To this I reply:  What of that?  We must not forget what is meant by such concomitance (section 39).  We are dealing with a fixed and necessary relation, not with an accidental one.  If these “wants” had been lacking, there would have been no coat.  So my second answer to the objector is, that, on the hypothesis of the parallelist, the relations between mental phenomena and physical phenomena are just as dependable as that relation between physical phenomena which we call that of cause and effect.  Moreover, since activity and causality are not the same thing, there is no ground for asserting that the mind cannot be active, merely because it is not material and, hence, cannot be, strictly speaking, a cause of motions in matter.

The plain man is entirely in the right in thinking that minds are active.  The truth is that nothing can be active except as it has a mind.  The relation of purpose and end is the one we have in view when we speak of the activity of minds.

It is, thus, highly unjust to a man to tell him that he is “a physical automaton with parallel psychical states,” and that he is wound up by putting food into his mouth.  He who hears this may be excused if he feels it his duty to emit steam, walk with a jerk, and repudiate all responsibility for his actions.  Creatures that think, form plans, and act, are not what we call automata.  It is an abuse of language to call them such, and it misleads us into looking upon them as we have no right to look upon them.  If men really were automata in the proper sense of the word, we could not look upon them as wise or unwise, good or bad; in short, the whole world of moral distinctions would vanish.

Perhaps, in spite of all that has been said in this and in the preceding section, some will feel a certain repugnance to being assigned a place in a world as orderly as our world is in this chapter conceived to be—­a world in which every phenomenon, whether physical or mental, has its definite place, and all are subject to law.  But I suppose our content or discontent will not be independent of our conception of what sort of a world we conceive ourselves to be inhabiting.

If we conclude that we are in a world in which God is revealed, if the orderliness of it is but another name for Divine Providence, we can scarcely feel the same as we would if we discovered in the world nothing of the Divine.  I have in the last few pages been discussing the doctrine of purposes and ends, teleology, but I have said nothing of the significance of that doctrine for Theism.  The reader can easily see that it lies at the very foundation of our belief in God.  The only arguments for theism that have had much weight with mankind have been those which have maintained there are revealed in the world generally evidences of a plan and purpose at least analogous to what we discover when we scrutinize the actions of our fellow-man.  Such arguments are not at the mercy of either interactionist or parallelist.  On either hypothesis they stand unshaken.