"w 
1126 General Notes. | November, 
effect. He pointed out that the doctrine of conscious automatism 
is logically the only possible outcome of the theory that nervous 
changes are the causes of bodily changes, and, therefore, it cannot 
be fought on grounds of physiology. If we persist in regarding 
the relation between brain and thought exclusively from a physi- 
ological point of view, we must of necessity be materialists. But 
it does not follow from this that the theory of materialism is 
true; and other considerations of an extra-physiological kind 
conclusively prove that the theory is false. We have, first, the 
general fact that all our knowledge of motion, and so of matter, 
is merely a knowledge of the modifications of mind. Therefore, 
so far as we are concerned, mind is necessarily prior to every- 
thing else. Thus the theory of materialism assumes that one 
thing is produced by another thing, in spite of an obvious demon- 
stration that the alleged effect is necessarily prior to its cause. 
But further, “motion produceth nothing but motion,” says 
Hobbes, and yet he immediately proceeds to assume that in the 
case of the brain it produces not only motion, but mind. Ma- 
terialism has to meet the unanswerable question—How is it that 
in the machinery of the brain motion produces this something 
which is not motion? Science has now definitely proved the 
correlation of all the forces, and this means that if any kind of 
motion could produce anything else that is not motion, it would 
be producing what science would be bound to regard as in the 
strictest sense of the word a miracle; causation from brain to 
mind is in the strictest sense of the word a physical impossibility. 
