ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the organisms simply as complicated material systems which behave in certain characteristic ways. The peculiarity of a volition as a cause-factor is that it involves as an essential part of it the idea of the effect. Mr Hume's arguments on this point are absolutely irrelevant, and that it may very well be true that in volition we positively know that our desire for such and such a bodily movement is a necessary condition of the happening of just that movement at just that time. The gases produced by the explosion have some energy of movement and some heat-energy, but much less chemical energy than the unexploded charge had. A conservative system might therefore be defined as one whose total energy is redistributed, but not altered in amount, by changes that happen within it. The Interactionist's contention is simply that there is a gap in any purely physiological explanation of deliberate action.
