CRITICAL NOTICE

Mind and Personality. By WILLIAM BROWN, M.D., D.Sc. University of London Press. 1926. pp. x + 334. Price 12s. 6d. net.

We have heard so much in recent years of the part played by the body in the formation and development of character that it is good to find a book with a title which suggests that even when we know all that can be known about the nervous system and the ductless glands, there may still be something to learn about human personality. We open Dr Brown's book with great expectations which are increased when we learn, from the table of contents, that he proposes to treat Personality from the standpoints of Physiology, Psychology, Psycho-pathology, Ethics, Evolution and Religion. On reading the book we feel that on the whole our expectations have been realized, although we may have feelings of regret in regard to some of its features. We are disappointed, for example, to find that it is not a systematic treatise, but, in part at least, a collection of separate essays; some of them apparently prepared for readers of a mental calibre different from that required of those to whom the greater part of the work is addressed. The absence of systematic treatment of his theme is accentuated by the wide range of Dr Brown's erudition. He switches us from psychology to mathematics, from mathematics to psycho-pathology, and from psycho-pathology to ethics, metaphysics and religion; but he does not give us any clear indication how these various lines of approach come together in his final conception of the nature of personality. Throughout all his treatment of detail, however, and from whatever standpoint he approaches the problem of Personality, there is an underlying philosophical attitude which determines the selection and presentation of his subject-matter in the earlier part of the book, and comes more clearly into view in his final chapters.

Dr Brown anticipates the reader's desire to know in what sense the term Personality is being used, but he refuses to define it, on the ground that different schools of thought hold different views on the nature of "what the general public call personality." The reader may reasonably object that he does not want a definition of what the general public call personality; what he wants is a definition or description of what Dr Brown means by personality in this book. But at the beginning of the book this would have been a difficult task, for the term is not used in the same sense throughout. In the earlier chapters it is used mainly as a psychological term; towards the end it is used exclusively as a philosophical term. From the standpoint of psychology "personality is the final differentiation which the individual has made, as it were, and produced in himself and superimposed upon all that he has inherited from past generations and lower forms of mental evolution" (p. 13). When we pass to the philosophical standpoint we find that "personality has a universal element that contrasts it with the individual and the singular, and that in this respect it is an ideal never completely achieved by finite minds" (p. 14).

Dr Brown reminds us of the dramatic meaning of personality, derived from persona the actor's mask, although this meaning is perhaps the farthest

away from common usage; but he makes no reference to the legal interpretation of a 'person' as a subject of rights and duties, although it was with implications derived from this source that the word came into our everyday speech. In his philosophical use of the term Personality Dr Brown adheres closely to the meaning it acquired in early theological writings. The Latin persona, used as equivalent to the Greek hypostasis, came to stand for Absolute Reality or Absolute Being; and when Christian theologians ascribed personality to God they did so to God as Three Persons, not as One. Personality thus conceived as the Supreme Reality was a communion or fellowship of persons. In his chapter on Mysticism Dr Brown says that finite personality, however far developed, "must be appearance and not complete reality, because in the universe there is no room for merely separate persons. Ultimately there can only be one complete person, he who is completely selfsufficing....The only complete person is the Absolute or God, and progress towards personality in individuals seems to be partly intellectual, along the path of reason, and partly intuitional. One can see it as a union, ever closer and deeper, with the spirit of the universe..." (p. 290).

In discussing the relations of the mind and the nervous system Dr Brown rejects every kind of mechanistic explanation of behaviour. He sees the quality of purposiveness in all vital activity and regards it as an ultimate category, a "phase of activity which is sui generis, and not to be explained away by material processes" (p. 23). He is inclined to think that conscious mental experience exists without break from the lowest organisms to man, although the degree or nature of consciousness may vary with the complexity of the organism endowed with it. In dealing with the mind-body relation he definitely rejects the theory of materialism or automatism and leans towards interactionism. He pays tribute to the influence of the ductless glands in producing disturbances of personality, but he says "one cannot argue from a fact of pathological order to an explanation of the normal mind" (p. 38). In his desire to stress the possibility of the mind's independence of the body, he declares that "the endocrine glands are no more essential to a normal personality than the brain itself or any other part of the body" (p. 38). At this point the reader's curiosity is aroused as to what Dr Brown means by a normal personality.'

