Near the end of the 1800s, the focus of panpsychism shifted again, this time to the Anglo-American philosophers. In the early years of the twentieth century, panpsychist views appeared in the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Francis Bradley, and Josiah Royce. Since that time the majority of works addressing panpsychism have come from British and American thinkers. The century was also marked by the emergence of several prominent scientist-philosophers who either sympathized with or directly advocated panpsychist views; they will be discussed in chapter 8.
English panpsychism, largely absent since the time of Henry More and Margaret Cavendish, was reestablished in 1874 by the physicist and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879). That year, he published an article, titled “Body and Mind,” in which he claimed that science had bridged the gap between the organic and the inorganic. By then it was known that the same chemical elements and same laws of physics applied to both realms, and hence the laws of the organic were “only a complication” of the inorganic. Clifford then proceeded to explore whether there was a basis for believing that a similar bridge had been built between the Science of Physics and the Science of Consciousness.
Beginning introspectively, Clifford notes that, for him, “there is only one kind of consciousness, and that is to have fifty thousand feelings at once, and to know them all in different degrees” (1874/1903: 46). This state of consciousness is “an extremely complex one,” a complicated unity arising from a multiplicity of sensations. As a singular state of consciousness, it is something completely non-physical and non-material: “We have no possible ground … for speaking of another man’s consciousness as in any sense a part of the physical world of objects or phenomena. It is a thing entirely separate from it.” (53) Clearly he is referring to a naturalistic yet non-material mind, and not arguing for an immaterial soul in the traditional sense. If the mind is immaterial, it cannot be reduced to force, as others have argued, because force is clearly physical and observable. The conclusion then must be a form of parallelism—“the physical facts go along by themselves, and the mental facts go along by themselves.”
The view Clifford arrived at was a form of Spinozan parallelism that incorporated elements of LaMettrie’s and Diderot’s vitalist materialism. Clifford regarded the human body as “a physical machine,” but “not merely a machine, because consciousness goes with it” (57). In making his case for panpsychism, he applied the Continuity argument: As we move down the chain of living organisms,
it is impossible for anybody to point out the particular place in the line of descent where [absence of consciousness] can be supposed to have taken place. … Even in the very lowest organisms, even in the Amoeba … there is something or other, inconceivably simple to us, which is of the same nature with our own consciousness, although not of the same complexity. [Furthermore] we cannot stop at organic matter, [but] we are obliged to assume, in order to save continuity in our belief, that along with every motion of matter, whether organic or inorganic, there is some fact which corresponds to the mental fact in ourselves. (60–61)
Echoing Fechner, Clifford then notes that his doctrine “is no mere speculation, but is a result to which all the greatest minds that have studied this question in the right way have gradually been approximating for a long time.”
Four years later, Clifford expanded on his views in the journal Mind, advocating a monist philosophy in which the basic constituent of reality is “mind-stuff.”1 Mind-stuff is neither mind nor consciousness, but rather the elements that combine together to form “the faint beginnings of Sentience.”2 Mind is viewed as composed of “mental atoms” that exist in parallel with physical atoms and which combine in an analogous manner. “A moving molecule of inorganic matter does not possess mind, or consciousness; but it possesses a small piece of mind-stuff.” (1878: 65) Intelligence and volition emerge only in higher-level complexes of mind-stuff, but a kind of proto-consciousness seems to be present in all things.
