282 NATURE AND MAN. 



its nature by the mo-lifications superinduced upon its original 

 mechanism by acquired habit ; and this doctrine is but the physio 

 logical expression of the Herbartian psychology of residua. The 

 response given by this mechanism, whether manifesting itself in 

 bodily or in mental action, is as automatic as the act of walking, 

 or any other sequence of movements which we execute with the 

 like absence of conscious or designed exertion. We cannot help, 

 for example, the recurrence of ideas called up by local or personal 

 associations ; nor can we help the feelings of pain or pleasure, of 

 aversion or desire, which are inseparably connected in our minds 

 with these ideas. It would be as unreasonable to say that we can 

 help them, as it would be to say that we can prevent ourselves 

 from feeling pain when a pin is run into our flesh, or pleasure in 

 eating a good dinner when we are hungry. 



But is this all ? Have we no power to control and direct this 

 automatic cerebral action, as the cerebral action itself directs and 

 controls the action of the lower centres? Does the body of man 

 constitute his whole self, or is there an Ego to which that body is 

 in any degree subservient ? 



To these questions it does not seem to me to be within the 

 capacity of physiology limiting that term to man s corporeity 

 to give an answer. If we look at the whole of our mental no less 

 than our bodily activity as dependent upon the reflex action of 

 our cerebrum, we are undoubtedly landed in an automatism, far 

 more varied indeed, but not less bound by the laws of physical 

 causation, than the automatism of the ascidian to which it is now 

 fashionable to trace back our pedigree. But to say that this is 

 the only way in which science permits us to regard it, is (as it 

 seems to me) to disregard that on which all science is based 

 experience. Surely our own immediate mental experiences are as 

 worthy of confidence, as are deductions drawn from phenomena 

 outside ourselves, which we can only rightly interpret on the basis 

 afforded by those very experiences ; the test of the validity of such 

 interpretation being furnished by their conformity to our other 

 immediate experiences. And if we are led by physiological evi 

 dence to recognize in the cerebrum a power of directing and con 

 trolling the automatism of the axial cord, I do not see on what 

 ground we are to reject the testimony of direct consciousness, 



