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There are contents in consciousness, sensations and perceptions, feelings and impulses, which the scientist must describe and explain too. But if the psychologist is the real natural scientist of the soul, this whole interplay of ideas and emotions and volitions appears to him as a world of causally connected processes which he watches and studies as a spectator.
One sense of materialism is the view that all mental phenomena are causally dependent upon physical phenomena in the above-defined sense of causal dependence. Whether this is the case or not, I do not profess to know.
What they do tend to prove, and what I for my part have no wish to deny, is that what we see is causally dependent upon our body and is not, as crude common sense would suppose, something which would exist equally if our eyes and nerves and brain were absent, any more than the visual appearance presented by an object seen through a microscope would remain if the microscope were removed.
Living matter is to be defined as “a unique chemical system, the molecules of which, by their peculiar reciprocal action, give rise to psychical and material processes in such a way that the processes of the one kind are always causally conditioned and started by those of the other kind.” The psychical phenomena he regards as transcendental, supernatural, “mystical,” yet unquestionably also subject to a strict causal nexus, although the causality must remain for ever concealed.
We hear a sound which we believe to be causally connected with the nightingale, and we see a sight which we believe to be causally connected with a nerve. But in each case it is only the sensation that ought, in strictness, to be called a datum. Now, sensations are certainly among the data of psychology. Therefore all the data of the physical sciences are also psychological data.
What, then, is the occasion and what the warrant for transforming perceived succession in time into causal succession, for substituting must for is, for interpreting the observed connection of fact into a necessary connection which always eludes observation? We do not causally connect every chance pair of successive events, but those only which have been repeatedly observed together.
We defined the "physical thing" as the class of its appearances, but this can hardly be taken as a definition of matter. We want to be able to express the fact that the appearance of a thing in a given perspective is causally affected by the matter between the thing and the perspective. We have found a meaning for "between a thing and a perspective."
But since we found that images can only be defined causally, we cannot deal with this suggestion, except in connection with the difference between physical and psychological causal laws. I come next to those characteristics of mental phenomena which arise out of mnemic causation.
Facts do not appear as causally connected, nor, if they did, would this guarantee that they will continue to do so in the future. The continuum of experience, we may add, is not given as a series of arithmetical units or geometrical equalities, unless we deliberately measure it out in accordance with mathematical principles.
For our very beings and understandings and consciousnesses, though but shadows in regard to any perfection either of outline or operation, are yet shadows of his being, his understanding, his consciousness, and he has cast those shadows; they are no more causally our own than his power of creation is ours.
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