Knowlton Chapter 19
Nineteen: Modern Materialism
I am out at last, in the condition you see me. My author has had to contend with many difficulties in bringing me forth; and he would have me suggest to you, that if the circumstances under which he has composed me, were known, they would be considered as sufficient apology for many minor errors. But for his attempting to write under such circumstances, he can offer nothing better than his conviction that he is able to throw considerable light on several very important and very interesting subjects. He firmly believes that the leading principles which I contain, are true; and that by the diffusion of truth, the happiness of the human family will in the end be promoted…It is expected the critics will fall to nibbling my soft parts—of which I possess a pretty good share—but my author will never be troubled for this, should it be found that they are unable to destroy my bones.
After his conversations with President Griffin at Williams College and the freethinkers in New York, Charles was even more determined to publish his materialist theory. He found a printer named Oakey in the neighboring town of Adams and “went in for one thousand copies, fully believing that the greater number I could get out the more wealthy I should be within one year.” This was an enormous job for the small printer, and Knowlton’s 448-page book took nearly four months to print. A lot of the time, Charles worked the press himself. The box of type Oakey owned was badly worn, and he had no drying press for smoothing the wet sheets after they were printed. Charles and the printer air-dried the pages and stitched them into bundles, and then Charles carried them one horse-load at a time to a binder twenty miles away in Pittsfield.
It’s unlikely all thousand copies were ever bound, because Charles once again ran out of money. Each volume cost him ninety cents, in spite of their blurry type and wrinkled pages. Even leaving several hundred copies unbound, Charles found himself “deeply in debt, with no means but the book to enable me to get out.” But Charles had high hopes for his book, and believed it would make him as famous as British philosopher John Locke, whom he quoted on the title page.
The Elements of Modern Materialism was dedicated to “The Friends of Truth and Intellectual Freedom,” for whom Knowlton hoped it would “brush away the scholastic mist that has so long enveloped the intellectual phenomena, and served to foster many important errors.” Charles’s basic claim and the core of his theory was that that consciousness was material. What people called the mind, Charles said, could be completely explained by physical processes. Sensation, perception, imagination, memory, knowledge, belief, and personal identity were all physical, chemical, and electrical functions of the brain. There was no soul.
In science, the simplest answer is always the best. Everything that happened in the mind could be understood without the need for a spirit, a “vital essence,” or a soul, Charles claimed. In fact, adding an immaterial, un-locatable spirit made explaining mental processes more complicated. The traditional distinction between body and spirit, Charles said, “is worse than absurd, for it is calculated to make some men think erroneously.” Old theories had resorted to spirits, Charles said, because the ancients knew no better. The only reason for the public’s continued belief in an immortal soul was the power that some people got over others because of it.
In Modern Materialism’s thirty-six chapters, Charles carefully explained his theory using the most up-to-date information available at the time. Although science had advanced substantially since ancient times when philosophers had written about souls, Charles was frequently forced to make educated guesses to explain processes that were still unknown. For example, since scientists had not yet discovered red blood cells, Charles acknowledged “Chemists are not agreed upon” how the blood absorbed oxygen. But the fact that scientists now have much more information than Knowlton had does not diminish the originality and importance of his theory. And despite the fact that early nineteenth-century science had only a partial understanding of how the body worked, Charles was confident that the remaining answers could be found. And they would be physical answers, discovered by observation and proven by experiment—not religious answers, read in ancient scriptures and validated by faith.
A completely materialistic explanation of life and thought had serious implications for both philosophy and psychology. Charles devoted whole chapters to mental functions such as memory, judgment, free will, instinct, dreams, insanity, and passion. Contemporary psychologists have pointed out that many of Knowlton’s psychological ideas closely resemble the twentieth-century theories of behaviorism. And some of his descriptions resemble speculative fiction, such as the story Charles told to illustrate his claim that personal identity is just a belief we hold “for convenience sake.”
A man named John Brown, Charles said, wakes up in Charles Knowlton's house looking exactly like Charles but believing himself to be John Brown. His wife Tabitha, Charles continued, “would be satisfied that I was either crazy, or else had a peculiar faculty of talking as though I were somebody besides C.K.…She might perhaps, say to me: look in the glass, and you will see that you are the same C.K. that you was yesterday.” Continuing more seriously, Charles reasoned:
I believe that I am the same man that did a certain act, felt a certain pain, or came to a certain conclusion, at a former period; But I believe it, in the common sense of the word same—in that sense which I use it, when I say, the horse in my stable is the same that I bought 4 years ago. I do not believe that I am one permanent subject of the thoughts and actions said to be the thoughts and actions of Charles Knowlton…But until we have a different language…I shall continue to call myself, and believe myself to be, the same Charles Knowlton that did certain things 10 years ago.
This was all very abstract, and the question of whether Charles Knowlton was a permanent being or something more temporary and contingent could have seemed very far from real life, except for its consequences. The belief Charles was arguing against—the belief that had ruled the European and American world for centuries—claimed that identity was eternal and that only the teachings and ministers of the church could save a sinner from eternal damnation.
After four hundred pages of philosophical abstraction and medical theory, Charles came back to that point in a concluding chapter “On Human Happiness, Good and Evil, Morality, &c.” “The words Good and Evil,” Charles said, “like all other words, are of human invention…Every thing which is productive of human happiness, is good; every thing which is productive of human misery, is evil.” This was the same utilitarian definition of morality Charles had used years earlier in his Hanover essay on dissection. He now extended it a little, and added that circumstances often changed the effects of things, making it nearly impossible to say categorically that any particular thing was universally good or evil. No one had perfect knowledge of life’s long chain of causes and effects, and no one knew the future.
Anyone who told you they knew how you should behave because they had read it in a sacred book, Charles concluded, was a fraud. “If the Book of Nature tell us one thing, and a paper book the contrary,” Charles said, “then one or the other must be false.” The only way to decide what was the right thing to do was to learn as much as possible from the “Book of Nature.” Human consciousness could be entirely explained by science, Charles said. And it must be, to free people from superstition and the authority of the church.