II

This should, I think, suffice to demonstrate how science tends to pulverize the universe and to multiply beings indefinitely. However, as already noted, science tends no less distinctly to unify the Cartesian duality of matter and mind. Hence it is inevitably led to, let us say not anthropomorphism, but psychomorphism. Monism can effectively be conceived in three ways (I am of course aware that this has been said many times before): either by seeing movement and consciousness—for example the vibration of a cerebral cell and the corresponding mental state—as two sides of a single fact, in which case one misleads oneself by this reminder of the ancient Janus; or by not denying the heterogeneous nature of matter and mind, but making them flow from a common source, from a hidden and unknown mind, a position which gains nothing but a trinity instead of, and in the place of, a duality: or, finally, by holding resolutely that matter is mind, nothing more. This last thesis is the only comprehensible one, and the only one which truly leads to the desired reduction. But there are two ways in which it may be understood. We may say with the idealists that the material universe, other egos included, is mine, exclusively mine, and that it is composed of my states of mind or of their possibility to the extent that it is affirmed by me, that is, to the extent that this possibility is itself one of my states of mind. If this interpretation be rejected, the only option is to admit with the monadologists that the whole external universe is composed of souls distinct from my own but fundamentally similar. In accepting this latter point of view, it so happens that one removes from the former its best support. To recognize that one knows nothing of the being in itself of a stone or a plant, say, and at the same time to stubbornly persist in saying that it is, is logically untenable; the idea which we have of it, as may easily be shown, has for its only content our states of mind; and as, abstracting away our states of mind, nothing remains, either it is only these states of mind which are affirmed when we affirm this substantial and unknowable X, or it must be admitted that in affirming some other thing, we affirm nothing. But if it is the case that this being in itself is fundamentally similar to our own being, then it will no longer be unknowable, and may consistently be affirmed.

Thus monism leads us to universal psychomorphism. Hitherto, however, monism has been demonstrated less than it has been affirmed. It is true that when one sees physicists like Tyndall, naturalists like Haeckel, philosophical historians and artists like Taine, and theorists of all schools,¹⁹ express the suspicion or the conviction that the hiatus between inside and outside, between sensation and vibration, is an illusion, then even if their arguments may not be convincing, the agreement of their convictions and presentiments has some importance. But, as soon as they attempt to put their finger on the alleged identity, this presumption loses all force in the face of the evident discord of the juxtaposed terms which they are trying to identify, namely movement and sensation.

The reason is that at least one of these terms is an unfortunate choice. The contrast between the purely quantitative variations of movement, whose deviations are themselves measurable, and the purely qualitative variations of sensation, whether they concern colours, odors, tastes or sounds, is too shocking to our mind. But if, among our internal states, distinct ex hypothesi from sensation, there were to be found some which vary quantitatively, as I have attempted to show elsewhere,²⁰ this singular character would perhaps allow us to attempt to use them to spiritualize the universe. In my view, these two states of the soul, or rather these two forces of the soul which are called belief and desire, whence derive affirmation and will, present this character eminently and distinctly. By the universality of their presence in all psychological phenomena, both human and animal, by the homogeneity of their nature from one end of their immense gamut to the other, from the slightest inclination to believe or to want up to certainty and passion, and finally by their mutual penetration and by other no less striking signs of similarity, belief and desire play exactly the same role in the ego, with respect to sensations, as do space and time in the external world with respect to material elements. It remains to be examined whether this analogy does not conceal an identity, and whether, rather than being simply forms of our sensory experience, as their most profound analyst believed,²¹ space and time are not perhaps primitive concepts or continuous and original quasisensations by which, thanks to our two faculties of belief and desire, which are the common source of all judgements and hence of all concepts, the degrees and modes of belief and of desire of psychic agents other than ourselves are translated to us. On this hypothesis, the movement of bodies would be nothing other than types of judgements or objectives formulated by the monads.²²

It will be seen that if this were the case, the universe would become perfectly transparent, and the open conflict between two opposing currents of contemporary science would be resolved. For if, on the one hand, science leads us towards vegetal psychology, to 'cellular psychology', and soon to atomic psychology, in a word to an entirely spiritual interpretation of the mechanical and material world, on the other hand its tendency to explain everything, including thought, in mechanical terms is no less evident. In Haeckel's 'cellular psychology',²³ it is curious to see the alternation of these two contradictory viewpoints between one line and the next. But the contradiction is resolved by the hypothesis set out above, and can only be resolved thus.

