Force and Matter

Answers

• Q05AUTOMATON

  Can human choices be fully explained by physical causes?

  Yes. mental life including will is explained by matter and force. There is no force without matter and no mind without brain; thought and will are functions of brain matter under natural law.

  They forget also that spirit can only exist on a substratum of organized matter, and that not the shadow of a proof can be brought forward to show that spirit can attain to an independent existence outside of matter. … Lastly they overlook that which in fact is proved everywhere, that if spirit and matter were opposites they could not act upon each other, nor in any essential respect be transmutable. The simple solution of the problem lies in the fact that not only physical but also psychical energies inhere in matter, and that the latter always become manifest wherever the necessary conditions are found, or that, wherever matter is arranged in a certain manner and moved in a certain way in the brain or the nervous system, the phenomena of sensation and thought are produced in similar fashion, as those of attraction and repulsion are under other conditions. *' If matter can fall to the ground then it can also think." — Schopenhauer. In the form of a stone it falls to the ground ; in the form of a muscle it con- tracts ; in the form of living nerve-substance it becomes capable of feeling and of thinking, or rises into self- consciousness.

  Archive.org records for German and English editions; did not open the free-will chapter, so no location given.