Matter, mind and meaning / by Whately Carington.

  • Carington, Whately, 1892-1947.
Date:
[1949]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Matter, mind and meaning / by Whately Carington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    kinds—all of which were believed to have power over mun¬ dane events of every description. But it is manifestly a hopeless task to undertake the systematic study of material phenomena, or the discovery of the laws which govern them (i.e. the observable regularities from which their course can be predicted) if you believe that whatever laws there may be are liable to be overridden at any moment by the whims of a malevolent spirit, the vagaries of the will of God, or the muttering of incantations by the local magician. But to free oneself from such beliefs—which, it must be remembered, were in those days as much taken for granted as the air one breathed—and thereby to secure, so to say, a clear field in which to work, must have been very much more difficult and have called for far greater strength of mind than it is easy for us to realize to-day. It could be, and of course occasionally was, achieved by the elect few; but for such emancipation to occur on the large scale that extensive scien¬ tific work demanded, it was necessary to find a justifying philosophy, that is to say, to rationalize the disbelief, and to do so, if possible, in such a way as not too grossly to offend existing Authority. 5. Cartesian Dualism. It has been pointed out to me by Professor Price that the categorical separation of Matter from Mind was largely due to the influence of Descartes, according to whose system of philosophy the distinction between ‘thought and extension’ (i.e. mind and matter) was absolute —‘so absolute that only the continual interference of God could account for their harmony’.1 This doctrine, which the great prestige of Descartes as a mathematician did much to spread, was evidently just what was needed. By asserting the complete causal independence of Matter and Mind, it gave the scientist the free field he needed; it did not deny the reality of mind or consciousness, as would have been contrary to common sense and universal experience; nor did it deny the manifest parallelism of mental and physical phenomena (e.g. volition and action) which would have been equally so, but it did deny that this parallelism was the result of causal 1 Wording from Webster's Dictionary, heading Cartesianism.