it." Anil if he is of an aggressive or defiant temper, he will perhaps end by demanding, as Captain Jack Burtsby used to demand at the close of an oracular utterance : " Can any man say to the contrary ? Avast, then!" In reply to which question I am sorry to have to assure my friend, for I fear ho will hardly bclievo me, that some people do " say to tho contrary;" that Sir Ray Lancaster and Sir Edward Schaeffer, and before them tho late T. H. Huxley, have all declared that mind cannot move matter, and that consequently no man's will can cause his arm to move, however strongly lie may feel assured about it, This pronouncement is rather startling, and may well excite the curiosity of the intelligent and unscientific reader. The moaning of the statement is somewhat as follows :—The movement of the arm is produced by the consumption of the energy stored up in tho muscular tissue, which is stimulated by nerve energy sent through the nerves from the brain, which is a storehouse of such energy. This energy of braiu, nerve, and muscle seems to us capable of being called forth by an act of tho will, but our scientific authorities declare, if I understand them rightly, that all movements, even those called voluntary, are in reality purely reflex, and that the mental state accompanying them has nothing whatver to do with the result. This astonishing opinion provokes the attempt to see how it works out whon applied to a concrete case.

Jones gets a telegram announcing that " Smith has failed." Jones is at once thrown into a state of the greatest mental perturbation, for Smith is his banker and business agent, and Smith's bankruptcy spells ruin to Jones. Accordingly Jones loses his appetite for the dinner to which he was just sitting down when the telegram came; his mind becomes a whirl of excitement, of confused imaginations, of conflicting resolutions, and insoluble perplexity. He determines to consult a lawyer, he packs his portmanteau for a journey, and forms twenty different plans. At length, by some means or other, it turns out that the telegram was wrongly written or wrongly read, and that the message was not "Smith has failed," but "Smith has sailed I" At once tho tempest is assuaged, and Jones has now only to consider tho bearing and purport of tho facts thus disclosed, and what, if any, action should l:e taken. Now, what has happened? The image of some black marks on a piece of paper was carried by the ethereal light waves through the transparent media of Jones' eyes, and was pictured, upside down, on his retina. Thenco tho picture was conveyed by nerves inside the skullpresumably right side up this time, to the part of tho brain where the thinking machinery is installed, and lo! instantly, there is a great commotion. This commotion has a double aspect. There is the mental excitement and disturbance, which is a matter of feeling, and is the only thing that wo are conscious of; and there is the physical disturbance, a little tempest among the brain cells which wo know from physiological science must be the source of ike outgoing energy that is conveyed by the nerves to the muscles, and the cause of the various actions that tho mind considers suitable in tho circumstances. It will be seen that there is a connected chain of nervo energy without reference to tho mental state, and tho biologists assure us that our feelings and our will cannot be a cause of nerve currents or of muscular movements, for these belong to the physical realm and cannot influence, or bo influenced by, that which is not physical, unless we aro prepared to deny the law of the conservation of energy, and to say that nerve force may vanish into an unknown super-physical realm, or again may be furnished from that realm for the use of the physical nervous mechanism.

Yet most persons would say that there could have been nothing to make Jones get excited until his mind had discovered the meaning of the black marks of which the image had been transmitted tlirough his optic nervo, that his excitement followed upon the interpretation which he put upon those marks, and that the mental disturbance set up a physical commotion in the brain cells, which again sent out nervo energy to investigate such muscular movements as the mind directed. But our eminent biologists will not permit us to rest in this apparently satisfactory view of the matter. They tell us that the mental state cannot be admitted as a factor in the chain of events, being only » by-pro-duct, or, as they like to call it, an cpipeh- j nomenon! j Then logically the perturbation of Jones' mind had nothing to do with his visit to his solicitor, which would have happened just the same if he had been a foreigner and not understood the telegram ; nay, the brain cells must have been so clever as to know tho difference between an f and an s without any help from the mind, and I really do not see how wo can stop short of saying that the mind of Bacon or of Milton did not prompt the fingers of the former in writing the Novum Organum, or the lips of the ! latter in dictating "Paradise Lost." Shakespere's "Rosalind" says "a woman's | thought .runs before her actions;" but | then Rosalind did not know about " epi- j phenomenalism," and it looks as if we j must resign ourselves to the conclusion of ! the poet of the " Rejected Addresses/' I and confess that Thinking is but an idle waste of thought, And noueht is everything and everything is ; nought. Yet a possible escape is suggested by ] Herbert Spencer, who persists, against . Huxley, in thinking that when a man | knocks another down for insulting him, it . is his feeling of anger at the insult that j is the real cause of the blow. And Spen- ; cer helps us out with the ether, which he ! thinks must bo the sphere in which the I transmutations of nervo and mind force respectively take place. This is strongly I suggestive of the " etheric double" which the occultists postulate as a medium be- ' tween tho brain and tho mind, a subject ! which the limits of my space forbid me I now to discuss. Perhaps mind and matter are one, as man and wife are one, but if the materialist claims tluit matter is that one, as some wretch of a man once said of himself and his wife, we may retaliate j by putting the case the other way, and I may continue to believe that thought is of | some importance in our lives. At all \ events there is Bishop Berkeley to fall ! back upon, and I do not think he has been annihilated since "Coxcombs vanquished Berkeley with a grin," as Pope tells us.