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.Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physicalchanges, not a cause of such changes.The soul stands related to the body as the bell of a clockto the works, and consciousness answers to the sound which the bell gives out when it is struck.Thus far I have strictly confined myself to the automatism of brutes.It is quite true that, tothe best of my judgment, the argumentation which applies to brutes holds equally good of men;and, therefore, that all states of consciousness in us, as in them, are immediately caused bymolecular changes of the brain-substance.It seems to me that in men, as in brutes, there is noproof that any state of consciousness is the cause of change in the motion of the matter of theorganism.If these positions are well based, it follows that our mental conditions are simply theGet any book for free on: www.Abika.comTHE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY82symbols in consciousness of the changes which take place automatically in the organism; andthat, to take an extreme illustration, the feeling we call volition is not the cause of a voluntaryact, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of that act.We areconscious automata."Professor Clifford writes:"All the evidence that we have goes to show that the physical world gets along entirely by itself,according to practically universal rules.The train of physical facts between the stimulus sentinto the eye, or to any one of our senses, and the exertion which follows it, and the train ofphysical facts which goes on in the brain, even when there is no stimulus and no exertion, - theseare perfectly complete physical trains, and every step is fully accounted for by mechanicalconditions.The two things are on utterly different platforms - the physical facts go along bythemselves, and the mental facts go along by themselves.There is a parallelism between them,but there is no interference of one with the other.Again, if anybody says that the will influencesmatter, the statement is not untrue, but it is nonsense.Such an assertion belongs to the crudematerialism of the savage.The only [p.132] thing which influences matter is the position ofsurrounding matter or the motion of surrounding matter.The assertion that another man'svolition, a feeling in his consciousness that I cannot perceive, is part of the train of physical factswhich I may perceive, - this is neither true non untrue, but nonsense; it is a combination of wordswhose corresponding ideas will not go together.Sometimes one series is known better, andsometimes the other; so that in telling a story we speak sometimes of mental and sometimes ofmaterial facts.A feeling of chill made a man run; strictly speaking, the nervous disturbancewhich coexisted with that feeling of chill made him run, if we want to talk about material facts;or the feeling of chill produced the form of sub-consciousness which coexists with the motion oflegs, if we want to talk about mental facts.When, therefore, we ask: 'What is the physical linkbetween the ingoing message from chilled skin and the outgoing message which moves the leg?'and the answer is, 'A man's will,' we have as much right to be amused as if we had asked ourfriend with the picture what pigment was used in painting the cannon in the foreground, andreceived the answer, 'Wrought iron.' It will be found excellent practice in the mental operationsrequired by this doctrine to imagine a train, the fore part of which is an engine and threecarriages linked with iron couplings, and the hind part three other carriages linked with ironcouplings; the bond between the two parts being made up out of the sentiments of amitysubsisting between the stoker and the guard."To comprehend completely the consequences of the dogma so confidently enunciated, oneshould unflinchingly apply it to the most complicated examples.The movements of our tonguesand pens, the flashings of our eyes in conversation, are of course events of a material order, andas such their causal antecedents must be exclusively material.If we knew thoroughly the nervoussystem of Shakespeare, and as thoroughly all his environing conditions, we should be able toshow why at a certain period of his life his hand came to trace on certain sheets of paper thosecrabbed little black marks which we for shortness' sake call the manuscript of Hamlet.Weshould understand the rationale of every erasure and alteration therein, and we should understandall this without in the slightest degree acknowledging the existence of the thoughts inShakespeare's mind [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]