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It must be admitted that the parallelist usually holds a view which differs rather widely from that of the unlearned.
The result would be the same if he had black hair or were bald. But this is not the concomitance that interests the parallelist. The two sorts of concomitance are alike only in the one point. Some phenomenon is regarded as excluded from the series of causes and effects under discussion.
So my second answer to the objector is, that, on the hypothesis of the parallelist, the relations between mental phenomena and physical phenomena are just as dependable as that relation between physical phenomena which we call that of cause and effect.
This is called the parallelist theory. We cannot discuss this here, as we shall meet with it again in the third part of this book. It has the advantage of leading to a very simple definition of unconsciousness. The unconscious is that which is purely physiological.
The parallelist, for it is he who opposes interactionism, insists that we must not forget that mental phenomena do not belong to the same order as physical phenomena.
Being unwilling to bring forth from the molecular movement of the brain the representation of the world, or to superpose the representation on this movement as in the parallelist hypothesis, he has arrived at a theory, very ingenious but rather obscure, which consists in placing the image of the world outside the brain, this latter being reduced to a motor organ which executes the orders of the mind.
But the man who received the blow becomes conscious that he was struck, and both interactionist and parallelist regard him as becoming conscious of it when the incoming message reaches some part of the brain. What shall be done with this consciousness? The interactionist insists that it must be regarded as a link in the physical chain of causes and effects he breaks the chain to insert it.
Now if we re-establish facts as they are, if we admit a parallelism between physical phenomena, on the one hand, and phenomena at once physical and psychical, on the other, the parallelist hypothesis loses every sort of meaning.
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. When the eyes are open, we see; when the ears are open, we hear; when the hand is laid on things, we feel.
They have no necessary connection with parallelism. The interactionist, as well as the parallelist, may be a determinist, a believer in freedom, or he may be a "free-willist." He regards mental phenomena and physical phenomena as links in the one chain of causes and effects. Shall he hold that certain mental links are "free-will" links, that they are wholly unaccountable?
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