DISSECTING FOR A SOUL.
THE New York physician, Dr. Irwin, who has got into a scrape with a New York coroner for dissecting the brain of Mr. Irving Bishop too soon after his death, appears to have given as his reason that he had an understanding with Mr. Bishop that if he should be near him at the time of his death, he was " to examine the brain, to see if he could find any ex- planation of the thought-reader's mysterious powers," which Mr. Bishop himself very naturally said that he could not understand. If any one could " understand " not merely thought-reading, but thinking itself, we should be surprised ; but we should be still more surprised if any dissection of the brain helped the understanding of either the one process or the other. If Mr. Bishop and Dr. Irwin supposed that by looking at the grey matter in the brain, or the brain's con- volutions, or by tracing the course of any nerve, it would be possible to " explain " thought-reading or thought or any other act of mind, they were certainly even more credulous than curious. Indeed, upon the most grossly materialist view that can be imagined, the hypothesis was very wild ; for you might just as wisely dissect a vibrating chord in order to discover why the vibration in a neigh- bouring chord of equal length caused the same vibration to be set up in it, without any medium of communication
between them except the intervening air. No light, we take it, could be thrown on that question by dividing the fibres of the chord whose spontaneous response to neighbouring vibrations was to be investigated ; yet that, we imagine, would be the nearest physical analogy we can conceive to dis- secting a brain in order to explain the phenomena of thought- reading. The notion that even a physical cause must always be a visible object, is one of the most groundless that can be imagined ; but the notion that you can explain a mental phenomenon of any kind by setting to work to dissect the brain, is much more than groundless, as irrational as it is possible to conceive. Suppose even that the brain of a thought-reader did contain one convolution more than the brain of an ordinary mortal, what would that do towards explaining thought- reading ? One would not even know whether the convolution were caused by the thought-reading, or the thought-reading by the convolution, or whether they were mere co-existing phenomena, both due, perhaps, to some third cause which pro- duced both. And how that state of things could possibly furnish an "explanation" of any kind, we are entirely unable even to conjecture. What does "explanation" properly mean? It means nothing but the power of so connecting one fact or event with another fact or event, that the clear apprehension of a single principle covers both, so that the same act of judgment is equally applicable to either. We are said to explain the attraction of the moon to the earth in the same manner as we explain the fall of the apple to the ground ; not that we understand either, but that if we did understand either, we should understand both. We are said to explain the modification of colour which takes place when the ptarmigan turns white in winter, by the consideration that those ptarmigan which are white are less easy to distinguish from the fields of snow than those whose colour is contrasted with the colour of the snow ; and are therefore safer from attack and pursuit, and more likely to multiply. But in each of these cases, all that we effect by our explanation is to enable ourselves to see that whatever explains one physical phenomenon will more or less adequately explain another closely resembling it ; and so, too, we may explain mental phenomena by discovering which of them should be classed together as closely resembling each other in their significance. Or we may observe, of course, that some one physical phenomenon always accompanies some one mental phenomenon, as the rising of the sun accompanies a great increase of our mental energy and activity ; or that some one physical phenomenon always follows a given mental phenomenon, like the raising of our arm the volition to raise it ; but do what we will, we shall certainly never leap the gulf which separates a physical from a mental event. Nobody has asserted the impossibility of this with more confidence than Professor Tyndall himself. We might conceivably discover some change in the nerves which is in- separably connected with some mental operation ; but do what we will, we cannot bring any imaginable change in any physical structure a bit nearer in signification to any percep- tion, or thought, or hope, or fear, or love, or hatred. We have learned that when the mercury rises in a thermometer, we often undergo the sensation of heat, and when it falls, of cold ; but we have not learned, and never shall learn, to understand either feeling a bit the better for knowing that most physical substances expand when we feel the former sensation and contract when we feel the latter. We know that there is good reason to suppose that some vibration takes place in an invisible and intangible medium which we call ether, corre- sponding to our perception of the colour red, and another and shorter vibration corresponding to our perception of the colour violet ; but we cannot translate the sensation of red colour into the idea of a wave of any length, and still less can we imagine why the wave which accompanies the sensation of red should be longer than the wave which accompanies the sensation of violet. The leap from physical to mental must be a leap, and nothing but a leap, while man's con- stitution endures. There is something absolutely incom- mensurable between physical facts and mental experiences, and no man will be more likely to find out the secret of thought-reading by dissecting a brain, than he will be to find out why strawberries are pleasant to the taste by either analysing a strawberry or dissecting the human palate. There is hardly any credulousness which is so absurd as the credulousness of which those are guilty who expect to find inside the nervous system something that will explain a mental fact. You may possibly find a constant physical antecedent, or a constant physical consequent, or a con- stant physical accompaniment of a mental operation ; but for anything that deserves the name of explanation, you must keep to the world of mind ; directly you leap the gulf into the world of matter, you have abandoned the search for an explanation, and are studying at best only inseparable and simultaneous physical events, if even you are so fortunate as to hit upon those which are really inseparable, and not merely accidentally associated with the phenomenon you are studying.
As regards the explanation of thought-reading, there is, of course, a double difficulty. You have really to explain the secrets of two minds, of which two minds only one at most is acces- sible to the student. Mr. Bishop appears to have discovered that the attitude of expectant attention was essential to his success in reading the thoughts of others, and that it took a good deal of steady volition to keep his own mind in that attitude of expectant attention. Well, that, so far as it goes, though it goes a very little way indeed, is a step in the direction of explanation. Every one has noticed how frequently letters cross between correspondents who have neglected each other for a very long time. That looks very much as if the attention fixed by one upon the other had had the effect, though the distance may be considerable, of drawing the reciprocal attention of the friend who was first the object of anxious thought, and of eliciting a corresponding act of attention from him. But in this case, the only thought- reading is the distinct idea of the relation between the two friends, the handling of which, as it were, by the one, appears to produce the consequence that it is handled immediately after- wards by the other. Any true thought-reading, if it only goes so far as the discovery of a pin hidden by the person whose thought is read, is a much more complex affair ; and its explanation, so far as we may speak of explanation, must be looked for in the direction of the power which some people certainly have of producing by the silent concentration of their wills, an effect on the mind of a companion, and a much greater effect on the mind of one kind of companion than on the mind of another kind. It can hardly be doubted but that the will to discover what is in the mind of another is closely analogous to the will to control the mind of that other ; nor that if a persistent effort of will is somehow efficacious in revealing a silent wish, a persistent effort of will might also be efficacious in resisting the control of a silent wish. We imagine that Mr. Irving Bishop,—if he were, as we suppose, a really remarkable thought-reader,—must have had a great power of compelling others by his own silent will to will that their thoughts should be known to him, so that be may have discovered them by virtue of an effort on his own part which produced in them, perhaps without their realising it, a willing- ness that he should know what they were thinking of. If so, the direction in which to investigate would have been to ex- periment on persons who were encouraged, sometimes to con- centrate their wills in resisting his, sometimes to concentrate their wills in assisting his, and to see what the effect was in each case,—whether in the former case his thought-reading was more or less spoiled, and whether in the latter case it was more or less assisted, and rendered more easy, rapid, and perfect. That certainly was the direction in which explanation, in the only sense in which explanation is possible, might have been most hopefully looked for. As for dissecting the brain in order to detect the power of thought-reading, nothing more super- stitious has been done since the augurs examined the livers of birds in order to discover whether an army would win or lose a battle.
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