Freedom of Will Empirically Considered. 5 



tion. The nervous system is the medium in each case, and 

 the bond between the two. 



The only view which at all interferes with liberty at this 

 point is that which regards all action in consciousness as a 

 secondary accompaniment of this interplay of stimuli and 

 activities in an organism, and so determined in its phenom- 

 ena by it. If the chief nerve-centres, more especially the 

 cerebrum, in man are the seat of a series of interactions 

 which take place between the inward movement and the 

 outward one, and are governed by them; if the phenomena 

 of consciousness are simply the accompaniments of these 

 complex actions and reactions in the brain, then liberty is 

 lost, not limited, by such conditions. 



The adverse reasons are many. (1) A very large share, 

 much the largest share, of nervous interplay goes on both in 

 the lowest and in the highest life without consciousness. 

 Consciousness is certainly no necessary product of merely 

 nervous interaction. (2) Consciousness regarded in this 

 light is from beginning to end a superfluous term. If con- 

 sciousness is incident to forces seeking directly their own 

 ends, we have no more use for consciousness in living than 

 in dead things; no more need of it in securing the muscular 

 activities that follow thought than in the circulation of the 

 blood, or in uniting the recognition by the eye of the char- 

 acters on the printed page with the muscles of the throat in 

 articulation. If no state of consciousness is of itself pro- 

 ductive of subsequent states of consciousness, but all are 

 alike dependent on underlying cerebral conditions, then each 

 state of consciousness and the entire series of states are, in 

 reference to physical events, supernumerary results. Be- 

 tween these states and these events it is impossible to affirm 

 any correspondence which is of the nature of knowledge. 

 (3) Consciousness has been introduced in development, on 

 the contrary, as a new term in a higher life, incident not 

 simply to organic relations, but one that seems greatly to 

 extend them and put them to new service. (4) There is no 

 known counterpart of any given thought in any given mole- 

 cular changes of any nerve substance. The first and funda- 

 mental step of proof in this direction has not yet been taken. 