Clifford’s mind-stuff theory was vulnerable to the combination problem. He offered no answer, and his untimely death a year later precluded any chance for resolution. This unresolved issue led certain philosophers to “reject decisively every form of mind-stuff.”3 Others, including William James, were fascinated by it. James dedicated an entire chapter of his 1890 book Principles of Psychology (“The Mind-Stuff Theory”) to it. After acknowledging the power and attraction of such a theory, he rejected it for essentially the same reason: Mental atoms cannot combine, because to do so they would have to be combined “upon some entity other than themselves” (158)—i.e., something non-mental.4
The next important development occurred in a work by the noted British author Samuel Butler (1838–1902). More a novelist than a formal philosopher, Butler nonetheless offered speculations on philosophical and metaphysical matters, and was an ardent supporter of evolution. He discussed his panpsychist views in his 1880 book Unconscious Memory
Like many other thinkers of the time, Butler noted that scientists had determined that the nature of the organic was the same as that of the inorganic, that vitalism had been largely disproved, that organic matter had been shown to be identical with inorganic, and that the same forces were everywhere present—views that hold to this day. The logical conclusion, then, was that certain essential characteristics of the living must inhere, in some form, in the non-living. “If we once break down the wall of partition between the organic and inorganic,” Butler writes,
the inorganic must be living and conscious also, up to a point. … It is more coherent with our other ideas, and therefore more acceptable, to start with every molecule as a living thing … than to start with inanimate molecules and smuggle life into them; … what we call the inorganic world must be regarded as up to a certain point living, and instinct, within certain limits, with consciousness, volition, and power of concerted action. (23)
At the conclusion of Unconscious Memory Butler reiterates his perspective, suggesting that it is the morally enlightened view: “I would recommend the reader to see every atom in the universe as living and able to feel and to remember, but in a humble way. … Thus he will see God everywhere.” (273) That a moral perspective is engendered by panpsychism is perhaps not obvious: “True, it would be hard to place one’s self on the same moral platform as a stone, but this is not necessary; it is enough that we should feel the stone to have a moral platform of its own.” (275) This is one of the earliest commentaries, along with those of Fechner and Paulsen, to cite the moral relevance of panpsychism. It indicates an emerging ecological value system in which objects of nature have intrinsic moral worth.
Gregory Bateson, apparently inspired by Butler, cited him on a number of occasions. But Bateson disagreed with the principle of attributing life and mind to atoms; rather, he adopted more of a qualified panpsychism in which all things except atoms possess minds—because they have no parts.5
In an 1884 article titled “Religion: A Retrospect and Prospect,” the noted evolutionist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) retraced the evolution of religion, discussed the origins of primitive animism, and observed that the spirits of nature gradually became more powerful, more unified, and more abstract. The concept of God, he asserted, lost more and more of its anthropocentrism, eventually becoming a kind of pure consciousness or spirit.
Spencer argued that the concept of God-as-First-Cause was a necessary and real aspect of the world, and that this God, stripped of all superfluous characteristics, was nothing more than pure mind. He saw force and consciousness as two distinct entities, but since “either is capable of generating the other, they must be different modes of the same [thing]” (1884: 9). He concluded from this that “the Power manifested throughout the Universe distinguished as material, is the same power which in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness.” Science, he noted, had confirmed that view. He then went on to claim that physics had revealed the “incredible power” of brute matter, as with the ability of simple materials to transmit sounds over wireless airwaves. And so too “the spectroscope proves … that molecules on Earth pulsate in harmony with molecules in the stars.” The man of science, Spencer wrote, was forced to conclude that
every point in space thrills with an infinity of vibrations passing through it in all directions; the conception to which [the enlightened scientist] tends is much less that of a Universe of dead matter than that of a Universe everywhere alive: alive if not in the restricted sense, still in a general sense. (10)
In 1885, Morton Prince published The Nature of Mind and Human Automatism, in which he presented a naturalist, Schopenhauerian metaphysic that he characterized as a form of materialism in which the inner essence or thing-in-itself of matter was, following Clifford, mind-stuff. Prince’s was not a dual-aspect theory; it was more of an idealist monism that opposed the inert view of mechanism: “matter is no longer the dead and senseless thing it is popularly supposed to be” (1885/1975: 163). Evolution suggested the unity of all phenomena. As a consequence, he wrote, “the whole universe … instead of being inert is made up of living forces; not conscious [but] pseudo-conscious. It is made up of the elements of consciousness.” (164)
Charles Strong wrote approvingly of Prince’s book, calling it “an extremely clear and forceful statement of the panpsychist hypothesis” (1904a: 67). He noted that Prince was “entitled to an honorable place among [panpsychism’s] earliest discoverers and defenders.” In fact Prince and Clifford were the first two philosophers to articulate systemic and explicit panpsychist theories strictly as theories of mind, rather than as adjuncts to larger metaphysical systems. Prince drew on both Schopenhauer and Clifford, and reinterpreted their theories in an evolutionary vein.6
In 1890, William James (1842–1910) published his first major work, the aforementioned Principles of Psychology. In it he examined the mind-stuff theory in detail, noting that the essence of the mind-stuff approach is that, as with the monads, higher-order consciousness is compounded of simpler, atomic mental entities. The theory of evolution, along with other scientific advances, offered a strong line of reasoning in favor of a panpsychist mind-stuff theory; if complex material bodies could evolve from simpler ones, why couldn’t the same happen for psychical entities? From an evolutionary-psychological viewpoint, James wrote, “if evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things. … Some such doctrine of atomistic hylozoism … is an indispensable part of a thorough-going philosophy of evolution.” (1890/1950: 149)
James appears to have implicitly agreed with this statement but doesn’t seem to have been convinced that mind-stuff was the proper interpretation. As has already been noted, the combination problem was for him an insurmountable barrier to the mind-stuff theory. On the ground that mental entities can only compound upon something non-mental, he called the compounding of consciousness “logically unintelligible.” Further, he argued, such a sum exists only to an outside observer and not in itself. In support, he quoted Royce: “Aggregations are organized wholes only … in the presence of other [external] things. … Unity exist[s] for some other subject, not for the mass itself.” (159) However, James commented in a footnote (162) that he was not opposed to combination per se, only to the intelligibility of combination within the assumptions of the mind-stuff theory. On his view, a combination resulted in something “totally new” and unlike that which composed it. Mind-atoms could combine not to form mind, but rather something completely different—though perhaps still mind-like. Thus the problem remained unresolved.
