rap 
 
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 The School of Law of Cornell University 
 
 And Presented February 14, 1893 
 
 • IN nEHORY OP 
 JUDCiE DOUGLASS BOARDMAN 
 
 FIRST DEAN OF THE SCHOOL 
 
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Cornell University Library 
 BF 161.M44P5 1877 
 
 Physiology of mind. 
 
 3 1924 024 900 387 
 
a Cornell University 
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THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. 
 
THE 
 
 PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. 
 
 BEING THE FIRST PART OF A THIRD EDITION, 
 
 KEV1SED, ENLARGED, AND IN GREAT PART REWRITTEN, 
 
 OF " THE PHYSIOLOGY AND PA THOLOGY OF MIND." 
 
 < 
 
 • V'- 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY MAUDSLEY, M.D. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 
 
 549 AND 551 BROADWAY. 
 1877. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The first edition of my work on the Physiology 
 and Pathology of Mind was published in the year 
 1867. A second edition appeared in the following 
 year, which was in due time exhausted, and the 
 book has been out of print for some years. The 
 delay in the publication of a third edition has been 
 owing mainly to the occupations of active profes- 
 sional life, which have hindered the bestowal of the 
 systematic work of revision and enlargement made 
 necessary by the progress of physiological and 
 psychological knowledge ; but partly also to a 
 lack of enthusiasm in the labour, arising from a 
 conviction that what was of value in the book had 
 either been said already, or would anyhow very 
 soon be said, by some one else. The current of 
 psychological thought having set so strongly in 
 physiological channels, it is pretty certain that the 
 reflections which one person has had, however 
 original they may seem to him, some other person 
 has had, has now, or will very soon have. One is 
 happily, too, more critical, as well. as less enthusiastic 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 and confident, at forty than at thirty years of age ; 
 and a result of the more sober mood is that what 
 seemed very important, and much needing to be 
 said, at the earlier date, does not seem of so much 
 consequence, or anywise to press for delivery, at 
 the later date. 
 
 There was another inhibitory reflection, occa- 
 sioned by a contemplation of the revolution in 
 psychological method, which has been going on 
 for some time now,. and of the entirely different 
 aspects which many psychological questions have 
 assumed in consequence. The changes that have 
 taken place have been so great and so rapid that 
 a book written ten years ago must necessarily, 
 unless re-written, be much out of date now. 
 
 In the preface to the first edition, the aim of the 
 work was declared to be twofold : " first, to treat 
 of mental phenomena from a physiological rather 
 than from a metaphysical point of view ; and, 
 secondly, to bring the manifold instructive in- 
 stances presented by the unsound mind to bear 
 upon the interpretation of the obscure problems 
 of mental science— to do what I could to put a 
 happy end to the 'inauspicious divorce' between 
 the Physiology and Pathology of Mind." The 
 way in which the fulfilment of the first part of 
 this twofold aim was prosecuted did not fail to 
 provoke much criticism, of the direct and indirect 
 sort, from those who assumed that it was a reck- 
 
PREFACE. vii 
 
 less attempt to discard entirely the psychological 
 method of inquiry into mental phenomena, and to 
 employ the physiological method exclusively. No 
 doubt the energetic exposition of the shortcomings 
 of the psychological method and the earnest ad- 
 vocacy of the physiological method lent some 
 countenance to that supposition, but it was none 
 the less directly contrary to the distinct enunciation 
 of that which was advocated in the first chapter 
 as the proper method of the study of mind, and 
 with the method actually pursued in the execution 
 of the work throughout. It was not possible to 
 set forth adequately the fruitfulness and the rich 
 promise of the physiological method, and to elevate 
 it to its rightful position, without exposing the 
 shortcomings of the psychological method, and 
 degrading it to a lower rank than that which it 
 had usurped. 
 
 The . physiological method has made such great 
 way that it stands not now in need either of de- 
 fence or advocacy ; and the result cannot fail to 
 be, as regards this book, that the exposition of its 
 merits, made with all the vehemence of youthful 
 enthusiasm, must look like a superfluous assertion 
 of claims which are not seriously contested, while 
 the record of acquisitions which have become part 
 of the general body of thought certainly requires 
 not the aggressive prominence which it had. 
 
 To adapt this edition in some measure to these 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 new conditions, I have, while incorporating the 
 entire substance of previous editions, omitted or 
 modified various expressions and passages which 
 seemed objectionable as they stood, and have 
 sought to maintain the level of a more sober style ; 
 and, in order to bring it even with the present 
 state of knowledge, the original matter has been 
 carefully revised and largely added to. The con- 
 sequence has been that what was the First Part 
 of former editions, treating of the Physiology of 
 Mind, and had been written in the first instance 
 in order to lay a foundation for the Second Part, 
 which dealt with the Pathology of Mind, has • 
 grown so much, and attained by its growth such 
 an independent character, as to render it advisable 
 to make.it a separate volume. 
 
 This volume is, then, presented as a treatise on 
 the physiology of mind, and may stand on its own 
 account as such, quite apart from the second 
 volume which, following in due season, will be 
 occupied entirely with the pathology of mind, and 
 with the accomplishment of the second part of the 
 twofold aim. Or, if it be thought too ambitious a 
 thing to call it a treatise, let it be looked upon as 
 a disquisition, by the light of existing knowledge, 
 concerning the nervous structures and functions 
 which are the probable physical foundations, or 
 the objective aspects, of those natural phenomena 
 which appear in consciousness as feelings and 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 thoughts, and are known only in that way — that 
 is to say, subjectively. Should any one choose 
 to declare that the book is neither Physiology 
 nor Psychology, but an ill-conceived medley, and 
 be offended at what is offered to him, I am not 
 careful to answer in that matter ; I am more 
 wishful, in my unwisdom, that it should be in 
 conformity with nature . than with the divisions of 
 sciences which he and those who think with him 
 labour to impose upon nature by way of amend- 
 ment upon its continuity and unity. It may not 
 be amiss perhaps to caution the reader that he 
 allow not the book to obtain by implication, 
 either from physiology or from psychology, more 
 authority than it is fairly entitled to ; I desire 
 Only that it may stand on its own bottom as an 
 exposition of the aspects, be they right or wrong, 
 in which the author's study and reflection have led 
 him to view the matters which are discussed in 
 its pages. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ON THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 
 
 Aspects of nature terrible to man in the infancy of thought ; whence 
 superstitious feelings and fancies regarding nature. As these 
 disappear metaphysical entities are assigned as natural causes, 
 and man deems himself the " measure of the universe." Finally, 
 the interrogation and interpretation of nature, after the inductive 
 method, begin j fruitful results of this method. Its adoption 
 was the extension to the intellect of the law of internal adaptation 
 to external relations. Any proposition concerning the uncon- 
 ditioned or absolute is nonsense. Is the inductive method, 
 objectively applied, available for the study of Mind ? Difficulties 
 in the way of such application. Development of biography, and 
 absence of any progress in metaphysics, are evidences of its 
 value. Discussion of the claim of Psychology to be inductive. 
 Its method of interrogating self-consciousness palpably inade- 
 quate ; contradictory results of its use, and impossibility of 
 applying it inductively. Observation of animals, of children, of 
 the lower races of men, and of insane persons has been entirely 
 neglected. Self-consciousness unreliable in the information 
 which it does give, and incompetent to give any account of a 
 large part of mental activity : gives no account of the mental 
 phenomena of the infant, of the uncultivated -adult, and of the 
 insane ; no account of the bodily conditions which underlie every 
 mental manifestation ; no account of the large field of unconscious 
 mental action exhibited, not only in the unconscious assimilation 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 of impressions, but in the registration of ideas and their associa- 
 tions, in their latent existence and influence when not active, and 
 in their recall into activity ; and no account of the influence 
 organically exerted upon the brain by other organs of the body. 
 Mind a consensus of affective, intellectual, and active functions, 
 and the basis of the affective functions is in the organic life : mind 
 a direct function of brain, but every organic function represented 
 in the brain. Defects of psychological nomenclature. Incom- 
 petency of self-consciousness further displayed by examination 
 of its real nature ; its method to be dethroned, not discarded. 
 Physiology cannot any longer be ignored ; henceforth necessary 
 to associate the Physiological with the Psychological method ; 
 the former being really the more important and fruitful method. 
 The study of the plan of development of Mind, the study of it 
 forms of degeneration in the insane and in criminals, the study 
 of its progress and regress, as exhibited in history, and the study 
 of biography, should not be neglected. The union of empirical 
 and rational faculties, really advocated by Bacon as his method, 
 is strictly applicable to the investigation of mental as of other 
 natural phenomena. Development of mind in nature a process 
 of organic evolution : unity and continuity in nature. The 
 question of relative value. of inductive or deductive reasoning 
 often a question of the capacity of him who uses it ; difference 
 between genius and mediocrity. Conclusion — Notes. 
 
 Page 1—76 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 
 
 The term " Mind " used in different senses : in its scientific sense, as 
 a natural force ; and in its popular sense, as an abstraction made 
 into a metaphysical entity. The brain certainly the organ of 
 the Mind, and the nervous cells the immediate agents of mental 
 function. A correlative change in nerve element accompanies 
 each mental state ; chemical composition of nerve element beine 
 extremely complex and unstable. Mental power an organised 
 result in the proper centres-a mental organization. No nerve 
 m lowest animal forms; perception of stimulus being the direct 
 physical effect m a homogeneous substance. The differentiation 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 of tissues in higher animals demands special means of intercom- 
 munication : the nervous system, at first very simple, subserving 
 this function. With increasing complexity of organization, a 
 corresponding complexity of the nervous system. Organs of 
 special senses appear, in very rudimentary form at first, by differ- 
 entiation of the general sense of touch ; corresponding central 
 nervous ganglia constitute entire brain in Invertebrata. Sensori- 
 motor function. Discriminations of organic susceptibility or 
 sensibility. Relation of consciousness to sensibility. Rudiments 
 of cerebral hemispheres and rudimentary ideation and emotion in 
 fishes. Convolution of the grey matter of the hemispheres in the 
 higher mammals, and corresponding increase of intelligence in 
 them. Differences in the size of the brain, and in the complexity 
 of its convolutions, in different races of men, and in different in- 
 dividuals of the same race ; corresponding differences in intel- 
 lectual development. Human embryonic development conforms 
 with general plan of development of Vertebrata. Discrimina- 
 tion of nervous centres : (a) primary, or Ideational ; (b) secondary, 
 or Sensorial ; {c) tertiary, or Reflex ; (d) quaternary, or Organic. 
 The evidence of the different functions of these centres, is ana- 
 tomical, physiological, experimental, and pathological. Lock- 
 hart Clarke on the structure of the convolutions in man. 
 Discriminating observation of mental phenomena necessary, and 
 metaphysical conception of Mind no longer tenable. Definitions 
 of mind. Mind never met with apart from brain. Differences 
 of matter in dignity and corresponding modes of force. Mind 
 the most dependent of all the natural forces ; relations of mental 
 force in nature. Concluding remarks. — Notes. Page 77 — 135 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE SPINAL CORD AND REFLEX ACTION. 
 
 Spinal' cord riot a conducting organ only, but contains nervous 
 centres of reflex or automatic movements. Earliest movements 
 of infant are reflex. Illustrations of reflex movements in the 
 decapitated frog. Pfliiger's experiments on the frog, and dis- 
 cussion of the theory that the spinal cord has sensorial functions. 
 So-called design of an act not necessarily evidence of will or 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 consciousness. Examples of inhibitory function. The nature of 
 the idea of design. Spinal cord is educated, and becomes the 
 centre of many acquired or secondary automatic movements ; 
 illustrations. The motor faculties mostly acquired in man 
 by education and exercise, but innate in many animals. 
 Bearing of instances of acquired adaptation of means to end on 
 the doctrine of 6nal causes. Motor faculties are exhausted by 
 exercise, and require periodical rest for restoration of power by 
 nutrition. Quantitative and qualitative relation of reaction to the 
 impression. Innate potentiality of nerve-element, and ac- 
 quired potentiality. Hereditary transmission of acquired 
 faculties implants the germ of innate endowment. Continuous 
 function of spinal cord : it acts («) on muscles ; (b) on vessels : 
 (c) on elements of a tissue ; (d) on other nerve-centres. Pfliiger's 
 laws of reflex movements. Causes of disorder of function of 
 spinal cord : (a) original differences of constitution ; (b) excessive 
 action ; (c) quantity and quality of the blood ; {d) eccentric 
 irritation ; (e) interruption of its connection with the brain. 
 Close sympathy between different parts of the nervous system . 
 Clear conceptions of the functions of spinal centres indispensable 
 to the study of the functions of the higher nervous centres. — 
 Notes . Page 136— 185 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE SENSORY CENTRES AND SENSATION. 
 
 Collections of grey matter constituting the sensory ganglia intervene 
 between the spinal centres and the supreme hemispherical ganglia. 
 Sensorium commune. Anatomical relations of different grey 
 nuclei yet uncertain, but nerve-fibres certainly connected with 
 their cells. Sensory ganglia with connected motor nuclei the 
 centres of independent reaction— of sensori-motor movements : 
 examples. Such movements are primary and secondary auto- 
 matic: examples. Instinctive acts of animals are sensori-motor. 
 Relation of consciousness to sensori-motor action : examples to 
 illustrate this relation, and discussion of them. Greater acute- 
 ness of sense in animals than in man, and consequent reactions 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 to impressions of which he is not sensible. Development of 
 sense in man by special cultivation. The origin and nature of 
 instincts. The law of heredity, and the law of variation. Trans- 
 formation of rational into instinctive acts. Relation of sensation 
 to perception. The dawn of perception. The ideas of object 
 and subject : the conception -of the ego. Development of per- 
 ception by synthesis of sensations. Sensations act as symbols in 
 sensori-motor action. Composite nature of mature sensation. 
 The idea of organization necessary to the just interpretation of 
 sensation ; assimilation and differentiation. No positive evidence 
 of intelligence and volition in the sensory ganglia : uncertain 
 whether they possess consciousness or not. The division made 
 between psychology and physiology is artificial. Consciousness 
 a concomitant of mental function, not the essential factor in it. 
 Subordination of the sensory centres to the cerebral ganglia. 
 Causes of disorder of the sensory ganglia : (a) original defects ; 
 (b) excessive stimulation ; (c) quantity and quality of blood ; (d) 
 reflex irritation ; (e) influence of cerebral hemispheres (?) . Con- 
 cluding remarks on the analogy between the functions of the 
 sensory centres and of the spinal centres. — Notes. 
 
 Page 186-258 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE SUPREME CEREBRAL CENTRES AND IDEATION. 
 
 Cortical centres of the hemispheres the centres of Ideation. Emotion 
 and volition. Speculations concerning the functions of different 
 convolutions. Pathological observations and inferences. Experi- 
 ments on animals, and the results. Anterior convolutions are 
 connected with motor, posterior with sensory, tracts. Path of a 
 psychical reflex act. The cerebral correlate of idea. Formation 
 of concrete and abstract ideas. Animals have not abstract 
 ideas, and the lowest savages have few or none. The so-called 
 fundamental or innate ideas. The probable mechanism of ideation, 
 and of the formation of concepts from precepts. Reflex cerebral 
 function — how far an explanation. Different modes of operation 
 of idea : [a) on movements, voluntary and involuntary, conscious 
 and unconscious ; (6) on the sensory ganglia, — physiologically, 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 as a regular part of mental function ; pathologically, in the pro- 
 duction of hallucinations ; ic) on the functions of nutrition and 
 secretion : illustrations ; (d) on other ideas : reflection or delibera- 
 tion. Relation of consciousness to Ideational activity. Com- 
 parison of ideas with movements in regard to their association, 
 their relation to consciousness, the time required for their per- 
 formance, and the limited power which the mind has over them. 
 The nature and influence of attention : voluntary and involuntary 
 attention. Motor innervation an essential factor in attention. 
 The physical conditions of an act of attention. Localization of 
 consciousness in the brain. The character of the particular 
 association of Ideas determined by (a) the individual nature, 
 (b) special life-experience. General laws of association of ideas. 
 Fundamental or innate ideas. The uniformity of nature. 
 Acquisition of ideas through the accumulated experiences of the 
 race and of the individual. The individual's particular associa- 
 tion of ideas — need of an individual psychology. Concluding 
 remarks on the illustration of the law of progress from the 
 general to the special in development, afforded by the develop- 
 ment of ideas. —Notes. . Page 2^ — 347 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 ON EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 
 
 Relation of emotion to idea. Emotions are based in ' the organic 
 life. Influence of state of nerve-element upon emotion. Idea 
 favourable to self-expansion is agreeable ; an idea opposed to 
 self-expansion is disagreeable or painful. Appetite or desire for 
 agreeable stimulus, and repulsion to or avoidance of painful 
 stimulus, as motives of action. Desire is self-conscious appetite. 
 The operation of the sexual appetite. Equilibrium between 
 individual and his surroundings not accompanied with desire. 
 Desires furnish the impulses to action ; the function of the intel- 
 lect is regulative. Character of the emotion determined by the 
 nature of external stimulus, and by the condition of the nerve- . 
 element, original and acquired. Original nature as determined 
 by (a) the race; {6) the culture of the epoch; (c) ancestral 
 qualities ; (d) bodily temperament. The ccenassthesis. The 
 mental or psychical tone. The complex nature of emotional 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 aptitudes, and their resolution or retrograde metamorphosis. 
 Effects of organic viscera upon the emotions ; such effects are 
 complex and non-intermittent, and cannot be studied by the 
 subjective method. Influence of condition of blood upon the 
 emotional tone. The expressions of the emotions : (a) in 
 muscular movements ; (b) in changes of nutrition and secretion ; 
 (c) in ideational activity. Action of disordered emotion. 
 Emotions' and passions. The evolution in the mental life of the 
 fundamental instincts of self-preservation and propagation. The 
 moral feeling — its origin and development. The moral law and 
 the law of natural selection. The progress from the general and 
 simple to the special and complex, in the evolution of the 
 emotions. — Notes Page 348 — 408 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 ON VOLITION. 
 
 Will, like every other natural force, has a cause. Free-will or 
 necessity : discussion of question. The reason and utility of the 
 doctrine of free-will. The will not a single, undecomposable 
 faculty of uniform power, but varies as its cause varies : differs 
 in quantity and quality, according to the preceding reflection. 
 According to the common view of it, an abstraction is made 
 into a metaphysical entity. The design in the particular volition 
 is a result of a gradually effected mental organization : a physical 
 necessity, not transcending or anticipating, but conforming with, 
 experience. Erroneous notions as to the autocratic power of 
 will. Its actual power considered (1) over movements, and (2) 
 over the mental operations. I. Over movements : (a) no power 
 over the involuntary movements essential to life ; (b) no power 
 to effect voluntary movements until they have been acquired by 
 practice ; (c) cannot control the means, can only will the event. 
 2. Over mental operations : («) the formation of ideas and of 
 their associations independent of it ; (b) its impotency in the 
 early stages of mental development — in the young child and in 
 the savage ; (c) cannot call up a particular train of thought, or 
 dismiss a train of thought, except through associations of ideas 
 which are beyond its control, and sometimes not at all. As many 
 centres of volitional reaction in the brain as there are centres of 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 ideas. Volition built up from residua of previous volitions of a 
 like kind. Volitional control is an instance of inhibitory 
 function in the highest nerve-centres. To the freest action ot 
 the will there are necessary an unimpeded association of ideas 
 and a strong personality. Character not determined by the will, 
 but determining it in the particular act. Relation of emotion to 
 volition. Character determines belief as well as conduct. Modi- 
 fication of character. The history of a man declares his character. 
 Differences in the quality and energy of the will. The character 
 of the reformer, and the conditions of a successful reform. Ex- 
 tensive and intensive reformers. Will the highest force in nature; 
 its highest function creative — initiating a new development of 
 nature. — Notes Page 409 — 462 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 ON ACTUATION. 
 
 Movement follows sensation. Movements leave behind them residua 
 in the motor centres, whence a repository of latent or abstract 
 movements. Motorium commune. Motor residua or intuitions 
 intervene between motive and act, and are related to conception 
 on the reactive side as sensation is on the receptive side. Actua- 
 tion proposed for the psychological designation of this depart- 
 ment. Motor intuitions mostly innate in animals, acquired in 
 man. Illustrations from vision, speech, the phenomena of hypno- 
 tism, paralysis, insanity, &c. The effects of bodily attitudes 
 upon mental states. The acquisition of speech. Aphasia : the 
 pathological conditions of its phenomena, and their signification 
 in relation to motor intuitions. Condition of intelligence in 
 aphasia. Thought possible without verbal language. Motor 
 hallucinations. Co-ordinate convulsions. The muscular sense : 
 its relation to the motor intuitions, and the essential part which 
 it plays in mental function. Morbid disorder of the muscular 
 sense. The will acts upon muscles indirectly through the motor 
 nervous centres. Orderly subordination of nervous centres in 
 the expression of the will in action. Natural differences between 
 different persons in the power of expression by speech or other- 
 wise. The origin, nature, and development of language. 
 
 Notes Pagers— 511 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 ON MEMORY AND IMAGINATION. 
 
 Definition and organic condition of memory. Memory exists in 
 every organic element of the body — an organic registration of im- 
 pressions. Conception of a mental organization necessary to an 
 understanding of its phenomena. Relation of consciousness to 
 memory. No memory of that which we have not had experi- 
 ence of, and no experience ever entirely forgotten. Physiological 
 ideas of assimilation and differentiation necessary to the interpre- 
 tation of its formation. Memory and recollection. Conscious- 
 ness of the possession of what we do not actually remember. 
 Imagination : its nature and function. The conditions of its 
 highest development. Relation of memory to imagination. 
 Fancy. Power of imagination built up by the assimilation 
 not only of the like in ideas, but also of the relations of ideas. 
 The one-making faculty. Its productive or creative p*ower is, 
 in its highest display, involuntary and unconscious : it is the 
 supreme manifestation of organic evolution. Differences in 
 the character of memory in different persons. Manifold dis- 
 orders to which memory is liable. The memory of early 
 youth and of old age. No exact memory of pain : why? — 
 Notes Page 512 — 540 
 
THE 
 
 PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ON THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 
 
 " Ich sag? es dir : ein Kerl der speculirt, 
 1st wie ein Thier, auf diirrer Heide 
 Von einem bbsen Geist im Kreis herum gefiihrt, 
 Und rings umher liegt schone griine Weide. " 
 
 Faust. 
 
 The right estimate of his relations to external nature has 
 ever been to man a matter of difficulty and uncertainty. 
 In the savage state of his infancy he feels himself so 
 little in the presence of nature's vastness, so helpless in 
 conflict with its resistless forces, so overawed by the spec- 
 tacle of its serenely inexorable course, that he falls 
 down in abject prostration before its various powers. 
 The earth of a sudden heaves beneath his trembling feet, 
 and his shattered dwellings bury him in their ruins ; the 
 swelling waters overpass their accustomed boundaries 
 and indifferently sweep away his property or his life ; the 
 furious hurricane ruthlessly destroys the labours of years ; 
 and famine or pestilence, regardless of his streaming 
 eyes and piteous prayers, stalks in desolating march 
 through a panic-stricken people. In the" deep conscious- 
 ness of his individual powerlessness he falls down in an 
 
2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 agony of terror and worships the causes of his sufferings : 
 he deifies the powers of nature, builds altars to propitiate 
 the angry Neptune, and, by offering sacrifices of that 
 which is most dear to him, even his own flesh and blood, 
 hopes to mitigate the fury of Phcebus Apollo and to stay 
 the dreadful clang of his silver bow. When the army of 
 the King of Assyria, coming up against Jerusalem to de- 
 stroy it, is devastated by pestilence, it is the angel of the 
 Lord which goes out in the night and smites in the camp 
 of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand 
 so that they are all dead corpses in the morning. In 
 like manner, when any case of sudden death occurs now 
 among the Bongos of Central Africa, it is some old 
 woman who has allied herself with the witches to do 
 evil, for it is deemed certain that a strong man would 
 not die unless he were bewitched.* Everything appears 
 supernatural when man knows nothing of the natural; 
 palsied with fear, he cannot observe and investigate; 
 himself he feels to be insignificant and helpless, while to 
 nature he looks up with awe-struck apprehension as mys- 
 terious and almighty. Reflect on the fearful feelings 
 which any apparent exception to the regular course of 
 nature — the appearance of a comet, the occurrence of 
 an earthquake or of an eclipse — even now produces in 
 many uncultivated minds, on the superstitious dread 
 which follows such unfamiliar event, and it will not be 
 difficult to realize the extreme mental prostration of 
 primitive mankind. 
 
