[Published in the Philippines Free Press, 10 April 1971.]
THE SOUL AND BERTRAND RUSSELL
Rolando M. Gripaldo
“So long as we adhere to the conventional notions of mind and matter we are condemned to a
view of perception which is miraculous.”
The words are those of Bertrand Russell who, in his essay, “What is the Soul?”, reasons: “Mind
(or soul) and matter were something like the lion and the unicorn fighting for the crown; the end of the
battle is not the victory of one or the other, but the discovery that both are only heraldic inventions.”
The history of philosophy is replete with bad arguments as to whether the body is the creation of
the mind or the mind is an emanation of the body. The controversy has been raging since the time of the
ancient Greeks. British empiricist David Hume, after analyzing the mind through introspection came to
the conclusion that no particular soul entity exists and that the mind is merely the sum total of its states.
Hume’s analysis was an extension of the conclusion drawn by Bishop Berkeley that matter is but an
invention of individual minds and that ultimately, the physical universe and everything in it are mere
ideas in the mind of God. Apparently influenced by Hume, some psychologists later asserted that the
mind as a thing does not exist. William James regarded consciousness not as an entity but as the
function of knowing, that is, as a stream of consciousness.
Russell offered a solution to this controversy by invoking the conclusions of modern physics and
physiological psychology: “Physicists assure us that there is no such thing as matter, and psychologists
assure us that there is no such thing as mind.” Modern physics is becoming increasingly mental, for in
the words of physicist James Jeans: “…the cumulative evidence of various pieces of probable reasoning
make it seem more and more likely that reality is better described as mental than as material.”
On the other hand, modern psychology is trying to reduce what appears to be mental activities to
bodily activities. If mind could be made less and less mental and matter less and less material, thought
Russell, then there must be “something that is neither mind nor body, out of which both can spring.”
This philosophy Russell called “neutral monism,” which is neither materialism nor idealism.
Reality is something difficult to know. One is tempted to associate the concept of neutral monism with
Immanuel Kant’s noumena, Anaximander’s “Boundless Infinite,” and Herbert Spencer’s “Unknowable.”
The following is James Jeans’s description of the world of reality: “…deep-flowing stream; the world of
appearance is its surface, below which we cannot see. Events deep down in the stream throw up bubbles
and eddies on the surface of the stream. These are the transfers of energy and radiation of our common
life, which affect our senses and so activate our minds; below these lie deep waters which we can only
know by inference. These bubbles and eddies show atomicity, but we know of no corresponding
atomicity in the currents below.”
To Russell there is no such thing as a substantial “I.” He in fact defined a “thing” as a “class of
events” to get rid of the concept “substance.” The physical universe, argued Russell, “consists of events,
not of things that endure for a long time and have changing properties.” Modern physics has eliminated
empty space and replaced it with a field of force or, in the words of mathematician-philosopher Alfred
North whitehead, “a field of incessant activity.” And since matter has been identified with energy which
is sheer activity, modern physics sees the particles (electrons, protons, etc.), as intersections of a number
of waves of energy. These intersections Whitehead called “point-events,” a collection of which “forms a
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body such as we ordinarily perceive. The simplest body of this kind is a molecule and a set of molecules
forms a lump of ordinary matter, such as a chair or a stone.”
In Russell’s phraseology, “The electrons and protons…are only crude first approximation, a way
of collecting into a bundle either trains of waves or the statistical probabilities of various kinds of
events.” Hence, “what has been thought of as a particle will have to be thought of as a series of events.
The series of events that replaces the particle has certain physical properties…but it has no more
substantiality than any other series of events that we might arbitrarily single out. Thus ‘matter’ is not a
part of the ultimate material of the world…” What the physiologist sees when he examines a brain is, in
one sense, in the physiologist, not in the brain he is examining. “We suppose that a physical process
starts from a visible object, travels to the eye, there changes into another physical process, causes yet
another physical process in the optic nerve, and finally produces some effect in the brain, simultaneously
with which we see the object from which the process started, the seeing something ‘mental,’ totally
different in character from the physical processes which precede and accompany it… Everything that we
can directly observe of the physical world happens inside our heads and consists of mental events in at
least one sense of the word mental. It also consists of events which form part of the physical world. The
development of this point of view will lead us to the conclusion that the distinction between mind and
matter is illusory. The stuff of the world may be called physical or mental or both or neither as we
please; in fact the words serve no purpose.”
It must be noted that events have causal relations through which we can collect the events into
groups. “If the causal relations are of one sort, the resulting group of events may be called a physical
object and if the causal relations are of another sort, the resulting group may be called a mind. Any event
that occurs inside a man’s head will belong to groups of both kinds; considered as belonging to a group
of one kind, it is a constituent of his brain, and considered as belonging to a group of the other kind, it is
a constituent of his mind. Thus both mind and matter are merely convenient ways of organizing events.”
The nonphilosopher should realize that the common sense point of view contains a number of
epistemological errors. For instance, when a person bumps his head against a stone wall, he does not
really touch it. Certain electrons and protons in his body are attracted and repelled by certain electrons
and protons of the body he thinks he has bumped against. But there is no actual contact. The particles of
his body are agitated by their nearness to the particles of the stone wall, thus transmitting a disturbance
along his nerves to his brain. Hence the deceptive sensation of contact.
When Russell died last year [1970] at the age of 97, one recalled his belief in the nonimmortality
of the soul or of matter. Said he: “There can be no reason for supposing that either piece of matter is
immortal. The sun is supposed to be losing matter at the rate of millions of tons a minute. The most
essential characteristic of mind is memory, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that a memory
associated with a given person survives that person’s death. Indeed there is every reason to think the
opposite, for memory is clearly connected with a certain kind of brain structure, and since this structure
decays at death, there is every reason to suppose that memory also must cease.” [end]
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