and Mind" are of a very different character. He treats the problem of the interrelation of body and mind-but suffers from the misconception that body and mind are separate entities without explaining their character or their mode of intercommunication. But he criticises the current theory of parallelism.

Psychologists since Fechner's day have indeed assumed that feeling is not motion and motion is not feeling. Feeling cannot act as a link in causation, and causation must be a chain of events in which cause and effect are uninterrupted. The question therefore is, how does the mental activity enter in the chain of events? If feeling does not form a part of the chain it plays no part in causation and the mind cannot ex principio act on the body. This would be a simple conclusion from the abstract considerations that by feeling we do not understand matter or motion, and by matter or motion we do not understand feeling, otherwise we might follow Mr. Broad in thinking that the theory of parallelism is absurd.

We will therefore make a few remarks on the theory of parallelism which we hold to be true in spite of misrepresentation. In a series of events which act as causes and effects in a mental process it is necessary that step by step brain motions are followed by other brain motions, but some of the brain motions are accompanied by phases of feeling, representing mental acts of thought. Definite thoughts are the inside accompaniment of definite brain motions and the nature of thought depends on definite forms of brain structures. And this definite structure gives them the faculty of acting. The meaning of words or the mental aspect is not endowed with energy, but definite brain structures which are endowed with energy are possessed of meaning, and when their feeling is stirred thought originates and assumes in the mind a definite meaning accompanied by the commotion of its correspond

ing definite structure. It is this brain motion which forms a chain in the causation and here is the point at which mind actually acts on body.

It is not the mind itself or the feeling which is present in our mind that forms a link in the chain of causation, but it is the energized nerve which stirs the brain and acts as the causal link. It is not impossible that by some diseased condition the nerve fails to act, and in that case there may be a state of will without the ability to execute it—a disease described by Ribot under the name aboulia.

Thus a critique of the theory of parallelism may become a verbal quibble. If we understand by mind merely the subjective side we could speak of the inability of mind or of feeling to act on the body, but if we understand by mind not only the subjective aspect of a mental process but also the bodily commotion of the brain which it ensouls, we would have to say that there is no question but that the mind influences the body. We must not lose sight of the fact that feeling is a mere abstraction, and if by this abstraction we mean only the subjective side of a process, only the mere actual feeling to the exclusion of its physical condition or accompaniment, it would naturally be illogical to make it the efficient cause in the chain of causation. But if we include in feeling its bodily condition we naturally include the physiological activity which is freighted with energy and forms a link in the chain of cerebral causation.

Mr. Broad certainly does not present a theory of his own which would be acceptable, or give us a satisfactory explanation as to the nature of mind. No! He leaves us in the dark as to what the mind really is or can be, and for all I can see in his proposition, the mind is a mysterious creation of a dualistic conception which is endowed with several mysterious qualities, acting on bodily forces in an unaccountable way.

According to Fechner feeling does not act on mind,

because motions only can be the causes in a chain of causation; what is not mechanical cannot produce an effect, for causation is mechanical. Feeling is different from mechanical action, but it is inefficient not because it is different, but because it is not motion. In order to be a cause, or a link in the chain of causation, it must move or push in order to produce a change of any kind. If the feeling in its narrowest meaning cannot stir motions in the brain, the accompanying brain motion may or probably will do it. In bearing this in mind we find no contradiction in the theory of parallelism.

Mr. Broad favors a "two-sided interactionism" in which "the mind sometimes acts on the body and the body sometimes acts on the mind." He condemns epiphenomenalism, according to which feeling is an epiphenomenon or superadded feature standing outside the regular normal causation of physico-chemical activity. Next in foolishness to this theory he regards parallelism. He claims with great insistence that the body is not a purely physical and chemical system, and in this latter point we can agree fully and without any reservation, for in the scale of natural phenomena we have a domain of purely physical and chemical phenomena and while some scientists assume that vital processes are purely physical and chemical we cannot deny that psychical transactions possess a feature that cannot be regarded as physical or chemical, but possesses something that is absolutely new.

If rightly understood there can be no quarrel on this point, and we fully agree that the influence of psychical items does make a difference in the chain of causation. If it is not the feeling portion of a telegram which makes a man jump from his seat and rush into action, it is the meaning of it which meets with an understanding of a threatening danger or whatever it may be, and this meaning is conveyed by the form of letters, which according to

former education possess a definite meaning. The forms of certain words together with the meaning with which they are endowed constitute the factor which causes the reaction and sets energy free, just as a key unlocks the bolts through the arrangement of its wards and it opens the lock on account of the shape of its indentations which fit into the corresponding shape of the lock. It is this correspondence of the meaning of words or of symbols which makes the psychical portion of interrelated events efficient, and it is this fittingness, this correspondence, not exactly the pressure and the energy, which constitutes the significance of spirituality. Thus we might very well say that it is not the energy or pressure of the key that opens the lock, but it is the very form, the singular complexity of its wards which in the Yale lock is reduced to a curve on the stem of the key. The mechanical pressure of the key as well as of the nerve is the moving power that is indispensable in the chain of causation, but the correspondence of the meaning of words determines an action in the same way as the proper key opens the lock into which it fits.

Thus it is seen that in judging of the theory of parallelism we must first of all understand its meaning and not confuse its issues. It is to be feared that Mr. Broad construes a parallelism of his own and condemns it on the ground of a misrepresentation which is either misconstrued or possibly a wrong presentation. At any rate it seems to me that Mr. Broad's criticism does not upset or invalidate the theory of parallelism, which so far as can be seen is the only one on which a monistic theory of the interaction of body and mind can be constructed.

EDITOR.

A PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW OF THE PRAGMATIC

P

ISSUE.

ROFESSIONAL philosophers have published many volumes trying to solve the problem, whether our ideas of things are true because they work or whether they work because they are true. To my mind the realities of life, and of acquiring knowledge, present no such issue, and the discussion of it has had its chief utility as a necessary step toward the discovery of its futility, and so contributing one factor to our understanding of intellectual evolution. To exhibit my justification for this belief is the reason for this essay. Incidentally it may appear that by adopting the first of these formulas to the exclusion of the second one some pragmatists are guilty of that same absolutism for which they so generously criticise others.

Here as everywhere we must seek the solution of our problem on the basis of a higher intellectual level than that on which it arose. Thus the desire for more efficient observation and a more inclusive synthesis of the factors of the problem will lead us to re-examine the seemingly conflicting formulas with the view of translating them into concepts of behavioristic psychology. From this new viewpoint perhaps we will see the old formulas as presenting mere incomplete and dissociated aspects of the same cognitive process. From this psychologic aspect we may also achieve such an integration as will rid us of our seeming conflict.