 Through familiarity, however, consternation after a 
 while subsides, and the spirit of inquiry follows upon 
 that of reverence; the prostrate being rises from his 
 
 • Schweinfurth's Heart of Africa, vol. i. p. 310. When the 
 North American chief Picheto was one night much alarmed by 
 the violence of the storm, he got up and offered some tobacco to 
 the thunder, entreating it to stop.-TANN £K , Narrative of a 
 Captwity among the North American Indians, p. 136. 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 3 
 
 knees to examine into the causes of events. Experience, 
 sooner or later, reveals the uniformity with which they 
 come to pass ; he discovers more or less of the laws of 
 their occurrence, and perceives that he can by applying 
 his knowledge avoid much of the damage which he has 
 hitherto suffered — that he can, by attending to theit 
 laws, even turn to his profit those once dreaded physical 
 forces. Now it is that man begins to feel that he has a 
 much higher position in nature than in his infancy he 
 had imagined ; for a time he looks upon himself as be- 
 longing to the same order as the things around him ; 
 and he emancipates himself in great part from the 
 dominion of the priests in whom he had hitherto believed 
 as the sacred propitiators of the gods whom his fears had 
 fashioned. When his creeds are seen to spring from an 
 imperfection of intellect, the prayers founded on them 
 are abandoned as marking an imperfection of will. 
 
 Thales of Miletus is said to have been the first who, 
 in this advance amongst the Greeks, laid aside the 
 priestly character and stood forth as a pure philosopher ; 
 and those who immediately followed him, and consti- 
 tuted the Ionian school of philosophy, having an instinc- 
 tive feeling of the unity between man and nature, did 
 seek objectively for a first principle of things — the apxn — 
 common to him and the rest of nature. This slow and 
 tedious method was soon, however, abandoned for the 
 easier and quicker method of deduction from conscious- 
 ness : abstractions were rrfade from the concrete by the 
 active mind ; and the abstractions being then projected 
 out of the mind into objective realities, were looked 
 upon and applied as actual entities in nature. Anaxi- 
 mander, diving into his own mind and finding something 
 inconceivable there, gave to it the name of the Infinite, 
 and, transferring it outwards, was thenceforth content to 
 pronounce it to be the true origin of all things ; whilst 
 Pythagoras, going perhaps still further into the unmeaning, 
 
4 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 proclaimed numbers, which are mere arbitrary symbols, 
 to be actual existences and the essences of things. 
 
 Thus it was that man, forgetful of his early humility, 
 rose by degrees to the creation of a god after his own 
 image, and to the construction of the laws of an external 
 world after the pattern of his own thoughts: he wor- 
 shipped a god who was of like passions with himself, sus- 
 picious, jealous, revengeful, kindled to anger by neglect, 
 appeased by praise and sacrifice, while such motives as 
 he felt to influence his own actions were held also to be 
 the principles governing the relations of external objects; 
 natural phenomena being explained by sympathies, loves, 
 discords, hates. As the child attributes life to the dead 
 objects around it, speaking to them and thinking to re- 
 ceive answers from them, so mankind, in the childhood 
 of thought, assigned its subjective feelings to objective 
 nature, entirely subordinating the physical to the meta- 
 physical : it was but another form of that anthropo- 
 morphism by which the Dryad was placed in the tree, the 
 Naiad in the fountain, Atropos with her scissors near the 
 running life-thread, and a Sun-god enthroned in the place 
 of a law of gravitation. As was natural, man, who thus 
 imposed his laws upon nature, soon lost all his former 
 humility, and from one erroneous extreme passed to the 
 opposite : as once he fell abjectly down in an agony of 
 fear, so now he rose proudly up in an ecstasy of conceit. 
 
 The assertion that man is the measure of the universe 
 was the definite- expression of this metaphysical stage of 
 human development. But it was a state that must 
 plainly be fruitless of real knowledge ; there could be no 
 general agreement among men when each one looked 
 into his own mind, and, arbitrarily framing the principles 
 of external nature out of what he thought he found there, 
 evolved the laws of the world out of the depths of his 
 own consciousness. Disputes must continually arise 
 about words when words have not definite meanings: 
 
r.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 5 
 
 and the unavoidable issue must be Sophistry and Pyr- 
 rhonism. This has been so ; the history of the human 
 mind shows that systems of scepticism have alternated 
 regularly with systems of philosophy. Fruitful of 
 empty ideas and wild fancies, philosophy has not been 
 unlike those barren women who would fain have the 
 rumbling of wind to be the motion of offspring. 
 
 Convinced of the vanity of its ambitious attempts, 
 Socrates endeavoured to bring philosophy down from 
 the clouds, introduced it into the cities, and applied 
 it to the conduct of human life ; while Plato and 
 Aristotle, opposite as were their professed methods, 
 were both alive to the vagueness of the common dis- 
 putations, and both laboured hard to fix definitely the 
 meanings of words. But words cannot attain to de- 
 finiteness save as living outgrowths of realities, as the 
 exact expressions of the phenomena of life in the in- 
 creasing speciality of human adaptation to external nature. 
 As it is with life objectively, and as it is with cognition 
 or subjective life, so is it with the organic growth of the 
 language in which the phenomena are embodied : there 
 is a progress from the simple to the complex. When the 
 words of the Aryan languages are carefully analysed into 
 their last radical elements, those prehistoric or primor- 
 dial elements which resist further analysis, we trace a 
 gradual progress from simple to mixed modes of thought, 
 and from concrete to abstract conceptions; there is a 
 continuous differentiation, first of nouns into substan- 
 tives and adjectives, then of the latter into adjectives 
 proper and nouns abstract ; synonymes again disappear, 
 each getting its special appropriation, for the more ancient 
 a language the richer it is in synonymes, and superfluous 
 words are taken up by new developments and combina- 
 tions of thought.* How, then, was it possible that a 
 
 * "There are dialects spoken at the present day which have no 
 abstract nouns, and the more we go back in the history of languages, 
 
6 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 one-sided method, which entirely ignored the examina- 
 tion of nature, should do more than repeat the same 
 things over and over again in words which, though they 
 might be different, were yet not less indefinite? The 
 results have answered to the absurdity of the method ; 
 for, after being in fashion for more than two thousand 
 years, nothing has been established by it ; " not only 
 what was asserted once is asserted still, but what was a 
 question once is a question still, and instead of being 
 resolved by discussion is only fixed and fed. " ( T ) * 
 
 Perhaps if men had always lived in the sunny climes 
 of the south, where the luxuriance of nature allowed of 
 human indolence and internal contemplation, they might 
 have continued vainly to speculate ; but when they were 
 brought face to face with nature in the rugged north, 
 and were driven to force by persevering labour the 
 means of subsistence from a sterile soil, then there arose 
 the necessity to observe her processes and investigate hei 
 secret ways. It has been remarked that the religions of 
 the world have originated in subtropical climates where 
 nature does not necessitate a continued and intense 
 application to labour : Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Christ, 
 Mahomet, having all belonged to subtropical zones. In 
 cold and temperate climes, where man must observe and 
 work, rather than meditate and pray, in order to live, 
 there was an unavoidable intending of the mind to the 
 realities of nature ; and this practice, which the exigen- 
 cies of living first enforced, became, in the fulness of 
 time, with those who had leisure and opportunity, the 
 disposition consciously to interrogate and interpret 
 
 the smaller we find the number of these useful expressions. As far 
 as language is concerned, an abstract word is nothing but an 
 adjective raised into a substantive." Auxiliary verbs have the same 
 position among verbs as abstract nouns among substantives ; they 
 are of late origin, and had originally a more material and expressive 
 character. — Max Muller, Chips from a German Workshop, vol. ii. 
 P- 54- * See Notes at the end of the Chapters. 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 7 
 
 nature. In Roger Bacon, we see the human mind 
 striving unconsciously, as it were, after the true method 
 of development ; while in Francis Bacon, who systema- 
 tized the principles and laid down the rules of the in- 
 ductive philosophy, we observe it doing with design and 
 method that which it had hitherto been blindly aiming 
 at. But as it is with the infant, so was it with humanity ; 
 action preceded consciousness, and Bacon himself was 
 the efflux of a spirit which prevailed and not the creator 
 of it ; he was the conscious exponent of an unconscious 
 impulse at work. By thus humbling himself to obey, 
 man has conquered nature ; and those plenteous " fruits 
 and invented works" which Bacon confidently antici- 
 pated as " sponsors and sureties " for the truth of his 
 method have been reaped in the richest abundance. 
 
 It seems strange enough now to us that men should 
 not have sooner hit upon the excellent and profitable 
 method of induction. How came it to pass that when 
 they surveyed organic nature, as Aristotle notably did, 
 they failed to perceive the progress in development from 
 the general and simple to the special and complex, which 
 is evident throughout it, and which in modern times has 
 been formularized by Von Baer as the law of progress, in 
 organic development ? Had they but formularized this 
 law of increasing speciality and complexity in organic 
 adaptation to external nature, then they had scarcely 
 failed to apply it to conscious human development ; and 
 that would have been to establish deductively the neces- 
 sity of the inductive method.* Unfortunately, Aristotle 
 stood alone ; and it remains his particular merit to have 
 
 * " Every one of our beliefs, as Kant saw very clearly, is at the 
 same time subjective and objective ; involving both an active and 
 a passive condition of the mind. The real bearing of this great 
 logical conception is an extension to the intellectual operations of the 
 fundamental principle of biology, the correspondence of organism 
 and environment common to every vital phenomenon." — Comtk's 
 Positive Polity, vol. i. p. 575- {English Translation.) 
 
8 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 foreseen in some sort the value of the inductive method. 
 Had he also consistently followed it in practice, which 
 he did not, there was an impassable hindrance to its 
 general adoption, in the moral errors engendered by 
 the metaphysical or subjective method, of which Plato 
 was so powerful a representative and so eloquent an 
 exponent. Man, as the measure of the universe, 
 esteemed himself far too highly to descend to be the 
 servant and interpreter of nature ; and this erroneous 
 conceit not only affected his conception of his relation 
 to the rest of nature, but permeated his social nature, 
 and vitiated his whole habit of thought. The supersti- 
 tious reverence of the Greek, who would put to death a 
 victorious general because he had left his dead unburied 
 on the field of tattle, must, we cannot doubt, have pre- 
 vented Aristotle from anatomical examination of the 
 structure of the human body. The same errors are con- 
 tinually reappearing in human history under new forms : 
 what happened in the Middle Ages may illustrate for us 
 the habit of Greek thought ; for at that time mistaken 
 religious prejudice allied itself most closely with the 
 metaphysical method which exalted man so much over 
 the rest of nature, opposing most virulently the birth 
 of positive science, which seemed to threaten to degrade 
 him ; and for a time it was doubtful which would 
 win. Can we wonder that the erroneous method was 
 triumphant in Greece • in the fourth century before 
 Christ, when it is only recently in England, in the nine- 
 teenth century after Christ, that the barbarian's reverence 
 for a dead body has permitted anatomical dissection, and 
 when the finger-bone of a saint, or a rag of his clothing, 
 is still treasured up in some parts of the civilized world 
 as a precious and sacred relic indued with miraculous 
 virtues ! The evil of the metaphysical method was not 
 intellectual deficiency only, but a corresponding baneful 
 moral error. 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 9 
 
 The adoption of the inductive method, which makes 
 man the servant and interpreter of Nature, is in reality 
 the systematic pursuance of the law of progress in 
 organic development ; it is the conscious intending of 
 the mind to external realities, the submitting of the 
 understanding to things — in other words, the increasing 
 speciality of internal adjustment to external impressions ; 
 and the result is a victory by obedience, an individual 
 increase through adaptation to outward relations, in 
 accordance with the so-called principle of natural selec- 
 tion. For in mental development, as in organic develop- 
 ment, that variation will survive which is best fitted to 
 survive. The mental capacity of one who is deprived 
 of any one of his senses, which are the inlets to im- 
 pressions from without, or the gateways of knowledge, is 
 less than that of one who is in the full possession of all 
 his senses; and the great advances in science have 
 uniformly corresponded with the invention of some 
 instrument by which the power of the senses has been 
 increased, or their range of action extended. Astronomy 
 is that which the eye has been enabled to discover by 
 the aid of the telescope ; the revelation's of new and 
 marvellous worlds of nature have been due to the 
 increased power of vision which the microscope has 
 conferred ; the extremely delicate balance has supplied 
 to science a numerical exactness ; the spectrum has 
 furnished a means of analysing the constitution of 
 the heavenly bodies; and the galvanometer has given 
 hopeful presages of important discoveries in nervous 
 function. 
 
 By the invention of these powerful aids to the 
 senses, we have succeeded in penetrating into regions of 
 nature which in times past were utterly unknown and 
 undreamt of; but the deeper our inquiries have gone, 
 the more clear has it been made that the phenomena 
 with which the senses, whether aided or unaided, bring 
 
io THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 us into relation, are but an inconsiderable fraction, on 
 the one hand, of the infinite magnitude of the universe, 
 and, on the other hand, of the infinitely minute and 
 complex molecular activities of nature, which are equally 
 inaccessible to our present powers of perception — as in 
 conceivable to us as colour to the blind, or as music to 
 the deaf. Art has attained to the skill to measure the 
 one-millionth of an inch, to detect a rise in temperature 
 of 8,8ooth of a degree centigrade, to reveal by the spec- 
 troscope the 1 80,000, oooth part of a grain of soda; but 
 these are probably only coarse measurements when com- 
 pared with the delicacy of the sense of smell, or at any 
 rate with the infinite minuteness of the molecular 
 activities of matter. There is endless room for further 
 development of the senses. Through ' them has know- 
 ledge entered; and the intellect has in turn devised 
 means for extending their action and increasing their 
 discriminating exactness : there have been action and 
 reaction and progressive specialization and complication 
 thereof. The two aspects of this relation we designate, 
 in their highest manifestations, as cognition and action, 
 or science antt art. 
 
 That which lies outside the relations of the subject, 
 with which man cannot come into any sort of relation by 
 his senses or otherwise, which lies therefore altogether 
 beyond consciousness, has been called the Real, the 
 Unconditioned, the Absolute, the Unknowable; and it 
 would not be difficult to invent another meaningless 
 term, beginning with a capital letter, in order to name 
 the unnameable. Such existence has no more delation to 
 us as conscious beings than the moral feelings of man- 
 kind have to the sensibility of an oyster or of an infusory 
 animalcule ; it could be known only by a consciousness 
 which had the power of transcending consciousness ; and 
 to affirm anything of it, either positive or negative, is 
 simply nonsense. Metaphysicians have, it is true, some- 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. II 
 
 times converted this impotence into a superconscious 
 faculty of mind to which they have given a big name, such 
 as Intuition of the Absolute or the like ; but although we 
 may think it probable, or feel certain, that there is 
 existence beyond human consciousness, which is no 
 more knowable by us than are moral relations by the 
 oyster or the infusory animalcule, we are not entitled 
 to make a positive cognitive faculty out of what is a 
 negation. Whence do we derive the assurance we have 
 of existence transcending human consciousness, if all we 
 know, feel, and believe are states of consciousness ? I 
 cannot but look upon it as the utterance or blind pro- 
 phecy of an instinct which will have conscious develop- 
 ment hereafter; in other words, as the prompting of 
 that impulse of evolution working in us which has 
 been from the beginning, and still is, and through which 
 it may well come to pass, ages hence, that much or 
 something of what now lies beyond the range of human 
 consciousness will come within the consciousness of 
 new or more highly developed faculties of superior 
 beings ; nature thus going on in her evident progress to 
 attain to more complete self-consciousness. Products 
 of the mighty past, we forefeel dimly, as it were, the 
 mighty future, of humanity. 
 
 Thus much concerning the historical evolution of the 
 inductive method. But now comes the important ques- 
 tion whether it is available for the study of the whole 
 of nature. Can we apply the true inductive and objec- 
 tive method to the investigation of psychical as well as 
 of physical nature? In the latter case it has long re- 
 ceived universal sanction ; but in the study of a man's 
 mind it is still a question what method should rightly 
 be employed. Plainly, it is not possible by simple ob- 
 servation of others to form true inductions concerning 
 their mental phenomena ; the defects of an observation 
 which reaches only to the visible results of invisible 
 
12 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 operations expose us without protection to the hypo- 
 crisy, conscious or unconscious, of the individual ; and 
 the positive tendency, which no one can avoid, to 
 interpret the action of another mind according to the 
 measure of his own, to see not what is in the object 
 but what is in the subject, frequently vitiates an assumed 
 penetration into motives. If we call to our aid the 
 principles of the received system of psychology, matters 
 are not mended ; for its ill-defined terms and vague 
 traditions, injuriously affecting our perceptions and 
 overruling the understanding, do not fail to confuse 
 and falsify inferences. It must unfortunately be added 
 that, in the present state of physiological science, it 
 is quite impossible to ascertain, by observation and 
 experiment, the nature of those organic processes which 
 are the bodily conditions of mental phenomena. There 
 would appear, then, to be no help for it but to have 
 entire recourse to the psychological method — that 
 method of interrogating self-consciousness which has 
 found so much favour at all times. 
 
 Before making any such admission, let this reflection 
 be weighed : that the instinctive nisus of mankind com- 
 monly precedes the recognition of systematic method ; 
 that men, without knowing why, do follow a course for 
 which very good reasons exist. Nay, more : the practical 
 instincts of mankind often work beneficially in actual 
 contradiction to their professed doctrines. When in the 
 Middle Ages faith was put in the philosophy of the 
 schools, the interrogation of nature by experiment was 
 going on in many places ; and the superstitious people 
 that believe in the direct interference of spirits or of 
 gods, still adopt such means of self-protection as a 
 simple experience of nature teaches. Man does not 
 consciously determine his method and then enter upon 
 it; he enters blindly upon it and at a certain stage 
 awakes to consciousness. The process of reasoning 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 13 
 
 itself adds nothing to knowledge ; it only displays what 
 was there before, brings to conscious possession what 
 before was unconscious, makes explicit what was implicit 
 in practical instinct. In the onward flowing stream of 
 nature's organic evolution, life first becomes self-con- 
 scious in man : in the slumbering mental development 
 of mankind, it is the genius who at due time awakens 
 to active consciousness the sleeping century. It would 
 indeed go hard with mankind if they must act wittingly 
 before they acted at all. 
 
 Two facts come out very distinctly from a candid 
 observation of the state of thought at the present day. 
 One of these is the little favour in which metaphysics 
 is held and the very general conviction that there is 
 no profit in it : the consequence of which firmly fixed 
 belief is, that it is cultivated as a science only by those 
 whose particular business it is to do so, who are engaged 
 not in action, wherein the true balance of life is main- 
 tained, but in speculating in professorial chairs, or in other 
 positions where there are little occasion for hard obser- 
 vation and much leisure for introspective contemplation ; 
 or if by any others, by the ambitious youth who goes 
 through an attack of metaphysics as a child goes through 
 an attack of measles, getting haply an immunity from 
 a similar affection for the rest of his life ; or, lastly, by 
 the active and ingenious intellects of those metaphysical 
 philosophers who, never having been trained in the 
 methods and work of a scientific study of nature, have 
 not submitted their understandings to facts, but live in 
 a more or less ideal world of thought A second fact, 
 which has scarcely been sufficiently weighed, is the 
 extreme favour in which biography is held at the pre- 
 sent time and the large development which it is re- 
 ceiving. 
 
 Let us look first at the import of biography. As the 
 business of a man in the world is action of some kind, 
 
H THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 and as his actions undoubtedly result from the relations 
 between him and his surroundings, it is plain that bio- 
 graphy, which estimates both the individual and his 
 circumstances and displays their inter-workings, can 
 alone give an adequate account of the man. What 
 was the mortal's force of character, what was the force 
 of circumstances, how he struggled with them, and 
 how he was affected by them, — what was the life-product 
 under the particular conditions of its evolution; 
 these are the questions which a good biography aspires 
 to answer. It regards men as concrete beings, takes 
 note, if it does its work properly, of their ancestral 
 antecedents, acknowledges the differences between them 
 in characters and capabilities, recognises the helpful or 
 baneful influence of surroundings, and patiently unfolds 
 the texture of life as the inevitable result Of the ele- 
 ments out of which, and the conditions under which, 
 it has been worked. It is, in fact, the application of 
 positive science to human life and the necessary con- 
 sequence of the progress of the inductive philosophy. 
 No marvel, then, that biography forms so large a part 
 of the literature' of the day, and that novels, its 
 more or less faithful mirrors, are in so great request. 
 The practical instincts of mankind are here, as 
 heretofore, in advance of systematic knowledge or 
 method. 
 
 On the other hand, the metaphysician has dealt with 
 man as an abstract or ideal being, having taken no 
 account of concrete men, has postulated him as a certain 
 constant quantity, and thereupon confidently enunciated 
 empty propositions. The consequence is that meta- 
 physics has never made any advance, but has only 
 appeared in new garb; nor can it in truth advance 
 unless some great addition is made to the inborn power 
 of the human mind. It surely argues no little conceit 
 in any one to believe that what Plato and Descartes 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 15 
 
 have not done, he, following the same method, will do.* 
 Plato interrogated his own mind, and set forth its 
 answers with a clearness, subtilty, and elegance of style 
 that is unsurpassed and unsurpassable ; until then the 
 probably yet far distant event of a better mind than his 
 making its appearance, his system may well remain as 
 the adequate representation of what the metaphysical 
 method can accomplish. Superseded by a more fruitful 
 method, it is practically obsolete ; and its rare advocate, 
 when such a one is found, may be said, like the Aturian 
 parrot of which Humboldt tells, to speak in the lan- 
 guage of an extinct tribe to a people which understand 
 him not.t 
 
 But the. method of interrogating self-consciousness 
 may be employed, and is largely employed, without 
 carrying it to a metaphysical extreme. Empirical psy- 
 chology, founded on direct consciousness as distin- 
 guished from the transcendental consciousness, whatever 
 that may be, on which metaphysics is based, claims to 
 give a faithful record of our different states of mind and 
 of their mutual relations, and has been extravagantly 
 lauded by the Scotch school as an inductive science. 
 It is argued, and with great cogency, that such states as 
 
 * "It would be an unsound fancy and self-contradictoiy, to expect 
 that things which have never yet been done can be done, except by 
 means which have never yet been tried." — Nov. Org. Aphorism vi. 
 Forasmuch, however, as we have good grounds for believing that 
 there is an accumulation of the inherited results of mental acqui- 
 sitions through the ages, whereby an inborn addition is made to the 
 power of the individual mind, we must admit the possibility that 
 those who can detect the forms and laws of thought by introspec- 
 tion may, after all, be able to do more than has been done in times 
 past. 
 
 + "There still lives, and it is a singular fact, an old parrot in 
 Maypures which cannot be understood, because, as the natives 
 assert, it speaks the language of the Atures — an extinct tribe of 
 Indians, whose last refuge was the rocks of the foaming cataract of 
 the Orinoco." — Humboldt, Views of Nature, vol. i. p. 172. 
 
