_Psychosis and the Fore-Brain._--Hippocrates wrote, "It is through the brain that we become mad, that delirium seizes us, that fears and terrors assail us." "We know that pleasure and joy on the one hand and pain and grief on the other are referable to the brain. It is in virtue of it that we think, understand, see, hear, know ugliness and beauty, evil and good, the agreeable and the disagreeable." Similarly and more precisely Descartes indicated the brain, and the brain alone, as the seat of consciousness. Finally, it was Flourens who perhaps first definitely insisted on the restriction of the seat of consciousness in higher animals to that part of the brain which is the fore-brain. A functional distinction between the fore-brain and the remainder of the nervous system seems, in fact, that consciousness and physical reactions are adjunct to the fore-brain in a way in which they are not to the rest of the system. After transection of the spinal cord, or of the brain behind the fore-brain, psychical phenomena do not belong to the reactions of the nervous arcs posterior to the transection, whereas they do still accompany reactions of the nervous arcs in front and still connected with the fore-brain. A man after severance of the spinal cord does not possess in the strict sense consciousness of the limbs whose afferent nerves lie behind the place of spinal severance. He can see them with his eyes, and if the severance lie between the arms and the legs, can feel the latter with his hands. He knows them to be a part of his body. But they are detached from his consciousness. Sensations derived from them through all other channels of sense than their own do not suffice to restore them in any adequate measure to his consciousness. He must have the sensations so called "resident" in them, that is, referred to them, without need of any logical inference. These can be yielded only by the receptive organs resident in the part itself, its skin, its joints, its muscles, &c., and can only be yielded by those receptive organs so long as the nerve impulses from them have access to the fore-brain. Consciousness, therefore, does not seem to attach to any portion of the nervous system of higher animals from which the fore-brain has been cut off. In the dog it has been found that no sign of memory, let alone intelligence, has been forthcoming after removal of the greater part of the fore-brain. Entry: 2
From 1880 onwards till the very end of his life, Huxley was continuously occupied in a controversial campaign against orthodox beliefs. As Professor W. F. R. Weldon justly said of his earlier polemics: "They were certainly among the principal agents in winning a larger measure of toleration for the critical examination of fundamental beliefs, and for the free expression of honest reverent doubt." He threw Christianity overboard bodily and with little appreciation of its historic effect as a civilizing agency. He thought that "the exact nature of the teachings and the convictions of Jesus is extremely uncertain" (_Essays_, v. 348). "What we are usually pleased to call religion nowadays is, for the most part, Hellenized Judaism" (_Essays_, iv. 162). His final analysis of what "since the second century, has assumed to itself the title of Orthodox Christianity" is a "varying compound of some of the best and some of the worst elements of Paganism and Judaism, moulded in practice by the innate character of certain people of the Western world" (_Essays_, v. 142). He concludes "That this Christianity is doomed to fall is, to my mind, beyond a doubt; but its fall will neither be sudden nor speedy" (l.c.). He did not omit, however, to do justice to "the bright side of Christianity," and was deeply impressed with the life of Catherine of Siena. Failing Christianity, he thought that some other "hypostasis of men's hopes" will arise (_Essays_, v. 254). His latest speculations on ethical problems are perhaps the least satisfactory of his writings. In 1892 he wrote: "The moral sense is a very complex affair--dependent in part upon associations of pleasure and pain, approbation and disapprobation, formed by education in early youth, but in part also on an innate sense of moral beauty and ugliness (how originated need not be discussed), which is possessed by some people in great strength, while some are totally devoid of it" (_Life_, ii. 305). This is an intuitional theory, and he compares the moral with the aesthetic sense, which he repeatedly declares to be intuitive; thus: "All the understanding in the world will neither increase nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is beautiful and this is ugly" (_Essays_, ix. 80). In the Romanes Lecture delivered in 1894, in which this passage occurs, he defines "law and morals" to be "restraints upon the struggle for existence between men in society." It follows that "the ethical process is in opposition to the cosmic process," to which the struggle for existence belongs (_Essays_, ix. 31). Apparently he thought that the moral sense in its origin was intuitional and in its development utilitarian. "Morality commenced with society" (_Essays_, v. 52). The "ethical process" is the "gradual strengthening of the social bond" (_Essays_, ix. 35). "The cosmic process has no sort of relation to moral ends" (l.c. p. 83); "of moral purpose I see no trace in nature. That is an article of exclusive human manufacture" (_Life_, ii. 268). The cosmic process Huxley identified with evil, and the ethical process with good; the two are in necessary conflict. "The reality at the bottom of the doctrine of original sin" is the "innate tendency to self-assertion" inherited by man from the cosmic order (_Essays_, ix. 27). "The actions we call sinful are part and parcel of the struggle for existence" (_Life_, ii. 282). "The prospect of attaining untroubled happiness" is "an illusion" (_Essays_, ix. 44), and the cosmic process in the long run will get the best of the contest, and "resume its sway" when evolution enters on its downward course (l.c. p. 45). This approaches pure pessimism, and though in Huxley's view the "pessimism of Schopenhauer is a nightmare" (_Essays_, ix. 200), his own philosophy of life is not distinguishable, and is often expressed in the same language. The cosmic order is obviously non-moral (_Essays_, ix. 197). That it is, as has been said, immoral is really meaningless. Pain and suffering are affections which imply a complex nervous organization, and we are not justified in projecting them into nature external to ourselves. Darwin and A. R. Wallace disagreed with Huxley in seeing rather the joyous than the suffering side of nature. Nor can it be assumed that the descending scale of evolution will reproduce the ascent, or that man will ever be conscious of his doom. Entry: HUXLEY