Science, Materialism, Mysticism

Matter and Mind

"advance" hits were scored in stringently conditioned experiments so greatly in excess of chance expectations that the odds against their being in fact due to chance were, on the most conservative estimate, of the order of 1032 (i.e. 1 followed by 32 zeros) to 1.

She takes it upon herself to return a clear answer to the four most important criticisms about such astonishing results. She writes: "First, the successes could not have been due to inadequate shuffling of the cards. No use was made of such relatively crude methods as hand shuffling: the order of presentation of the cards was systematically 'randomized', by methods which are familiar to statisticians, and which are fully described in the original articles.

"Secondly, the critic may point out that it is notoriously easy (as witness the case of the horse Clever Hans described in New Biology No. 5') for the agent (the alleged 'transmitter') to convey information to the subject quite unwittingly by the tone of his voice or by small unconscious movements. In Seal's experiments, however, agent and subject were unable to see each other, and the agent never spoke. The signal 'next guess' was given by a third person (referred to as 'the experimenter'), who sat close to the agent, but who, at the time of giving the signal, had not seen the upturned card.

"Thirdly, it may be said that the methods of statistical analysis employed must have been either (a) intrinsically unsound, or (b) unsuited to the particular type of material. The answer to (a) is that the methods employed were the normal techniques for the assessment of odds against chance, that to reject them would involve rejecting the whole mathematical theory of probability which forms the theoretical basis of statistics. As regards (b), the application of these methods to the experimental data was carried out under the supervision of some of the leading authorities in the country

' This horse was for a time believed by many people (including his owner) to be tapping out answers to sums held up before him on a slate. It was finally discovered that he was in fact responding to tiny unconscious signs of tension and relaxation made by the person holding the slate.

Page 194

including Professor R.A. Fisher, and none of the many statisticians who have since scrutinized the procedure have able to make any but minor criticisms which do not affect the statistical significance of the results.

"Fourthly, the critic may point out that the most perfect statistical techniques will give misleading results if they are applied to data that have been selected to prove a case. Can we be sure that nothing of the sort has happened here? Can we be sure, in other words, that the results statistically analysed are in fact all the results? - that the experimenters have never succumbed to the temptation (so familiar to those who have ever tried a promising hypothesis statistically) of saying, after an unsuccessful result, 'we won't count this one'? The answer can be given categorically. No result was ever ruled out after the event. The only results that were not included in the final calculations were the results of certain runs of guesses (such as the clairvoyant runs shortly to be described*), which it had been decided in advance should not form part of the main experiment."

After this sharp though brief scrutiny of the objections, Mrs. Knight elucidates the immensity of the odds involved and gives her general conclusions. "As already stated, the odds against chance in the second experiment with Shackle- on were of the order of 1032 to 1. What this implies may be made clearer by a parallel. The chance of guessing the day and month of a person's birthday correctly at the first attempt is, of course, 1 in 365 (if we disregard leap years). Now, as we can discover by the use of Logarithmic tables, 1032 equals approximately 36512; so that the odds against Shackleton's results being due to chance are equivalent to the odds against correctly guessing the birthdays of twelve people in succession. In short, though we can never completely eliminate the possibility that the results may be no "ore than a gigantic coincidence, the probability is so small

' The description is: "runs in which the agent merely touched the back of • card without looking at it."

Page 195

that it may in practice be disregarded: whether we like it o,. not, we must accept the conclusion that there is some cause- factor involved that we do not yet understand."

Then, facing "the most disturbing feature of the experiments... precognition," she searches for the most "plausible" explanation of the undeniable "cause-factor" - the explanation that would least demand the abandonment of theoretical presuppositions favourable to a materialistically inclined science. "The only remotely plausible explanation that has been so far offered," she writes, "is that put forward by the late H.F. Saltmarsh. Saltmarsh pointed out that (as has long been recognised) what we experience as 'now' has always some extension in time. Experiences, one might say, do not drop into the past, but fade into the past; a moment of time with no duration, like a point in space with no magnitude, is a mere conceptual artefact. Furthermore, the duration of the 'specious present', as it is technically called, varies with the individual's mental attitude; it is less when he is concentrating intensely, greater when he is relaxed. These facts are generally accepted, but the specious present has usually been regarded as extending only into the past. Saltmarsh, however, suggested that it may also extend a short distance into the future; and he further suggested that the duration of the specious present may be greater at the subconscious than at the conscious level, so that an event that is already past or still to come, for the conscious mind, may be 'now' for the subconscious. Telepathic communication is generally held to take place at the subconscious level, so that Saltmarsh's hypothesis would, if it were credible, provide a possible explanation of precognition. The hypothesis receives some support from the fact that when, in the experiment with Shackleton, the interval between guesses was increased from 3 seconds to 5, the subject became restless and irritable and ceased to score above chance expectations."

As Mrs. Knight notes, the extension of awareness into the future - which is the essence of the specific mystery of precognition - is not avoided by Saltmarsh's theory. Even to

Page 196

touch the future 3 seconds ahead is to revolutionise the whole meaning of time and causality and to raise the query whether the new meaning is compatible with materialism. Mrs. Knight records that most workers in the field of ESP argue that no physical cause can account for a subject's cognisance of future events. But to her the argument does not seem entirely conclusive. She states: "If we can swallow the colossal prima facie improbability that an event E2 can cause an event El which precedes it in time, it is surely straining at a gnat to suggest that the improbability is greater if E2 and El are physical than if they are mental events."