16 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. Jchap. 
 
 thoughts, feelings, memories, volitions, are subjective, 
 known only to the individual's consciousness, the words 
 denoting them having acquired their meaning from 
 introspection ; that they admit of classification, which 
 obviously can only be done by introspection ; and that 
 there may therefore be a science of mind, a psychology, 
 which may stand on its own basis and be studied in- 
 dependently of all other sciences. The question then is 
 concerning the nature of the basis. Its value as an inde- 
 pendent science must plainly rest upon the trustworthi- 
 ness and the sufficiency or competence of consciousness 
 as a witness of that which takes place in the mind. Is 
 the foundation sufficiently secure? It may well be 
 doubted ; and for the following reasons : — 
 
 (a.) The first, which is of no great weight, seeing 
 that a similar objection might be made to observa- 
 tion in any other science, is, that there are but 
 few individuals who are capable of attending to the 
 succession of phenomena in their own minds ; such in- 
 trospection demanding a particular cultivation, and being 
 practised with any degree of, or pretence to, success 
 by those only who. have learned the terms, and been 
 imbued with the theories, of the system of psychology 
 supposed to be thereby established. And with what 
 success ? 
 
 (6.) There is no agreement between those who have 
 acquired the power of introspection ; and men of ap- 
 parently equal cultivation and capacity will, with the 
 utmost sincerity and confidence, lay down inconsistent 
 or directly contradictory propositions. It is not possible 
 to convince either opponent of error, as it might be in ■ 
 a matter of objective science, because he appeals to a 
 witness whose evidence can be taken by no one but 
 himself, and whose veracity, therefore, cannot be tested. 
 He brings forward the factitious deliverances of his indi- 
 vidual consciousness, but no fact which is capable of 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 17 
 
 being demonstrated to another mind. Now there is no 
 witness who is so easily suborned to give false evidence, 
 and whose testimony at all times requires such stringent 
 cross-examination, as self-consciousness. For when it is 
 at work, the observed and the observer are one, and the 
 observer is not likely in such case to be unbiased by 
 the feelings of the observed and to conform rigidly to 
 the rules of exact observation. In external observation 
 we find it necessary to lay down strict rules in order 
 to avoid fallacies ; it is certainly not less necessary to 
 do so in observation from within. 
 
 (c.) To direct consciousness inwardly to the observa- 
 tion of a particular state of mind is to isolate that 
 activity for the time, to cut it off from its relations, and, 
 therefore, to render it unnatural. In order to observe 
 its own action, it is necessary that the mind pause from 
 activity ; and yet it is the train of activity that is to be 
 observed. So long as you cannot effect the pause 
 necessary for self-contemplation, there cannot be a 
 sufficient observation of the current of activity : if the 
 pause is effected, then there can be nothing to observe ; 
 there would be no consciousness, for consciousness is 
 awakened by the transition from one physical or mental 
 state to another.* This cannot be accounted a vain and 
 theoretical objection, for the results of introspection too 
 surely confirm its validity : what was a question once is 
 
 * To persist in one mode or state of consciousness would be 
 really to be unconscious ; wherefore when our attention is given 
 intensely to some observation or reflection, so that we are absorbed 
 in it, we hardly seem to be conscious ; in fact, consciousness is 
 aroused when the attention wanders. We do not perceive one con- 
 tinuous and unvarying action upon the senses, e.g. the movement 
 of the earth, the pressure of the atmosphere upon the surface of 
 our bodies, &c. For the same reason probably we do not hear 
 the music of the spheres ; a sound of unvarying tone and continu- 
 ance falling on the ears from the first moment of life. And yet it 
 is possible the noise may be stupendous. 
 
18 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 a question still, and instead of being resolved by intro- 
 spective analysis is only " fixed and fed."( 2 ) 
 
 (</.) The madman's delusion, which is only an extreme 
 instance of error growing out of causes that are con- 
 stantly at work to pervert an individual's feeling and to 
 vitiate his reasoning, is of itself sufficient to excite 
 profound distrust, not only in the objective truth, but in 
 the subjective worth, of the testimony of an individual's 
 self-consciousness. Descartes laid down the test of a 
 true belief to be that which the mind could clearly and 
 distinctly conceive : if there is one thing more clearly 
 and distinctly conceived than another, it is commonly 
 the madman's delusion. No marvel, then, that psycho- 
 logists, since the time of Descartes, have held that the 
 veracity of consciousness is to be relied upon only 
 under certain rules, from the violation of which, Sir W. 
 Hamilton believed, the contradictions of philosophy 
 had arisen. On what evidence, then, do the rules rest ? 
 Either on the evidence of consciousness, whence it 
 comes to pass that each philosopher and each lunatic 
 has his own rules, and no advance is made ; or upon the 
 observation and judgment of mankind, to confess which 
 is very much like throwing self-consciousness overboard 
 — not otherwise than as was advantageously done by 
 positive science when the exact figures on the ther- 
 mometer, and not the subjective and deceptive feelings 
 of heat or cold, were recognised to be the true test of 
 the individual's temperature. 
 
 The charge against self-consciousness is not merely 
 that it cannot always be relied upon in that of which it 
 does give information, but that it does not give any 
 account of a large and important part of our mental 
 activity : its light reaches only to states of conscious- 
 ness, not to states of mind. Its evidence, then, is not 
 only untrustworthy save under conditions which it no- 
 wise helps us to fix, but it is of little value, because it 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. V) 
 
 has reference only to a small part of tLat for which its 
 testimony is invoked. May we not then justly say that 
 self-consciousness is utterly incompetent to supply the 
 facts which shall lay the foundations of a truly inductive 
 psychology ? Let the following reasons further warrant 
 the assertion : — 
 
 r. It is the fundamental maxim of inductive philoso- 
 phy that observation should begin with simple instances, 
 ascent being made from them step by step through 
 appropriate generalizations, and that no particulars 
 should be neglected. How does the interrogation of 
 self-consciousness fulfil this just demand? It is a 
 method which is applicable only to mind at a high 
 degree of development, so that it perforce begins with 
 those most complex instances which give the least 
 certain information ; while it passes completely by mind 
 in its lower stages of development, ignoring those 
 simpler instances which give the best or securest infor- 
 mation. In this it resembles the philosopher who, while 
 he gazed upon the stars, fell into the water ; " for if," as 
 Bacon says, " he had looked down, he might have seen 
 the stars in the water, but, looking aloft, he could not 
 see the water in the stars."( 3 ) Where has the animal 
 any place in the accepted system of psychology ? or the 
 child, the direction of whose early mental development 
 is commonly decisive of its future destiny ? To speak 
 of induction, where so many important instances are 
 neglected and others are selected according to caprice 
 or the ease of convenience, is to rob the word of all 
 definite meaning and mischievously to misuse it. 
 
 Psychology has neglected not only all animals except 
 man, as it was bound by its method to do, but all the 
 lower races of men : instead of being a science of mental 
 phenomena as these are presented in nature, it represents 
 the deliverances of the complex self-consciousness of 
 an educated white man who has been specially trained 
 
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 in its method. Hence have arisen the hot disputes 
 between the empiricists who looked on one side of the 
 shield and the idealists who looked on the other side of 
 it — between those who hold that all knowledge is derived 
 from experience, and those who uphold the existence of 
 forms of thought in the mind anterior to experience. 
 Study the development of mind from its beginning in 
 animals through its manifold gradations up to its highest 
 reach in man, and it is made probable that the so-called 
 forms of thought represent the innate mental capacities 
 which are the result of evolution — which the civilized 
 man has, and which the animal or the lowest savage has not. 
 A psychology which is truly inductive must follow the 
 order of nature, and begin where mind begins in the 
 animal and infant, rising thence gradually to those 
 higher and more complex mental phenomena which the 
 introspective philosopher discerns or thinks he discerns. 
 Certainly it may be said, and it has been said, that 
 inferences as to the mental phenomena of the child can 
 be correctly formed from the phenomena of the adult 
 mind. But it is exactly because erroneous inferences 
 have been made in that way, that the mental phenomena 
 of the child have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, 
 and that psychology has not received the benefit of the 
 correction which a faithful observation of them would 
 have furnished. It was the physiologist who by a care- 
 ful observation of the lower animals, " having entered 
 firmly on the true road, and submitting his understanding 
 to things," arrived at generalizations which were found 
 to explain many of the mental phenomena of the child, 
 and which have furthermore thrown much light upon 
 the mental life of the adult. The careful study of the . 
 genesis of mind is as necessary to a thorough knowledge 
 of mental phenomena as the study of its plan of de- 
 velopment confessedly is to an adequate conception of 
 the bodily organization and its functions. 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 21 
 
 Again, it might be thought a monstrous mistake of 
 nature to have brought forth so many idiots and lunatics, 
 seeing that the introspective psychologists, though mak- 
 ing a profession of induction with their lips, have taken 
 no notice whatever of the large collection of instances 
 afforded by such unwelcome anomalies. Certainly it 
 may be said, and no doubt it has been said, that the 
 mental phenomena of the idiot and lunatic are morbid, 
 and do not, therefore, concern psychology. It is true 
 that they do not concern a psychology which violently 
 separates itself from nature. But it is exactly because 
 psychology has thus unwarrantably severed itself from 
 nature — of which the so-called morbid phenomena are 
 no less natural a part than are the phenomena of health 
 — that it has no sure foundations ; that it is not induc- 
 tive; that it has not received the benefit of the corrective 
 instances which a faithful observation of the unsound 
 mind would have afforded. In reality the phenomena of 
 insanity, presenting a variation of conditions which 
 cannot be produced artificially — the instantia contra- 
 dictoria — furnish what in such matter ought to have 
 been seized with the utmost eagerness ; namely, actual 
 experiments well suited to correct false generalization 
 and to establish the principles of a truly inductive 
 science. The laws of mental action are not miraculously 
 changed nor reversed in madness, though the conditions 
 of their operation are different; and nature does not 
 recognise the artificial and ill-starred divisions which men, 
 for the sake of convenience, and not unfrequently in the 
 interests of ignorance, make. 
 
 2. Consciousness, which does not even tell us that we 
 have a brain, is certainly incompetent to give any ac- 
 count of the essential material conditions which underlie 
 every mental manifestation and determine the character 
 of it. Let the function of an individual's optic ganglia 
 be abolished by disease or otherwise, and he would not 
 
22 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chaf. 
 
 be conscious that he was blind until experience had con- 
 vinced him of it. Let him have a sensation of light or of 
 sound, or any other seemingly most simple sensation, he 
 would not learn through consciousness how complex it 
 really is, nor even whether it proceeded from within or 
 from without — whether it was entirely subjective or 
 whether it had an objective cause; t/iathe could only learn 
 by subsequent discovery. The most simple phenomenon 
 which consciousness makes known to us is really very 
 complex ; a feeling which is elementary to it may be far 
 from elementary ; and we cannot, by its means, go deeper 
 into the discovery of the simpler constituent elements. 
 Clearly then the science which does enable us to go 
 deeper in the analysis of the really complex state which 
 the most simple delivery of consciousness is, must lie 
 at the foundation of a true psychology. On grounds 
 which will not easily be shaken it is now indeed admitted, 
 that with every display of mental activity there is a cor- 
 relative change or waste of nervous element ; and on the 
 condition of the material substratum must depend the 
 degree and character of the manifested energy or the 
 mental phenomenon. Now the received system of psy- 
 chology gives no attention to these manifold variations 
 of feeling in the same individual which are due to tem- 
 porary modifications of the bodily state, and- by which 
 the ideas of the relations of objects to self and to one 
 another are so greatly affected. The quality of the 
 ideas which arise in the mind under certain circum- 
 stances, the whole character indeed of our insight at the 
 time, is notably determined in great part by the feeling 
 which may then have sway ; and that feeling is not always 
 objectively caused, but may be entirely due to a par- 
 ticular bodily condition, as the daily experience of every 
 one may convince him, and as the early phenomena of 
 insanity often illustrate in a striking manner. The most 
 ingenious introspectionist could never discover from the 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY UF MIND. 23 
 
 revelations of self-consciousness that the cause of a par- 
 ticular mood of mind lay in the liver, or in the heart, or 
 in some other organ of the body ; nor could he gain 
 from them the least inkling how essentially the opera- 
 tions of these organs affect the characters of the in- 
 dividual, the actual constitution of his ego. Every 
 sensation, again, is located by consciousness peripherally; 
 it tells us plainly that touch is in the finger, sound in 
 the ear, sight in the eye, smell in the nostrils ; whereas 
 physiological observation proves to us conclusively that 
 this information is incorrect, and that each sensation 
 has its immediate seat centrally in the brain. 
 
 Again, Bacon long ago set down individual psychology 
 as wanting ; and insisted on a scientific and accurate 
 dissection of minds and characters, and the secret 
 dispositions of particular men, so " that from the 
 knowledge thereof better rules # may be framed for the 
 treatment of the mind."(4) So far as the present psy- 
 chology is concerned, the individual might have no 
 existence in nature ; he is an inconvenience to a system 
 which, in neglecting the individual character or tem- 
 perament, ignores another large collection of valuable 
 instances. So far as truth is concerned, however, the 
 individual is of some moment, seeing that he often posi- 
 tively contradicts the principles arbitrarily laid down by 
 a theoretical system. He who would realize how vague, 
 uncertain, speculative, how far from the position of a 
 true science, psychology is, should endeavour to grasp 
 some one of its so-called principles, and to apply it 
 deductively in order to predicate something of the char- 
 acter of a particular person ; let him do that, and he can- 
 not fail to perceive .how much he has been mocked with 
 the semblance of knowledge, and must needs agree with 
 Bacon as to the necessity of a " scientific and accurate 
 dissection of minds and characters and the secret dis- 
 positions of particular men." That, moreover, is a study 
 
24 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 which will be prosecuted successfully not by looking 
 within but by looking without himself. 
 
 When the theologist, who occupies himself with the 
 supersensuous, has said all that he has to say from his 
 point of view; when the jurist, who represents those 
 principles which the wisdom of society has established, 
 has in turn exhaustively argued from his point of view, — 
 then the ultimate appeal in a concrete case must be to 
 him, be he physiologist or physician, who deals with the 
 bodily organization ; through his ground only can the 
 theologist and jurist pass to their departments, and they 
 must accept their knowledge of it from him : on the 
 foundation of facts which the faithful investigation of the 
 bodily nature lays, must rest, if they are to rest safely, 
 their systems. Certainly it is not probable that this 
 most desirable and inevitable result will come to pass in 
 this day or generation; for it is not unknown how far 
 dfstant yet is the day of full and exact physiological 
 knowledge, nor how slowly, when it approaches, we may 
 expect the light to penetrate the thick fogs of ignorance, 
 and to dissipate the irritated prejudices which ever op- 
 pose the gentle advent of new truth. Happily, it is 
 certain that in the mortality of man lies the salvation of 
 truth. 
 
 3. There is an appropriation of external impressions 
 by the mind or brain, which regularly takes placewithout 
 any, or only with a very obscure, affection of conscious- 
 ness. As the various organs of the body obtain' from 
 the blood the material suitable to their nourishment and 
 assimilate it, so the organ of the mind unconsciously 
 appropriates, through the inlets of the senses, the influ- 
 ences of its surroundings. The impressions which it thus 
 receives and retains do not produce definite ideas and 
 feelings, but they nevertheless permanently affect the 
 mind's nature; so that as an individual consciously 
 provides his food, and then leaves the due assimilation 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 25 
 
 of it to the unconscious action of the organism, in like 
 manner may he consciously arrange the circumstances in 
 which he will live, but cannot then prevent the uncon- 
 scious assimilation of their influence and the correspond 
 ing modification of his character. Not only slight habits 
 of movement are thus acquired, but habits of thought 
 and feeling are imperceptibly organized; so that an 
 acquired nature may ultimately govern one who is not at 
 all conscious that he has changed. Let any 'one take 
 careful note of his dreams, he will find that many of the 
 seemingly unfamiliar things with which his mind is then 
 occupied, and which appear to be new and strange pro- 
 ductions, are traceable to the unconscious appropriations 
 of the day. There are other stories on record like that 
 well-known one which Coleridge quotes of the servant- 
 girl who, in the ravings of fever, repeated long passages 
 in the Hebrew language, which she did not understand, 
 and could not repeat when well, but which, when living 
 with a clergyman, she had heard him read aloud. The 
 remarkable memories of certain idiots, who', much defi- 
 cient in or nearly destitute of intelligence, will repeat the 
 longest stories with the greatest accuracy, testify also to 
 this unconscious cerebral action ; and the way in which 
 the excitement of a great sorrow, or some other cause, 
 such as the last flicker of departing life, will sometimes 
 call forth in idiots manifestations of mind of which they 
 always seemed incapable, renders it certain that much 
 is unconsciously taken up by them which cannot be 
 uttered, but which leaves its relics in the mind. 
 
 It is a truth which cannot be too distinctly borne in 
 mind, that consciousness is not co-extensive with mind, 
 that it is not mind but an incidental accompaniment of 
 mind. It may seem, perhaps it is, an extravagant thing 
 to say, but to me it seems conceivable that a man might 
 be as good a reasoning machine without as he is with 
 consciousness, if we assumed his nervous system to be 
 
26 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 equally susceptible to the influences which now affect him 
 consciously, and if we had the means, by microscope or 
 galvanoscope or some other more delicate instrument 
 hereafter to be invented, of reading off the results of his 
 cerebral operations from without : we should be dis- 
 pensing only with the sense by which the operations 
 are observed within, not with the power by which they 
 are done — with the witness not with the agent of 
 them. From the first moment of its independent 
 existence the brain begins to assimilate impressions 
 from without, and to react thereto in corresponding 
 organic adaptations; this it does at first without con- 
 sciousness, and this it continues to do unconsciously 
 more or less throughout life. Thus it is that mental 
 power is being organized before the supervention of con- 
 sciousness, and that the mind is subsequently regularly 
 modified as a natural process without the intervention of 
 consciousness. The preconscious action of mind, as 
 certain metaphysical psychologists in Germany have 
 called it, and the Unconscious action of mind, which may 
 perhaps be now deemed to be established, are assuredly 
 facts of which the most ardent introspective psychologist 
 must admit that self-consciousness can give us no ac- 
 count. I do not overlook the fact that some writers hold 
 these supposed unconscious states not to be, as they 
 appear, entirely unconscious, believing that it is because 
 slight attention only is given to them that they pass away 
 immediately and are forgotten. But if this be granted, it 
 does not really alter matters much ; for it would, only 
 prove that the brain or mind may do its work with a 
 consciousness so slight as to be almost nil. A con- 
 sciousness which has sunk to such a degree of subcon- 
 sciousness as to be practically unconsciousness, cannot 
 be of much moment in the operations : when so much 
 is dispensed with, jt is hardly worth while to contend 
 for the importance of the little that is left. 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY Oh MIND. 27 
 
 4. That which has existed with any completeness in 
 consciousness leaves behind it, after its disappearance 
 therefrom, in the mind or brain, a functional disposition 
 to its reproduction or reappearance in consciousness at 
 some future time.(s) Of no mental act can we say that it 
 is "writ in water;" something remains from it whereby its 
 recurrence is facilitated. Every impression of sense upon 
 the brain, every current of molecular activity from one to 
 another part of the brain, every cerebral reaction which 
 passes into muscular movement, leaves behind it some 
 modification of the nerve elements concerned in its func- 
 tion some after-effect or, so to speak, memory of itself 
 in them which renders its reproduction an easier matter, 
 the more easy the more often it has been repeated, and 
 makes it impossible to say that, however trivial, it shall 
 not under some circumstances recur. Let the excita- 
 tion take place in one of two nerve-cells lying side by 
 side, and between which there was not any origina. 
 specific difference, there will be ever afterwards a differ- 
 ence between them. This physiological process, what- 
 ever be its nature, is the physical basis of memory, and it 
 is the foundation of the development of all our mental 
 functions. 
 
 That modification which persists or is retained in 
 structure after function, has been differently described as 
 a residuum, or relic, or trace, or disposition, or vestige, 
 or again as potential, latent, or dormant idea. Not only 
 definite ideas, but all affections of the nervous system, 
 feelings of pleasure and pain, desires, and even its out- 
 ward reactions, thus leave behind them their structural 
 effects, and lay the foundations of modes of thought, 
 feeling, and action. Particular talents are sometimes 
 formed quite, or almost quite, involuntarily; and com- 
 plex actions, which were first consciously performed by 
 dint of great application, become automatic by repeti- 
 tion ; ideas, which were at first consciously associated, 
 
28 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 ultimately coalesce and call one another up without any 
 consciousness, as we see in the quick perception or 
 intuition of the man of large worldly experience ; and 
 feelings, once active, leave behind them their uncon- 
 scious residua, thus affecting the general tone of the 
 character, so that, apart from the original or inborn 
 nature of the individual, . contentment, melancholy, 
 cowardice, bravery, and even moral feeling are generated 
 as the results of particular life-experiences. Conscious- 
 ness is not able to give any account of the manner in 
 which these various residua are perpetuated, and how 
 they exist latent in the mental organization ; but a fever, 
 a poison in the blood, or a dream, may at any moment 
 recall ideas, feelings, and activities which seemed to have 
 gone for ever. The lunatic sometimes reverts, in his 
 ravings, to scenes and events of which, when in his 
 sound senses, he has no memory ; the fever-stricken 
 patient may pour out passages in a language which he 
 understands not, but which he has accidentally heard ; a 
 dream of being at school again brings back with painful 
 vividness the school feelings; and before him who is 
 drowning every event of his life seems to flash in one 
 moment of strange and vivid consciousness. ( 6 ) Some 
 persons who suffer from recurrent insanity remember 
 only in their lucid intervals the facts of former lucid 
 intervals, and in their paroxysms of derangement the 
 ideas, feelings, and events of former paroxysms. Dreams 
 not remembered in the waking state may yet affect 
 future dreams, appearing in them as vague and confused 
 recollections. * 
 
 * "A Lutheran clergyman of Philadelphia informed Dr. Rush 
 that Germans and Swedes, of whom he had a. considerable number 
 in his congregation, when near death, always prayed in their native 
 language, though some of them, he was confident, had not spoken 
 these languages for fifty or sixty years." — Abercrombie, On the 
 lit t dice lua I rowers, p. 142, 8th ed. 1838. 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 29 
 
 It has been before said that mind and consciousness 
 are not synonymous ; it may now be added, that' the 
 existence of mind does not necessarily involve its con- 
 stant activity. Descartes maintained that the mind is 
 a spiritual activity which always thinks; and others, 
 resting on that assumption, have held that we must 
 always dream in sleep, because the mind, being spiritual, 
 cannot cease to act ; for non-activity would be non- 
 existence. Such opinions illustrate how completely 
 metaphysical conceptions may overrule the best under- 
 standing : non-activity of function is certainly non-exist- 
 ence of function, but it is not mental annihilation ; so far 
 from the mind being always active, it is the fact that 
 at each moment the greater part of the mental organi- 
 zation is not only unconscious, but inactive. Mental 
 power exists in statical equilibrium as well as in mani- 
 fested energy; and the utmost tension of a particular 
 mental activity may not avail to call forth from their 
 secret repository the dormant energies of latent faculty, 
 even when its function is most urgently needed : no 
 man can call to mind at any moment the thousandth 
 part of his knowledge. How utterly helpless is con- 
 sciousness to give any account of the statical condition 
 of mind ! But as statical mind is in reality the statical 
 condition of the nervous substrata which minister to 
 its manifestations, it is plain that, if we ever are to know 
 anything of mental organization, it is to the progress 
 of physiology that we must look for information. 
 
