ed as this properly called
_parallelism_ at all? To this I answer: The name matters little. I
have used it because I have no better term. Certainly, it is not the
parallelism which is sometimes brought forward, and which peeps out
from the citation from Clifford. It is nothing more than an insistence
upon the truth that we should not treat the mind as though it were a
material thing. If any one wishes to take the doctrine and discard the
name, I have no objection. As so guarded, the doctrine is, I think,
true.

Second: If it is desirable to avoid the word "cause," in speaking of
the relation of the mental and the physical, on the ground that
otherwise we give the word a double sense, why is it not desirable to
avoid the word "concomitance"? Have we not seen that the word is
ambiguous? I admit the inconsistency and plead in excuse only that I
have chosen the lesser of two evils. It is fatally easy to slip into
the error of thinking of the mind as though it were material and had a
place in the physical world. In using the word "concomitance" I enter
a protest against this. But I have, of course, no right to use it
without showing just what kind of concomitance I mean.

[1] "First and Fundamental Truths," Book I, Part II, Chapter II. New
York, 1889.

[2] "Lectures and Essays," Vol. II, p. 57. London, 1879.

CHAPTER X

HOW WE KNOW THERE ARE OTHER MINDS

40. IS IT CERTAIN THAT WE KNOW IT?--I suppose there is no man in his
sober senses who seriously believes that no other mind than his own
exists. There is, to be sure, an imaginary being more or less
discussed by those interested in philosophy, a creature called the
Solipsist, who is credited with this doctrine. But men do not become
solipsists, though they certainly say things now and then that other
men think logically lead to some such unnatural view of things; and
more rarely they say things that sound as if the speaker, in some
moods, at least, might actually harbor such a view.

Thus the philosopher Fichte (1762-1814) talks in certain of his
writings as though he believed himself to be the universe, and his
words cause Jean Paul Richter, the inimitable, to break out in his
characteristic way: "The very worst of it all is the lazy, aimless,
aristocratic, insular life that a god must lead; he has no one to go
with. If I am not to sit still for all time and eternity, if I let
myself down as well as I can and make myself finite, that I may h