Some confusion is at work in this statement. Precognition implies not only that two periods of time - the present and the future - are as if at the same moment but also that two locations in space are as if at the same point, for event E2 and event El occur in different places as well as in different times, the former where the agent sits and the latter where the subject does. In other words, precognition implies telepathy into the bargain. Now, if we talk of precognition in physical terms instead of mental, E2 which is to occur in the brain of a person 3 seconds from now causes El which occurs just now in the brain of another person: the second person's brain knows at the moment what the first one's brain which will know the same thing 3 seconds afterwards makes it know. But brains are definitely separate entities located in space. To suggest that precognition occurs between brains is to put them not only outside the time observed in the physical universe but also outside that universe's space, for the two brains have had communication as if they had been existent at the same point. This is to contradict all that we know of brains, whereas of minds we may argue, as does Professor Price whom Dingwall and Parsons as well as Mrs. Knight quote, that they cannot be considered entirely separate entities: they cannot be reduced completely to spatial system such as brains are and, at least at the subconscious or subliminal level they have every appearance of being encapsulated", a joint entity. Mrs. Knight herself refers

Page 197

towards the end of her article to psychologists being familiar with the hypothesis of a "common unconscious" put for- ward by Jung who, according to her, "based his view mainly on the fact that certain symbols and images, which he called 'archetypes', and which bear very little resemblance to the experiences of normal life, occur with striking consistency in folk-lore, fairy-tales, dreams and the delusions of the in- sane." Hence, on her own admissions, the "colossal prima facie improbability" involved in precognition must be far smaller-if E2 and El are mental than if they are physical events. To refuse to believe they are physical events is not to strain at a gnat but to avoid swallowing a second camel on top of the first.

How big this camel may be can be gauged still more if in addition to looking at the common or collective unconscious m relation to space we look at it in relation to time. Jung has an eloquent passage: "If it were permissible to personify the unconscious, we might call it a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and, from having at his command a human experience of one or two million years, almost immortal. If such a being existed, he would be exalted above all temporal change; the present would mean neither more nor less to him than any year in the one hundredth century before Christ; he would be a dreamer of age-old dreams and, owing to his immeasureable experience, he would be an incomparable prognosticator. He would have lived countless times over the life of the individual, of the family, tribe, and people, and he would possess the living sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering, and decay." Something that could be "an incomparable prognosticator" may promise to be extended in the future no less than in the past and to supply a ground for the phenomena of precognition as well as of what parapsychologists call retrocognition or clairvoyant awareness of concealed past events. A sort of "altogetherness" seems a feature of the collective subliminal and it is hardly illogical to think of this feature as covering

Page 198

not space alone but time also. At least Dr. Jacobi, with Jung's authority behind her, has written: "The unconscious manifests itself in such a way that it seems to stand outside of space and time: it is spaceless and timeless." We have, on the other hand, no reason to think of brains as being free of time- limitations any more than of space-limitations.

A physical explanation of the precognitive experience is really ar1 impossibility. It would be an impossibility even if the telepathic experience were physically explicable. But that experience, too, defies physical explanation. Mrs. Knight is honest enough to concede about telepathy: "The upholders of mental causation must be granted their point, that belief in a physical cause of telepathy is at present little more than an act of faith." However, she enters a caveat. She asks us not to regard as entirely conclusive the argument that since telepathic communication, unlike all known forms of physical radiation, seems to be unaffected by distance, a physical explanation is untenable. She counter-argues: "The longest distance over which results of undoubted significance have been obtained is some 200 miles - between London and Merkses, in Belgium. The alleged evidence for telepathy over longer distances - as between New York and London - is quite unconvincing. To conclude from this data alone that telepathic communication is unaffected by distance may be as fallacious as it would be to conclude that wireless reception is unaffected by distance because we can tune in to Luxembourg as easily as to the Third Programme."

That "may", of course, is welcome as indicating that merely a possibility is being pointed out. And how poor the possibility is has been shown in the very next paragraph by Mrs. Knight herself: "The wireless analogy must not be pressed too far. It is true that electrical activity is continually going on in the brain, and that certain characteristic rhythms of brain activity can be picked up and recorded by appropriate instruments. These and similar facts have made the ""'an-in-the-street very receptive to the suggestion that-ESP lay be due to 'some kind of wireless effect'. But it must be

Page 199

emphasised that there is no evidence whatever that a hum brain is capable of picking up radiations from another brain or that the effect of such 'reception', even if it could occur would be to cause the recipient to have conscious experiences which were similar to those of the transmitter."

Yes, the possibility of "mental radio" is extremely poor Equally meagre is the chance of reducing telepathy to the action of "other sensory modalities besides those we already know" - modalities which, as Mrs. Knight says, must differ from the known ones not only in degree but in kind. Still, she is inclined to clutch at straws as when she writes that "if dowsing or water-divining can be shown to be a genuine physical phenomenon - say, a reaction to some kind of electromagnetic influence - there should be in the case of telepathy no premature closing of our account with physical reality." This is clutching at straws because she also writes:

"Admittedly, there is only a remote analogy between dowsing and ESP." A similar desperate concession to the supposed scientific temper of scepticism about the extra- sensory appears to be in the caveat to which we have referred.

