1000 Dynamic Theory. 



effects. It would be incompatible with everything we know of the 

 cerebral action, to suppose that the physical chain ends abruptly in a 

 physical void, occupied by an immaterial substance; which immaterial 

 substance, after working alone, imparts its results to the other edge of 

 the ph} T sical break, and determines the active response, two shores of 

 the material with an intervening ocean of the immaterial. There is in 

 fact no rupture of nervous continuity. The only tenable supposition is 

 that mental and physical proceed together as undivided twins. " 1 This 

 states the case extremely well, and but for the bias of a preconceived 

 notion of an immaterial stuff, ought to have suggested the truth to its 

 writer. As this incongruous notion had to be injected into every solu- 

 tion that was attempted, it instantly rendered the whole matter insolu- 

 ble, and practical^ Bain leaves the question just where he found it. 

 He says, " There is an alliance ivith matter, with the object or extended 

 world, but the thing allied, the mind proper, has itself no extension, 

 and cannot be joined in local union." "The only mode of union 

 that is not contradictory is the union of close succession in time." 

 "We are entitled to say that the same being is by alternate fits, object and 

 subject under extended and under unextended consciousness; and 

 that without the extended consciousness the unextended would not 

 arise. " That is, without the cerebral and nervous organization which is 

 the "extended and material mass," we would not have "the power of 

 becoming alive to feeling and thought, the extreme remove from all that is 

 material. " This last sentence expresses the truth, although its true 

 import was completely missed by its author. There is certainly an in- 

 separable connection between the material nervous, and cerebral elements 

 and their functions of feeling and thought. But when we come to un- 

 derstand that feeling and thought are simply motions or agitations of 

 the Subtile and refined materials which compose these elements, not only 

 does the difficulty of comprehending how material elements can be 

 joined to immaterial phenomena vanish, but we see that there is no pos- 

 sibility at all of the latter being separated from the former. According 

 to the dynamic theory, all motion is the motion of physical bodies. 

 The character of any particular mode of motion depends upon the pe- 

 culiar constitution or form of the matter to which motion is imparted. 

 Long as the earth has existed, there was never on it the motion we call 

 walking, till an animal came into existence possessed of legs. There never 

 was the peculiar motion we call ringing, until a metallic instrument was 

 constructed of such elasticity and peculiar form that it rapidly recovered 

 its shape after being distorted by a violent blow. There never was the 

 motion we call sound, until an organization of peculiar nervous ele- 

 ments and construction had come into existence. As sound is sensa- 

 1 Bain, Mind and Body. 



