The New Leviathan

By R. G. Collingwood

This early work by Robin G. Collingwood was originally published in 1942 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The New Leviathan' is an academic work on the subject of philosophy. Robin George Collingwood was born on 22nd February 1889, in Cartmel, England. He was the son of author, artist, and academic, W. G. Collingwood. He was greatly influenced by the Italian Idealists Croce, Gentile, and Guido de Ruggiero. Another important influence was his father, a professor of fine art and a student of Ruskin. He published many works of philosophy, such as Speculum Mentis (1924), An Essay on Philosophic Method (1933), and An Essay on Metaphysics (1940).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: May 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781473396036

Book preview

PART I

MAN

I

BODY AND MIND

1. 1. WHAT is Man?

1. 11. Before beginning to answer the question, we must know why it is asked.

1. 12. It is asked because we are beginning an inquiry into civilization, and the revolt against it which is the most conspicuous thing going on at the present time.

1. 13. Civilization is a condition of communities; so to understand what civilization is we must first understand what a community is.

1. 14. A community is a condition of men, in which are included women and children; so to understand what a community is we must first understand what men are.

1. 15. This gives us the scheme of the present book: Part I, an inquiry into man; Part II, an inquiry into communities; Part III, an inquiry into civilizations; and Part IV, an inquiry into revolts against civilization.

1. 16. About each subject we want to understand only so much as we need in order to understand what is to be said about the next.

1. 17. We know, or at least we have been told, a great deal about Man; that God made him a little lower than the angels; that Nature made him the offspring of apes; that he has an erect posture, to which his circulatory system is ill adapted, and four incisors in each jaw, which are less liable to decay than the rest of his teeth, but more liable to be knocked out; that he is a rational animal, a risible animal, a tool-using animal, an animal uniquely ferocious and malevolent towards his kind; that he is assured of God, freedom, and immortality, and endowed with means of grace, which he prefers to neglect, and the hope of glory, which he prefers to exchange for the fear of hell-fire; and that all his weal and all his woe is a by-product of his Oedipus-complex or, alternatively, of his ductless glands.

1. 18. Each of these themes would fill this book: but which of them would advance the inquiry whose lines I have laid down?

1. 19. We of the twentieth century hold ourselves bound to the tradition in these matters laid down by Bacon and Descartes in the seventeenth: to speak not merely ‘to the subject’ but ‘to the point’; to divide our subject into parts, to arrange the parts in such an order that what is said about each prepares the way for what is said about the next; and to say about each not all we know but only what need be said for the sake of that preparation.

1. 2. Of all the things we know or have been told about Man, which is the one thing that concerns us at the present stage of our inquiry?

1. 21. I answer: The division between body and mind. For civilization is a thing of the mind, and a community, too, is a thing of the mind. It follows that the ‘Man’ into which we are inquiring in order to prepare for our account of civilization is a ‘Man’ of the mind.

1. 22. If Man, as they say, consists of body and mind, our inquiry demands that we should dismiss research into man’s body as alien to our purpose and concentrate on the study of man’s mind: not all about it, but so much of it as will advance us towards the study of community.

1. 3. Man’s body is made of matter and the study of man’s body belongs to that group of studies which are concerned with ‘the material world’: what are called the natural sciences.

1. 31. To say that, separately considered, the several parts of man’s body are ‘matter’ is to say that they behave according to laws investigated by physicists and chemists.

1. 32. Whether these are two sciences or one is a question we need not here raise.

1. 33. Collectively considered, these same parts are an organism: that is to say, a thing whose special characteristic it is to be alive.

1. 34. What being alive is, I leave to the physiologists.

1. 35. If anybody were to ask me: ‘What is life?’ I should reply: ‘It is what physiologists investigate.’

1. 36. Whether physiology is the same as physics and chemistry, or different from one or both of them, is another question we need not here raise.

1. 4. Some reader may think it strange to define matter in terms of physics and chemistry (1. 31) and life in terms of physiology (1. 35); and may think it better to define physics and chemistry in terms of matter, and physiology in terms of life.

1. 41. ‘Physics and chemistry’, he may say, ‘is the Science of Matter; and everyone knows what matter is. Physiology is the Science of Life; and everyone knows what life is.’