Moreover, the caveat, taken even in isolation, is based on a mistake. Within a range of 200 miles it may be as easy for a Londoner to tune in to a place in Belgium as to the BBC in his own city and then the law of inverse square connecting distance with intensity in physical radiation may have no perceptibly crucial bearing. But examine the situation a little differently. Do not try to show that within such a range the intensity can hardly be proved to be always uniform or that, judging from short-distance experience, we should refrain from generalising that the intensity never weakens over any stretch of space. Try rather to answer the question: If telepathy obeys the inverse square law, would not a person who could send a telepathic message from Luxembourg to London produce with the same effort an enormously powerful effect from one room to another in the same house? There is no record of any such overwhelming impact at close quarters. This completely demonstrates that, unlike physical

Page 200

radiation, telepathy is unaffected by distance.

With the establishment of telepathy as being not due to physical causes, precognition, which is the greater marvel and which Mrs. Knight considers a fact as indisputable as telepathy, becomes a fortiori non-physical. All the small hesitations she feels bound to register have no value and impede not in the slightest the clear doom rung spectacularly of epiphenomenalism by ESP.

4

By studying Mrs. Knight's significant acceptances and clearing up the little doubts she entertains, we have shown that in ESP there is spectacularly irrefutable evidence of mind being not only a vera causa but also an independent existent in its own right with an extension beyond the individual organism and with operations that are outside the body and brain, outside even physical space and time, though capable of contact with them all. For this extension we have allowed the label introduced and discussed by Mrs. Knight herself - Jung's "common (or collective) unconscious".

Now we have to make some corrections about this extra- individual extension of mind. The first concerns what Mrs. Knight says of it at almost the close of her article. Her passage runs: "The hypothesis is consistent with the view which is now widely held on other grounds, that ESP does not, as was originally supposed, mark the beginning of a new stage of evolution, but that it is a relic of a more primitive function. In his address to the Zoological Section of the British Association in 1949, Professor A.C. Hardy suggested that telepathic communication may be most evident among gregarious animals and social insects; and if this were so, it would certainly help to solve some of the main theoretical problems of animal instinct. Observations made by Soal in his experiments confirm, up to a point, the view that telepathy is a primitive function since he finds that the majority of successful subjects are of the emotional, illogical,

Page 201

'intuitive' type, and that rigorous intellectual training on the whole, inimical to success. Women, on the whole, make better percipients than men, and children than ^

University students (from whom the majority of mental subjects have so far been drawn) are possibly the most unsuitable types of all, and it would seem n^ worth while to experiment with psychopathic and mentally defective subjects, or with patients who have undergone prefrontal lobotomy.'"

This passage has the appearance of a queer Parthian shot It seems to sink the status of ESP when ESP is found scientifically undeniable and when the odds against its being compatible with a materialistic philosophy are astronomical. Does Mrs. Knight forget that in her book of selections from William James she has stated that ESP very strongly recommends to us James's theory of a cosmic consciousness of varying kinds or a collection of several cosmic consciousnesses? Does she seriously mean to urge that such a consciousness or such a collection of consciousnesses is something altogether inferior to the human stage in evolution? To be able to work without the limited and fallible senses, to triumph mentally over physical space and have the possibility of exceeding the prison-house of the ego- mentality - do these implications of telepathy look like implications of "a relic of a more primitive function" than the human mind? And, remember, ESP is not confined to telepathy: there is precognition which mentally triumphs over physical time over and above including telepathic transcendence of matter and the space-relations of the material world. If possibilities are opened to us of being Plato's "spectator of all time and all existence", are we confronting a sub-human relic or the promise of a super- human development?

No doubt, the facts themselves of ESP are very primitive - reading of Zenner cards and the like trivialities; but they are

' A brain operation which puts some of the higher centres out of action.

Page 202

chinks in a wall beyond which lie gigantic vistas that are, in Mrs. knight's own words, "most disturbing" and "incredible" . Even "straight" telepathy, particularly if it be not due to physical causes, has, in her view, theoretical implications "far-reaching indeed". Precognition she regards as a more colossal wonder, whether it be physically or mentally caused , since "with its apparent implication that causation can work backward in time it seems

to violate one of the essential presuppositions of science." And yet phenomena magnificently revolutionary in significance are sought to he made typical of emotional, illogical, femininely "intuitive", infantile, psychopathic and cretinish subjects or of animal herds and insect communities!

We may grant that in a "common unconscious" there could be primitive or else chaotic or even demonic elements, since many layers of the subliminal are covered by that phrase. But surely this does not primitivise the whole of the subliminal. Surely, too, we may note in sub-human or non- intellectual stages an easier operation of telepathy and still avoid the howler of refusing to see in it and all the more in precognition a sign of the next stage in evolution. If rigorous intellectual training is, on the whole, inimical to success in ESP, then there is something wrong with intellectuality - a defect which, for all the glorious things intellect can do, is an obstacle in evolutionary progress. It is a commonplace that intellectual activity of the abstract kind is not the whole of human culture - the romantic temperament, the artistic "imagination, the social sense, the ethical emotion, the religious aspiration are some of the things that have to fill the gaps left by abstract thinking. The abstract thinker himself carries, implicit in his specific role, artistic and ethical and even religious attitudes: the feel of "form", the devotion to truth", the faith in the "reason" and "harmony" embodied in the universe and the thrill to its vast "comprehensibility". Then there is the part played by what Einstein does not hesitate to characterise as "intuition". Would it be right to say that the master thinkers in physics are being "primitive"

Page 203

in a derogatory sense when, by being intuitive and making difficult theoretical leaps sheer beyond any possible inductive suggestion from empirical data/ they light upon mathematical constructions like those of relativity theory? There are levels of intuition - and just because the word "intuitive" has been debased by popular novelists who mostly apply it to feminine "hunches" we should not consider it unfit for distinguishing an evolutionary stage higher than our present one in which the abstract intellect has much to say.

