The Arithmetical Paradox: The Oneness of Mind

Sherrington’s paradox too is an arithmetical paradox, a paradox of numbers, and it has, so 1 believe, very much to do with the one to which 1 had given this name earlier in this chapter, though it is by no means identical with it. The previous one was, briefly, the one world crystallizing out of the many minds. Sherrington’s is the one mind, based ostensibly on the many cell-lives or, in another way, on the manifold sub-brains, each of which seems to have such a considerable dignity proper to itself that we feel impelled to associate a sub-mind with it. Yet we know that a sub-mind is an atrocious monstrosity, just as is a plural-mind - neither having any counterpart in anybody’s experience, neither being in any way imaginable.

1 submit that both paradoxes will be solved (I do not pretend to solve them here and now) by assimilating into our Western build of science the Eastern doctrine of identity. Mind is by its very nature a singulare tantum. I should say: the over-all number of minds is just one. I venture to call it indestructible since it has a peculiar timetable, namely mind is always now. There is really no before and after for mind. There is only a now that includes memories and expectations. But I grant that our language is not adequate to express this, and I also grant, should anyone wish to state it, that I am now talking religion, not science - a religion, however, not opposed to science, but supported by what disinterested scientific research has brought to the fore. Sherrington says: ‘Man’s mind is a recent product of our planet’s side.’!

I agree, naturally. If the first word (man’s) were left out, I would not. We dealt with this earlier, in chapter I. I t would seem queer, not to say ridiculous, to think that the contemplating, conscious mind that alone reflects the becoming of the world should have made its appearance only at some time in the course of this ‘becoming’, should have appeared contingently, associated with a very special biological contraption which in itself quite obviously discharges the task of facilitating certain forms of life in maintaining themselves, thus favouring their preservation and propagation: forms of life that were late-comers and have been preceded by many others that maintained themselves without that particular contraption (a brain). Only a small fraction of them (if you count by species) have embarked on ‘getting themselves a brain’.

And before that happened, should it all have been a performance to empty stalls? Nay, may we call a world that nobody contemplates even that? When an archaeologist reconstructs a city or a culture long bygone, he is interested in human life in the past, in actions, sensations, thoughts, feelings, in joy and sorrow of humans, displayed there and then.

But a world existing for many millions of years without any mind being aware of it, contemplating it, is it anything at all? Has it existed? For do not let us forget: to say, as we did, that the becoming of the world is reflected in a conscious mind is but a cliche, a phrase, a metaphor that has become familiar to us. The world is given but once. Nothing is reflected. The original and the mirror-image are identical. The world extended in space and time is but our representation (Vorstellung). Experi- ence does not give us the slightest clue of its being anything besides that - as Berkeley was well aware.

But the romance of a world that had existed for many millions of years before it, quite contingently, produced brains in which to look at itselfhas an almost tragic continuation that I should like to describe again in Sherrington’s words: The universe of energy is we are told running down.

It tends fatally towards an equilibrium which shall be final. An equilibrium in which life cannot exist. Yet life is being evolved without pause. Our planet in its surround has evolved it and is evolving it. And with it evolves mind. If mind is not an energy-system how will the running down of the universe affect it? Can it go unscathed? Always so far as we know the finite mind is attached to a running energy-system. When that energy-system ceases to run what of the mind which runs with it? Will the universe which elaborated and is elaborating the finite mind then let it perish?

Such considerations are in some way disconcerting. The thing that bewilders us is the curious double role that the conscious mind acquires. On the one hand it is the stage, and the only stage on which this whole world-process takes place, or the vessel or container that contains it all and outside which there is nothing. On the other hand we gather the impression, maybe the deceptive impression, that within this world-bustle the conscious mind is tied up with certain very particular organs (brains), which while doubtless the most interesting contraption in animal and plant physiology are yet not unique, not sui generis; for like so many others they serve after all only to maintain the lives of their owners, and it is only to this that they owe their having been elaborated in the process of speciation by natural selection.