Upon rejecting the mind-stuff theory, James offered up the alternative theory of “polyzoism” or “multiple monadism.” He claimed no originality for that view—which “has been frequently made in the history of philosophy”—but simply asserted that it was the most logically consistent and problem-free alternative. Consider the human brain. Under polyzoism, every cell in the brain has its own unique consciousness, which is distinct from and unrelated to the consciousnesses of the other cells. But the cells clearly interact physically, and their interaction is brought together in a unifying hypothetical entity that James calls the “central cell” or “arch-cell.” Unfortunately science finds no evidence of any such central cell in the brain or any other organ. Furthermore, one cannot stop logically at the cell; one must extend the reasoning down to some ultimately small and simple units, arriving at a system much like Leibniz’s monadology: “The theory [of polyzoism] must set up for its elementary and irreducible psycho-physic couple, not the cell and its consciousness, but the primordial and eternal atom and its consciousness.” (180) Such a view is “remote and unreal” but nonetheless “must be admitted as a possibility”—and in fact “must have some sort of a destiny.”
In 1890, James was only implicitly panpsychist. His soul-theory took on all the central features of Leibniz’s monadology, including the universal presence of a central unifying point of mind—though he did not yet claim that all things have souls. Not until later would he argue more explicitly for what he called “pluralistic panpsychism.” His panpsychist metaphysics is one of the few such systems to have been seriously discussed and debated in recent philosophical discourse; for a detailed treatment, see Ford 1982. I will summarize some of the most important points here.
James’ metaphysical turn roughly coincided with the turn of the century. In 1901 and 1902 he presented his Gifford Lectures, which were then published as Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). In the book he clarified his conception of panpsychism without yet truly endorsing it. First he indicated his sympathy with a panpsychist or animist worldview:
How could the richer animistic aspects of Nature … fail to have been first singled out and followed by philosophy as the more promising avenue to the knowledge of Nature’s life? … A conscious field PLUS its object as felt or thought of PLUS an attitude toward the object PLUS the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs [constitutes a] full fact … ; it is of the kind to which all realities whatsoever must belong.” (392–393)
James’ first explicit endorsement of panpsychism came in a series of lecture notes to a philosophy course taught at Harvard University in 1902–03. According to Perry (1935: 373), James announced that “pragmatism would be his method and ‘pluralistic panpsychism’ his doctrine.”