Besides, what is the essence of the "logical necessity" by which the abstract thinker guides himself, determining one step to be correct and another incorrect, choosing his course and arriving at conclusions? It is certainly not something which can itself be argued out. To argue out anything, we already take for granted that there is logical necessity. Arguments are justified by the presence of logical necessity:

the presence of logical necessity cannot be justified by arguments. We cannot use logic to prove logic. Logical necessity is beyond proof. Its basis lies in self-evidence, in intuitive perception by us. The logical operation of the intellect is intuitive through and through, though the intellect in its general functioning is not a directly intuitive agent and has laboriously to construct tentative and uncertain knowledge by various means unlike the authentically intuitive consciousness of an ultra-mental sort which would carry the seal of its own knowledge by an inner identity with its object. Intuitiveness is not necessarily sub-intellectual, and in its authentic form it is something which intellectuality would impede by its lower mode of working. Not that intellectuals cannot be authentically intuitive as much as any other type:

they can, but by quieting the usual activity of the intellect, going within themselves, becoming receptive to some sort of inspiration or revelation, most often by surrendering their problems to the subliminal and suddenly finding them solved or at least greatly simplified and elucidated.

Page 204

As with intuition, so with telepathy and precognition: acute intellectuality would interfere with the working of a higher mode of mentality which acts without both sense- observation and logical inference. Non-intellectuals may more easily prove transmitters of a cosmic consciousness's hidden powers. This does not mean that these powers are sub-intellectual: it only means that intellectuality is to be surpassed and not clung to as the grand finale of psychological evolution. The intellect may be a fine instrument for formulating and expressing truth: it may not be the best instrument for discovering truth. An intellectual who is not too proud of his own activity nor too attached to its analytic operations but can open himself to deeper and higher ranges of awareness by a certain in-drawn passivity would undoubtedly be as telepathic and precognitive as one who is less "cerebrotonic". ESP tests show that a relatively passive state is what is most helpful. To quote Mrs. Knight: "Thouless found that the best results were obtained when the subject was not greatly concerned about the results of the experiment, and was not consciously trying to make a high score." Besides, ESP is acknowledged to be a subliminal affair signalled to the surface mind. Mrs. Knight says that telepathic communication is generally held to take place at the subconscious level, and the subconscious character of precognition is indicated by her comment: "Though the term 'extra-sensory perception' is convenient and widely used, it must be realised that the subject's experience differed in many ways from what is ordinarily called perception. Usually, he had no idea whether or not he was guessing right - a right guess 'felt' no different from a wrong one: and furthermore, and more surprisingly, the recording of the guess, whether in speech or writing, seemed to be accompanied by a minimum of conscious ideation." Now, intellectuality is the most sharply

I awake of the psychological workings that take place this side of the threshold of consciousness; so, naturally, it would tend to render openness to the other side rather difficult.

Page 205

This difficulty is no sign that what is on the other side is inferior to intellectuality. Just because receptiveness to that side is easier to the non-intellectual we do not prove the "primitiveness" of what happens there or comes from there And just because anthropology brings evidence of ESP as a far more frequent occurrence among primitives the source that is tapped does not grow aboriginal. And just because gregarious animals and social insects may be communicating on a larger scale by telepathy the power employed does not get stamped as a sub-human function surviving in us like the operation of a not quite atrophied vestigial organ. The same more-than-intellectual power can be contacted on a low level and a high one: its manifestation in civilised man can have results quite different from those obtained among cattle and ants or among savages.

The mentally developed state may be somewhat of a stumbling-block to its manifestation, but this state has come about from an evolutionary necessity and represents a transcendence of the animal level, a new perceptive and conceptive orientation in the surface consciousness, without which whatever more-than-intellectual power exists cannot operate in its largest or profoundest or most luminous mode as a surface presence. The obstruction this state may offer to that power has been accepted as a price for keener surface evolution: this state is not meant to be discarded, it has to be made compatible with that power. A problem of accordance and adjustment is here because both the elements are desirable, and the fact that sub-human creatures may have more facile ESP than humans, and primitives than civilised men, and non-intellectuals than those with "rigorous intellectual training", merely underlines the toughness of the problem to be solved and does not indicate that ESP fails mark the beginnings of a new stage of evolution. Perhaps Mrs. Knight and others who share her view are under wrong impression that the development of ESP must involve the loss of mind in general and intellect in particular, the of man's proper differentia as the highest evolute so far, and

Page 206

therefore conclude that it would signify a regression rather than a progression.

