256 president's address — section j. 



moment, each physical cause is fulfilled in its physical effect, where is 

 there room for the strange by-product of consciousness ? The physical 

 cause empties itself, so to speak, into its effect, is equivalent to its 

 effect ; how can it produce, over and above this, the collateral effect 

 of mind ? If the physical circle is so closed and self-contained that 

 it cannot be influenced by mind, then it cannot influence mind in its 

 turn, or call any mental fact into being. Matter, it would appear, has 

 enough to do with itself and its forces ; beyond these limits it cannot 

 move a step in its causal process ; all its effects are within itself ; 

 and mind remains solitary, apart, and unexplained. Materialism thus 

 finds itself in a blind alley. 



On the theory that material agency is the sole cause, and mind 

 simply an effect, a human being is only a conscious automaton. If 

 this be true, mind is at best a spectator of what it cannot influence. 

 We move from place to place, intent on ends to be accomplished, ap- 

 parently guided by desire and volition, but we are asked to believe that 

 our movements are never directed by foresight or ordered by will. 

 The savage or the schoolboy is struck, and the blow arouses feeling. 

 He strikes back again, but the return blow, we are assured, is not the 

 result of feeling or will ; it is a reaction which is due wholly and solely 

 to physiological factors. The song of the poet, the manuscript of the 

 philosopher, the book published by the man of science, owe nothing 

 to imagination or thought ; they are the products of cerebral changes. 

 The mental facts which have been caused by these movements in the 

 brain are supposed to have exerted no real infl^uence on the song, the 

 manuscript, or the treatise. Civilisations have been founded, cities 

 have been built, nations have grown up, without the active aid of any 

 living mind. All the bodily activities of the race might have been 

 carried on equally well by mindless organisms. (A) And if mental facts 

 are only inert consequents of successive changes in the brain, it follows 

 that mind has no efficiency within itself. We do not direct our thoughts 

 or imaginations ; our conclusions are not the result of reasoning ; 

 we are not drawn by pleasure or repelled by pain ; we are not swayed 

 by motives. Every mental change, as it is unfolded, is the immediate 

 offspring of a cerebral change ; even our will is but the passive slave 

 of molecular currents in the brain. The logical consequence of this 

 theory, as Dr. Stout has said, is that man as a conscious being never 

 does anything at a\\.{i). Is not this a sufficient reduciio ad absurdum ? 



The human mind is thus degraded into a remarkable, but irrelevant, 

 appendage of bodily activities. Mind, it would seem, is the one thing 

 in the world which is thoroughly useless. We have learned from Darwin 

 that when a variation is found to be of no service to an organism it dies 



{h) " An author writes a book ; a builder has a house built by the help of a hundred 

 woi-kmen ; a general fights a battle with a hundred thousand soldiers. The 

 omniscient physiologist would explain all these i rocesses, as physically con- 

 ditioned, by the organisation of the respective bodies, their nervous and 

 muscular systems, and, on the other hand, by the nature of the external 

 stimuli. He would explain the author of the Critique of Pure Reason just aa 

 he would explain a clockwork." Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy, p. 88. 

 {i) Manual of Psychology, p. 50. 



