Not less unimportant is the second point raised in the notion of “authority.” To judge for himself is everybody’s business, and should be required of everybody. Even if nobody should have the happy thought of making use of the better insight, the dependent person who always wants to go further will lead himself into doubtful situations. The three important factors, school, newspaper, and theater, have reached an extraordinary degree of power. People apperceive, think, and feel as these three teach them, and finally it becomes second nature to follow this line of least resistance, and to seek intellectual conformity. We know well enough what consequences this has in law, and each one of us can tell how witnesses present us stories which we believe to rest on their own insight but which show themselves finally to depend upon the opinion of some other element. We frequently base our constructions upon the remarkable and convincing unanimity of such witnesses when upon closer examination we might discover that this unanimity has a single source. If we make this discovery it is fortunate, for only time and labor have then been lost and no mistake has been committed. But if the discovery is not made, the unanimity remains an important, but really an unreliable means of proof.
Section 47. (b) The Mechanism of Thinking.
Since the remarkable dissertation of W. Ostwald,[205] on Sept. 20, 1905, we have been standing at a turning point which looks toward a new view of the world. We do not know whether the “ignorabimus” of some of the scientists will hold, or whether we shall be able to think everything in terms of energy. We merely observe that the supposedly invincible principles of scientific materialism are shaken.
Frederick the Great, in a letter to Voltaire, says something which suggests he was the first to have thought of the purely mechanical nature of thought. Cabanis had said briefly, that the brain secretes thought as the liver bile. Tyndall expressed this conception more cautiously, and demanded merely the confession that every act of consciousness implies a definite molecular condition of the brain, while Bois-Reymond declared that we could not explain certain psychical processes and events by knowledge of the material processes in the brain. “You shall make no picture or comparison, but see as directly as the nature of our spirit will permit,” Ostwald tells us, and it is well to stick to this advice. We need neither to cast aside the mechanical view of the world nor to accept energism; neither of them is required. But according to the teachings of the latter, we shall be enabled to recognize the meaning of natural law in the determination of how actual events are conditioned by possible ones. And thus we shall see that the form that all natural laws turn to expresses the mediation of an invariable, a quantity that remains unchangeable even when all the other elements in the formula of a possible event alter within the limits defined by the law.[206]