CHAPTER X MONADIC INTERCOURSE Don Quixote affirmed the two flocks of sheep were armies with such assurance that Sancho actually believed it, and said to his master, "And pray now, good your worship, what must we do?" "What," answered Don Quixote, but assist and support that side which is weak and discomforted? Thou must know, Sancho, that yonder host that fronts us, is led and commanded by the mighty Emperor Alifanfaron, sovereign of the great island of Trapoban; and that other belongs to his mortal enemy, the King of the Garamanteans, known by the name of Pentapolin with the naked arm, because he always goes to battle with the sleeve of his right arm tucked up."-Cervantes. IF we accept the view of monadic activity which sees in the image and not in the sensation the essential expression of mind, the problem of the intercourse of monads is completely transformed. The psychological inquiry has brought us back to the metaphysical problem already indicated in the discussion of the windowlessness of the monad,-the problem whether in conceiving the knowledge of the monad to be solipsistic we are not thereby rendering an intercourse between monads inconceivable. When we come to see, however, that intercourse depends not on the power of one monad to impart something of its substance to another, but on its power to evoke aesthetic activity in another, the problem is raised to a new and higher plane. It is generally admitted that at some stage of its activity the mind forms images; it is almost universally thought that this cannot be either the primitive or the essential function of the mind. Images seem in their very nature to be subjective and personal and supererogatory, their value being proportional to their verisimilitude to some objective reality to which the mind is passive and on which the image is moulded. Ordinarily this something objective is assumed to be the external world which makes impressions on the mind, but for the analytic psychologist it is perception, and perception has generally been taken to be an association of definite and distinct and specific sensations. On any sensation theory the problem of intercourse is insoluble because there is no way of association by which passively received sensations can become language, and without language (in the wide meaning, and not in the narrow meaning which restricts it to spoken or written words) there is no means of intercourse. On the other hand, when we conceive the mind in the first moment of its expression as an aesthetic activity, that is as an activity which expresses its intuition in imagery as the necessary preliminary of translating living force into outward action, then we see that the image is already language, and the problem of intercourse disappears. Human beings possess in speech a most highly developed and mobile language. Speech is indeed the distinctive feature of human nature, and has probably more than any other endowment secured to man his present predominant position over other living forms. It is dependent, as we know, on a special development of the cerebral cortex, contrived to give the human will control over a varied and immense range of delicately co-ordinated movements of the muscles of mouth, tongue, larynx, etc. Regarding the problem from the purely psychical side it appears to us that, by whatever chance or concomitance of chances it originated, language essentially depends on a logical, that is, a reasoning process, and that it has developed pari passu with the development of our logical power. Nothing else seems necessary so far as mental conditions are concerned. Because man had this reasoning power, no doubt at first feeble, tentative and imperfect, he had, we usually suppose, all the conditions necessary for discovering that there were other minds with whom by agreement as to external signs he could establish communication. The reason why animals do not speak is popularly held to be because they are more foolish than we are, that is more deficient as compared with us in the power of logical reasoning. We pity them on this account and think of them as our poor dumb friends. Now while undoubtedly spoken and written language is a refinement, dependent on the intellect, a special mode of mental activity, and conditioned by a special neural formation in the Rolandic area of the cerebral cortex, language in its wide meaning as the communication by outward expression of internal intuition is not distinctively human and is not dependent on any reasoning process. It is dependent on mental activity, but on an aesthetic not on a logical activity. It depends on images. Language means not that the sensitivity of one creature is communicated to another, and certainly not that the thought or idea of one person is of itself conveyed to another person, but that the image evoked by one mind can be made to evoke a corresponding image in another mind. The problem of intercourse therefore is clearly connected with the production of an image. What is the nature of this activity? An image is not something which is a common object to two minds. It is wholly private and personal to the mind which creates it. Intercourse therefore must mean that one mind can call forth the activity of another, and the power to do so is intimately