Moreover, this hypothesis is in no way anthropomorphic. Belief and desire have the unique privilege of including unconscious states. There certainly exist unconscious desires and judgements. These include, for example, the desires implicit in our pleasures and pains, and the judgements of localization and so on which are incorporated in our sensations. By contrast, unconscious and unfelt sensations are a manifest impossibility; if a few minds have thought to posit them, it is either because they have used this phrase mistakenly to refer to sensations which are not affirmed or discerned, or because, while understanding that it is really necessary to admit unconscious states of mind, they have wrongly understood sensations as capable of being such states. In addition, the facts which have been used to support the hypothesis of unconscious sensibility, already striking enough in themselves, also serve to prove general conclusions considerably beyond this. They show that our own consciousness (that is, the directing monads or leading elements of the brain) has as its constant and indispensable collaborators innumerable other consciousnesses whose modifications, external with respect to us, are for them internal states. Ball says: 'Certain physiologists who take an interest in psychology have proved that we cannot forget anything. Traces of our previously received impressions accumulate in the cells of our brains, where they remain latent indefinitely, until one day a superior influence awakens them from the tomb where they were buried in sleep ... When in the course of a conversation one tries to remember a name, a date, or a fact, the information sought often escapes us, and only several hours later, when we are thinking of something else entirely, does it come spontaneously to offer itself to us. How can we explain this unexpected revelation? It is because a mysterious secretary, a skilful automaton has been working for us while the intellect [he should have said our own intellect, the directing monad] neglects these trivial details'.²⁴

That psychiatrists find it necessary to have recourse to the metaphors of a secretary or an interior librarian to explain the phenomena of memory, constitutes a strong presumption in favour of the monadic hypothesis. The monadological theory can therefore readily appropriate for itself the arguments of the English and German psychologists on this subject. But since, after all, it seems to be necessary to see as unconscious in some cases some states of mind, let it be noted that in truth, a desire or an act of faith not only can exist without being felt, but actually cannot be felt as such, any more than a sensation can be active by itself. Now, by this remarkable characteristic, the two internal forces I have named are distinguished for us by being objectifiable (objectivable) to the highest degree. Since they may apply to any sensation whatsoever, however radically different these sensations may be from each other, to the colour red as to the note C or D, to the smell of a rose as to the feeling of cold or warmth, why may they not apply just as much to unknown and, I submit, unknowable phenomena, ex hypothesi different from sensations, but no more or less distinct from sensations than the latter are from each other? Why may sensation not be seen simply as a species of the genus quality, and may not one admit that there exist outside us non-sensory qualifying signs which, just like our sensations, may serve as the point of application for the psychic forces par excellence, namely the static force called belief and the dynamic force called desire? It is perhaps from an instinctive and confused feeling of this truth that the idea of force has been built on the model of desire, and the key to the universal enigma sought in this idea. Schopenhauer lifted the mask of this concept by calling it almost by its true name, will. But will is a combination of faith and desire, and the master's disciples, Hartmann among them, had to add the idea to the will.²⁵ They would have done better to break apart the will and distinguish in it the two elements. We may rightly be amazed that, among so many philosophical conjectures, it has occurred to nobody, at least explicitly, to seek in the objectification of belief rather than of desire the solution to the problems of physics and of life. At least explicitly; for without knowing it, we conceive of matter—coherent and solid substance, satisfied and at rest—not only with the help of, but in the image and likeness of our convictions, as we conceive of force in the image of our efforts. Only Hegel glimpsed this truth, to judge by his conceit of composing the world from sequences of affirmations and negations. Hence perhaps, despite certain aberrations and strange subtleties, comes the air of architectural and magisterial grandeur which pervades his ruined work, and which marks, in general, the superiority of substantialist systems throughout history, from Democritus to Descartes, over the liveliest of dynamistic doctrines. Have we not seen monism, beneath the brilliant light of the currently prevailing evolutionism, which pushes to its limit the Leibnizian idea of force, attempting the renewal of the Spinozan concept of substance? For, as will moves towards certitude, as the movement of stars and atoms moves towards their definitive agglomeration, the idea of force leads naturally to the idea of substance, where, weary of the agitations of an illusory phenomenalism, grasping finally realities which are taken for immutable, idealist and materialist thought each in turn take refuge. But, of these two ascriptions to the mysterious external noumena of our two interior quantities, which is legitimate? Why may we not dare to say that both are?