1. 42. Egregious blunder! A beginner in physics or chemistry does not know what matter is, and if he thinks he does it is the duty of his teacher to disabuse him; but he knows what physics or chemistry is; it is the stuff in this red text-book, or the stuff old So-and-so teaches, or the stuff we have on Tuesday mornings.

1. 43. The beginner has in his head a definition of the science; a childish definition, perhaps, but still a definition; of the science’s subject-matter he has no definition at all.

1. 44. Only the hope of a definition. ‘I don’t know what life is, but I hope I shall when I have studied physiology for long enough.’

1. 45. ‘That is true for a beginner in physiology; but for a master in physiology the reverse is true; a master in physiology has found out all that it can tell him and knows what life is. A beginner in physiology does not; for him physiology is definable and life as yet, except in the language of hope, indefinable.’

1. 46. A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that this expected reversal is never going to happen and that he is going to be a beginner all his life.

1. 47. A physiologist who has learned that lesson can certainly offer a definition of life; but this will only be an interim report on the progress of physiology to date. For him, as for the beginner, it is the nature of physiology that is relatively certain; the nature of life that is relatively vague.

1. 48. For each, life is definable (so far as it is definable at all) only in terms of physiology; never physiology in terms of life.

1. 5. To think that physics or chemistry ought to be defined in terms of matter or physiology in terms of life is more than an egregious blunder; it is a threat to the existence of science.

1. 51. It implies that people know what matter is without studying physics or chemistry, and what life is without studying physiology.

1. 52. It implies that this non-scientific and pre-scientific knowledge concerning the nature of matter or life is perfect and final, so far as it goes, and can never be corrected by anything science can do.

1. 53. It implies that, if anything scientists imagine themselves to have discovered about matter or life or what not is inconsistent with anything contained or implied in this non-scientific and pre-scientific knowledge, the scientists have made a mistake.

1. 54. It implies that, if they have made the mistake by using (for example) experimental methods, it is experimental methods that are at fault and must be abandoned.

1. 55. It implies that, if they have made the mistake by arguing logically, it is logic that is at fault and must be abandoned.

1. 56. It implies that any scientist who will not yield to persuasion and confess the supremacy of non-scientific or pre-scientific knowledge over all possible scientific inquiry must be made to yield by any means that can be devised.

1. 57. At one blow, by enunciating the apparently harmless proposition that physics or chemistry is the science of matter, physiology the science of life, or the like, we have evoked the whole apparatus of scientific persecution; I mean the persecution of scientists for daring to be scientists.

1. 58. In whose interest is such a persecution carried on? Who stands to gain by it? The nominal beneficiary differs from time to time: sometimes it is religion, sometimes statecraft, and so on. None of these has ever in fact gained a ha’porth of advantage. The actual beneficiary has always been obsolete science.

1. 59. A given science, in its progress down to the year y1, has reached certain conclusions which we will call c1 Later, in the year y2, it has demolished these and arrived at the conelusion c2. At the time y2 religious or political authorities who learned the doctrine c1 at school and have never learned anything else (or perhaps never even in their youth learned what scientists were then teaching, but only something which had been taught long ago) learn to their horror that scientists are now teaching the doctrine c2.

1. 6. Their loyalty to the long-dead scientists who taught them to believe in c1 boils over, and they call upon all the powers of Church and State to suppress this new doctrine c2, whose only fault is that while it was growing up they were asleep. Their persecution succeeds, as John Stuart Mill long ago remarked that persecution generally does; and who is the gainer? The scientists who taught c1? But they are dead. The gainer is their obsolete doctrine.

1. 61. Man’s mind is made of thought.

1. 62. What this statement means I shall explain in the sequel; I will not linger over it now.

1. 63. I will only say two things: first, that thought is both theoretical and practical.

1. 64. Theoretical thought is, for example, thinking about the cold, or thinking about the difference between cold and hot, or thinking that yesterday was even colder than to-day.

1. 65. Practical thought is, for example, thinking whether to light a fire or thinking that you will go back to bed, or thinking: ‘Why should I have the window open?’

1. 66. Secondly, that thought is primarily practical; and only in the second place theoretical, because it is in the first place practical.

