Theodicy | Page 7

another, nor deduce them from
the assumed fundamental 'woodiness'.

We can now see why 'substantial forms' were the _bêtes noires_ of the
seventeenth-century philosophers. It was because they turned nature
into an unmanageable jungle, in which trees, bushes, and parasites of a
thousand kinds wildly interlaced. There was nothing for it, if science
was to proceed, but to clear the ground and replant with spruce in rows:
to postulate a single uniform nature, of which there should be a single
science. Now neither probatology nor cynology could hope to be [18]
universal--the world is not all sheep nor all dog: it would have to be
hylology; for the world is, in its spatial aspect, all material. Let us say,
then, that there is one uniform material nature of things, and that
everything else consists in the arrangements of the basic material nature;
as the show of towers and mountains in the sunset results simply from
an arrangement of vapours. And let us suppose that the interactions of
the parts of matter are all like those which we can observe in dead
manipulable bodies--in mechanism, in fact. Such was the postulate of
the new philosophers, and it yielded them results.
It yielded them results, and that was highly gratifying. But what,
meanwhile, had happened to those palpable facts of common
experience from which the whole philosophy of substantial forms had
taken its rise? Is the wholeness of a living thing the mere resultant of
the orderly operations of its parts? Is a bee no more essentially one than
a swarm is? Is the life of a living animal indistinguishable from the
rhythm of a going watch, except in degree of complication and subtlety
of contrivance? And if an animal's body, say my own, is simply an
agglomerate of minute interacting material units, and its wholeness is
merely accidental and apparent, how is my conscious mind to be
adjusted to it? For my consciousness appears to identify itself with that
whole vital pattern which used to be called the substantial form. We are
now told that the pattern is nothing real or active, but the mere
accidental resultant of distinct interacting forces: it does no work, it
exercises no influence or control, it is nothing. How then can it be the
vehicle and instrument of my conscious soul? It cannot. Then is my
soul homeless? Or is it to be identified with the activity and fortunes of
a single atomic constituent of my body, a single cog in the animal
clockwork? If so, how irrational! For the soul does not experience itself
as the soul of one minute part, but as the soul of the body.

Such questions rose thick and fast in the minds of the
seventeenth-century philosophers. It will cause us no great surprise that
Leibniz should have quickly felt that the Formal Principle of Aristotle
and of the Scholastic philosophy must be by hook or by crook
reintroduced--not as the detested substantial form, but under a name by
which it might hope to smell more sweet, entelechy.
Nothing so tellingly revealed the difficulties of the new philosophy
in[19] dealing with living bodies as the insufficiency of the solutions
Descartes had proposed. He had boldly declared the unity of animal life
to be purely mechanical, and denied that brutes had souls at all, or any
sensation. He had to admit soul in man, but he still denied the
substantial unity of the human body. It was put together like a watch, it
was many things, not one: if Descartes had lived in our time, he would
have been delighted to compare it with a telephone system, the nerves
taking the place of the wires, and being so arranged that all currents of
'animal spirit' flowing in them converged upon a single unit, a gland at
the base of the brain. In this unit, or in the convergence of all the
motions upon it, the 'unity' of the body virtually consisted; and the soul
was incarnate, not in the plurality of members (for how could it, being
one, indwell many things?), but in the single gland.
Even so, the relation between the soul and the gland was absolutely
unintelligible, as Descartes disarmingly confessed. Incarnation was all
very well in the old philosophy: those who had allowed the interaction
of disparate natures throughout the physical world need find no
particular difficulty about the special case of it provided by incarnation.
Why should not a form of conscious life so interact with what would
otherwise be dead matter as to 'indwell' it? But the very principle of the
new philosophy disallowed the interaction of disparate natures, because
such an interaction did not allow of exact formulation, it was a 'loose'
and not a 'tight' relation.
From a purely practical point of view the much derided