THE LIMITS OF HUMAN AUTOMATISM. 287 



It may be fairly urged, on one side, that the tendency of 

 modern scientific investigation has been to show that a very large 

 proportion (if not the whole) of those changes whose succession 

 constitutes our mental life, are determinately related, on the one 

 hand, to the mental states which immediately preceded them, and, 

 on the other, to the material conditions of the bodily organism. 

 The pure metaphysician, who studies the " laws of thought " in the 

 abstract, as if man consisted of mind without body, no more doubts 

 the former, than the physiologist, who works upwards from body 

 to mind, and studies the successions of consciousness as functions 

 of the nervous system, can question the latter. And the psycho- 

 logist, whose object (to use the words of Mr. Herbert Spencer) is 

 to elucidate "not the connection between internal phenomena, nor 

 *' the connection between external phenomena, but the connection 

 " between these two connections," and who studies the relation 

 between psychical phenomena and physical conditions through the 

 whole range of the animal kingdom, interpreting these phenomena 

 by a scientific scrutiny of his own experiences, and applying the 

 knowledge thus gained to the explanation of the actions of organisms 

 whose constitution resembles his own (this inquiry being the special 

 object of the present treatise), finds himself irresistibly brought to 

 the conclusion that automatism * has a very large share in the life 

 of every human being; and is thus naturally led to question 

 whether there is atiy part of man's action which is exempted from 

 the law of physical causation. 



The corrective to this view, however, appears to me to be 

 furnished by the intelligent study of that large class of the phe- 

 nomena of human nature which lies patent to every trained 

 observer in the ordinary course of events. For the more carefully 

 he studies these phenomena, the more clearly is he led to see that, 

 as has been pithily said by Emerson, " Thoughts rule the World ;" 

 and that, though the spheres of moral and physical causation 

 impinge (as it were) upon one another, they are in themselves 

 essentially distinct The influence of a great idea conceived by a 



* In the term " Automatism," as used here and elsewhere, I include not 

 merely those bodily but those mental activities, which ai'e detcrniwatdy related 

 to (or, in other words, are caused bv) previous bodily or mental activities, to the 

 exclusion of all choice or self-direction on the part of the Ego. 



