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Herbert Spencer: Brain, Mind and the Hard Problem

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Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience

Part of the book series: History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences ((HPTL,volume 6))

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Abstract

Spencer’s neurobiology was grounded in von Baer’s biogenetic law and Carpenter’s zoology, rather than Darwin’s ideas of evolution. Addressing the question of consciousness Spencer believed that is the accompaniment of activity in “higher centres”, as a result of a general principle of ontogenesis whereby organized complexity arises from undifferentiated homogeneity. His notion of “higher centre” resonates with more modern views, the place in which information from the sensory modalities is sent, co-ordinated and correlated. Spencer’s view of consciousness was not limited to man but extended throughout the animal kingdom.

Author was deceased at the time of publication.

‘… in my private opinion it [The Principles of Psychology] will ultimately stand beside Newton’s Principia.’ Much of the material of this chapter has been derived from my earlier publications on Spencer’s psychology: (Smith 1982a, 1983a, 2007).

Herbert Spencer: letter to his father whilst working on his Psychology (Duncan 1911, p. 75).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to the Dictionary of National Biography Spencer’s ‘influence in the latter part of the nineteenth century was immense … [his] influence extended throughout the world.’ The popularity of his publications may be judged by the fact that he was offered some 22 academic distinctions, ranging from university doctorates to fellowships and presidencies of learned societies all over the world. These distinctions, moreover, were offered in spite of it being known that he was not interested in honours such as these and, indeed, habitually declined them.

  2. 2.

    Letter, March 15, 1870, in Darwin 1887, vol. 3, p. 120.

  3. 3.

    Spencer 1904.

  4. 4.

    Duncan 1911.

  5. 5.

    Webb 1979, pp. 21–38; Peel 1971; Francis 2007.

  6. 6.

    Letter…, Duncan 1911, p. 546.

  7. 7.

    Carpenter 1839.

  8. 8.

    Milne-Edwards 1834.

  9. 9.

    von Baer 1828, 1837.

  10. 10.

    Von Baer 1828, p. 140.

  11. 11.

    Haeckel 1874.

  12. 12.

    Spencer 1864.

  13. 13.

    Spencer 1870a, p. 396.

  14. 14.

    Carpenter 1839, p. 20.

  15. 15.

    Spencer 1852.

  16. 16.

    Duncan 1911, p. 140.

  17. 17.

    In an interesting article Martin Raitier has suggested that the effort of writing the Psychology brought on the reading epilepsy from which he suffered for the rest of his life (Raitiere 2011).

  18. 18.

    He was fond of relating how he had thrown down a copy of Kant in disgust after finding that he disagreed with the first two or three pages (Elliot 1975).

  19. 19.

    Spencer 1904, vol. 1, p. 391: ‘the data for the subjective part, which was after a manner unlike that commonly adopted , were lying ready internally: the views taken in the objective part were so alien to those of preceding psychologists that no extensive study of their writings was necessary’.

  20. 20.

    Spencer 1844a, b, c.

  21. 21.

    Spencer 1853.

  22. 22.

    Spencer 1855, Preface, p. iv.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., p. 34.

  24. 24.

    Spencer 1853, p. 519.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., p. 518.

  26. 26.

    Locke 1690, Book 1, chapter 1.

  27. 27.

    This shift from the passive to the active, from spectatorship to involvement, can also be found in the evolutionary neuropsychology published by Erasmus Darwin at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries (see Smith 2005).

  28. 28.

    Darwin 1838, pp. 196–7.

  29. 29.

    Spencer 1865, p. 535.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., p. 521n: ‘…Dr Whewell defines necessary truths as “those in which we not only learn that the proposition is true, but see that it must be true; in which the negation of the truth is not only false but impossible…’.

  31. 31.

    Spencer 1855, p. 28.

  32. 32.

    Feigl 1958, p. 28: ‘Don’t you want anesthesia if the surgeon is to operate on you? And if so what [you] want prevented [is not behavior but] the occurrence of the very raw feels of pain, is it not?’

  33. 33.

    Wittgenstein 1975, §343.

  34. 34.

    Spencer 1855, p. 42.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., p. 24.

  36. 36.

    Spencer 1872, vol. 2, p. 490.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., §472–473; see also Smith 1983a, b.

  38. 38.

    For a modern version of this position see Metzinger 2009.

  39. 39.

    Spencer 1872., vol. 2, p. 491.

  40. 40.

    Spencer 1855, p. 23n; Spencer 1864, vol. 2, p. 413.

  41. 41.

    Spencer 1855, p. 578.

  42. 42.

    Spencer 1872, p. 419.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., pp. 454–455.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., pp. 463–4.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., p. 459.

  46. 46.

    Piaget 1972.

  47. 47.

    Spencer 1870a, p. 169; and in the second edition of the Psychology (vol. 2, p. 232) he writes ‘…the impression of resistance. This is the primordial, the universal, the ever-present constituent of consciousness’. The idea that the physical concepts of force and energy are derived from our conscious experience of muscular energy is familiar today from the work of historians of science such as Max Jammer (Jammer 1957, p. 7).