1. 67. Its theoretical forms depend more completely on its practical than its practical do upon its theoretical; without theory there would only be a few rudimentary types of practice, but without practice there would be no theory at all.

1. 68. It would be a more disastrous mistake in the science of mind to forget that thought is always practical than to forget that it is sometimes theoretical.

1. 7. There are sciences which investigate mind; but they have certain peculiarities distinguishing them from the ‘natural sciences’.

1. 71. Their principle is that whereas from a natural science a man often learns something utterly new to him, the sciences of mind teach him only things of which he was already conscious.

1. 72. Any form of consciousness may be reflected upon; that is, it may become the object of another form of consciousness.

1. 73. Let a man have a certain form of consciousness, C1. Let him reflect on this: let him, that is to say, call into being in himself another form of consciousness, C2, the consciousness of C1.

1. 74. Whatever a science of mind can tell him about C1, is something of which he was already conscious in the state C2.

1. 75. This does not mean he already knew it, whether by the organized or systematic knowledge called ‘science’ or by the random, unsystematic knowledge called ‘experience’,¹ which is the raw material out of which ‘science’ is made by arranging it in systematic form.

1. 76. But when it has been thus worked up every element in the resulting product is derived from the original raw material; for every question has been asked and answered ‘with your eye on the object’, where the object is C1 and the eye C2.

1. 77. The answer to any question in any science of mind is provided by reflection. Any man who answers that question must already have reflected on the function he is studying, or he could not answer it. Any man who understands (let alone accepts or rejects) the answer must have reflected on the same function, or he could not understand it.

1. 78. The two are exactly on a level so far as the materials for the science are concerned.

1. 79. The only advantage the first has over the second is in deciding what questions to ask.

1. 8. Whatever questions he asks, the answers depend on the extent of his own reflection; not on distant travel, costly or difficult experiment, or profound and various learning.

1. 81. The second has exactly the same resources for checking the answers as the first for giving them.

1. 82. The only way in which the first can establish an ascendancy over the second is by talking so obscurely that the second does not know what he is talking about. This is the infallible mark of one who deals with the sciences of mind in the spirit of a charlatan.

1. 83. Man as body is whatever the sciences of body say that he is. Without their help nothing can be known on that subject: their authority, therefore, is absolute.

1. 84. Man as mind is whatever he is conscious of being.

1. 85. The sciences of mind, unless they preach error or confuse the issue by dishonest or involuntary obscurity, can tell us nothing but what each can verify for himself by reflecting upon his own mind.

1. 86. Any lesson which he is too poor a hand at reflection to verify he cannot learn at all; the most he can do is to repeat parrot-wise the words in which it was taught.

1. 87. A man who wants to know what he is in his capacity as mind has no need to ask a specialist, and no specialist has any right to demand his acceptance of any particular answer.

1. 88. The general form of answer to any such question is: In teipsum redi. You have the makings of the answer in your own consciousness. Reflect, and you will find what it is. In the meantime I offer you the fruits of my own reflection, so that ‘the pains left another, will onely be to consider, if he also find not the same in himself. For this kind of Doctrine, admitteth no other Demonstration.’¹

¹ A name for ‘propositional thinking’ (11. 22).

¹Leviathan, p. 2.

II

THE RELATION BETWEEN BODY AND MIND

2. 1. MOST people, probably, have thought of man’s mind as inhabiting his body somewhat as he inhabits a house.

2. 11. Traditional folk-lore is full of stories that testify not only to the past prevalence of this belief but to its permanent hold over men’s minds.

2. 12. For as long as the story expressing a belief is still told the belief is alive, though the people in whom it is alive may know that it is childish and would be quick to disown it.

2. 13. Childish it certainly is; for nothing can inhabit a house made of matter except something else made of matter.

2. 14. Nobody can entertain this ancient belief, therefore, except either a person who does not know enough about man’s body to know that it is made of matter, or a person who does not know enough about man’s mind to know that it is not.

2. 15. A story that can only survive by ignorance of its subject-matter can have no scientific interest. Let us call it an old wives’ tale.

2. 2. Suppose a man who had lately believed this old wives’ tale grew dissatisfied with it.

2. 21. Suppose he said: ‘The mind is more intimately connected with its body than an inhabitant with his house.

