296 NATURE AND MAN. 



human life generally, it is obvious that its stream would flow on 

 exactly as it does, if we had no consciousness at all of what we 

 are about; that the actions and reactions of the " ideagenous 

 molecules " would do the work of the philosopher, even if they 

 never generated ideas in his mind ; that he would give forth its 

 results in books or lectures, not from any intention or desire that 

 his books should be read and his lectures heard, so as to bring 

 the thoughts of other minds into relation with his own, but simply 

 because .certain molecular motions in his brain call forth the 

 movements of speech or writing ; and that, in like manner, the 

 noblest works of genius — the master-pieces of the poet, the artist, 

 and the musician — would none the less be produced, if the 

 "symbols in consciousness" were never evoked in their pro- 

 ducers' nature, and would prove none the less attractive to other 

 automata, if the molecular movements of their brains should be 

 equally incapable of exciting either intellectual or emotional 

 activity ; such activity being, to use a legal phrase, mere " sur- 

 plusage." To myself this seems like a rcductio ad absui-dum. 

 For although I maintain in the present treatise that an automatic 

 action may take place in the cerebrum, which, without any inter- 

 vention of consciousness, may evolve products usually accounted 

 mental, yet in all such cases the action takes place on the lines 

 previously laid dois^n by volitional direction ; being exactly parallel, 

 in the case of cerebral action, to that secondary or acquired 

 automatism, by which particular kinds of movement, originally 

 acquired by "training," come to be performed " mechanically." 



1 fail to find, then, in any of the modern developments either 

 of physical or physiological science, any adequate grounds for 

 abandoning the position maintained in the following treatise, as 

 to the direction and control to which the automatic activity 

 of man is subject in proportion to the development of his 

 volitional power, — that is, the power exerted by the Ego not 

 only with a distinct purpose, but with a consciousness of effort, the 

 strength of which is the mark and measure of its exercise. 



The direct testimony of consciousness, in regard not only to 

 the existence of this volitional power, but also to the self- 

 determination of the Ego in the exercise of it, is borne out by 