In any case, one good service our author's mistake does to the thesis we have been unfolding. By drawing attention to the biological antiquity, so to speak, of ESP and to the likelihood suggested by Dr. Hardy of ESP's prevalence among animals and insects she helps the whole evolutionary process to stand out in a more than materialistic light and the once-fashionable theory of chance and of blind forces to look far less plausible than the hypothesis of a universal subliminal which transcends material structure, is independent of it and possesses diverse ranges ("several cosmic conscious- nesses", in James's phraseology) pushing through matter, overcoming difficulties of function across millennia and slowly moulding forms for its manifestation in a scale of higher and higher organisation corresponding to its own order of levels. The interaction between it and matter would explain the most striking phenomenon in evolutionary history - the paradox of, at the same time, "crass casualty" and subtle purpose.

But to get our thesis into proper focus we must go behind the Jungian choice of the word "unconscious" which we have allowed so far. It is clear that a universal subliminal such as we have been led inexorably to assume on the available scientific evidence cannot be any real unconscious- ness through and through. The Jungian designation is a misnomer and has arisen from an inaccuracy in the logic of psycho-analytic observation. The only direct observation the psycho-analyst makes of the subliminal is via dreams. And -lung's comment apropos this observation is: "It seems to us as if the collective unconscious, which appears to us in reams, had no consciousness of its contents - though, of course, we cannot be sure of this." Indeed all the less sure can we be in face of what Jung, like all other psycho-analysts "o treat of the subliminal, admits: "The unconscious Perceives, has purposes and intuitions, feels and thinks, as does the conscious mind.... It is a fact that the unconscious

Page 207

contains subliminal perceptions whose scope is nothing less than astounding.... Today we know for certain that the unconscious contains contents which would mean an immeasurable increase of knowledge if they could only be made conscious." What actually happens in dreams is that the "capsulated ego" is not able to retain its usual consciousness and begins to drift on some unplumbed tide of being info which it frequently sinks or which often washes away its clear lines of self-existence. It is from the capsulated ego's experience that we transfer unconsciousness to the subliminal. The unconscious should be defined as a consciousness of which we are not the possessors rather than as something which is itself inherently unconscious.

But what then becomes of Jung's characterisation in one place: "Exclusiveness, selection and discrimination are the root and essence of all that claim the name of consciousness"? According to him, the deeper we go into the subliminal the less of individual insularity and of exclusiveness, selection and discrimination do we come across and at last we touch a level where exist a number of patterns, called "archetypes" by him, which are common to the whole of humanity, and then we have the collective unconscious which, says he in vivid evocative phrases, "is anything but a capsulated personal system; it is the wide world, and objectively as open as the world... a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside/ no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine arid no thine, no good and no bad. It is the world of water, where everything living floats in suspension; where everything living begins, where I am inseparably this and that, and this and that are I; where I experience the other person as myself, and the other, as myself, experiences me. No doubt, the subliminal impresses the psycho-analyst as being very unlike the tight and bounded and differentiate field of our awareness. But Jung's characterisation, in one place, of what is and what is not conscious is rather arbitral it generalises too much from a certain organisation of consciousness.

Page 208

And it seems to overlook two important points. surely the subliminal is not all an amorphous mass - there are persistent rhythms and recurrent patterns in it, without which no sense would attach to a term like "archetypes" and Jung would not be able to speak, as he does, of a structure or morphology of the unconscious. Surely, again, even within the particular psychological organisation to which alone he concedes the description "conscious" we have signs of an expansive, comprehensive and interfusing mode in the poet's "esemplastic" imagination and the synthesising and unifying sweep within the philosopher's progressive abstraction towards a "world-view", not to mention the mystic's rapturous vision and experience of oneness-in-manyness and diversity-in-identity. To call such states of consciousness a welling up of the unconscious is merely to quibble over terms. "Consciousness" need not be confined to our ordinary state: it can be various in organisation and pitch, it can be sub-mental and it may be supra-mental. To avoid un- necessary confusion and puzzlement we should mean by the established current word "unconscious" simply conscious- ness other than the surface kind which is usually ours or which we can recognise outside ourselves as in some way resembling it. And the common or collective unconscious is this consciousness at its deepest and widest - an ultra- individual cosmicity of multi-dimensional experience.

Yes, a veritable cosmicity and not only a commonalty behind the human or at most the whole of the organic. Particularly if we accept the principle of developmental and evolutionary continuity it has every mark of being a universal subliminal some of whose activities in the form of energy- releasing archaic symbolisms and mysterious personality- healing processes have been studied by Jung. In that case, it would be at work even through inorganic nature - but not Merely as what Julian Huxley chooses to name "psychoid activities of low intensity" undetectable by us though present .It would be confined to these activities if the psychological were nothing more than a concomitant of the physical,

Page 209

utterly dependent on the latter and corresponding to it complexity of organisation and, in fact, arising as a peculiar subjective aspect of the objective system. When the psycho- logical is seen as being far greater than epiphenomenalism allows, then what this enlarged or extended epiphenornenalism view grants can signify solely that the "psychoid activities of low intensity" a la Huxley are just the infinitesimal surface manifestations, the meagre and shadowy out-filtrations of the universal subliminal through matter: the universal subliminal" has magnitudes hidden behind its superficial potencies or impotencies in metal and stone, even as behind those in insect and animal and man.

