Forming a sentence? Part Two

Yesterday, I spoke of James's discussion of the theory of mind-stuff, or mental chemistry, as a proposed basis for psychology. James famously responded that you cannot understand a sentence as a self-compounding of a number of words.

The theory is a bygone. Why bother with it now, except as a curiosity that was on the way out even when James critiqued it in 1890?

Because the theory has one proponent whose name is still very much with us: Herbert Spencer. We tend to think of Spencer as a social theorist. We associate him with the notion that 'survival of the fittest' should be allowed to work its way through the social sphere as it did in the primordial jungle. Those of us who have been to law school associate this in turn with a famous taunt that Oliver Wendell Holmes directed at his laissez-faire colleagues, that the constitution does not enshrine Spencer's philosophy.

But, think of Spencer in this way, we may forget to think of Spencer as his own contemporaries thought of him. He was seen as a very broad systematic thinker, the author of works not merely on sociology and politics, but on metaphysics ("first principles"), biology, and psychology as well. He presumed to see the same laws at work everywhere. In any sphere of existence, small things are coming together to make larger things, and homogenous big things are becoming more complicated to become heterogenous. Furthermore, he saw all of this as a forward movement, a progression in value.

James despised Spencer's influence in psychology. One might think that James's chapter on the mind-stuff theory was for him a chance to counter-act that influence. And in fact it was, but not in as direct a fashion as one might believe.

Spencer was a believer in the mind-stuff theory, and in the chemistry-like compounding it requires. Spencer wrote that it is "probable" that "something of the same order as that which we call a nervous shock is the ultimate unit of consciousness; and that all the unlikenesses among our feelings result from unlike modes of integration of this ultimate unit."

To James, as we've noted, this is logically unintelligible. Nervous shocks (or something of "the same order") don't compound by themselves, although perhaps they are synthesized by a self. We have to know what that self is and what its purposes are in order to understand the reality of that which brings them together.

But, more interesting as a historical matter -- James sort of lets Spencer off the hook here. The dalliance with mind-stuff is a mere "local detail" for Spencer, not integral to his system, James tells us in a footnote. There are some other evolutionary philosophers for whom it is critical, those who take mind-dust to be present everywhere, who see evolution as taking place within a panpsychist world. But Spencer is not one of these. Spencer believes consciousness merely an occasional result of the transformation of a certain amount of physical force. Presumably a physical brain must be there for this transformation to take place. Spencer and James are both -- as we would say in 21st century lingo -- emergentists on mind-body matters. At least, such was James' working hypothesis while he was working on his big psychology book, though he later entertained very different views. Spencer's embrace of mind-dust puts him in alliance with misguided panpsychists. But, James says in effect, "no harm no foul" to Spencer in this footnote.

Altogether a fascinating little bit of business, this inability of words to make up a sentence by themselves. Or of tiny-but-compounding "nervous shocks" to make up perception.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

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Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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