130 Mind and Body 



larger group in other cases of the same event. Why 

 not go to the other extreme and say that the brain is 

 not necessary to voluntary movement, since volition 

 could bring about the movement without using the 

 nervous processes to do it with ? In his posthumous 

 book, Mind, Motion, and Monism, the late Mr. Romanes 

 brings out this inadequacy of the automaton view, using 

 the figure of an electro-magnet, which attracts iron filings 

 only when it is magnetized by the current of electricity. 

 If I may be allowed to develop such a figure, I should 

 say that whatever the electricity be, the magnet is a 

 magnet only when it attracts iron filings ; to say that it 

 might do as much without the electricity would be to 

 deny that it is a magnet ; and the proof is found in 

 the fact simply that it does not attract iron filings when 

 the current is not there. So the brain is not a brain 

 when consciousness is not there ; it could not produce 

 voluntary movement, simply because, as a matter of 

 fact, it does not. So consciousness does not, on the 

 other hand, produce movement without a brain. The 

 whole difficulty seems to lie, I think, in an illegitimate 

 use of the word ' causation/ Professor Ladd seems to 

 me to be correct in holding that such a conception as 

 physical causation cannot be applied beyond the sphere 

 of things in which it has become the explaining prin- 

 ciple, i.e., in the objective, external world of things. 

 The moment we ask questions concerning a group of 

 phenomena which include more than these things, that 

 moment we are liable to some new statement of the 

 law of change in the group as a whole. Such a state- 

 ment is the third alternative in this case ; and it is the 

 problem of the metaphysics of experience to find the 