2. 22. ‘There seems to be a sympathy between the two. Hardly anything happens to the mind without a corresponding thing happening to the body, and vice versa.

2. 23. ‘This correspondence between body-events and mind-events I will call (for I like long words, especially when derived from the Greek) psycho-physical parallelism.’

2. 24. Has this man taken the step from old wives’ tales to scientific theory, or has he only moved from one old wives’ tale to another?

2. 25. ‘Psycho-physical Parallelism’ is another old wives’ tale. If a mind does not really live in its body it does not really run parallel to its body, and what is more nobody thinks it does.

2. 26. Parallelism is a geometrical idea presupposing a space of at least two dimensions in which two lines run, each preserving its equidistance from the other, not meeting.

2. 27. Psycho-physical Parallelists do not really think that mind-events and body-events occur in pairs at equidistant places. They do not even want to be regarded as thinking so. They would be rather vexed than flattered if you took them so seriously as to ask: ‘What is the unvarying distance between any mind-event and the corresponding body-event?’

2. 28. They would protest that this was breaking a butterfly upon the wheel. They use the word ‘Parallelism’ only because it is long and sounds learned. They don’t mean anything by it; at any rate, not what they say; all they mean is that there is a one-one relation between a mind-event and its corresponding body-event, and that this is not a causal relation.

2. 29. ‘One-one relation’ sounds more up-to-date than ‘parallelism’: less mellifluous, more appropriate to an age of rubber truncheons. But it is just as evasive. It hints mathematical implications which it does not mean you to take seriously. You are told that a single mind-event is never correlated with a group of body-events, or vice versa: but if you thought you were meant to believe this, you would find that you had only been listening to another old wives’ tale.

2. 3. One bids farewell to ‘Psycho-physical Parallelism’ with regret. It is a pity that so nice a derangement of epitaphs should turn out to mean simply nothing at all. But if sadder we are wiser. We have learned that polysyllabic phrases do not necessarily conceal profound significance; they may conceal a desire to persuade the simple that there is significance where there is none.

2. 31. Alternatively, a man who grows dissatisfied with the first old wives’ tale may say (priding himself a little, perhaps, on being too clever to fall into psycho-physical parallelism): ‘Anyhow, body-events and mind-events do not form two parallel series, proceeding each on its own way without mutual interference.

2. 32. ‘For there is mutual interference. The pain which occurs as a mind-event when a kick on my shin occurs as a body-event cannot be traced to any origin in the mind-series; it is a mind-event, due to a body-event.

2. 33. ‘The kick with the pain it produces is a breach of parallelism. It is a case of interaction; a case where body acts on mind.

2. 34. ‘Similarly there are cases where mind acts on body. The movements of my hand as I write these words are not due to previous body-events, though no doubt previous body-events such as eating my breakfast are more or less indispensable conditions of them; they are due to mind-events, namely my wish to write the words.’

2. 35. Here is a third old wives’ tale called, no less pompously than the second, and for the same discreditable motives, Psycho-physical Interactionism. The idea is that mind acts on body and body on mind.

2. 36. How body acts and is acted upon it is for the physicist to tell us. Different schools of physicists have answered in different ways; but all schools have agreed that however one body acts it can only act upon another body, and however one body is acted upon it can be acted upon only by another body.

2. 37. Challenge any Psycho-physical Interactionist to put forward any account of Psycho-physical Interaction which any school of physicists will accept as regards the physical end for anything except nonsense, and you will find no takers.

2. 38. You will find that the Psycho-physical Interactionist already knows his own ideas to be what any physicist would call nonsense, and will counter-attack by maintaining that physicists know nothing about physics; in fact, by what I have called evoking the apparatus of scientific persecution (1. 57).

2. 39. Who, in this case, is the beneficiary? The man who wants to palm off an old wives’ tale as a theory of the relation between body and mind.

2. 4. The truth is that there is no relation between body and mind. That is, no direct relation; for there is an indirect relation.

2. 41. ‘The problem of the relation between body and mind’ is a bogus problem which cannot be stated without making a false assumption.

2. 42. What is assumed is that man is partly body and partly mind. On this assumption questions arise about the relations between the two parts; and these prove unanswerable.

