An Introduction to PhilosophyFullerton, George Stuart
Philosophy
An Introduction to Philosophy
Fullerton, George Stuart
Philosophy
To this I reply: What of that? We must not forget what is meant by such
concomitance (section 39). We are dealing with a fixed and necessary
relation, not with an accidental one. If these "wants" had been lacking,
there would have been no coat. So my second answer to the objector is,
that, on the hypothesis of the parallelist, the relations between mental
phenomena and physical phenomena are just as dependable as that relation
between physical phenomena which we call that of cause and effect.
Moreover, since activity and causality are not the same thing, there is
no ground for asserting that the mind cannot be active, merely because it
is not material and, hence, cannot be, strictly speaking, a cause of
motions in matter.
The plain man is entirely in the right in thinking that minds are active.
The truth is that _nothing can be active except as it has a mind_. The
relation of purpose and end is the one we have in view when we speak of
the activity of minds.
It is, thus, highly unjust to a man to tell him that he is "a physical
automaton with parallel psychical states," and that he is wound up by
putting food into his mouth. He who hears this may be excused if he
feels it his duty to emit steam, walk with a jerk, and repudiate all
responsibility for his actions. Creatures that think, form plans, and
_act_, are not what we call automata. It is an abuse of language to call
them such, and it misleads us into looking upon them as we have no right
to look upon them. If men really were automata in the proper sense of
the word, we could not look upon them as wise or unwise, good or bad; in
short, the whole world of moral distinctions would vanish.
Perhaps, in spite of all that has been said in this and in the preceding
section, some will feel a certain repugnance to being assigned a place in
a world as orderly as our world is in this chapter conceived to be--a
world in which every phenomenon, whether physical or mental, has its
definite place, and all are subject to law. But I suppose our content or
discontent will not be independent of our conception of what sort of a
world we conceive ourselves to be inhabiting.
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