The series of 1904–05 lectures that would become Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912) marks a further change in James’ thinking, as he seems to move more toward a position of neutral monism. Here he suggests, after the manner of Mach, that “pure experience” is the ultimate reality. James seems to recognize that his view of radical empiricism is close to panpsychism, yet he defers an elaboration:
The “beyond” must of course always in our philosophy be itself of an experiential nature. If not a future experience of our own … , it must be a thing in itself in [panpsychists] Dr. Prince’s and Professor Strong’s sense of the term—that is, it must be an experience for itself. … This opens the chapter of the relations of radical empiricism to panpsychism, into which I cannot enter now. (1912/1996: 88–89)
Later in the book, James again suggests that the problems of causality between mind and matter lead “into that region of pan-psychic and ontologic speculation of which [panpsychists] Professors Bergson and Strong have lately [addressed] in so able and interesting a way. … I cannot help suspecting that the direction of their work is very promising, and that they have the hunter’s instinct for the fruitful trails.” (189)
In his 1905–06 lecture notes, he once more steers toward panpsychism: “Our only intelligible notion of an object in itself is that it should be an object for itself, and this lands us in panpsychism and a belief that our physical perceptions are effects on us of ‘psychical’ realities.” (in Perry 1935: 446)
James’ 1907–08 Hibbert Lectures, published as A Pluralistic Universe (1909), not only furthered his commitment to panpsychism but also made clear his fundamental opposition to the attitude and logic of conventional materialism. There are, he said, two kinds of philosophers: the cynical and the sympathetic. The former inevitably develop materialistic philosophies; the latter develop spiritualistic ones. Here we see his recognition of the ethical imperatives that are built into one’s worldview. Spiritualism may be either of the traditional dualist type or of the monist variety. The spiritual monists, furthermore, may be radically monist (e.g., absolute idealism) or may be more a “pluralist monism.” James then places himself and his radical empiricism in the latter group. The monism resides in the fact that all things are pure experience, the pluralism in the fact that all things are “for themselves” (that is, are objects with their own independent psychical perspectives). Radical empiricism is thus not only sympathetic; it is a morally vital philosophy. Materialism, because it removes the intimacy between mankind and nature, is cynical and axiologically defective: “Not to demand intimate relations with the universe, and not to wish them satisfactory, should be accounted signs of something wrong.” (1909/1996: 33)
As I have already noted, James devoted an entire lecture (chapter) to Fechner’s panpsychism and gave a very sympathetic reading. The next lecture, “Compounding of Consciousness,” offers his final solution to the combination problem. Formerly he had argued that any collective experience had to be unlike the constituent experiences; they had to be “logically distinct.” The result, logically speaking, was that combination was impossible. Now he realizes that this situation is “almost intolerable” because “it makes the universe discontinuous” (206). Such logic forces one to conclude that the universe is a “contradiction incarnate.” If analytic logic compels one to this view, “so much the worse for logic” (207). For James, logic is an intellectual tool of the cynical, materialistic philosophers, and he thus transcends it. He adds this: “Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it.” (212) Combination, therefore, is possible after all, and in fact it maintains the continuity of mind throughout the universe.
Here, too, James abandons his earlier soul-theory: “Souls have worn out both themselves and their welcome, that is the plain truth.” (210) Individual minds and the hierarchy of lower- and higher-order mind constitute the reality of the cosmos: “the self-compounding of mind in its smaller and more accessible portions seems a certain fact” (292).
In the final lecture, James states his belief in a superhuman consciousness and speculates that “we finite minds may simultaneously be co-conscious with one another in a super-human intelligence.”7 Overall, he advocates “a general view of the world almost identical with Fechner’s” (309–310). He foresees a new worldview, a fundamental change in philosophy, “a great empirical movement towards a pluralistic panpsychic view of the universe” (313).8 This new system “threatens to short-circuit” the cynical worldview of the mechanistic materialists.
Not that we must abandon all present modes of thinking, or fall into mysticism or irrationalism. James holds out the hope that, in his new worldview, “empiricism and rationalism might [yet] strike hands in a lasting treaty of peace”; he implores thinking people to “seek together … using all the analogies and data within reach” to understand this new conception of mind and consciousness. “Why,” he asks, “cannot ‘experience’ and ‘reason’ meet on this common ground?” (312) The new worldview is thus spiritual, sympathetic, even reverent. Following Paulsen, James notes that the greatest order of mind in the cosmos is that which we may call God. God is the mind of the cosmos, a kind of nouveau world-soul in which we all co-consciously participate. “Thus does foreignness get banished from our world. … We are indeed internal parts of God and not external creations, on any possible reading of the panpsychic system.” (318)
Others of James’ later writings reinforce his final commitment to panpsychism. In the Miller-Bode notebooks of 1908 he writes that “the constitution of reality which I am making for is of [the] psychic type” (in Perry 1935: 764). His last writings include a series of essays meant to be a kind of philosophical text; they were eventually collected and published as Some Problems of Philosophy (1911a). In the last two of these essays he again addresses the problem of causation, considering both the conceptual and the perceptual views. The conceptualist or “intellectualist” approach consists of essentially a Humean negation of causality, something he derides as “confused and unsatisfactory.” Preferable is a perceptualist view based on our own personal experience of the continuity of causality. This leads James into the mind-body relationship and its larger implications. He takes the experience of causal continuity as literally the stuff of causation—recalling his radical empiricism. Upon taking this view, “we should have to ascribe to cases of causation outside of our own life, to physical cases also, an inwardly experiential nature. In other words we should have to espouse a so-called ‘pan-psychic’ philosophy.” (218) In the posthumously published Memories and Studies, James remarks:
[T]here is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, … into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir. … Not only psychic research, but metaphysical philosophy, and speculative biology are led in their own ways to look with favor on some such “panpsychic” view of the universe as this. (1911b: 204)
Ultimately, he writes, what is important in philosophy is vision. “Philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than of logic.” (1909/1996: 176) Unfortunately, “few professorial philosophers have any vision,” and “where there is no vision the people perish” (165). Pluralistic panpsychism seems to provide James with the vision he seeks.
