s a link in the physical chain of
causes and effects--he breaks the chain to insert it. The parallelist
maintains that it is inconceivable that such an insertion should be
made. He regards the physical series as complete in itself, and he
places the consciousness, as it were, on a _parallel_ line.

It must not be supposed that he takes this figure literally. It is his
effort to avoid materializing the mind that forces him to hold the
position which he does. To put the mind in the brain is to make of it
a material thing; to make it parallel to the brain, in the literal
sense of the word, would be just as bad. All that we may understand
him to mean is that mental phenomena and physical, although they are
related, cannot be built into the one series of causes and effects. He
is apt to speak of them as _concomitant_.

We must not forget that neither parallelist nor interactionist ever
dreams of repudiating our common experiences of the relations of mental
phenomena and physical. Neither one will, if he is a man of sense,
abandon the usual ways of describing such experiences. Whatever his
theory, he will still say: I am suffering because I struck my hand
against that table; I sat down because I chose to do so. His doctrine
is not supposed to deny the truth contained in such statements; it is
supposed only to give a fuller understanding of it. Hence, we cannot
condemn either doctrine simply by an uncritical appeal to such
statements and to the experiences they represent. We must look much
deeper.

Now, what can the parallelist mean by _referring_ sensations and ideas
to the brain and yet denying that they are _in_ the brain? What is
this reference?

Let us come back to the experiences of the physical and the mental as
they present themselves to the plain man. They have been discussed at
length in Chapter IV. It was there pointed out that every one
distinguishes without difficulty between sensations and things, and
that every one recognizes explicitly or implicitly that a sensation is
an experience referred in a certain way to the body.

When the eyes are open, we _see_; when the ears are open, we _hear_;
when the hand is laid on things, we _feel_. How do we know that we are
experiencing sensations? The setting tells us that. The experience in
question is given together with an experience of the body. This is
_concomitance of the mental and the physical_ as it appears in the
experience of us all; and fr