Abstract

The fifth chapter of _ERCE_ criticizes William Lawrence’s materialism in his _Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man_, which he supports by appeal to the Humean account of causation found in the work of Thomas Brown. It focuses especially of Lawrence’s treatment of the “necessary connexion” between “irritability” and “living muscular fibres” and between “sensibility” and “living nervous fibres.” The chapter argues that Lawrence fails to recognize the need for separate qualities of _life_ and _mind_ because he fails to distinguish between two possible relations that can be meant by the term ‘necessary connexion’, one of them merely verbal and the other metaphysical and causal. Shepherd traces Lawrence’s alleged errors to his acceptance of the central features of Thomas Brown’s treatment of causation. Foremost among these is Brown’s definition of ‘cause’ as a relation essentially involving temporal antecedence and consequence between distinct objects.