 5. Consciousness reveals nothing of the actual process 
 by which one idea calls another into activity, and has 
 no control whatever over the manner of the repro- 
 duction ; it is only when the idea is made active by 
 virtue of some association, when the effect solicits or 
 extorts attention, that we are conscious of it; and there 
 is no power in the mind to call up ideas indifferently. 
 If we would recollect something which at the moment 
 
3 o THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 escapes us, confessedly the best way of succeeding is 
 to permit the brain to work unconsciously; and while 
 the consciousness is otherwise occupied, the forgotten 
 name or circumstance will oftentimes flash into the 
 memory. A glass of wine or some other stimulant shall 
 sometimes do more to arouse ideas by its physical 
 or chemical action upon the nerve-element than the 
 strongest efforts of attention will do. In composition 
 the writer's consciousness is engaged chiefly with his 
 pen and with the sentences which he is forming, while 
 the results of the brain's unconscious working, matured 
 by an insensible gestation, emerge from unknown depths 
 into consciousness, and are by its help embodied in 
 appropriate words. As there are undulations of ether 
 which are too rapid, and others which are too slow, to 
 produce the sensation of light when they strike upon the 
 eye, so it is easy to conceive that there may be molecular 
 vibrations in the nerve- element which are either too rapid 
 or too slow to generate consciousness, but which, never- 
 theless, suffice to effect these latent associations. 
 
 Not only is the actual process of the association of* 
 our ideas independent of consciousness, but that assimi- 
 lation or blending of similar ideas, or of the like in 
 different ideas, by which general ideas are formed, is 
 in no way under the control or cognizance of conscious- 
 ness. When the like in two perceptions is appropriated, 
 while that in which they differ is neglected, it would 
 seem to be by an assimilative action of the nerve-cells 
 or circuits of the brain which, particularly modified by 
 the first impression, have an attraction or affinity for 
 a like subsequent impression : the nerve-element so 
 modified and so ministering takes to itself that which 
 is suitable and which it can assimilate, or make of the 
 same kind with itself, while it rejects, for appropriation 
 by other nerve-circuits, that which is unlike and which 
 will not blend. Or that which takes place may perhaps 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 31 
 
 be represented more correctly in this way : when two 
 objects resemble one another, having common qualities 
 of which we can form a general idea, that which is like 
 in them will necessarily excite in the same nerve-tract 
 of the brain exactly the same number and kind of 
 molecular vibrations ; the second perception will . be a 
 reproduction of the first, in so far as it is a perception 
 of the qualities which the second object has in common 
 with the first. Now this reproduction of the same vibra- 
 tions, which is the perception of the. like in two ideas, will 
 take place the more readily because of the functional 
 disposition to the reproduction of them which the first 
 perception has left behind it; wherefore, as all experi- 
 ence shows, there is a tendency of mind to perceive 
 resemblances. That in which the second perception 
 differs from the first will also excite its appropriate vibra- 
 tions, but if they do not -blend into unity with any 
 previously experienced ones, they are not readily appre- 
 hended, and may be overlooked entirely by conscious- 
 ness ; they are so feeble or pass away so rapidly perhaps 
 that the state of consciousness appropriate to them is 
 not produced^ It is the aim, therefore, of a good training 
 in observation and reasoning to compel attention to differ- 
 ences in order that they may make a fit impression and 
 be registered, and thus to prevent too hasty generalization. 
 Whatever the organic process in the brain, it takes 
 place, like the organic action of other elements of the 
 body, quite out of the reach of consciousness. We 
 are not aware how our general and abstract ideas are 
 formed ; the due material is consciously supplied, and 
 there is an unconscious elaboration of the result Mental 
 development thus represents a sort of nutrition and 
 organization ; or, as Milton aptly says of the opinions 
 of good men that they are truth in the making, so we 
 may truly say of the formation of our general and 
 complex ideas that it is mind in the making. When 
 
32 
 
 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 the individual brain is a well-constituted one, and has 
 been duly cultivated, the results of its latent activity, 
 rising into consciousness suddenly, sometimes seem like 
 intuitions ; they are strange and startling, as the products 
 of a dream ofttimes are, to the person who has actually 
 produced them. Hence it was no extravagant fancy in 
 Plato to look upon them as reminiscences of a previous 
 higher existence. His brain was a brain of the highest 
 order, and the results of its unconscious activity, as they 
 flashed into consciousness, would show like revelations, 
 and might well seem intuitions of a higher life quite 
 beyond the reach of present will. 
 
 But the process of unconscious mental elaboration 
 is sufficiently illustrated in daily experience. The in- 
 stantaneous judgments of the distance, the position, the 
 size, the figure of objects, which accompany our visual 
 sensations, are not consciously made, nor are they put 
 in logical form ; in fact, all the labours of philosophers 
 hitherto have not been sufficient to discover and ex- 
 plain the processes by which we acquire them — to set 
 forth explicitly the premisses, the reasoning, and the con- 
 clusions which are implicit in them. In dreams a person 
 may compose vigorously and fluently, or speak eloquently, 
 who can do nothing of the sort when awake ; in the 
 first stages of acute mania there is sometimes exhibited 
 a wit, a liveliness of imagination, a fluency of speech, 
 of which the person is utterly incapable when he is in 
 sound health ; schoolboys know how much a night's rest 
 improves their knowledge of a lesson which they have 
 been learning before going to bed ; great writers or 
 great artists, as is well known, have been truly astonished 
 at their own creations, when they have calmly examined 
 them after the enthusiasm of invention was past, and 
 have been unable to conceive how they contrived to 
 produce them ; and to the unconscious action of the 
 brain is owing, most probably, that occasional sudden 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 33 
 
 consciousness, which almost every one at some time 
 or other has had, of having been before in exactly the 
 same circumstances as those which are then present, or 
 having said or done exactly the same thing, though such 
 a previous exact experience was impossible; but the 
 action of the brain in the assimilation, of events here mo- 
 mentarily anticipates consciousness, which, when aroused, 
 finds a familiarity in them. The same conviction is 
 sometimes felt in dreams. The impression is momentary, 
 vanishing in the instant of feeling it, and cannot be 
 recalled by any voluntary effort, nor can it be adequately 
 described in words. Inventions seem sometimes, even 
 to the discoverers, to be matters of accident and good 
 fortune, who, however, have not failed to deserve the 
 accident of good fortune by long labour and training 
 in inquiry ; the most voracious plagiarist is commonly 
 the most unconscious; the best thoughts of an author 
 are always the unwilled thoughts which surprise himself; 
 and the poet under the inspiration of creative activity 
 is, so far as consciousness is concerned, being dictated 
 to. If we reflect, we shall see that it must be so ; the 
 products of creative activity, in so far as they transcend 
 the hitherto experienced, are unknown to the creator 
 himself before they come forth, and cannot therefore 
 be the result of a definite act of his will ; for to an • 
 act of will a conception of the result is necessary. 
 " The character," says Jean Paul, speaking of the poet's 
 work, "must appear living before you, and you must 
 hear it, not merely see it; it must, as takes place in 
 dreams, dictate to you, not you to it; and so much 
 so that in the quiet hour before you might perhaps be 
 able to foretell the what but not the haw. A poet who 
 must reflect whether in a given case he shall make a 
 character say yes or no — to the devil with him : he is 
 only a stupid corpse." * 
 
 * Aesthetik. 
 
34 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 If an inherited excellence of brain has conferred upon 
 the individual great inborn capacity, it is well; but if 
 he has not such heritage, then no amount of conscious 
 effort will completely compensate for the defect. As 
 in the germ of the higher animal there is the potentiality 
 of many kinds of tissue, while in the germ of the lower 
 animal there is only the potentiality of a few kinds of 
 tissue ; so in the good brain of a happily endowed man 
 there is the potentiality of great assimilation and of great 
 and varied development, while in the man of low mental 
 endowment there is only the potentiality of a scanty 
 assimilation and of small development. But it is ridicu- 
 lous to suppose that the man of genius is ever a fountain 
 . of self-generating energy ; whosoever expends much in 
 productive activity must take much in by appropriation ; 
 whence comes so much of the truth which there is in 
 the observation that genius is a genius for industry. 
 They do most by genius who would do most without 
 it. To believe that any one, how great soever his natural 
 genius, can pour forth with spontaneous ease the results 
 of great productive activity without corresponding labour 
 in appropriation, is no less absurd than it would be to 
 believe that the acorn can grow into the mighty monarch 
 of the forest without air and light and without the kindly 
 influence of the soil. 
 
 It has been previously said that mental function does 
 not necessarily imply consciousness, and, again, that 
 mental organization does not necessarily involve mental 
 function ; it may now be affirmed that, the most import- 
 ant part of mental action, the essential process on which 
 thinking depends, is unconscious mental, or, if the 
 word be liked better, cerebral activity. We repeat, then, 
 the question : how can self-consciousness suffice to furnish 
 the facts of a true mental science ? Assuredly it can 
 give no account of its own origin. It is not a constant 
 state, but rather a process of becoming conscious j only 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 35 
 
 when the organic conditions of nerve element reach a 
 certain height of energy or have a certain duration do 
 they produce consciousness ; and it is plain that they, 
 thus lying beneath consciousness, are inaccessible to 
 self-observation. 
 
 6. The brain not only receives impressions uncon- 
 sciously, registers impressions without the co-operation 
 of consciousness, elaborates material unconsciously, calls 
 latent residua again into activity without consciousness, 
 but it responds also as an organ of organic life to the 
 internal stimuli which it receives unconsciously from 
 other organs of the body. As the central organ to which 
 the various organic stimuli of a complex whole pass, 
 and where they are duly co-ordinated, it must needs 
 have most important and intimate sympathies with the 
 other parts of the harmonious system ; and a regular 
 quiet activity, of which we only become occasionally 
 conscious in its abnormal results, does prevail as the 
 consequence and expression of these organic sympathies. 
 On the whole, this activity is even of more consequence 
 in determining the tone of our feeling, or of our disposi- 
 tion, and the character of our impulses, than that which 
 follows impressions received from the external world ; 
 when disturbed in a painful way, it becomes the occasion 
 of that feeling of gloom or discomfort which does not 
 itself give rise to anything more than an indefinite antici- 
 pation of coming affliction, but which clouds ideas that 
 arise, rendering them obscure, unfaithfully representative, 
 and painful. The rapidity and success of conception, 
 and the reaction of one conception upon another, are 
 much affected by the state of this active but unconscious 
 ' cerebral life : the poet is compelled to wait for the 
 moment of inspiration ; and the thinker, after great but 
 fruitless pains, must often tarry until a more favourable 
 disposition of mind. We are brought into direct relations 
 with external nature, perceiving and modifying it, by 
 
36 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 means of our intellectual and active functions ; they are, 
 as cerebral functions, in close connection with the 
 mechanisms of sensation and motion, of which their 
 anatomical substrata may be regarded as continuations. 
 But mind is constituted by affective as well as by intel- 
 lectual and active functions, in every mental act there 
 being a consensus of these three classes of functions; 
 and the affective functions of the brain, which-are pro- 
 bably in close relations with the internal organs of the 
 body, are the foundation of the emotions and impulses, 
 and give force, purpose, and unity to our. intellectual 
 and active life. 
 
 In insanity the influence of this sympathetic organic 
 activity is most marked ; for it then happens that the 
 morbid state of some internal organ becomes the basis 
 of a painful but formless feeling of profound depression, 
 which ultimately condenses into some definite delusion. 
 In dreams its influence is no less manifest ; for he who 
 has gone to sleep with a disturbance of some internal 
 organ may find the character of his dreams to be 
 determined by the feeling of the oppression of self of 
 which the organic trouble is the cause : he is thwarted, 
 he is afflicted, he is at school again, he is under sentence 
 of death, he is attending at his ■ own funeral ; in some 
 way or other his personality is oppressed; and the 
 dream-drama takes its character from the affective tone. 
 Most plainly of all, however, does the familiar influence 
 of the sexual organs upon the mind witness to this 
 operation ; and it was no wild flight of " that noted liar 
 — fancy " in Schlegel, but a truly grounded creation of 
 the imagination, that he represented a pregnant woman 
 as being visited every night by a beautiful child, which 
 gently raised her eyelids and looked silently at her, but 
 which disappeared for ever after delivery.* Whatever 
 
 * "In Schlegels — viel zu wenig erkanntem — Florentin sieht eine 
 Schwangere immer em schemes Wunderkind, das mit ihr Nachts die 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 37 
 
 then may be thought of the theory of Bichat, who located 
 the passions in the organs of organic life, it must be ad- 
 mitted that he therein evinced a just recognition of the 
 importance of that unconscious cerebral activity which is 
 the expression of. the organic sympathies of the brain. 
 Mind is without doubt the direct function of brain, but 
 is not less certainly a function of the whole organism 
 indirectly ; for in the brain every organic function is 
 represented directly or indirectly. 
 
 In dealing with unconscious mental activity, and with 
 mind in a statical condition, it has been a necessity to 
 speak of brain and .cerebral action, where I would will- 
 ingly, to avoid offence that might be taken thereat, have 
 spoken, had it been possible, of mind and mental action ; 
 but it was impossible, if one was to be truthful and intel- 
 ligible, to do otherwise. When the important influence 
 of the brain, as an organ of organic life, on mental life 
 comes to be considered, there are no words available for 
 expressing the phenomena in the language of the received 
 psychology, which, though it admits the brain to be the 
 organ of mind, takes no notice whatever of it as an 
 organ. It may perhaps be maintained that it is im- 
 proper and indeed absurd to speak of mind except 
 when speaking of states of consciousness. This of course 
 I do not admit, holding that there is a vast amount of 
 mental function which goes on unconsciously. But if it 
 be asserted that I am not justified in speaking of statical 
 or inactive mind, mind being actual energy or function, 
 I have nothing to reply; the reader must understand 
 thereby the mental organization or that organization of 
 brain which ministers to mental function, and pardon 
 the incorrect expression, because of the .difficulties with 
 which the metaphysical conception of mind, infecting 
 
 Augen aufschlagt, ihr stumm entgegen lauft u. s. w. und welches 
 unter der Entbindung auf immer verschwindet." — Jean Paul, 
 Aesthetik. 
 
3 8 THE PHYSIULUUY UP MJJWU. [CHAP. 
 
 the common language of psychology, oppresses a writer. 
 Psychologists, like Descartes, define mind to be the 
 thinking or conscious substance, that is, the sub- 
 stance the functions of which are thought, feeling, and 
 will. Those who do not admit any such spirituaL sub- 
 stance, but hold that mind is a general term embracing 
 these functions, the substance beneath which is brain, 
 must sometimes use the words brain and mind loosely as 
 meaning the same thing — namely, the substance,, unless 
 they are prepared to repudiate the language of pysclio- 
 logy, to go their own way using their own terms, and to 
 abandon all attempts to reconcile the truth which there 
 is in the old doctrines of pyschology with the new truth 
 which is made known by the discoveries of modern 
 physiology.* Mind, used in the sense of substance or 
 
 * The doctrine of latent modifications of mind — of unconscious 
 acts and affections of mind — which Sir W. Hamilton declared to be 
 "established beyond all rational doubt," has no difficulties to face 
 before it is accepted, if we distinctly apprehend the fact that the 
 organ is brain and the function mind, and view the doctrine by the 
 light of our knowledge of other nervous functions. But it would 
 be quite impossible to get forward if one made this explanation on 
 every occasion on which it was necessary . to take account of. psy- 
 chological doctrines implying a mental essence. When the psycho- 
 logist declares that perception is not in the brain, but in the 
 " unknown essence mind, "he affirms both what is true and what 
 is untrue. It is true that perception is not strictly in the brain, 
 because perception is function, and function cannot justly be said 
 to be in the organ ; unquestionably function is potential in organ, 
 but when it has become actual in consequence of material changes 
 in the organ, it is energy which has gone forth from the organ, and 
 cannot any longer be said properly to be in it. Perception being 
 part of the function — mind, may therefore be said to be in mind. 
 We know nothing of the organ and its changes by self-conscious- 
 ness ; the knowledge which we get through consciousness is neces- 
 sarily of function ; wherefore it is so far true that we only know 
 mental states in consciousness. But it is untrue, or at any rate it is a 
 gratuitous assumption, for which there is no warrant in facts, to 
 affirm that consciousness is the function of an unknown essence— • 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 39 
 
 essence, and brain, used in the sense of organ of mental 
 function, are at bottom two names for the same sub- 
 stance ; the former word being the symbol by which it is 
 denoted through the inner sense of consciousness, the 
 latter word the symbol by which the outer senses denote 
 it j in like manner, such psychological terms as idea and 
 will are to the inner sense symbols of cerebral functions 
 which are known to the outer senses as physiological ner- 
 vous currents or excito-motor processes in the cerebral 
 convolutions. He who should insist on keeping these 
 different symbols of the same substance or process 
 punctiliously distinct on every occasion, and should 
 scrupulously shrink from ever translating one into terms 
 of the other, makes an abrupt and arbitrary division in 
 knowledge where there is continuity in nature, building 
 up two distinct sciences out of a study of the same 
 subject-matter, and acts very much as a person would do 
 who should refuse to recognize an object, when it is per- 
 ceived by or described in terms of one sense, to be the 
 same object as. it is when perceived by or described in 
 terms of another sense ; who should insist, for example, 
 on giving a different name to the orange which he per- 
 ceives by touch from that which he gives to the orange 
 
 mind, and that it cannot be a function of brain. Consciousness 
 cannot possibly tell us what is and what is not function of brain, 
 and when it undertakes to do so, goes entirely beyond its province, 
 and acts as absurdly as a man in a dark room in which he had 
 never been before would do, if he were to undertake to declare 
 positively from his own observation what was and what was not in 
 the room. It is not true, as might be said, that physiology makes a 
 like gross mistake when it undertakes to declare that which is known 
 only in consciousness, to be a function of brain, for although it cannot 
 witness to what passes in consciousness only, an individual can by 
 its method of observation and experiment produce and observe 
 variations in his consciousness corresponding with artificially pro- 
 duced variations of brain-states, and can justly infer similar cor- 
 relative effects from similar observations made by him upon other 
 persons?. 
 
40 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 which he perceives by sight, and on always keeping the 
 perceptions of his different senses punctiliously distinct. 
 
 Let me briefly go on now to state what the relations 
 of the brain as a bodily organ are. 
 
 i. The brain has, as previously set forth, a life of re- 
 lation ; which may be properly distinguished into — (a) a 
 relation with external nature through the inlets of the 
 senses ; and (6) a relation with the other organs of the 
 body through the nervous system distributed throughout 
 the body. These have already been sufficiently dwelt 
 upon here ; they will receive fuller attention afterwards. 
 
 2. But the brain has also a life of nutrition, or, if I 
 may so call it, a vegetative, life. In this its true organic 
 life, there is a nutritive assimilation of suitable material 
 from the blood by the nerve cell ; a restoration of the 
 statical equilibrium being thereby effected after each dis- 
 play of energy. The extent of the nutritive repair and 
 the mould which' it takes must plainly be determined by 
 the extent and form of the change or waste of matter 
 which has been the condition of the display of function : 
 the material change or waste in the nerve cell or circuit, 
 which the activity of an idea implies, is replaced from the 
 blood according to the mould or pattern of the particu- 
 lar, idea; statical functional potentiality thus following 
 through the agency of nutritive attraction upon the waste 
 of active idea through functional repulsion. The ele- 
 ments of the nerve cell or circuit grow to the form in 
 which it energizes. Whatever be the intimate molecular 
 process, it is certain that the functional disposition 
 which previous function produces is effected by nutri- 
 tion, that it requires a rich supply of blood, such as 
 the brain is known to have, and that it cannot be 
 effected if the supply of blood is cut off. This organic 
 process of repair is not usually attended by con- 
 sciousness, and yet it may obtrude itself into conscious- 
 ness : as the function of any organ, which proceeds, 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 41 
 
 when all is well, without exciting any sensation, does, 
 under conditions of disorder, give rise to unusual sensa- 
 tion or to actual pain ; so the organic life of the brain, 
 which usually passes peaceably without exciting con- 
 sciousness, may under certain conditions thrust itself 
 forward into consciousness and produce anomalous 
 effects. When this happens, the abnormal effect is not 
 manifest in sensation, for the hemispheres of the brain, 
 as physiologists well know, are not sensitive in that 
 sense ; but it is displayed in the involuntary appearance 
 of emotional ideas in consciousness, and in consequent 
 confusion of thought ; the statical potentiality becomes 
 energy, not through the usual train of association, but 
 by reason of the abnormal stimulus from the inner life. 
 Thus it is that the presence of alcohol or of some other 
 such foreign agent in the blood will excite into activity 
 ideas which lie out of the usual path of association, 
 which the utmost tension of consciousness would fail to 
 arouse, and which the will cannot repress nor control. 
 Thus it is that in some forms of insanity the irruption 
 of a vivid idea into consciousness, which may reach such 
 an intensity of energy as to become an uncontrollable im- 
 pulse, is attended with or preceded by an active deter- 
 mination of blood to the brain, the head becoming 
 suddenly hot and the feet as suddenly cold. Whosoever 
 will be at the pains of attending to his own daily ex- 
 perience will find that ideas frequently arise into con- 
 sciousness without any apparent relation to those 
 previously active ; without, in ' fact, any possibility of 
 explaining, quoad consciousness, why and whence they 
 come. ( 7 ) 
 
 To what has been before said of unconscious mental 
 function this more may now be added — that the deep 
 basis of all mental function lies in the organic life of the 
 brain, the characteristic of which in health is that it pro- 
 ceeds without consciousness. He whose brain makes 
 
42 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 him conscious that he has a brain is not well, but ill; 
 and thought that is conscious of itself is not natural and 
 healthy thought. How little competent, then, is con- 
 sciousness to supply the facts of an inductive science of 
 mind ! Pneumatology was at one time subdivided into 
 theology, demonology, and psychology ; all three resting 
 on the evidence of the inner witness. Demonology has 
 taken its place in the history of human error and super- 
 stition ; theology is confessedly now best supported by 
 those who strive to ascend inductively from nature's law 
 up to nature's God ; and psychology, shorn of its former 
 transcendental glories, stays its fall by appropriating the 
 discoveries of physiology and by translating them into 
 its still semi-metaphysical pliraseology, preserving only in 
 its nomenclature the shadow of its ancient authority and 
 state. On what foundation can a science of mind rest 
 safely, save on the faithful observation of all available 
 instances, whether psychical or physiological ? 
 
 Why, however, it will naturally be asked, repudiate 
 and disparage introspective psychology, now that it 
 evinces a disposition to abandon its exclusive mode of 
 procedure and to profit by the discoveries of physiology ? 
 Because the union, as desired by it, is an unnatural and un- 
 hallowed union, which can only issue in abortions or give 
 birth to monsters ; not otherwise, than as Ixion, designing 
 impiously to embrace Juno, had intercourse with the 
 clouds and begat centaurs. It is not a cursory perusal of 
 physiological text-books, and a superficial acquaintance 
 with the nature and functions of the nervous system, 
 which will put meaning into the vague and abstract lan- 
 guage of psychology ; that would simply be to subject 
 physiology to the tortures of Mezentius — to stifle the 
 living in the embraces of the dead ; but it is a sound 
 general-knowledge of the whole domain of organization, 
 at the head of which stands the nervous system, and the 
 final achievement or perfect consummation of which is 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 43 
 
 mind, that is indispensably pre-requisite to the formation 
 of fundamentally true conceptions of mental phenomena 
 on a physiological basis. The processes most nearly re- 
 sembling mental processes are those of life, for mind is 
 the function of the highest and most complex vital struc- 
 ture ; it is the most complex and special form of life 
 which we have to do with ; wherefore the study of vital 
 processes may .be justly declared to be the necessary 
 foundation of the scientific study of mental phenomena. 
 The question between modern physiology and the old 
 pyschology is not a question of eclectic appropriation 
 of the discoveries of the former by the latter, but a 
 fundamental question of method, of study. 
 