It will perhaps be objected that this psychomorphism is a very easy solution, and all the more illusory for that, and that it is a delusion to pretend that one can explain vital, physical or chemical phenomena by psychological facts, since the latter are always more complex than the former. But, though I admit the complexity of sensations and the complete legitimacy of explaining them by physiological facts, I cannot admit this of desire nor of belief. I maintain that analysis cannot get its teeth into these irreducible concepts. There is an unnoticed contradiction in the position that, on the one hand, an organism is a mechanism constructed in conformity to purely mechanical laws, and, on the other, that all the phenomena of mental life, including the two mentioned above, are purely products of the organization created by this life, and do not exist prior to it. If, in fact, the organized being is only an admirably constructed machine, it should function like any other machine, in which not only no new force but not even any radically new product can possibly be created by the most marvellous arrangements of wheels and cogs. A machine is nothing but a special distribution and direction of pre-existing forces which traverse it without essentially altering it. It is nothing but a change of form of raw materials which it receives from outside and whose essence does not change. If then, once more, living bodies are machines,

the essential nature of those products and those forces which result from their functioning which are known to us fundamentally (sensations, thoughts, volitions) attests that the substances which nourish them (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen etc.) contain hidden psychic elements. In particular, among these superior results of the vital functions, there are two which are forces, and which, springing forth from the brain, could not have been created there by the mechanical play of cellular vibrations. Can it be denied that desire and belief are forces? Is it not clear that with their reciprocal combinations, passions and intentions, they are the perpetual winds of history's tempests, and the waterfalls which turn the mills of politics? What leads the world on and drives it in its course, if not beliefs religious or otherwise, ambitions and cupidities? These so-called products are forces to such an extent that they alone can produce societies, which many contemporary philosophers still maintain are true organisms. The products of an inferior organism would then be factors of a superior organization! Thus, in admitting the dynamical character of these two states of mind, the conclusion (which in any case cannot be escaped by regarding them as products) acquires a higher degree of rigour. For we know that the forces employed by machines always emerge from them considerably less denatured than their raw materials. It follows that, if belief and desire are forces, it is probable that when they emerge from the body in our mental manifestations, they do not differ noticeably from how they were when they entered, in the form of molecular cohesions or affinities. The ultimate foundation of material substance would then be open to us; and it is worth the trouble of examining whether, in following through the consequences of this point of view, we remain in agreement with the facts established by science. And here I have the advantage of being able to rely on the accumulated work of Schopenhauer, Hartmann and their school, who have, I believe, succeeded in showing the primordial and universal character, not of will, but of desire.

To cite only one example, consider a small mass of protoplasm, in which no sign of organization has been discovered, 'a clear jelly like the white of an egg', as Perrier says. This jelly nonetheless, he adds, executes movements, captures animalcules, digests them, etc. It evidently has appetite, and consequently must have a more or less clear perception of what its appetite is for. If desire and belief are nothing but products of organization, whence comes this perception and this appetite of an admittedly heterogeneous, but not yet organized, mass? Almann, of the Royal Society of London, says: 'The movements of spores seem frequently to obey a real volition; if the spore encounters an obstacle, it changes direction and moves back by changing the movement of its cilia'.²⁶ A railway mechanic could do no better. Nonetheless, this spore is only a cell detached from an immobile and insensible plant, to which we grant no will and no intelligence. But, lo and behold, intelligence and will all of a sudden appear in the daughter cell, even though they exist not at all, even virtually, in the mother cell! Let us rather say that, when it judges best to do so, when it is useful to its goal, to its particular cosmic plan whence proceed all its movements, the vital element reveals and unfolds its hidden resources. At first mixed with an infinity of others in an indivisible lump of protoplasm, at the desired moment it calls a halt to its indivision, it encloses and sequesters itself with a compact group of vassals, it throws up defensive ramparts of calcium; or else it stretches out its flagella like a rower extending his oars, and moves towards its prey. Every body of water contains myriads of these unicellular living beings which 'construct for themselves a skeleton ... of concentric spheres as transparent as crystal, and of a perfect symmetry and beauty'. Evidently the single cell under consideration could not accomplish these prodigious feats alone, and we must rather conclude that it was only the soul of a whole people of workers. But what expenditure of psychic acts is required by such a task!

