There is yet another set of facts which seem explicable on the supposition that consciousness has causal efficacy.It is a well-known fact that pleasures are generally associated with beneficial, pains with detrimental, experiences.All the fundamental vital processes illustrate this law.
Starvation, suffocation, privation of food, drink and sleep, work when exhausted, burns, wounds, inflammation, the effects of poison, are as disagreeable as filling the hungry stomach, enjoying rest and sleep after fatigue, exercise after rest, and a sound skin and unbroken bones at all times, are pleasant.
Mr.Spencer and others have suggested that these coincidences are due, not to any pre-established harmony, but to the mere action of natural selection which would certainly kill off in the long-run any breed of creatures to whom the fundamentally noxious experience seemed enjoyable.An animal that should take pleasure in a feel- ling of suffocation would, if that pleasure were efficacious enough to make him immerse his head in water, enjoy a longevity of four or five minutes.But if pleasures and pains have no efficacy, one does not see (without some such à priori rational harmony as would be scouted by the 'scientific' champions of the automaton-theory) why the most noxious acts, such as burning, might not give thrills of delight, and the most necessary ones, such as breathing, cause agony.The exceptions to the law are, it is true, numerous, but relate to experiences that are either not vital or not universal.Drunkenness, for instance, which though noxious, is to many persons delightful, is a very exceptional experience.But, as the excellent physiologist Fick remarks, if all rivers and springs ran alcohol instead of water, either all men would now be born to hate it or our nerves would have been selected so as to drink it with impunity.The only considerable attempt, in fact, that has been made to explain the distribution of our feelings is that of Mr.Grant Allen in his suggestive little work Physiological Aesthetics; and his reasoning is based exclusively on that causal efficacy of pleasures and pains which the 'double-aspect' partisans so strenuously deny.
Thus, them, from every point of view the circumstantial evidence against that theory is strong.A priori analysis of both brain-action and conscious action shows us that if the latter were efficacious it would, by its selective emphasis, make amends for the indeterminateness of the former; whilst the study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.The conclusion that it is useful is, after all this, quite justifiable.
But, if it is useful, it must be so through its causal efficaciousness, and the automaton-theory must succumb to the theory of commonsense.I, at any rate (pending metaphysical reconstructions not yet successfully achieved), shall have no hesitation in using the language of common-sense throughout this book.Footnotes The Theory of Practice, vol., p.
The present writer recalls how in 1869, when still a medical student, he began to write an essay showing how almost every one who speculated about brain-processes illicitly interpolated into his account of them links derived from the entirely heterogeneous universe of Feeling.Spencer, Hodgson (in his Time and Space), Maudsley, Lockhart Clarke, Bain, Dr.Carpenter, and other authors were cited as having been guilty of the confusion.The writing was soon stopped because he perceived that the view which he was upholding against these authors was a pure conception, with no proofs to be adduced of its reality.Later it seemed to him that whatever proofs existed really told in favor of their view.
Chas.Mercier: The Nervous System and the Mind (1888).p.9.
Op.cit.p.11.
See in particular the end of Chapter IX.
