Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/392

378 GEORGE TRTJMBULL LADD : further, there are important and essential factors 1 and activities of psychic life and psychic development which cannot be related to changes in the bodily element in any such manner as to justify the word "parallelism" ; and this, for the very good reason that in respect of these factors and activities psychic and physical pheno- mena are decidedly not parallel. And no legitimate interpretation of the figure of speech involved in the uses of this word can justify the hypothesis. I repeat, therefore, that the very terms in which the hypothesis states itself are, when the attempt is made to render their figurative meaning into conceptions of scientific value and scientific accuracy, either unintelligible, or inadequate, or plainly false. Let me call attention again at this point to the data for all our theorising. These data are facts of experience which place the two classes of phenomena in felt dynamical relations within the unity of the mind's life. The explanation which discriminating, " ontological consciousness " gives of this experience refers the two classes of phenomena, thus related, to two real beings as their subjects, or centres of attachment, as it were. It is essentially the same kind of an explanation which the intellect gives of all such experienced relations. Indeed, the very concepts which we employ in all explanations arise out of the same experience. 7. A fortiori does the hypothesis psycho-physical parallelism f when, as always of necessity happens, it becomes metaphysical, either fail fully to apprehend, or else quite completely contradict, the proper meanings and applications of the categories which it employs. The truth is that it, too often, sets out with the claim to establish itself in a purely scientific way upon an empirical basis ; and beginning to feel weakness here, because so many of the facts are- difficult of arrangement under such an hypothesis, it makes the leap into what it has perhaps warned all psychologists against as being the dark night of metaphysics, the " death kingdom of abstractions " in this case, not well abstracted from well-ascertained empirical, data. 8. Psycho-physical science in the broadest meaning of this, term or the classified and organised knowledge of the empirical data so long as it remains faithful to its inherent limitations, as well as stoutly defensive of its own rights within its legitimate domain, does not essentially alter the popular conceptions. These conceptions regard the body and the mind as belonging to different classes of beings and yet as reciprocally influencing each other in a unique way. They not only authorise, but they even demand (and the demand is itself based upon the deepest experiences of the soul) the theory of dynamic relations established between the two, which are worthy of being called " causal," and which may be investigated as determined and determining ; while at the same time doing honour to the claims of each to a place in the world of reality as known by a trustworthy experience. What science discovers is not " parallelism," but an infinitely subtile and com-