Theodicy | Page 8

pineal gland
theory would serve. If we could be content to view Descartes as a man
who wanted to make the world safe for physical science, then there
would be a good deal to be said for his doctrine. In the old philosophy

exact science had been frustrated by the hypothesis of loose relations
all over the field of nature. Descartes had cleared them from as much of
the field as science was then in a position to investigate; he allowed
only one such relation to subsist, the one which experience appeared
unmistakably to force upon us--that between our own mind and its
bodily vehicle. He had exorcized the spirits from the rest of nature; and
though there was a spirit here which could not be exorcized, the
philosophic conjurer had nevertheless confined it and its unaccountable
pranks within a minutely narrow magic circle: all mind could do was to
turn the one tiny switch at the centre of its [20] animal telephone
system. It could create no energy--it could merely redirect the currents
actually flowing.
Practically this might do, but speculatively it was most disturbing. For
if the 'loose relation' had to be admitted in one instance, it was admitted
in principle; and one could not get rid of the suspicion that it would
turn up elsewhere, and that the banishment of it from every other field
represented a convenient pragmatic postulate rather than a solid
metaphysical truth. Moreover, the correlation of the unitary soul with
the unitary gland might do justice to a mechanistical philosophy, but it
did not do justice to the soul's own consciousness of itself. The soul's
consciousness is the 'idea' or 'representation' of the life of the whole
body, certainly not of the life of the pineal gland nor, as the unreflective
nowadays would say, of the brain. I am not conscious in, or of, my
brain except when I have a headache; consciousness is in my eyes and
finger-tips and so on. It is physically true, no doubt, that consciousness
in and of my finger-tips is not possible without the functioning of my
brain; but that is a poor reason for locating the consciousness in the
brain. The filament of the electric bulb will not be incandescent apart
from the functioning of the dynamo; but that is a poor reason for saying
that the incandescence is in the dynamo.
Certainly the area of representation in our mind is not simply
equivalent to the area of our body. But in so far as the confines of
mental representation part company with the confines of the body, it is
not that they may contract and fall back upon the pineal gland, but that
they may expand and advance over the surrounding world. The mind

does not represent its own body merely, it represents the world in so far
as the world affects that body or is physically reproduced in it. The
mind has no observable natural relation to the pineal gland. It has only
two natural relations: to its body as a whole and to its effective
environment. What Descartes had really done was to pretend that the
soul was related to the pineal gland as it is in fact related to its whole
body; and then that it was related to the bodily members as in fact it is
related to outer environment. The members became an inner
environment, known only in so far as they affected the pineal gland;
just as the outer environment in its turn was to be known only in so far
as it affected the members.
[21] This doctrine of a double environment was wholly artificial. It was
forced on Descartes by the requirements of mechanistical science: if the
members were simply a plurality of things, they must really be parts of
environment; the body which the soul indwelt must be a body;
presumably, then, the pineal gland. An untenable compromise, surely,
between admitting and denying the reality of the soul's incarnation.
What, then, was to be done? Descartes's rivals and successors
attempted several solutions, which it would be too long to examine here.
They dissatisfied Leibniz and they have certainly no less dissatisfied
posterity. It will be enough for us here to consider what Leibniz did. He
admitted, to begin with, the psychological fact. The unity of
consciousness is the representation of a plurality--the plurality of the
members, and through them the plurality of the world. Here, surely,
was the very principle the new philosophy needed for the reconciliation
of substantial unity with mechanical plurality of parts. For it is directly
evident to us that consciousness focuses the plurality of environing
things in a unity of representation. This is no philosophical theory, it is
a simple fact. Our body, then, as a physical system is a mechanical
plurality; as focused