Herrick, Body-Mind Controversy. 427 



reality (subjective idealism) — panpsychism, or the other way is to say 

 that atoms and molecules are the real thing and states of conscious- 

 ness only an accidental phosphorescence or epiphenomena." "Mental 

 states are not different stuff from the objects, but the attitudes, the in- 

 dividual attitudes, necessary for reconstruction of the experience and 

 thus the counterpart of the objects in this process of construction. 

 The subjective is real, as an attitude, etc." 



Coming finally to the author's statement of the Psychophysical 

 Idealism for which the book stands, it reduces to the statement that 

 "brain-process Is a manifestation of the accompanying mind." The 

 mind is manifested directly through the brain. We have supposed 

 that our thoughts are given directly ; but not so, we only know we 

 think when we discover changes in the brain cortex. But we would 

 not do the author injustice. We are now astonished to discover that 

 "by brain event we mean the actual modification of another or the 

 same consciousness — and this is th e only natural or strictly defensible 

 meaning of the word." This identification of brain-event and mind- 

 event would seem to reduce the matter to a question of identity and 

 we might have been spared the rest of the book. (Yet in the next 

 sentence we return to "nerve currents passing from eye to brain" and 

 "perception of the brain event"). 



Behind a mass of contradictory and inconsequent statements we 

 frequently get glimpses of a genuine realism. "The phenomenal 

 causal relation between sensory stimulus and sensational brain event is 

 the symbol of a real causal relation between the extramental event and 

 the sensation, the phenomenal causal relation between the volitional 

 brain event and voluntary motion the symbol of a real causal relation 

 between volition and an extra-mental event." The link between this 

 idealism and modern realism must be found, we believe, in the inter- 

 pretation of energy as potentially capable of mentality as a manifesta- 

 tion of all or some of its modes. In this sense the two systems agree 

 in holding "the universe to be in all parts mental in nature." 



Panpsychism will offend the scientific mind by what seems an un- 

 warrantable assumption that all things in themselves are mental in 

 their nature. They will ask with Professor Stumpf "How can we 

 conceive of a crystal, a dew drop, or a molecule as possessing any- 

 thing analogous to sensation and will as we know them in ourselves ?" 

 This difficulty Dynamic Realism meets by assuming a unitary nature 

 underlying all things. They have in common an energic character 

 which implies, on the face of it, nothing more than efficiency or power 

 to act,, and this, of course, a fundamental philosophical necessity of all 