We may suggest that on Jung's own notion of the collective unconscious a universal subliminal may be posited. According to him, the collective unconscious holds the precipitate of all meaningful experience from the beginning of life's and mind's appearance. But in his eyes the appearance of life and mind is itself out of a vast ground of the unconscious which he variously calls "libido", "psychic energy", "total force pulsing through and combining one with another all the forms and activities of the psychic system". The unconscious ground of psychic energy, there- fore, is pre-existent to the appearance of life and mind. What then is the relation between this pre-existent unconscious ground and the patterned contents which are regarded as the collective sediment of all human and animal experience - the sediment which keeps dynamically rising into the personal consciousness in diverse significant forms that are Jung s special study? Are they merely the precipitated result of life s and mind's experience during human and pre-human history? The fact that they keep dynamically rising suggests that they may not be just the product of life's and mind s experience but what was originally hidden in the unconscious and rose into that experience from a pre-existent store and sank back as sediment with whatever novelty was realised by the rise into consciousness. The suggestion 01 pre-existent store is reinforced by Jung's view that the chic

Page 210

dynamisms of the collective unconscious represent typical fundamental experiences of all human and even animal energy — the fl P"0" modes of activity, as it were, within life and mind, whose effect on the consciousness is determined on the one hand by the psychological history through which life and mind have passed and on the other by potentialities immanent in the unconscious. Jung compares these potentialities to the "axial system of a crystal, which predetermines the crystalline formation in the saturated solution" without itself having a particular form: the axial system controls merely the stereometric structure, not the concrete shape of the individual crystal: the concrete shape comes from the solution in which the precipitate occurs, the experience of all life and mind: the solution creates the images that crystallise on the potential axial system. Jung thus grants something immanent and potential which pre-exists as a determining principle in the unconscious before life and mind started their history as manifest forces on earth. The collective unconscious is not only the "womb" and the "unfathomable ground" from which life and mind appeared but also an existent which is far from being a mere void. So it could very well be a universal subliminal such as we have supposed on the score of evidence outside the psycho-analyst's clinic.

Here we are likely to be pulled up and told: "Whatever the evidence on which you have proceeded to your supposition, you cannot drag Jung in to add any plausibility to it. Has he not in an important context talked of the collective unconscious in association with terms of 'inherited brain structure', thus fitting it to individual physiology and bind- "^g it down to a particular material organisation?" Our reply . can be easily formulated. Dr. Jacobi whose authorised book ^ have already quoted in an earlier article explains: "The term brain structure, which is used by Jung where one would Perhaps expect psychic structure, must be properly under- stood. It is meant to point to the biological connection. For We psyche as it presents itself to us - i.e. as it is understood y Us — is connected with our bodily being. That does not by

Page 211

any means, however, imply biological 'dependence'." And Dr. Jacobi cites Jung's own statements: "The psychic deserves to be taken as a phenomenon in itself, for there are no grounds for regarding it as a mere epiphenomenon, even though it is associated with the function of the brain; just as little as one can conceive of life as an epiphenomenon of the chemistry of carbon." - "We can very well determine with sufficient certainty that an individual consciousness with reference to ourselves has come to an end in death. Whether, however, the continuity of the psychic processes is thereby broken remains doubtful, for we can today assert with much less assurance than fifty years ago that the psychic is chained to the brain." Jung will not support the epiphenomenalist. There is not scientific evidence for saying that the collective unconscious has any corresponding neural events in the individual body. Even the individual unconscious on its intuitive and inspirational side has not been shown by anything to be bound up with brain-tracks: its continuity with the collective goes all against such a bondage. The fact that even that part of the individual which is not subliminal has no real discontinuity with it but is in some way its surface manifestation goes in favour of its having also some transcendence of neural events. Jungian psychology, understood in its true position and attitude, does not contradict at all our thesis but contributes to it and rounds off the non-materialistic and pro-interactionist conclusions, applicable on even a cosmic scale, to which we have arrived by our manifold scrutiny of scientific opinions on consciousness and the brain.

Several lines of enquiry spring from these conclusions, directed towards the trends of organic evolution, the issue between dualism and monism, the problem of the individual's destiny, the method of conscious development in relation to the paranormal powers proved by ESP. The question we proposed at the beginning of the present series can be regarded as settled now. The one immediately relevant matter remaining to be dealt with is the short reply Mrs

Page 212

Knight has given to a brief criticism of ours, published in Science News 30, of her essay on this question. We shall, by way of a supplementary note, consider in a final instalment the merits of her reply.

Supplementary Note

In Science News 30, a reply based on part of the very first essay in this series was given by the author to Mrs. Knight's article in Science News 25 which had sought to prove invalid the famous argument of the interactionists against the epiphenomenalists or what Mrs. Knight called "the brain-dependence school", that the position of the latter is self-contradictory. Mrs. Knight had quoted and criticised McTaggart's brief formulation of the argument: "If materialism is true, all our thoughts are produced by purely material antecedents. These are quite blind, and are just as likely to produce falsehood as truth. We have thus no reason for believing any of our conclusions - including the truth of materialism, which is therefore a self-contradictory hypothesis." Mrs. Knight's contentions have been exhaustively examined by us and attacked from various angles and found to be untenable. In Science News 30, they were touched upon from only one angle which concerned itself with her analogy between the thinking brain and the electronic calculating machine. The editor of that periodical invited Mrs. Knight to defend her position. She wrote the following:

"In my article in Science News 25 I made two main points, viz (1) we accept results worked out by electronic calculators, though the functioning of the calculators is unaccompanied by consciousness, and (2) the laws of logic may have their counterparts in the functioning of the human brain, just s mathematical laws have their counterparts in the function- "8 of the calculator. Mr. Sethna takes exception to both Points. He says that I have 'overlooked the precise reason y electronic machines can calculate correctly and give us truth' - viz. that they 'work according to a man-made plan';

Page 213

and that I have failed to see that, if I draw an analogy between the calculator and the human brain, I must logically conclude that the brain, like a calculator was designed by a conscious being.

