AUTOMATON-THEORY. 137 



be a ' reason ' for tliem, and sometliing must ' determine ' 

 the laws. And when one seriously sits down to con- 

 sider what sort of a thing one means when one asks 

 for a 'reason,' one is led so far afield, so far away from 

 popular science and its scholasticism, as to see that even 

 such a fact as the existence or non-existence in the universe 

 of ' the idea of a beefsteak ' may not be wholly indifferent 

 to other facts in the same universe, and in particular may 

 have something to do with determining the distance at 

 which two molecules in that universe shall lie apart. If 

 this is so, then common-sense, though the intimate nature 

 of causality and of the connection of things in the universe 

 lies beyond her pitifully bounded horizon, has the root and 

 gist of the truth in her hands when she obstinately holds 

 to it that feelings and ideas are causes. However inade- 

 quate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide 

 of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have 

 it, than the Automatists are wdien they say thej^ haven't it. 

 As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of meta- 

 physical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no 

 right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject 

 only, as the automatists do, and to say that that causation 

 is unintelligible, whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes 

 about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had 

 never been born. One cannot thus blow hot and cold. One 

 must be impartially naif or impartially critical. If the 

 latter, the reconstruction must be thorough-going or ' meta- 

 physical,' and will probably preserve the common-sense 

 view that ideas are forces, in some translated form. But 

 Psychology is a mere natural science, accepting certain 

 terms uncritically as her data, and stopping short of 

 metaphysical reconstruction. Like physics, she must be 

 naive ; and if she finds that in her very j)eculiar field of 

 study ideas seem to be causes, she had better continue to 

 talk of them as such. She gains absolutely nothing by a 

 breach with common-sense in this matter, and she loses, 

 to say the least, all naturalness of sj)eech. If feelings are 

 causes, of course their effects must be furtherances and 

 checkings of internal cerebral motions, of which in them- 

 selves we are entirely without knowledge. It is probable 



