The others
but transmit the agent's impulse; on him
we put responsibility; we name him when one
asks us 'Who's to blame?'
But the most previous agents ascertainable,
instead of being a longer span, are often of
much shorter span than the activity in view.
Brain-cells are our best example. My brain-
cells are believed to excite each other from
next to next (by contiguous transmission of
katabolic alteration, let us say) and to have
been doing so long before this present stretch
of lecturing-activity on my part began. If any
one cell-group stops its activity, the lecturing
will cease or show disorder of form. _Cessante_
_causa,_cessat_et_effectus_ -- does not this look as
if the short-span brain activiteis were the more
real activities, and the lecturing activities
on my part only their effects? Moreover, as
Hume so clearly pointed out,(1) in my mental
activity-situation the words physically to be
---
1 [_Enquiry_Concerning_Human_Understanding_, sect VII, part I,
Selby-Bigge's edition, pp. 65 ff.]
175
uttered are represented as the activity's immediate
goal. These words, however, cannot
be uttered without intermediate physical processes
in the bulb and vagi nerves, which processes
nevertheless fail to figure in the mental
activity-series at all.
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