In truth, one might justifiably wonder, when one compares to cellular inventions, cellular industries, and cellular arts, as a spring day exhibits them to us, our arts, our industries, and our little human discoveries displayed in our periodical exhibitions, whether it is really certain that our own intelligence and will, those great egos disposing of the vast resources of a gigantic cerebral state, are superior to those of the tiny egos confined in the miniscule city of an animal or even plant cell. Surely, if we were not blinded by the prejudice of always considering ourselves superior to everything, such comparisons would not be to our advantage. At root, it is this prejudice which prevents us from believing in the monads. In its agelong effort to interpret everything outside us in terms of mechanism, even those things which most break forth with accumulated signs of genius, namely living beings, our mind as it were blows out all the lights of the world for the sole benefit of its own little spark. Certainly Espinas²⁷ is right to say that a small amount of intelligence suffices to explain the social work of bees and ants. But if one grants this small amount and judges it necessary to account for the products of these insects-which are in any case very simple, like the products of our industries-it must be admitted that to produce their organization, so infinitely superior in complexity, in richness, and in adaptive flexibility to all their works, a great deal of intelligence and many intelligences were necessary.—A remark naturally suggests itself at this point: Since the accomplishment of the simplest and most banal social function, which has persisted unchanged over centuries (for example, the reasonably regular coordinated movement of a procession or a regiment) demands, as we know, so much preparatory training, so many words, so much effort, and so much mental force spent almost all in vain-then what torrents of mental or quasi-mental energy must be necessary to produce these complex manoeuvres of simultaneously accomplished vital functions, by not thousands but billions of different actors, all of them, we have reason to think, essentially egotistical, and all as different from each other as the citizens of a vast empire!

It would doubtless be necessary to reject this conclusion if it were proven, or had even a modicum of probability, that beyond a certain degree of corporeal smallness, intelligence (I do not mean sensory intelligence as we know it, but psyche, the genus of which all intelligence known to us is only a species) was impossible. If this impossibility were established, we could deduce that all psychological phenomena are results radically different from their conditions, even though all intelligent beings observed by us, or more generally all beings which have a psyche, proceed from parents or ancestors who equally have a psyche, and even though the spontaneous generation of intelligence is a hypothesis even less acceptable, if such a thing be possible, than the spontaneous generation of life. But however far we penetrate into the microscopic and even ultra-microscopic depths of the infinitely small, we will always discover living seeds and complete organisms, in which observation or induction will lead us to recognize the characteristics of animality as much as of vegetation, since the two kingdoms are indistinguishable in minimis. As Spottiswoode says: 'A diameter of millimetres is approximately the smallest that a microscope allows us to see distinctly. But solar rays and electric light reveal to us the presence of bodies infinitely beneath these dimensions. Tyndall had the idea of measuring them as a function of light waves ... by observing a mass of them and noting the hues they reflected ... These infinitely small bodies are not just gaseous molecules; they include moreover complete organisms, and the illustrious scientist just cited has made a thorough study of the considerable influence which these miniscule organisms exercise in the economy of life'.²⁸

But, it will be objected, even if we cannot thus attain the limits of the psychic, nonetheless common sense affirms that, by and large, beings much smaller than ourselves are much less intelligent; and, following this progression, we are sure to arrive, on the path of increasing smallness, at the absolute absence of intelligence. Common sense indeed! Common sense also tells us that intelligence is incompatible with excessive size and in this, it must be admitted, experience proves it right. But if we juxtapose these two commonsensical affirmations, the one unmotivated, the other likely, it is clear that they emerge from the prejudice of anthropocentrism. In reality, we judge beings to be less intelligent the less we understand them, and the error of thinking the unknown to be unintelligent goes hand in hand with the error, which we will examine below,²⁹ of thinking the unknown to be indistinct, undifferentiated, and homogenous.

The foregoing should on no account be seen as a disguised plea in favour of the teleological principle (principe de finalité), which is now so rightly discredited in its ordinary form. Perhaps, in fact, from a methodological point of view, it would be preferable to deny nature any goal and any idea than to claim, as many do, that all her goals and all her ideas can be linked to a single thought and will. This would be a curious way to explain a world where beings are constantly devouring each other; where, in each being, the agreement of functions, to the extent that it exists at all, is nothing but a transaction of contrary interests and claims; where in the normal state, and in the most balanced individual, useless functions and organs can be seen, in the same way as in the best-governed State dissident sects will always spring up, and provincial particularities will be religiously perpetuated by the citizens and of necessity respected by the rulers, even though they disrupt the unity which is their dream! However infinite one may suppose thought or divine will to be, if it is to be one thing, it will ipso facto become inadequate as an explanation of reality. Between its infinity, which supposes the coexistence of contradictories, and its unity, which demands perfect agreement, we must choose,—or else make, in a marvellous fashion, the one proceed from the other, each in turn, the latter from the former, then the former from the latter ... But let us not become involved with such mysteries. Either there is no intelligence at all in matter, or matter is wholly saturated with intelligence; there is no middle ground. And in truth, scientifically speaking, it comes down to the same thing. Let us suppose for a moment that one of our human States, composed not of a few thousand but of a few quadrillions or quintillions of men, hermetically sealed and inaccessible as individuals (like China, but infinitely more populous still, and more closed) was known to us only by the data of its statisticians, whose figures, made up of very large numbers, recurred with extreme regularity. When a political or social revolution, which would be revealed to us by an abrupt enlargement or diminution of some of these numbers, took place in this State, we might well be certain that we would be observing a fact caused by individual ideas and passions, but we would resist the temptation to become lost in superfluous conjectures on the nature of these impenetrable causes even though they alone were the real ones, and the wisest option would appear to us to explain as best we could the unusual numbers by ingenious comparisons with clever manipulations of the normal numbers. We would thereby arrive at least at clear results and symbolic truths. Nonetheless, it would be important from time to time to recall the purely symbolic nature of these truths; and precisely this is the service which the theory of monads can offer to science.

