220 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



Matter — I mean the case of tlie 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, in a 

 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 

 servant's muscles ; ■which, again, involves the disappearance of an equiva- 

 lent of heat in the combustion of his muscular tissues. The case is exactly 

 the same 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 hmbs 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 mterpretation 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, 



* See also " Hume's Life," by Huxley ; p. 128, 