  48. 48.

    Spencer 1872, p. 233.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., p. 488.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., 503.

  51. 51.

    Sartre 1957, p. 45.

  52. 52.

    Spencer 1870a, b, p. 147–8.

  53. 53.

    Francis Bacon observes that ‘God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass, capable of the image of the universal world’ (Bacon, 1605, Advancement of Learning, Book 1, §3).

  54. 54.

    Descartes 1664, Part 2, §4.

  55. 55.

    Descartes 1637, chapter IV, p. 33.

  56. 56.

    Koyré 1970, p. xi.

  57. 57.

    Heidegger 1962, p. 249: ‘The “scandal of philosophy” is not that this proof [that for an external world] has yet to be given but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again… such expectations, aims and demands arise from an ontologically inadequate way of starting with something of such a character that independently of it and “outside” of it a “world” is to be proved present-at-hand.... If Dasein is to be understood correctly, it defies such proofs, because, in its Being, it already is what subsequent proofs deem it necessary to demonstrate for it.’

  58. 58.

    Spencer 1870a, b, p. 128.

  59. 59.

    Huxley 1870, vol. 1, p. 191.

  60. 60.

    Spencer 1870a, b, pp. 116–117.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., 1870, pp. 148–9.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., 1870, p. 150.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., p. 151.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., p. 154.

  65. 65.

    Roe et al. 1992.

  66. 66.

    Spencer 1870a, b, p. 562.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., p. 563.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., p. 104.

  69. 69.

    Ibid., p. 291.

  70. 70.

    Ibid., p. 98.

  71. 71.

    Spencer 1904, vol. 1, p. 470.

  72. 72.

    Sp, Spencer 1870a, b, p. 106.

  73. 73.

    Ibid., p. 560.

  74. 74.

    It is, of course, far from obvious why mere difficulty of discharge, ‘friction’, should be a necessary and sufficient concomitant of consciousness. Romanes was quick to see this: ‘I think, however, that Mr Spencer is not sufficiently explicit … in showing that “the raw material of consciousness” is not necessarily constituted by mere complexity of ganglionic action. Indeed, as I have said, such complexity in itself does not appear to have anything to do with the rise of consciousness, except in so far as it may be conducive to what we may called ganglionic friction which may be expressed by delay in response’ (Romanes 1883, p. 74n).

  75. 75.

    Ibid., p. 106.

  76. 76.

    Ibid., p. 107–8.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., p. 105.

  78. 78.

    Carpenter, …, p. 458.

  79. 79.

    Spencer 1870a, b, p. 105.

  80. 80.

    Ibid., p. 507.

  81. 81.

    We still await a good reason to conclude that the qualia associated with the reactions of animals lower in the scala naturae than the vertebrates are significantly less vivid than our own.

  82. 82.

    Spencer 1870a, b, p. 561.

  83. 83.

    Ibid., p. 567.

  84. 84.

    See Ibid., pp. 564–71 and account in Smith 1982a, b.

  85. 85.

    Ibid., pp. 137–8. For a recent assessment see Rogers 2012.

  86. 86.

    Wallace 1870, p. 209.

  87. 87.

    Smith 1983a, b.

  88. 88.

    Spencer 1870a, b, p. 159.

  89. 89.

    Ibid., p. 160.

  90. 90.

    Ibid., p. 158.

  91. 91.

    Ibid., p. 158.

  92. 92.

    For an analogous critique of solipsism see Deutsch 1997, pp. 81–4.

  93. 93.

    Spencer 1890, Introduction, p. vi.

  94. 94.

    Wittgenstein 1976, §390.

  95. 95.

    Spencer 1870a, b, p. 160–161.

  96. 96.

    Ibid., p. 162.

  97. 97.

    Webb 1979, p. 28.

  98. 98.

    Nevertheless, although Spencer’s Psychology had little overt influence on the psychology in the century after its author’s death, its covert influence has been considerable. Translations of Spencer’s works into Russian influenced Sechenov and through Sechenov, Pavlov (see Brazier 1959, p. 54) and, in England, exerted a profound effect on John Hughlings Jackson, often regarded as the founder of British neurology (see Smith 1982b). Jackson, in his turn, influenced not only neurology but also Sigmund Freud and Arnold Pick, one of the inaugurators of psycholinguistics in the twentieth century.

  99. 99.

    See Watson 1913.

  100. 100.

    Crick 1995, p. 253.

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  1. Emeritus, Department of Vision Sciences, Aston University, Aston Triangle, B4 7ET, Birmingham, UK

    C. U. M. Smith

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  1. Department of Vision Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    C.U.M. Smith

  2. Department of Psychology, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, Michigan, USA

    Harry Whitaker

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Smith, C.U.M. (2014). Herbert Spencer: Brain, Mind and the Hard Problem. In: Smith, C., Whitaker, H. (eds) Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8774-1_8

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