Natural-Philosophical Lectures on the Fundamental Problems of Consciousness and Life

Translated from: Palágyi, Melchior. Naturphilosophische Vorlesungen über die Grundprobleme des Bewußtseins und des Lebens. Charlottenburg: Verlag von Otto Günther, 1908. Translation from a digitised copy held by the Harvard College Library.

Translation note: This is the first English translation of Palágyi's twenty lectures on natural philosophy. The translation preserves the author's sentence structure and rhetorical devices. German terms are given in brackets on first use; sidenotes provide context for key philosophical concepts. This translation is a work in progress — further lectures will be added incrementally.

Introduction#

The problems of vitalism [Vitalismus] and psychologism [Psychologismus] stand in the foreground of modern scientific and philosophical interest. Vitalismus — not the postulation of a mysterious life-force, but the epistemic thesis that vital processes are accessible to only one direct witness, and are therefore irreducible to mechanical (publicly observable) processes. Psychologismus — the systematic conflation of the vital and the mental, originating in the Locke–Berkeley–Hume tradition; termed thus by the historian of philosophy Johann Eduard Erdmann.

The vitalism so often pronounced dead in the course of the last centuries is indeed living again in our days as "neo-vitalism" [Neovitalismus] with a greater energy than ever before. But when vitalism makes itself heard, this signifies for the intellectual barometric reading of scientific thought something like the oppressive heat before a thunderstorm or the proximity of a tempest. — Seemingly without connexion with this neo-vitalistic current, but at bottom conditioned by it, there is also making itself noticeable within psychology a worrying secessionist movement: psychology, namely, is to separate itself entirely from the philosophical disciplines and constitute itself as an independent, purely scientific and experimental discipline. This split in the psychological camp shows that one has grown weary of the unclear entanglement of experimental natural science and metaphysical thought such as obtains in psychophysics. The call for the separation of experiment and metaphysics points at the same time to a crisis in philosophical thought altogether. In fact, everywhere a deep longing for a new foundation of epistemology and metaphysics makes itself felt. As far as the eye can reach, there prevails in all scientific camps an intellectual fermentation as on the eve of an upheaval of the received scientific and philosophical conceptions.

Leading figures of physical research, such as Maxwell, Hertz, Lord Kelvin, and others, declared without concealment that the distinctive nature of the life-process [Lebensprozess] renders its resolution into a combination of purely mechanical (physico-chemical) processes an impossibility. Lebensprozess — the continuous, flowing vital process accessible only to its own subject; distinguished from mechanical processes which have many witnesses.

And what is still more significant, the biologists themselves, who otherwise were accustomed to think more mechanistically than the mechanists, are abandoning the hopeless endeavour to transform the riddle of life into a mechanical problem. Precisely such biologists as Driesch, Wolff, Apathy, and others, who are wholly filled with the spirit of exact scientific research, make the principle of the irreducibility of the vital process to purely mechanical (physico-chemical) processes the foundation of their biological thinking. Hans Driesch (1867–1941), Gustav Wolff (1865–1921), and Stephan von Apathy (1863–1922) were leading neo-vitalist biologists of the period.

Should this conception prevail, we are approaching a new epoch in the history of natural science and philosophy: an epoch in which biology will no longer be the mere satellite of mechanistic natural science and will no longer seek its glory in wanting to make itself superfluous and dissolve into pure mechanism. Yet unfortunately there still prevails, even in biological circles, the old prejudice that only mechanistic thinking may lay claim to strict scientificity. To oppose this prejudice and to furnish the proof of the scientific equality of mechanistic and vitalistic thinking is the one tendency of the following philosophical lectures.

Mechanistic and vitalistic research can, in my view, only in the most intimate accord with one another procure the foundations of a genuine knowledge of nature. Into all perceptions, observations, into all measurements of the mechanistic natural scientist, however rigorous, the vital moment [das vitale Moment] necessarily intrudes as well, because we are able to perceive mechanical phenomena only by means of the vital processes of our own organism. A phenomenon of the inorganic natural process exists for us only in so far as it is presented to our consciousness [Bewußtsein] through a process of our own vital process. We behold the entire mechanical natural process, as it were, only through the windows of our own life-process, so that the ascertainment of mechanical facts necessarily requires a complementary fixing of the corresponding vital conditions, and conversely the perception of vital facts must always be supplemented by the investigation of the corresponding mechanical conditions. In this principle of correlation [Correlation] it is stated that mechanistic and vitalistic research can no more subsist without one another than a right half of the body without the complementary left half can form a living organism.

But how is it that this, so to speak, self-evident principle of the correlation of mechanical and vital processes yet finds no general recognition, indeed that the best philosophical minds of our age must positively exhaust themselves in the struggle for it? The answer to this question leads us over to the psychologistic problem, which forms the principal theme of these lectures.

It lies in the developmental history of modern natural science and philosophy that a sound vitalistic thinking, such as would be absolutely required for the harmonious supplementation of mechanistic research, was unable to arise. For those facts which we must designate as the most familiar vitalistic facts, such as, for example, sense-sensations [Sinnesempfindungen], were presented by the founders of modern psychological thinking, by the chief representatives of English philosophy — Locke, Berkeley, Hume, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and others — not as vital processes [Lebensvorgänge], but as psychical facts. One confused the concept of life with the concept of mental (psychical) activity; one fashioned an entirely novel, hybrid concept, such as was still wholly unknown to the ancients: that modern concept of "the psychical" [des Psychischen], which signifies neither life nor yet consciousness of life, and yet both at once. The age-old distinction between the "Tree of Life" and the "Tree of Knowledge," which the prescient human spirit had made, so to speak, already in Paradise, was lost; and in its place a new tree was planted, which is neither the tree of life nor the tree of knowledge, but the tree of conceptual confusion, and which for more than two centuries has been producing a most unwelcome profusion of flourishing errors — the sum of which the highly meritorious historian of modern philosophy, Johann Eduard Erdmann, designated as psychologistic thinking. Johann Eduard Erdmann (1805–1892), Hegelian philosopher and author of Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Darstellung der Geschichte der neuern Philosophie (1834–53), a comprehensive history of modern philosophy.

The confusion of the tree of life and the tree of knowledge finds in Locke an almost palpably tangible expression in that he presents our sense-sensations as the elements of our "ideas," or also as simple ideas, from which, by composition, complex ideas of the phenomena and things of the external world are supposed to arise. These Lockean "ideas" still waver between "thoughts" on the one hand and sense-sensations or, in general, "experiences" — that is, vital processes — on the other. In his work they still have a vacillating, ambiguous character, which is the fundamental trait of every psychologistic thinking. It is first Berkeley who energetically demands the complete equation of idea and sense-sensation, and thereby becomes the founder of the consistently ambiguous or perverse idealism. He denies the existence of abstract ideas, ridicules them, and understands by idea nothing other than something singular, concrete — namely, the individual sense-intuition, and, going further, the individual physico-chemical phenomenon itself. His famous principle esse-percipi identifies the perceived phenomenon with the perceptual activity of our mind.

Inorganic natural process, life-process, and psychical activity cease to be concepts distinct from one another; the entire sensible world of phenomena migrates, skin and all, into consciousness and becomes a mere product of consciousness, so that the existence of a material world subsisting outside of consciousness can be denied.

Berkeley devised this theory because he believed that through it he could arrive at an irrefutable proof of the existence of God. The noble Bishop of Cloyne was a witty, high-minded, God-inspired thinker — but a proof of God has long since ceased to make an impression on any mortal. His good intention is forgotten; his error, however, has founded a school as scarcely any other error in modern times. It has become the starting-point of a specifically modern sophistry that to this very day puts forth the most luxuriant and seductive blossoms. For if one formulates the identity esse-percipi, or what is equivalent: physical phenomenon = psychical activity, one possesses therein a sophistical means of now playing the role of an "empirical idealist," now that of an "empirical realist." If one reads the identity from left to right, one dissolves reality into ideas and may profess idealism; but if one reads it conversely, from right to left, then all ideas become mere sense-sensations, indeed mere physico-chemical phenomena, and one may then call oneself a realist.

Since Berkeley's principle has, as it were, two opposed poles like a magnet, it exercised a tremendous power of attraction upon minds and influences modern thought to a quite unprecedented degree. It gave the impetus to the transcendental or formal idealism of Kant; it becomes illusionism in Schopenhauer, correlativism or positivistic idealism in Laas, empirio-criticism or the philosophy of pure experience in Avenarius and Mach, immanence-philosophy in Schuppe, solipsism or theoretical egoism in Schubert-Soldern, phenomenalism, conscientialism, epistemological idealism, panpsychism, psycho-monism, and so forth, in uncounted other thinkers. Palagyi here catalogues the principal post-Kantian positions that he traces back to Berkeley's esse-percipi. Ernst Laas (1837–1885), Richard Avenarius (1843–1896), Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Wilhelm Schuppe (1836–1913), and Richard von Schubert-Soldern (1852–1924) were leading figures of late-nineteenth-century positivism and immanence-philosophy.

It lies, however, by no means in the character of the German spirit to confuse the vital with the mental; rather, the history of German thought shows that it resists this confusion — in so far as it becomes aware of it — with determination. The most significant German

philosophers combat English psychologism. Leibniz opposes Lockean sensualism; Kant turns all the more sharply against "the good Berkeley" the more he was originally influenced by him; and the great representatives of specifically German idealism, Fichte and Hegel, are at pains to strip from themselves even the last trace of English sensualism, in order to bring the "Idea" in its absolute spirituality to its due. Unfortunately they fell into an excess and thereby uprooted their own best endeavour. German idealism has long lain in ruins, and the same holds also for French rationalism.

Originally the rationalist line was the main line of both French and German philosophy; the sensualist line held, particularly in the latter, only the second rank. It is the reverse with English philosophy, in which rationalism never succeeded in attaining a leading role. The ideal of the English spirit is that mighty vitality of which the figures of the Shakespearean drama are brimming and overflowing. The English spirit would accordingly have been called upon to procure the foundations of that vitalistic thinking which forms the necessary supplement to the mechanistic research founded by Galilei. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, the three chief luminaries of English philosophy, were, however, no natural scientists. Although they were fascinated by that which is the living element in us, they nevertheless confused it with the mental and created that hermaphrodite concept of the psychical which for two centuries has been hindering in the highest degree the sound development of vitalistic thinking, and thus of biological natural research altogether.

But how is it possible, one asks, that a hybrid concept was able to hold minds captive through so many generations? To this it must be answered that the best among the leading spirits of the human race have for nearly two centuries been waging an unceasing struggle against that ambiguous concept — admittedly with an as yet inadequate success, because hermaphrodite concepts exercise upon the mass of the educated, and indeed upon independent researchers as well, a far greater power of attraction than pure and clear conceptions. For a hybrid concept contains indeed a logical contradiction, but in such a form that it creates the appearance of arising from the highest philosophical striving — the striving after unity in knowledge — indeed, of being the realisation of the so ardently desired monism. Peculiarly enough, only concepts which are, as it were, logical bastards — that is, which contain a logical contradiction — can simulate a perfected monistic

knowledge; clear conceptualisations, however, are unable to promise more than they actually contain, and always remind us of the not-knowing that lurks in the closest neighbourhood of knowing, and of the hard intellectual labour that still remains to be done in order to come one step closer to the monism that in its completion will, however, never be attained.

The monistic conviction that underlies all scientific and philosophical thought may be formulated in approximately the following intelligible manner: All powers that are efficacious in the universe form but one power; correspondingly, all lawfulnesses in whose sense those powers operate form but one law; and what is the main thing: that one universal power and this one universal law are identical with one another. (Identity of the all-encompassing Being and the all-encompassing Knowing.) The exposition of this monistic principle is, to be sure, not the task of the following investigations, in which I merely attempt to open a path leading to that proposition, by endeavouring to demonstrate the hybrid character of the psychical as it sprang from the English philosophical spirit, and to replace it with a pure concept of the living as well as a pure concept of the mental. Through the sharp abstract distinction of the living and the mental, their concrete unity is indeed not impaired; on the contrary, the concrete unity of our life-process and our mental activities can be recognised only to the extent that we succeed in achieving a rigorous abstract differentiation of the concepts of life and of consciousness. [Author's note:] A limited being and a limited knowing can, however, never be identical; only between limitless being and limitless knowing does every difference cease.

Psychologistic thinking, on the other hand, in its traditional forms permits neither a pure concept of life nor a pure concept of mental activity to arise, and is accordingly, on the one hand, the most dangerous enemy of a scientific biology, while on the other hand it is its fault that a modern science of the mental activity of man was unable to develop. With respect to the detailed demonstration of this state of affairs, reference is made to the lectures; here I wish to illuminate their content through the following summarising reflections.

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a) As regards biology first of all, it is a science of life, and must accordingly, in order to have a right to exist, be able to point to vital facts that form the object of its investigation. But of vital facts there can only be talk because we find life in ourselves. Could we not find it in ourselves, it would be

impossible to seek it anywhere else. But we find life in ourselves in that we notice that we feel [fühlen] and sense [empfinden], so that the certainty of being alive is guaranteed to us through the vital facts of feeling [Gefühl] and sensation [Empfindung]. Gefühl — feeling; not merely emotion, but the vital process through which we have knowledge of the vegetative life-substrate. Contrasts with Empfindung (sensation), which relates to the mechanical world. Empfindung — sensation; the animal-vital process through which we are placed in connexion with the inorganic (mechanical) natural process. Distinguished from feeling (Gefühl), which relates to the vegetative substrate.

Thus an epistemologically grounded biology can have no other starting-point than the facts of one's own feeling and one's own sensation. Just as the certainty of one's own thinking, the Cogito (of the great Descartes), forms the starting-point of the science of mind, so the certainty of life, the Vivo, which is established for everyone through the processes of his feeling and sensing, is the irrefutable foundation of every biological thinking — though, as must at once be added, not the sole foundation thereof.

For there exist, besides those vital processes which we designate as feeling and sensation and which are characterised by the fact that they can have only a single immediate witness (namely the person by whom they are experienced), yet another class of vital processes, which cannot be directly observed by any witnesses at all — that is, which have no immediate connexion whatsoever with our consciousness: these are the processes of the own-life [Eigenleben] of the structural constituents of our body. The histological and anatomical components of our body — notably the extremely small point-like formations, such as the microchromosomes, further the most delicate thread-like formations, such as the nerve and muscle fibrils, no less than the first workshops of life itself, the cells, and the tissues and organs arising from their propagation and differentiation — all lead indeed a mysterious own-life that in its immediacy is absolutely unreachable for our consciousness, and that I designate as "vegetative life" [vegetatives Leben]. Vegetatives Leben — the non-conscious organic substrate: the own-life of cells, tissues, and organs, which is absolutely inaccessible to consciousness in its immediacy.

