idea seems baseless, and I do not think it necessary to dwell further on this point.[1]
We seem, therefore, driven to regard soul and body as causally connected, and the question will be as to the nature of their connection. Can this be all, so to speak, on one side? Is the soul merely an adjective depending on the body, and never more than an effect? Or is, again, the body a mere accompaniment resulting from the soul? Both these questions must be met by an emphatic negative. The suggested relation is, in each case, inconsistent and impossible. And, since there is no plausibility in the idea of physical changes always coming from, and never reacting on, the soul, I will not stop to consider it. I will pass to the opposite one-sidedness, a doctrine equally absurd, though, at first sight, seeming more plausible.
Psychical changes, upon this view, are never causes at all, but are solely effects. They are adjectives depending upon the body, but which at the same time make absolutely no difference to it. They do not quite fall outside causation, for they are events which certainly are produced by physical changes. But they enter the causal series in one character only. They are themselves produced, but on the other hand nothing ever results from them. And this does not merely mean that, for certain purposes, you may take primary qualities as unaffected by secondary, and may consider second-
- ↑ Of course, even on these hypotheses, one link of a series will be a cause of what follows, if you take that link in connection with the rest of the universe. Hence with regard to “occasionalism” we may say that, since every cause must be limited more or less artificially, every cause therefore is able to be called an “occasion.” You may take in further and further conditions, until your partial cause seems an item unimportant, and even therefore ineffective. And here we are on the confines of absolute error. If the “occasion” is divided from the whole entire cause, and so held to be without an influence on the effect, that is at once quite indefensible.
