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.

There is another consideration that affects parallelism alone. Since the
theory credits each of the two series with a closed and sufficient causal
sequence, each of which excludes the other, it does away with causality
altogether. That the one line runs parallel with the other excludes the
idea that a unique system of laws prevails, determining the character and
course of each line. One of the two lines must certainly be dependent, and
one must lead. Otherwise there can be no distinctness of laws in either.
Let us recall our illustration of the cloud shadows once more; the
changing forms of the shadows correspond point for point with those of the
clouds only because they are entirely dependent upon them. We may
illustrate it in this way: a parallel may be drawn to an ellipse, it also
forms a closed curved line. But it is by no means again an ellipse, but is
an entirely dependent figure without any formula or law of its own.
Parallelism must make one of its lines the leading one, which is guided
and directed by an actual causal connection within itself. The other line
may then run parallel with this, but its course must certainly be
determined by the other. And as the line of corporeal processes, with its
inviolable nexus of sequences, is not easily broken, parallelism, after
many hard words against materialism, frequently returns to that again or
becomes inconsistent. But if one says that the two aspects of phenomena
are only the forms of one fundamental p