But the changes that take place within this in itself witnessless vegetative life-process can reach the cognisance of consciousness through vital messengers — namely through feelings, or rather emotions [Emotionen]. Such vital processes as, for example, feelings, which have an immediate contact with our consciousness-activity [Bewusstseinstätigkeit], and which can thus be immediately apprehended by one and only one witness, I call animal vital processes [animale Lebensvorgänge]; and besides feelings I distinguish two further kinds thereof: namely sensations and phantasms [Phantasmen]. Bewusstseinstätigkeit — consciousness-activity; the intermittent, punctual acts of consciousness, as distinct from the flowing vital processes they apprehend. Animale Lebensvorgänge — animal vital processes; those higher vital processes that have immediate contact with consciousness, comprising feelings, sensations, and phantasms. Contrasted with vegetative processes, which have no such contact. Phantasmen — phantasms; a class of animal vital processes, hitherto scarcely recognised, through which we enter into the sensations and feelings of other persons, relive past experience, anticipate the future, and apprehend the present reality. Three types are later distinguished: direct, inverse, and symbolic.

Sensations are animal vital processes through which we are placed in connexion with the ocean of the inorganic natural process that encompasses our life-process on all sides. Phantasms, too, are animal vital processes, whose distinctive nature has hitherto been as good as entirely unrecognised, and upon whose investigation I lay the greatest weight in the following investigations, because without their aid no (human) mental

activity can take place. Through phantasms we transport ourselves into the sensations and feelings, and thus into the life-process, of other persons; through phantasms we live ourselves back into our past life, or forward into the hoped-for or feared future; through phantasms we remove ourselves from reality altogether and create for ourselves a proper imaginary world. And what is most peculiar: even reality, even the present world of phenomena, can be apprehended only by means of phantasms. I believe I have furnished in the following investigations the proof that sense-sensations are indeed indispensable but thoroughly insufficient conditions of our sense-perception [Sinneswahrnehmung], and that they must first arouse that peculiar kind of vital processes which we call "phantasms," so that the requisite vital basis for a mental perceptual activity may be procured. In short, our consciousness requires phantasms just as much to transport itself into present reality as to transport itself into a past, a future, or any imagined world whatsoever. To be sure, there arises thereby for our investigation the important and difficult task of expounding the antagonism between reality-phantasms [Wirklichkeitsphantasmen] and imagination-phantasms [Imaginationsphantasmen], and of demonstrating upon this occasion the scholastic vacuity of the so-called theories of association [Assoziationstheorien].

But what lends to our life-process the character of almost excessive mysteriousness is the vegetative substratum [Untergrund] thereof, which we all divine, and into which we sometimes fancy ourselves gazing down with a gentle horror, as into an abyss. The witnessless darkness of this vegetative substratum of life misleads many biologists into an abuse of the concepts of the "unconscious" [das Unbewußte] and the "subconscious" [das Unterbewußte]. One can create much semblance of profundity with such expressions, but produce no knowledge. A rational biology will have to resign itself once and for all to the fact that vegetative vital processes in their immediacy are unreachable for consciousness, but that we can besiege the vegetative riddle in an indirect manner from two sides. On the one hand, the changes within the vegetative process make themselves known — as stated — through the animal vital processes of feelings and affects; on the other hand, our vegetative life-process expresses itself in a system of physico-chemical processes that form precisely the object of mechanistic physiology, and that emerge most perspicuously in respiration and in the pulse.

Thus it follows already from these schematically summarising reflections that biology must rely in equal measure upon vitalistic and upon mechanistic research. On the one hand, the vegetative substratum of life must be apprehended through its animal-vital manifestations, which can have only one observer; on the other hand, one apprehends it through those manifestations that are accessible to any number of observers, and which we may for this reason designate as mechanistic (physico-chemical) processes.

At the same time, in this light it emerges with almost palpable clarity in what critical a position biology found itself, and still finds itself, in the course of its entire modern development. On the one hand, there is nothing easier in the world than simply to deny the existence of witnessless vegetative-vital processes, whereby their physico-chemical manifestations become purely mechanical processes that have nothing to do with any supposed life; and the physiologists do indeed incline, in no small part, towards this dangerous view, through which biology is uprooted and appears in the light of an applied physics and chemistry that happens to be tinkering about on so-called living beings. On the other hand, there is nothing easier in the world than to present those vital facts that are thoroughly familiar to us all — namely sensations, feelings, and phantasms — and that could form an unassailably secure starting-point of biological research, as though they were not vital processes at all, but rather mental activities: as the English psychologists, and under their influence most of the French and German colleagues as well, have done. Thus the entire content of biology falls between the two millstones of mechanistic and psychologistic thinking, now to be ground down into purely physico-chemical processes, now to evaporate into so-called phenomena of consciousness. Of vital facts one may under such circumstances no longer speak: for those vital processes that have no immediate connexion with consciousness are simply denied, while those vital facts that are immediately connected with consciousness are re-stamped as psychical facts. Thus there comes about a tragicomic biology that knows nothing of a life; its counterpart is, to be sure, that tragicomic psychology that knows no mental activity.

If the epistemological position of biology within the circle of the other sciences is to be truly clarified, one must above all seek to put an end to the psychologistic confusion of the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. This is assuredly no easy task. For the animal vital processes that we designate as feeling, sensation, and phantasm agree with our mental activity completely in this: that they all can have one and only one immediate witness. This misleads us into confusing the animal-vital processes that come to our consciousness with the mental acts [geistige Akte] of perception through which they are apprehended. It lies in the nature of the case that the vital process of sensing and the mental act of

perceiving must flow together into a concrete unity. For as soon as we become conscious of a sensation, the union of the vital sensation-process with consciousness-activity must already have taken place — that is, must already belong to the proximate past. We can never say: now the sensation is approaching our consciousness, now it is already quite near to it, now it is knocking at the gates of consciousness, now at this mathematical instant it has gained admittance. For a sensation-process that has not yet united with our consciousness-activity does not yet exist for us; and a sensation that already exists for us has already accomplished its union with consciousness-activity in an unnoticed manner. Truly there is no more natural and pardonable illusion in the world than the psychological illusion that confuses the vital process that comes to cognisance with the act of taking cognisance. But it is precisely the most natural and precisely the most pardonable illusions that completely decompose our logical thinking, by drawing it into a vortex of endless contradictions.

Our animal-vital processes, particularly our phantasms, are of an intuitable [anschaulich] nature; but if one confuses mental activity with them, one must also declare mental activity to be intuitable. In fact, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and others hold psychical activity to be intuitable. Locke teaches that there is an "inner sense" (internal sense) with which we perceive our own mental activity. From this "inner sense" arose "inner perception," "inner observation," and it also gave the impetus to the formation of the mystical concept of apperception [Apperception] in Leibniz, Kant, Herbart, Steinthal, Wundt, and others. We should thus be in possession of a faculty for beholding our own mental activity, and upon this inner beholding psychology as an "empirical" science would be founded.

Were it possible to behold one's own psychical activity, we would not only see images but also inspect this very seeing, and we would not only hear tones but also be able to listen to our own hearing. As surely as one's own seeing cannot be inspected, one's own hearing cannot be overheard, so certain is it that the opinion that our psychical activity is inwardly intuitable, and that upon this inner intuitability an "empirical" science of the human mind could be founded, is an absurdity.

Our animal vital processes — feelings, sensations, phantasms — are indeed something immediately perceivable, intuitable (and indeed for the one who experiences them); but the mental acts that attach to them are something non-intuitable [unanschaulich]. Unanschaulich — non-intuitable; mental acts cannot be seen, heard, or touched. They are not accessible to any form of inner or outer intuition; they can only be known through thinking about thinking.

What in our experiences is intuitable belongs to biology and is subject to a scientific

investigation in the vitalistic sense; but what attaches to our experiences in a non-intuitable manner — namely our own mental activity — belongs to psychology and logic, and must be investigated by psychological and logical means.

The ancient philosophers, in particular Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, knew that the mental activity of man is non-intuitable, and they did not fancy that they could come to understand their own thinking through any kind of intuition. They were conscious that whoever wishes to come to know his own thinking must think about it. Only modern psychologism believes it has found a path that makes it possible, without thinking, by way of a peculiar "inner perception," to investigate one's own thinking "empirically" — failing to notice, to be sure, that the path it found is the vitalistic path to the perception of one's own animal vital processes. It would therefore not be advisable to draw a comparative parallel between the self-knowledge of the ancient philosophers and that of the modern psychologists, for such a comparison could turn out to be but little flattering for the latter.

Two directions of thought there are principally through which the modern spirit distinguishes itself from the ancient: through mechanism [Mechanistik] and through psychologism [Psychologistik]. As regards mechanistic thinking, which proceeded from Copernicus, Galilei, and others, there lives in it an incomparably fruitful and rigorous sense of truth, to which we owe our superiority over the ancients and for which they could envy us. The same cannot be said of psychologism and its extreme elaboration, Berkeleyan idealism, even with the best of wills. For the confusion of the tree of life and the tree of knowledge is no mere illusion among other sister-illusions; it must be designated outright as the mother of all human aberrations, because it makes man go astray in his very humanity. For that animal species which we designate as "Homo sapiens" is characterised precisely by the fact that it would, despite immeasurable contrary temptation, ever and again distinguish the merely living from the mental in its own hermaphrodite nature. A doctrine, however, such as psychologism, which is expressly directed towards the confusion of the living and the mental, necessarily marks a decadence of the human spirit in science as well as in the fine arts and in social convictions.

Nevertheless I am far from failing to recognise the extraordinary historical significance of modern psychologism. Precisely because it raises the source of all aberrations of human

thinking to a system of philosophy with a stupendous endurance and energy, its ultimately necessary failure must lead to new intellectual evolutions that could not have come about without it. For the more one loses oneself in the fervent striving to fashion a hybrid concept of the living and the mental, the richer the stimulus received by genuinely vitalistic and genuinely psychological thinking. There are indeed great errors in the face of which one consoles oneself with the hope that they must lead to great truths.

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b) If the hybrid concept of the psychical, as it stems from English philosophy, is to be definitively overcome, one must decompose it into its natural two components: the vital and the mental component. For this, however, it does not suffice to regard consciousness-activities as something non-intuitable, as indeed the great thinkers of antiquity also did, because upon the basis of a merely negative characteristic — namely non-intuitability — a science of consciousness cannot be built. A psychology as science is possible only if a positive characteristic of our consciousness-activities can also be found — to be sure not in the sense intended by Locke when he ascribed to psychical activity the positive character of intuitability, which can never belong to it. I believe I have found this positive mark of all psychical activities in their peculiarly intermittent [intermittierend] character. Intermittierend — intermittent; the core thesis of Palagyi's psychology: consciousness does not flow continuously but proceeds in discrete, pulse-like acts separated by temporal intervals.

The intermittency [Intermittenz] of our mental activity becomes most easily noticeable in our acts of will. Intermittenz — intermittency; the positive characteristic distinguishing consciousness-activity from vital processes. Consciousness pulses rather than flows.

Our willing, namely, is no unceasingly flowing willing; for were it to have an uninterruptedly continuous flow, we would, from sheer willing, never arrive at the execution of any determinate individual volition. In other words: we cannot, in any given time-interval — let us say, for example, in a second — issue arbitrarily many, not millions and billions of movement-impulses; that is, a time must elapse — even if only a quite brief time — before we come from one movement-impulse to another. Now the fact that we do not produce arbitrarily many immediate impulses of will (movement-impulses) within a determinate duration of time — that is, that our immediate impulses of will can follow upon one another only at certain temporal intervals — I call their intermittency. Corresponding to this intermittency, our genuinely voluntary movements have a strikingly periodically articulated character. Consider the gait of a human being: it does not have that character which the purely mechanical movements of a ball rolling, a stone falling, or

the flowing and streaming of liquids and gases display. For since human movement is to be regulated by intermittent impulses of will, it must have a periodically articulated character.

Consider, further, not only the physical but also the mental gait of a human being, as it expresses itself in his speaking, and one will have to admit that all the trains of thought of the human mind have the same character as its impulses of will. Were the thinking activity of man not an intermittent but a continuously flowing one, the sense of one word would not be able to stand out from the sense of another, the content of one sentence from the content of another sentence — that is, our speech could also not be an articulated speech.

Finally, the acts of our sense-perception, too, are by no means of a flowing nature, although they most readily create the illusion of continuity. For we cannot perform arbitrarily many — not even a thousand, not even a hundred, not even ten — perception-acts in a single second. It takes a certain small time, a fraction of a second, before we arrive from one perception-act to another. Of this one convinces oneself very easily by the most manifold experimental means — for example, through the well-known experiments with the colour-wheel [Farbenkreisel]. If the disc turns slowly, the individual coloured sectors can still be distinguished; but if the speed of rotation exceeds a certain magnitude, the colours of the sectors fuse into a mixed colour, because before the perception-act by which we could apprehend the one sector-colour has been completed, the remaining sector-colours have already flown past our gaze. Animal vital processes, such as colour-sensations, have a flowing character and can under certain circumstances flow together; but mental acts, because they are intermittent, cannot be brought to flow together. For whoever finds even the perception-acts of his mind already flowing together is approaching unconsciousness; and of whoever confuses, or more accurately conflates, the higher mental acts with one another, we say that he is in a logical error or else is guided by a consciously sophistical intention.

Our animal vital processes — such as sensation-processes, for example — have a flowing (continuous) character, but our perception-acts do not flow along, as the so-called "psycho-physical parallelism" [psychophysischer Parallelismus] would have it. There are no psychical processes running parallel to the physical processes. The theory of "psycho-physical parallelism" is but a modern expression for the

psychologistic conceptual confusion, originating from England, that is unable to make any distinction between vital process and mental activity, inasmuch as it holds both to be flowing. The animal vital processes have an intuitable flow; mental acts, by contrast, are non-intuitable, because they have no flow at all, but are distinguished by a wholly instantaneous character and precisely for this reason are intermittent. Mental acts take up no duration of time; they are merely the temporal end-points of some vital process or also the temporal starting-points thereof. Animal vital processes pour themselves, as it were, into the mental act — as for example in perception — or they stream forth, as it were, from the mental act — as for example in the impulse of will. In short, mental acts delimit the vital processes and give them articulation and form. Were the mental acts also flowing, our world would be an absolutely formless stream — that is, something unthinkable. Two temporally successive mental acts, connected with one another by a vital process, I call a mental pulse-beat [geistiger Pulsschlag]. If this metaphorical expression is allowed, then psychology can be conceived as the science of the mental or consciousness-pulses [Bewusstseinspulse], and then its mediating position between biology and logic also emerges in an intuitable fashion. Geistiger Pulsschlag — mental pulse-beat; the unit of consciousness: two successive mental acts connected by a vital process. Psychology is thus the science of these consciousness-pulses.

