360 THE RELATION OF MIND TO BODY 



the like. We have no senses by which we can perceive minds ; 

 therefore we are unable to conceive how they affect or are affected 

 by brains ; but that does not confer on us the right to declare 

 dogmatically that there is no relation save a parallelism. Other 

 existences, though equally inconceivable, are readily believed in 

 by all of us, including Huxley and Clifford, merely because suffi- 

 cient evidence demonstrates their existence. Thus both authors 

 accepted the theory of gravitation as a true statement of fact ; 

 that is, they supposed that the earth attracts bodies to its surface 

 by means of an immaterial something, which, acting across millions 

 of miles of space, affects even the sun and the stars. " One cannot 

 thus blow hot and cold. One must be impartially naif or impartially 

 critical." 1 



600. For the idealist, material bodies (e.g. brains) do not exist. 

 His insurmountable difficulty is to account for the coexistences and 

 sequences of phenomena. 2 It is, for example, no easier for him to 

 imagine that iron (a mere appearance) can couple railway carriages 

 (also mere appearances) than to imagine that feelings of amity can 

 perform the task. To adult people, thinking in common-sense 

 terms, the idea that immaterial minds can influence material brains 

 seems, on the face of it, very absurd as absurd as that sentiments 

 of amity can couple railway carriages. On the other hand, the 

 notion that the chains of physical and mental facts are distinct and 

 separate seems reasonable as reasonable as that feelings cannot 

 connect railway carriages. But why does the one seem absurd and 

 the other reasonable ? Only, I think, because experience has im- 

 pressed on us, till we accept its teaching as a natural law, that, 

 while sentiments do not directly influence such things as railway 

 carriages, physical things do. An infant would feel no sense of 

 absurdity in the one case or of reasonableness in the other ; nor 

 should we had our experience been different. We consider things 

 reasonable or absurd accordingly as they do, or do not accord with 

 previous experience. Our experience is that sentiments do not 

 influence such things as railway carriages, with which they have no 

 direct connexion. Therefore, though the evidence that brains and 

 sentiments are directly connected, and that they influence one 

 another is immensely massive, we, or at least some of us, reasoning 

 from analogy, tend to suppose that neither connexion nor influence 

 exist. It would be quite as reasonable to suppose that there is no 

 such thing as gravitation or magnetism. 



1 James, Principles of Psychology, vol. i. p. 137. 



2 See 566 (footnote 2). 



