454 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



given half as much thought to the nature of minds, for he was little 

 interested in psychology. Nevertheless, his common sense — whatever 

 that may be — led him to laugh at a way of looking at things that 

 could not have struck Lucretius and many other able men as absurd 

 at all. 



It is extremely interesting to ask why the men of our day, I do 

 not mean the professional psychologists, but the great mass of intelli- 

 gent persons who do not care much for psychology, and who know 

 little of philosophy, should take up certain ways of regarding things 

 mental, and should unhesitatingly repudiate others which have once 

 been popular. We can not in the least explain it by saying that their 

 own experience of minds leads them to embrace such conclusions. As 

 a rule, they do not reflect upon their experiences of their minds at all, 

 and some of them are hardly capable of serious reflection upon the 

 subject. As early as the seventeenth century, John Locke remarked 

 that " the understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and per- 

 ceive all other things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and 

 pains to set it at a distance, and make it its own object." To this 

 modern psychologists will heartily subscribe. 



The fact is that the average man's notions about the mind are a 

 part of his share in the heritage of the race. He who knows some- 

 thing of the history of human thought finds in them the echoes of old 

 philosophies — traces of theories sometimes the most fantastic. The 

 common sense which guides men is the resultant attitude due to many 

 influences, some of them dating very far back indeed. 



I have said that, even among the ancient Greeks, there were pro- 

 tests against the materialization of the mind. Both Plato and Aris- 

 totle stood out against it, each in his own way. It is true that Plato 

 distributes the soul through the body in a way that might strike an 

 Epicurean as not unnatural — a part of it was below the diaphragm, 

 a part of it in the chest, and a part of it in the head. But he does 

 speak of this last and noblest part in somewhat the same tone as that 

 in which men came later to speak of the human mind. Aristotle fol- 

 lows his teacher in regarding the reason, at least, as something to be 

 carefully distinguished from everything material. However, it is in- 

 teresting to note that he conceives of the divine reason, or first cause 

 of motion, as touching the world without being touched by it. 



May we not describe this last notion as material at one end, so to 

 speak ? If reason is so immaterial that it can not be touched by mat- 

 ter, what does it mean to say that it touches matter? But we must 

 get used to queer ways of talking about minds, if we will follow the 

 history of human thought. The seed dropped by Plato and Aristotle 

 has grown into a tree when we come to Plotinus the Neo-Platonist, 

 who lived in the third century after Christ. 