Reaction to James’ panpsychism is revealing. Despite the considerable evidence, most philosophers still argue that James only “toyed” with panpsychism. A few—among them Ford (1981, 1982), Kuklick (1977), Cooper (1990), and Sprigge (1993)—explicitly acknowledge his endorsement, Ford (1982) citing several examples to the contrary.
Four important panpsychist works were released in 1892. One was Friedrich Paulsen’s Introduction to Philosophy, discussed in chapter 5. Another was “Panpsychism and Panbiotism,” a notable article by Paul Carus, editor of The Monist. In the article, Carus offers some pro and con thoughts on panpsychism, proposing that the term ‘panbiotism’ be used in its place. “Everything,” he argues, “is fraught with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live.” (234) Surprisingly, he dismisses Ernst Haeckel’s view that matter possesses mind or soul as “fantastic,” and proceeds to develop his own definition of soul. One of the more interesting sections of Carus’ piece is titled “Mr. Thomas A. Edison’s Panpsychism.” In a brief essay titled “Intelligent Atoms,” Edison had stated that “every atom of matter is intelligent.” Carus quotes him as follows:
All matter lives, and everything that lives possesses intelligence. … The atom is conscious if man is conscious, … exercises will-power if man does, is, in its own little way, all that man is. … I cannot avoid the conclusion that all matter is composed of intelligent atoms and that life and mind are merely synonyms for the aggregation of atomic intelligence. (243)
Quite unexpected words from one of the world’s greatest inventors and practical thinkers!
In Spirit of Modern Philosophy, Josiah Royce—an American philosopher well known for his pragmatism and absolute idealism—proposed a theory of the Universal Self (or Logos, or World-Spirit, or God) as the cosmic mind which is the reality behind all physical phenomena. Of this Infinite Self, according to Royce, we know little directly—only that it exists, is conscious, and is fundamentally One. The Self doesn’t act on reality, precisely because it is reality: “He isn’t anywhere in space or in time. He makes from without no worlds. … The absolute Self simply doesn’t cause the world.” (1892/1955: 348)
Royce examines several dual-aspect theories of mind, including Clifford’s mind-stuff concept; he finds them unsatisfactory in their original form, but “luminous and inevitable” when understood in light of the Self. Consider two people. Their bodies follow physical laws and may interact in causal ways. But their physicality is merely a manifestation of their underlying inner reality as conscious beings. In the non-physical realm, their two minds interact, communicate, and participate—and this results in true knowledge. “He and I,” Royce claims, “have spiritual relations, think of each other, and do somehow indirectly commune together.” (417)
Like many other thinkers of the time, Royce saw in evolution grounds for viewing all physical objects as subject to the same metaphysical principles. Since humans possess an inner mind and a distinct identity, then so too does everything. This is the “relation of the inorganic world to our human consciousness”:
The theory of the “double aspect,” applied to the facts of the inorganic world, suggests at once that they, too, in so far as they are real, must possess their own inner and appreciable aspect. … In general it is an obvious corollary of all that we have been saying. (419)
[W]e … know that there is no real process of nature that must not have, known or unknown to us, its inner, its appreciable aspect. Otherwise it could not be real. (427)
Royce counsels the reader not to view this as mere animism or anthropomorphism. It would be simplistic and misleading to presuppose that “stones or planets” have anything like a human inner life: “it is not ours to speculate what appreciative inner life is hidden behind the describable but seemingly lifeless things of the world.” Yet we are certain that it exists, because “the Logos finds a place for it … in the world of appreciation.” The Logos is by definition timeless, and hence the cosmos has always had this inner life—before humans, before life, before the Earth.
Royce advances this line of thinking in Studies of Good and Evil (1898), displaying a deepening conviction that all things have inner lives with as much reality and intrinsic worth as those of humans:
[W]e have no sort of right to speak in any way as if the inner experience behind any fact of nature were of a grade lower than ours, or less conscious, or less rational, or more atomic. … This reality is, like that of our own experience, conscious, organic, full of clear contrasts, rational, definite. We ought not to speak of dead nature. (1898/1915: 230)
The contrast is clear: The “dead nature” of mechanism is fundamentally challenged by the panpsychic worldview.