connected with the activity which creates the image originally. This interconnexion of the activity of two minds would be impossible were the image only a mosaic formed by the external association within the mind of its passive experience, its data of sense. Intercourse is impossible and unmeaning if the interrelatedness it implies is conceived on the analogy of the ordinary action and reaction of things in the physical world. Such interaction is not and could not by any kind of transformation become intercourse. If we want an analogy of the intercourse of mind with mind in the physical world, we must seek it, not in the kind of compensation we discover in colliding billiard balls, but in a phenomenon like that of wireless telegraphy. In wireless telegraphy two instruments when tuned to the right pitch will respond to one another by reciprocal adaptation, the communication between them being established by the Hertzian waves. By the use of the discovery intercourse is established between two operators. If we complete the scheme by including the minds of the two operators we have an illustration of the relatedness of the monads in intercourse. There is no interaction in the scientific meaning. Expression in one mind evokes corresponding expression in the other, but that expression is not common to the two minds, is not shared by them, is not intercommunicated. Whatever form the expression takes in the individual minds, whether it be perceptual or conceptual, aesthetical or logical, it is incommunicable. Only when the two minds are attuned, like the instruments, is there intercourse, and the intercourse depends on the creation by each mind for itself of the appropriate imagery which expresses that accord. Let me illustrate what I mean by this psychical creation of imagery. Let us take a common instance of animal behaviour below the human, for example the behaviour of the chicken newly hatched. Any one may observe it. Very soon after its release from the egg the chick is running about with its fellows, obeying the cluck of its foster-mother, pecking at objects, swallowing some and rejecting others. It is indifferent to the presence of many living creatures in its environment, but immediately alarmed at the approach of others, running with the rest of its brood to the protection of the hen's covering wings. The creature's behaviour shows that it perceives and remembers. Let us assume that these faculties are part of its heritage; the important questions I wish to consider are the nature of the mentality, the mode of its working, and the product of the activity, of the creature's mind in so far as it is revealed in its behaviour. By a process of natural reasoning we suppose that the order of the creature's experience must be from without inwards. Its mind seems to be dependent upon the data it receives, and as the creature appears to us to be richly endowed with organs of sense, we conclude that these have an informing function, and that the mind, with its activity of perceiving and remembering, shapes and forms this matter by a process which is ultimately reducible to association. If any one will take the trouble to reflect on this notion it will immediately appear that it is the notion of an impossible process. Assume whatever inherited powers of perception and memory you like, limit those powers to the direct and simple interpretation of sensations, with their reflex or instinctive responsive actions, and see if you can in any conceivable way construct the experience. Think what the process of reasoning must be which has to combine and integrate the multitudinous sensations, simultaneous and successive, visual, auditory and tactile, pleasant and painful, graduated in intensity, extensity and protensity, into that range of conscious experience which constitutes the first day of life of a chicken. Do not make the mistake of thinking it is simply a time difficulty. Let one day be as a thousand years to the chicken, it is impossible to conceive the means by which it could bring the manifold of sense into the unity of its experience. But this difficulty is nothing to that of accounting for intercourse, even that limited intercourse which we denote by the term gregariousness. Call gregariousness an inherited instinct if you will, you must still form some concept of its mode of working. How with a mind purely passive to the apport of sensation, and active only in association, can you account for the social actions of the creature? To call it an instinct and leave its mode of working unexplained, and impossible to explain, is only to make more evident the bankruptcy of the notion that passivity to sensations and activity in logic exhaust the chicken's mind. Can we suppose the logical processes of perceiving and remembering associated sensations powerful enough of themselves to project sensations into the experience of another subject? The important thing is not the length of time nor the complexity of the process but the utter impossibility of conceiving either its initiation or its success. It is evident, of course, under any hypothesis, that a new-born living creature such as a newly hatched chicken brings with it in its physiological organization a latent energy of past racial experience. But this does not |