424 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



dinary chemistry, its physics ordinary physics, 

 its mechanics ordinary mechanics, may or may 

 not be true ; the circumstances are exceptional, 

 and it is conceivable (to persons ignorant of the 

 facts) that allowance may have to be made for 

 them, even in the expression of the most general 

 laws of Nature. But in any case, every question 

 about your body is a question about the physical 

 laws of matter, and about nothing else. To say : 

 " Up to this point science can explain ; here the 

 soul steps in," is not to say what is untrue, but 

 to talk nonsense. If evidence were found that 

 the matter constituting the brain behaved other- 

 wise than ordinary matter, or if it were impos- 

 sible to describe vital actions as particular ex- 

 amples of general physical rules, this would be a 

 fact in physics, a fact relating to the motion of 

 matter ; and it must either be explained by fur- 

 ther elaboration of physical science, or else our 

 conception of the objective order of our feelings 

 would have to be changed. The question, " Is 

 the mind a force ? " is condemned by similar con- 

 siderations. A certain variable quality of mat- 

 ter (the rate of change of its motion) is found to 

 be invariably connected with the position rela- 

 tively to it of other matter ; considered as ex- 

 pressed in terms of this position, the quality is 

 called force. Force is thus an abstraction re- 

 lating to objective facts; it is a mode of grouping 

 of my feelings, and cannot possibly be the same 

 thing as an eject, another man's consciousness. 

 But the question, " Do the changes in a man's 

 consciousness run parallel with the changes of 

 motion, and therefore with the forces in his 

 brain?" is a real question, and not prima-facie 

 nonsense. Objections of like character may be 

 raised against the language of some writers, who 

 speak of changes in consciousness as caused by 

 actions on the organism. The word cause, iroAAa- 

 X<2s \ty6fj.ei/ov and misleading as it is, having no 

 legitimate place in science or philosophy, may 

 yet be of some use in conversation or literature, 

 if it is kept to denote a relation between objec- 

 tive facts, to describe certain parts of the phe- 

 nomenal order. But only confusion can arise if 

 it is used to express the relation between certain 

 objective facts in my unconsciousness, and the 

 ejective facts which are inferred as corresponding 

 in some way to them and running pai-allel with 

 them. For all that we know at present, this re- 

 lation does not in any way resemble that ex- 

 pressed by the word cause. 



To sum up, the distinction between eject and 

 object, properly grasped, forbids us to regard 

 the eject, another man's mind, as coming into 



the world of objects in any way, or as standing 

 in the relation of cause or effect to any changes 

 in that world. I need hardly add that the facts 

 do very strongly lead us to regard our bodies as 

 merely complicated examples of practically uni- 

 versal physical rules, and their motions as deter- 

 mined in the same way as those of the sun and 

 the sea. There is no evidence which amounts to 

 a pjrima-facie case against the dynamical uni- 

 formity of Nature ; and I make no exception in 

 favor of that slykick force which fills existing 

 lunatic asylums and makes private houses into 

 new ones. 



V. CORRESPONDENCE OF ELEMENTS OF MIND AND 



BRAIN-ACTION. 



I have already spoken of certain ejective facts 

 — the changes in your consciousness — as running 

 parallel with the changes in your brain, which 

 are objective facts. The parallelism here meant 

 is a parallelism of complexity, an analogy of 

 structure. A spoken sentence and the same sen- 

 tence written are two utterly unlike things, but 

 each of them consists of elements ; the spoken 

 sentence of the elementary sounds of the lan- 

 guage, the written sentence of its alphabet. Now 

 the relation between the spoken sentence and its 

 elements is very nearly the same as the relation 

 between the written sentence and its elements. 

 There is a correspondence of element to element ; 

 although an elementary sound is quite a different 

 thing from a letter of the alphabet, yet each ele- 

 mentary sound belongs to a certain letter or let- 

 ters. And the sounds being built up together 

 to form a spoken sentence, the letters are built 

 up together, in nearly the same way, to form the 

 written sentence. The two complex products 

 are as wholly unlike as the elements are, but the 

 manner of their complication is the same. Or, 

 as we should say in the mathematics, a sentence 

 spoken is the same function of the elementary 

 sounds as the same sentence written is of the 

 corresponding letters. 



Of such a nature is the correspondence or 

 parallelism between mind and body. The funda- 

 mental "deliverance" of consciousness affirms 

 its own complexity. It seems to me impossible, 

 as I am at present constituted, to have only one 

 absolutely simple feeling at a time. Not only 

 are my objective perceptions, as of a man's head 

 or a candlestick, formed of a great number of 

 parts ordered in a definite manner, but they are 

 invariably accompanied by an endless string of 

 memories, all equally complex. And those mas- 

 sive organic feelings with which, from their ap- 



