PHILOSOPHY, THE GUIDE OF MENTAL LIFE 267 



tery." It is to be noted that many of the Ten Commandments 

 are also in the negative form. In any event, moral and ethical 

 codes reflect states of human and social development, which 

 change from time to time and vary from group to group. 5 



In final analysis, a human being can actually carry out only two 

 types of activity: he can think, and he can change the position of 

 some material things. The phenomena which then follow are 

 usually the resultants of the natural mental or physical forces 

 which are thus set in motion; for the effects may be on the minds 

 of other human beings, as well as upon mechanisms actuated by 

 push-buttons or levers. 



The immediate or the remote consequences of what an indi- 

 vidual chooses (or thinks he chooses) to think or to do may not 

 always be rigidly certain; but they are, as a rule, sufficiently cer- 

 tain to serve as guides for human behavior in the future, as they 

 have been during the long past. Sciences of all kinds teach us to 

 see more and more clearly what we may reasonably expect to be 

 the consequences of our thoughts and choices of action. Both 

 material and ethical progress lie along such lines. It may be re- 

 called that when Jesus of Nazareth was being crucified, He said: 

 "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." 



Now it may very well be that certain configurations of physical 

 units possessing the power of thought and of action would, if pre- 

 cisely duplicated and placed in precisely the same conditions, al- 

 ways respond with precisely the same thoughts and choices. But 

 the law of probability indicates how vanishingly small are the 

 chances for precise duplication of any complicated set of structural 

 and milieu conditions. The particulate nature of all matter, in- 

 cluding our scientific apparatus, our sense organs, nerves and 

 brain, as well as the electrical and other forms of energy whereby 

 sense impressions are received, transmitted, and integrated into 

 concepts, leads to the conclusion that neither human senses nor 

 mentality can secure accurate premises whereon to base any logical 

 conclusions as to causality. "The principle of logic remains true 

 that from given premises there always follows a unique conclusion, 

 but it does not apply where there are no premises or not suffi- 

 ciently accurate premises." 6 



Genetics teaches us, on the other hand, how powerful are the 

 effects on thought and action of inherited physical structure. 

 Identical twins, arising from the same fertilized ovum, are sur- 

 prisingly alike in structure, action, and thought. Their finger- 



