INERTIA AS RELATED TO CONSCIOUSNESS 95 



"mental inertia" by certain examples of activities, 

 which in my opinion are rather to be referred to 

 mental affectability, and continues : " Apathy will 

 represent the inertia of a passive mind, industry 

 that of an active mind." Later in the essay, for 

 such, rather than a lecture, it is, he writes : "I 

 have already endeavoured to establish the analogy 

 between habit of industry and the inertia of a 

 moving body. ... I have said that the in- 

 ertia of matter is continually blended with other 

 forces which complex its results and render them 

 apparently contrary to their cause, and also that in 

 this respect, it resembles the inertia of the mind.'' 

 There is more to the same purpose, but I have 

 quoted enough to show that the same ideas that 

 were in my mind in 1899 were expressed by Faraday 

 eighty-one years previously. Until the end of 

 1903 I had not the slightest notion that any one, 

 still less so eminent and exact a thinker as Faraday, 

 had established this analogy between the inertia of 

 matter and that of mind. I felt with increasing 

 certainty that there must be an inertial property 

 in living matter, the physical basis of psychic 

 inertia. It would be easy, but unfair, not to say 

 ungracious, to criticise young Faraday's thesis, for 

 he was only twenty-eight years old when he composed 

 it. He does not supply the link between the inertia 

 of non-living matter and the inertia of the mind, 

 which is to me now so obvious, i.e., the inertia of 

 the tissues of the living organism. But we must 

 remember that 1818 was just about the time that 



