< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu
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FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

265

If the suggestions of previous paragraphs are valid, correspondent with this vast organic universe we are compelled to imagine the existence of a universal consciousness in which each psychic element affects every other, and is affected by every other.

As I have said above, this conception, or conceptions closely allied thereto, have been reached by many thinkers who approach the subject from the most diverse standpoints. Let me quote two passages from lately published works by writers of eminence, in which this is exemplified.

In his 'World and the Individual'[1] Professor Josiah Royce tells us that

We have no right whatever to speak of really unconscious nature, but only of uncommunicative nature, or of nature whose mental processes go on at such different time-rates from ours that we can not adjust ourselves to a live appreciation of their inward fluency, although our consciousness does make us aware of their presence. My [Professor Royce's] hypothesis is that, in case of nature in general, as in the case of the particular portions of nature known as our fellowmen, we are dealing with phenomena of a vast conscious process, whose relation to time varies vastly, but whose general characteristics are throughout the same. From this point of view, evolution would be a series of processes suggesting to us various degrees and types of conscious processes. The processes, in case of so-called inorganic matter are very remote, from us; while in the case of the processes which appear to us as the expressive movements of the bodies of our human fellows, they are so near to our own inner processes that we understand what they mean. I suppose then that when you deal with nature you deal with a vast realm of finite consciousness of which your own is at once a part and an example.

And in Dr. Stout's 'Manual of Psychology'[2] we find the following words:

If the doctrine of psyche-physical parallelism is true the reason of the connexion between conscious process and correlated nervous process is not to be found in the nervous and consciousness processes themselves. Both must be regarded as belonging to a more comprehensive system of conditions; . . . In particular the individual's consciousness, as we know it, must be regarded as a fragment of a wider whole, by which its origin and its changes are determined. As the brain forms only a fragmentary portion of the total system of material phenomena, so we must assume the stream of individual consciousness to be in like manner part of an immaterial system. We must further assume that this immaterial system in its totality is related to the material world in its totality as the individual consciousness is related to nervous processes taking place in the cortex of the brain.

If the notions presented in the previous sections are warranted, then it appears clear that there must be in this universe an enormous variety of consciousnesses corresponding with the enormous variety of types of systematization in this universe. These consciousnesses must vary in breadth and complexity; and as certain minor systems within the whole vast physical system must be more closely systematized than others, so certain of these consciousnesses must be more closely systematized—more nearly closed systems—more self-contained—more individual—than others. Human consciousnesses would in this view be

  1. ↑ Vol. II., p. 225 ff.
  2. ↑ Ch. III., Sec. 4, p. 51 ff.
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