makes it incumbent on us to believe that the procession of physical
cause and effect is complete within the region of brain--a closed
circle, as it were, from which no energy can, without argumentative
suicide, be supposed to escape into the region of mind; and next,
because, even were this difficulty disregarded, it is unaccountable that
the causative influence (whatever it is supposed to be), which passes
over from the region of physics into that of psychics, should be such as
to render the psychical series coherent in itself, when on the physical
side the series must be determined by purely physical conditions,
having no reference whatsoever to psychical requirements.

Thus it is argumentatively impossible for Materialism to elude the
necessity of explaining the kind of connexion which it supposes to
subsist between neurosis and psychosis; and forasmuch as the above
considerations clearly show this connexion cannot be accepted as one of
ordinary causality without some answer being given to the questions
which reason has to ask, Materialism must be ruled out of court if she
fails to respond to the demand. But it is no less clearly impossible
that she can respond to the demand, and therefore at the bar of
Philosophy Materialism must be pronounced, for this as well as for the
reasons previously cited, conspicuously inadequate to account for the
facts.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 4: Professor Flint, _Antitheistic Theories_, p. 99.]

[Footnote 5: _Philosophy of Religion_, pp. 95, 99, and 101.]

[Footnote 6: British Association Report, 1879, p. 28.]

[Footnote 7: British Association Report, 1868. Trans. of Sections, p.
5.]

CHAPTER III.

MONISM.

We have seen, then, that both the alternative theories of Spiritualism
and Materialism are found, when carefully examined, to be so beset with
difficulties of a necessary and fundamental kind, that it is impossible
to entertain either without closing our eyes to certain contradictions
which they severally and inherently present. We may, indeed, go even
further than this, and affirm that to suppose mind the cause of motion
or motion the cause of mind is equally to suppose that which in its very
nature as a supposition is neither true nor untrue, but nonsensical.
For, as Prof. Clifford has said in his essay on _Body and Mind_,--

'It may be conceived that, at the same time with every exercise of
volition, there is a disturbance of the physical laws; but th