Were our capacity for perception not an intermittent but a flowing one — could we thus perform infinitely many perception-acts in a second — the natural processes would betray their last secret to our beholding gaze; for we could penetrate into the smallest temporal divisions of every happening, we could learn what takes place in the millionth and billionth parts of a second, indeed ultimately even the infinitely small could not remain hidden from us. Moreover, for a mind that could perform arbitrarily many acts in an arbitrarily short time, a time would no longer exist at all; in a timeless instant it would have performed infinitely many mental acts; a world of phenomena in the sense that it exists for us could not exist for it — it would be an all-encompassing, world-exhausting mind. Our human limitation rests precisely upon the fact that we are not capable of producing in a second as many perception-acts, as many impulses of will, and as many mental acts in general as we please — that is, that our psychical activities have an intermittent character. We must, equipped with a merely intermittent mental agility, seek to do justice to a continuously flowing world; or, more precisely formulated: it follows from the intermittent character of our mind that the world in which we are confined must be a continuously flowing world of phenomena — a state of affairs that can also be expressed

conversely: it lies in the nature of a continuously flowing world of phenomena that it must necessarily be supplemented and apprehended by an intermittent mental activity. Flowing phenomena and intermittent consciousness of them condition one another mutually.

Now it scarcely needs any further special emphasis that a flowing or continuous process can never be fully investigated and fathomed by a mind active in an intermittent manner. Of the unfathomability of the continuous, the mathematicians in particular know how to sing a song; for even the sharpest and most ingenious means of higher analysis come to grief upon the continuous, because ultimately even the sharpest and most ingenious mathematical thinking has an intermittent character and consequently can never in all futurity be finished with the concept of continuity.

Our investigation thus leads us directly to the limits of human knowledge, by showing wherein it actually lies that our knowledge must be, now as in all futurity, a limited one. In my view the "critique of knowledge" [Erkenntniskritik], desired by Locke and Hume and experimentally carried out by Kant, as the science of the limits of human knowing, is in truth still a pium desiderium. Kant's grand attempt to found a critique of knowledge was bound to fail because he allowed himself, despite his energetic resistance, to be taken captive by English psychologism. For by presenting the "things in themselves" as the unknowable, Kant created the appearance that the phenomena, or rather our sensations, were something thoroughly knowable. But this is precisely the essence of the psychologistic aberration: that, taking offence at the non-intuitability of things in themselves, or rather of substances, matters, and forces, it regarded the phenomena, or rather the sensations, as something completely known, thoroughly manifest. To be sure, nothing is more familiar to us than our own sensing, but this familiarity changes nothing about the most peculiar state of affairs, namely that every sensation temporally flows together from boundlessly many sections, and that we are unable to apprehend these boundlessly small sections in their separateness. Thus every flowing process consists of boundlessly many, entirely unknown elements or differentials, which are known to us only through their sum, only through their integral. Through the semblance of the senses, there is thus, as it were, the miracle accomplished that an unfathomable mystery spreads itself out before us as though it had been completely unveiled. Only whoever pursues no genuine critique of knowledge allows himself to be deceived by this semblance. There is in the whole

world for us humans nothing more mysterious than the uninterruptedly flowing, eternally fleeting, never wholly capturable phenomenon that slips away from the cunningest experiments. Herein the genuinely modern spirit distinguishes itself from the ancient: in that it lets the substance be substance, but instead immerses itself in the riddle of the infinitely fleeting with a passion unknown to the ancients. We pursue the fleeting phenomenon with an incomparably exciting wild chase (of observation, experiment, and calculus) in order to catch its lawfulness by stealth and bring it to formulae, and are all the while perfectly aware of never being able to capture the last secrets of the eternal fleetingness. I now show wherein this lies. An intermittently active mind will always only be able to fumble after and limp behind the uninterruptedly flowing-fleeting phenomenon, however nimbly it may apply itself in doing so. But if someone complains to us that the "things in themselves" must after all remain hidden from us for all time, we shall endeavour to console him in the following manner: A so-called "thing in itself" has the good and unassailable right to be a mystery, for it is from the outset something non-intuitable and is, by virtue of our definition, to remain forever non-intuitable. It is quite otherwise, however, with the phenomena; for these are from the outset intuitable and present themselves as though they could be entirely seen through — whereas reflection shows that they conceal an unfathomable mystery in their ceaselessly restless flow. Before one would take any offence at the unknowability of the "things in themselves," then, let one first seriously halt before the unfathomability of the "phenomena in themselves." The unknowable thus begins by no means where psychologism and also Kantianism place it (namely in the substances, or rather the things in themselves): for the "unknowable") dwells already everywhere in the phenomenon itself — namely in the continuous flow thereof. [Author's note:] More correctly: the non-intuitable.

Although the fundamental tone of the following investigations is an epistemological-critical one, so that in them a system of the critique of knowledge is, so to speak, contained in a latent manner, it was nevertheless not my intention to bring this system also to the fore. I confine myself merely to demonstrating the inner contradictions of psychologism and to replacing its hybrid conceptualisations with pure conceptions. Hereby, on the one hand, an exact vitalism is to be founded; on the other hand, the way to a rigorous science of mind is to be opened. In what sense I mean this, may I be

permitted to make some further remarks here at the close of this Introduction.

We call a science exact that is not content with the mere perception and observation of facts, but advances to a measuring and calculating investigation of their lawfulness. Measurable — directly measurable — are, however, only material things, or rather the mechanical (physico-chemical) processes of the material world. For it lies in the very concept of a measurement-operation [Messungsoperation] that it shall be capable of being repeated and controlled by any number of observers. Now there exist, however, besides the mechanical (physico-chemical) processes, no processes whatsoever that would be accessible to any number of observers; hence only mechanical processes can be subject to direct measurement [Messung]. Messung — measurement; only mechanical processes, being accessible to multiple observers, are directly measurable. Vital processes are accessible only to the single witness who experiences them.

Vital processes, on the other hand — particularly feelings, sensations, and phantasms — can only ever have one witness, are thus always inaccessible to a direct measurement and are in general subject only to a so-called estimation of magnitude [Grössenschätzung] by the single witness who perceives them. Grössenschätzung — estimation of magnitude; the subjective counterpart to objective measurement. What is mechanical is measurable; what is vital is merely estimable.

The significant difference between mechanical and vital processes thus comes to light in the difference between measurement of magnitude and estimation of magnitude, for the mechanical, because it can have any number of witnesses, is something measurable, whereas the vital, because it can in the best case have only one witness, is merely something estimable. Now, since the difference between the mechanical and the vital has been suppressed everywhere by psychologism, it never came to a philosophical investigation of the difference between measurement and estimation of magnitude. For hidden in the difference between measurement and estimation is the entire riddle of the non-living and the living.

Now, just as the living and the non-living stand in a relation of correlation or mutual conditionedness to one another, so too are measurements and estimations interwoven in the same correlation with one another. Into every measurement-operation there intrude, namely, in a most unwelcome manner, moments in which it is no longer a matter of an actual measuring but of an exact perceiving, a mere fixing, and the like — where, therefore, the vital process of the person carrying out the measurement begins to influence the entire measurement-operation in an undesired manner. On the other hand, every mere estimation of magnitude always takes place under certain external conditions that can be altered and subjected to a measurement, so that the changes in the estimation-results can be set against the changes in the external conditions found by measurement.

From this highly complicated state of affairs it follows, on the one hand, that a vital moment mingles itself into all of our measurements,

becoming the source of so-called errors of measurement; but on the other hand, also, that these errors can be subjected to a comparative and verifying measurement. Thus the animal-vital process, precisely because it necessarily obtrudes itself upon our measurements, can be made the object of an indirect measurement through comparative and verifying methods. The most significant impetus to such indirect or vitalistic measurements proceeded principally from two great researchers of modern times: the astronomer Bessel and the physiologist Donders. Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784–1846), astronomer, discoverer of the "personal equation" — systematic individual differences in observational timing. Franciscus Cornelis Donders (1818–1889), physiologist, pioneer of reaction-time measurement.

While the mechanical processes are directly, and the animal-vital processes only indirectly, measurable, psychical activities can never be subject to a measuring investigation (neither in a direct nor in an indirect manner). The psychologistic conceptual confusion has, to be sure, gone so far as to want to measure even the psychical, but in this presumption there comes to characteristic expression precisely the incapacity of psychologism to make a distinction between mechanical and vital processes on the one hand and mental activities on the other. Psychical acts are non-intuitable and have, as we added, an intermittent character; they are thus something merely countable [Zählbares], but can never be measured. To the extent that we come to know the vital processes by which the mental acts are connected with one another, and learn to measure them in a vitalistic manner, it will also become possible to proceed to a counting of the mental acts that were performed during a determinate psychical achievement. The development of vitalistic measurement-methods, or rather the experimental investigation of the pulses of our consciousness, can with time lead to psychical countings and thereby also make possible an application of mathematics to the science of mental activities.

From this, however, we are still very far removed. There must first be created a proper branch of the critique of knowledge that investigates measurement of magnitude and estimation of magnitude in their relation to one another and undertakes to clarify the fundamental concepts of direct or mechanistic and indirect or vitalistic measuring. I reserve the treatment of this difficult task for a separate work, in which I also intend to publish my vitalistic measurements.

For the present I had to content myself with conceptually separating measuring perception from merely estimating perception, through which I was led to a new theory of sense-perception. In measuring

perception, certain movements of the body are necessarily performed; in merely estimating perception, one part of these movements — such as the adjustment of the sense-organs — is indeed retained, but another part is replaced by movements "performed merely in the imagination" [in der Einbildung vollzogene Bewegungen]. In all of our perceptions, indeed in all mental activities whatsoever, real or also merely imagined movements play a decisive role. I believe I have furnished in the following lectures (8th–14th lecture) the proof that without real or imagined movements, perception-acts and mental activities in general could never be carried out. Psychologism believes it can build a world of perceptions out of sensation-elements; against this error it had to be shown that movement can never be reduced to sensation, and that without real or imagined movement nowhere and never could a sense-perception come about. Eingebildete Bewegung — imagined movement; a vital process (not a thought about movement) that replaces actual bodily movement in estimating perception; decisive for all perception and mental activity.

If a sensation is to come to consciousness, it must awaken an imagination-process [Einbildungsvorgang] through which the nerve-waves proceeding from the periphery are thrown back to their point of origin, so that the nerve-process underlying every perceptual activity must be conceived as a self-enclosed process — that is, as a circular process [Kreisprozess]. Kreisprozess — circular process; the closed feedback loop in which nerve-excitation travels from periphery to centre and back again, forming the physiological basis of perception.

To be sure, this new theory of perception requires a scientific proof, which, however, has been in the main actually furnished by the great histologist Stephan von Apathy. Stephan von Apathy (1863–1922), Hungarian histologist whose gold-staining methods revealed continuous neurofibrillary networks in the nervous system, challenging the prevailing neuron doctrine.

The investigations of this reformer of nerve-histology, distinguished by a rare degree of exactitude, have indeed furnished the indubitable proof that there are nowhere in the nervous system so-called "nerve-endings," but rather that those nervous structural elements that serve the conduction of excitation — and thus represent, as it were, the actual conducting wires of the nervous system — and which are designated by Apathy as "neurofibrils" [Neurofibrillen], form a self-enclosed system of conducting pathways, so that, proceeding from any arbitrary point of a neurofibril and advancing with continuous organic continuity, one can arrive again at the point of departure. Like the system of the blood-circulation, the nervous system too is a self-enclosed whole: a fact through which the entire life of the nerves appears to us in a completely new light. The doctrine of nerve-functions — that is, nerve-physiology — will have to be reworked in the sense of the great Apathian discovery, and this circumstance makes it comprehensible that its recognition still

encounters a vehement resistance in some physiological circles. Its eventual victory is, however, beyond doubt, because the closure-doctrine [Geschlossenheitslehre] of the neurofibrils was established with microtechnical methods that are universally acknowledged as the sharpest methods of modern microtechnique. ("Apathian gold-method.") A closer report on the closure-doctrine of the nervous system I furnish in the 15th lecture. Moreover, the reader may also find that all of my investigations into the relation of consciousness to the life-process press with logical necessity towards the closure-doctrine of the nervous system and represent, as it were, a philosophical proof of the Apathian principle.

First Lecture: The Principle of Intermittency#

Whether consciousness has discontinuity-points and whether there are consciousness-empty intervals in the course of life? The strict continuity-hypothesis of consciousness already includes within itself the assumption of immortality. The question of the continuity or the discontinuity of consciousness is the fundamental question of the theory of consciousness. Descartes as representative of the continuity-doctrine. He delivers, however, nowhere a proof of his continuity-hypothesis. Gassendi and Locke combat the continuity-doctrine without, however, breaking through to a principle of discontinuity. Locke holds the continuity of consciousness-activity to be the essence of waking. This is, however, an unfounded dogma. The articulated structure of human speech is a proof for the intermittency of consciousness-activity. One confuses the unity of our consciousness-activity with its alleged continuous flow. The "form" or articulation of human consciousness-activity. Also the perceptual activity of consciousness is an intermittent one. We cannot continuously follow a continuously flowing process with our perception-acts and consequently cannot penetrate into arbitrarily small fractions of a second. Pulse of the perception-acts. Heightening of the pulse-frequency through attention. This heightening very soon reaches its upper limit. The principle of intermittency is at the same time also the progress- or evolution-principle of human consciousness. To every system of consciousness-pulses belongs a world corresponding to this system. Historical predecessors of the intermittency-idea. Related thoughts in Karl Ernst von Baer. Each lecture opens with a synopsis composed by Palágyi himself, outlining the argument that follows.

Gentlemen! M. H.! — abbreviation of Meine Herren! ("My Gentlemen!"), the standard academic address in early twentieth-century German universities. Of all riddles that human consciousness is able to pose to itself, consciousness itself is no doubt to be regarded as the greatest riddle. How little we know it comes immediately to light when we attempt to give ourselves an account of even the most ordinary transformations of the same. It belongs, for example, to the nature of human consciousness that it cannot be maintained in waking activity beyond a certain duration of time. What is the reason for this? And what shall we think of that alteration which consciousness suffers through sleep? May we perhaps make the assumption that the activity of our consciousness suffers a complete rupture through sleep? Does consciousness-activity have somewhere, in the transition from the waking to the sleeping state, a discontinuity-point?

By a discontinuity-point would be meant precisely the complete tearing-off of the thread of consciousness.

The assumption that consciousness could suffer complete interruptions in sleep, that there would thus have to be periodic consciousness-empty intervals in the course of life, is already at first glance treacherous in the highest degree. For if the activity of consciousness were to suffer a complete rupture (that is, an end), it is not to be seen how it could begin anew and nonetheless be the continuation of an activity that had already come to a complete standstill. We harbour furthermore reservations about conceiving of sleep as a complete cessation of consciousness-activity, because indeed within sleep that kind of consciousness-activity which we designate as dreaming remains possible. Nothing, however, is so suited to plunge us into the highest confusion concerning the nature of our consciousness as the enigmatic fact of dreaming. For one can easily form the idea that even the deepest sleep is not dreamless, indeed that it consists of an unceasing series of extremely brief and extremely incoherent dreams which so completely displace one another that not the slightest trace of them remains lodged in our memory.

