288 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



and completeness of the physical series, if a certain con- 

 cession to metaphysical materialism is made by regarding 

 the psychical as a mere " epiphenomenon " of the physical. 



This form of parallelism, of course, being metaphysical 

 throughout, cannot be refuted by an immanent introspective 

 psychological analysis like ours, but can only be refuted 

 by general considerations, or by showing on the basis of so- 

 called objective happening that the completeness of the 

 physical series does not exist. By the latter means we 

 have already refuted parallelism in our analysis of action. 



As to general anti-parallelistic arguments, let me add in 

 the first place to what was said before l Lotze's argument that 

 it is impossible to regard the " soul " as a parallel resultant 

 of single mechanical events, since a " resultant " in the clear, 

 i.e. mechanical meaning of the term always relates to the 

 effect of forces acting upon one and the same material ele- 

 ment. Besides this the strict parallelistic theory, maintain- 

 ing the completeness of both its " sides " or " aspects " of the 

 Eeal, may be refuted by showing that it leads to absurdities 

 of a very remarkable kind. Only the psychical acts upon 

 the psychical, only the physical upon the physical, so the 

 theory advocates. But this implies that any and every 

 inorganic event or state has its " psychical " counterpart, 

 which, of course, is simply absurd. Eickert 2 has well 

 observed against parallelism that, according to this theory, 

 the effect of alcohol on the human mind would be not the 

 effect of C 2 H 6 but of the " psychical " that " corresponds ' 

 to C 2 H 6 0. C 2 H 6 as such would only act upon the human 

 body. It seems to me that there is no reason whatever to 

 assume that every inorganic event or state " represents ' 



1 See page 115, note 1. J Festschrift fur Sigwart, 1900. 



