Mind and motion ; and Monism / by the late George John Romanes.

Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mind and motion ; and Monism / by the late George John Romanes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    case; and therefore it can make no practical difference whether the source of it be regarded as natural or super-natural, material or mental: so that a man be fated to will only in certain ways and this with all the rigour which belongs to causa- tion as physical—it is scarcely worth while to dispute whether the predestination is of God or of Nature. There can be no question, however, that in this matter the possibility which I have supposed to be suggested by the spiritualist is more far-fetched than that which obviously lies to the hand of the materialist; and, moreover, that it too plainly wears the appearance of a desperate device to save a hollow theory. It remains to add that this great difficulty against the spiritualistic theory has been revealed in all its force only during the present generation. Since the days of fetishism, indeed, the difficulty has always been an increasing one—growing with the growth of the perception of uniformity on the one hand, and of mechanical as distinguished from volitional agency on the other. But it was not until the correlation of all the physical forces had been proved by actual experiment, and the scientific doctrine of the conservation of energy became as a consequence firmly established, that the difficulty in question assumed the importance of a logical barrier to the theory of mental changes acting as efficient causes of material changes.