CHAPTEK V. 



THE AUTOMATON-THEORY. 



In describing the functions of the hemispheres a short 

 way back, we used language derived from both the bodily 

 and the mental life, saying now that the animal made inde- 

 terminate and unforeseeable reactions, and anon that he 

 was swayed by considerations of future good and evil ; 

 treating his hemispheres sometimes as the seat of mem- 

 ory and ideas in the psychic sense, and sometimes talk- 

 ing of them as simply a complicated addition to his 

 reflex machinery. This sort of vacillation in the point of 

 view is a fatal incident of all ordinary talk about these 

 questions ; but I must now settle my scores with those 

 readers to whom I already dropped a word in passing (see 

 page 24, note) and who have probably been dissatisfied 

 with my conduct ever since. 



Suppose we restrict our view to facts of one and the same 

 plane, and let that be the bodily plane : cannot all the out- 

 ward phenomena of intelligence still be exhaustively de- 

 scribed ? Those mental images, those * considerations,' 

 whereof we spoke, — presumably they do not arise without 

 neural processes arising simultaneously with them, and 

 presumably each consideration corresponds to a process sui 

 generis, and unlike all the rest. In other words, however 

 numerous and delicately differentiated the train of ideas 

 may be, the train of brain-events that runs alongside of it 

 must in both respects be exactly its match, and we must 

 postulate a neural machinery that offers a living counterpart 

 for every shading, however fine, of the history of its owner's 

 mind. Whatever degree of complication the latter may 

 reach, the complication of the machinery must be quite as 

 extreme, otherwise we should have to admit that there 

 may be mental events to which no brain-events correspond. 



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