Then the activity of our consciousness would be a continuous one. And we should no doubt have to extend the continuity-hypothesis also to those "unconscious" states into which the organism falls, for example, in fainting or in narcosis. But what one is to make of such a consciousness-activity, which gives not the slightest report even of the gravest surgical interventions upon the organism — that no mortal can say. It is in the highest degree precarious to present consciousness-activity as a continuous one, because one is finally driven to the view that it persists uninterruptedly even in apparent death or indeed in death itself, and that it had existed already before birth, in the embryonic state, no less than during and before fertilisation. In short, the continuity-hypothesis of consciousness-activity is not easily to be brought into harmony with the fact that human consciousness can undergo many a difficult crisis. It also seems in its ultimate consequence to press towards the assumption that individual consciousness-activity has existed from eternity and must endure into eternity. For if one assumes that individual consciousness-activity took an absolute beginning at some time alpha and will take an absolute end at some time

omega, then alpha and omega are discontinuity-points of individual consciousness, and whoever holds these two discontinuity-points to be possible can well also concede that the consciousness-activity of an individual might exhibit arbitrarily many discontinuity-points. The strict continuity-theory, however, entirely excludes the existence of any discontinuity-point whatsoever, that is, it includes from the outset within itself the immortality-doctrine of individual consciousness. Whoever therefore wishes to maintain the standpoint of a strict continuity-doctrine of human consciousness is unconditionally obliged to furnish a strict proof for the eternity of individual consciousness-activity, because this eternity is already comprised within the continuity-hypothesis proper.

On the other hand, however, one cannot easily content oneself with a discontinuity-hypothesis of consciousness either. If one assumes that the activity of consciousness can completely cease in sleep, it is not to be seen what difference regarding consciousness-activity could exist between normal healthy sleep and fainting or narcosis? It is furthermore to be noted that the assumption of consciousness-empty temporal intervals of consciousness-activity may by no means yet be designated as a pure discontinuity-hypothesis. In certain periods of time consciousness would be uninterruptedly active, in other periods of time it would be completely inactive, as the following figure shows:

a --- b --- c --- d --- e --- f --- g --- h

where the segments (ab), (cd), (ef), (gh) would signify the continuous activity of consciousness during waking, while the segments (bc), (de), (fg) would signify consciousness-empty intervals during sleep. In the sense of such a conception, consciousness would thus be at times continuous and at times discontinuous, which certainly cannot be designated as a unified mode of thought.

The question whether human consciousness-activity is a flowing or a leaping one, and how in the latter case we should have to represent this leaping character to ourselves,

has in philosophy never been raised with determination and discussed thoroughly — that is, taking into consideration all possible cases. And yet it is the most significant question that we can formulate with regard to the nature of human consciousness, for it extends to the entire history of human consciousness, to every segment and every interval of this for us human beings so interesting history, and encompasses all possible, severe as well as mild crises by which human consciousness can be affected; indeed it spans altogether all possible normal transformations that our consciousness undergoes in the course of life. The question whether our consciousness has a flowing or leaping character contains in such manner all in any way significant problems of human destiny within itself: it is the scientific, so to speak mathematical formulation of the fundamental problem of a theory of consciousness [Bewusstseinslehre]. Bewusstseinslehre — theory (or doctrine) of consciousness; Palagyi's term for the systematic investigation of the structure and limits of consciousness, distinguished from both empirical psychology and Kantian epistemology. Precisely for this reason I place it at the head of the investigations with which we wish to occupy ourselves here.

That such a question could not remain entirely unnoticed need scarcely be said. It forced itself upon thinkers involuntarily and plays in the philosophemes of Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz, if not a leading, yet a most noteworthy role. In particular, Descartes is to be regarded as the originator of the continuity-hypothesis of human consciousness. To be sure, he nowhere expressly asserts that the activity of our consciousness is a continuous or flowing one, but his famous proposition — the soul always thinks — admits of no other interpretation than that we must conceive of the activity of our consciousness as an uninterrupted, that is, steadily flowing one. In the sense of Descartes, it belongs to the nature of a mind to be engaged in unceasing thought-activity, just as it belongs to the nature of corporeal substances to possess extension unceasingly. Quite as a body cannot exist without extension, a mind is unable to subsist without thinking. The soul of the human being always thinks; for its being, its essence, is precisely this perpetual thinking.

This proposition Descartes has of course nowhere proved. It steals in, as something self-evident, into his Meditations. As is well known, Descartes proceeds in his philosophy from the principle of the certainty of thought. Nothing can be more certain than the existence of our thought-activity, for if we doubt this existence, the fact that we doubt is precisely a proof that a thought-activity really and indubitably exists. This real and indubitable existence of thought-activity becomes in Descartes, in the twinkling of an eye, a continuously subsisting existence. A proof, however, that our thought-activity not only exists but also exists uninterruptedly, is nowhere to be found in Descartes. The peculiar idea of a restless, never-tiring, incessantly active thinking is in the highest degree characteristic of the individuality of this admirable, grand-minded thinker. One should set upon his monument the inscription: Semper cogitare.

Against this fundamental principle Gassendi Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), French philosopher and priest whose objections to Descartes' Meditations constitute the Fifth Set of Objections (1641). remarks that lethargic states must indeed count as unconscious ones, and that in the mother's womb one could not yet have had consciousness either. But this rejoinder is rather feeble, because Gassendi lacks the courage and strength to seriously contemplate the thought of an interruption of consciousness-activity (through sleep, stupefaction, etc.). But what use is it to contend against the continuity-principle if one shrinks from openly pronouncing and somehow grounding the discontinuity-idea? Something similar holds for the later and historically most significant position taken by Locke against the Cartesian high-tide of spirits. Locke's polemic is directed not merely against the Cartesian doctrine of innate ideas; rather he combats also — what is little noticed — the Cartesian continuity-theory as such. "I for my part," says the upright founder of modern "empiricism," "confess that I have one of those dull souls that does not always busy itself in the contemplation of ideas, and holds the incessant thinking no more necessary for the soul than incessant motion for the body. Thinking is not the essence of the soul, but one of its operations, and however much it may be regarded as the proper activity of the soul, the soul need not be assumed to be always thinking and in activity. This may be the privilege of the infinite Author and Preserver of all things, who never slumbers and sleeps; but it is not fitting for a finite being, at least not for the human soul."

Locke notes quite rightly that the Cartesian continuity-principle contains no sober characterisation of human consciousness, but is rather to be conceived as a hymn to the eternal nature of thought-activity as such. But Locke too takes no principled position against the continuity-doctrine, for he does not venture to profess any discontinuity-doctrine of consciousness whatsoever; indeed he concedes that the essence of waking consciousness consists in an unceasing thought-activity: "I grant that in a waking man the soul is never without thinking, because this is the condition of waking."

Locke here uncovers in a few words a fundamental defect [Grundgebrechen] of modern theory of consciousness (psychology and epistemology). He pronounces it as a self-evident truth that the essence of waking consciousness consists in a continuous thought-activity, and consequently holds it unnecessary to prove the proposition in any way. It does not occur to him to consider that we human beings sometimes have coherent dreams, for which a continuous consciousness-activity can be claimed just as much as for waking experiences. If, for example, someone dreams that he steps into a boat, pushes off from the shore, leaves the vessel to the play of the waves, but the same capsizes as a result of a violent surge and he himself plunges into the water, etc.:

it is not to be seen why to these dream-experiences there could not correspond a continuous consciousness-activity just as well as to any waking experiences whatever. It is not the continuity of consciousness-activity through which a waking experience distinguishes itself from a coherent dream-experience. One readily concedes that between a waking experience and a dream-experience, however coherent (respectively, between the corresponding consciousness-activities), some most significant difference must exist; but we do not have the slightest grounds for supposing that the activity of consciousness in dreaming could not at least for a while have just as well a continuously flowing character as in the waking state.

It is, however, altogether an entirely unfounded dogma that waking consciousness-activity has a continuously flowing character and that its distinguishing mark consists in precisely this continuous flow. Such a dogma could only arise because we do not yet possess a truly critical investigation of human consciousness at all. It is thoroughly questionable and cannot be decided affirmatively from the outset whether waking consciousness-activity is a continuously flowing one. Undoubtedly we all live in the illusion that the waking consciousness of the human being is engaged in a continuously flowing activity; indeed it is not to be denied that a stronger illusion than this cannot exist at all: but permit me already here in the introduction to point to two series of facts which are suited to shake the naive belief in the continuous flow of waking consciousness-activity.

1. Human speech, as the foremost sensibly apprehensible expression of our thinking, testifies a thousandfold through its wonderfully finely articulated structure that our consciousness-activity is by no means a flowing one, but on the contrary one that is articulated in the eminent sense of the word. Human speech moves forward in articulated unities which we call sentences, and however intimately the sense of one sentence may cohere with the sense of another, each individual sentence nevertheless asserts also its own, independent sense. A series of many thousands of sentences can cohere so intimately that it becomes the bearer of a single fundamental thought; for this, however, it is by no means required that each of the many thousands of sentences give up its own independent sense and that all sentences together flow into an unarticulated thought-porridge: on the contrary, each individual sentence must inalienably assert its own distinct sense, so that it may have its own share in the production of that unitary fundamental thought which is borne by many thousands of sentences.

In short, the unity of our thought-activity is not maintained through the memberless continuous flow of the same, because through such a memberless continuity no thought whatsoever could come about. Just as little as the gait of a human being is comparable to the flowing of a stream, so too the course of his thoughts is not at all similar to a continuous flow, but is composed of well-articulated thought-steps or thought-acts. Only the invisibility of thought-activity led to the formation of such metaphorical expressions as "thought-flow" or "stream of thought." But every intelligible discourse shows clearly that an intelligible sense must articulate itself into independent sentences which precisely through their distinctness yield a unitary sense. And if we write these sentences down, then our punctuation marks (full-stop, question-mark, semicolon, comma, etc.) are precisely the sensible proofs that our thought-activity is distinguished by a temporal articulation or temporal architectonic which we shall have to investigate thoroughly.

If we consider furthermore the structure of a single sentence, we find that within it the meaning of each word stands out sharply from the meaning of every other, and that this is nonetheless no hindrance to the meanings of several words uniting into a completely unitary sentential sense. The sense of a sentence never comes about through the words which are the bearers of this sense giving up their own meaning and flowing together into an unarticulated sentential porridge; rather, words are suited, only by virtue of their fixed, inalienable meaning, to become bearers of some determinate sentential sense. If the word, because it is used within a sentence, were to lose its proper meaning, it could no longer be employed in another sentence, and it would be the end of the possibility of a sensible human discourse.

One ordinarily confuses the unity of our consciousness-activity with its alleged continuous flow, and one believes that a unity of our consciousness can only be maintained through the steady flow of its activity. This nowhere clearly pronounced, but for precisely this reason all the more dangerous, universally prevailing prejudice we shall have to oppose in the most determined manner, in order to prove at length that through a steadily flowing activity thoughts can never be produced and that the unity of consciousness consists only through a well-articulated activity of the same. In subjecting this articulation to a thorough examination, a morphology or

theory of forms of human consciousness will result for us, wherein, however, we take the expression "form" by no means in the scholastic sense in which the epistemologists have used it especially since Kant. We speak here of the real form of human consciousness-activity, that is, of the really existing temporal articulation of the same, which can only be investigated by above all raising the question of the flowing or non-flowing character of consciousness-activity: a question that for Kant and his followers did not yet exist at all.

But perhaps one will raise against our endeavour, right at the start, the objection that one may very well speak of an articulation of the sensibly apprehensible linguistic expression, but not at the same time of an articulation of thought-activity itself. That would now indeed be a most peculiar view of the relation of language to thinking; but I scarcely believe that a philosopher could be found who would have the courage seriously to maintain the standpoint that our thought-activity is in itself a memberlessly flowing, so to speak formless one, and that only its linguistic expression possesses an articulation and architectonic. For on this view one could never speak of individual judgements and individual concepts as members of our thinking, and there would exist an absolute incongruity between thought-activity on the one hand and the structure of human speech on the other.

But whoever nonetheless harbours doubts as to whether human thought-activity could in itself be an articulated one, to him we recommend the consideration of a second series of facts, which is suited to grant a far deeper insight into the nature of human consciousness-activity than the cursory observation of the structure of human speech was able to offer.

2. That consciousness-activity which we develop during seeing, hearing, etc., in short during sensory perception, respectively during the sensory observation of arbitrary processes and phenomena, is never a continuously flowing activity. The process itself which we observe may very well be a continuously flowing one, but it is not given to us to take cognisance separately of the infinitely many phases of any steadily flowing process. We strain our attention altogether in vain in order to distinguish as many phases as possible in the leap of an animal, for example a horse, and the instantaneous photographs of such a movement instruct us in a humbling manner as to how little we perceive of what happens before our eyes. We are simply not able to penetrate with our perceiving gaze into small fractions of a second: quite as we are also incapable of grasping with unaided eyes what lies spread before us in small surface-portions of 1/100, 1/1000, etc. of a square millimetre. Were the observing activity of our consciousness a steadily

flowing one, nothing of what takes place in the hundredth or thousandth parts of a second or of a millimetre could in any way remain hidden from us.

The acts of our observing attention have, as it were, a pulse [Puls]. Puls — pulse; the rhythmic, intermittent beat of consciousness-acts. Palagyi's central metaphor: just as the arterial pulse marks discrete beats of the heart, the consciousness-pulse marks discrete acts of awareness separated by gaps. Our attention leaps away from the phenomena only to return swiftly to them again, and because this letting-go and re-seizing of the observed process takes place with great rapidity in fractions of a second, there arises for us afterwards the illusion as though our attention had been at work in a steadily flowing manner. If one considers, however, that for a steadily flowing attention not even the smallest temporal intervals of an occurrence could remain hidden, one sees at once that such an attention was not granted to us human beings. We are able to strain our attention, that is, we can accelerate the succession of our consciousness-acts [Bewusstseinsakte] Bewusstseinsakt — consciousness-act; a single, discrete act of consciousness, non-intuitable and instantaneous, contrasted with the continuous flow of vital processes. or, figuratively speaking: we can heighten the pulse-frequency of our consciousness-activity, and then it becomes possible that we perceive more phases of a process, more details of a visual field, than otherwise; but beyond a certain measure it would be in vain to wish to strain our attention, that is, there exists for us human beings an upper limit of the pulse-frequency of our attention which we cannot exceed with the best will and the most sustained practice. In particular, the pulse-frequency of our attention cannot become an infinite one, which would be unconditionally required for attention, filling all the smallest time-particles, to become a steadily flowing one. Nor can the pulse-frequency of our attention sink below a lower limit if we are to remain in the waking state. It will, however, be our task to study thoroughly the nature of our consciousness-pulse, for what we are properly concerned with is the grounding of a pulse-theory of human consciousness.

