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The proof does not carry this conviction, that cerebral conditions establish and define mental ones, but only that they are often an immediate, irresistible provocation to them; as bad digestion to bad dreams. Physical states may overpower the mind, and the form of the hallucination still be due to the mind. The fever may induce a very diverse delirium in different persons. The two sets of causes are concurrent in the result.

The reverse proposition we confidently offer as presenting more important and more obvious truth. Pure mental states affect and usually control cerebral ones. (1) This is the manifest and unavoidable conclusion from the fact of thought. Thought involves the evolution of one mental state from a previous mental state, the attaching of a second conception or judgment to a former one. If its not this, it ceases to be thought, and becomes illusion. Even imagination evokes its images one from another, unites them by a mental connection. If one thought, as in the proof of a proposition, follows another, not by an inherent connection, a mental dependence, but by the relation of successive physical states in the brain, then we are utterly at fault in the entire thought-process, and it is something quite other than we have supposed it to be. The images of the imagination even can not be shadows that chase each other on the screen by an outside, alien law, much less can the successive judgments of coherent thought be united independently of the thinking agent. Reasons cohere, thoughts coalesce, conclusions are evolved from premises, and these facts imply that a previous mental state is, in connection with the underlying powers of the mind, the efficient source of a succeeding one; that the nexus is a mental efficiency, and not a physical one. Reasoning, as the result of a series of cerebral states united by unknown physical forces, is utterly incomprehensible, is subversive of our most direct primitive