"To this I can only reply that (1) I did not 'overlook' the first point -1 took it for granted; and (2) no analogy is perfect, and I do not want to press this particular analogy nearly as far as Mr. Sethna supposes. He says that I 'equate' the brain and the calculator, but this was certainly not my intention. To take a parallel case - in lecturing on the sense of sight, I sometimes find it helpful to draw analogies between the eye and the camera, but this does not mean that I 'equate' the two.

"I agree that if I regarded the brain/calculator analogy as perfect I should have to infer that the brain was designed by a conscious being. But I do not regard the analogy as perfect, and I have no need to draw this inference, though most theologians would do so. I am content to say that the machine is a product of design and the brain (so far as we know) of evolution, but that instructive analogies can still be drawn between them.

"Towards the end of his letter Mr. Sethna says that 'truth... is absolutely irrelevant to... a brain-process or any other physical activity by itself.' If Mr. Sethna means by this that a brain-process cannot be true (or false), this statement is indisputable. But if he means that a brain-process cannot give rise to beliefs that are true (or false), he is begging the question."

Well, what shall we say about this reply of Mrs. Knight's? Like the article itself it seems to miss the fundamental issue - a strange thing for a mind like hers which has shown its acuteness and fairness in several articles on psychological themes.

She says that all analogies are imperfect and so there is no invalidity in her analogy just because it is not perfect. But how can she defend her analogy when the central point or contact, which would make it pertinent in spite of its imperfection,

Page 214

is not there? The electronic machine, in spite of its difference from the human brain, can be compared to the latter for the purpose of making the brain-dependence hypothesis plausible, if this machine does not positively imply man's mind acting the logician and mathematician independently of it and making "true results" possible to it. Since this machine does positively imply independent mental activity of a logico-mathematical order, we can only compare certain modes of mechanism in the calculator and the human brain, but never argue that the truth-quality of our beliefs can come about independently of mental antecedents. The whole controversy revolves round this truth- quality and that quality's independence of mental antecedents is precisely what the analogy forbids us to assert and what she tries to project from the calculator to the brain.

Here attention must be drawn to Mrs. Knight's peculiar presentation of my thought with regard to her analogy. While my discussion revolved round what I have called truth-quality, she makes it out to have been about design by a conscious being. She puts me in the same box as "most theologians" and thus subtly discredits my position. My letter was not couched in the somewhat naive and crude terms in which "most theologians" might state their case. I never implied that just as man directly designs and constructs the electronic calculator God directly designs and constructs the brain. The question of the brain having been the work of a conscious being was not brought in at all: what ^s asserted was the necessary presence of a mental determinant independent of the brain and acting upon and surfeiting cerebral processes. Of course, ultimately the other question cannot be shirked and the answer to it is definitely in the affirmative, but it can be tackled and decided on a more philosophical as well as more scientific plane than that of common theology.

I do not deny that the brain is a product of evolution and not exactly of design in the sense in which the electronic machine is. But I do not see that the sole alternative to calling

Page 215

it an evolutionary product is to follow "most theologians" All depends on our view of evolution. This is not the place to enter into an examination of evolution-concepts. But a brief comment must be made on the suggestion emanating from Mrs. Knight's remarks: "I am content to say that the machine is the product of design and the brain (so far as we know) of evolution." The suggestion appears to be, in the present context, that the activity, which happens in conjunction with brain-events, of seeing logical implications and arriving at a logically true conclusion, is a product of wholly blind forces at work during the long stretches of evolutionary history. The suggestion is but the epiphenomenalist theory applied to the process of evolution and blandly ignores the self- contradictoriness inherent in that theory and extending to this application. To conceive of the brain as a product of utterly blind forces is to overlook the very essence of "truth" in the logical sense. There may be some point in asking whether, for instance, the stomach which appears to do purposive action is not really the outcome of blind evolutionary forces: the entire Darwinian hypothesis was possible because the theory of natural selection showed that such a question could be asked without immediate self-stultification. But, with logical truth, there is always an "ought" involved: what conclusion ought to be drawn from certain premises? This "ought" calls for a real and not merely apparent weighing of alternatives and choice of direction - a process sui generis because of a sense of obligation to the ideal of correct inference. If a conclusion is reached simply because we must reach it according to predisposing physical factors, logical truth has no meaning. Here is not only mind but also something beyond sheer determinism whether physical or mental. If wholly blind forces have gone to the making of this process in evolutionary history and are still at work behind it we must stop discussing whether anything is logically true o false, whether the brain-dependence hypothesis is logically truth or a falsehood.

It is by its forgetting the distinction I made, in my reply,

Page 216

between a "must" and an "ought" that the closing para of Mrs. Knight's defence is as unsatisfactory as her plea for her analogy. She is thinking of truth and falsehood in some other sense than the logical which is here being discussed. Let me, at the risk of a little tediousness, dwell on this point. In the logical sense beliefs are true if they have been reached by seeing the logical implications of premises and coming to a reasoned conclusion. If only a brain-process gives rise to any beliefs, there is no real seeing of logical implications. What appears to be such seeing is nothing save an illusion, for the beliefs in question are dictated by the inexorable "must" of physical effects from physical causes without the intervention of any "ought". There need have been no reasoning at all: the conclusions had to be what they are by a blind physical necessity, not a seeing logical obligation. So it is meaningless to speak of beliefs logically true arising from a brain-process or any material activity by itself.

