74 
TRANSACTIONS OF THE TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
believe that some pre-potent stress, or the eternal'stars, are swaying his 
destiny. In his scientific moods he delights in the idea that a fortuitous or 
a pre-destined concourse of atoms is bringing everything about, or that 
the elementary lives of his constituent cells are the true agents that blind¬ 
ly perform the functions of his being. Or, again, to disclaim his own re¬ 
sponsibility in his actions, the plea of insanity is.advanced; or, more 
sweeping still, the plea of irremediable heredity. And next it is evolu¬ 
tion, either mechanical]} or divinely ordained, that is believed, by dint 
of purely physical processes, to achieve all results. Yet, regardless of all 
his fatalistic theories, the inconsistent creature will thrill with rapturous 
admiration at the account of noble deeds, and with all his might, and at 
all risks, he will battle in defense of his honor and of his beloved ones, 
and for fulfillment of his ideals. 
Naturalistic thinkers, when they contemplate the central dilemma of 
body and mind, find themselves generally confronted by the following 
two-fold perplexity: First, how can so material an occurrence as molecu¬ 
lar brain-motion be possibly converted into so completely immaterial a 
phenomenon as. a conscious state? And, vice versa, how can an imma¬ 
terial something, which a mental state evidently is, how can it possibly 
impart motion to matter? 
Sundry modes of vibration impinge from outside on our recipient 
sensory organs. A definite molecular stir is thereby set up in their re¬ 
spective nerves and propagated along their course to the brain-substance. 
And here it is where we are brought face to face with the all-important 
hyper-mechanical problem. For the metamorphosis of a material mo¬ 
tion into consciousness, the metamorphosis of a definite molecular stir 
into a definite conscious state, this out-and-out incommensurate trans¬ 
mutation is, to our mind, utterly incomprehensible. 
Most scientists have, in fact, openly declared this distracting psycho¬ 
physical riddle to be insoluble, to be a final inexplicability in nature. 
And no less unthinkable is the imparting of motion to matter by a 
mental state, by something wholly devoid of momentum, and, therefore, 
of moving power. Consequently, it is out of the question that it can be 
any kind of mental state in us, call it “motive,” or by any other name, 
which is initiating and directing our so-called voluntary movements. 
Do we. then, here really stand before an impenetrable mystery? Is 
our thought really doomed to stay forever still before this seeming dead¬ 
lock? 
Decently a number of scientists, and among them Huxley and Tyn¬ 
dall, have pretended to circumvent the awkwardly pointed horns of this 
great dilemma by coolly declaring that, irrespective of their scientifically 
adopted mechanical canon and conviction, they have found intellectual 
rest in pure idealism. 
