The Meta'physics of a N’aturalist 
95 
Still, this form of expression is also more or less misleading. 
What we call the brain is as truly a phenomenon of experience as 
what we call mind, — only a step farther removed, and it accords 
better with the facts to consider both as correlative expressions 
of energic forms (life) which reveals itself in various modes, 
though to our direct apprehension it only reveals itself as psychic 
acts or modes. 
Applying the necessary corrective to Professor James^ theory, 
it appears that no gain is secured, for the kind of immortality 
which we crave and he proposes is not that of undifferentiated 
energy back of the brain and the mind but that of the modes 
determined, as he would say, by the brain. The naive assurance 
that the brain is only a thin spot that lets consciousness through 
fails; for, certainly, the size and position of this thin spot must 
have all to do with the kinds of modes of energy involved in 
thought. One would not say that the shape of the orifice had 
nothing to do with the generating of specific energy by a turbine, 
for example. Otherwise, if thoughts are ready made and are 
in no wise determined by the brain, why do we have one? The 
argument is an ingenious non sequitur. 
But with the modification that brain and thought are simul- 
taneous expressions of life, i. e., an organized self-limited form 
of energy having a teleological ground and a career expressed in 
its form, we discover two series of variables whose tie is their 
common relation to an existence of which they are more correctly 
described as appearances. From the series of thought-variables 
we may, by experience, learn to predict the brain-variations 
and vice versa; but it does not follow that brain-processes cause 
thought-processes. Lest we should be prematurely drawn into 
a discussion of causation, from which pit escape is well-nigh 
impossible, we may hasten to admit that causation in this sphere 
must be identified with coherence in a system or organism, 
and so becomes an aspect of teleology as in natural science it is 
but one form of statement of the law of conservation of energy. 
But whatever be the nature bf the being constituting the basis 
of coherence, of brain and mind, it is subject to change; thought 
in a connected series bound together by memory into a unitary 
experience or personality is not apparently necessarily continuous. 
Life may go on in its absence for a time. Not every kind of 
brain-process is continually functioning. In some sense life 