Mrs. Knight does not seem to grasp this and so she thinks I am begging the question. If I say that even a seemingly reasoned belief cannot arise from a brain-process I may be begging the question whether mental phenomena can be caused by physical phenomena. But if a reasoned belief is only seemingly reasoned, we knock all significance out of logical truth. That is what McTaggart bases his argument on, for in that case materialism which itself purports to be a reasoned belief can be logically neither true nor false or is just as likely to be false as true, being merely an effect inexorably determined by physical necessity. Where is any begging of the question in my assertion? I am only clarifying the question - and unless one realises what the question is, there can be no talk about beliefs logically true or false.

I am puzzled why Mrs. Knight has quoted me as saying truth...is absolutely irrelevant to...a brain-process or any other physical activity by itself." Quoted thus, I seem to supply the ground for a possible difference between saying that a brain-process cannot be true (or false) and saying that a "rain-process cannot give rise to beliefs that are true (or

Page 217

false). If she had quoted my actual words: "Truth or correctness in the logical sense the only sense concerned in the discussion", my point would have been evident, for then belief arising from a brain-process would have been seen immediately as resulting from a mechanical "must" and not a logical "ought" and therefore falling outside the realm of logical truth with which we are concerned. Indication of the specific sense in which "truth" has to be taken here would at once rule out the possibility of thinking that a brain-process can give rise to true (or false) beliefs or else that such a process can lead to beliefs true rather than false. The suggestion is unfairly made that I am indulging in a petitio principii.

The lack of substance and relevance in Mrs. Knight's rejoinder cannot help underlining our thesis against epiphenomenalism, which we have developed through four articles based on both philosophical reasoning and scientific evidence.

POSTSCRIPT (1958)

In Main Currents in Modern Thought, November 1957, pp. 36- 38, Dr. H. Tudo Edmunds, a medical authority, has written an article, "The Electro-encephalograph and the Mind", which is of extreme pertinence to our controversy with Mrs. Knight. This article very pointedly demonstrates how certain scientific findings seem to prompt the epiphenomenalist theory but how an extension of scientific enquiry itself is an aid to the opposite hypothesis. After discussing the common evidences of the Electro-encephalograph (E.E.G.), Dr. Edmunds writes in the concluding portion of his study:

"So far we have been dealing with minute electric cur- rents set up in the brain during what might be called its normal, everyday functioning, and the relation of function to current pattern has tended to confirm the common biological view that the mind is a product of the brain, and that different brains create different characters and personalities.

Page 218

However, when investigating less common mental phenomena such as hypnosis, extrasensory perception and telepathy the E.E.G. shows certain discrepancies which cast serious doubt on this belief. It is found that under hypnosis, when a subject's eyes are closed, but he is made to believe they ar0 open, his E.E.G. is still that of closed eyes. Similarly if his eyfi5 are open, and he is made to believe they are shut so that he acts as if he were blind, the brain still records that his eyes are not only open, but seeing. If the hypnotist induces a state of moderate or deep trance, the subject's brain does not register sleep, but shows him to be in a state of full or even heightened awareness of the hypnotist and any suggestions he may make. The inference would seem to be that the hypnotist succeeds in some way in by-passing the brain and establishing direct contact with the subject's mind, while the brain continues to record the actual physiological changes taking place, as if the hypnotist did not exist. In this way it is found that deep sleep produced by a hypnotist causes little or no effect on the E.E.G. rhythms, whereas normal sleep, or that produced by the action of an anaesthetic on the brain cells, causes marked changes in the E.E.G. findings.

"We are thus faced with a rather startling paradox, for if the mind is simply the product of the brain cells, then any change occurring in the one must be exactly related to a change in the other, for the function of an object cannot change unless the object itself changes in some way. Yet the E.E.G. shows that the mind can be deluded while the brain continues to function normally. Similarly, when a person experiences extrasensory perception such as telepathy or clairvoyance, the E.E.G. records a normal functioning of the brain, and not what would be expected if these thoughts and visual pictures had been conveyed to the person's conscious- ness through the usual sensory organs via the brain. We are thus driven to the conclusion that the mind is separate from the brain and uses the latter as an organ of expression.

"To many this may seem a simple truism, but to the

Page 219

materialist it is a disturbing discovery, for it breaks down the walls of his citadel and shows him wide vistas of a non- material country of which he has hitherto been completely unaware. Moreover he is faced with the fact that if the mind with all its known potentialities is a separate entity from the brain, he must be prepared to accept the possibility of its having a separate existence at death and perhaps during sleep. If this is so, it would account for many unexplained phenomena such as the ability of some people in trance to describe events in distant continents at the moment they are occurring, and numerous other experiences of a similar nature that are beyond the scope of this article.

"It would also explain why the great religious teachers of the world have always spoken of man as actually being a soul and possessing a temporary body as an instrument of experience, for they were probably not offering a hypothesis, but stating a fact of nature of which, in their greater wisdom, they were fully aware."

Page 220