United States or Bahrain ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The mere facts proved no theory true. As James so well said: "The psychologists noticed a connection, and at once assumed that it was the only possible kind of connection" which was not at all the case. Mere coincidence, in two sets of phenomena, does not prove that they are causally related; that one produces the other. It is all a matter of interpretation, not of fact.
And Spinoza's doctrine of necessity maintains that all events are determined by their proper causes, not that everything is immediately caused by some antediluvian event. And this is true even though we can start from any event in the present, no matter how trivial, and go back to an event causally antecedent, and from that to another, even until we recede into the stellar dust itself.
The poet makes us understand the inner life, but he does not describe or explain it; he makes us feel with other people, but he does not make those feelings causally understood. The realistic novelists sometimes undertake this psychological task, but they are then on the borderland of literature, the analysis of their heroes becomes then a psychological one.
They belong therefore to the theory of the physical world, and can have no bearing upon the question whether what we see is causally dependent upon the mind.
If we are to deal at all with inner life not from a purposive but from a causal point of view, we are obliged to admit this reconstruction. Without it we cannot have any science of the mind, without it we can understand the intentions of our neighbor and appreciate the truth and morality of his meanings but we cannot causally explain his experiences or determine which effects are to be expected.
Eruptive or explosive by origin, they occur in close connection with spots; whether causally, the materials ejected as "flames" cooling and settling down as dark, depressed patches of increased absorption; or consequentially, as a reactive effect of falls of solidified substances from great heights in the solar atmosphere.
As regards this doctrine, it need only be pointed out that, were it true, mind and body could never influence one another, since they are not causally connected. Yet, if there be no connection, how is it that they correspond so exactly? for, as James said, "It is quite inconceivable that consciousness should have nothing to do with a business which it so faithfully attends." 4th.
To those who cannot doubt that thought was first, causally preceding the earliest material show, it is easily plain that death can be the cure for nothing, that the cure for everything must be life that the ills which come with existence, are from its imperfection, not of itself that what we need is more of it. We who are, have nothing to do with death; our relations are alone with life.
There remains, however, an important question, namely: Are mental events causally dependent upon physical events in a sense in which the converse dependence does not hold? Before we can discuss the answer to this question, we must first be clear as to what our question means.
In short, after what manner the progression of the divine orders takes place from the one principle of all things, and how in the generations of the gods, the orders between the one, and all-perfect number, are filled up, we shall be unable to evince. A whole prior to parts is that which causally contains parts in itself.
Word Of The Day