It is an error to believe that the consciousness-activity of the human being is comparable to a flowing stream. It is not the acts of our consciousness but the processes of nature that have a steady, uninterrupted flow. Heraclitus expresses with his "Panta rhei" merely one half of a fundamental truth; one ought to supplement the famous dictum in the following manner: Everything flows, only consciousness of this flow is itself nothing flowing. The events storm, rage, and race on without pause, but the acts of human consciousness do not storm, rage, and race without pause along with them. To be sure, our consciousness-activity is caught up in the all-encompassing temporal course of the universal process of nature, but the temporal course of our consciousness-acts is not to be conceived as a flowing-along with the phenomena, but merely as a pulsating-along [Mitpulsieren] with them. I ask

not to be misunderstood: for in "opposing" the intermittent activity of consciousness to the stream of phenomena, I am far from wishing to found a "dualistic doctrine" of the process of nature on the one hand and human thinking on the other; rather, my entire endeavour is directed towards the elaboration of a unity-doctrine of the two. In the midst of the eternally streaming ocean of phenomena a human consciousness pulsates; but that eternal stream is only a stream because it presents itself as a stream to a pulsating consciousness; and this consciousness-pulse is only a pulse because it is borne by that stream to which it relates itself by means of its acts in thinking.

Our consciousness-activity distinguishes itself from the flow of phenomena through its intermittent character. Were our thought-acts not to have an intermittent character but to flow along with the phenomena, consciousness itself would not be distinguishable from the phenomena — that is, there would then be no consciousness at all. To be sure, neither could there then be any talk of a stream of phenomena, because where consciousness is lacking, there can be no talk of anything at all. Both our consciousness and the flow of events are made possible only through the fact that consciousness, through its intermittent activity, distinguishes itself from the continuous stream of these events.

We owe it to the intermittent nature of our consciousness-activity that we are conscious beings and can speak of a world that appears to us. But upon precisely this intermittent nature of our consciousness-acts it also rests that our consciousness is a limited one, or as we are accustomed to express it, that certain limits are set to our capacity for cognition. There is much talk in modern philosophy of the limits of human cognition, and we owe it chiefly to the efforts of Locke, (Hume,) and Kant that modern epistemology regards it as a chief task to investigate the so-called limits or bounds of the human capacity for cognition: but it seems to me that this "criticist" direction of modern philosophy, despite the great acumen that was expended upon its development, was bound to remain unfruitful, because it could not rouse itself to the openly posed, clear question — upon what, then, does the limitedness of human nature actually rest? I believe that in the investigations which follow I shall be able to furnish the proof that the limitedness of human consciousness rests precisely upon the intermittency of its activity, and that the examination of the so-called limits of human cognition receives a clear scientific sense only when one conceives of it as an examination of the peculiar nature of our mental acts [geistige Akte]. Geistige Akte — mental acts; the non-intuitable, instantaneous acts of consciousness (thinking, judging, perceiving) that cannot be seen, heard, or touched. Distinguished from vital processes, which are continuous and flowing. An

intermittent consciousness-activity is namely never capable of doing full justice to the continuous flow of phenomena, and all flowing occurrence in nature retains for the human understanding a most disquieting irrational character, because it is simply impossible by means of pulsating and articulating mental acts to fully master the continuous course of events. It lies, however, at the same time in the intermittent nature of our consciousness-activity that we are able to investigate the course ever more and more precisely, and to approach the ideal of an absolute cognition ever more and more closely, without ever being able to realise this ideal. The principle of the intermittency of human consciousness thus contains within itself not only the principle of its limitedness, but wishes to be at the same time the expression of the peculiar boundless capacity for progress by which human inquiry is characterised.

Were it possible to accelerate our consciousness-pulse beyond the limit of the human, the world-picture that unrolls before us would undergo an essential transformation. To every system of consciousness-pulses belongs a world corresponding to this system. Upon this belonging-together of mental pulse and appearing world rests what we interpret now as objectivity, now as subjectivity of our world-views. We say: an objective world appears to us in which we live, and the sense of this statement is in the first instance that those mental pulses which are our own are in fact and necessarily co-ordinated with that world which precisely appears to us. But we say also that our world-picture is a merely subjective one, and the sense of this assertion is that if our mental pulses were to change, the world that appears to us would also have to become a different world in kind. With the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity (as also of ideality and reality) much abuse has been practised in modern philosophy, and we shall have to be particularly on our guard against the careless use of these expressions. Here it shall only be emphasised that in my view the said expressions assume a determinate sense only when we conceive of consciousness-activity as an intermittent one and especially take into account that various conscious beings are equipped with various pulses of consciousness.

For the rest, we wish to leave the great problem whether our consciousness-activity is a steadily flowing one or not for the time being as an open one, and to reserve it for our later investigations to take a definitive position on the matter. Should it turn out, for example, that with an intermittent consciousness-activity the construction of a logically coherent series of thoughts is impossible, then the doctrine of the intermittency of our mental acts would indeed have to be dropped at once. Or should it emerge that our sensory world-picture would have to be quite differently constituted than it actually is, if our sense-perception were a pulsating one, then a pulse-theory of attention could not remain in force for a single moment. I hope, however, to be able to furnish the proof that not only do all facts of our mental life agree very well with the principle of intermittency, but that a science of consciousness can only be erected upon the foundation of this principle. Should I, however, find myself in error, I hope even through this error to render a service to science. For in working towards the most binding proof possible of the intermittency-doctrine of consciousness, I compel the researchers who may set out from an opposing view to found a clear and convincing continuity-doctrine of consciousness. For the present we unfortunately possess no exact theory of consciousness at all, whether it take a position for or against the continuity-principle.

In closing this lecture I should like to remark that the doctrine of the intermittency of human consciousness-activity is nothing quite so new as might appear at first glance. Every thought that emerges in the course of the historical development of science has been stimulated by forebears in manifold ways, indeed also divined and fleetingly grasped, or at least somehow prepared. It would therefore not surprise me if philosophical-historical research were to demonstrate the germs of the intermittency-principle in a whole series of systems; for I find afterwards, myself, in a multitude of thinkers, intimations which can without compulsion be interpreted as an inkling of the intermittency-idea. It is especially the psychologists of more recent times who have expressed this thought in a peculiarly restricted formulation. They say that our "time-sense" does not have a continuous character, and mean by this that we are able to follow the flowing time-stream with our perception not in a flowing manner, but only in intermittent intervals. Were these authors to express themselves better, they would have to say that we conceive of the time-stream now as flowing, now as intermittent; and indeed, we regard time as steadily flowing when we place the stream of natural phenomena within it; we regard it, however, as intermittent when we think of the temporal course as posited through the acts of our consciousness. For the phantasy [Phantasie] time is flowing, for phantasy places phenomena within time; for the understanding, on the other hand, the temporal course is composed of discrete time-

points drawn together as closely as possible, for the understanding generates time through discrete acts that cannot flow together with one another. Something similar holds also for the phantasy-based and the rational conception of space.

It should be mentioned finally that the great embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer, Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876), Baltic German naturalist and embryologist. The address Palagyi references was delivered in 1860 to the Russian Entomological Society and published as "Welche Auffassung der lebenden Natur ist die richtige?" ("Which Conception of Living Nature Is the Correct One?"). in an address delivered at the opening of the Russian Entomological Society (1860), pursues a train of thought that touches upon the one set forth above at one point. Of an intermittency of human consciousness he is admittedly not thinking, but he speaks of the "6, at most 10, life-moments" that we have per second. He stands, namely, under the impression of the "reaction-experiments" or "psychical time-measurements" that had then come into vogue, and attaches exceedingly poetic, imaginative reflections to the fact that a certain time (the fraction of a second) is required before we perceive a sense-impression acting upon us. He contemplates human beings of the same mental kind as we, who would, however, have a thousand-fold or million-fold faster, respectively slower, arterial pulse than we, and describes with incomparable vividness how the sensory world would take shape for such "month-persons," "minute-persons," etc. He does indeed indulge in thoroughly adventurous assumptions and conclusions, for he wishes to "condense" the life-content of a human being so that it extends over only minutes, or also to "thin it out" so that it extends over millennia: nevertheless, within this whole phantasmagoria there is also a scientific content. It seems to me that the great researcher came close to the concept of the consciousness-pulse, but so thoroughly conflated it with the arterial pulse, and held the concepts of life-process and consciousness so little apart, that he thereby deprived himself of the actual scientific yield of his poetic visions. In any case I wish to draw attention most emphatically to his work "Which Conception of Living Nature Is the Correct One."

Second Lecture: The Problem of the Continuity or Intermittency of Consciousness-Activity#

The problem of the continuity or the intermittency of consciousness-activity presses towards a thorough investigation of the entire history of human consciousness. Importance of the investigation of the periodic transformations of consciousness in the waking state and in sleep. The abuse which mystics and sceptics practise with dream-consciousness. The alteration which consciousness undergoes through sleep, through fainting, etc., proves that we must distinguish the life-process from consciousness-activity. In the alert state the life-process acts in a promoting manner upon consciousness-activity; in the turning towards drowsiness this influence becomes an inhibiting one. There are no consciousness-processes, but merely consciousness-activities. The rapids of the life-stream. The confusion of consciousness and life that is contained in the principle: percipi esse. If all processes were consciousness-processes, then sleep, fainting, and death would have to be perceptions of the sleeping, unconscious, or dead person. There are life-processes that exclude the consciousness of their taking place. Even sensation-processes can be cut off from consciousness when the latter is too greatly occupied by other sensations. Enthusiastic character of the doctrine that the world of appearances is a product of consciousness. The sophistry that insinuates itself into this enthusiasm. The sound vitalistic kernel that is contained in "empirical idealism."

Gentlemen! We raised in the previous hour the difficult problem of the continuity or the intermittency of human consciousness, and must now say to ourselves that, if any decision in this question is to be reached at all, we must necessarily survey the entire history of an individual consciousness and come to know it in all its essential features, in order to arrive at a definitive judgement as to whether the activity of consciousness is a steadily flowing or an unsteadily intermittent one. Therein consists precisely the significance of that problem hitherto rather neglected in philosophy, that it compels us to investigate in exact fashion the general history of an individual human consciousness in all life-stages from birth to death, because, were there even a single minute in life in which consciousness-activity were a continuous one, we should have to become doubtful of the principle of intermittency, or conversely should have to lose faith in the continuity-principle, were there to be found even a single minute in life in which the activity of consciousness proved itself to be intermittent. Were someone, however, to wish to resolve the problem raised in such a sense that the activity of our consciousness could in certain segments of our life show a continuously flowing, in other segments on the contrary an intermittent character: then it would be all the more his duty, investigating all life-segments precisely, to show what the reason might be that it pleases consciousness to prove itself now as flowing, now however to exhibit a capricious intermittency.

Our highest interest is naturally aroused by those critical moments or intervals of the course of our life in which our consciousness-activity appears to suffer an interruption, as for example in sleep, in fainting, or in death. A being that would know neither sleep, nor fainting, nor death, but would be conscious of itself from eternity to eternity, would certainly not need to become reflective about its own consciousness in such a manner as we human beings, who must ask what the matter may be with the light of our consciousness, since this light can to all appearances be extinguished, and what is still more remarkable, can in spite of its extinction light up once more. Quite especially it is the periodic transformation of our consciousness, brought about by the alternation of waking and sleep, that must above all arouse our interest, for it is after all in the first instance this everyday periodic transformation that suggests to us the thought that the light of our consciousness could have in all its segments a periodically extinguishing and re-igniting character.

"Psychology," however, appears to avoid if possible the question whether our consciousness-activity everywhere has a necessarily periodic character. It concerns itself only incidentally and by way of appendix with dream-consciousness, and brings the same into such close connexion with hallucinations that it almost gains the appearance as though dreaming were a pathological process which would not have to be taken seriously into consideration in the doctrine of normal consciousness. Now it scarcely needs saying that it belongs to the nature of our life-process to fluctuate necessarily between the states of waking and sleeping, so that we form for ourselves a wholly false concept of our life-process if we leave out of account the fundamental law of this its necessary periodicity. Going further, however, I should also like to maintain that it belongs not only to the nature of our life-process but also to the nature of our consciousness-activity to undergo periodic transformations and to rock itself now upon the waves of waking activity, now upon those of dream-consciousness. If there are persons who according to their own statement seldom or never at all dream, this is of little significance, for one dreams far more than one is inclined to believe. Nor have I ever yet encountered a human being who would have maintained that he has absolutely no notion of what is meant by the word "dream," since he knows nothing of the sort from his experience. A human being who did not have the concept of the "dream" would be a human being of unsound mind, because he could also have no concept of what we mean by the word "reality." Only the contrast between dream and waking consciousness instructs us properly about the contrast between "chimera" and "reality," and it is accordingly a most important chapter in the mental developmental history [Entwickelungsgeschichte] Entwickelungsgeschichte — developmental history; the term encompasses both ontogenetic (individual) and phylogenetic (species) development, characteristic of post-Darwinian German scientific vocabulary. of the child, where it arrives at a distinction between dream-image and reality-image. We remain, alas, with respect to this distinction in a certain sense always children, that is, we arrive even in philosophy at no genuine concept of reality, because we do not take the trouble to establish scientifically, with all the power of our discriminating understanding, the difference between dream-consciousness and waking consciousness. We fall upon the byways of mysticism and scepticism chiefly for the reason that we have no scientific theory of the difference between dreaming and waking consciousness.

[Author's note:] The difference between dream-image and perception-image is discussed in the 13th Lecture.

All mysticism rests, namely, in the last ground upon the fact that we are beings who have dreams, and thus fall into a peculiar second state of consciousness that runs along intermittently beside waking consciousness and that is no doubt able to insinuate itself for brief moments into the midst of waking life. If now there exists such a mysterious second consciousness, the thought lies near that in some individuals it could be far more strongly developed than in others, and that through methodical cultivation it could be led towards a still higher development. We neglect our dream-consciousness — so a mystic might speak — and let that wonderful talent which manifests itself in the formation of dream-intuitions wither away: were we, however, to bestow upon dream-life the cultivation due to it, as we do with waking consciousness, then the dream, at the highest stage of development where it becomes the "clairvoyant dream," would grant us not only higher raptures but also higher insights than any waking consciousness is able to afford. Spatial distances that remain closed to the waking eye would open themselves to us at will; we would be able to gaze prophetically into arbitrarily distant future times; indeed, we could, elevating ourselves above space and time, enter into commerce with the realm of spirits, etc. etc. Who does not know these seductive siren-calls of the various "spiritistic" and "occultistic" schools: but where has there ever been a mystic who bestowed upon us a genuine science of the difference between waking and dream-consciousness and of their relation to one another? To be sure, we must also confess that the opponents of the mystics, the men of the "Enlightenment," instruct us even far less about the fundamental question of what we are to make of dream-consciousness in distinction from waking consciousness.