Notes

19. [Trans. Note: John Tyndall (1820-1893), physicist; Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), biologist and naturalist; Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893), historian and literary critic. All argued for some form of dual-aspect monism, in which mind and matter are seen as two aspects of a single underlying reality. Tyndall, sometimes remembered as a thoroughgoing materialist, also seriously considered the idea of a 'primeval union between spirit and matter', such that they would be 'two opposite faces of the self-same mystery' ('Scientific Use of the Imagination' (1870), in Fragments of Science, London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1879, vol. II, pp. 101-136, on p. 133). Haeckel propounded a monism which 'recognizes one sole substance in the universe, which is at once “God and nature”; body and spirit (or matter and energy) it holds to be inseparable' (The Riddle of the Universe, trans. J. McCabe, London, Watts & Co., 1929, p. 16). Taine, finally, describes mind and matter as 'one and the same tongue, written in different characters' (On Intelligence, trans. T. D. Haye, London, L. Reeve & Co., 1871, pp.297-8.)]↩
20. [Trans. Note: The theory of belief and desire as psychological quantities goes back to Tarde's early (1880) essay 'La Croyance et le désir' ('Belief and desire', in Essais et mélanges sociologiques); see particularly section II.]↩
21. [Trans. Note: The reference is to Kant's theory of space and time as 'pure forms of intuition' in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Tarde speaks slightly loosely here, as Kant regards time as a form of inner as well as outer (sensory) intuition.]↩
22. According to Lotze, if there is anything spiritual in the atom, this must be pleasure and pain, rather than a concept; I maintain exactly the contrary. [Trans. Note: 'If there is anything spiritual in an atom of material mass, we need not suppose that it has any concept (Vorstellung) of its position in the world, or that the powers it exercises are accompanied by any effort (Strebung); but we may affirm that it inwardly perceives the pressure or shock, the dilation or contraction which it undergoes in the form of a feeling of pleasure or pain'. (H. Lotze, Medicinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele, Leipzig, Weidmann'sche Buchhandlung, 1852, p. 134 = Principes généraux de psychologie physiologique, trans. A Penjon, Paris, G. Baillière & Cie, 1881, p. 133.]↩
23. [Trans. Note: For a brief statement of Haeckel's 'cellular psychology', see his The Riddle of the Universe (1899), trans. J. McCabe, London, Watts & Co., 1929, p. 145: 'Just as we take the living cell to be the “elementary organism” in anatomy and physiology, and derive the multicellular animal or plant from it, so, with equal right, we may consider the “cell-soul” to be the psychological unit, and the complex psychic activity of the higher organism to be the result of the psychic activity of the cells which compose it'. For a more in-depth exposition, see Zellseelen und Seelenzellen, Leipzig, Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1909.]↩
24. [Trans. Note: Probably Benjamin Ball (1833-1893), psychologist. The citation has not been traced.]↩
25. [Trans. Note: Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), philosopher. Where Schopenhauer based his thought on a strict separation of will and idea, Hartmann identified the two as dimensions of the unconscious.]↩
26. [Trans. Note: George James Almann (1812-1898), botanist and zoologist. The citation has not been traced.]↩
27. [Trans. Note: Alfred Espinas (1844-1922), sociologist. The reference is to his work Des Sociétés animales [Animal Societies], Paris, G. Baillière, 1877. In fact, Espinas' own view of the scope of intelligence in social insects is closer to Tarde's than the text may suggest.]↩
28. [Trans. Note: William Spottiswoode (1825-1883), mathematician and physicist. The citation has not been traced.]↩
29. [Trans. Note: See chapter VI below.]↩