2. 43. For man’s body and man’s mind are not two different things. They are one and the same thing, man himself, as known in two different ways.

2. 44. Not a part of man, but the whole of man, is body in so far as he approaches the problem of self-knowledge by the methods of natural science.

2. 45. Not a part of man, but the whole of man, is mind in so far as he approaches the problem of self-knowledge by expanding and clarifying the data of reflection.

2. 46. The natural sciences have already made some progress towards describing man in their own way. Friends of these sciences believe that this progress will continue if natural scientists are allowed to go on working.

2. 47. Some who profess to be friends of the human mind, and show their friendship by showing enmity towards natural science, one of the human mind’s most triumphant successes, hope it will stop because, they fancy, whatever in man proves recalcitrant to explanation by the natural sciences will prove itself to be not body but mind; if nothing does, the inference will be that man is all body and therefore has no mind.

2. 48. Nothing could be sillier. In the natural sciences, mind is not that which is left over when explaining has broken down; it is what does the explaining. If an explanation of mind is what you want, you have come to the wrong shop; you ought to have gone to the sciences of mind.

2. 49. The ‘indirect relation between body and mind’ (2. 4) is the relation between the sciences of body, or natural sciences, and the sciences of mind; that is the relation inquiry into which ought to be substituted for the make-believe inquiry into the make-believe problem of ‘the relation between body and mind’.

2. 5. Not that these make-believe inquiries are valueless. Hobbes, noticing the fictitious character of academic discussions, made the famous remark: ‘I say not this, as disapproving the use of Universities: but because I am to speak hereafter of their office in a Common-wealth, I must let you see on all occasions by the way, what things would be amended in them; amongst which the frequency of insignificant speech is one.’¹

2. 51. This is scolding little girls for giving dolls’ tea-parties with empty cups and little boys for playing with wooden swords. Academic discussions and the frequency of insignificant speech belong to the world of make-believe.

2. 52. One chief pursuit of the immature animal, human or other, is to prepare itself for the dangers of real life, while its elders are protecting it from them, by making believe to face them; and this is the greater part of education; so that the office of universities in a commonwealth is to provide an unfailing flow of insignificant speech.

2. 53. For speech is man’s weapon against the dangers of his own world, and insignificant speech is what he teaches his cubs as his fellow creatures teach theirs to bat without clawing and nip without biting.

2. 54. Man’s world is infested by Sphinxes, demonic beings of mixed and monstrous nature which ask him riddles and eat him if he cannot answer them, compelling him to play a game of wits where the stake is his life and his only weapon is his tongue.

2. 55. That is why men teach their offspring to use their tongues in a kind of puppy-play where all speech has to be as insignificant as a doll’s teacup is empty or a boy’s sword harmless; where the talk is only pretence talk or what is called academic discussions and the problems talked about are only pretence problems or what are called academic problems; where the supervisors of these childish sports set for discussion ‘academic’ questions such as: ‘Compare the merits of Psycho-physical Parallelism and Psycho-physical Interactionism’, not because they fancy them significant but because they know them for nonsense.

2. 6. I have mentioned two approaches to the problem of self-knowledge: the natural sciences and the sciences of man (2. 44–5). I have suggested that the relation between them is one into which inquiry ought to be made (2. 49).

2. 61. I shall not undertake it. There is only one thing about it which has to be said here.

2. 62. Each is valid. Each is a search for truth, and neither goes unrewarded.

2. 63. Each, therefore, has its own problems and must solve them by its own methods.

2. 64. Neither can do anything but harm, either to itself or to its fellow, by trespassing on its fellow’s hunt.

2. 65. Of these two different forms of science, the one that has started a hare must catch it.

2. 66. The reason is plain. You can only solve a problem which you recognize to be a problem.

2. 67. The same methods, therefore, which led to the asking of a question must lead to the answering of it.

2. 68 If they cannot, at least no others can; for others will involve the recognition that the question needs an answer.

2. 7. Here you are in the middle of a problem. The same horse that got you into it must get you out again.

2. 71. No amount of admiration for some other horse must betray you into the FALLACY, OF SWAPPING HORSES.

