The World in One’s Mind
By Eli Siegel
What does it mean that the world is in a person’s mind? How is this so, as other things are so? —This is the most famous poem of Emily Brontë:
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life—that in me has rest,
As I—undying Life—have power in Thee!
………………………………………
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void;
Thou—Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.
There is a point in mind where, while one is aware of oneself, there is a seeing of something else present. In Tolstoy and many others it is the presence of God.
“No coward soul is mine.” Every living being is afraid; what we’re afraid of is one of the things making what our character is. In this poem, Emily Brontë feels there is something in her that nothing can destroy or change badly. There’s a good deal of optimism or courage or confidence that doesn’t ring true. This poem does ring true.
In these lines, there is the whole purpose of a good deal of religion: the seeing of oneself as the world and the world as oneself:
O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life—that in me has rest,
As I—undying Life—have power in Thee!
God is said to be in the breast of the writer; all Life has rest in her, but the writer has power in undying Life. Mind is like that: there is the relation, the identification, of the two—self and world. As we think of the anchovies with their foolishness; the beetles, with their tendency to bother farmers and then retreat if the farmer knows a remedy; the frog, which can have catastrophes not only in the woods but in laboratories—the fact is that every one of those things is the world as that thing.
The universe, in becoming a paramecium, did a paramecium job, showed it could be a paramecium. What makes the paramecium do as it does, could not be without the universe present, even though the paramecium seems to do things for itself.
“Vain are the thousand creeds / That move men’s hearts—unutterably vain.” “Creeds” here are descriptions of the world that Miss Brontë sees as from the top. There is a something different from them, which is logic and feeling at once. The life feeling is like that, and this is where the drama comes in: whenever there is life, there is something which is knowing, and something which is a valuing, or a feeling of pain and pleasure.
As poet, Emily Brontë is going to that point where heat and light are one, seeing and feeling are one.
About mind, there is always what the biologists call adaptation. Emily Brontë is trying to adapt herself to an infinite world in her fashion. The paramecium, frog, beetle, anchovy also are trying to adapt themselves: because as soon as you have mind, the purpose, it seems, is to do something with your environment. Religious people adapt themselves to the universe instantaneously. The paramecium is less comprehensive. It wants to adapt itself to that body of water in which it has come to be.
I could talk in biological terms of the mind in this poem: Emily Brontë, in a moment of crisis, is trying to adapt herself to a developing universe, the nature of which she is not factually familiar with, but she feels that she can be secure as to the principle of that universe. And so, she makes statements which say that the unknown as environment is in a state of thigmotaxis or happy adjustment to the spirit of Miss Brontë. Miss Brontë, furthermore, identifies her own spirit with undying Life itself. And so, the adaptation here is of a rather extreme kind.
I could talk that way, because I feel that if you don’t like a certain way of talking, at least if you have to, you can show you can represent it.
The important thing is that, in different ways, we are trying to see something other than ourselves justly as a means of preserving and advancing and giving meaning to ourselves. This is a purpose of mind that can be found in the simplest biological adjustment.
Minds Mingle and Differ
Some of the most useful anecdotes about mind are in Darwin’s The Descent of Man. In the third chapter, “Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals,” we have a paragraph on imitation. Mind differs and imitates.
Darwin writes: “The principle of Imitation is strong in man.” We have drama—because imitation can be flattery, but it can also be the awfullest kind of mockery. As soon as a child leaves a teacher and is with the other boys, he begins imitating: And did you do that, Robert?!
In certain morbid states of the brain this tendency is exaggerated to an extraordinary degree: some hemiplegic patients and others…unconsciously imitate every word which is uttered…and every gesture or action which is performed near them.
A good deal of mind comes from the desire to be like what is not yourself and at the same time not honor it. This kind of imitation is a result of wanting to be like something not yourself but with the reservation of not honoring it. But the principle of the definition holds good: if we meet something and imitate it, it’s because, along with meeting it, there has been pleasure and pain of a sort which we show in our mocking or imitating procedure.
“Animals…sometimes imitate each other’s actions; thus two species of wolves, which had been reared by dogs, learned to bark.” Learning is the seeing of difference and sameness as to yourself in things not yourself. You assimilate, which means that you see a likeness. You have it for yourself, which means you see a difference.
In the history of life, we have beings like each other going in flocks or in herds, sometimes being so much like the others that one’s own life is given away, as with the sheep who jumped over the cliff because their leader felt it was right to do so. Instinct can be foolish.
