Mary Midgley asks: ‘How has it come about that a number of highly educated and sophisticated scholars – people dedicated to the life of the mind – are now claiming that their own minds, and other people's minds too, do not exist?’ (149). She shows by quotations that that they really do make these claims. And she argues that they are not just adopting a colourful way of speaking; their claims constitute a myth by which people are starting to live (4), and one which not only conflicts with common sense (36) but impedes our attempts to unify discordant strands within ourselves and to arrive at satisfactory relations with the rest of nature.

‘In a very fundamental way’, she quotes J. Westerhof as saying in New Scientist, ‘we are not real. Instead, our self is comparable to an illusion – but without anyone there that experiences the illusion’ (24). How do writers today fail to see an absurdity here that was obvious to Descartes and before him to Augustine? In the seventeenth century Western Europeans conceived the world as made up, ultimately, of spirit and matter. Matter was intrinsically powerless and inert; spirit provided organising force – the Creator was a spirit – and also a space ‘on which the inner life of human beings could go on’ – our minds or souls were spirits (12, 114). This view was grounded in Christianity. But Christianity became ‘politically unpopular’, Midgley suggests, for causing religious wars and for making compromises with oppressive regimes (12, 140). First God was discarded, and more recently spirits generally in a rage of ‘intellectual spring cleaning’: philosophers campaigned ‘to solve the mind-body problem by removing the mind’ (13). It proved impossible, however, to live without religion. For some people physical science takes its place: they ‘believe in’ it as from Galileo's day to Darwin's people ‘believed in’ God. Steven Weinberg calls for the building of Supercolliders as ‘the cathedrals of our age’ (4). Mechanistic materialism is ‘professed by scientists and many other people today in the half-casual way in which people used formerly to recite the Christian creeds’ (149).

Although, however, the reciters may think they are saying merely that human souls are an illusion left over from Christianity, in fact they are saying that it is an illusion that thinking can affect the world. As Francis Crick observed, what is actually at issue is free will: ‘something that is believed to be science is clashing here with the irremovable practical principles by which we live our lives’ (22, 36–8). By ‘free will’ she means ‘not a general licence to escape causality but, as we normally understand the word, a sense that our efforts can be genuinely effective’ (38). We think we can affect and change the world by trying. It is impossible to live without thinking this, and those who declare that all our behaviour is determined by physical causes, nevertheless try to find valuable documents they lose (111), and exhort the rest of us to try to do science and abandon superstition. They are imprisoned in a kind of schizophrenia.

A central doctrine in modern materialism is that there is no purpose either in human action or elsewhere in nature. Officially natural selection is supposed to do the organising work formerly done by God. That it and the laws of particle physics alone, however, are sufficient between them to account for the evolution of the species we see around us is hard to believe, especially as the laws of physics are applied in a mathematicised world, deprived of time and change (136–8). Midgley points out that in practice people sneak purpose back into it in various ways. An animistic account is given of genes. Genes are not, in fact, physical realities but abstract objects, patterns or structures that physical entities exemplify; but this is overlooked, and they are credited with a purpose, self-replication, and rather disagreeable moral characteristics. ‘This lush mythology of gene-selfishness’, as Midgley puts it (82–3), ‘supplies the teleological jam that is needed to make thin scientific stories like this go down.’ Then when human beings appear to do things just for fun, or to benefit their friends, or to preserve their society, it is claimed that their action is really aimed at their good as individuals, that is, at survival and reproduction. This involves a systematic confusion of purpose and consequence; the alleged consequences – being helped by others and self-replication – are taken as what the agent really wants (63).

Midgley quotes Darwin more often than anyone else, and particularly passages in his writing that make Darwinians today blush, like his admission of ‘the difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man, with his capacity of looking far backward and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity’ (87). She does not say we must postulate a source of the natural order outside it; she speaks of ‘innate creative capacities of matter’ (72, 88); but nor does she propose any crude form of vitalism. She will not accept the suggestion of Tom Nagel and Russell that ‘some kind of stuff, neither mind nor matter, is present to underlie both of them’; she advises us, if we wish to understand the growth of organisation in the universe, to ‘cease asking what everything is made of’ (141). Having digested these denials and prohibitions, the reader might wish her to offer a clear positive statement on the matter. She says on page 146 ‘We are as we are because we have grown that way’, and quotes with approval Aristotle's words ‘Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the line of demarcation’ (144). She believes, I think, that there is a continuous natural passage in the universe from what from what is definitely lifeless to what is definitely conscious and purposive, continuous in that it runs through what is not definitely either. This continuous progression cannot, she holds, be explained by the kinds of explanation current in physical science, but I do not find her saying what sort of explanation would be appropriate, whether, for instance, it would be in terms of goods immanent in the universe to which the process tends. She blames Plato with some justice for giving people the ideal of reducing physics to mathematics, but she might be sympathetic to his praise in the Phaedo for explanations in terms of what is best and his endowment of the world with soul in the Timaeus (34 b) and Sophist (248–9).

Midgley is more explicit on the mind-body relation: she advocates a dual aspect theory based on the difference between two ways we have of perceiving ourselves. We have an ‘outer’ awareness of ourselves as the sources of mirror images, footsteps in the snow, creaks as we climb the stairs, and an ‘inner’ awareness of our thoughts, feelings and desires. ‘Roughly speaking’, she says, ‘mind and body are names that correspond with what we perceive in these two ways’ (113). ‘Your mind is YOU, considered as a thinker, feeler and chooser’ (56). But although what is viewed in these two ways is a single living organism, we are nonetheless ‘divided beings, full of conflicts’, with warring motives, ideals and visions of life. ‘Our individual unity is not a state fully attained but an enterprise, an effort, an aspiration that is central to our lives, all the more central because we are so much troubled by the clashes’ (131–2). In this enterprise it does not help us to be told that the clashing elements are illusory and that our behaviour is really caused by ‘a vast assembly of nerve cells’ (22). Her opponents may say that an explanation in terms of brain cells (why brain cells, she asks acutely (26), rather than quarks?) is more genuine or profound than one in terms of thoughts and feelings. But this is a metaphysical, not a scientific statement, and needs metaphysical backing. There are no metaphysical grounds for saying that human beings are less real than their components, and there are arguments, which she provides in her Chapter 4, for saying that since explanation is always directed to some purpose, the genuineness of an explanation must be assessed relatively to that purpose. If what we are trying to explain is conscious human behaviour, we need something like the metapsychology of Freud (or, she might have said, Plato); reference to brain cells is not so much profound as irrelevant.

She does, however, allow some utility to the study of the two hemispheres of the brain. The left, apparently, is used in attention to detail, the right in taking broad views. As she wants us to combine our inner and outer views of ourselves, so she urges us to coordinate a detailed with a holistic way of thinking generally – rather as it is the convergence of the optic axes that gives us stereoscopic vision. Obsession with the small, combined with blindness to the broader picture not only emboldens educated scholars to doubt their own existence; it leads biologists since Darwin to overlook group selection (69–71), and politicians to overlook phenomena like climate change (55).

Mary Midgley is now well into her tenth decade, but the reader need have no fear that time, which blunts the lion's claws, has dulled the edge of her wit or deprived her pen of its pristine vigour. Far from that, it has simply worn away her inhibitions. She feels free to speak her mind about ‘bad faith’ and ‘pseudo-scientific superstitions, doctrines professed for the sake of appearances but not seriously believable’ (19). ‘The current stream of our thought’, she says, ‘is like a river that has been gradually shifted from its former course by accumulations of silt and is now flowing in very odd directions’ (19–20). The limpid prose in which she carries out her dredging operations sparkles with happy phrasing.