the matter of the brain, and are
as inefficient in influencing those changes as the shadow of a cloud is
powerless to direct the movements of that of which it is the shadow.

But when Materialism reaches, in a clear and articulate manner, this
inference as a conclusion necessary from its premises, it becomes
opposed at once to common sense and to the requirements of methodical
reason. It becomes opposed to common sense because we all feel it is
practically impossible to believe that the world would now have been
exactly what it is even if consciousness, thought, and volition had
never appeared upon the scene--that railway trains would have been
running filled with mindless passengers, or that telephones would have
been invented by brains that could not think to speak to ears that could
not hear. And the conclusion is opposed to the requirements of
methodical reason, because reason to be methodical is bound to have an
answer to the question that immediately arises from the conclusion. This
question simply is, Why have consciousness, thought, and volition ever
been called into existence; and why are they related, as they are
related, to cerebral action? Materialism, by here undertaking to prove
that these things stand uselessly isolated from all other things, is
bound to show some reason why they ever came to be, and to be what they
are. For observe, it is not merely that these things exist in a supposed
unnecessary relation to all other things; the fact to be explained is
that they exist in a most intimately woven and invariable connexion with
certain highly complex forms of organic structure and certain highly
peculiar distributions of physical force. Yet these unique and
extraordinary things are supposed by automatism to be always results and
never causes; in the theatre of things they are supposed to be always
spectators and never actors; in the laboratory of life they are supposed
to be always by-products; and therefore in the order of nature they are
supposed to have no _raison d'etre_. Such a state of matters would be
accountable enough if the stream of mental changes were but partly,
occasionally, and imperfectly associated with the stream of material
changes; but as the association is so minute, invariable, and precise,
the hypothesis of the association being merely accidental, or _not
requiring explanation_, becomes, at the bar of methodical reasoning,
self-convicted of absurdity.

The state of the case, then,