26 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



ness. It is perfectly intelligible that they should affect 

 those special processes with which consciousness is con- 

 cerned, for all parts of the brain stand in intimate physio- 

 logical relation to one another, and thus it happens that the 

 basis of much that goes on in consciousness is to be found 

 in molecular interactions not accompanied by consciousness. 

 Mind is really brain and nothing more. No other perma- 

 nent subject is either directly experienced or implied by 

 experience. 



Now the body is no doubt a continuous unity with whose 

 functions conscious activity stands in close relation. But 

 it is not a ' permanent subject,' because it is not strictly a 

 ' subject ' at all. To identify mind and body in the sense 

 of resolving one into the other is simply to confuse distinct 

 categories. Body, as known to us, is that which is measur- 

 able and ponderable, that which has mass, which moves and 

 is moved, is visible, tangible and so forth. Mind is that 

 which feels, sees, hears, judges, expects, infers. To say 

 that mind is body is as much a confusion as to say that a 

 weight is an inference or that an acceleration is a wish. 

 Very slight consideration shows that if mind and body are 

 to be identified in any intelligible sense the meaning must 

 be that in any individual they form one permanent reality 

 whose attributes include on the one side the phenomena 

 which we group as physical, on the other those which we 

 group as mental. Such a reality would be a psycho- 

 physical whole, which we may call the Self. This concep- 

 tion may pass as a prima facie account, and it serves to put 

 the question of substance in the right form. For at bottom 

 what we have to ask is whether the mental phenomena 

 depend on the bodiJy, or the bodily on the mental, or 

 whether there is some interaction between the two. That 

 is to say, to understand the relation of mind and body we 

 ought to know whether the totality of the processes going 

 on within the self is to be understood in mechanical terms 

 as a series of actions and reactions of masses in motion, or 

 in terms of mind as a series of efforts determined by pur- 

 poses. Now the only sound method of approaching this 

 question is to consider the self as a psycho-physical whole, 

 and to enquire how it acts. In point of fact this enquiry 