2. 72. If the wretched horse called Mental Science has stuck you in mid-stream you can flog him, or you can coax him, or you can get out and lead him; or you can drown, as better men than you have drowned before.

2. 73. But you must not swap him even for the infinitely superior horse called Natural Science.

2. 74. For this is a magic journey, and if you do that the river will vanish and you will find yourself back where you started.

¹ Leviathan, p. 4.

III

BODY AS MIND

3. 1. MAN’s ‘body’ as known to the physicist, the chemist, and the physiologist, whether these sciences are three or two or one, is by definition something other than his mind; for these sciences are natural sciences.

3. 11. Our inquiry has to do with man’s mind (1. 21). We must refuse, therefore, on pain of falling into the fallacy of swapping horses (2. 91), to let ourselves be side-tracked by any siren-song describing the delights of physics, chemistry, or physiology, and the horrors awaiting the rash voyager who would air his ignorant opinions about thought without troubling to inform himself, for example, upon the all-important subject of cerebral physiology.

3. 12. But it does not follow that there is no sense in which a discussion of man’s ‘body’ can be of value for an inquiry into his mind.

3. 13. There is another sense of the word ‘body’: a sense neither physical nor chemical nor physiological but psychological.

3. 14. This sense is closely connected with our present inquiry, and we must not ignore it.

3. 15. First, however, we must assure ourselves that it exists: I mean that there is in ordinary, everyday, well established usage a sense of the word ‘body’ in which, surprising though it may seem, the body is part of the mind.

3. 2. For this purpose I shall ask the reader to reflect on three phrases: ‘bodily appetite’, ‘bodily pleasure’, and ‘bodily exertion’.

3. 21. I think he will admit that they are in common use. I want him to ask what sort of a ‘body’ it is to which they refer.

3. 22. If he thinks that question implies an attempt to get more meaning than they actually contain out of popular phrases, I shall remind him that the phrases have a respectable ancestry: they come down to us from Plato and Aristotle, and anything we say about their meaning in current English can be checked and shall be checked by research into their pedigree.

3. 3. When hunger is called a bodily appetite the word ‘bodily’ is not otiose; at that rate curiosity might be called an appetite but not a bodily appetite.

3. 31. I should not care to say that ‘bodily’ conveys a reference to the physiological body and that curiosity is not a ‘bodily appetite’ because physiology cannot give any account of it. I should not be at all surprised to find that, when cerebral physiology and the physiology of the endocrine system were taken into account, it could; and very much surprised to find out that it never hoped to.

3. 32. Hunger is, at any rate in part, a certain group of feelings; for example, a ‘gnawing’ sensation at the stomach, a general organic sensation of weakness or lassitude, with an inability to see clearly and a tendency for things to go black, and an emotional feeling of gloom or depression.

3. 33. There is nothing corresponding to these in the case of curiosity, or if there is I have never noticed it, perhaps because I have never suffered from curiosity as acutely as I have suffered from hunger.

3. 34. I make bold to say that there is a characteristic group of feelings (sensations and emotions connected with them) whereby a man knows that he is hungry, and none by which he knows that he is curious.

3. 35. The adjective ‘bodily’ when used of hunger refers to the presence of this group of feelings.

3. 4. I turn to the phrase ‘bodily pleasure’. The pleasure of lying in a hot bath is called a bodily pleasure; the pleasure of reading Newton’s Principia is not.

3. 41. ‘Bodily’ here does not mean ‘physiological’ in the sense that physiology could offer an account of the one and not of the other; if it could explain either, I do not doubt that it could explain both.

3. 42. The difference is that in the case of the bath the pleasure is the pleasure of feeling in certain ways: the pleasure of warmth on the skin and so forth; in the case of the Principia the pleasure is the pleasure of thinking in certain ways.

3. 43. If my pleasure in reading the Principia were derived from the actual look and smell and feel of the volume in my hands and under my nose and before my eyes I should call that, too, a bodily pleasure.

3. 44. A ‘bodily’ pleasure means a pleasure arising out of ‘feelings’, that is, sensations and the emotions directly connected with them.

3. 45. I do not call hunger, fear, or love a feeling, though each is rich in elements of feeling; hunger I call an appetite, fear a passion, love a desire or an appetite according to whether it does or does not involve the recognition that ‘this is love’.

