220 Transactions.— Miscellaneous. 
Matter—I mean the case of the voluntary movements of our limbs. I 
determine to stretch out my arm, and the mental mandate is at once 
obeyed. But even here the nexus remains to us entirely mysterious. If I 
order a servant to bring in a scuttle of coals, and he does it, I am, ina 
sense, the cause of the occurrence. But that is only in a hyper-physical 
sense. There exists a sufficient physical cause in the contraction of my 
lent of heat in the combustion of his muscular tissues. The case is exactly 
the sathe in the instance of the movement of my own limbs at the bidding 
of my own will. Here also there is a physical antecedent—(a sufficient 
cause in the sense of the Physicists)—in the expenditure of my own bodily 
forces. The mental initiative is something outside (so to speak) of the 
physical series, and not connected with it in any way conceivable by the 
human intellect. I am here only asserting against Mr. Frankland the 
doctrine of his own teachers. ** We are," says J. S. Mill, “the causes of 
the motion of our own limbs in the same sense, and no other than that, in 
which cold causes ice, or a spark causes an explosion of gunpowder.” By 
this Mill meant, of course, that our volitions are mere antecedents, not pro- 
ducing causes of motion.* This is well-beaten ground; and whilst dis- 
claiming the larger conclusions of the Positivist school, I have always 
thought it to be in the right upon this particular point. But if we are not 
justified in regarding a mental act as the vera causa of a voluntary motion, 
which we have exactly conceived and pre-adjusted, how much less is it 
allowable to posit a like act as the underlying cause of an unknown and 
unsuspected change in the cerebral matter. 
The terms in which Mr. Frankland expresses his doctrine seem to 
warrant the interpretation I have been putting upon them, namely, that the 
‘“‘noumena " in the mental series are causes of the phenomena in the physical 
series ; and my remarks have applied to the theory understood in this sense. 
But taking the paper as a whole, it is rather perhaps. its true meaning 
that ** noumena " and ** phenomena ” (if not identical) are common effects 
of a single cause, or motions of a single substance ; the supposed cause, a 
substance, being within the circle of our own consciousness—being, in fact, 
in each man's case, his own mind— himself. To put it shortly : Thought 
and Cerebration are to be regarded equally as vibrations of our own self- 
conscious Substance; or even as one and the same vibration. From this is 
drawn the further inference, that our own self-conscious substance is a 
portion of the universal substance. 
I have no right to press against Mr. Frankland the dicta of masters in 
the school to which he apparently belongs. As an independent thinker, 
ee m * See also “ Hume’s Life,” by Huxley ; p. 128, 