The final and perhaps most important articulation of Royce’s panpsychism can be found in The World and the Individual (1899–1901). He asks the reader to “suppose that even material nature were internally full of the live and fleeting processes that we know as those of conscious mental life” (213). Drawing on recent science, he then introduces some new variations on the arguments for panpsychism, all based on “four great and characteristic types of processes” (219) that ordinary matter shares with “conscious Nature” (i.e., mankind). First Royce notes that both matter and mind exhibit irreversibility in their processes—a reference to the recently formulated second law of thermodynamics. Second, he notes that both realms display a tendency to communicate: Minds and ideas interact with each other, and likewise matter and energy exhibit field properties (“wave-movements”) that indicate an interpenetration and communicative interaction. Third, both show tendencies toward a quasi-stable behavior, in spite of their irreversibility, that Royce—following Peirce—calls a “habit.” Nature exhibits countless “approximate rhythms” that are repeatable and definite yet never absolutely fixed. Fourth, the process of evolution demonstrates the continuity of nature, from inorganic to organic to consciousness. These are all variations on the Evolution/Continuity arguments, employing the latest developments in science and physics.
From these arguments Royce concludes that a mental aspect of nature must exist, but that it operates so much more slowly than our human consciousness that we cannot perceive it:
[W]e have no right whatever to speak of really unconscious Nature, but only of uncommunicative Nature, or of Nature whose mental processes go on at such different time-rates from ours that we cannot adjust ourselves to a live appreciation of their inward fluency, although our consciousness does make us aware of their presence. (225–226)
The “very vast [mental] slowness in inorganic Nature,” such as in a rock or a solar system, is no less extant that our own mentality. Time scale is entirely arbitrary, and therefore slower is not lesser. The Mind in nature is fully conscious. Hence, a mental life is to be found everywhere:
Where we see inorganic Nature seemingly dead, there is, in fact, conscious life, just as surely as there is any Being present in Nature at all. And I insist, meanwhile, that no empirical warrant can be found for affirming the existence of dead material substance anywhere. (240)
The fourth significant publication of 1892 was “Man’s Glassy Essence,” in which Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) discussed the relation between the psychical and physical aspects of material things. This was the fourth of Peirce’s five famous Monist articles on metaphysics, published in 1891–1893. The first three—“The Architecture of Theories,” “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined,” and “The Law of Mind”—laid the groundwork for the panpsychist vision he set forth in “Man’s Glassy Essence.”
“The Architecture of Theories” begins with a discussion of the “brick and mortar” of any viable philosophical system. That article, like all of the five, is very diverse in concepts; Peirce seems to dash from one topic to the next, only roughly forming a consistent overall theme. After discussing the relevance of evolution to philosophy of mind, he asserts that “the old dualistic notion of mind and matter … will hardly find defenders today” (1891/1992: 292). We are thus compelled to a new form of monism—one that he designates, surprisingly, ‘hylopathy’, meaning the view that all matter “feels.”
This monism must have one of three forms: neutralism (in which mind and matter are independent), materialism (in which the physical is primary), and idealism (in which the mental is primary). Peirce rejects neutralism because two independent entities are proposed where only one is required. He dismisses materialism as “repugnant to scientific logic” because “it requires us to suppose that a certain kind of mechanism will feel.” Thus, we are left with idealism. Peirce has in mind a particular variation, “objective idealism”:
The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. (293)
Here Peirce refers to his so-called cosmogonic thesis in which the universe originates in a condition of pure, chaotic feeling, then becomes progressively crystallized into matter as this mind undergoes a kind of solidification through patterns of recurrence that he calls “habits.” Mind is thus at the core of reality. It exists in varying stages of solidification (or “objectification,” as Schopenhauer would have it), and can be seen in one sense as matter and in another as mind.
In “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” Peirce rejects determinism, arguing instead for his own version of anti-necessitarianism (“tychism”). One of the reasons for his rejection is that necessitarianism requires an entirely unsatisfactory epiphenomenal view of mind: “Necessitarianism cannot logically stop short of making the whole action of the mind [simply] a part of the physical universe. … Indeed, consciousness in general thus becomes a mere illusory aspect.” (1892a/1992: 309) Some small degree of tychistic freedom is required to “insert mind into our scheme.”
