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 to have touched the weak part of the doctrine and not to be decisive. We will only run through them briefly.

It has been said: there is no logical necessity which forces us to refuse to the consciousness the privilege of acting in complete independence of the nervous mechanism.

It has also been said: it is by no means certain that any nervous mechanism can be invented which imitates and, if need were, could replace an intellectual act. For instance, what association of nerve cells, what molecular action, can imitate an act of comparison which enables us to see a resemblance between two objects? Let it be supposed, for example, that the resemblance of two impressions come from a partial identity, and that the latter has for material support an identity in the seat or the form of the corresponding nervous influx. But what is identity? How can it be conceived without supposing resemblance, of which it is but a form? How, then, can the one be explained by the other? Thus, for instance, at the bottom of all our intellectual acts, there is a certain degree of belief. Can any material combination be found which corresponds thereto?

There is one last objection, the most serious of all. Parallelism, by establishing a fixed and invariable relation between the physical and the moral, ends by denying the rôle of this last, since the physical