It is impossible.Equally impossible is it to imagine a similar idea loosening the attractive force between two molecules."
This passage from an exceedingly clever writer expresses admirably the difficulty to which I allude.Combined with a strong sense of the 'chasm'
between the two worlds, and with a lively faith in reflex machinery, the sense of this difficulty can hardly fail to make one turn consciousness out of the door as a superfluity so far as one's explanations go.One may bow her out politely, allow her to remain as a 'concomitant,' but one insists that matter shall hold all the power.
"Having thoroughly recognized the fathomless abyss that separates mind from matter, and having so blended the very notion into his very
nature that there is no chance of his ever forgetting it or failing to saturate with it all his meditations, the student of psychology has next to appreciate the association between these two orders of phenomena..
..They are associated in a manner so intimate that some of the greatest thinkers consider them different aspects of the same process....When the rearrangement of molecules takes place in the higher regions of the brain, a change of consciousness simultaneously occurs....The change of consciousness never takes place without the change in the brain; the change in the brain never...without the change in consciousness.But why the two occur together, or what the link is which connects them, we do not know, and most authorities believe that we never shall and never can know.Having firmly and tenaciously grasped these two notions, of the absolute separateness of mind and matter, and of the invariable concomitance of a mental change with a bodily change, the student will enter on the study of psychology with half his difficulties surmounted."
Half his difficulties ignored, I should prefer to say.For this 'concomitance'
in the midst of 'absolute separateness' is an utterly irrational notion.
It is to my mind quite inconceivable that consciousness should have nothing to do with a business which it so faithfully attends.And the question, 'What has it to do?' is one which psychology has no right to 'surmount,'
for it is her plain duty to consider it.The fact is that the whole question of interaction and influence between things is a metaphysical question, and cannot be discussed at all by those who are unwilling to go into matters thoroughly.It is truly enough hard to imagine the 'idea of a beefsteak binding two molecules together;' but since Hume's time it has been equally hard to imagine anything binding them together.The whole notion of 'binding' is a mystery, the first step towards the solution of which is to clear scholastic rubbish out of the way.Popular science talks of 'forces,' 'attractions' or 'affinities' as binding the molecules; but clear science, though she may use such words to abbreviate discourse, has no use for the conceptions, and is satisfied when she can express in simple 'laws' the bare space-relations of the molecules as functions of each other and of time.To the more curiously inquiring mind, however, this simplified expression of the bare facts is not enough; there must be a 'reason'