One of the best sections of the book is that entitled Personality and Psychology. Here Dr Brown discusses experience and the organized self, instincts, emotions and sentiments, volition, and responsibility in mental disease. In dealing with the problem of the nature of the subject of experience he tries to find a middle way between the views of William James and those of James Ward. With Ward he postulates a subject as such and he rejects James' 'passing thought' on the ground that it fails to distinguish the process of experience from the content of experience; but he differs from Ward in holding that it is not the presentations that are associated in successive experiences, but the various acts of experience. Speaking purely psychologically he regards the conscious mind as "a sequence of mental processes in time; which sequence obeys certain laws, or shows certain uniformities, due to the organisation of acts of experience with their corresponding contents in systems" (pp. 58-59).

On the nature of the structure of the mind Dr Brown follows McDougall in regarding it as built up on a foundation of inherited conative and emotional dispositions which become organized in relation to a hierarchy of cognitive

dispositions acquired in the course of individual experience. He accepts, in the main, McDougall's account of the instincts and Shand's doctrine of the sentiments; but he questions the validity of McDougall's view of the relation of instincts to emotions. Such emotions as fear and loneliness do not appear as emotional qualities accompanying the instinctive activities of escape or gregariousness, but are rather called out when these instinctive activities are frustrated or prevented free play. So, also, the derived emotions-Mr Shand's "prospective emotions of desire"- are related to the success or failure of desire in attaining its end. Dr Brown therefore suggests that the emotions might be classified in accordance with the usual view of emotion-"the view that it is a kind of friction in the mental machinery."

The problems of the will are discussed in various sections of the book and there are numerous references to "the contrasted theories of free will and determinism." We know that Freud's insistence on the determinism of all mental process has aroused much opposition to his views among those who are disposed to adopt a libertarian view of human nature; and there are some psycho-therapeutists whose reluctance to accept the teachings of psychoanalysis is due to a belief that to do so is to deny the "freedom of the will." In discussing this question Dr Brown says, we can at once dismiss any doctrine of free will of indifference....We must believe in the general principle of relevance," and in "the principle of sufficient reason." If anything occurs in the mind there must be a sufficient reason why it should occur, but "that is not the same thing as saying that every moment of consciousness is mechanically determined by preceding events in consciousness." It is not clear here whether the word 'consciousness' is being used in its specific sense as opposed to unconsciousness, or in the older sense of the mind as a whole. No Freudian would maintain that moments of consciousness are always determined by preceding events in consciousness. What they do maintain is that events in consciousness are sometimes determined by events in the Unconscious. Dr Brown asserts or implies throughout the book that he is a believer in the 'freedom of the will'; but so long as he is writing as a psychologist he is almost as much a determinist as Freud himself. He very rightly says that psychologists "must adopt some form of determinism if they are to be psychologists at all," and he himself adopts what William James called the 'soft' form of determinism known as self-determinism. But at the psychological level selfdeterminism is still determinism and is as much opposed to real 'freedom' (indeterminism) as is "the rigid determinism of Freud."

As has often been pointed out the doctrine of self-determinism is no way of escape from the moral problem in determinism. Dr Brown identifies character with will; will is "the totality of the mind in its organization"; "Character is an organization of impulsive tendencies. Will is that organization in action." "A man acts freely so far as he is true to himself and so far as he is acting in accordance with the principles developed in his individual life and according to his own personality." "So far as conduct is the outcome of the whole mind working in its unity, so far it is self-determined, and free in the only sense in which we can understand freedom." All this, however, leaves untouched the old problem of "the bad man." The conduct of the bad man may be "the outcome of his whole mind working in its unity and so far self-determined," but is he free in the only sense that matters? Is he free to be 'good'?

The truth is (as Dr Brown frequently takes occasion to point out) that the

problem of freedom is not a psychological problem at all, and "psychology cannot either prove or disprove determinism." It is a metaphysical problem, and the significance of all that Dr Brown says about freedom and determinism can be understood only in the light of his philosophy: "Psychology is not the science of the soul; psychology is the science of the mind, of mental process in time." The real subject of experience is the transcendental or pure ego. The empirical ego develops in the course of time, the pure ego is out of time. Time is unreal. Value experiences of the good, the beautiful, and the true, and religious experiences, are beyond the merely empirical. Personality is within these values. "It takes one beyond time and beyond the limits of the individual, and that is what is meant in saying that personality is in the end transcended in the Absolute or God, and that there is only one complete personality" (p. 303).

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For Dr Brown all the meaning of life is bound up with the transcending of time, and for this reason he cannot rest satisfied with any psychological theory of personality which binds us down in a time process. If time is completely real for us, our ultimate outlook upon reality is very depressing and unmeaning." In value experiences time appears to be transcended, although "it is difficult to attribute the characteristics of morality, which is one of our three general values, to a timeless experience" (p. 286). But it is in the mystical form of religious experience that the transcending of time is most obvious. "When in the mystical experience, we have the feeling of timelessness, it is quite conceivable that we are passing beyond the limits of time, and proving, to ourselves at any rate, that time is appearance and not reality" (p. 285).

