THE AUTOMATON HYPOTHESIS 357 



good for man ; and, therefore, that all states of consciousness in 

 us, as in them, are immediately caused by molecular changes of 

 the brain-substance. It seems to me that in men, as in brutes, 

 there is no proof that any state of consciousness is the cause of 

 change in the motion of the matter of the organism. 



" If these positions are well based, it follows that our mental 

 conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of the changes 

 which take place automatically in the organism ; and that, to 

 take an extreme illustration, the feeling we call volition is not 

 the cause of a voluntary act, but a symbol of that state of the 

 brain which is the immediate cause of the act. We are conscious 

 automata." l 



595. "All the evidence that we have goes to show that the 

 physical world gets along entirely by itself, according to practi- 

 cally universal rules. . . . The train of physical facts between 

 the stimulus sent to the eye, or to any one of our senses, and the 

 exertion which follows it, and the train of physical facts which 

 goes on in the brain, even when there is no stimulus and no exer- 

 tion these are perfectly physical trains, and every step is fully 

 accounted for by mechanical conditions. . . . The two things are 

 on utterly different platforms the physical facts go along by 

 themselves, and the mental facts go along by themselves. There 

 is a parallelism between them, but no interference of one with the 

 other. Again, if anybody says that the will influences matter, 

 the statement is not untrue, but it is nonsense. Such an assertion 

 belongs to the crude materialism of the savage. The only thing 

 which influences matter is the position of surrounding matter, or 

 the motion of surrounding matter. . . . The assertion that another 

 man's volition, a feeling in his consciousness which I cannot 

 perceive, is part of the train of physical facts which I can perceive 

 this is neither true nor untrue, but nonsense ; it is a combination 

 of words whose corresponding ideas will not go together. 2 . . . 

 Sometimes one series is known better, and sometimes another ; so 

 that in telling a story we speak sometimes of mental and some- 

 times of material facts. A feeling of chill made a man run ; 

 strictly speaking, the nervous disturbance which coexisted with 

 that feeling of chill made him run, if we want to talk about 

 material facts ; or the feeling of chill produced the form of sub- 



1 Huxley, Animal Automatism, quoted in part by James, The Principles of 

 Psychology, vol. i. p. 131. 



2 W. K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays, Body and Mind, pp. 262-3, quoted by 

 James. 



