IS MAN AN AUTOMATION 151 



atmosphere. But I am not sure that most persons would not be in- 

 clined to maintain that the mind is in the body ' somehow ' — and when 

 we inquire into the significance of this * somehow/ we can scarcely fail 

 to discover that it has a material flavor. Whether rightly or wrongly, 

 most men think of the mind as in the body in somewhat — but only 

 somewhat — the same way as material atoms may be in the body. And 

 he who thinks of the mind in this way may, if the question occur to 

 him at all, assume that mind and body interact somewhat as two ma- 

 terial things interact with each other. 



To be sure, the more one reflects upon the difference between mental 

 phenomena and physical, the more vague and indefinite this ' some- 

 what ' seems to become. Material things can lie beside one another in 

 space; they can approach one another and recede from one another. 

 Their interaction is a thing to be described in physical terms ; we have 

 to do with space and motions in space. Have we anything analogous 

 to this when we are considering, let us say, the mental image of a rail- 

 way station and those physical changes in the brain which antecede my 

 moving my feet in the direction of the station ? Is the mental image 

 literally in any part of the brain? Can it approach or recede from 

 any group of molecules? Does it mean anything to say that it lies 

 between this physical occurrence and that? And if the relation be- 

 tween what is mental and what is physical is really so different from 

 the relation between two physical things, must we not recognize that the 

 word ' interaction ' is ambiguous when it is applied indiscriminately 

 to either relation? 



As early as the seventeenth century reflection upon the differences 

 which distinguished the mental and the physical led to the conclusion 

 that it is impossible that ideas should be inserted as links in any phy- 

 sical chain of events. You can not plant an imaginary tree in a real 

 ten-acre lot ; you can not insert the thought of a cork into the neck of 

 a real bottle; is it more sensible to say that the thought of a railway 

 station may be inserted as a link in a series of changes in the nervous 

 system of a man ? To such men as Huxley and Clifford it seemed that 

 the physical series must be regarded as unbroken. Clifford, much in- 

 fluenced by the philosopher Spinoza, describes the relation between 

 physical changes in the brain and the accompanying ideas as a 

 ' parallelism/ as a correspondence or concomitance. It is scarcely 

 necessary to add that neither he nor any later parallelist has intended 

 the word c parallelism ' to be taken literally. It only means that mental 

 phenomena are to be regarded as excluded from the series of physical 

 changes, and yet as accompanying them. 



Now, I think we may leave out of consideration those who endeavor 

 to steer a middle course — to eat their cake and, at the same time, to 

 keep it. The question is: Is the series of physical changes to be re- 



