What is the Sould
One of the most painful circumstances of recent
advances in science is that each one makes us know less than we thought we did.
When I was young we all knew, or thought we knew, that a man consists of a soul
and a body; that the body is in time and space, but the soul is in time only.
Whether the soul survives death was a matter as to which opinions might differ,
but that there is a soul was thought to be indubitable. As for the body, the plain
man of course considered its existence self-evident, and so did the man of science,
but the philosopher was apt to analyse it away after one fashion or another, reducing
it usually to ideas in the mind of the man who had the body and anybody else who
happened to notice him. The philosopher, however, was not taken seriously, and
science remained comfortably materialistic, even in the hands of quite orthodox
scientists.
Nowadays these fine old simplicities are
lost: physicists assure us that there is no such thing as matter, and psychologists
assure us that there is no such thing as mind. This is an unprecedented occurrence.
Who ever heard of a cobbler saying that there was no such thing as boots, or
a tailor maintaining that all men are really naked? Yet that would have been
no odder than what physicists and certain psychologists have been doing. To
begin with the latter, some of them attempt to reduce everything that seems
to be mental activity to an activity of the body. There are, however, various
difficulties in the way of reducing mental activity to physical activity. I
do not think we can yet say with any assurance whether these difficulties are
or are not insuperable. What we can say, on the basis of physics itself, is
that what we have hitherto called our body is really an elaborate scientific
construction not corresponding to any physical reality. The modern would-be
materialist thus finds himself in a curious position, for, while he may with
a certain degree of success reduce the activities of the mind to those of the
body, he cannot explain away the fact that the body itself is merely a convenient
concept invented by the mind. We find ourselves thus going round and round in
a circle: mind is an emanation of body, and body is an invention of mind. Evidently
this cannot be quite right, and we have to look for something that is neither
mind nor body, out which both can spring.
Let us begin with the body. The plain man
thinks that material objects must certainly exist, since they are evident to
the senses. Whatever else may be doubted, it is certain that anything you can
bump into must be real; this is the plain man's metaphysic. This is all very
well, but the physicist comes along and shows that you never bump into anything:
even when you run your hand along a stone wall, you do not really touch it.
When you think you touch a thing, there are certain electrons and protons, forming
part of your body, which are attracted and repelled by certain electrons and
protons in the thing you think you are touching, but there is no actual contact.
The electrons and protons in your body, becoming agitated by nearness to the
other electrons and protons are disturbed, and transmit a disturbance along
your nerves to the brain; the effect in the brain is what is necessary to your
sensation of contact, and by suitable experiments this sensation can be made
quite deceptive. The electrons and protons themselves, however, are only crude
first approximations, a way of collecting into a bundle either trains of waves
or the statistical probabilities of various different kinds of events. Thus
matter has become altogether too ghostly to be used as an adequate stick with
which to beat the mind. Matter in motion, which used to seem so unquestionable,
turns out to be a concept quite inadequate for the needs of physics.
Nevertheless modern science gives no indication
whatever of the existence of the soul or mind as an entity; indeed the reasons
for disbelieving in it are very much of the same kind as the reasons for disbelieving
in matter. Mind and matter were something like the lion and the unicorn fighting
for the crown; the end of the battle is not the victory of one or the other,
but the discovery that both are only heraldic inventions. The world consists
of events, not of things that endure for a long time and have changing properties.
Events can be collected into groups by their causal relations. If the causal
relations are of one sort, the resulting group of events may be called a physical
object, and if the causal relations are of another sort, the resulting group
may be called a mind. Any event that occurs inside a man's head will belong
to groups of both kinds;
Well, maybe not any event; to take drastic example, being shot in the head.
considered as belonging to a group of one
kind, it is a constituent of his brain, and considered as belonging to a group
of the other kind, it is a constituent of his mind.
Thus both mind and matter are merely convenient
ways of organizing events. There can be no reason for supposing that either
a piece of mind or a piece of matter is immortal. The sun is supposed to be
losing matter at the rate of millions of tons a minute. The most essential characteristic
of mind is memory, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that the memory
associated with a given person survives that person's death. Indeed there is
every reason to think the opposite, for memory is clearly connected with a certain
kind of brain structure, and since this structure decays at death, there is
every reason to suppose that memory also must cease. Although metaphysical materialism
cannot be considered true, yet emotionally the world is pretty much the same
as i would be if the materialists were in the right. I think the opponents of
materialism have always been actuated by two main desires: the first to prove
that the mind is immortal, and the second to prove that the ultimate power in
the universe is mental rather than physical. In both these respects, I think
the materialists were in the right. Our desires, it is true, have considerable
power on the earth's surface; the greater part of the land on this planet has
a quite different aspect from that which it would have if men had not utilized
it to extract food and wealth. But our power is very strictly limited. We cannot
at present do anything whatever to the sun or moon or even to the interior of
the earth, and there is not the faintest reason to suppose that what happens
in regions to which our power does not extend has any mental causes. That is
to say, to put the matter in a nutshell, there is no reason to think that except
on the earth's surface anything happens because somebody wishes it to happen.
And since our power on the earth's surface is entirely dependent upon the sun,
we could hardly realize any of our wishes if the sun grew could. It is of course
rash to dogmatize as to what science may achieve in the future. We may learn
to prolong human existence longer than now seems possible, but if there is any
truth in modern physics, more particularly in the second law of thermodynamics,
we cannot hope that the human race will continue for ever. Some people may find
this conclusion gloomy, but if we are honest with ourselves, we shall have to
admit that what is going to happen many millions of years hence has no very
great emotional interest for us here and now. And science, while it diminishes
our cosmic pretensions, enormously increases our terrestrial comfort. That is
why, in spite of the horror of the theologians, science has on the whole been
tolerated.
On
Denoting (1905)
Vagueness (1923)
Icarus
or The Future of Science (1924)
What is an Agnostic
Knowledge and
Wisdom
Why I am
not a Christian (06.03.1927)
In
Praise of Idleness (1932)
Of Co-Operation
(18.05.1932)
On Sales Resistance
(22.06.1932)
On Modern
Uncertainty (20.07.1932)
What is the Soul?
(28.09.1932)
On youthful
Cynism (1930)
Philosophical
Consequences of Relativity (1626)
On Astrologers
How
to become a Man of Genius
Education
and Disciple
What
Desires are politically important? (Speech at the Nobel Award, 11.12.1950)
Prolog to his Autobiography: What
I have lived for