RELATIONS BETWEEN MIND AND MATTER. 95 



being, a condition of things that educational theories and 

 practice ignore or overlook when they attempt to make a moral 

 and intellectual being out of one in his savage stage of exist- 

 ence, as if one should try to make the caterpillar live on the 

 honey of flowers and fly, when as yet it had neither the 

 instincts nor machinery for such a life. Feed him what he 

 wants and can digest, protect him from enemies of all sorts, 

 and let him otherwise alone. If nature intended him to fly, 

 his wings are growing, though they may be folded so as not to 

 be discerned and no use is made of them. Let them alone. 

 If she did not thus intend him to fly, no food nor training nor 

 painstaking will give him wings and he will never fly. This is 

 a by-path. 



To everyone who has thought and read on this subject of the 

 relation of mind to the bodily organism, especially in the last 

 few years, there appears at once the question of the relation of 

 the doctrine of the conservation of energy to mental action, 

 the question of free will and the question of automatism. I 

 have not heard that any one actually disputes the doctrine of 

 the conservation of energy, which means that energy is not 

 created nor annihilated by any kind of a process known to 

 us. Let me quote the words of Hoffding in his Outlines of 

 Psychology as bearing on this point : " In the nature of the 

 case only four possibilities can be conceived : (i) either con- 

 sciousness and brain, mind and body act one upon the other 

 as two distinct beings or substances, (2) or the mind is only a 

 form or product of the body, (3) or the body is only a form or 

 product of one or several mental beings, or finally, (4) mind 

 and body, consciousness and brain are evolved as different forms 

 of expression of one and the same being." He then presents 

 the arguments pro and con on each of these, and at last thus 

 concludes : " Only the last or the fourth possibility then seems 

 to be left. We have no right to take mind and body for two 

 beings or substances in reciprocal interaction. On the contrary, 

 we are impelled to conceive the material interaction between 

 the brain and nervous system as an outer form of the inner 

 ideal unity of consciousness. Both parallelism and propor- 

 tionality between the activity of consciousness and cerebral 