Peirce returns to panpsychism briefly in “The Law of Mind.” He observes that “tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology … and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind” (1892b/1992: 312). But he then diverts again to a different discussion. At the end of the article he reiterates that “what we call matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hide-bound with habits” (331).
Coming now to the main piece, Peirce begins “Man’s Glassy Essence” with a look at physics and chemistry, then goes on to discuss primitive life forms and the protoplasm inside all living cells. Of all the properties of protoplasm, the most important is that it “feels”—and what is more, it exhibits all essential qualities of mind. Sensitivity and sentience are inferred, Peirce tells us, by analogy: “[T]here is fair analogical inference that all protoplasm feels. It not only feels but exercises all the functions of mind.” (1892c/1992: 343) Among the properties on which the analogy is based are reaction to the environment, ability to move, ability to grow, and ability to reproduce.
And yet, Peirce writes, protoplasm is simply complex chemistry, a particular arrangement of molecules. Feeling cannot be accounted for by mechanistic laws; therefore, we are forced to admit “that physical events are but degraded or undeveloped forms of psychical events” (348). He then presents his own dual-aspect theory of mind:
[A]ll mind is directly or indirectly connected with all matter, and acts in a more or less regular way; so that all mind more or less partakes of the nature of matter. … Viewing a thing from the outside, … it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, … it appears as consciousness. (349)
The dynamic sensitivity of protoplasm necessarily results in an enhanced capability for feeling: “nerve-protoplasm is, without doubt, in the most unstable condition of any kind of matter; and consequently, there the resulting feeling is the most manifest” (348). Again, this sort of sensitivity is a general property of matter: “Wherever chance-spontaneity [i.e. unstable sensitivity] is found, there, in the same proportion, feeling exists.” Peirce thus effectively introduces a new argument for panpsychism, drawing on the correlation between a specific physical characteristic—dynamic sensitivity—and the mental property of feeling. All matter is dynamic to some degree, and thus must be associated with an “interior” that feels. I will designate this as the argument from Dynamic Sensitivity. Like the evolutionary argument, it incorporates forms of continuity and non-emergence, to which it adds a reference to the indwelling power of dynamical systems. Clearly Peirce was only sketching out his views in this essay, but certainly the lack of a developed theory of dynamical systems restricted his ability to articulate himself. With the advent of chaos theory and non-linear dynamics in the late twentieth century, we now have new ways of expanding on Peirce’s insight—see, for example, Skrbina 2009b and chapter 9 below.
Later in “Man’s Glassy Essence,” Peirce elaborates on his notion of a “general idea.” Individual ideas, he claims, spread out over time, influence one another, and become fused together into a general idea. As he wrote in his earlier article “The Law of Mind,” such general ideas are “living feelings spread out” (1892b/1992: 327). Any general idea that comes to exhibit a pattern of regularity or recurrence is said to acquire a habit: “Habit is that specialization of the law of mind whereby a general idea gains the power of exciting [regular] reactions.” In fact the general idea is rather the mind of the habit. This mind associated with the general idea is a unity—one that is, in some fundamental ontological sense, like a human personality:
The consciousness of a general idea has a certain “unity of the ego” in it. … It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person; and, indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea. … Every general idea has the unified living feeling of a person. (1892c/1992: 350)
Peirce recognized that his generalized theory of mind applied to larger-scale super-human structures as well as the smaller sub-human systems. People who interact strongly with one another produce a true group mind that is essentially like the mind of the individual. Personhood or personality results when the feelings (sub-minds) are “in close enough connection to influence one another.” “There should be,” Peirce continues, “something like personal consciousness in [collective] bodies of men who are in intimate and intensely sympathetic communion.” In other words, degree of participation determines degree of mind. He adds that these ideas “are no mere metaphors” and that “the law of mind clearly points to the existence of such personalities.”
After the Monist series, Peirce continued to articulate his cosmogony, albeit in a vague and indeterminate way. This outlook relates to his broader semiotic conception of the world, in which the basic architecture of reality consists of signs. “All this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.” (1934: 302) Signs in general have a symbolic nature9; they represent an object to an interpretant. Signs or symbols are furthermore alive; they grow, expand, and reproduce. “[E]very symbol is a living thing, in a very strict sense that is no mere figment of speech.” (1992b: 264) The symbol or sign is the most general conception of life, a “living general”; “it is of the nature of a sign to be an individual replica and to be in that replica a living general. … There can be no reality which has not the life of a symbol.” (1992b: 324) Biological life is but a special case of “living general.”
