act, but my apprehension of its meaning is mental. Here we
have an effect of matter on mind. In consequence of my apprehension of
the meaning of the letter, I go to the right place at the right time;
here we have an effect of mind on matter. I shall try to persuade you,
in the course of these lectures, that matter is not so material and mind
not so mental as is generally supposed. When we are speaking of matter,
it will seem as if we were inclining to idealism; when we are speaking
of mind, it will seem as if we were inclining to materialism. Neither
is the truth. Our world is to be constructed out of what the American
realists call "neutral" entities, which have neither the hardness and
indestructibility of matter, nor the reference to objects which is
supposed to characterize mind.
* It would seem, however, that Dr. Hart accepts this theory
as 8 methodological precept. See his contribution to
"Subconscious Phenomena" (quoted above), especially pp. 121-2.
There is, it is true, one objection which might be felt, not indeed to
the action of matter on mind, but to the action of mind on matter. The
laws of physics, it may be urged, are apparently adequate to explain
everything that happens to matter, even when it is matter in a man's
brain. This, however, is only a hypothesis, not an established theory.
There is no cogent empirical reason for supposing that the laws
determining the motions of living bodies are exactly the same as those
that apply to dead matter. Sometimes, of course, they are clearly the
same. When a man falls from a precipice or slips on a piece of orange
peel, his body behaves as if it were devoid of life. These are the
occasions that make Bergson laugh. But when a man's bodily movements
are what we call "voluntary," they are, at any rate prima facie, very
different in their laws from the movements of what is devoid of life.
I do not wish to say dogmatically that the difference is irreducible;
I think it highly probable that it is not. I say only that the study of
the behaviour of living bodies, in the present state of our knowledge,
is distinct from physics. The study of gases was originally quite
distinct from that of rigid bodies, and would never have advanced to its
present state if it had not been independently pursued. Nowadays both
the gas and the rigid body are manufactured out of a more primitive and
universal kind of matter. In like manner, as a question of methodology,
the la
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