“Dureau de la Malle gives an account of a dog reared by a cat, who learnt to imitate the well-known action of a cat licking her paws.” This means that in the animal kingdom one is not necessarily academic or confined. Somebody different from you does something, and if it’s useful, you don’t have to stick with the lodge. When a dog imitates a cat, it means that provincial lines, nationalisms, are being questioned.
Minds mingle with minds, quarrel with minds, separate from minds. Even so, each mind is what it is.
A correspondent assures me that a cat in his house used to put her paws into jugs of milk having too narrow a mouth for her head. A kitten of this cat soon learned the same trick.
The word trick is important. Mind concerns tricks, and mind is concerned with religion. It is always so: in mind there are the friskiness and the solemnity that we find in reality itself.
These sentences of Darwin describe minds being like other minds in a fairly high field: dogs and cats. But we know, for example, that gnats on a summer afternoon imitate each other. They’re in a swarm; and every time there’s a swarm of anything, somebody is imitating somebody.
Mind Aware of Mind
We have the matter of mind being aware of mind, and occasionally fighting it. A great example of this, one of the greatest in literature, is the fight of mind and mind as represented by Brutus and Cassius in act 4, scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It is one of the most complicated things in the world: mind is judging another mind, and in the meantime history is going on.
Mind is a critic of itself and of other minds, ethically, and in terms of knowledge. One of the things that one mind can do to another is contradict it: What you say is wrong; what I say is right! It took many years—thousands—to have that kind of warfare. The other kind of warfare was when two jungle animals were after another animal and felt they were in each other’s way.
Cassius. That you have wrong’d me doth appear in this:
You have condemn’d and noted Lucius Pella
For taking bribes here of the Sardians;
Wherein my letters, praying on his side,
Because I knew the man, were slighted off.
Mind doesn’t like other minds to have a little opinion of it in any way. Cassius doesn’t like the opinion that the mind of Brutus has of the mind that is Cassius.
But Brutus says: “You wrong’d yourself to write in such a case.” Cassius is saying that Brutus wronged him, and Brutus is saying, “You wrong’d yourself”—which is said in arguments a great deal: It’s your own fault!
Proportion in Mind
When Cassius says, “In such a time as this it is not meet / That every nice offence should bear his comment,” we come to the idea of mind as having proportion. As the paramecium goes away from an obstacle, it has to be accurate, which means it has to show proportion in motion. There is proportion in mind. Cassius is saying that Brutus is making something larger than he should; the thing is really smaller.
Brutus. Let me tell you, Cassius, you yourself
Are much condemn’d to have an itching palm;
To sell and mart your offices for gold
To undeservers.
A thing in mind, very early, is what other beings deserve. When, for example, a bird goes away for food and doesn’t eat it all herself but brings the food back to the nestlings, we have proportion, but also mind. The bird knows that somebody is waiting for the food. She has mind of a high type.
Cassius says: “I an itching palm?” In the history of mind, the mind of man, some things were found to be not liked. One is avarice, the excessive acquisitive desire. Brutus is angry with Cassius’s avarice. But without mind there would be no avarice. We can say that a squirrel or chipmunk is avaricious when it stores away much more than it needs. Avarice has been looked on as disproportion.
Mind Is Interested in Justice
When Brutus says, “Remember March, the ides of March remember: / Did not great Julius bleed for justice’ sake?,” we come to some idea of ideals, justice. It took a long time; but we can find the beginnings of justice: for instance, the fact that gnats in a swarm keep out of each other’s way. Whether it’s skill or some idea of justice, no one knows, but they don’t get tangled up.
In the meantime, along with the minds of Brutus and Cassius, the mind of Shakespeare is busy, with some reference to the mind of Plutarch.
Cassius. Brutus, bait not me;
I’ll not endure it: you forget yourself,
To hedge me in; I am a soldier, I,
Older in practice, abler than yourself.
Here we come to a point which is, again, the drama of mind: the relation of self-preservation to self-respect, the pride that one is, is to be seen in history, in biology, and in mind wherever we find it. And we come to an idea of aesthetics; because the sense of pride that a living being can have in itself is also aesthetic pride.
The beginnings of aesthetics can be seen importantly, early—because in nature there is shape and color, and also there is difference and sameness, there is recurrence and individuality; and these matters are in art.
They are in reality. They are in mind.
I hope in the discussion of today, the definition I began with—Mind is the power of at once meeting something and having pleasure and pain—has been given some continuity and some factuality.
♦