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Mini-Course in Philosophy The Psychological Question |
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A Mini-Course in Philosophical Psychology The Psychological Question is the question of life and living bodies. The department of philosophy which answers this question is called philosophical psychology or rational psychology. In our day, the simple name psychology usually suggests the great mass of laboratory sciences which bear that general name. These are not the concern of philosophy, although their findings, like the findings of all the special sciences, must ultimately fall under the light of philosophy and take form under its principles. The name psychology is Greek for "the science of the soul" or "the science of the life-principle," although, in many a modern book lavelled as psychology you will find no mention of the soul and precious little about a substantial principle of life, where you do not find the frank denial of such a principle. The philosophical science of psychology attempts to set forth in an ultimate manner the truth about life and living bodies. Sometimes this science is presented in two parts, called respectively minor and major psychology, which deal first with life in plants and brute animals, and then with life in human beings. The mini-course is divided into the following two Sections: Section 1 - Life in Plants and Animals Section 2 - Life in Human Beings
Section 1: Life in Plants and Animals Topics:
a) Life Life as it appears in living bodies is sometimes described as the capacity for self-perfective movement or activity. Sometimes this brief description is further shortened, and it is said that life is self-motion. In discussing The Ontological Question we have learned that anything moved is moved by something other than itself. It would seem at first glance that self-motion is a contradiction and an impossibility. But the phrase does not mean that the living body moves itself into existence, or sustains itself there, or equips itself for its activity. Like other creatures, it depends for its being and its activity upon Creator, Preserver, and Concurrer. But, granted that it is created, preserved, and sustained in function, the living body tends by its activity to express, develop, or perfect itself. In this the living body is distinct from the non-living body, all activity of which is transient. Perhaps it would be a just revision of the brief description of life given above, to say that life, in living bodies, is a capacity for immanent activity. Life in living bodies is a capacity for activity, and an exercise of this activity. As a capacity it is called life in actu primo, that is, life in first actuality, or life in basic fact. As the exercise of life-functions, it is life in actu secondo, that is, life in second actuality, or life in actual exercise. Now, the capacity for life-functions or vital operations is entirely due, in living bodies, to the presence of a substantial principle, a life-principle, a soul, a psyche. Indeed, it is accurate to say that life in actu primo or in basic fact is the soul. For the soul is that actuality whereby the body is alive and can exercise vital operations. The soul or psyche or life-principle is a substance (incomplete in lesser bodily beings than man) which is substantially joined to the body-substance. Indeed, the soul is the substantial form of the body, and is therefore the substantial principle which make the body exist as a living body of its specific kind. The soul is substantially united with the body in such a way that the result is a single living thing, a single if compound substance. Life is essentially different from nonlife. A living body is not merely a more complex thing than a nonliving body; it is an essentially different kind of thing. Note the following points of difference between living bodies and nonliving bodies:
Now it is manifest that bodies which exhibit such fundamental differences in origin, development, decline, structure, operation, are not mere varieties of one kind of thing. They are things essentially different; since they are essentially different substances, they are substantially different. And this is proof sufficient that life cannot originate in nonlife through an added complexity of structure to a nonliving body by mechanical, physical, or chemical activity. Life comes from life and a living body comes from living bodies and ultimately from the First Cause or creator of life and living bodies. Life in living bodies manifests a scale or gradation. There are three types of such life, and these stand related, not like steps in the same stairway, but like three sets of parallel stairs. For the three types are essentially different; one is not merely a more perfect form of another. Yet the second type has all the perfections of the first, plus its own specific perfection. And the third has all the perfection of the second, plus its own specific perfection. These grades of life are called vegetal or plant-life, sentient or animal-life, and rational or human life. Life in living bodies is, therefore, at once of three kinds and of three grades. We assert the essential difference of the three grades of life in living bodies for the compelling reason that each superior grade of life has perfections or operations which are essentially beyond the reach of the lower grade or grades. As we have said more than once, life in a living body is due to the presence of a substantial principle of life or a soul. The mass or material bulk of a body does not account for its life. The structure of a body as an organism does account for life-activity, but this very structure has to be built according to a set plan before it is operative, and this building is due to an indwelling substantial principle which is not that thing which is built; even after building, the organic structure does not explain its permanence or its actual functioning, for in itself, it is only a structure suited for its functioning, and a substantial activating principle is still required to explain the fact that it does actually exercise vital operations. There must be, in a word, a first informing and substantial principle which makes the body alive; which determines the body as plant, animal, or man; which holds the body in its organic and functioning unity. This substantial principle we call the soul. Modern scientists do not like the word. They prefer psyche, or entelechy, or bathmic energy, or vital direction, or even "the something over." But philosophy cannot pause to quarrel about words. We call it the soul, and we say that it is the substantial principle of life which constitutes the organism and is substantially fused with the organism in the unity of a living body, and that it is the root of all operations of the living body, even those activities which it uses as instruments and which are in themselves mechanical or physicochemical. b) Vegetal Life Vegetal life is the life of plants. For a plant is truly a living body. It is not only a body with physical, mechanical, and chemical activities; its has these, but they are under a precise direction and application which is the plant's, and not their own. A plant is a body that exists and lives by reason of its substantial form or vegetal soul. A plant is alive, but it lacks any form of knowing. The fundamental form of knowing in bodies is that which is exercised by a sense or by senses; a living body with one or more senses is called a sentient body or is said to have sentiency. A plant is a body that truly alive but lacks sentiency. The vegetal operations (that is, vital operations) are three: nutrition, growth, and vital generation or tendency to reproduce.