All mystical doctrines rest in the last ground upon a competition that dream-consciousness wages against the waking consciousness of the human being, and indeed, as the history of the world shows, very often with great success. But not only the mystic, the sceptic too makes use of the fact of dreaming in order to confuse and undermine our conception of waking consciousness. The mystic wishes to trump waking consciousness with a mysterious, dream-kindred gift; the sceptic, on the contrary, wishes in the reverse manner to devalue waking consciousness precisely by making it into a worthless dream. It is, for example, in the highest degree characteristic how Descartes Rene Descartes (1596–1650). The dream-argument appears in the First Meditation (Meditationes de prima philosophia, 1641). makes use of the fact of dreaming in order to ground his theoretical doubt concerning all waking sense-perception. There is simply no stronger argument against the reality of our waking sensory world than its kinship with the dream. The images, namely, which the dream conjures up, vie especially in youthful years in splendour of colour and sensuous glow with the most vivid images of waking sight, so that they suggest the thought that our waking intuitions too are nothing more than a kind of dream-intuitions, and that the things which waking life conjures up before us would be just as unreal as the things that appear to us in the dream-vision. Waking life would be a second dream-state, with the difference that we could not at all free ourselves from its terrible oppressive weight, and perhaps only death could bring a deliverance from the same.

In vain does Descartes then wish to prove to us that we can be certain of our own thought-activity, because the doubt concerning it — since it too represents a thought-activity — refutes itself. For if there is no fixed difference between dreaming and waking consciousness, it could well be that all our thinking is an activity merely of dream-consciousness, and that consequently the certainty of the proud Cartesian "Cogito" etc. would be no more significant than any arbitrary dream-certainty. If one does not show us that waking consciousness is something essentially different from the dream, one reasons in vain against scepticism. Since now Descartes nowhere demonstrates that waking certainty is something quite different from the certainty which a dreamer believes himself to have, his "Cogito" too remains a principle of which one does not know whether one may ascribe to it waking or dream-certainty.

From this it is to be seen what fundamental significance belongs to the distinction between waking and dream-like consciousness-activity. Here the intimate connexion of this problem with another no less significant problem shall first be set forth.

It is a universally known fact that we are able to struggle against drowsiness, partly by executing physical movements, partly by seeking to occupy our mind with stimulating objects that interest us in the highest degree. In the end, however, all such galvanising [elektrisierende] Elektrisierende Mittel — literally "electrifying means"; Palagyi uses the word figuratively for stimulants that rouse wakefulness, with a nod to the galvanic experiments of the period. means fail, and it becomes an impossibility for us to keep waking consciousness-activity going. Such experiences convince us in an immediately felt manner that there is something against which our consciousness-activity must struggle in order to be able to maintain itself. This something is our own life-process, which can undergo such an alteration that it inhibits, impedes, suppresses our consciousness in its activity, and under certain circumstances leads it over into a second kind of activity, namely the dream. When the organism has rested in sleep, the life-process swells up in such a manner that it acts upon consciousness in a stimulating, promoting, and directly dream-awakening fashion. From this it is to be gathered that we may never confuse the activity of our consciousness with our vital process. The life-process can exert a promoting influence upon our waking consciousness-activity, but it can also inhibit it and, despite the highest exertion of our will, in mysterious fashion paralyse it, respectively lead it over into the dream-state. Already this universally known fact contains within itself a wholly sufficient ground for prudently keeping apart the activity of our consciousness and the course of our life-process as two concepts different from one another. It is something quite different merely to live and again something different to live with consciousness, namely with waking consciousness. For however extremely closely our consciousness may hang together with our life-process, that feeling of exertion [Anstrengungsgefühl] Anstrengungsgefühl — feeling of exertion or effort; the subjective sense of strain experienced in struggling against drowsiness, which Palagyi takes as direct evidence that consciousness-activity and life-process are distinct. which we experience in the struggle against sleep teaches us that consciousness-activity is something that can be overpowered, and periodically also is necessarily overpowered, and therefore must not be confused with its overpowerer. Sleep is no deed of our consciousness, no act of the same, but rather an overcoming of its activity through a mysterious turning of our life-process, which has been elucidated by physiology only in a very inadequate measure.

All crises of consciousness: deliria, states of fainting and narcosis, etc., show plainly that alterations which take place in our life-process can draw the activity of our consciousness into sympathy, by constricting, confusing, disrupting it, or even bringing it to a complete standstill. Although, therefore, our waking consciousness-activity could not subsist without being borne and promoted by the life-process, we shall nonetheless have to guard ourselves against confusing the two concepts, for experience teaches that the life-process can take turnings which lead to enigmatic catastrophes of consciousness.

The unconscious person and the narcotised one are alive, although according to the universally prevailing view they must be regarded as "unconscious," that is, as not evincing even the slightest trace of consciousness-activity. It is universally held that life can still continue without consciousness having to be active in even the slightest degree. It is a popular conviction that the life-process must be a steadily flowing one, for when the light of life is truly extinguished once, that is, when death truly sets in, there can be no further talk of a new flickering-up of the life-process in question, whereas the activity of consciousness can very well suffer a temporary interruption and nonetheless set in anew. I confess that I share this conviction, and that I am filled with the endeavour to procure for this popular conviction a scientific validity. To be sure, I diverge from the popular view in this, that I regard consciousness also in all its waking activities as pulsating. The life-process is, so long as it lasts, an uninterruptedly flowing one; consciousness-activity, however, does not flow along with it, but merely pulsates along with it, and such states as, for example, fainting have merely the significance that during their duration the consciousness-pulse ceases.

But however this may be, so much may be taken as established: that sleep and fainting are not deeds or acts of our consciousness, but rather states in which something befalls our consciousness, in which it conducts itself passively [leidend] Leidend — literally "suffering"; Palagyi's use here carries the dual sense of passivity and suffering, underscoring that consciousness in sleep or fainting is not acting but undergoing something imposed upon it by the life-process.: passively in consequence of such a turning of the life-process as suppresses our waking consciousness-activity in a manner still to be investigated.

We shall therefore take care not to confuse the activity of consciousness with its passivity, that is, we shall have to make a sharp distinction between the moments when consciousness does something and the temporal intervals when something happens to consciousness. For it is, as I shall presently show, a chief defect [Hauptgebrechen] of modern philosophy and especially of modern psychology that it speaks in a careless manner of consciousness-processes [Bewusstseinsvorgänge] Bewusstseinsvorgänge — consciousness-processes; the term Palagyi objects to, on the grounds that consciousness properly has acts (active, intermittent), not processes (passive, flowing). The distinction is central to his critique of modern psychology. and creates the appearance as though the investigator of human consciousness always had to do with "consciousness-processes," when after all the essence of our consciousness manifests itself first and foremost in its acts, whereby I understand by consciousness-acts not only the activity of sense-perception but also the phantasy-acts (of the artist), the thought-acts (of the researcher), the will-acts (of the practical human being). I employ the cumbersome expression "consciousness-activity" only for the reason that there exists no other expression encompassing all kinds of activities of the human mind.

To be sure, the human mind is not pure, not absolute activity, as it would have to be in the sense of Descartes if the soul were always to think, that is, to perform acts continuously. In all its activity, in all its acts, our consciousness is supported and borne by our vital process, just as the oarsman with his skiff is supported and borne by the stream. As the work of the oarsman is not a flowing but a rhythmic one, so too the acts of our consciousness during the mental voyage are not a flowing but a pulsating one; but as the stream that bears the skiff is a steadily flowing stream, so too the life-stream that bears our mental activity, as it were, upon its back is of a steadily flowing nature.

As further an oarsman, because his skiff does not stand still during the brief pauses he requires in order to take a fresh stroke, can surrender to the illusion that his work-activity is not an intermittent but a flowing one: so too the mental oarsman can surrender to the illusion that it is not the vital stream that makes his mental oar-strokes possible which has a flowing character, but that these intermittent oar-strokes themselves are of a flowing nature. In this illusion we are all commonly caught up: we confuse the stream of our own life-process with the mental oar-stroke of our own consciousness. We do not keep apart the concepts of the vital and of the psychical.

How, then, does one bring the mental oarsman to his senses, so that he does not confuse his mental work with the vital work of his organism? Quite simply, by proceeding with him in a manner similar to that used with an actual boatman who would be unable to distinguish the strength of his arm from the strength of the stream bearing him! One brings him to a rapid. For so long as the surface of the stream is gentle and smooth, the oarsman can easily leave out of account the difference between the strength of his arm and the strength of the stream; but if the stream carries him into the depths, it will become clear to him what difference exists between his muscular strength and the power of the stream. Now our life-stream too has its peculiar periodic rapids, namely there where it draws our consciousness from the luminous realm of waking into the dull realm of dreams. Truly, a being whose consciousness is subject to sleep ought not to confuse its mental activity with that life-stream which tears its thinking into the whirl of confused dreams.

Nevertheless, the history of modern philosophy shows us that characteristically modern thought is above all characterised by the passionate propensity to confuse the concepts of consciousness and of the vital process with one another, and thereby to create a ruinous mental confusion such as was wholly unknown in antiquity. Quite especially the British philosophy, as it is represented pre-eminently by Locke, Berkeley, George Berkeley (1685–1753), Irish philosopher and Anglican bishop, whose esse est percipi ("to be is to be perceived") is Palagyi's principal target in this lecture. His chief philosophical works are A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713). and Hume, David Hume (1711–1776), Scottish philosopher. Together with Locke and Berkeley, he forms the British empiricist tradition that Palagyi here characterises as confounding vital and mental categories. is distinguished by the fact that it has developed the conceptual confusion of life and consciousness (or experience [Erlebnis] Erlebnis — experience in the sense of lived experience; a vital event or occurrence, as distinct from a mental act. Palagyi's point is that British empiricism conflates the lived event (Erlebnis) with the mental act (geistiger Akt) that takes cognisance of it. and mental act) into a proper art and science, from which modern psychology and epistemology [Erkenntnislehre] Erkenntnislehre — theory of knowledge, epistemology; literally "doctrine of cognition." Palagyi views modern epistemology as vitiated by the same confusion of vital and mental that characterises British empiricism. have issued.

This characteristic conceptual confusion, with which we shall have to concern ourselves repeatedly and very thoroughly, emerges most clearly in Berkeley. Corporeal things, a so-called matter — so the paradoxical Irish philosopher notoriously teaches — do not exist. What we perceive with our senses are always only states and properties, such as warmth, cold, hardness, colour, odour, etc., but never an alleged substratum that would underlie these properties. A so-called material bearer of these properties no mortal has ever yet perceived with any one of his senses, for what presents itself to the senses are always only states and properties or some alteration in the same. That which we call a corporeal thing is nothing more than a complex of properties. But as concerns these sensory properties, they have existence only within a perceiving mind. Warmth, cold, colour, density, magnitude, etc. are present only for one who feels, senses, represents them, that is, they are nothing more than consciousness-contents of a mind, which bring tidings of nothing of the sort that allegedly takes place outside consciousness. All our experiences [Erlebnisse] run their course wholly within our consciousness: they are born in consciousness, unfold within the same, and find in the same also their grave. Berkeley takes the Lockean principle that sensations are ideas in bloody earnest; he makes the vital process, skin and all, into a psychical happening. "Esse est percipi." Or as Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). "Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung" ("The world is my representation") opens his principal work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818/1844). says: "The world is my representation."

What consequences it has when one lets experiences run their course within consciousness, and consequently denies the vital process falling outside consciousness which comes to consciousness only afterwards: this may be shown by some examples. Sleep is an experience, hence it would have to run its course within the consciousness of the sleeper, that is, the latter would have to have an uninterrupted consciousness of his sleeping state. Since, however, sleep cannot be a consciousness-content of the sleeper, nothing remains but to deny its existence. For in the sense of "esse est percipi" only that can exist which runs its course within consciousness. There would also have to be no fainting and no death, because fainting is no consciousness-content of the unconscious person and death is no consciousness-content of the corpse. By ascribing existence only to consciousness-contents one abolishes all catastrophes of consciousness and quite especially death from the world. One becomes God.

Everyone knows that sleep is a segment of our life-process, and everyone sees that this segment of our life-process cannot combine itself with the consciousness of its taking place; hence it is clear that the life-process is something other than the consciousness of its taking place. This holds not only for sleep but in general for all segments of our life-process, quite especially also for the life-processes of waking. Only it is a rather difficult task to make, within waking, a distinction between what in waking is mere life-process and what in it is mere consciousness-activity. The life-process in the waking state is so bound up with the consciousness of this waking that one easily falls into the temptation of confusing the concepts of the waking life-process and of waking consciousness-activity. Precisely for this reason it had to be pointed out that the life-process also has such segments (as for example sleep) where it is not combined with a consciousness of its taking place, in order to draw attention to the fact that a life-segment and the consciousness of the same are not identical concepts.

The sensations that we have in the waking state are, considered in themselves, nothing more than waking experiences, that is, segments of our waking life-process; to be sure, they are commonly combined with the consciousness of their taking place, so that one easily falls into the error that the sensation-experience is identical with the consciousness-acts through which we have tidings of it. Now there are, however, universally known experiences in abundance which warn us against confusing the sensation-experience with the consciousness of its taking place. A single example may suffice here. Everyone knows that during some interesting occupation the ticking of the clock on the wall is not heard, but that it emerges very readily as soon as one breaks off the work. The sensation-processes which the ticking of the clock calls forth in us were, however, also taking place at the time when we could not become aware of them, because our consciousness-activity was set in connexion with other life-processes. In general, a number of simultaneous sensation- and feeling-processes are always knocking at our consciousness; the latter, however, can at a given moment set itself in connexion only with coherent life-processes belonging to the same kind, so that the remaining life-processes which press towards consciousness must meanwhile persist in an unperceived state. From this it is to be seen that we must take care not to confuse the vital processes of sensation and feeling with the acts of consciousness through which they are made known to us.

Consciousness-acts are our most properly mental doings; sensation-processes, however, are not at all our doings, but mere processes which, by virtue of their mysterious (and still to be investigated) union with our consciousness, can stimulate the activity of the latter to perceptions, but which can also, especially when they are very intense, impede, inhibit, or altogether bring to a standstill consciousness-activity. With genial depth of insight [genialem Tiefblick] Plato The reference is likely to the Theaetetus (184b–186e), where Plato distinguishes the soul's own activity in judging from the passive affections of the senses. says that our sensations are, as it were, the springboard [Schwungbrett] of our mental activity; to be sure, they are under certain circumstances also the brake-shoes [Hemmschuhe] of the same. In general there exists between life-process and consciousness-activity such a union that the former exerts now a promoting, now an inhibiting influence upon the latter; conversely, our consciousness is called upon to give our life-process a conscious direction, and this directing activity of consciousness can be now salutary, now also injurious to the welfare of the life-process.