3. 5. Why is digging called ‘bodily exertion’ and following a mathematical argument not?

3. 51. Not because physiological strains are present in the former case and not in the latter.

3. 52. Anyone who knows anything about blood-pressure knows that they are often present in the latter.

3. 53. It is because in digging my consciousness of effort either is or is closely bound up with motor sensations in, for example, the muscles that I use when I dig.

3. 54. Once more, then, ‘bodily’ means ‘connected with feelings, i.e. sensations and the emotions directly connected with them’. This is what I call the ‘psychological sense of the word body’.

3. 6. This sense of the word ‘body’ goes back through the New Testament to Aristotle and Plato.

3. 61. ‘Body’ in the New Testament (σῶμα) is often used to mean ‘feeling’ in this sense of the word; sometimes, but by no means always; with some further (Gnostic) suggestion that what is so called is inherently evil and a source of sin, though not its only source.

3. 62. Here are a few references, to which others might be added. Mark v. 29, ‘she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague’; Luke xi. 34, ‘the light of the body is the eye’; Romans vi. 6, ‘knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed’; vii. 24, ‘who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’; viii. 10, 13, ‘if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin . . . but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live’; 1 Corinthians ix. 27, ‘I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection.’

3. 63. In Plato the expressions ‘bodily pleasure’ and ‘bodily appetite’ are common, and Plato is careful to tell us that they are not his own invention (‘the so-called bodily pleasures’, αἱ περὶ τὸ σῶμα καλούμεναι ἡδοναί, Republic, 442 A, where pace Adam I suppose ‘so-called’ to qualify not ‘pleasures’ but ‘bodily’); but are currently used as implying a special sense of the word ‘body’.

3. 64. The ‘so-called bodily pleasures’ are (ibid.) the pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex. Now these according to Plato himself (Rep. 580 E) are the pleasures, or some of the pleasures, of ‘The Acquisitive’; and ‘The Acquisitive’ is one of the three ‘forms’ (εἴδη) or ‘parts’ (μέρη) which go to make up the mind (ψνχή).¹

3. 65. ‘The Acquisitive’ is that part or form of the mind to which sensation belongs.

3. 66. That pleasure is a mental thing is nowhere to my recollection said outright by Plato himself (Adam says it occurs in Timaeus, 64 B, but I cannot see it there). Plato does, however, say (Philebus, 35 c) that appetite is a mental thing, and Aristotle says the same of pleasure (Eth. Nic. 1099a8, τὸ μὲν γὰρ ἣδεσθαι τῶν ψυχνικῶν).

3. 67. But Aristotle does not hesitate to speak like Plato of ‘bodily pleasures’, evidently with the same implied gloss on ‘body’ as here meaning a part of mind which includes among its functions that of sensation.

3. 7. The thing that first concerned us at the beginning of our inquiry, I said (1. 21), was the division between body and mind.

3. 71. The inquiry is concerned with mind. We must exclude from it all inquiry into ‘body’ where ‘body’ means matter, or what is studied by natural science.

3. 72. It has now become clear that sometimes ‘body’ means not matter but feeling; and that when it does it means something which we must not neglect.

3. 73. I have already said (1. 61) that man’s mind, is, made of thought; but here comes something else, feeling which seems to belong somehow to mind. Let us consider it.

¹ ‘Soul’ is our conventional translation for ψυχή; but the word ‘soul’ is obsolescent or obsolete in modern English, except in a few special contexts, and ‘mind’ has taken its place.

IV

FEELING

4. 1. A feeling consists of two things closely connected: first, a sensuous element such as a colour seen, a sound heard, an odour smelt; secondly, what I call the emotional charge on this sensation: the cheerfulness with which you see the colour, the fear with which you hear the noise, the disgust with which you smell the odour.

4. 11. Does every feeling consist of these two elements? I do not know. Generalization about feelings is impossible (5. 55). All I can say is that those which I can recollect examining have done so, and that I assume the rest are, and have been, and will be like them.

4. 12. Does ‘sensation’ mean the object of seeing or the like (the colour, the sound, &c.) or the act of seeing it, hearing it, &c.? The question is not answerable without first clearing up the confusions it involves. I shall attend to this later

4. 13. Man’s mind is made of thought (1. 61), but feeling seems to belong somehow to mind (3. 73); how?

