Chapter 10
Matter
247. Body and matter are normally taken as interchangeable
words, and I have often used them in this way. Nevertheless, ancient authors
distinguished their meaning, and I think that ideas could be clarified and made
more distinct if the words regained their proper meaning. In this chapter,
therefore, I will attempt to make clear and distinguish the concepts contained
in the words body and matter.
If the feeling principle had constant, uniform and unchangeable feelings
furnished with extension, it would certainly perceive a body. But would
it be in a condition to affirm to itself that it perceived a material
body? The answer to this question depends upon the concept,
materiality, which we must now examine.
248. When we consider the reality of feeling, it is easy to see that the
feeling principle, although it receives, also posits an act of its own,
the act of receiving. There is no doubt that it is not inactive. This
act of the feeling principle expands in extension, that is, in what is felt.
But how is it modified?
In the first place, the soul can develop different grades of activity and,
given certain conditions, can in various ways separate its capacity for feeling
from the act of feeling. It could possibly separate this capacity from
stimulation altogether or, through an efficacious act of the will, could
further the capacity in its feeling. Such a modification of feeling through the
influence of the soul is a first change in feeling.
249. Observation, too, shows that the act of feeling can be modified not only by the activity of the feeling soul, but also by what is felt, because what is felt can in fact be withdrawn from, or submitted to a given feeling principle. In this case, however, the act of feeling is not modified directly. It remains what it was although its term is removed, or added, or changed(121) in the way that a scene changes before our open eyes (the act of sight remains unchanged but the eyes see changing pictures).
This takes place continually in our corporeal feelings which vary from one moment to the next not because of change on the part of what feels, but because of change on the part of what is felt. As a result, the extension and shape of our corporeal fundamental feeling changes without our knowledge and against our will. In addition the quality and intensity of feeling changes. What was pleasant becomes painful or less pleasing, and we begin to feel in new ways as previous feelings cease. Colour, taste, and aural phenomena, together with many other modes of feeling, are stimulated in us, although we are not conscious of any increase or decrease in the activity applied to our act of feeling. Without any direct change in this act, we find it modified continually through change in its terms. We are not, therefore, in command of these terms of our feeling. A principle different from ourselves exists which like a magician produces all kinds of surprises on the stage of our feeling. But there is more.
250. Not only are we incapable of dominating the things we feel, which sometimes vanish when we want them to remain and arrive when we least desire them; we realise also that the wonderful production of many associated feelings springs from a single, identical principle. For example, when we feel the pain caused by a thorn, we see the thorn under our nail and take hold of it to remove it. The pain-, sight- and touch-feeling together indicate the presence of a single agent producing three very distinct feelings which harmonise only in so far as they are diffused in a unity of space, and cease within a unity of time when we realise that the thorn has been removed.
251. When the various agents have been distinguished from feelings in this way, the agents themselves reveal certain laws about themselves all of which are based on a fundamental dictum: `One agent cannot take the place of another without removing it.' These are laws which we infer from the feelings resulting from the action of many individual agents. Such laws are independent of the act of feeling and of ourselves as feeling beings, and produce terms and stimuli of feelings irrespective of our own desires.
252. We are, therefore, passive in regard to our feelings and their changes. Moreover, the agents which render us passive are completely out of our control. They show their independence by the disturbance they exert on us as they change the place and quality of our feelings, and by the way in which they change place amongst themselves according to certain inflexible laws over which our will has no power whatsoever. This agent, which does not directly modify us, that is, our act of feeling, changes and modifies the extended terms of our feeling according to definite laws. And this agent is called matter.
253. The concept of body contains therefore: 1. a principle acting in us as feeling beings, and 2. an extension which is the term of the feeling caused in us by that action. The concept of matter, however, contains in addition a force that: 1. by disturbing corporeal extension, the term of our feeling, limits, shapes and modifies it according to certain laws, and produces movements within it; and 2. independently of ourselves as feeling principle, exercises the disturbing action on the extension we feel.
254. Comparing the properties of body and matter, we see that corporeal feeling does not require amongst its elements any principle extraneous to feeling. Material feeling, however, does require and presuppose an active principle extraneous to feeling. This principle extraneous to corporeal feeling is itself felt only through the disturbance it exerts on the term of corporeal feeling; it is not felt as an element of feeling itself. If it did contribute as an element constituting feeling, it would be necessary to seek another principle capable of modifying this element, and so on ad infinitum. We have to stop, therefore, at a principle which, without itself forming part of feeling, changes the corporeal thing felt in a feeling. This agent, at work in the extended term of corporeal feeling, is called matter.
255. And our body is said to be material because in it, that is, in the extended term of our feeling, an action is revealed according to which one part of the corporeal extension acts upon another according to certain laws and independently of any intervention by us.
256. We may now re-state as follows what we have said in the preceding chapters.
1st. Only what is feelable suffices to make us perceive body.
2nd. To make us perceive matter, we also need what is sensiferous. This makes us experience a disturbance which is not exercised directly on ourselves as feeling beings, but on what is felt, the term of our feeling.
3rd. The force that changes what is felt, by removing it from the act of feeling according to determined laws, provides us with the concept of some brute thing called matter which does not enter our feeling, and is independent of our understanding and will.
257. We have to be careful not to confuse the notion of matter in general with the notion of the matter of feeling, which we considered in The Origin of Thought.(122) Moreover, a kind of matter and form can be distinguished in the fundamental feeling. The act of feeling is the formal part of that feeling; what is felt can be called its material element in so far as it is the term - an active and necessary term - of the act of feeling. This matter of feeling, however, is not related to the matter of body about which we have spoken in this chapter. The word matter expresses a relative concept which, therefore, is variable in accordance with any variation in the term of the relationship.
Notes
(121) Cf. OT, 705-706.
(122) OT, 1005-1019.