namely, the vicarious functioning of different parts of the brain. In many cases where this or that “centre” is injured, and rendered incapable of function, or even extirpated, the corresponding part of the mind is by no means destroyed along with it. At first the mind may suffer from “the effect of shock” as the phrase runs, but gradually it may recover and the same function may be transferred to another part of the brain, and there be fulfilled sometimes less perfectly, sometimes quite as perfectly as before. We had to deal with this fact of vicarious function in discussing the general theory of life. It is one of the greatest difficulties in the way of the mechanistic and materialistic theories. But it must give some trouble to the parallelists too. We need not speak of the wonderful duplication of all existence which parallelism must establish, though it is difficult to evade the question how a _natura sive deus_ could have come, so superfluously, to say the same thing twice over. Superfluously, for since both are alike self-contained and independent of one another, one can have no need of the other. One objection, however, may be urged against both parallelism and materialism, which makes them both impossible, and that is, automatism. Both parallelism and materialism maintain that the sequence of physical processes is complete in itself and can be explained in terms of itself. _All_ physical processes! Not only the movements of the stars, the changes in inanimate matter, the origin and evolution of the forms of life, but also what we call actions, for instance the movements of our arms and our legs, and the complicated processes affecting the breathing organs and tongue, which we call “speech.” Every plant, every animal, every human being must be as it is and where it is, must move and act, must perform its functions, which we explain as due to love or hate, to fear or hope, even if there were no such thing as sensation, will, idea, neither love nor hate, fear nor hope. More than this, all that we call history, building towns and destroying them, carrying on war and concluding peace, uniting into states and holding national assemblies, going to school and exercising mouth and tongue, argument, making books and forming letters, writing Iliads, Bibles, and treatises on the soul or on free will, holding psychological congresses and talking about parallelism;—all this must have been done even if there had been no consciousness, no psychical activity in any brain! This is the necessary consequence to which the theories of parallelism and materialism lead. If it does not follow, then there was from the outset no meaning in establishing them. But the monstrosity of their corollary is fatal to them. It is idle to set up theories in which it is impossible to believe.