4. 14. There are two senses in which one thing ‘belongs’ to another: as a constituent or as an apanage.

4. 15. One thing belongs to another as a constituent in the way in which a man belongs to a family or a plank to a boat or a page to a book.

4. 16. One thing belongs to another as an apanage in the way in which an estate belongs to a family or a mooring to a boat or a card in the library catalogue to a book.

4. 17. A mind has both constituents and apanages.

4. 18. The essential constituent of mind is consciousness or thought (practical and theoretical) in its most rudimentary form. In addition, many minds have other constituents in the shape of various specialized forms of consciousness. Forms of consciousness are the only constituents, so far as I know, possessed by any mind.

4. 19. Feeling is an apanage of mind. It is an apanage of simple consciousness, namely its proper object, what there is consciousness of.

4. 2. Man as mind is consciousness, practical and theoretical, both in its simplest form and also in specialized forms; he has feeling, both in its simplest or purely sensuous-emotional form and also in specialized forms.

4. 21. These specialized forms of feeling arise through the practical work of consciousness, which is always bringing into existence new types of feeling and then, reflecting on the situation its practical work has created, making it an object to itself in its theoretical form.

4. 22. Consciousness in its simplest form finds feeling in its simplest form, and consciousness in any specialized form finds feeling in a correspondingly specialized form, ‘there’, ‘ready-made’, ‘immediately given’, as soon as it begins to operate theoretically.

4. 23. Whether this means that feeling already exists ‘unconsciously’ before that happens is a question I will postpone (cf. 5. 8).

4. 24. Simple feeling is the ‘proper object’ (4. 19) of simple consciousness: that is, the only thing simple consciousness in its theoretical form does is to apprehend simple feeling, and the only way in which simple feeling is apprehended is by simple consciousness. And similarly with the relation between a specialized form of feeling and the corresponding specialized form of consciousness.

4. 25. A man will describe himself as ‘conscious of seeing a red colour’, ‘conscious of hearing a loud noise’, and so forth. This is normal usage of the word ‘conscious’ or the equivalent word ‘aware’.

4. 26. There are abnormal usages: ‘I am conscious of a flaw in this argument’, ‘I am conscious of the dangers by which I am surrounded’, where it is not implied that a logical fallacy or a danger is a feeling.

4. 27. These abnormal usages are what grammarians call ‘figures of speech’, recognized and licensed inaccuracies which deceive no one. These are either ‘synecdoche’, mentioning only one part of a thing when you wish to be understood as referring to the whole of it, or ‘ellipsis’, saying outright only one part of what you wish to be understood as meaning.

4. 28. It does not matter which they are. It makes no difference whether you call them inaccurate in the same way or in different ways, so long as you recognize them as inaccurate and are not deceived by them.

4. 29. People often say ‘I am conscious of’ or ‘I am conscious that’ when they mean ‘I know’. ‘I am conscious of an impending change in the weather’ is a short way of saying ‘I am conscious of a peculiar pain in my shoulder: I recognize that as rheumatism; I know by experience that I get rheumatism when the weather is going to change’, or something like that. What is important is that nobody should suppose the man to be seriously implying that a future change of weather is an object of consciousness.

4. 3. Consciousness is the root of knowledge, but it is not knowledge. Knowledge is a highly specialized form of consciousness containing many elements which are not present in simple consciousness.

4. 31. In order to know anything I must not only be conscious, I must reflect on that consciousness. This reflection on simple consciousness I call second-order consciousness. Until consciousness is made an object of reflection there can be no knowledge, because there is no knowledge without, first, the performance of certain specialized operations of thought and, secondly, consciousness of these operations as having been actually performed: which is a second-order consciousness.

4. 32. Of these specialized operations I will mention three. First, where x is the thing I want to get knowledge about, and begin with mere consciousness of, I make suppositions about x.

4. 33. For example, as I write, I hear a roaring noise. Having fixed my attention on it by an act of second-order consciousness whose practical aspect is what I call selective attention or the focusing of my consciousness on that noise and away from other things, I consider whether I shall suppose it to be a noise in my head or a noise made by something outside