Page:Conservationofen00stew.djvu/228

series is the physical series of facts, the successive agitation of the physical organs, called the eye, the retina, the optic nerve, optic centres, cerebral hemispheres, outgoing nerves, muscles, etc. There is an unbroken physical circle of effects, maintained while we go the round of the mental circle of sensation, emotion, and thought. It would be incompatible with every thing we know of the cerebral action to suppose that the physical chain ends abruptly in a physical void, occupied by an immaterial substance; which immaterial substance, after working alone, imparts its results to the other edge of the physical break, and determines the active response—two shores of the material with an intervening ocean of the immaterial. There is, in fact, no rupture of nervous continuity. The only tenable supposition is, that mental and physical proceed together, as individual twins. When, therefore, we speak of a mental cause, a mental agency, we have always a two-sided cause; the effect produced is not the effect of mind alone, but of mind in company with body. That mind should have operated on the body, is as much as to say that a two-sided phenomenon, one side being bodily, can influence the body; it is, after all, body acting upon body. When a shock of fear paralyzes digestion, it is not the emotion of fear, in the abstract, or as a pure mental existence, that does the harm; it is the emotion in company with a peculiarly excited condition of the brain and nervous system; and