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"The double aspect theory ... professes to overcome the onesidedness of these two theories [materialism and idealism] by regarding both series as only different aspects of the same reality, like the convex and the concave views of a curve (G.H. Lewes); or, according to another favourite metaphor, the bodily and the mental facts are really the same facts expressed in different language."

— Baldwin, James Mark (1861-1934)

Author

Baldwin, James Mark (1861-1934)

Work Title

Double Aspect Theory [from Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology]

Date

1901

Metaphor

"The double aspect theory ... professes to overcome the onesidedness of these two theories [materialism and idealism] by regarding both series as only different aspects of the same reality, like the convex and the concave views of a curve (G.H. Lewes); or, according to another favourite metaphor, the bodily and the mental facts are really the same facts expressed in different language."

Metaphor in Context

The double aspect theory acknowledges the incomparability of material and conscious processes, and maintains the impossibility of reducing the one to the other, in terms either of materialism or idealism (spiritualism). It professes to overcome the onesidedness of these two theories by regarding both series as only different aspects of the same reality, like the convex and the concave views of a curve (G.H. Lewes); or, according to another favourite metaphor, the bodily and the mental facts are really the same facts expressed in different language. The most characteristic feature of the theory is its strenuous denial of the possibility of causal interaction between body and mind, or vice versa, in deference to they supposed necessities of the law of the conservation of energy. For interaction it substitutes parallelism or concomitance. Each side seems to 'get along by itself,' or rather, as Bain puts it, 'we have always a two-sided cause. The line of causal sequence is not mind causing body, and body causing mind, but mind-body giving birth to mind-body' (Mind and Body, 132). This doctrine of 'a double-faced unity,' as Bain calls it, has more recently appropriated to itself the name of MONISM (q.v.). In stating the theory, the main stress is frequently laid upon the unbroken sequence of the material facts; in that case the theory approximates the doctrine of conscious automatism, and the position becomes practically indistinguishable from the more 'guarded and qualified materialism' with which Bain, indeed, in the volume referred to, appears to identify it (cf. Mind and Body, 140). Wundt, on the other hand, while accepting the principle of psychophysical parallelism in an empirico-psychological reference, gives it ultimately a metaphysical interpretation which brings it nearer to an idealistic position. The theory, therefore, while professing to harmonize materialism and spiritualism, occupies a position of somewhat unstable equilibrium between the two, and shows a tendency in different expositors to relapse into the one or the other.