Dr Brown rejects all naturalistic explanations of mystical experiences that may be truly called religious. We should not overlook, he says, the rôle played by narcissism in some forms of religious experience, but he considers quite inadequate the actual evidence in support of the view that all mystical experience can be explained in terms of this theory. Against this evidence he sets some general arguments put forward in an earlier portion of the book. We find, however, on referring to these arguments, that they are hardly adequate to the burden imposed upon them. One of these arguments one that Dr Brown calls "the more satisfactory one of actual experience". consists of this statement: "After an analysis (for scientific purposes) by a leading psycho-analyst extending over ninety-two hours, my religious convictions were stronger than before, not weaker....In many patients whom I have myself analyzed I have found a similar result. Although mere emotionalism and religiosity is diminished, the essentially religious outlook on life remains unimpaired" (p. 268).

The other argument relied upon to combat the psycho-analytical explanation of mystical experience is the theoretical objection to "explaining the normal mind in terms of the abnormal, without first giving an adequate theory of the distinction between normal and abnormal." Freudians might retort that in declaring mystical experience to be a normal experience Dr Brown is begging the very question at issue.

On many occasions throughout the book psycho-analysts are criticized for their "tendency to take results attained by investigation of pathological cases, and to use a theory based upon those results as the ground of explanation of normal mental processes" (p. 153). But it is not clear why Dr Brown should have so much objection to this tendency, for he himself admits that “we are

all of us pathological" (p. 304). If this be true, it must be difficult to draw any sharp line between normal and abnormal reactions of the mind, and it may well be that the reactions of the mind shown in exaggerated form by those who are obviously abnormal are the same in kind as the mental reactions of those who think themselves normal but are not. The so-called normal reactions of the mind have proved themselves inadequate to account for abnormal mental process; it may be that the so-called abnormal reactions may be useful as explanatory factors in so-called normal mental process.

It may be, however, that by his exaggerated sense of the difference between the normal and the abnormal Dr Brown is unnecessarily adding to the difficulty of reconciling his philosophy with his clinical experience. What he says about value experience and its independence of spatio-temporal conditions might suggest to him that an experience may not necessarily be lacking in value because it is associated with some pathological state or with some mental process that is best known in a pathological setting. He says, "it is absurd to attempt to explain the normal in terms of the abnormal, e.g. to explain why a person is a great artist through so-called complexes or repressed tendencies. His art, so far as it is true art, is destined to live and is in harmony with the totality of things, is in harmony with the entire Universe" (p. 133). Now, apart from the likelihood that no 'normal' person is without repressed tendencies, and that no one without repressed tendencies will ever produce a work of true art, it may be contended that the value of a work of art would in no way be detracted from by its derivation from repressed tendencies. Repressed tendencies must be as much "in harmony with the totality of things" as the work of art which may be but another mode of their appearance. If they both mean the same thing, the idealist is entitled to place the higher value on the work of art because, for him, it is nearer to Ultimate Reality.

Similar considerations can be applied to mystical experience. Scientists may be quite justified in criticizing such experience as abnormal, because it involves a disturbance of the sensori-motor attitude towards life; but they have no warrant for denying the value of the experience which such disturbance may entail or permit. If by abrogation of sensori-motor functions the mystic does indeed pass, as Dr Brown is inclined to believe, "beyond the limits of time," we should expect him to have a timeless experience; and, for all we know to the contrary, this timeless experience may be, as mystics in all ages have claimed, an experience of "direct union with the Divine."

Much that may puzzle the reader in Dr Brown's references to the normal and abnormal is due to his desire to remind us that every purely psychological aspect of personality has to be considered also from a philosophical point of view. Thus whilst he is willing to admit that from the scientific standpoint the normal may be regarded as one extreme in a graduated series leading to the more and more abnormal, he says that from the philosophical standpoint the normal is the ideal. But the ideal of complete normality, he declares, is never achieved in this world, so that his protest against those who try to explain the normal mind in terms of the abnormal falls to the ground. For in attempting to explain the normal in terms of the abnormal all that one does is to show the connections between the two ends of the graduated series which, in the language of psychology, is all that we mean by normal and abnormal; one is not trying to explain the normal understood as the ideal.

Dr Brown's conceptions of the normal and the abnormal are related to his view that the psycho-physical organism is a "mechanism of revelation." Just