EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



alence between a sorrowful feeling and a motion 

 of matter that can be expressed in terms of foot- 

 pounds. You might as well talk about a crim- 

 son taste or an acid sound. When you weep, 

 therefore, it is not grief, but the cerebrum, that 

 acts upon the tear-glands. You say that the 

 grief causes the tears, because you are conscious 

 of the relation of sequence between the subjec- 

 tive emotion and the objective flow of tears, 

 while you are totally unconscious of the molec- 

 ular movements going on in the brain. But, in 

 reality, the subjective emotion is something 

 purely immaterial, or, if you choose to say so, 

 spiritual, and its relation to what goes on in the 

 brain is merely a relation of concomitance. 



I have illustrated this point at disproportion- 

 ate length, because it is both important and 

 difficult. Until this point is perfectly clear in 

 one's mind, any discussion of the alleged mate- 

 rialistic tendencies of modern philosophy is 

 simply a waste of words. It is very clear that 

 modern philosophy does show a decided tend- 

 ency toward investigating what goes on in the 

 nervous system when we think and feel ; and it 

 is also clear that modern philosophy considers 

 itself bound to study the nervous system as a 

 material aggregate, with an atomic constitution, 

 and subject to the same physical laws with other 

 matter. I hope I have now made it equally 

 clear that these tendencies of modern philoso- 

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