218 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



founded. It is made upon the collation of the mental phenomena revealed 

 to us by self-consciousness, with those physical changes in the grey nervous 

 matter of the brain, which are, with great probability, assumed to accom- 

 pany the mental phenomena. Let it be supposed that the observer volun- 

 tarily enters upon some train of thought — say, the asses' bridge in Euclid : 

 it is assumed, and, I concede, with great probability assumed, that this 

 mental process will be exactly represented by concomitant observable 

 physical changes in the nervous substance. One may imagine observations 

 of this kind brought to a high pitch of accuracy, so that any witness of the 

 cerebral phenomena, in the case supposed, should be enabled to infer there- 

 from, with certainty, that the subject was in the act of demonstrating Pro- 

 position No. 5 of the First Book. In this and similar cases Mind takes — 

 or seems to take — the initiative. We should, therefore, expect to find the 

 thought slightly in advance, in point of time, of its material expression ; or, 

 at least, not posterior in point of time. In such a case Mr. Frankland 

 seems to consider himself justified in inferring that the mental operations — 

 the noumena, as he terms them — ^^ underlie," or are even identical with, the 

 physical appearances. These are his words : — ' ' According to the doctrine 

 of Mind- Stuff, these feelings, or thoughts [in the mind of the person to 

 whom the brain belongs] , are the noumena — the " things-in-themselves " — 

 which underlie the changes in the grey matter of the brain. What appears 

 to an outside observer — or rather, what would appear to him were the skull 

 transparent, as a change in the grey matter of the brain — is, in reality, a 

 feeling or thought in the mind of the person to whom the brain belongs." 



I find it not easy exactly to define my own position with reference to 

 this speculation. There is much in Mr. Frankland's essay with which I 

 heartily concur. He appears to me, if I may venture to say so, on the verge 

 of truths which will lead him in a philosophical direction diametrically 

 opposite to that which I understand him to be now pursuing. To such 

 positions as these — that there are realities which underlie appearances — 

 that physical science can never reveal to us these realities — that Psychology 

 alone can give us philosophical access to them — I assent ex animo. But I 

 find it necessary to question the particular mode in which the writer pro- 

 poses to make the transit from that which apj^ears to that which is. 



In collating the sequence of ideas in the mind with the concomitant 

 medullary changes, we have, I submit, two parallel series of phenomena 

 between which we are incompetent to conceive of any necessary connection. 

 I presume that this will be at once admitted as true in regard to any two 

 parallel series of physical phenomena. In the field of physical science we 

 know only, that events follow one another in an invariable sequence. We 

 are not entitled to affirm that the antecedent event causes, or produces, the 



