Note 11 — Chapter IV

It is, however, the belief of all religious persons that even this distinction does not hold. If they are right in their belief, the distinction would then become one as to the mode of converse. In this case what is called communion with the Supreme Mind must be supposed to be a communion sui generis: the converse of mind with mind is here direct, or does not require to be translated into the language of mechanical signs: it is subjective, not ejective. Still, even here we must believe that the physical aspect accompanies the psychical, although not necessarily observed. An act of prayer, for example, is, on its physical aspect, an act of cerebration: so is the answer (supposing it genuine), in as far as the worshipper is concerned. Thus prayer and its answer (according to Monism) resemble all the other processes of Nature in presenting an objective side of strictly physical causation. Nor is it possible that the case could be otherwise, if all mental processes consist in physical process, and vice versa. It is obvious that this consideration has important bearings on the question as to the physical efficacy of prayer. From a monistic point of view both those who affirm and those who deny such efficacy are equally in the right, and equally in the wrong; they are merely quarrelling upon different sides of the same shield. For, according to Monism, if the theologians are right in supposing that the Supreme Mind is the hearer of prayer in any case, they are also right in supposing that the Mind must necessarily be able to grant what is called physical answers, seeing that in order to grant any answer (even of the most apparently spiritual kind) some physical change must be produced, if it be only in the brain of the petitioner. On the other hand, the scientists are equally right in maintaining that no physical answer to prayer can be of the nature of a miracle, or produced independently of strictly physical causation; for, if so, the physical and the psychical would no longer be coincident. But, until the scientists are able to perform the hopeless task of proving where the possibilities of physical causation end, as a mere matter of abstract speculation and going upon the theory of Monism, it is evident that the theologians may have any latitude they choose to claim, both as regards this matter and that of so-called miracles.