 But when our conceptions have been vitally informed 
 by physiological knowledge, it will be found a hard matter 
 to express them adequately and exactly in the terms of 
 pyschology. One conviction cannot fail to be brought 
 home to those who have pursued the physiological study 
 of mind — that it would have been well if the inquirer, 
 after rising step by step from the investigation of life in 
 its lowest forms to that of its highest and most complex 
 manifestations, could have entered upon the study of 
 mental phenomena without being hampered by any phi- 
 losophical theories concerning their nature, and could 
 have described them in terms which were free from any 
 previous metaphysical meanings. Fc* the terms of psy- 
 chology, have these faults — first, they are vague and 
 obscure ; and, secondly, they often imply false theories. 
 Used at first to denote external things, before there 
 was a conception of the nature of such external things 
 as vital processes are, they were borrowed and used 
 in a sort of figurative sense to express internal states, 
 and have now become so abstract, and been so de- 
 praved by their divorce from nature, as to be almost 
 empty of real meaning. Secondly, there is hardly a 
 single term which does not imply a theory, and a theory 
 
44 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 which is mostly either inadequate or false: under- 
 standing, will, idea, mind, are all terms which involve 
 psychological theories, and cannot easily be divested 
 of them. Indeed it is not possible to write a sentence 
 concerning our highest mental functions in terms of 
 psychology without implying, if the word have any 
 meaning at all, entities which are merely objectified 
 abstractions. Moreover, this also must be borne in 
 mind, for it aggravates our difficulties — that a word is 
 not merely a definite symbol of something, but a centre 
 also of various associations which affect essentially its 
 meaning; use it then as carefully as we may in its 
 psychological sense, we cannot detach these associations 
 from its meaning, and in spite of ourselves are driven 
 to raise a metaphysical haze.* 
 
 Such are the charges against self-consciousness whereon 
 is founded the conclusion as to its incompetence ; they 
 show that he who thinks to illuminate the whole range 
 and depth of mental function by the light of his own 
 
 * Another consequence is that those who, being familiar with 
 psychological analysis and ignorant of. physiology, go to work to 
 criticise the physiological exposition of mental phenomena, often 
 fail entirely to realise the meaning of that which they criticise ; the 
 words do not convey any physiological associations to thsir minds, 
 while at the same time they arouse the familiar psychological associa- 
 tions ; the result being that such. critics go round and round in a circle 
 grinding psychological wind without really touching the essential 
 facts. They might do worse than take the advice which a mystic 
 like Schopenhauer gives them: — "I pray you do not write on 
 physiology in its relations to psychology, without having digested 
 Cabanis and Bichat in succum et sanguinem ; in return you may 
 leave many German scribblers unread. At best the study of 
 psychology is vain, for there is no Psyche ;-men cannot be studied 
 alone, but in connection with the world — microkosmus and macro- 
 kosmus combined — as I have done. And test yourself whether you 
 really possess and comprehend physiology, which presupposes a 
 knowledge of anatomy and chemistry." — Arthur Schopenhauer, 
 His Life and his Philosophy, by Helen Zimmern, p. 24. 
 
l.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 45 
 
 consciousness is not unlike one who should go about to 
 illuminate the universe with a rushlight. A reflection on 
 the true nature of consciousness will surely tend to con- 
 firm that opinion. Whoever endeavours faithfully and 
 firmly to obtain a definite idea of what is meant by 
 consciousness, will find it nowise so easy a matter as the 
 frequent and ready use of the word might imply. Meta- 
 physicians, faithful to the vagueness of their ideas, and 
 definite only in individual assumption, are by no means 
 agreed in the meaning which they attach to it; and 
 it sometimes happens that the same metaphysician uses 
 the word in two or three different senses in different 
 parts of his book: Sir W. Hamilton, for example, uses it 
 at one time as synonymous with mind, at another time as 
 synonymous with knowledge, and at another time to ex- 
 press a condition of mental activity. That there should 
 be so little certainty about that upon which their philo- 
 sophy fundamentally rests must be allowed to be no 
 small misfortune to the metaphysicians. 
 
 What consciousness is will appear better if its relations 
 be closely examined without prejudice. It will then be 
 seen that it is not separable from knowledge ; that it 
 exists only as a part of the concrete mental act ; that it 
 has no more power of withdrawing from the particular 
 phenomenon, and of taking full and fair observation of 
 it, than a boy has of jumping over his own shadow. 
 Consciousness is not a faculty or substance, but a quality 
 or attribute of the concrete mental act. There is no con- 
 sciousness without something of which one is conscious, 
 no abstract consciousness without contents ; and it may 
 exist in different degrees of intensity, or it may be absent 
 altogether. In so far as there is consciousness, there is 
 certainly mental activity ; but it is not true that in so far 
 as there is mental activity there is consciousness ; it is 
 only with a certain intensity of representation or con- 
 ception that consciousness appears. What else, then, is 
 
46 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 the so-called interrogation of consciousness but a self- 
 revelation of the particular mental state whose character 
 it must needs share ? When the mental state is past, it 
 is known, not by direct consciousness, but by memory ; 
 and the introspective observation of mental sequences by 
 memory is assuredly subject to as many errors as the 
 external observation of physical sequences by the senses. 
 Consciousness can never be a valid and unprejudiced 
 witness; for although it testifies to the existence of a par- 
 ticular mental modification, yet when that modification 
 has anything of a morbid character, consciousness, which 
 is a part of it, is necessarily affected by the taint and 
 is morbid also. Accordingly, the lunatic appeals to the 
 evidence of his own consciousness for the truth of his 
 hallucination or delusion, and insists that he has as sure 
 evidence'of its reality as he has of the argument of any 
 one who may try to convince him of his error. And is 
 he not right from a subjective standpoint ? To one who 
 has vertigo the world turns round. A man may easily 
 be conscious of free will when, isolating the particular 
 mental act, he cuts himself off from the consideration 
 of the causes which have preceded it and on which it 
 depends. "There is no force," says Leibnitz, "in the 
 reason alleged by Descartes to prove the independence 
 of our free actions by a pretended lively internal senti- 
 ment. It is as if the needle should take pleasure in 
 turning to the north ; for it would suppose that it turned 
 independently of any other cause, not perceiving the 
 insensible motions of the magnetic matter."* Is it not 
 supremely ridiculous that, while we cannot trust con- 
 sciousness in so simple a matter as whether we are hot 
 or cold, we should be content to rely entirely on its evi- 
 dence in the complex phenomena of our highest mental 
 activity? The truth is that what has very often hap- 
 
 * Essais de Thiodicie, Pt. I. Spinoza uses a similar illustration 
 of the moving stone. 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 47 
 
 pened before has happened here : the quality or attribute 
 has been abstracted from the concrete, and the abstrac- 
 tion converted into an entity : the attribute, conscious- 
 ness, has miraculously got rid of its substance, and then 
 with a wonderful assurance assumed the office of com- 
 menting and passing judgment, from a higher region of 
 being, upon the nature of that whereof it is actually a 
 function. Descartes was in this case the clever architect, 
 and his success has fujly justified his art: while the 
 metaphysical stage of human development lasts, his 
 work will doubtless stand. 
 
 That the subjective method — the method of interro- 
 gating self-consciousness — is not adequate to the con- 
 struction of a true mental science, has now seemingly 
 been sufficiently established. This is not to say that it 
 is worthless ; for when not strained beyond its capabili- 
 ties, its results must, in the hands of competent men, be 
 as useful as they are indispensable, , We can investigate 
 the properties of water without knowing its composition ; 
 in like manner, we can observe the associations and 
 sequences of mental states without knowing their phy- 
 sical antecedents. Moreover, when we have discovered 
 by objective inquiry the physical antecedents, we must 
 still depend upon the help of subjective observation in 
 order to establish the exact sequences of the mental 
 states, which we only know by introspection, to the physi- 
 cal states which we observe and make experiments upon. 
 D'Alembert compares Locke to Newton, and makes it a 
 special praise to him that he was content to descend 
 within, and that, after having contemplated himself for a 
 long while, he presented in his " Essay " the mirror in 
 which he had seen himself; "in a word, he reduced 
 psychology to that which it should be — the experimental 
 physics of the mind.'' But it was not altogether because 
 of this method, but in some degree in spite of it, that 
 Locke was greatly successful ; it was because he possessed 
 
48 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 a powerful and well-balanced mind, the direct utterances 
 of which he sincerely expressed, that the results which 
 he obtained, in whatever nomenclature they may be 
 clothed, are and always will be valuable ; they are the 
 self-revelations of an excellently constituted and well- 
 trained mind. The insufficiency of the method used is 
 proved by the fact that others adopting it, but wanting 
 his sound sense, directly contradicted him at the time, 
 and do so still. Furthermore, Locke did not confine 
 himself to the interrogation of his own consciousness ; 
 for he introduced the practice — for which Cousin was so 
 angry with him — of referring to savages and children. 
 And one may take leave to suggest that the most valuable 
 part of Locke's psychology, that which has been a lasting 
 addition to knowledge, really was the result of the em- 
 ployment of the inductive or rather objective method ; for 
 psychology cannot be truly inductive unless it is studied 
 objectively. Nay, more: if any one will be at the pains to 
 examine candidly the history of the development of psy- 
 chology up to its present stage, he may be surprised to 
 find how much the important acquisitions of new truths 
 and the corrections of old errors have been due, not to 
 the interrogation of self-consciousness, but to external 
 observation, though it was not recognised as a systematic 
 method. Not the least valuable, though a hitherto little 
 valued, part of the psychology of Descartes is that in 
 which he treats of the automatic functions of the lower 
 animals, anticipating in some important particulars the 
 modern doctrine of reflex action. The past history of 
 psychology — its instinctive progress, so to speak — no less 
 than the consideration of its present state, proves the 
 necessity of admitting the objective method. 
 
 That which a just reflection teaches incontestably, the 
 present state of physiology illustrates practically. Though 
 very imperfect as a science, physiology has made sufficient 
 progress to prove that no psychology can endure except 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 
 
 49 
 
 it be based upon its investigations. Let it not, more- 
 over, be forgotten, as it is so apt to be, that there is a 
 continuity throughout nature, and that the divisions in 
 our knowledge are artificial; that they should be ac- 
 cepted and used rather, as Bacon says, " for lines to 
 mark or distinguish, than sections to divide and sepa- 
 rate ; in order that solution of continuity in sciences 
 may always be avoided."* Not the- smallest atom which 
 floats in the sunbeam, nor the minutest molecule which 
 vibrates within the microcosm of an organic cell, but is 
 bound as a part of the mysterious whole in an inextrica- 
 ble harmony with the laws by which planets move in 
 their appointed orbits and with the laws which govern the 
 marvellous creations of genius. Above all things it is 
 now necessary that the absolute and unholy barrier set 
 up between psychical and physical nature be broken 
 down, and that a just conception of mind be formed, 
 founded on a faithful recognition of all those phenomena 
 of nature which lead by imperceptible gradations up to 
 this its highest evolution. Happily the beneficial change 
 is being gradually effected, and ignorant prejudice or 
 offended self-love in vain opposes a progress in know- 
 ledge which reflects the course of progress ' in nature : 
 the stars in their courses fight for such truth, and its 
 angry adversary might as well hope to blow out with his 
 pernicious breath the all-inspiring light of the sun as to 
 extinguish its ever-waxing splendour. 
 
 No one pretends that physiology can, for many years 
 to come, furnish the complete data of a positive mental 
 science : all that it can at present do — and that is not a 
 small service — is to overthrow the data of a false 
 psychology. It is easy, no doubt, to point to the ex- 
 tent of our ignorance, and to maintain that physiology 
 never will lay securely the foundations of a mental 
 science, just as it was easy to say, before the invention of 
 
 * De Augmentis Scictitiarum, B. IV. 
 
50 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 the telescope, that the ways of the planets could never 
 be traced and calculated. The confident dogmatist in 
 this matter might well learn caution from an instructive 
 example of the rash error of a greater philosopher than 
 he can claim or hope to be : — " It is the absurdity of 
 these opinions," said Bacon, "that has driven men to 
 the diurnal motion of the earth ; which, I am convinced, 
 is most false.'"* What should fairly and honestly be 
 weighed is, that mental organization is the last, the 
 highest, the consummate evolution of nature, and that, 
 therefore, it must be the last, the most complex, and 
 most difficult object of human study. There are really 
 no grounds for expecting a positive science of mind at 
 present ; for to its establishment the completion of the 
 other sciences is necessary ; and, as is well known, it is 
 only lately that the metaphysical spirit has been got rid 
 of in astronomy, physics, and chemistry, and that these 
 sciences, after more than two thousand years of idle and 
 shifting fancies, have attained to certain principles. Still 
 more recently has physiology emerged from the fog, and 
 this for obvious reasons : in the first place it is absolutely 
 dependent upon the physical and chemical sciences, and 
 must, therefore, wait for the progress of them ; and, in 
 the second place, its close relations to psychology, when 
 it is concerned with the functions of the brain, have 
 kept it under the spell of the metaphysical spirit. 
 That, therefore, which should be in this matter is that 
 which is, and instead of being a cause of despair, is a 
 ground of hope. 
 
 But let it not be forgotten that the physiological 
 method deals only with one (I.) division of the matter 
 to which the objective method is to be applied ; there 
 are other divisions not less valuable : — 
 
 II. The study of the plan of development of mind, as 
 exhibited in the animal, the barbarian, and the infant, 
 * De Augmentis Scientiarum, B. III. 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 51 
 
 furnishes results of the greatest value, and is as essential 
 to the construction of a true mental science as the study 
 of its development confessedly is to a full knowledge of 
 the bodily organism. By that means we get at the deep 
 and true relations of phenomena, and are enabled to 
 correct the erroneous inferences of a superficial observa- 
 tion ; by examination of the barbarian, for example, we 
 observe phenomena in the simple- which, even when most 
 simple, are still complex enough; we eliminate also 
 the hypocrisy which is the result of the social condition, 
 and which is apt to mislead us in the civilized individual. 
 For information concerning the most distant epochs of 
 human development — those which are prehistorical — ■ 
 our resources are not great ; we make shift with an ex- 
 amination of the flint and bronze instruments and other 
 records of art which have been discovered by modern 
 research, and with a study of the formation and develop- 
 ment of languages. In the language are embodied 
 the thoughts and feelings of a period, and from it we 
 are able to form reasonable conjectures concerning the 
 social state and the beliefs thereof. For this purpose the 
 study of myths also has been found most useful : they 
 reveal mental states in which the anthropomorphic in- 
 terpretation of nature was habitual, and carried to the 
 extremest pitch, — a mode of interpretation of which 
 we have still a survival in the masculine and feminine 
 nouns of objects, such as sun and moon, in some mo- 
 dern languages. In his language, as also in his nature, 
 man is the heir of the mental and moral labours of his 
 most distant ancestors : it embodies, as his nature does, 
 the accumulated acquisitions of successive generations 
 of men. 
 
 III. The study of the degeneration of mind, as exhi- 
 bited in the different forms of idiocy and insanity, is 
 indispensable as it is invaluable. So we avail ourselves 
 of the experiments provided by nature, and bring our 
 
S 2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 generalizations to a most searching test. Hitherto the 
 phenomena of insanity have been entirely ignored by 
 psychologists and grievously misinterpreted by the vulgar, 
 because interpreted by the false conclusions of a sub- 
 jective psychology. Had not such material facts as 
 the revelations of consciousness in dreams and in 
 delirium been constantly neglected by those who pro- 
 fessed to be inductive pyschologists, truer generali- 
 zations must perforce have been formed ere thisj and 
 fewer irresponsible lunatics would have been executed 
 as responsible criminals. Why those who put so much 
 faith in the subjective method do reject such a large 
 and important collection of instances as dreams and 
 madmen furnish, they have never thought proper to ex- 
 plain. Another promising but strangely neglected field 
 of inquiry is a study of criminals. The time will come, 
 ought to have come now, when prisons shall be used for 
 the systematic investigation of the antecedents, and for 
 the clinical study of the varieties, ,of the criminal nature, 
 just as asylums are used for the clinical study of diseased 
 minds, hospitals for the study of diseased bodies. It 
 may be doubted whether half the books that have been 
 written on moral philosophy would be worth one good 
 book by an earnest and industrious inquirer who should 
 undertake the scientific study of the inmates of a single 
 prison. 
 
 IV. The study of biography and of autobiography, 
 which has already been described as the application of 
 positive science to human life, will plainly afford essential 
 aid in the formation of a positive science of mind. Thus 
 we trace the development of the mind in the individual 
 as affected by hereditary influences, education, and the 
 circumstances of life. Concerning autobiographies, how- 
 ever, it will not be amiss to bear in mind an observation 
 made by Feuchtersleben, that " they are only of value to 
 the competent judge, because we must see in them not 
 
h] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 53 
 
 so much what they relate as what, by their manner of 
 relation, is undesignedly betrayed." 
 
 V. The study of the progress or regress of the human 
 mind, as exhibited in history, most difficult as the task is, 
 cannot be neglected by one who wishes to be thoroughly 
 equipped for the arduous work of constructing a posi- 
 tive mental science. The unhappy tendencies which 
 lead to individual error and degeneration are those which 
 on a national scale conduct peoples to destruction ; and 
 the nisus of an epoch is summed up in the biography of 
 its great man.* Freed from the many disturbing con- 
 ditions which interfere so much with his observation of 
 the individual, the philosopher may perhaps discover in 
 history the laws of human progress in their generality 
 and simplicity, as Newton discovered, in the motions of 
 the heavenly bodies, the law for which he would have 
 looked in vain had he watched the fall of every apple in 
 Europe. Moreover, in the language, literature, painting, 
 sculpture, and in the political, social and religious institu- 
 tions of mankind, there are important materials for the 
 construction of a science of mind. As Comte has set 
 forth with great elaboration, the individual is a social unit, 
 and cannot be comprehended independently of the social 
 medium in which he lives; just as it is necessary to study 
 his bodily organism in its relations with surrounding 
 physical nature, so it is necessary to study his mental 
 functions in their relations with the human nature of 
 which he is a unit. No one who has given the least 
 thought to the process of human evolution can be sur- 
 prised that the prophet of a new religion, or a social re- 
 former, or a philosopher does not appear among a tribe 
 of Red Indians ; when a man of superior mental endow- 
 
 » " When nature has work to be done,'' says Emerson, " she 
 
 creates a genius to do it. Follow the great man, and you shall see 
 
 what the world has at heart in these ages. There is no omen like 
 
 that." 
 
 i 
 
54 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 ments does appear among them he becomes a great 
 hunter, or a great warrior, or a great orator in council ; 
 for he applies all his energies to the work in which it is 
 the tribal ambition to excel, and the tribal joy to succeed. 
 The history of mankind is a continuation of the natural 
 history of the universe, and must have discoverable laws ; 
 but while the course of cosmic evolution as far as mind 
 is completed, and known in part, its continued evolution 
 in mind is far from complete, and is yet hardly known at 
 all. However, as the astronomer can, from observation 
 of a portion of a planet's course, draw the path of its 
 entire orbit, so may it be possible in the time to come, 
 from observation of the course of the past years of 
 human development, to discover the laws of future 
 development. 
 
 May we not then truly say that he only is the true 
 psychologist who, occupied with the observation of the 
 whole of human nature, avails himself not alone of every 
 means which science affords for the investigation of 
 the bodily conditions which assuredly underlie every dis- 
 play of function, conscious or unconscious, but also of 
 every help, subjective or objective, which is furnished by 
 the mental manifestations of animal and of man, whether 
 undeveloped, degenerate, or cultivated ? Here, as every- 
 where else in nature, the student must deliberately apply 
 himself to a close communion with the external, must 
 intend his mind to the realities which surround him, and 
 thus, by patient internal adjustment to outward relations, 
 gradually evolve into conscious development those inner 
 truths which are the unavoidable expressions of the liar-' 
 mony between himself and nature. By diligent colliga- 
 tion of facts, patient observation of their relations, and 
 careful consilience of inductions, he will attain to sound 
 generalizations in this as in other departments of nature ; 
 in no other way can he do so. Of old it was the fashion 
 to try to explain nature from a very incomplete knowledge 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 55 
 
 of man ; but it is the certain tendency of advancing 
 science to explain man on the basis of a perfecting know- 
 ledge of nature. 
 
 Having fairly admitted a method, it behoves us to take 
 heed that we are not too exclusive in its application. To 
 this onesidedness there is a strong inclination : even in 
 the investigation of physical nature men often now write 
 of induction as Bacon himself never wrote of it. They 
 would repudiate as impious all use of theory in scientific 
 inquiries, forgetful that not a single question can be put 
 to nature without some theory, and that in the interro- 
 gation of nature no answer is ever volunteered ; the 
 definite answer is not vouchsafed unless the definite 
 question be put, or the definite experiment made, as 
 Bacon says, ad intentionem ejus quod queritur. It might 
 seem, from the usual fashion of speech, that the function 
 of the mind was merely that of a polished and passive 
 mirror, in which natural phenomena should be allowed 
 simply to reflect themselves ; whereas every state of con- 
 sciousness is a developmental result of the relation be- 
 tween mind and the impression, of the subject and object. 
 What Bacon strove so earnestly to abolish was the method 
 of systematically looking into the mind and, by torture 
 of self-consciousness, drawing thence empty ideas, as the 
 spider forms a web out of its own substance, — that ill- 
 starred divorce between mind and nature which had been 
 cultivated by the Schoolmen as a method. What he 
 wished, on the other hand, to establish was a happy 
 marriage between mind and matter, between subject and 
 object; to prevent the "mind being withdrawn frpm 
 things farther than was necessary to bring into a har- 
 monious conjunction the ideas and the impressions made 
 upon the senses." * For, as he says, the testimony and 
 
 * "Nos vero intellectual longius a rebus non abstrahimus quam 
 ut rerum imagines et radii (ut in sensu fit) coire possint." (Proleg. 
 Instaurat. Magn.) This passage, as usually rendered, is not intel- 
 
56 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 information of the senses have reference always to man, 
 not to the universe — to man's limited capacities of appre- 
 
 ligible ; the translation in the text, if not literally exact, evidently, 
 as the context proves, expresses Bacon's true meaning. He had 
 objected to all before him that some had wrongly regarded the 
 sense as the measure of things, while others, equally wrongly, "after 
 having only a little while turned their eyes upon things, and in- 
 stances, and experience, then straightway, as if invention were 
 nothing more than a certain process of excogitation, have fallen, as 
 it were, to invoke their own spirits to utter oracles to them. But 
 we," he goes on, "modestly and perseveringly keeping ourselves 
 conversant among things, never withdraw our understanding," &c. 
 Mr. Spedding, in his admirable edition of Bacon's works, translates 
 the passage thus : — " I, on the contrary, withdraw my intellect from 
 them no further than may suffice to let the images and rays of 
 natural objects meet in a point, as they do in the sense of vision." 
 According to this interpretation — if there really is any meaning in it 
 — the images and rays of objects express the same thing. Mr. 
 Wood's translation, in Mr. Montagu's edition, is: — "We abstract 
 our understanding no further from them than is necessary to prevent 
 the confusion of the images of things with their radiation, a confu- 
 sion similar to that we experience by our senses. " This is worse 
 still ; ut possint coire means, certainly, " that they come together," 
 not "that they may not mingle or may be prevented from mingling." 
 After all, the 95th Aphorism furnishes the clearest and surest com- 
 mentary on the passage — " Those who have treated the sciences 
 were either empirics or rationalists. The empirics, like ants, only 
 lay up stores and use them ; the rationalists, like spiders, spin webs 
 out of themselves ; but the bee takes a middle course, gathering her 
 matter from the flowers of the field and garden, and digesting and 
 preparing it by her native powers. In like manner, that is the true 
 office and work of philosophy which, not trusting too much to the 
 faculties of the mind, does not lay up the matter, afforded by natural 
 history and mechanical experience, entire or unfashioned in the 
 memory, but treasures it after being first elaborated and digested 
 in the understanding. And, therefore, we have a good ground 
 of hope, from the close and strict union of the experimental and 
 rational faculty, which have hitherto been united." In the very 
 place where the obscure passage occurs, he says, after speaking of 
 the inauspicious divorce usually made between mind and nature — 
 "The explanation of which things, and of the true relation between 
 the nature of things and the nature of the mind, is as (he strewing 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 57 
 
 hension, not to the infinite capacities of nature to be 
 apprehended ; and it is a great error to assert that the 
 sense is the measure of things. But by his method of 
 effecting, as completely as possible, a reconciliation be- 
 tween the subjective and objective, he hoped to have 
 " established for ever a true and lawful marriage between 
 the empirical and the rational faculty, the unkind and ill- 
 starred divorce and separation of which has thrown into 
 confusion all the affairs of the human family." The mind 
 that is in harmony with the laws of nature, in an intimate 
 sympathy with the course of events, is strong with the 
 strength of nature, and is developed by its force : it is the 
 identification of subject and object, which men have so long 
 and so mischievously laboured to divorce. For there are 
 not two worlds — a world of nature and a world of human 
 consciousness standing over against one another, but one 
 world of nature whereof human consciousness is an 
 evolution and, may we not say, a consummation. The 
 aim and labour of man should be to identify himself with 
 nature by intimate communion therewith, not to place 
 himself in a position of separation and antagonism under 
 the delusion of a monstrous manie de grandeur. 
 
