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Updated: April 30, 2025
The only arguments for theism that have had much weight with mankind have been those which have maintained there are revealed in the world generally evidences of a plan and purpose at least analogous to what we discover when we scrutinize the actions of our fellow-man. Such arguments are not at the mercy of either interactionist or parallelist. On either hypothesis they stand unshaken.
We have seen that certain men of science are inclined to look upon the physical world as a great system, all the changes in which may be accounted for by an appeal to physical causes. And we have seen that the parallelist regards ideas, not as links in this chain, but as parallel with physical changes.
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.
Hence, the parallelist seems justified in objecting to the assimilation of the two. He prefers the word "concomitance," just because it marks the difference. He does not mean to indicate that the relation is any the less uniform or dependable when he denies that it is causal. They are the plan of the real external world and its changes; they are aspects of the objective order of experience.
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.
On the one hand it includes the parallelist conception which we have recognised as effete. And on the other it is plain that it is not self-sufficient. At least it requires that somewhere or other there should be a principle of position giving once for all what will afterwards be maintained.
Is it not reduced to the position of a passive spectator? Must we not regard man as "a physical automaton with parallel psychical states"? Such an account of man cannot fail to strike one as repugnant; and yet it is the parallelist himself whom we must thank for introducing us to it. The account is not a caricature from the pen of an opponent.
The plain man's objection to such an account of himself seems to be abundantly justified. As I have said earlier in this chapter, neither interactionist nor parallelist has the intention of repudiating the experience of world and mind common to us all. We surely have evidence enough to prove that minds count for something.
He claims that to make mental phenomena effects or causes of bodily motions is to make them material. Must, then, the parallelist abandon the argument for other minds? Not at all. The force of the argument lies in interpreting the phenomena presented by other bodies as one knows by experience the phenomena of one's own body must be interpreted.
One day Mr Bergson came down into the arena of dialectic, and, talking to his opponents in their own language, pulled their "psycho-physiological paralogism" to pieces before their eyes; it is only by confounding in one and the same argument two systems of incompatible notations, idealism and realism, that we succeed in enunciating the parallelist thesis.
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