These three vital operations are found in every living body. They are therefore found in plants. And since plants are the lowest in the scale of living things, these three vital operations are all the life functions possessed by plants. Vital operations are produced by the respective powers or faculties of the soul or life-principle in a living body. For no created substance acts immediately, but through the mediation of its powers to act. These powers in a living body are, in themselves, qualities of the substance called the soul or life-principle. Hence, while we say truly that the plant itself exercises its vital operations, we speak more precisely when we say that the plant exercises these operations by means of the powers for such function which inhere, in the plant-soul or principle of life. A plant, therefore, is a living body which normally possesses three vital powers or faculties, the nutritive power, the growing or augmentative power, and the generative or reproducing power. The life-principle or soul in plants is called a material principle. Now, a thing is material for one of two reasons: either it is made of bodily matter, or it depends upon what is made of bodily matter. The plant-soul or life-principle is not made of matter. It cannot be severed from the plant and looked at separately. It is the substantial form of the plant, and a substantial form is simple and not made of parts. But the plant-soul depends for existence and function upon the organism (the arranged and articulated body) which it constitutes as an existing living body; which it builds up and activates. Without the organism, the functions of nutrition, growth, and vital generation cannot be exercised; and where the plant-soul can exist it can function. Therefore, without the organism the plant-soul cannot exist or function. It is, in consequence, called a material life-principle, not a spiritual life-principle as the human soul is. The plant-soul is essentially simple, that is, not composed of parts. Hence, in itself, it is indivisible. Yet since the plant-organism is divisible, and since a suitable division of the plant-organism is ordinarily capable of retaining life as a new and separate plant, the life-principle of a plant is said to be accidentally divisible according to the divisibility of the plant-organism into such parts as will be able to retain and exercise plant-life. Thus the plant-soul is actually one but potentially multiple. The plant-soul is generated as the plant itself is generated. It comes along, so to speak, as an essential constituent, determinant, or form. Similarly, the plant-soul perishes as the plant perishes. It is not a substance capable of independent existence, as a spirit is, but ceases to be with the cessation of the plant from being. This sort of generation and corruption is called accidental. A plant-soul, accidentally generated, is said to be educed from the potentiality of matter, and, accidentally corrupted, it is said to be reduced to the potentiality of matter. In other words, the plant-soul is not created anew for each plant; not is the plant-soul annihilated when the plant dies. It is drawn out of the capability of matter to be substantially constituted as a plant; it falls back into such unactualized capability when the plant dies. c) Sentient Life A sentient being is a living body which has all the perfections and operations of a plant and, in addition, has the essentially different and superior powers of knowing and of acting on knowledge. A sentient being is an animal body. We call a living animal body simply an animal. This philosophical use of animal differs from the scientific use. For we make no distinction of animals on the score of their structure; we do not distinguish philosophically among birds, insects, reptiles, and so on. All of these are animals as well as the larger beasts that are commonly called so in ordinary speech. Indeed, man himself is an animal, although he is also more than an animal, and is essentially other and greater than that which is animal merely. An animal is a living body with sentiency. From the amoeba to the elephant, this definition holds true. (Note: the fact that sometimes it is difficult to tell whether some microscopic unicellular organisms belong in the plant or animal category has no bearing here; it simply points out the limitations of human instruments to make an accurate and proper distinction.) A sentient body has powers of knowing, that is, of knowing in the lowest order of knowledge. A sentient body has sentiency or powers of sense. Sentiency is a knowing-power exercised through the body or part of the body. If a special part of the body serves for a special kind of knowing (as the eye, the ear, the nose) this part is called a sensory or a sense-organ. A sentient body has not only the power of knowing by means of a sense or of senses; it has the power to act on knowledge. That is, it has the power to tend towards the attaining of what is senses as desirable or good, and away from what is sensed as undesirable or bad. This power is called appetition, or appetency, or simply appetite. And, in most animals, this power of appetency is followed by local movement. Animals that can move from place to place have the power of locomotion. Hence, the vital powers of an animal are, in addition to the nutritive power, the growing power, the reproductive power, these three: the sensing-power, the appetizing-power, and, usually, the power of local movement. By these powers the animal exercises the vital operations of:
We defined a plant as a living body which lacks sentiency. We may define an animal as a living body with sentiency which lacks intellect or understanding. For no mere animal is intellectual, rational, or intelligent. We speak of "intelligent" animals in a metaphorical way; we mean that the animals are alert, that they use their marvelous sensing-powers in a striking way. But no animal that is not more than animal (as man is) has intelligence. We shall recognize the truth of this assertion when we come to study the intellect in man. Here it will suffice to notice these facts:
The inner sense of what is desirable, whether to attain or to perform, is called instinct. It is this sense, more than any of the other senses, that manifests itself in the activities which lead the unthinking to speak of "intelligent animals." Now there are vast and essential differences between instinct and intelligence or intellect. Instinct is organic; it depends on a sensory or organ (which is a part of the brain); intellect is inorganic or spiritual (nonmaterial). Instinctive knowledge is antecedent to experience; intellectual knowledge is acquired and presupposes experience. Instinct is fixed, not inventive; intellect is endlessly working out new things. Instinct is very limited; intellect is of seemingly boundless capacity. Instinct is changeless; intellect applies its knowledge in a multitude of ways. The soul or life-principle of an animal is the animal's substantial form. That is, it is the substantial reality which joins with prime matter to constitute the animal as an existing body of the essential or specific kind that it is. It is a material principle, since it depends for existence and function upon the organism, the body, which it sets in being and activates. It is a principle educed from the potentiality of matter and is accidentally generated as the animal entire comes into being; it is reduced to the potentiality of matter when the animal is corrupted or dies, and thus it is accidentally corrupted. Some animals have an organism that may be divided, and each part will endure as a complete organism. This is less common among animals than among plants, and in what we call the higher animals (those that appear to have all the senses with which man is equipped) this multiplication by partition or fission is not verified at all. For animals in the main are of much more complex and delicately balanced structure than plants are. The normal mode of reproduction among animals is by direct birth or by birth in egg-form which undergoes subsequent development until the full animal nature of the species is realized. Of the lower animals among which multiplication by fission or partition is a fact, the life-principle is, as in plants, actually one but potentially multiple. For a worm, for example, that may be divided carefully in such a way that each part will live as a complete worm, is, to begin with, one worm; its life is one life. Thus it is actually one, and its soul or life-principle is actually one. But, inasmuch as it can be divided into two worms, it is potentially multiple, and so is its life-principle. The senses or sentient knowing-powers which may be found in animals are classified as external and internal. All animals have at least one exterior or external sense, and this is the sense generally called touch. This is the basic sense. It is indeed the bridge over which the sensing of all the other sense must pass. For a thing is not seen unless the eye come into contact or touch with its image; a thing is not smelled unless the air carry its minute particles and bring these into contact with the olfactory nerve; a thing is not heard unless sound-waves are carried to touch upon the auditory nerve. And since the interior or internal senses depend for their findings upon the preliminary activity of the exterior senses, it may truly be said that the sense of touch is basic to all sensing. A living body that gives no evidence of having the sense of touch (which may be loosely described as a sense of resistance, temperature, stimulus, irritation) is not an animal-body, but a plant-body. The higher animals, and man, have five exterior senses and four interior senses. The exterior senses are: touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. (Under the head of touch we include the sense of resistance, the sense of temperature, the muscular sense, the sense of pleasure, the sense of pain.) The interior senses are: sense-consciousness, imagination, sense-memory, and the estimative sense. Each of these will be discussed in brief detail in the study of sentiency in man. d) Species of Living Things In a biological sense, a species is a class of living bodies, the members of which are similar in structure, and can breed indefinitely in their natural state. In the rather rare case of offspring from parent-animals of different species, we have a hybrid. The hybrid is usually sterile, but if it should have offspring, this will be an animal of the type of one of the parents of the hybrid. This fact is called reversion to type. Minor groups of animals within the species are called varieties. When varieties are artificially cultivated, they are called breeds or races. The offspring of parent-animals of different breed is called a mongrel. A mongrel often shows marked characteristics of one out of several ancestral breeds; this reversion is called atavism. Different species which have some common characteristic make a genus. A genus grouped with other similar genera constitutes a family. Families of similar type make an order. Orders are grouped as classes. Classes are grouped into phyla. The phylum is the most general biological class of organisms, that is, of living bodies. That there are different species of living things, and of animals, needs no proof. The question is not of the existence of species, but of the