198 W. L. COURTNEY, M.A., LL.D., 
the other is corporeal and mortal, how are the relations of 
mind to body to be satisfactorily explained? There are 
obvious interactions between the two elements; the body 
affects the mind, when we suffer for instance from a headache, 
and the mind affects the body, as for instance when we will 
to move an arm ora leg. If the two elements are absolutely 
antithetical, how can they thus influence one another? 
It was left to the acuteness of a woman to put this difficulty 
to Descartes: the objection is found in one of the letters 
which that royal blue-stocking, Elizabeth, the Princess 
Palatine, wrote to the philosopher. But no answer is forth- 
coming, until the followers of Descartes, Geulincx and 
Malebranche brought forward their singular theory of 
Occasionalism. The solution propounded is this :—It is God 
who unites the two dissimilar things, body and soul. On the 
occasion of a physical stimulus, God suggests to the mind the 
appropriate sensation, and on the occasion of a volition, God 
suggests or brings about the appropriate muscular movement. 
Thus the Divine Being is held to be always interfering, as it 
were, to keep human life and activity going. All action is his 
action, just as all mental states are his states. It is a 
desperate theory, but unless one is frankly disposed to accept 
a dualism of ultimate principles, it is in some shape or other 
not an unusual one. Leibnitz proposes a variation of the 
theory in his celebrated “consentement preétabli” or pre- 
established harmony. In order to get rid of the necessity of 
constant and repeated interference, Leibnitz proposes to 
regard body and soul as two clocks which are wound up so 
as always to keep time with each other. The immediate 
action of God is thus that of the clockmaker who originally 
winds up and sets the two timepieces. Then for the rest of 
their respective lives they exactly correspond, and the 
possibility of interaction between body and soul is resolved 
into an exact equivalence and correspondence of respective 
functions. 
In a modern world, as might be expected, men of science 
and philosophers have grown impatient of explanations like 
these. They either tell us not to ask impossible questions 
and to be content with noting down and tabulating the 
various relations which experience gives us as existing 
between mind and body (such is the position of what is 
generally called Positivism) or else they frankly cut out one 
member of the antithesis and bid us regard mental activities 
and the whole sphere of consciousness as In some sense 
produced by or the result of material movements or finally as 
