independent of, the human mind--quite as
much as they are external to, or independent of, the calculating
machine. Now, it is this assumption which I challenge. The theory of
Monism entitles one to deny that when we have driven the question down
to the granite bed of natural causation, nothing more remains to be
done; according to this theory it still remains to be asked, What is the
nature of this natural causation? Is it indeed the ultimate datum of
experience, below which the human mind cannot go? And is it indeed so
far external to, or independent of, the human mind, that the latter
stands to it in the relation of a slave to a master--coerced as to
action by the conditions which that master has laid down?

Now these questions are all virtually answered in the affirmative by the
dualistic theory of Spiritualism. For the Will is here regarded as an
agent bound to act in accordance with those conditions of external
necessity which dualism recognizes as natural causation. Its internal
causation thus becomes but the reflex of external; and the reflection
becomes known internally as the consciousness of motive. Hence, the Will
cannot be philosophically liberated from the toils of this external
necessity, so long as dualism recognizes that necessity as existing
independently of the Will, and thus imposing its conditions on
volitional activity. But the theory of Monism, by identifying external
with internal causation--or physical processes with psychical
processes--philosophically saves the doctrine of freedom, and with it
the doctrine of moral responsibility. Moreover, it does so without
relying upon any precarious appeal to the direct testimony of
consciousness itself. As this view of the subject is one by no means
easy of apprehension, I will endeavour to unfold it part by part.

To begin with, Monism excludes the possibility of volition being
determined by cerebration. Let us suppose, for example, that a sequence
of ideas, _A, B, C, D_, occurs in the mind, which on its obverse or
cerebral aspect may be represented by the sequence _a, b, c, d_. Here
the parallelism is not due, as supposed by Materialism, to _a_
determining _Ab_, _b_ determining _Bc_, &c.; it is due to _Aa_
determining _Bb_, _Bb_ determining _Cc_, &c.--the two apparently diverse
causal sequences being really but one causal sequence. If the
determinist should rejoin that a causal sequence of some kind is all
that he demands--that the Will is equally prov