THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. ISl 



prised to find this much-despised word now sprung upon 

 them at the end of so physiological a train of thought. But 

 the plain fact is that all the arguments for a ' pontifical cell ' 

 or an ' arch-monad ' are also arguments for that well-known 

 spiritual agent in which scholastic ps^-chology and com- 

 mon-sense have always believed. And my only reason for 

 beating the bushes so, and not bringing it in earlier as a 

 possible solution of our difficulties, has been that by this 

 procedure I might perhaps force some of these materialistic 

 minds to feel the more strongly the logical respectability of 

 the spiritualistic position. The fact is that one cannot 

 attord to despise any of these great tiaditional objects of 

 belief. Whether we realize it or not, there is always a great 

 drift of reasons, positii^e and negative, towing us in their 

 direction. If there be such entities as Souls in the universe, 

 they may possibly be affected by the manifold occurrences 

 that go on in the nervous centres. To the state of the en- 

 tire brain at a given moment they may resjDond by inward 

 modifications of their own. These changes of state may be 

 pulses of consciousness, cognitive of objects few or many, 

 simple or complex. The soul would be thus a mediiim 

 upon which (to use our earlier phraseology) the manifold 

 brain-processes combine their effects. Not needing to con- 

 sider it as the ' inner asj^ect ' of any arch-molecule or brain- 

 cell, we escape that physiological improbability ; and as its 

 j)ulses of consciousness are unitary and integral affairs from 

 the outset, we escape the absurdity of suj^posing feelings 

 which exist separately and then ' fuse together ' by them- 

 selves. The separateness is in the brain-Avorld, on this 

 theory, and the unity in the soul-world ; and the only 

 trouble that remains to haunt us is the metaj)hysical one of 

 understanding how one sort of world or existent thing can 

 affect or influence another at all. This trouble, however, 

 since it also exists inside of both worlds, and involves 

 neither physical improbability nor logical contradiction, is 

 relatively small. 



I confess, therefore, that to posit a soul influenced in 

 some mysterious way by the brain-states and responding to 

 them by conscious affections of its own, seems to me the 

 line of least logical resistance, so far as we yet have attained. 