Youthful enthusiasm [Schwärmerei] Schwärmerei — enthusiasm, rapture, or fanaticism; a term with a long history in German philosophy (cf. Kant's Schwarmerei), denoting an excessive, uncritical exaltation of sentiment over reason. does indeed find pleasure in letting the concepts of consciousness and life-process blur into one another, because thereby everything that befalls us may count as our own deed, everything experienced as the work of our creative mind. We advance by the shortest route to godhood. One need only confuse two concepts with one another and thereby becomes God. Everything that appears in heaven and on earth is, in so far as it precisely appears, nothing more than my representation, that is, the work of my mind. What an exaltation lies in such a conviction! To be sure, one must be young, divinely young, to be able to harbour such a conviction in one's swelling breast. One need only say to oneself that sleep, fainting, and death are nothing more than my mere representations, works of my own mind, in order to hover in godlike sublimity over the universe. One cannot hold it too much against the young blood that it inclines to such enthusiastic excess, for to be a little mad will always remain the prerogative of youth.

Berkeley seems himself to notice that what befalls us — that is to say, the sensation-process — is after all not our own mental deed, for he teaches that all our sensations are impressed upon us by God, that is, he makes our mind into something purely passive. On the other hand, he does indeed maintain that all our sensations are our own mental products, so that it gains the appearance as though our mind were the purest activity. Thus his idealism shows a peculiar Janus-face, because his fundamental principle admits of a twofold reading. The principle esse-percipi, the sense of which can also be expressed thus: life-process = consciousness, or: sensation = idea, signifies, when read from left to right, that all sensory appearance is something mental, and then has an idealistic colouring; read from right to left, however, it signifies that everything mental is in the last ground nothing more than sense-sensation, and is then the expression of the extremest sensualism [Sensualismus] Sensualismus — sensualism; the philosophical doctrine that all knowledge originates in sensation. Palagyi's point is that Berkeley's "idealism" is in truth an inverted sensualism, since it reduces all mental content to sense-impressions.. An idealism that is at bottom only an exaggerated sensualism has never existed in antiquity nor in the Middle Ages; it is par excellence a product of the modern age. Its founder is Berkeley, who is thus in a certain sense to be regarded as the "most modern" among all modern thinkers. In fact he has exerted a deep influence not only upon Kant and Schopenhauer, but he also commands a following among the physicists and physiologists of our day. (Mach, Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Austrian physicist and philosopher whose Die Analyse der Empfindungen (1886) reduces physical objects to complexes of sensations in a manner Palagyi regards as neo-Berkeleyan. Verworn, Max Verworn (1863–1921), German physiologist known for his "conditionalism" and psycho-monist tendencies. etc.)

Some thinkers appear to believe that the Berkeleyan idealism is a monistic doctrine. The proposition, namely, that all appearance is consciousness-content would have the significance that we had traced back everything physical to something psychical and had thus arrived at a panpsychism [Panpsychismus] Panpsychismus — panpsychism; the view that all of reality is fundamentally psychical. Palagyi regards it as a pseudo-monism achieved by verbal equivocation. or psycho-monism [Psychomonismus] Psychomonismus — psycho-monism; a term for the position that reduces all reality to the psychical. Palagyi treats it as equivalent to panpsychism.. This panpsychism, however, is all the more alluring because it also admits the reverse reading, in which everything psychical becomes something physical (sensory). One proclaims that everything is psychical and understands by the psychical always only the physical. Thus one becomes a monist through equivocation and conceptual confusion. To be sure, unification of our cognition, that is, monism, is the highest aspiration of every genuine philosopher; but if monism is to consist in giving up the distinctness of our concepts, and hence also our capacity for distinction, who would then still wish to be a monist?

But although the Berkeleyan idealism (as indeed British sensualism in general) rests upon a confusion of the most fundamental concepts of the human mind, namely vitality [Vitalität] and consciousness [Bewußtheit] Bewußtheit — consciousness in the abstract sense, conscioushood; here paired with Vitalität (vitality) to mark the two fundamental categories whose confusion Palagyi diagnoses as the root error of British empiricism.: it has nonetheless exercised an immeasurable influence upon the development of modern thought. There is contained in Berkeley's doctrine the kernel of a most significant truth which must be extracted from it. An easy task this is, to be sure, not.

We can, namely, receive immediate tidings of the processes of the inorganic natural process surrounding us only in that the same call forth alterations in our own life-process. What calls forth no alteration in our life-process, awakens no echo in the same, is for our immediate perception as good as non-existent. Everything "given" must necessarily be given to us through some process of the life-process. One can therefore say, with a reservation, that everything happening in the world is in the first instance nothing more than a process within our own vital process. This is the vitalistic kernel of truth [vitalistische Wahrheitskern] of Berkeley's doctrine, which falsely gave itself the appearance of an "idealistic" doctrine. To be sure, the vitalistic truth which is contained in Berkeley's doctrine, as it were in disguised form, must also be supplemented by the other truth: that the processes of our own life-process do indeed represent the whole world to us, but that they are able to bring this about only because they are called forth by mechanical processes of the external world and are referred to these through the activity of our consciousness. We wish to come to a more precise understanding about this in the next lecture.

Third Lecture: The Three Classes of Events That Are Not Reducible to One Another#

The three classes of events that are not reducible to one another. The false monism that confuses unity with absence of distinction. Its two principal varieties: psychologistic and mechanistic monism. The logical perversity involved in proceeding from the existence of mechanical processes and afterwards searching for vital processes. Vital processes that can have only one witness. Principle of vital and mental individuality. Mechanical processes can have arbitrarily many witnesses. Life-processes that can have no immediate witness at all. The vitalistic and the mechanistic investigation of life-processes. Critical situation of biology.

Gentlemen! The totality of all that may occur in the universe divides, for the cognising human mind, into three classes of events: a) consciousness-acts, b) vital processes, c) mechanical occurrences. Each of these three classes of events has so very much its own specific character that any one of them can never be "reduced" to any other. It is rather the task of human inquiry to fathom the incomparable peculiarity of these three realms of happening as far as possible; I say "as far as possible" because it is not given to the human mind ever to exhaust completely the peculiar character of mental activity, of the life-process, or indeed of mechanical happening. But however inexhaustible the specific differences of the three realms of happening may be, they nonetheless form a single, absolutely unified realm, and it must be regarded as the chief task of philosophy to set forth this absolute unity as far as possible. A complete and conclusive exposition of the same — that is, the definitive construction of a monistic philosophy — can never succeed, because the differences, the manifoldnesses, that are to be unified are inexhaustible.

Only this much is certain, and this will prove to be an outflow of the highest logical principle: that on the one hand we may never rest content in the distinguishing of diversities that must not be "reduced" to one another, and that on the other hand we must never cease in the endeavour to set forth the absolute unity of all specific diversities. Whoever has not yet grasped the supreme principle of logic, the principle of identity, will to be sure find a contradiction in the fact that we distinguish, for example, three realms of happening which cannot be reduced to one another and that we nonetheless wish to set forth the absolute unity of the three realms: but for the present we can only recommend to him that he reflect upon whether it has any sense to speak of unity where a manifold is in reality not present at all, or whether conversely a manifold could exist in reality if it were not comprehended into a unity. Only he who has become clear about this is able to press through to the supreme principle of logic and will be able to avoid falling at every moment into a new logical contradiction.

Unfortunately, most modern investigators believe that a unification of specifically different processes is possible only through the abolition of their difference, that they must therefore deny the real being of the manifold in order to be able to secure the validity of the unity-principle. This singular mode of thought has the consequence that whoever wishes to unify all differences must of necessity deny the existence of every difference. But whoever denies the existence of every difference abolishes the activity of every power of discrimination, and consequently all human cognitive activity as well, because without distinctions there is no cognition. Thus the falsely understood drive towards unity in philosophy presses towards a denial of differences and towards an annihilation of the discriminating human understanding. This self-destructive monism, which confuses the concepts of unity and absence of distinction, appears in modern science in quite manifold guises. Among its principal forms belong: 1. psychologistic monism, 2. mechanistic monism; both of which currents of thought must be regarded as the true sources of the specifically modern Babylonian confusion of minds.

As for psychologistic monism, whose actual originator we may regard as Berkeley, George Berkeley (1685–1753), Irish philosopher and bishop. His esse est percipi ("to be is to be perceived") dissolved the physical world into ideas in the mind, making him the forefather of what Palagyi here calls psychologistic monism. it dissolves all happening into psychical happening. In the sense of this doctrine there can properly be no vital processes and no mechanical occurrences in nature at all, because all happening of which we have knowledge takes place in our consciousness and must therefore be psychical happening. It belongs to the peculiar character of this theory that it exercises a paralysing influence upon the human capacity for discrimination, by preventing its adherent from reflecting upon the different realms of happening, and quite especially by systematically teaching one to confuse the vital with the mental. It bears, to be sure, an idealistic, or as one also expresses it, a spiritualistic character on its face, but is, as has already been remarked, scarcely to be distinguished from an absolute sensualism; for whoever identifies physical happening with psychical happening has, upon a reversed reading, identified psychical happening with physical happening. Thus psychologistic monism actually tips over into a mechanistic monism, with which it in fact gets along very well indeed. Thinkers who are originally mechanistic monists need only practise the reversed reading of their own doctrines in order to be able to comport themselves like psychologistic monists.

As for mechanistic monism, it asserts in the first place that all vital processes are in truth distinguished by nothing from mechanical ones, or at least promises that in time it will prove possible to "reduce" all phenomena of life to mechanical processes. It belongs to the character of this doctrine that it is not sparing with promises, and consequently enjoys great popularity everywhere where one meets its eternal prophecies with a naive faith. Mechanistic monism can go so far as to wish to reduce not only vital processes but also mental activity to mechanical happening, and then, in this extreme — or, as one sometimes expresses it, materialistic — elaboration, it is scarcely to be distinguished from psychologistic monism; for whoever presents all mental activity as mechanical happening arrives, upon a reversed reading of his own conception, at the view that all mechanical happening is a psychical activity. Ordinarily, however, the mechanistic monists shrink from the last step, from the "reduction" of mental activity to mechanical processes, and persist merely in the view that vital processes must indeed be reduced to mechanical happening, but that the psychical (sensation, representation, etc.) is something apart, whose relation to the physical will never be comprehended. (The famous Ignorabimus of E. Du Bois-Reymond.) Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896), German physiologist. In his celebrated lecture Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens (1872), he declared that the relation between brain processes and consciousness constitutes an absolute limit of natural knowledge — hence the lapidary Ignorabimus ("we shall never know").

Upon an attentive comparison of the two principal forms of monism one will find that both mechanistic and psychologistic monism agree in this: that they will on no account allow the specific peculiarity of vital processes to come into its own; the former because it would dissolve the vital into the mechanical, the latter because it would dissolve the vital into the psychical. Indeed, even in those monistic systems that one might designate as rationalistic (Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), Dutch philosopher whose Ethics (1677) treated thought and extension as parallel attributes of a single substance. Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), whose system of Absolute Idealism subordinated nature to the self-development of Spirit (Geist), leaving the specifically vital, in Palagyi's view, without its proper standing.), the living, the vital, never comes into its peculiar right. It may quite simply be designated as a chief defect of all modern science and philosophy that, out of their predilection for the mechanistic and the psychologistic, they cause the specific peculiarity of vital processes to vanish. This grave aberration is what has already often divided minds and leads, especially in our own day, to a far-reaching crisis in the natural sciences and in philosophy.

It is therefore in the highest degree gratifying that biologists such as H. Driesch, Hans Driesch (1867–1941), German biologist and philosopher of nature. His experiments on sea-urchin embryos (1891 ff.) led him to revive vitalism, arguing that no machine-model could account for the regulative capacities of developing organisms. He later elaborated a philosophical "entelechy" concept. G. Wolff, Gustav Wolff (1865–1941), German zoologist known for his experiments on lens regeneration in the newt, which he took as evidence against purely mechanistic accounts of development. J. Reinke, Johannes Reinke (1849–1931), German botanist and natural philosopher who argued for a non-mechanistic conception of vital forces, which he termed Dominanten (dominants). R. Neumeister, Richard Neumeister (1857–?), German physiological chemist who questioned the reducibility of biochemical processes to ordinary chemistry. K. Schneider, Karl Camillo Schneider (1867–1943), Austrian zoologist and vitalist philosopher. His work on animal behaviour emphasised the irreducibility of vital functions to mechanical models. etc. stand up with deep insight into the nature of life-processes for the specific character of the vital as against the mechanical, and seek to show, by way of developmental-physiological and chemical-physiological experiments, that the functions of an organism must not be confused with the performances of an artificially constructed machine. Nothing can be more conducive and fruitful for the investigation of the functions of life than to set them in parallel with mechanical machine-performances, in order in such manner to make the intimate connexion, but also the fundamental difference between them, as comprehensible as possible: nonetheless I scarcely believe that on this path a binding proof of the specific character of vital processes could ever be furnished. And for the following reason:

This is precisely the perversity of the one-sidedly mechanistic mode of thought, that, proceeding from the existence of mechanical processes, it afterwards sets out in search of peculiar vital processes. Whoever enters upon this path will never be able to penetrate through to the existence of life-processes. For what lies nearer to a living being: its own life-process or the mechanical world of appearances standing over against it? I believe the answer to this question will be difficult for no one. But if a human being has occupied himself so long with mechanical natural sciences that ultimately the mechanical world of appearances comes to seem something nearer to him than his own life-process, then there will be no more helping him, for he will sweep through all the spaces of the heavens to search for something living, and he will be able to find it nowhere, because he did not find it in himself. Even the neo-vitalists, however great the services they may otherwise have rendered to the deeper investigation of life, seem to me to fall into the comical fundamental error of the one-sidedly mechanistic thinkers, for to them too the concept of a machine seems something more immediately at hand than the concept of their own life-process. Thus one must call out to them as well the word of the German prince of poets: "Why rove into the distance, when the good lies so near?" [Author's note:] The quotation is from Goethe's poem Erinnerung (1827): "Warum in die Ferne schweifen? / Sieh, das Gute liegt so nah." Palagyi's version slightly adapts the wording.

If one surveys the three realms of events that, for human consciousness, constitute the unified world of all happening, then everyone must surely notice that nothing can lie nearer to our consciousness than its own consciousness-activity, and that, if we wish to proceed in philosophy and in the special sciences from any fundamental certainty, this certainty can be none other than the certainty formulated by the great Descartes concerning one's own thinking — or rather, consciousness-activity. But with this certainty there connects itself in an immediate manner another, which unfortunately is nowhere expressed by Descartes: I mean the certainty of the taking-place of one's own life-process. If, for example, someone feels hunger or thirst, then in this feeling not only his own consciousness but also his own life-process becomes manifest to him. In perceiving something, we know not only that our consciousness is active, but that we are alive. Just as the certainty of one's own consciousness-activity is the starting-point of every science of the human mind, so must the certainty of our own life, which manifests itself in all our experiences (sensations, feelings, etc.), be regarded as the natural starting-point of every scientific biology. Had someone not the consciousness of his own life, he could not have even the faintest intimation of what we understand by the word "life" in the case of other living beings, and biology would be for him for ever a book with seven seals.

