that we cannot; but the way is straight and narrow and there are few, if any, who succeed in finding it. Formally to abjure all metaphysics, and then really to admit no end of doubtful metaphysics of physics — as Mr. Huxley and Dr. Maudsley, and so many others are constantly doing — is scarcely consistent with adherence to the principles of pure science. No one has pointed this out more clearly than Professor James. In a royal passage (I, p. 137) he declares: "As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only, as the automatists do, and to say that that causation is unintelligible, whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born. One cannot thus blow hot and cold. One must be impartially naïf or impartially critical."
Words like those just quoted affect me somewhat as did the recent utterance of a man whose entire life had been devoted to physical researches. This speaker, in the very midst of insisting on the complete right of science to assume that all phenomena belong to its domain, affirmed the human will to be a vera causa and to originate changes that run throughout the entire physical universe. Bravo! was my involuntary exclamation; but should not I, as a pronounced spiritualist in psychology, be well beaten and ostracized from the sacred circle of so-called "scientists," were I to make a similar venture?
As to the explanatory value of the metaphysical postulate of a mind, or soul, I feel obliged to differ greatly from Professor James. That the postulate should not be intruded into the science of psychology, to warp its facts and prejudice its legitimate inductions, I readily admit. Nevertheless, it is a postulate which not only stands as a great light at the end of our pathway, but which also illumines, by interpreting, the significance of every step. Says our author : "I confess, therefore, that to posit a soul influenced in some mysterious way by the brain-states, and responding to them by conscious affections of its own, seems to me the line of least logical resistance, so far as we yet have attained." Beside this confession I will place my