origin of species. We have already noticed the fact of the origin of life. Life does not come from nonlife. A living body is not the product of nonliving bodies. Life in its first origin can have no explanation except in creation; life came by creation from the First Cause, from the First Giver of Life, or, as many prefer, from God But did God endow the lower living things with powers to develop into higher types of things? Have the species of living things, and notably of animals, a common origin in one living body, or in one type of living body? Of course, the creator of the world can make his world as he chooses. If he chose to have all plant and animal bodies develop from a single parent-body of a lower type than any existing plant or animal, who shall say that he may not do so? Yet he must, in that case, have equipped the original body with the powers to develop superior life-forms. For no living body has any tendency in the way of reproduction except in its own kind. Even for this, of course, the living body has to be equipped. Geology seems to indicate that the forms of bodily life that appeared on our earth were increasingly more complex; that there was an ascending scale of development among living bodies. We leave man out of this account, for, as we have noticed, science simply does not know any ancestors of man. Man's most notable and characteristic powers and activities are of a nature superior, and essentially superior, to all organic function, and hence cannot have their explanation in an animal development or evolution. There are two theories about the origin of species. One maintains the changelessness of species, and declares that one species does not develop into another. Each species, while diversified by varieties, clings to its essential type and shows a fixed tendency to retain it always. No body, and hence no living body, has the suicidal tendency of destroying itself so that an essentially different (even if superior) body may exist in its place. The defenders of the changelessness of species say that the Creator of Life made species as they are, either by a succession of creations at different times, or by a single creation of all species at once, although these species (like seeds all planted at the same time but destined to appear as plants at widely different seasons) have come into being at different stages of the earth's development. The other theory about the origin of species is that of transformed or derived species; it declares that one species is derived or descended from other species. This theory is accurately called transformism; it is more generally, and less accurately known as evolution. Evolution is of three types: monistic, Darwinian, and theistic.
A philosophical theist may accept theistic evolution if he is satisfied with the evidence offered. But no type of evolution is scientifically established as fact, in spite of what some prominent voices in science may say. Evolution is a hypothesis, that is, a scientific guess. There is evidence that makes an evolutionary development of living bodies appear likely; there is no evidence that makes such a development a certainly known fact (in spite of those prominent voices, again). It is to be noticed that any type of evolution demands a Creator who set the process in motion, a Conserver who sustains it, and a Concurrer who goes along with it to support its activity and achievements. No evolutionary theory can, in the final analysis, dispense with a First Cause, A Creator, or, as some would say, God. Can a theist hold the theory that man's body has an animal origin? That is, can it be held as a hypothesis -- since scientific knowledge on the point is presently out of question -- that the body of a single individual man was an animal body (ultimately formed from the slime of the earth) into which a Creator (or God) breathed a human soul? For such a belief there is absolutely no evidence, yet the hypothesis in itself is not in open conflict with philosophical theism or even with Christian revelation. Summary of the Section In this Section we have defined life both in basic fact (in actu primo) and in actual exercise (in actu secundo). We have described the manifestations of life in living bodies. We have seen that life in living bodies comes, in each case, from a substantial principle or source which is the substantial form of the living body; this substantial form is called the life-principle or the soul of the living body. We have discerned an essential difference between a living body and a lifeless body. We have learned that life in living bodies is of three essential kinds, and that these kinds are also essentially different grades; the three grades of life in living bodies are vegetal life, sentient life, and rational or human life. Of vegetal life, we have seen that it is characterized by three vital operations, nutrition, growth, and vital generation. Of sentient life, we have leaned that it is essentially different from and essentially superior to vegetal life, and that it has all the operations of vegetal life plus its own proper operations of sensation, appetition, and, usually, locomotion. We have learned that the soul or life-principle in plants and in animals is material, inasmuch as it depends for existence and function upon the organism which it actuates; that it is generated and corrupted accidentally, inasmuch as it emerges and ceases to be with the organism as a whole; that it is educed from the potentiality of matter and reduced thereto as the animal or plant is generated or dies. We have discussed the origin of species and have mentioned various theories which seek to explain it.
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