 A contemplation of the earlier stages of human de- 
 velopment as exhibited by the savages, certainly con- 
 strains the admission that the conscious or designed co- 
 operation of the mind in the adaptation of man to 
 external nature was not great. The fact is, however, in 
 exact conformity with what has already been asserted 
 concerning the nature and domain of consciousness. 
 Assuredly it is not consciousness, the natural result of a 
 due development, which gives the impulse to development ; 
 
 and decoration of the bridal chamber of the Mind and Universe, 
 the Divine Goodness assisting ; out of which marriage let us hope 
 (and this be the prayer of the bridal Song) there may spring helps 
 to man, and a line and race of inventions that may in some degree 
 subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity." 
 
58 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 conscious method has had no greater part in the forma- 
 tion of a moral sense in the later epochs than it probably 
 had in the discovery of fire and its uses in the earlier 
 epochs of human evolution. Whence comes the im- 
 pulse of evolution on earth we know not ; but certainly 
 from a source that is past finding out by our finite appre- 
 hension — from the primeval central Power which hurled 
 the planets on their courses, and holds the lasting orbs of 
 heaven in their just poise and movement. In virtue of 
 the fundamental impulse of its being, mankind struggles, 
 at first blindly, towards a knowledge of and adaptation to 
 external nature, until that which has been insensibly ac- 
 quired through generations becomes an inborn addition 
 to the power of the mind, and that which was uncon- 
 sciously done becomes conscious method. 
 
 It were well, then, that this idea took deep and firm 
 root in our thoughts : that the development of mind, 
 both in the individual and through generations, is a gradual 
 process of organization — a process in which Nature is 
 undergoing her latest and most consummate development 
 through man. In reality we do not fail virtually to recog- 
 nise this in the case of language, the organic growth of 
 which, as we scientifically trace it, is the result of the 
 unseen organization of thought that lies beneath, and 
 alone gives it meaning. His own consciousness, faith- 
 fully interpreted, might suffice to reveal to each one the 
 gradual maturing or becoming through which a process 
 of thought continually goes in his mind. So has it been 
 with mankind : at first there was an instinctive or pure 
 organic development, the human race struggled on, as 
 the child does, without being conscious of its ego ; then, 
 as it reached a certain stage of development, it became, 
 as the youth does, exceedingly self-conscious, and an ex- 
 travagant and unhealthy metaphysical subjectivity was 
 the expression of an undue self-feeling ;. and finally, as 
 the happily developing individual passes from an undue 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 59 
 
 subjectivity to a calm objective manner of viewing things, 
 so Bacon may be said to mark the epoch of a correspond- 
 ing happy change in the development of mankind. Let 
 us entirely get rid, however, of the notion that the objec- 
 tive study of nature means merely the sensory perception 
 of it ; we see, not with the eye, but through it ; and to 
 any one who is above the level of the animal the sun is 
 not a. bright disc of fire about the size of a big cheese, 
 but an immense orb rushing through space with its 
 attendant planetary system at the rate of some hundreds 
 of thousands of miles a day. Now, such are the won- 
 drous harmony, connection, and continuity pervading 
 that mysterious whole which we call Nature, that it is im- 
 possible to get a just and clear idea of one pure circle of 
 her works without that idea becoming most useful in 
 flashing a light into obscure and unknown regions, and in 
 thus aiding the conscious establishment of a further har- 
 mony of adaptation between man and nature.* Hence 
 we anticipate observation by far-reaching deductions, 
 foreseeing facts that are abstractly included in the pure 
 circle of a true general intuition, and which, when ob 
 served, are the verification of our deduction. The brilliant 
 insight or intuition of the man of genius, who so often 
 anticipates the slow result of systematic investigation, 
 witnesses with singular force to that truth. Far wiser than 
 many of his commentators. have been, Bacon accordingly 
 failed not to appreciate clearly the exceeding value of 
 idea in the interpretation of nature. 
 
 But if the due co-operation of the mind is necessary, 
 if the harmony of subjective and objective was Bacon's 
 real method, in the prosecution of physical science, how 
 much more useful must the just union of the empirical and 
 rational faculties be in the study of mental science ; the 
 task then being to apply the ideas of the mind to the 
 
 * "Denn woNatur im reinen Kreise waltet ergreifen alleWelten sicli.'' 
 
 Goethe, Faust. 
 
60 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 interpretation of the mind's processes of activity. It 
 must assuredly be allowed that the light of one's own 
 train of thought is often most serviceable in interpreting 
 the mind of another person ; so much so, indeed, that 
 one may know what is passing therein with not less cer- 
 tainty, sometimes even with greater certainty, than when 
 it is actually uttered. In order to be successful in this 
 sort of intuition, not only good natural insight, but a 
 large experience of life and men, is most necessary, else 
 the most grievous mistakes may be made ; here, as else- 
 where, power is acquired by intending the mind to exter- 
 nal realities, by submitting the understanding to things. 
 This then is objective observation; if strictly subjective, 
 it must be limited to the revelations of self-consciousness. 
 Plainly, too, this objective application ef our ideas to the 
 interpretation of another mind is a very different matter 
 from the deliberate direction of consciousness to its own 
 states, — that introspective analysis of the processes of 
 thought whereby, as before said, the natural train of 
 ideas being interrupted and the tension of a particular 
 activity maintained, an artificial state of mind is produced, 
 and a tortured self-consciousness, like an individual put 
 to the torture, makes confessions that are utterly untrust- 
 worthy, most often giving the exact answer which the 
 torture was applied to extract. The genuine utterances 
 of his inner life, or the sincere and direct revelations 
 of the man of great natural ability and good training, 
 are the highest truths — but the contradictory anatomical 
 revelations of internal analysis by the professed psy- 
 chologists , are the vainest word jugglings with which 
 a tenacious perseverance has vexed a long-suffering 
 world. They should justly be opposed, as by Bacon ; 
 or shunned, as by Shakespeare ; or abhorred, as by 
 Goethe : — " Ich habe nie an Denken gedacht." * As 
 
 * Hiebei bekenn' ich dass mir von jeher die grosse und so 
 bedeutend klingende Aufgabe : erkenne dich selht, immer verdach- 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 61 
 
 in the child there is no consciousness of the ego, so in 
 the highest development of humanity, as represented by 
 these our greatest, a similar unconsciousness of the ego 
 seems to have been reached ; and the individual, in inti- 
 mate and congenial sympathy with nature, carries forward 
 its organic evolution with a child-like unconsciousness 
 and a child-like success. 
 
 To prevent misunderstanding, let me say, although 
 what has gone before in this chapter should render it un- 
 necessary, that I have no absurd desire to repudiate intro- 
 spective observation entirely ; I aspire only to see it de- 
 throned from the exclusive place which it has usurped, 
 and relegated to its proper place in the study of mental 
 science. One ought perhaps to distinguish systematically 
 between the simple revelations of mental states in con- 
 sciousness, which, coming from a well-trained mind, yield 
 valuable aid to other methods of inquiry, and the empty 
 results of the methodical application of introspective 
 analysis to construct a self-sufficient philosophy of 
 mind without regard to or aid from other methods. 
 Everybody can perceive that feelings, ideas, volitions, 
 are known through self-consciousness, and have only 
 a subjective meaning. And although they may, and 
 no doubt do, correspond to what, I suppose, we may 
 call objective changes in the nervous system, we cannot 
 know them by objective inquiry, any more than we can 
 know the material changes by mental introspection. No 
 observation of the brain, no investigation of its chemical 
 activities, gives us the least information respecting the 
 states of feeling that are connected with them ; as has 
 
 tig vorkam, als eine List geheim verbunder Priester, die den 
 menschen durch unerrcichbare Forderungen verwirren, und von 
 der Thatigkeit gegen die Aussenwelt zu einem innern falschen 
 Beschaulickeit verleiten wollten. Der mensch kennt sich selbst, in 
 sofern er die Welt kennt, die er nur in sich und sich nur in ihr 
 gewahr wird. Jeder neue Gegenstand, wohl be<chaut, schliesst ein 
 neues Organ in uns auf. — Goethe, vol. 49-50. 
 
62 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 been aptly remarked, it is certain that the anatomist and 
 physiologist might pass centuries in studying the brain 
 and nerves, without ever suspecting what a pleasure or a 
 pain is, if they have not felt both ; even vivisections teach 
 us nothing except by the interpretation which we give 
 them through observation of our own mental processes. 
 Nevertheless, it would be rash to declare that the energies 
 which in consciousness are feelings, ideas and volitions 
 will not sometime be appreciable and even measurable 
 by delicate physical instruments which may yet be in- 
 vented, not otherwise than as certain phenomena accom- 
 panying conduction along a nerve-track are now appreci- 
 able and measurable by the galvanometer. The question 
 for psychology is how we are to observe in detail, and 
 ascertain definitely, the correspondences between the 
 subjective states which are known by self-consciousness 
 and the objective changes in brain to which they run 
 parallel, and which we believe to be the physical condi- 
 tions of them. In the same way, I answer, as we establish 
 correspondences in physical phenomena — by observation 
 and experiment. Our aim must be to study carefully the dif- 
 ferences between the brains of the lower animals, between 
 the brain of the animal and the human brain, and between 
 different human brains, and to compare the observed 
 differences in structural development with the carefully 
 studied differences in mental functions ; to observe what 
 loss or modification of mental function in an animal 
 follows the removal or the experimental modification of 
 a particular portion of brain ; and to take advantage, 
 for the same purpose, of the pathological experiments 
 upon the human brain which are made for us by disease 
 and by accidental injuries. 
 
 But granted, it may be said, you will eventually succeed 
 in establishing an exact sequence of a particular mental 
 state to a particular change in brain — nay, perhaps, of all 
 the special mental states to their special cerebral changes, 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 63 
 
 you are still no nearer explaining why the energy which 
 follows the cerebral change is a feeling, or an idea, or a voli- 
 tion — why it becomes conscious. That is so, no doubt : 
 but at the same time we are no worse off in that respect 
 than we are in respect of other natural forces, such as elec- 
 tricity and chemical affinity, and the changes in matter to 
 which they are sequent; allof which sequences, as known 
 to us, it may be remarked, are only states of conscious- 
 ness. You do not ask us to explain why chemical affinity 
 or electricity is what it is, nor demand that we should do 
 more than establish the invariable relation between matter 
 and force : why then make such an unwarrantable demand 
 only when cerebral organization functions as conscious 
 energy ? We have done enough, we contend, when we 
 have established invariable sequence — when we have 
 definitely ascertained in respect of each mental function, 
 that a particular state of cerebral matter is the invariable 
 condition of it — that when this varies it varies, and when 
 this is not it is not ; and we may certainly claim the right 
 to exult, should it ever come to pass, as it may well be it 
 will, that we succeed in appreciating by delicate mechani- 
 cal instruments the energies which appear in conscious- 
 ness as feelings, ideas and volitions, and in measuring 
 the variations of them. The true method of psychology 
 is the union of the subjective and objective methods, or 
 rather the rigorous prosecution of the objective method 
 interpreted by subjective light. This is the happy 
 bridal union from which we may expect vigorous off- 
 spring. There is not one science of psychology, another 
 science of cerebral physiology, and between them a 
 science of physiological psychology : there are not 
 three sciences, but one science — that of the physiology 
 of the nervous system, the phenomena whereof have 
 an objective and a subjective aspect, and are to be 
 studied by external and internal observation. Mind 
 and nature are, as Aristotle pointed out long ago, 
 
64 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [cHAr. 
 
 really two sides of the same fact, which are only separ- 
 able verbally. 
 
 Before concluding this chapter it may be well distinctly 
 to affirm a truth which is an unwelcome one, because it 
 flatters not the self-love of mankind ; and it is this, that 
 there is all the difference in the world between the gifted 
 man of genius, who can often anticipate the slow results 
 of systematic investigation, and who strikes out new paths, 
 and the common herd of mortals, who must plod on with 
 patient humility in the old tracks, " with manifold motions 
 making little speed : " it is the difference between the 
 butterfly which flies and feeds on honey and the cater- 
 pillar which crawls and gorges on leaves. Men, ever 
 eager to "pare the mountain to the plain," will not 
 willingly confess this ; nevertheless it is most true. Rules 
 and systems are necessary for the ordinarily endowed 
 mortals, whose business it is to gather together and 
 arrange the materials ; the genius, who is the architect, 
 has, like nature, an unconscious system of his own. It 
 is the fate of its nature, and no demerit, that the cater- 
 pillar must crawl : it is the fate of its nature, and no 
 merit, that the butterfly must fly. The question, so much 
 disputed, of the relative extent of applicability of the so- 
 called inductive and deductive methods, often resolves 
 itself into a question as to what manner of man it is who 
 is to use them — whether one who has senses only, who 
 has eyes and sees not, or one who has senses and a soul ; 
 whether one who can only collect so-called facts of obser- 
 vation, or one who can bind together the thousand scat- 
 tered facts by the organizing idea, and thus guarantee 
 them to be facts. Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe, Humboldt, 
 Bacon too, and, in truth, all men. who have had anything 
 of inspiration in them, were not mere sense-machines for 
 registering observations, but rather instruments on which 
 the melody of nature, like sphere music, was made for 
 the benefit and delectation of such as have ears to hear. 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 65 
 
 That some so virulently declaim against theory is as 
 though the eunuch should declaim against lechery : it is 
 the chastity of impotence. 
 
 In no case, however, can the inductive and deductive 
 methods be separated ; and it would be a great error to 
 suppose that the highest genius can dispense with long 
 and patient industry in observation. The well-endowed 
 and well-trained natural philosopher is pleased when a 
 strange and novel fact presents itself, because it is cal- 
 culated to arrest the routine of observation and reflection, 
 and to set him to work on a new path to bring it under 
 known laws or to discover the new law of which it is a 
 result; accordingly he is careful not to pass it by, but ob- 
 serves it earnestly, holding to it tenaciously, associates or 
 compares it with other facts of a like nature which have 
 come within his experience, frames a theory or hypothe- 
 sis concerning it, deduces other facts which must be if 
 the hypothesis were true, and finally tests the deduction 
 by rigid comparison of the facts inferred with the results 
 of patient observation and varied experiment. It is 
 probable that he forms many erroneous hypotheses, and 
 abandons them after trial, before he hits upon the true 
 one which he verifies. " The world little knows," wrote 
 Faraday, " how many of the thoughts and theories which 
 have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator 
 have been crushed in silence and secrecy by his own 
 severe criticism and adverse examination ; that in the 
 most successful instances not a tenth of the suggestions, 
 the hopes, the wishes, the preliminary conclusions have 
 been realized." The qualities necessary to the success- 
 ful discoverer appear then to be these : first, an impres- 
 sionability to, and determined observation or mental 
 registration of, a novel phenomenon : secondly, a fruitful 
 faculty of discerning relations of identity and of there- 
 upon framing hypotheses ; and, lastly, persistent industry 
 in following out the consequences of an hypothesis, by 
 
66 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 foreseeing -its results and devising experiments to test 
 and verify them. Patient observation and industry may 
 no doubt be acquired by ordinary training, but the 
 faculty of detecting identity and uniformity in different 
 objects and events, and the fruitful imagination which 
 frames hypotheses and devises means of verification, are 
 not within the reach of everybody ; they are more or less 
 qualities of original nature. Each generation has a 
 common heritage of ideas, and an individual mind finds 
 itself in a certain atmosphere of thought which it reflects 
 more or less distinctly. He who has what is called 
 genius is in harmony with and assimilates the best 
 thought of his own epoch and of preceding epochs, and 
 carries it forward to a higher evolution. An age which 
 lacks that impulse of evolution which the genius em- 
 bodies, is apt to harden into obstructive formula. 
 
 So rarely, however, does nature produce one of these 
 men gifted with that high and subtile quality called 
 genius — being scarce, indeed, equal to the production of 
 one in a century — and so self-sufficing are they when 
 they do appear, that we, gratefully accepting them as 
 visits of angels, or much as Plato accepted his super- 
 celestial ideas, need not vainly concern ourselves about 
 their manner of working. It is not by such anxious 
 troubling that one will come ; it is not by introspective 
 prying into and torture of its own self-consciousness that 
 mankind evolves the genius ; the mature result of its un- 
 conscious development flows at due time into conscious- 
 ness with a grateful surprise, and from time to time the 
 slumbering centuries are thus awakened. It is by the 
 patient and diligent work at systematic adaptation to 
 the external by the rank and file of mankind ; it is by 
 the conscientious labour of each one, after the inductive 
 method, in that little sphere of nature, whether psychical 
 or physical, which in the necessary division of labour 
 has fallen to his lot — that a condition of evolution is 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 67 
 
 reached at which the genius bursts forth. Tiresome, 
 then, as the minute man of observation may sometimes 
 seem as he exults over his scattered facts as if they were 
 final, and magnifies his molecules into mountains as if 
 they were eternal, it is well that he should thus enthu- 
 siastically esteem his work ; and no one but will give a 
 patient attention as he reflects how indispensable the 
 humblest unit is in the social organism, and how excel- 
 lent a spur vanity is to industry. Not unamusing, though 
 somewhat saddening, is it, however, to witness the pain- 
 ful surprise of the man of observation, his jealous indig- 
 nation and clamorous outcry, when the result at which 
 he and his fellow-labourers have been so patiently, though 
 blindly, working, when the genius-product of the cen- 
 tury which he has helped to create, starts into life — 
 when the metamorphosis is completed and the cater- 
 pillar has become a butterfly : amusing, hecause the 
 patient worker is supremely astonished at a result which, 
 though preparing, he nowise foresaw ; saddening, be- 
 cause individually he is annihilated, and all the toil in 
 which he spent his strength is swallowed up in the pro- 
 duct which, gathering up the different lines of investi- 
 gation and thought, and giving to them a unity of 
 development, now by epigenesis ensues. We perceive, 
 then, how it is that a great genius cannot come save at 
 long- intervals, as the tree cannot blossom but at its due 
 season ; and how, when he comes, he reaches his hand 
 across the silent years, from the height on which he 
 stands, to the great ones who have gone before him, and 
 are similarly lifted up on high as lights to lighten the 
 paths of the toiling multitudes in the valleys and on the 
 plains below. 
 
 But why should any one, great or little, fret and fume 
 because he is likely soon to be forgotten ? What more 
 is the individual than a passing phase of being; and 
 what matters it if he be forgotten in life or death ? The 
 
68 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 work which he has done, whether it has been good or bad, 
 will in no case be forgotten of the universe. It were an 
 excellent physic to vanity for a man to consider his 
 littleness in relation to mankind ; to pass thence to a 
 consideration of himself in relation to the world's his- 
 tory ; and to complete the humbling reflection by con- 
 sidering himself in relation to the universe. The genius 
 himself, as individual, is after all of but little account; 
 it is only as the birth of the travailing centuries that he 
 exists, only so far as he is a true birth of them and ade- 
 quately representative that he is of value : the more 
 individual he is, the more transitory is his fame ; the 
 more completely representative he is, the less original 
 he is. When he is immortal, he has become a mere 
 name marking an epoch of thought, and no longer an 
 individual. What is the fame of him who first dis- 
 covered fire and its uses ? What the fame of him who 
 first taught men to plant wheat : an invention which the 
 ancient Greeks thought too much for human wit, and 
 attributed, as we do the generation of a moral sense, to 
 Divine aid. It is useful to label a discovery with a name, 
 in order to mark its date in the development of a science ; 
 but it is not one man's, it is many men's.* Whosoever, 
 in a foolish conceit of originality, strains after novelty 
 and neglects the scattered and perhaps obscure labours 
 of others who have preceded him, or who are contem- 
 
 * Und doch ziehen mnnchmal gewisse Gesinnnngen und Gedanken 
 schon in der Luft umher, so dass mehrere sie erfassen konuen. 
 Immanet aer sicut anima communis qua? omnibus prcesto est et qua 
 omnes communicant invicem. Quapropter multi sagaces spiritus 
 ardentes subito ex aere presentiscunt quod cogitat alter homo. Oder, 
 um weniger mystisch zu reden, gewisse Vorstellungen werden reif 
 durch eine Zeitreihe. Audi in verschiedenen Garten fallen Friichte 
 zu gleichen Zeit von Baume. — Goethe. 
 
 Viele Gedanken heben sich erst aus der nllgemeinen Cultur,hervor 
 wie die Bliithen aus den griinen Zweigen. Zur Rosenzeit sieht man 
 Rosen uberall bliihen.— Goethe. 
 
I.] 1HE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 69 
 
 poraneous with him ; whosoever, over-cateful of his in- 
 dividual fame, cannot carry forward his own evolution 
 with a serene indifference to neglect or censure, but 
 makes puerile demands on the approbation of the world 
 — may rest content that he is not a complete birth of 
 the age, but more or less an abortive monstrosity : the 
 more extreme he is as a monstrosity, the more original 
 must he needs be. It is a strange comedy when men 
 contend for priority in discovery so eagerly as they do, 
 often the while making scanty acknowledgment of what 
 they owe to the past ; what would they say if, when the 
 time of flowering had come, a rosebud were to call all 
 rose-trees to take notice that it was the first to. blossom 
 on its tree, and to witness the great wrong that was done 
 to it by the roses which confessed not that they had 
 learnt from it how to blossom after their kind ? 
 
 Viewing mental development, whether in the indivi- 
 dual or in the race, as a process of organization, as the 
 consummate display of nature's organic evolution, and . 
 recognising, as we must do, the most favourable condi- 
 tions of such evolution to be the most intimate harmony 
 between man and nature, I may rightly conclude, so far 
 as concerns the rule of a conscious method of inquiry, 
 with the ancient and well-grounded maxim — " Learn to 
 know thyself in nature, that so thou mayest know nature 
 in thyself."( 8 ) 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 1 (^. 6). — "Insomuch that many times not only what was asserted 
 once is asserted still, but what was a question once is a question 
 still, and instead of being resolved by discussion, is only fixed and 
 fed." — Bacon, Proleg. Inst. Magn. 
 
 3 (p. 18). — The received psychology M. Comte calls an "illusory 
 psychology, which is the last phase of theology," and says that it 
 " pretends to accomplish the discovery of the laws of the human 
 mind by contemplating it in itself; that is, by separating it from 
 
70 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 causes and effects." (Miss Martineau's Translation, p. n.) Again, 
 he says : "In order to observe, your intellect must pause from 
 activity ; yet it is this very activity that you want to obsreve. If you 
 cannot effect the pause, you cannot observe ; if you do effect it, 
 there is nothing to observe. The results of such a method are in 
 proportion to its absurdity. " (Ibid. p. II.) 
 
