Page:Mind and the Brain (1907).djvu/277

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the wrong side, while the natural sciences reckon, weigh, and measure the right side. And this is so true, they add, that the same phenomenon absolutely appears under two forms radically different from each other according as they are looked at from one or the other of the two points of view. Every one of our thoughts, they point out to us, is in correlation with a particular state of our cerebral matter; our thought is the subjective and mental face, the corresponding cerebral process is the objective and material face.

Though this dualism is frequently presented as an observed truth, I think it is possible to show its error. Take an example: I look at the plain before me, and see a flock of sheep pass through it. At the same time an observer, armed with a microscope à la Jules Verne, looks into my brain and observes there a certain molecular dance which accompanies my visual perception. Thus, on the one hand, is my representation; on the other, a dynamic state of the nerve cells. This is what constitutes the right and the wrong sides of the stuff. We are told, “See how little resemblance there is in this; a representation is a psychical, and a movement of molecules a material, thing.”

But I, on the contrary, think there is a great resemblance. When I see the flock passing, I have a visual perception. The observer who, by the hypothesis, is at that moment looking into