Peirce’s cosmogony, in brief, is this: In the beginning there was a vast formless state, which he calls “the ovum of the universe.” This ovum was not empty, but consisted of “a primeval chaos of unpersonalized feeling”10—that is, of subjectless, disembodied, undifferentiated feeling-qualities. This cosmic Feeling is alive, is sentient, and may even be consciousness per se: “every true universal, every continuum, is a living and conscious being” (1993: 162), and “whatever is First is ipso facto sentient” (260). Random reactions within this vast sea of feeling-qualities at some point gave rise to a first symbol—an original, living entity that marked the beginning of natural law or “habit.” With the advent of symbols or signs came space, time, matter, and energy, all of which were emergent qualities. From these things the visible universe evolved. But the cosmos never lost its fundamental character as a composition of living, feeling signs. Halton (2005) refers to this metaphysical system as “Peircean animism.”
Burks (1996: 343), however, had it more correct: “Peirce is a panpsychist, making feelings (psychological Firsts) the elementary building blocks of the universe.” The primordial feelings are prior not only to mind and matter, but even to space-time: “As the ultimate atoms of the universe, panpsychic feelings (Firsts) are too simple to be related by space and time.” (345) Indeed, it was from precisely such feelings that space and time emerged: “Objects and events are relational complexes of Firsts. … This is the sense in which space and time have evolved … .” Burks dedicates an entire section of his paper to “Peirce’s panpsychic firsts.” In that section he explains that “objective idealism is a form of panpsychism, the view that all objects of the universe are constituted of basic feelings and their interactions” (349–350). There are even theological implications: “panpsychic feelings provide a mental basis for Peirce’s panpsychic God” (352). In a related essay, Burks (1997: 531) offers a concise summary: “Peirce’s cosmic theory of evolution was a panpsychism: the universe began as a chaos of primitive feelings and gradually evolved the material and mental laws and systems of today.” Houser (2014: 29) evidently concurs: “This is a panpsychism.” Without citing any history, Houser acknowledges its unconventional nature: “Clearly, though, Peirce’s panpsychism is not at all ordinary, but it is a panpsychism all the same … .” And it follows directly from the ideas sketched out in the Monist essays.
Such views are in striking contrast to Peirce’s more famous analytic work in logic and positivism. Yet it is clear that he read other panpsychist philosophers—he cites Fechner, Schelling, Clifford, Carus, Empedocles, Epicurus, Gilbert, James, Leibniz, von Nägeli, Royce, and the Stoics, all in contexts that would indicate familiarity with their theories of mind. Peirce’s pragmatism, like James’, thus seems to have been fully compatible with a panpsychist outlook. This fact may have influenced the later pragmatists John Dewey and Ferdinand Schiller, both of whom also articulated panpsychist views.
Anglo-American panpsychism of the late nineteenth century came to a close with the British idealism of Francis Bradley (1846–1924). In 1893 Bradley published the first edition of his major work, Appearance and Reality. His system of idealism was based on an absolute monism in which, as with Mach and James, the ultimate reality is pure experience. “Feeling, thought, and volition,” writes Bradley, “are all the material of existence, and there is no other material, actual or even possible.” (1893/1930: 127) Thus, this ultimate reality is not merely experience, but “sentient experience.” His monism doesn’t allow for separating subject from object, and as a result the subject himself is nothing more than experience—as was the case with Schopenhauer’s “will.” For both subject and object, “to be real is to be indissolubly one thing with sentience” (128).
Later in Appearance and Reality Bradley addresses the nature of the inorganic. In his absolute monism, all things are fundamentally one, and hence the inorganic shares essential qualities with the organic. This justifies an argument by analogy: “A sameness greater or less with our own bodies is the basis from which we conclude to other bodies and souls.” (239) Where the sameness is clear, so is the imputation of psychical life. But even in the cases where it is not obvious, we have “no sufficient warrant for positive denial [of mind].” In our profound ignorance of the absolute, we must allow for the possibility that “every fragment of visible Nature might, so far as is known, serve as part in some organism not [obviously] like our bodies.” He reaches a somewhat tentative panpsychist conclusion:
[Physical] arrangements, apparently quite different from our own, and expressing themselves in what seems a wholly unlike way, might be directly connected with finite centers of feeling. And our result here must be this, that … we cannot call the least portion of Nature inorganic. (240)
If this is less than a ringing endorsement, Bradley at least concludes—in the absence of evidence to the contrary—that the intellectually prudent view is to assume that inorganic matter has its own center of feeling.11