 3 (p. 19). — "But the truth is, that they are not the highest in- 
 stances which give the best or securest information, as is expressed, 
 not inelegantly, in the common story of the philosopher, who, 
 while he gazed upon the stars, fell into the water ; for if he had 
 looked down, he might have seen the stars in the water, but, look- 
 ing aloft, he could not see the water in the stars." — De Augment. 
 Scient. B. ii. 
 
 4 (p. 23). — Individual Psychology Bacon set down as wanting ; he 
 enforces its study, ' ' so that we may have a scientific and accurate 
 dissection of mind and characters, and the secret dispositions of par- 
 ticular men may be revealed, and that from the knowledge thereof 
 better rules may be framed for ihe treatment of the, mind." — De 
 Augment. Scient. B. vii. 
 
 s (p. 27). — Beneke lays it down as a fundamental law of mental 
 development "dass Alles was als Akt in ihr erzeugt wird, auch 
 wenn es aus dem Bewusstsein oder Erregtheit der Seele entschwindet, 
 doch innerlich fortexistirt, und in die spateren gleichartigen Akte 
 als Unterlage hineingegeben wird." — Pragmatische Psychologie, 
 p. 24. 
 
 What is the nature of this functional disposition of nerve-element 
 which is produced by previous function, we know not. It is clear 
 that we give no explanation of it by calling it so, any more than we 
 do by describing it, as Beneke did, as a residuum or vestige of pre- 
 vious activity, or, as was done by certain German writers, as poten- 
 tial or unconscious idea. Objections to the supposition of uncon- 
 scious idea laid by inactive in the mind or brain are not far to seek. 
 "Ideas," Mr. Herbert Spencerremarks {Principles of Psychology, vii. 
 p. 485), "are like the successive chords and cadences brought out 
 from a piano, which successively die away as other ones are sounded. 
 And it would be as proper to say that these passing chords and 
 cadences thereafter exist in the piano, as it is proper to say that 
 passing ideas thereafter exist in the brain. In the one case, as hi 
 the other, the actual existence is the structure which, under like con- 
 ditions, again, evolves like combinations The existence in 
 
 the subject of any other ideas than those which are passing, is pure 
 hypothesis absolutely without any evidence whatever." This 
 analogy, when we look into it, seems more captivating than it is 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 71 
 
 complete. What about the performer in the case of the piano 
 and in the case of the brain respectively ? Is not the performer 
 a not unimportant element, and necessary to the completeness 
 of the analogy ? The passing chords and cadences would have 
 small chance of being brought out by the piano if they were 
 not previously in his mind. Where, then, in the brain is the 
 equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the performer's mind? 
 If Mr. Spencer supposes that the individual's mind, his spiritual 
 entity, is detached from the brain, and plays upon its nervous 
 plexuses, as the performer plays upon the piano, his analogy 
 is complete ; but if not, then he has furnished an analogy which 
 those who do take that view may well thank him for. There 
 is this difference between the passing chords and cadences of the 
 piano and the passing chords and cadences in the brain— and it is of 
 the essence of the matter — that, in the former case, the chords and 
 cadences do pass and leave no trace of themselves behind in the 
 structure of the piano ; while, in the latter case, they do not pass or 
 die away without leaving most important after-effects in the structure 
 of the brain ; whence does arise in due time a considerable differ- 
 ence between a cultivated piano and a cultivated human brain, 
 and whence probably have arisen, in the progress of development 
 through the ages, the differences between the brain of a primeval 
 savage and the brain of Mr. Spencer. Those who speak of latent 
 ideas do, therefore, endeavour to denote thereby an important some- 
 thing which Mr. Spencer's analogy leaves out of sight. With the 
 brain, function makes faculty ; not so with the piano. 
 
 Another objection to. the doctrine of unconscious ideas, is that we 
 only know ideas through consciousness, and consciousness through 
 ideas ; the expression, unconscious idea, is as absurd therefore as 
 that of unconscious consciousness. If to this it be replied that the 
 energies which appear in consciousness as ideas may certainly be 
 sometimes excited into activity, and have their effect upon thought 
 or upon movement, without our consciousness, it may be said that 
 we do wrong to call them ideas in such case ; and even if we do call 
 them so, they are still active ideas, and that the question is not of 
 such, but of so-called ideas that are laid by inactive. It is this 
 which is the absurdity ; for the idea, like the definite movement of 
 muscle, is the function not the structure, not the statical element but 
 the element in action ; we might as well speak of the movement of 
 blowing the nose as being laid up inactive in the muscles or their 
 nerve-centres (which, after all, in a certain sense it is, for the young 
 child can't blow its nose), as talk of unconscious ideas stored up in 
 the mind. Inactive idea is, in fact, inactive action, a contradic- 
 
72 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 don in terms. And this brings us to the objection to speaking f 
 the functional disposition as a residuum or trace ; that it is plainly 
 not a portion of the idea which is left behind, that there is no re- 
 semblance between the idea and the modification of material 
 element which follows it, and that it is therefore improper to call this 
 modification a residuum of idea. When the potentiality becomes 
 energy, when the structure is in function, then only is there idea. It 
 is Wundt (Grundziige der physiologischen Psychologic, pp. 712 and 
 790) who proposes to speak of it as functional disposition. When we 
 endeavour to form an intuition of its nature, we are met with the 
 difficulty of figuring to the senses what takes place in such new, 
 obscure, and yet impenetrable regions of minute activities as the 
 molecular processes of nerve-function ; we are driven to have recourse 
 to the coarser experiences of the senses for the materials of an 
 intuition, which is accordingly coarse and inadequate. 
 
 6 (p. 28). — The most interesting description of the feelings that 
 accompany death by drowning, occurs in a letter from Rear- Admiral 
 Sir F. Beaufort to Dr. Wollaston : — 
 
 " From the moment that all exertion had ceased — which I imagine 
 was the immediate consequence of complete suffocation — a calm 
 feeling of the mostperfecttranquillitysuperseded the previous tumultu- 
 ous sensations ; it might be called apathy, certainly not resignation, 
 for drowning no longer appeared to be an evil. I no longer thought 
 of being rescued, nor was I in any bodily pain. On the contrary, 
 my sensations were now rather of a pleasurable cast, partaking of 
 that dull but contented sort of feeling which precedes the sleep pro- 
 duced by fatigue. Though the senses were thus deadened, not so 
 the mind ; its activity seemed to be invigorated in a ratio which 
 defies all description, for thought rose above thought with a rapidity 
 of succession that is not only indescribable, but probably incon- 
 ceivable by any one who has not been in a similar situation. The 
 course of these thoughts I can even now in a great measure retrace — ■ 
 the event which had just taken place— the awkwardness that had pro- 
 duced it, the bustle it had occasioned, the effect it would have on a 
 most affectionate father, the manner in which he would disclose it to 
 the rest of the family, and a thousand other circumstances minutely 
 associated with home, were the first series of reflections that occurred. 
 They took then a wider range, our last cruise, a former voyage and 
 shipwreck, my school, the progress I had made there, and the time I 
 had misspent, and even all my boyish pursuits and adventures. Thus 
 travelling backwards, every past incident of my life seemed to glance 
 across my recollection in retrograde succession ; not, however, in 
 mere outline and collateral feature. In short, the whole period of 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 73 
 
 my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic 
 review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a conscious- 
 ness of right a*nd wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or its con- 
 sequences ; indeed, many trifling events which had long been for- 
 gotten, then crowded into my imagination, and with the character of 
 recent familiarity. .... The length of time that was occupied 
 with this deluge of ideas, or rather the shortness of time into which 
 they were condensed, I cannot now state with precision : yet cer- 
 tainly two minutes could not have elapsed from the moment of suffo- 
 cation to the time of my being hauled up." 
 
 In the Confessions of an Opium Eater (p. 261), De Quincey relates 
 how, when dreaming under the influence of opium, he remembered 
 things which, when waking, he could not have recognized as parts 
 of his former experience, and remembered them with all the feelings 
 of the original experience ; and thereupon quotes a surmise that the 
 book which shall be opened at the day of judgment is the everlast- 
 ing roll of remembrance. "The minutest incidents of my childhood, 
 or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived. I could not 
 be said to recollect them ; for, if I had been told of them when 
 waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts 
 of my past experience. But placed as they were before me in dreams 
 like intuitions, and clothed in all the evanescent circumstances and 
 accompanying feelings, I recognized them instantly. .... Of this, 
 at least, I feel assured, that there, is no such thing as ultimate for- 
 getting ; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible ; 
 a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our pre- 
 sent consciousness and the secret inscriptions of the mind. Accidents 
 of the same sort will also rend away this veil. But alike, whether 
 veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever ; just as the stars 
 seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, 
 we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil ; 
 and they are waiting to be revealed, whenever the obscuring daylight 
 itself shall have withdrawn." One is tempted to add the question 
 fiom Blanco White's Sonnet: — 
 
 "If Light may thus deceive, wherefore not Life ? " 
 
 » (/. 41). — " It is to be regretted that he (Dugald Stewart) had 
 not studied (he even treats it as inconceivable) the Leibnitzian 
 doctrine of what has not. been well denominated obscure perceptions 
 or ideas— that is, acts and affections of mind, which, manifesting 
 their existence in their effects, are themselves out of consciousness or 
 apperception. The fact of such latent mental modifications is now 
 established beyond all rational doubt ; and on the supposition of 
 
74 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 their reality, we are able to solve various psychological phenomena 
 otherwise inexplicable. Among these are many of those attributed 
 to habit." (Sir W. Hamilton, in his edition of Reid," p. 551.) 
 
 " Daraus, dass die Seele des Gedankens sich nicht bewusst sei, 
 folge noch gar nicht, dass sie zu denken aufhore." {Neue Versuche 
 iib. d. menschlich. Versland. B. ii. 
 
 "Ich sehe nicht," says Leibnitz, again, "dass die Cartesianer 
 jemals beweisen haben oder beweisen konnen, dass jede Vorstellung 
 von Bewusstsein begleitet ist." And again: — "Darin namlich 
 haben die Cartesianer sehr gefehlt, dass sie die Vorstelhmgen.deren 
 man sich nicht bewusst ist,. fur nichts rechneten. Das war auch der 
 Grand, wariim sie glaubten, dass nur die Geiste onaden waren, und 
 dass es keine Seelen der Thiere oder andere Entelechien gebe." — 
 Leibnitz als Denker. Auswahl seiner kleinern Aufsatee. By G. 
 Schelling. Pp. 108 and 115. 
 
 He was the first to assert the existence of "unconscious per- 
 ceptions or ideas," and he assigned them a high importance. The 
 phrase may seem paradoxical, but the contradiction is perhaps only 
 apparent. For if we only know what we are conscious of, and know 
 nothing of which we are not conscious, what right have we to 
 declare of the existence which we know by or in consciousness, that 
 it can have no existence out of consciousness ? " Vorstellungen 
 zu haben, und sich ihrer doch nicht bewusst zu sein, darin scheint 
 ein Widerspruch zu liegen. Allein wir konnen uns doch mittelbar 
 bewusst sein, eine Vorstellung zu haben, ob wir gleich unmittelbar 
 uns ihrer nicht bewusst sein." — Kant, Anthropologic Quoted by 
 Hartmann : Philosophic des Unbewussten. Vol. i. p. 13. 
 
 Fichte, in his Bestimmung des Menschen — " In jedem Momente 
 ihrer Dauer ist die Natur ein zusumrnenhangendes Ganze ; in jedem 
 Momente muss jeder einzelne Theil derselbe so sein wie er ist, weil 
 alle iibrigen sind wie sie sind ; und du konntest kein Sandkornchen 
 von seiner Stelle verriicken, ohne dadurch vielleicht alle Theile des 
 unermesslichen Ganzen hindurch etwas zu verandern. Aber jeder 
 Moment dieser Dauer ist bestimmt durch alle abgelaufenen Momente, 
 und wird bestimmen alle kiinftigen Momente, und du kannst in dem 
 gegenwartigen keines Sandkorne Lage anders denken als sie ist, 
 ohne dass du genothigt wiirdest die ganze Vergangenheit ins Un- 
 besbimmte hinauf, und die ganze Zukunft ins Unbestimmte heralxlir 
 anders zu denken. " — ■Sammtliche Werke, ii. 1 78. 
 
 It is only right to add-, that the fullest exposition of unconscious 
 mental action is to he found in Beneke's. works. A summary of 
 his views is conlained in his Lehrbuch der Psyckologie als Natur- 
 wissenschaft. 
 
I.] THE METHOD OF THE STUDY OF MIND. 75 
 
 8 (p. 69). — I leave this note as it stood in the first edition (1867). 
 Then the criticism was thought by some to be hardly just ; indeed, 
 it has not escaped censure. There are few persons, I suspect, who 
 would not endorse it now in its application to Mill. 
 
 Since this chapter was written, and, indeed, separately published, 
 Mr. J. S. Mill has made a powerful defence of the so-called Psycho- 
 logical Method. In his criticism of Comte in the Westminster 
 Review for April 1865, and in his " Examination of Sir W. Hamil- 
 ton's Philosophy," he has said all that can be-said in favour of the 
 Psychological Method, and has done what could be done to dis- 
 parage the Physiological Method. This he had already done many 
 years ago in the second volume of his " System of Logic," and he 
 is now only consistent in returning to the charge. Nevertheless, 
 the admirers of Mr. Mill may well experience regret to see him 
 serving with so much zeal on what is a so desperately forlorn hope. 
 Physiology seems never to have been a favourite study with Mr. 
 Mill— in none of his writings does he exhibit any indications of being 
 really acquainted with it ; for it is hardly possible to conceive that 
 any one having a knowledge of the present state of this science, 
 would disparage it as he has done, and exalt so highly the psycholo- 
 gical method of investigating mental phenomena. The wonder is, 
 however, that he who has done so much to expound the system 
 of Comte, and to strengthen and complete it, should on this question 
 take leave of it entirely, and follow and laud a method of research 
 which is so directly opposed to the method of positive science. Of 
 course, I speak now strictly of the method, not of Comte's applica- 
 tion of it in his unfounded phrenological speculations, which are 
 scarcely less wild and absurd than his religious delirium appears 
 to be. [Not really so wild as I rashly imagined — that comes of 
 giving an opinion of an author without having read him properly.] 
 However, though one may suspect Mr. Mill to be unfortunate in his 
 ignorance, or entirely mistaken in his estimate, of the physiological 
 method, one cannot fail to profit by the study of his arguments 
 on behalf of the psychological method, and by his exposition of 
 its merits. By parading the whole force of the reasons in favour 
 of it, he has exhibited, not so much its strength as its weakness, 
 and has undesignedly given important assistance to the physiological 
 method. For the reasons why he has not been convincing, and why 
 this chapter has been left unmodified, I may refer to the arguments 
 set forth in a review of his "Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's 
 Philosophy " in the Journal of Mental Science for January 1866. 
 "Mr. Mill," it is there said, "has a high opinion of the psycho- 
 logical method of inquiry into mental phenomena, and thinks Comte 
 
76 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. i. 
 
 to have committed a great error in discarding it. Whether that be 
 true or not is not the question now ; we may admit it to be true, and 
 still ask whether it is a sufficient reason for ignoring those important 
 results of the physiological method of research which bear vitally 
 on psychology ; whether, in fact, because a certain method has 
 some worth, it can therefore afford to dispense entirely with the 
 aid furnished by other methods." 
 
 And again: — "The present complaint against Mr. Mill is that 
 he takes no notice of. the effects of recent scientific conceptions on 
 the questions referred to philosophy ; that he goes on exactly as he 
 might have gone on if he had lived in the days of Aristotle ; that at 
 a time when a new method, highly fertile in fact and of more fruitful 
 promise, was available, he persists in trying to do, by the old method, 
 what Plato, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and a host of others have 
 not done. Now, we have not the slightest faith that ten thousand 
 Mills will, following the same method, do what these great men 
 have not done; but there can be no question that, had Mr. Mill 
 chosen, to avail himself of the new material and the new method, 
 which his great predecessors had not in their day, he would have 
 done what no other living man could have done." 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 
 
 " That which perceives is a part of nature as truly as the objects of 
 perception which act on it, and, as a part of nature, is itself an 
 object of investigation purely physical. It is known to us only in 
 the successive changes which constitute the variety of our feelings : 
 but the regular sequence of these changes admits of being traced, 
 like the regularity which we are capable of discovering in the suc- 
 cessive organic changes of our bodily frame. There is a Physiology 
 of the Mind, then, as there is a Physiology of the Body — a science 
 which examines the phenomena of our spiritual part simply as phe- 
 nomena, and from the order of their succession, or other circum- 
 stances of analogy, arranges them in classes under certain general 
 names ; as, in the physiology of our corporeal part, we consider the 
 phenomena of a different kind which the body exhibits, and reduce 
 all the diversities of these under the names of a few general Func- 
 tions." — Sketch of a System of Philosophy of the Human Mind, by 
 T. Brown, M.D. 
 
 The crude proposition that the brain secretes thought 
 as the liver secretes bile has been the subject of much 
 ridicule to those who have not received it with out- 
 cries of disapprobation and disgust.* Assuredly it is not 
 an exact expression of the facts ; one may rightly admit 
 the brain to be the principal organ of mind without ac- 
 cepting the fallacious comparison of mental function 
 
 * "Nous concluons avec la meme certitude que le cerveau digere 
 en quelque sort les impressions ; qu'il fait organrquement la secre- 
 tion de la pensee." — Rapport du Physique el du Moral de fHomnu; 
 par P. J. G. Cabanis. 
 5 
 
78 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 with biliary secretion. Here as elsewhere, confusion is 
 bred by the common use of the word " secretion '' to ex- 
 press, not only the functional process but the secreted 
 product, both the insensible vital changes and the tangible 
 results of them. Let us begin with the endeavour to fix, 
 with as much precision as possible, what we mean by 
 mind. 
 
 In the first place, mind, viewed in its scientific sense 
 as a natural force, cannot be observed and handled and 
 dealt with as a palpable object ; like electricity, or 
 gravity, or any other of the natural forces, it is appreci- 
 able only in the, changes of matter which are the con- 
 ditions of its manifestation. Few, if any, will now be found 
 to deny that with each display of mental power there are 
 correlative changes in the material substratum ; that every 
 phenomenon of mind is the result, as manifest energy, of 
 some change, molecular, chemical, or vital, in the nervous 
 elements of the brain. But we have to deal here with 
 matter the chemical nature of which is extremely complex 
 and obscure ; for notwithstanding the labour which has 
 been given to the chemical analysis of the brain and 
 nervous system, and, notwithstanding that we are sure of 
 its chemical elements, very little is yet known exactly of 
 the actual composition of nerve element. This much, 
 however, is certain : that its constituents are of a very 
 complex character, easily undergo decomposition, and, 
 being compounded largely of carbon and hydrogen, have 
 a high oxidation value. It is probable that a chemical 
 synthesis is effected in the substance of nerve, through 
 which the nutrient material brought by the blood is 
 finally converted into highly complex and unstable 
 albuminoid compounds ; these representing a great value 
 of potential energy, which becomes actual through their 
 decomposition during function. The compounds named 
 Cer|brin, Cerebrinic acid, Lecithin, and the various fats 
 containing phosphorus, which have been discovered in 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 79 
 
 the brain, have been supposed, indeed, to be derived 
 from the disintegration of a more complex substance 
 named Protagon, having a chemical composition re- 
 presented by the formula C 232 H^ N 4 P0 44 .* Whether 
 that be so or not must be decided by future research; 
 meanwhile, we are content to believe that without oxida- 
 tion we can no more have thought from brain than we 
 can have flame from fuel. 
 
 The so-called extractives of nerve further testify to 
 change or retrograde' metamorphosis through functional 
 activity ; for there are found .lactic acid, kreatin, uric acid, 
 probably also hypoxanthin, and, representing the fatty 
 acids, formic and acetic acids. These products are like 
 those which are found in muscle after its functional 
 activity : in the performance of an idea, as in the perform- 
 ance of a movement, there is a retrograde metamorphosis 
 of organic element ; the display of energy is at the cost of 
 highly organized matter, which undergoes degeneration or 
 passes from a higher to a lower grade of being ; and the 
 final retrograde products are, so far as is at present known, 
 somewhat similar in muscle and nerve. While the con- 
 tents of nerves, again, are neutral during rest in the living 
 state, they become acid after death and after great ac- 
 tivity during life : the same is the case also with regard to 
 muscle.t Furthermore, after prolonged mental exercise, 
 the products of the disintegration of nerve element, into 
 the composition of which phosphorus enters largely, are 
 recognised in an increase of phosphates in the urine ; 
 while it is only by supposing an idea to be accompanied 
 by a correlative change in the nerve-cells that we can 
 
 * The constitution of Lecithin has been represented by the 
 formula C 4i H 90 NP0 9 ; that of Cerebrin by the formula C 37 H 33 
 NO,. 
 
 + During putrefaction the brain furnishes acid products, among 
 which are recognised oleic, margaric, phosphoglyceric and phos- 
 phoric acids. 
 
80 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 explain the exhaustion following excessive mental work 
 and the breaking down of the brain in extreme cases. 
 
 These things being so, what is it which in a physio- 
 logical sense we designate mind ? Not the material pro- 
 ducts of cerebral activity which pass as excretions into 
 the blood, but the marvellous energy which cannot be 
 grasped and handled. The energy which is mind may 
 more properly be compared with the energy which is 
 muscular function. Here, then, is manifest a fallacy of 
 the statement that the brain secretes thought as the liver 
 secretes bile. It is plain that the tangible results of the 
 brain's activity, the waste matters which pass into the 
 blood for assimilation by tissues of a lower kind and 
 for ultimate excretion from the body, might not less 
 rightly be called the secretion of the brain, and be com- 
 pared to the "bile, than the intangible energy displayed in 
 the mental phenomena. 
 
 That there is a consumption of matter during function, 
 not otherwise than as there is a consumption of fuel in 
 the steam-engine, and that the energy in both cases is 
 produced thereby, is beyond doubt ; but whether the sub- 
 stance of the nerve-cell itself suffers any waste is not so 
 certain. It has been supposed that it is the material 
 supplied by the blood which is chiefly consumed during . 
 function, not the substance of nerve-cell, in like manner 
 as it is the fuel, not the steam-engine, which supplies 
 the necessary force. But if this were so, why should the 
 nerve-cell be so soon exhausted by work, and require re- 
 pose in order to recruit — if we may not say, repair — 
 itself? And why does function once exercised leave 
 behind it a disposition to future function, unless there be 
 some molecular disintegration of nerve which is made 
 whole by nutrition ? It is found by experiment that if 
 the vagus nerve of an animal be stimulated, so as to make 
 the heart beat slowly, it will continue to beat for a long 
 time ; but if galvanism be applied in such a way as to 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 81 
 
 quicken the heart's pulsations, it quickly becomes ex- 
 hausted and stops ; owing, it would seem, to exhaustion 
 of its motor nerve-centres, which stimulation of the 
 vagus prevented by diminishing somehow the changes in 
 them. Then again, the appearance of Lecithin and of 
 the other similar complex compounds in such quantities 
 as are met with in the brain would indicate that there 
 is something more going on than a mere deposit of 
 material from the blood and a consumption thereof— 
 would point, in fact, to some disintegration of the nerve 
 substance itself; so that it is certainly a legitimate sup- 
 position that they may be supplied to the brain ready 
 made for consumption. However, similar compounds 
 have been obtained from the blood, lymph, yolk of 
 egg, and the spermatic fluid. By the old writers it was 
 said that the "vital spirits" were secreted from the 
 blood in the brain and were diminished or exhausted by 
 frequent or prolonged use. With the necessary change of 
 terms, that is probably very much what happens. The 
 elements of nerve substance are secreted from the blood 
 in the nerve-cells, and, undergoing decomposition during 
 function, are diminished or exhausted by frequent or pro- 
 longed use. It may be that there is something in the 
 nerve-cell which is fixed and forms a sort of permanent 
 framework, and that a part is unstable and transitory, 
 being perpetually decompounded during function and 
 recompounded during rest. The fact is, that we cannot 
 sever a nerve-cell from its medium; tl.a which it takes 
 into itself from the blood is an essential part of its 
 nature and function — without it, it could not be a living 
 nerve-cell ; and it is to make an absolute division which 
 exists not in nature when we affirm that the material 
 consumed in function belongs either exclusively to the 
 blood or to the nerve-cell. 
 