Sometimes a painter introduces into his large picture, or a poet into his long poem, an unpretending subordinate character who is himself. Thus the poet of the Odyssey has, I suppose, I Man on his Nature, p. 23 2 .

meant himself by the blind bard who in the hall of the Phaeacians sings about the battles of Troy and moves the battered hero to tears. In the same way we meet in the song of the Nibelungs, when they traverse the Austrian lands, with a poet who is suspected to be the author of the whole epic. In Durer’s All-Saints picture two circles of believers are gathered in prayer around the Trinity high up in the skies, a circle of the blessed above, and a circle of humans on the earth. Among the latter are kings and emperors and popes, but also, if I am not mistaken, the portrait of the artist himself, as a humble sidefigure that might as well be missing.

To me this seems to be the best simile of the bewildering double role of mind. On the one hand mind is the artist who has produced the whole; in the accomplished work, however, it is but an insignificant accessory that might be absent without detracting from the total effect.

Speaking without metaphor we have to declare that we are here faced with one of these typical antinomies caused by the fact that we have not yet succeeded in elaborating a fairly understandable outlook on the world without retiring our own mind, the producer of the world picture, from it, so that mind has no place in it. The attempt to press it into it, after all, necessarily produces some absurdities. Earlier I have commented on the fact that for this same reason the physical world picture lacks all the sensual qualities that go to make up the Subject of Cognizance. The model is colourless and soundless and unpalpable.

In the same way and for the same reason the world of science lacks, or is deprived of, everything that has a meaning only in relation to the consciously contemplating, perceiving and feeling subject. I mean in the first place the ethical and aesthetical values, any values of any kind, everything related to the meaning and scope of the whole display. All this is not only absent but it cannot, from the purely scientific point of view, be inserted organically. If one tries to put it in or on, as a child puts colour on his uncoloured painting copies, it will not fit. For anything that is made to enter this world model willy-nilly takes the form of scientific assertion offacts; and as such it becomes wrong.

Life is valuable in itself. ‘Be reverent towards life’ is how Albert Schweitzer has framed the fundamental command- Inent of ethics. Nature has no reverence towards life. Nature treats life as though it were the most valueless thing in the world. Produced million-fold it is for the greatest part rapidly annihilated or cast as prey before other life to feed it. This precisely is the master-method of producing ever-new forms of life.

‘Thou shalt not torture, thou shalt not inflict pain!’ Nature is ignorant of this commandment. Its creatures depend upon racking each other in everlasting strife. ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’ No natural happening is in itself either good or bad, nor is it in itself either beautiful or ugly. The values are missing, and qui te particularly meaning and end are missing. Nature does not act by purposes. If in German we speak of a purposeful (zweckmiissig) adaptation of an organism to its environment, we know this to be only a convenient way of speech. Ifwe take it literally, we are mistaken. We are mistaken within the frame of our world picture.

In it there is only causal linkage.

Most painful is the absolute silence of all our scientific investigations towards our questions concerning the meaning and scope of the whole display. The more attentively we watch it, the more aimless and foolish it appears to be. The show that is going on obviously acquires a meaning only with regard to the mind that contemplates it. But what science tells us about this relationship is patently absurd: as if mind had only been produced by that very display that it is now watching and would pass away with it when the sun finally cools down and the earth has been turned into a desert of ice and snow.

The notorious atheism of science which comes, of course, under the same heading. Science has to suffer this reproach again and again, but unjustly so.

No personal god can form part of a world model that has only become accessible at the cost of removing everything per- sonal from it. We know, when God is experienced., this is an event as real as an immediate sense perception or as one’s own personality. Like them he must be missing in the space-time picture. I do not find God anywhere in space and time - that is what the honest naturalist tells you. For this he incurs blame from him in w·hose catechism is written: God is spirit.