294 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



intra-psychical series is " parallel " to the part played by the 

 psychoid. But, in fact, this " parallelism " is quite different 

 from what is called so in common practice. We regard it 

 as impossible to accept parallelism in its common form, 

 namely, in the sense that the intra-psychical series might be 

 paralleled by a series of events composed of single conscious 

 acts of the type of so-called sensations, or, speaking 

 objectively, by events of the mechanical or energetical 

 class. But our new sort of parallelism does not assert 

 anything of the kind. If for once we allow ourselves an 

 excursion into metaphysics, i.e. an assertion about the 

 hypothetic character of absoluteness as in fact we shall 

 do to the full extent at the end of this book we may say 

 that the intra-psychical series, or briefly " the Psychical," 

 " the Conscious," is parallel to, or rather an epiphenomenon 

 of a certain metaphysical happening (unexplainable in 

 detail, but most certainly not resembling anything mechanical, 

 not even by analogy) which interferes with the meta- 

 physical correlate of so-called mechanical reality. 



CONCLUSIONS 



Among all the living bodies in Nature there is certainly 

 one whose vitalistic autonomy can be proved directly, viz. 

 " my body " ; its " psychoid " being the immediate correlate 

 of the intra-psychical series, as soon as the introspective 

 point of view is changed for the point of view of natural 

 science. 



In these words the chief results of the present chapter 

 are summarised. 



The argument brought forward here against the doctrine 



