The Outline of Science, Volume 1

We must not shirk the very difficult question of the relation between the bodily and the mental side of behaviour. (a) Some great thinkers have taught that the mind is a reality by itself which plays upon the instrument of the brain and body. As the instrument gets worn and dusty the playing is not so good as it once was, but the player is still himself. This theory of the essential independence of the mind is a very beautiful one, but those who like it when applied to themselves are not always so fond of it when it is applied to other intelligent creatures like rooks and elephants. It may be, however, that there is a gradual emancipation of the mind which has gone furthest in Man and is still progressing. (b) Some other thinkers have taught that the inner life of thought and feeling is only, as it were, an echo of the really important activity—that of the body and brain. Ideas are just foam-bells on the hurrying streams and circling eddies of matter and energy that make up our physiological life. To most of us this theory is impossible, because we are quite sure that ideas and feelings and purposes, which cannot be translated into matter and motion, are the clearest realities in our experience, and that they count for good and ill all through our life. They are more than the tickings of the clock; they make the wheels go round.[Pg 242] (c) There are others who think that the most scientific position is simply to recognise both the bodily and the mental activities as equally important, and so closely interwoven that they cannot be separated. Perhaps they are just the outer and the inner aspects of one reality—the life of the creature. Perhaps they are like the concave and convex curves of a dome, like the two sides of a shield. Perhaps the life of the organism is always a unity, at one time appearing more conspicuously as Mind-body, at another time as Body-mind. The most important fact is that neither aspect can be left out. By no jugglery with words can we get Mind out of Matter and Motion. And since we are in ourselves quite sure of our Mind, we are probably safe in saying that in the beginning was Mind. This is in accordance with Aristotle's saying that there is nothing in the end which was not also in kind present in the beginning—whatever we mean by beginning.