We can indeed extend and deepen our concept of life in extraordinary measure through the immense body of experience that has been accumulated and ordered in biology, but all this extension and deepening is possible only because we bring with us from the outset a concept of life, and because from the outset, together with the consciousness that we are mentally active, we also connect the consciousness that our mental activity is most intimately bound up with our life-stream. It is not the existence of vital processes, but rather the existence of mechanical processes that can appear in a doubtful light. For all that we perceive must be given to us as a constituent piece of our own life-process, so that we necessarily find it as a segment in our own life-stream. If, therefore, we can be certain of any processes at all, these are doubtless our own vital processes; whether, however, beyond these vital processes there exists something further that we may rightly designate as mechanical processes — that can certainly be called in question. It is therefore a perverse procedure to seek, starting from mechanical appearances, to arrive at the discovery of our life-process, since we all, starting from our own feeling of life, arrive at the assumption of an existence of mechanical processes.

In seeing this, it will also become possible for us to establish what everyone understands by his own life-process as distinct from any mechanical happenings whatever. Only when this has been established can we also deliberate whether vital processes and mechanical happenings can somehow be "reduced" to one another or not. The dispute between vitalists and mechanists, as the neo-vitalists and their opponents conduct it, seems to me to be a hopeless one for this reason: that both parties conduct themselves unphilosophically, that is, do not proceed from the certainty of their own life-process in order first of all to establish what they understand by mechanical happening as distinct from their own life-processes.

As for one's own life-process, the fact that one calls it one's own already fixes its chief characteristic in an unambiguous manner. I am able to live only my own life-process; and it is an impossibility that a person A should live the vital process of another person B. The same that holds for the life-process holds also for death, in that no person can die the death of another, but in death merely forfeits his own life. This solitude, self-enclosedness, or inalienability of the life-process may be designated as the principle of vital individuality. We can indeed share in the sufferings and joys of another person, feel with them: but these sympathetic feelings are precisely constituents of our own and not of another's life-process. A life-event of which a person A has immediate knowledge as of his own life-event can never belong to the life-process of another person B; for were it possible that life-events which we designate as our own were the life-events of other persons, it would be all over with the possibility of self-distinction: there would then be no individuals in the vital sense; to be sure, none in the mental sense of the word either.

For of mental individuality precisely the same holds that we have just established for the vital. No one is able to carry on the consciousness-activity of another person, but only his own; and however much two persons may think of one and the same truth, for example, of the truth that 2 x 2 = 4, the consciousness-activities of the two persons are nonetheless not identical; rather, two thinking-activities subsist, both of which are directed upon the same truth. In short, mental individuality is just as solitary, self-enclosed, or inalienable as the vital personality. If we must keep the two conceptually apart, this is so, in the first place, because mental activity is interrupted in states of fainting, lethargy, and the like, while the life-process still endures. Later we shall have to show in detail that even during the waking state the life-process must be distinguished from the consciousness-activity bound up with it. Here, however, it becomes clear to us how easy it is to confuse the life-process with consciousness-activity, since for both the same principle of solitude, self-enclosedness, or inalienability holds. British philosophy, as it is represented especially by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, actually confuses mental and vital individuality, and thereby arrives at the peculiar hybrid concept of psychologistic individuality, in which one never knows whether one is dealing merely with the living or also with the consciously living person. It is, to be sure, its great merit that it urges us to consider life together with consciousness in their union; but it is also its great fault that it did not urge with equal force the separation of the concepts of life and consciousness. Through this it came about that the concept of genuine vitality could not come into its own in science, but remained veiled and was forced to atrophy under the ambiguous and sanctimonious concept of psychologism.

Here, however, what is at issue is not the distinction of the living from the mental, but the distinction of the living from the mechanical. If two persons A and B look upon one and the same appearance E — for example, upon a rainbow — then each of the two persons can perceive the rainbow only because the same becomes a content of the life-process of each of the two persons. Let us call the alteration that the life-process of person A undergoes as she looks upon the rainbow: a; the corresponding alteration in the other person: b; then a and b are two life-events that may never be confused with one another. Person A can, for example, suddenly close her eyes while person B keeps hers open; consequently only the latter still enjoys the immediate sight of the optical appearance. Thus the vital processes that take place in the two persons while they behold the said appearance are by no means identical; rather, they are two processes belonging to two different life-processes, which are, however, referred by the consciousness of the two persons to one and the same rainbow.

This same rainbow is now a mechanical, or, as we may more fittingly express it, a physical appearance, which must be well distinguished from the two vital processes a and b, which are referred by the consciousness of two persons A and B to the same physical appearance E.

Herewith is set forth the ground upon which we originally and from the outset base our distinction between our own life-process and mechanical (or physical) appearances. A life-event that is my life-event can be immediately connected only with my consciousness; it can be immediately perceived only by me, and apart from my consciousness there is in the whole world no other human consciousness that could be the immediate witness of my life-event. A mechanical process, by contrast, can never be witnessed immediately, but always only mediately, because we must refer ourselves to it through a life-event. But since a mechanical process can be witnessed only mediately, it is also possible that 2, 3, or arbitrarily many witnesses can be produced for it.

If one considers that a life-event can, even in the best case, have only a single immediate witness, one sees that no one can be the immediate witness of another's life-event; that foreign life-events can therefore never present themselves to us as such, but always only through the mediation of mechanical processes. If a life-event belonging to a foreign life-process is to make itself known to us, it must express itself, that is, it must conjoin itself with a mechanical process by means of which it manifests itself to us. The mechanical processes through which the foreign life-process manifests itself to us are commonly changes of place, that is, movements, but it can also manifest itself to us through the production of noises, of tones (the voice), through a luminescence (fireflies, luminous sea-creatures), through electrical shocks, etc. — in short, through every kind of mechanical (that is, physico-chemical) process.

Mechanical processes are thus the bond between life-process and life-process. Were there namely only life-processes, they would be absolutely isolated; every life would be, as it were, a weaving within itself, without the slightest connexion with another life. If one life-process is to be able to communicate with another, the one must express itself to the other, that is, it must excite mechanical processes through whose mediation it comes into connexion with other life-processes. Through mechanical processes the life-processes of the various persons are connected with one another; at the same time, however, the mechanical processes form the partition-wall between the life-processes of the various persons. The life-processes of the various individuals thus form, as it were, islands in the general ocean of mechanical happenings, which bathes them, separates them from one another, and connects them with one another.

Already on the basis of these first, primitive formulations of the concepts of life and mechanism, it stands out clearly that it is a logical impossibility to reduce the life-process in any way to mechanical processes. For were we to reduce our own life-process to mechanical processes, this would mean that our life-process would have to cease to be individual, that is, to cease to have a single immediate witness. Mechanical processes, in the sense of our explanation, have no immediate witness at all, but only mediate ones, and the number of these can be any whatever. If, then, our life-process is to become a mechanical process, it may no longer have any immediate witness, but may only be mediately ascertained by arbitrarily many witnesses. But then it is also truly all over with the life-process, and one has to do only with a decomposing corpse. So long, therefore, as there will be human individuals who are conscious that their own life-process can have only one witness whilst mechanical processes can have arbitrarily many, the concept of the life-process will not be reducible to the concept of mechanical processes. The principle of individuality forbids the mechanisation of life: that is, individual processes could not exist if everything were mechanical process. Mechanical processes and life-processes condition one another — in the sense of our determination — reciprocally. For it lies in the concept of a mechanical process that it shall be capable of being witnessed by arbitrarily many individual life-processes, or rather, consciousness-activities. Conversely, it lies in the concept of individual life-processes, or rather, consciousness-activities, that they must be separated from one another and connected with one another through mechanical processes.

The explanation that our life-process can have only one witness, that is, that it is an individual process, suffices, to be sure, to distinguish it from the inorganic process of nature, which is accessible to arbitrarily many witnesses: but it suffers from the defect that it does not encompass all life-events, but only one group of them. The mysteriousness of the life-process is extraordinarily potentiated by the circumstance that there are life-events which in their immediacy can have no witness at all, and of which we are nonetheless fully convinced that they exist and belong to our life-process. They form, in terms of developmental history, the substratum of our entire life-process, but our consciousness is not capable of placing itself in immediate contact with them.

We convince ourselves of the existence of this substratum of life — unreachable for our immediate consciousness — in the following manner.

Our own life-process becomes known to us not only in such a way that we remain the sole and exclusive witnesses of it, but it also confronts us in such a way as does any arbitrary foreign life-process. If, for example, I execute an arm-movement, any stranger can be a witness of it just as well as I myself. The movement of my arm must, in so far as it is an appearance that can have arbitrarily many witnesses, be regarded as a purely mechanical process, which must be investigated entirely with the means of purely mechanistic natural research. Nonetheless, for me myself my arm-movement is no merely mechanical process, but an "expression," a mechanically realised expression of my life-process. It is "life" that expresses itself in my arm-movement; but as "life" it is in its immediacy a mystery for my perception, for I am incapable of giving an account of how this life contrives to present itself in a muscular contraction, that is, in a mechanical process (which is accessible to arbitrarily many observers). Were that life of the muscle known to me which presents itself to me in a mechanical manner as a contraction (just as it does to every foreign beholder), I could also give an account of how the mysterious transition from muscle-life to the mechanically emergent contraction takes place. Since, however, everyone can indeed perceive the contraction of his muscles, but no one is in a position to say how the own-life of the muscle contrives to express itself in a universally perceptible contraction, we must admit to ourselves that the life which immediately underlies our movements is a life which is known to us only through its expression, but not in and of itself.

Nonetheless, we are, whenever we execute any movement, fully convinced that it is "our" movement and not the movement of a foreign person or a foreign object. Regarded as a mere (universally perceptible) movement, it is indeed nothing more than a purely mechanical process; but by virtue of our feeling of life we know with indubitable certainty that this movement belongs to our life-process and is a mechanical expression of the same. As a mechanical process, the movement of my arm is indeed to any stranger just as well intuitively given as to myself — indeed under certain circumstances better intuitively given to the stranger than to myself — but there subsists between this movement and my life-process a connexion by virtue of which it is characterised precisely as my movement and not as a foreign one. This connexion is made known to me through my feeling, and this feeling vouches for me that the muscle which contracts has its own-life [Eigenleben], Eigenleben — own-life; the autonomous vital activity proper to each morphological constituent (cell, muscle, organ) of the body, completely inaccessible to consciousness in its immediacy, yet making itself known through feelings and through mechanical expressions (contractions, secretions, etc.). which can present itself mechanically in a contraction. Although, therefore, the own-life of the muscles, as well as of the remaining morphological constituents of our body, is in an immediate manner inaccessible to our consciousness, it admits of no doubt that such an own-life really exists and that its alterations are on the one hand made known to us through feelings, and on the other hand come to light in mechanical processes — such as, for example, muscular contractions — in such a manner that they become universally perceptible.

We recognise here the exceedingly great difficulties with which the concept of life is burdened, and which have had the consequence that philosophers as well as biologists gladly avoided a definition of the "life-event" as distinct from a "mechanical process," or that they gladly attached themselves to a theory that proclaimed the identity of vital and mechanical processes, thereby relieving investigators of the trouble of giving themselves any account of the difference between the mechanical and the vital. To be sure, scarcely anything more convenient can be devised than the identification of the vital and the mechanical; but he to whom only convenience matters in science is to be counselled that he should identify not only the concepts of the mechanical and the vital, but indeed all human concepts with one another, since he will then be relieved of every distinction and of all reflection.

The difficulty of the concept of life is principally to be sought in the fact that we can speak of life-events in a twofold sense. There are life-events that have an immediate connexion with consciousness, and there are life-events that entirely lack such an immediate connexion with consciousness. The former kind of life-events — such as feelings and sense-impressions — are to us the most familiar things in the world; the latter kind of life-events, by contrast, which represent the substratum of the former and which constitute the own-life of the morphological constituents of our own body, are, among all processes in the world, the most mysterious. For they can in their immediacy never be made the object of a natural-scientific investigation, because they have no immediate contact with our consciousness; but they can mediately be subjected to natural-scientific examination in a twofold manner. The alterations in the own-life of the structural elements of our body are namely on the one hand made known to us through feelings; on the other hand they express themselves in a universally perceptible manner, namely in movements and in general in physico-chemical processes. The feelings that rise up to our consciousness from the own-life of the structural elements of our body must be investigated in a vitalistic manner; the movements, by contrast, in which this own-life expresses itself, must be investigated in a mechanistic manner. Thus, for example, the feeling of fatigue, through which the state of the own-life of our muscles is revealed to us, will be subject to a vitalistic examination; the chemical changes, however, that are brought about through fatigue in the material constitution of the muscle, form the object of mechanistic research methods.

In uncovering the peculiar difficulty that attaches to the concept of life, there also comes to our distinct consciousness the critical situation in which biology finds itself — in so far as it is to be not a crude empiricism but a rigorous science. The existence of an own-life of the structural elements (for example, the cells) of our body can, namely — since it is not immediately accessible to consciousness — be denied, whereby the physico-chemical expressions of every own-life appear devalued to exclusively mechanistic processes, to which no "mysterious life" at all is supposed to underlie. Many physiologists are in fact inclined to deny that in the physico-chemical processes of our organism a hidden substratum of life [Lebensuntergrund] Lebensuntergrund — substratum of life (literally: life-underground); the hidden vital activity beneath the surface of observable physico-chemical processes. expresses itself, and this kind of investigator arrives at the singular view that one may never speak of a life-process as distinct from physico-chemical processes.

Against these one-sidedly mechanistically minded physiologists one can indeed appeal with victorious certainty to the fact that the existence of peculiar life-events — such as sense-impressions and feelings — cannot be denied by any reasonable person; but this decisive argument forfeits all its force because sensations and feelings were conceived by Locke, Berkeley, Hume, etc. not as vital but as psychical processes, and because this absurdity gained universal dominion not only in philosophy but was unfortunately adopted by biologists as well.

Biology thus stands on the one hand in danger of dissolving itself into mere mechanism, and on the other into mere psychologism. In the face of this critical state of affairs, it will be our endeavour to show that in biology two kinds of methodology — a mechanistic and a vitalistic one — must interlock and harmoniously complement one another, in order that biology may exist at all as a rigorous science and become the foundation of a genuine psychology.

Glossary#

German terms as they appear in this translation, with established English renderings. References to existing English-language scholarship are noted where available.