Charles Hartshorne
If the particular sense qualities which we intuit characterize, in this particularity, not so much things in themselves as the biological uses which are made of objects, it may none the less be true that things in themselves must be conceived in terms of a general analogy with the qualities of our experience. The object may not be red or blue or sweet, but there may be something vaguely like these qualities in things, quite apart from human experience. Upon the affective theory, this “may” is equivalent to the statement that panpsychism may be true.
The principal obstacle to the acceptance of this doctrine—apart from sheer irreligious prejudice—has been the fact that the lower we go in the scale of organic beings the more uncertain does the “inference by analogy” to the feelings, if any, of such creatures become, until it appears to lose all force entirely. It is just here that the conception of an immediate participation in somatic cellular feeling becomes epistemologically important. For it would mean that our knowledge of other sentient individuals came to us in two ways rather than in one, and that at the very point where the inference by analogy approached its weakest stage—in the one-celled animal, a radically different type of evidence, based on direct intuition, entered to strengthen it. Thus panpsychism becomes in principle a doubly verifiable hypothesis. It is well known that two independent arguments for a conclusion are, taken together, strong as the product, and not merely as the sum, of the strengths of each.
Let us suppose that, by tracing the continuous analogy of behavior and structure—in themselves two lines, rather than one, of evidence—by which man is related even to a one-celled creature, some probability, however weak, could be established that under certain circumstances the nerve cells of a man’s finger and the therewith-connected conducting fibers and brain cells would undergo suffering, at least if they were sentient at all, and suppose also it could be shown that under the very same conditions the man himself habitually feels pain in the finger, would we not have some real evidence in this coincidence of the two chains of testimony that the inference by analogy was correct?1 Then if, further, we could satisfy ourselves of the truth of the affective analysis of sensations generally, we should be justified in extending the same treatment to other sensations than that of pain, and in fact would begin to see in all experience a clue to the feeling state of creatures besides ourselves.
It is also noteworthy that even the inference to the feelings of other human beings would be strengthened. For by observing both the macroscopic or bodily and the microscopic or cellular structure and behavior of another, we should have a double clue to his feelings, including the objective feelings constituting his sensations.
It is to be admitted and emphasized that such speculations will amount to very little indeed until they have been given a more specific character. The dimensions of feeling quality as directly given must be traced more definitely than we have succeeded in doing in the preceding chapter, and these dimensions must be correlated with physiological variables, in compatibility with the all-or-none transmission of the nervous impulse. This all-or-none law suggests that we must look for the explanation of qualitative variations exclusively in “modulations” ofthe pattern of pulses, not in the character of the single pulses.
The picture developed in this section emphasizes, on the contrary, the quality of feeling in the cellular units. It must, however, be remembered that the law deals directly only with a single dimension—namely, intensity—and while the implication is that the entire character of the nerve action in a given transmission or terminal nerve fiber is independent, except for timing, of the character of the stimulus, we cannot assume that this time pattern itself has no effects of a non-intensive nature upon the nervous process. Yet it is clearly sound procedure to neglect such subtleties until we have made much more progress in unraveling the impulse patterns.
Now all pattern as immediately given is subject to aesthetic principles of concord and discord. Perhaps, then, the quality of our experiences depends chiefly not upon that of the cellular units as psychic individuals but upon our sense of the smoothness or other Gestalt qualities of the configurations formed by these units as fused into the oneness of our awareness. On the other hand, by our general panpsychic principle, such Gestalt quality would also enter into the constituent units, so that the two points of view we have just been contrasting are not altogether different. In any case the significant fact is that the physiological aspect of non-intensive dimensions is as yet a nearly complete mystery.2 Where all theories are so nearly at a complete loss, even such vaguely promising possibilities as those we have been considering may deserve attention.
There ‘remains the problem of the inorganic physical realities external to the human body. Here no direct intuition of appreciable vividness is possible; we are reduced to analogy alone for all particularization of the general panpsychistic doctrine. Nevertheless, the possibility of a direct check upon the principle of analogy at a point which we may perhaps term halfway between the higher animals, the indubitably psychical organisms, and the simplest of physical entities, electrons, protons, photons—the point, that is, which is occupied by the cells of the human body—forbids us to declare impossible or fruitless the application of this principle lower down on the scale3
Notes
1. If the analysis of space given in chap. vi is correct, then the experience of a feeling as spatially distinct from the self, as “there” in the finger, is absolute proof of the existence of a feeling center not identical with the human self. For “depth is epistemological”—to repeat the key phrase of the analysis.
2. See Troland’s masterly discussion of the possibilities (Psychophysiology I, 109-28).
3. It seems necessary frequently to remind the critics of panpsychism that the question is not whether sticks and stones are sentient individuals; for such objects are not individuals except in the sense in which a crowd is so. Indeed, the group mind may well be thought to have a much higher degree of effective individual unity than that swarm of molecules called a “stone.”
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation, pp. 263-266.