 Secondly, it is needful, in order to avoid confusion, to 
 apprehend the exact signification of what is understood by 
 
S2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chat\ 
 
 the common and vague use of the word mind. It is 
 really a general term acquired by observation of and 
 abstraction from the manifold variety of mental pheno- 
 mena : by such observation of the particular phenomena 
 and appropriate abstraction from them we get, as an 
 ultimate generalization, the general conception or the, 
 so to speak, essential idea of mind. An illustration will 
 help to exhibit what I mean. The steam-engine is a 
 complicated mechanism, of the construction and mode 
 of action of which many people know very little, but it 
 has a very definite function of which those who know 
 nothing of its construction can still form a sufficiently 
 distinct conception ; the co-ordinate integral action of 
 the steam-engine, as we conceive it, is different from the 
 nicely-adjusted mechanism, or from the action of any 
 part of it. But the function of the engine is dependent 
 on the mechanism and on the co-ordinate action of its 
 parts, as well as on the supply of suitable fuel, cannot be 
 dissociated from these, and has no real existence apart 
 from them, though it may exist separately as a conception 
 in our minds. By observation of the mechanism and 
 appropriate abstraction we get the essential idea of the 
 steam-engine, a fundamental idea of it, which, as our 
 ultimate generalization, expresses its very nature as such, 
 containing, as Coleridge would have said, "the inmost 
 principles of its possibility as a steam-engine.'' » 
 
 So likewise with regard to the manifold phenomena of 
 mind : by observation of them and abstraction from the 
 particular we get the general conception or the essential 
 idea of mind, an idea which has no more existence out of 
 the mind than any other abstract idea or general term. 
 Because we can form the general conception of mind, it 
 does not follow that mind can exist apart from the complex 
 organization of the brain and its suitable blood-supply ; 
 we have no warrant in science or in logic for such an 
 inference. In virtue, however, of that powerful tendency 
 
n.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 83 
 
 in the human mind to make the reality conformable to 
 the idea, a tendency which has been at the bottom of so 
 much confusion in philosophy, this general conception 
 has been converted into an objective entity and allowed 
 to tyrannize over the understanding. A metaphysical 
 abstraction has been made into a spiritual entity, and a 
 complete barrier thereby interposed in the way of posi- 
 tive investigation. Whatever be the real nature of mind 
 — and concerning that it is as vain to speculate as 
 concerning the real nature of gravitation, electricity, or 
 chemical affinity — it is most certainly dependent for its 
 every manifestation on the brain and nervous system ; 
 and now that scientific research is daily disclosing more 
 clearly the relations between it and its organ, it is plainly 
 most desirable to guard against the common metaphy- 
 sical conception of mind, by recognizing the true subjec- 
 tive character of the conception and the mode of its origin 
 and growth. 
 
 A third important consideration is that mental power 
 is truly an organized result, not, strictly speaking, built 
 up, but matured by insensible degrees in the course of 
 life. The brain is not, like the liver, the heart and other 
 internal organs, capable, from the moment of birth, of all 
 the functions which it ever discharges ; for while, in com- 
 mon with them, it has a certain organic function to which 
 it is born equal, its high special character in man as the 
 organ of conscious life, the supreme instrument of his 
 relations with the rest of nature, is developed only by a 
 long and patient education. Its functions are developed 
 by education in the individual as they have been de- 
 veloped in the race by the gradual results of education 
 through the ages. If we are inclined to feel surprise 
 that so great a result should be accomplished in the in- 
 dividual in so short a time, we shall do well to reflect upon 
 — first, the rich inheritance of other men's labour, ' the 
 capitalized experiences,' which he has in the constitution 
 
84 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 of his brain ; and, secondly, the vast amount of human 
 labour and experience which is concentrated in what we 
 call education — that is, in the means and appliances 
 brought to bear even on the humblest child ; for these 
 means and appliances represent the accumulated acquisi- 
 tion of ages of human struggle. The very language 
 which it is taught embodies the gains of countless ages 
 of progressive adjustment of the human organism to its 
 environment. Though the brain, then, is formed during 
 embryonic life, its highest development only takes place 
 after birth; and, as will hereafter appear, the same gradual 
 progress from the general to the special which is ex- 
 hibited in the development of the organ is witnessed in 
 the development of our intelligence. How inexact and 
 misleading in this regard, therefore, is any comparison 
 between it and the liver ! 
 
 Nevertheless, it must be distinctly laid down that 
 mental action is as surely dependent on the nervous 
 structure and its due supply of suitabje blood as the 
 function of the liver confessedly is on the hepatic struc- 
 ture and its blood-supply : that is the fundthiental prin- 
 ciple upon which the fabric of a mental science must rest.* 
 The countless thousands of nerve-cells which form so 
 great a part of the delicate structure of the brain are 
 undoubtedly the centres of its functional activity: we 
 know right well from experiment that the ganglionic 
 nerve-cells scattered through the tissues of organs, as for 
 example through the walls of the intestines and the 
 
 * Strangely enough, some philosophers in Germany now maintain 
 that the proposition "that all conscious mental activity can only 
 take place as a function of the brain " is unassailable, but that it is 
 not true of unconscious mental activity and of the impulses and in- 
 tuitions which it produces. " Uber die unbewusste Geistesthatigkeit 
 dagegen sagt er gar nichts aus, sie bleibt also, da alle Erscheinungen 
 lhre Unabhiingigkeit von den H'irnfunctionen beweisen, als etwas 
 Selbststandiges bestehen, und nur die Form des Bewusstsein eischeint 
 durch die Materie bedingt."— Hartmann, p. 388, 3rd ed. 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 85 
 
 structure of the heart, are centres of nerve force minis- 
 tering to their organic action ; and we may confidently 
 infer that the ganglionic cells of the brain, which are not 
 similarly amenable to observation and experiment, have 
 a like function. Certainly they are not inexhaustible 
 centres of self-generating force ; they give out no more 
 than what they have in one way or another taken in ; 
 they receive material from the blood, which they assimi- 
 late, or make of the same kind with themselves ; a 
 correlative metamorphosis of energy necessarily accom- 
 panying this upward transformation of matter, and the 
 nerve-cell thus becoming, so long as its unstable equili- 
 brium is preserved, a centre of statical power of the 
 highest vital quality. The maintenance of the equili- 
 brium of nerve element is the condition of latent thought 
 — it is mind statical; the manifestation of thought in- 
 volves the change or destruction of nerve element. The 
 nerve-cell of the brain, it might in fact be said, repre- 
 sents statical thought, while thought represents dy- 
 namical nerve-cell, or, more properly, the energy of 
 nerve-cell. 
 
 I do not go then farther than facts warrant when I de- 
 clare the following propositions to be established in mental 
 science : — (a.) When a thought occurs in the mind there 
 necessarily occurs a correlative change in the grey matter 
 of the brain ; without it the thought could not arise, and 
 with it cannot fail to arise, (b.) This change consists in 
 a movement of some kind, which, in our present defect 
 of knowledge, everyone may conceive of as he pleases. 
 The nearest analogy is probably to be found in the com- 
 pounds, and compounds of compounds, of vibrations in 
 music ; at any rate this analogy will help us, coarse and 
 defective as it may be, to frame some kind of intuition of 
 what takes place. Unzer called these movements material 
 ideas, and divided them into object-presentative and repre- 
 sentative according as they were excited from without 
 
86 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap: 
 
 and from within. They are determined in direction by the 
 established nerve-paths — the fibres and the connections of 
 cells, (c.) The movement takes time ; the time occupied 
 is sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but is always an 
 appreciable period, as will be pointed out later on, (d.) 
 It requires a regular supply of properly constituted blood. 
 (e.) It is arrested or prevented by an interruption of the 
 continuity of nerVe, or by slight modifications of its struc- 
 ture, as by section of or pressure on a nerve, or by com- 
 pression of the brain. (/.) The movements are impeded 
 and finally prevented by the exhaustion produced by 
 frequent or prolonged exercise without due intervals 
 of rest. 
 
 So far from discussing whether mind is a function of 
 brain, the business which science now has immediately 
 before it is the more special investigation of the condi- 
 tions of activity of the ganglionic nerve-cells or groups 
 of nerve-cells and of the fibres which unite them into mul- 
 titudinous plexuses. If we look to those humbler animals 
 in which nervous tissue makes its first appearance, it is 
 plain that the simple mode of its existence in them allows 
 of no other manner of proceeding; if we trace upwards 
 the gradual increasing complication of the nervous system 
 through the animal kingdom, it is evident that such 
 manner of proceeding is the only one to furnish the 
 materials of a comprehensive and sound induction ; and 
 if we duly weigh the results of physiological experiment 
 and pathological research, it is no less certain that we 
 must discard scientific investigation altogether in cerebral 
 physiology, if we reject the ganglionic nerve-cells of the 
 brain as centres of mental force. 
 
 In the lowest forms of animal life nerve does not exist: 
 the Protozoa and many of the Zoophytes are, so far as 
 can be ascertained, destitute of any trace of nervous 
 system. The most simple beings consist of an apparently 
 uniform, homogeneous substance, by means of which all 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 87 
 
 their functions are executed.* They are nourished 
 without digestive organs ; breathe without respiratory 
 organs ; feel and move without organs of sense, without 
 muscles, without nervous system. The stimulus which 
 the little creature receives from without produces some 
 change in the molecular relations of its almost homo- 
 geneous substance, and these insensible movements 
 would seem to amount collectively to the sensible move- 
 ment which it makes. The perception of the stimulus 
 by the creature is the molecular change which ensues, 
 the imperceptible motion passing, by reason of the 
 homogeneity of its substance, with the greatest ease 
 from element to element of the same kind, as it were by 
 an infection, or as happens in the sensitive plant ; and 
 the sum of the insensible molecular motions, as neces- 
 sarily determined in direction by the form of the animal, 
 or by some not yet recognised cause, results in the visible 
 movement. The important researches of Graham into 
 the colloidal condition of matter have proved the neces- 
 sity of considerable modification in the common concep- 
 tion of solid matter : instead of the notion of impenetra- 
 ble, inert matter, we must substitute the idea of matter 
 which, in its colloidal state, is penetrable, exhibits 
 energy, and is widely susceptible to external agents, " its 
 existence being a continued metastasis." f This sort of 
 energy is not a result of chemical action, for colloids are 
 
 * One must guard against the assumption that any kind of living 
 protoplasm is really homogeneous. Hyaline it may be, but we 
 know not how complex its structure may be. It is possible that 
 sometimes tracks in the apparently homogeneous substance may be 
 so far differentiated as to be adapted to convey impressions, and 
 thus to serve the primitive function of nerve, although we -cannot 
 observe the least difference in structure. As nerve is formed by 
 differentiation from apparently homogeneous substance, there must 
 be a period when we cannot say with certainty whether what we see 
 is nerve or is not. 
 
 t Philosophical Transactions,\%fo. 
 
88 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 singularly inert in all ordinary chemical relations, but a 
 result of its unknown intimate molecular constitution ; 
 and the undoubted existence of colloidal energy in 
 organic substances which are usually considered inert and 
 called dead, may well warrant the belief of its larger and 
 more essential operation in organic matter in the state of 
 instability of composition in which it is when under the 
 condition of life. Such energy would then suffice to 
 account for the simple uniform movements of the homo- 
 geneous substance of which the lowest animal consists ; 
 and the absence of any differentiation of structure is a 
 sufficient reason of the absence of any localization of 
 function, and of the general uniform reaction to different 
 impressions. But it will be observed that even the 
 movements of these simplest creatures, in which there is 
 not the least indication of the elements of a nervous 
 system, are not entirely vague, confused, and indefinite ; 
 they present certain indications of adaptation to func- 
 tional ends ; they are definite in relation to their medium. 
 They evince, in fact, the fundamental property of living 
 matter, which is manifest even in a mere speck of living 
 protoplasm — namely, adaptive motion in response to im- 
 pressions, co-ordination of variety to unity of action, a 
 principle of individuation. 
 
 With differentiation of tissue and increasing complexity 
 of organization, which are met with as we ascend in the 
 animal kingdom, the nervous tissue appears, but at first 
 under a very simple form.^) Wherever differentiated parts 
 of an organism are combined for a common end, the co- 
 operation is effected by a nervous system. Its simplest 
 type or unit may be represented as two fibres that are 
 connected by a nerve-cell or a ganglionic group of nerve- 
 cells ; the fibres are apparently simple conductors, and 
 might be roughly compared to the conducting wires of a 
 telegraph, while the cell, being the centre in which nerve 
 force is generated, may be compared to the telegraphic 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 89 
 
 apparatus ; the effect which the stimulus of the afferent 
 or centripetal nerve excites in it is transmitted along the 
 efferent or centrifugal nerve, and therein is displayed the 
 simplest form of that reflex action which plays so large a 
 part in animal life.* This type of structure is repeated 
 throughout the complex nervous system of all the higher 
 animals : the fibres with their junction-cells form units 
 from the multiplication and complex arrangement of which 
 the various and most complicated nervous structures are 
 built up. Cut across the afferent nerve or otherwise in- 
 terrupt its continuity, the impression made upon its 
 terminal fibres cannot reach the centre ; cut across the 
 efferent nerve, the central excitation is powerless to in- 
 fluence the muscles or parts to which it is distributed. 
 Not all the passion and eloquence of a Demosthenes 
 
 * The fibres act as conductors, and have like physiological properties. 
 Philippeau and Vulpian (Comptes Rendus, vi. ) and Rosenthal (Cent- 
 ralblatt, No. 29, 1864) have succeeded in uniting the central end of 
 the cut lingual nerve, the sensory nerve of the tongue, with the peri- 
 pheral end of the cut hypoglossal, the motor nerve of the tongue. 
 The natural course of a stimulus is upwards in the lingual, down- 
 wards in the hypoglossal. But after the union has taken place, 
 stimulation of the central part of the lingual produced contractions 
 of the tongue, such as normally follow stimulation of the hypoglossal. 
 Thus it is proved that the end of a sensory nerve may be united with 
 the end of a motor nerve, and when the union is complete, excitation 
 of the sensory may be transmitted to the motor fibres. Inversely, 
 stimulation of the peripheral end of the hypoglossal produced 
 evidence of pain. If the end of a rat's tail be grafted into the skin 
 of its back, and when the graft is completed, if the tail be cut through 
 at its base, the animal will, at the end of some months, feel a pinch 
 of the grafted tail and turn round to bite (Bert). The irritation of 
 the nerve which, before the operation, travelled from the end to the 
 base of the tail, i.e. centripetally, now travels in the opposite direc- 
 tion, still centripetally. It would seem that, as Mr. Lewes has in- 
 sisted, the neurility is the same in all nerves ; the difference of 
 function being due, not to difference of physiological properties, but 
 to differences of connections of the fibres. See also Lecons sur la 
 Physiologic Gin/rale et Comparie du Systhne Nerveux, par A. 
 Vulpian. 1866. 
 
go THE PHYSIOLOGY Of MIND. [chap. 
 
 could force its way outwards into words, if the motor 
 nerves of the tongue were cut across ; he would grimace 
 vainly, like a speechless idiot, if a slight molecular change 
 in their structure sufficient to bar conduction were pro- 
 duced. Owing to the differences of kinds of tissue and to 
 the specialization of organs in the more complex animal, 
 there cannot plainly be that intimate molecular sympathy 
 between all parts which there is in the homogeneous sub- 
 stance of the simplest monad ; the easy motion, as by 
 an infection, from particle to particle, where the substance 
 is of the same kind, cannot take place in the heteroge- 
 neous body, where the elements are of a different kind-: 
 accordingly special provision is required for insuring com- 
 munication between different parts, and for co-ordinating 
 and harmonizing the activity of different organs. The 
 animal must be rendered capable of associating a number 
 of distinct actions for definite ends. 
 
 This function, necessitated by the physiological division 
 of labour, the nervous system subserves ; and we might 
 compare, it to that which the gifted generalizer fulfils in 
 human development : he grasps the results of the various 
 special investigations which a necessary division of labour 
 enforces, brings them together, and elaborates a result in 
 which the different lines of thought are co-ordinated, and 
 a unity of action is marked out for future progress. The 
 nervous system effects the synthesis which the specializa- 
 tion of organic instruments in the analysis of nature renders 
 necessary ; it represents the integration of relations, and 
 of relations of relations, of things in a gradually ascend- 
 ing scale ; it is the highest expression of that principle of 
 individuation which is the characteristic feature of life in 
 all its forms, but most manifest in its highest forms. To 
 this function it is well adapted, first, by the extent of its 
 distribution, and, secondly, by its exceeding sensibility, 
 whereby an impression made at one part is soon felt at a 
 distance from the place where it is made. 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 91 
 
 With the increasing complexity of organization which 
 marks the increasing speciality of organic adaptation to 
 external nature, or, in other words, which marks an ascent 
 in the scale of animal life, there is a progressive compli- 
 cation of the nervous system : special developments 
 ministering to special purposes take place. The fibres 
 appear to preserve their characters as simple conduc- 
 tors, while a development of special structures at their 
 peripheral and of special ganglionic cells, or of special 
 connections of cells, at their central endings reveals the 
 increasing speciality and complexity of function. Upon 
 the special terminal structures, which are, as it were the 
 instruments of analysis, depends the kind of the impres- 
 sion made ; they are adapted to the special nature of 
 the external impressions which they take up, while the 
 kind of impression that is perceived and the character 
 of the reaction thereto are determined by the nature of 
 the nerve-cells with which the central end of the nerve 
 is connected. Accordingly, we find that with the appear- 
 ances of the organs of the special senses, as we mount in 
 the scale of animal life, there is a corresponding increase 
 in the ganglionic centres, which, being clustered together, 
 form the primitive rudiments of a brain, and represent, 
 in the main, those sensory ganglia which in man lie at the 
 base of the brain between the decussation of the pyramids 
 and the floors of the lateral ventricles. 
 
 It is not known with certainty when the different organs 
 of the special senses severally make their first appearance ; 
 they are at first very rudimentary, and are clearly special- 
 ized evolutions from the most general sense, that of 
 touch. The skin is an organ of sense which extends 
 over the outside of the body, and perceives by actual 
 contact with the objects that affect it ; the other senses 
 are probably nothing else than differentiated involutions 
 of it, complex cuticular structures, which are placed more 
 or less within the body, and they perceive without actual 
 
92 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 contact ; touch then may be justly held to be the primi- 
 tive, the fundamental sense, that which is the mother 
 tongue of knowledge. In the highest animals the 
 terminal fibres of the nerves of the special senses 
 enter cells which have the character of epithelial cells, 
 and the forms of which are modified according to the 
 nature of the external impressions which they are fitted 
 to receive. This epithelial character of the terminal 
 cells is best seen in the organs of smell and taste, but 
 it is manifest also in the organ of sight ; for the so-called 
 staffs and cones of the retina, which are alone sensitive 
 to light, the nerve-cells themselves of the retina and the 
 optic fibres being not, are regarded as metamorphosed 
 epithelial cells.* In some of the lower creatures the 
 organs of hearing, smell, and taste are manifestly special 
 modifications of certain portions of the covering of the 
 body, and the organ of sight itself, when it appears in its 
 earliest and simplest form, is nothing more than the 
 terminal ending of a nerve, surrounded by a few pig- 
 ment granules, in the epithelial cells of a fold or recess 
 of the skin. Even in the Amphioxus, which is a vertebrate 
 animal, the eyes are two small pigment spots, the organ of 
 smell is a cup-shaped depression at the fore end of the 
 body, and no organ of hearing is discoverable. As we 
 ascend in the scale, structures adapted to the reception 
 of particular impressions, as of light, of sound, of touch, 
 become more special, and render the higher animal 
 capable of more numerous, special, and complex rela- 
 tions with external nature. There is a diffusion through 
 the entire substance of the simplest creatures of physio- 
 logical properties which are specialized and localized in 
 the higher animals.f 
 
 * Wundt, Grundziige der physiologiscken Psychologie, p. 318. 
 
 + The Hydra exhibits a sensitiveness to light, although it has no 
 special sense of sight; it shuns the dark and chooses the light side 
 of the vessel in which it is placed. Some again of the zoophytes 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 93 
 
 Not till we arrive as high as the fishes do we discover 
 anything more in the brain than sensory ganglia con- 
 nected with the origins of nerves ; below them there 
 is no trace of cerebral hemispheres or brain proper. 
 It is plain, then, that the cerebral hemispheres are not 
 essential to sensation or the motor reaction to sensa- 
 tion ; for they are altogether wanting where both these 
 functions are displayed in a lively and vigorous way. To 
 the simpler relation between the individual organism and 
 external nature which is denoted by reflex or exato-motor 
 
 that have no definite organs of hearing contract themselves when 
 vibrations of sound are propagated through the medium in which 
 they are. They feel the vibrations, though the feeling is no doubt 
 different in quality from that which a well-developed organ of hearing 
 would impart. " Polypes, zoophytes, and other infusory animalcules 
 that have neither brain nor nerves, feel and move without a nervous 
 system, because the Author of Nature appears to have endowed the 
 pulp of which their bodies are composed with the faculty of sen- 
 sation and motion, just as the medullary pulp of the nervous 
 system alone, of ,all the organs of our body, is endowed with that 
 faculty." — Prochaska, On the Nervous System, p. 387. Syd. Soc. 
 Transl. When a special sense fails in man, the general sensibility 
 may partially replace it "I have known several instances," says 
 Abercrombie, " of persons affected with that extreme degree of deaf- 
 ness which occurs in the deaf and dumb, who had a peculiar suscepti- 
 bility to particular kinds of sounds, depending, apparently, on an 
 impression communicated to their organs of touch or simple sensation. 
 They could tell, for instance, the approach of a carriage in the street 
 without seeing it, before it was taken notice of by persons who had 
 the use of all their senses." — On the Intellectual Powers. Kruse, 
 who was completely deaf, nevertheless had a bodily feeling of music ; 
 and different instruments affected him differently. Musical tones 
 seemed to his perception to have much analogy with colours. The 
 sound of a trumpet was yellow to him ; that of a drum, red ; that of 
 the organ, green, Sic.— Early History of Mankind, by J. B. Tylor, 
 In his Reminiscenees of the Opera, Mr. Lumley tells of a friend who 
 used to compare the voices of the different celebrated singers, to 
 different colours, distinguishing them so. It is an old saying of a blind 
 man, that he thought scarlet was like the sound of a trumpet. No 
 doubt colours have different psychical effects, red having an exciting 
 and blue a calming effect. 
 
94 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 action, there now succeeds the more complex relation of 
 sensory stimulus and sensori-motor reaction j in place of 
 general reaction to stimulus, discriminations of impres- 
 sions and corresponding special reactions by virtue of 
 specially adapted structures are witnessed: This condition 
 or stage of the development of the nervous system, which 
 is natural and permanent in so many of the lower, ani- 
 mals, corresponds to that artificial state of things which 
 may be produced experimentally in a higher animal by 
 depriving it of its cerebral hemispheres. The kind of 
 function manifest is strictly comparable to that of the 
 infant's mental life in the early brief stage before the 
 cerebral hemispheres have come into action, or to those 
 phenomena of mental life sometimes displayed by the 
 adult, as for example by the somnambulists, when the 
 influence of the cerebral hemispheres is nearly sus- 
 pended. 
 
 Here is suggested a reflection : how important it is 
 clearly to distinguish in thought and to denote by 
 language special features, which, being included under, 
 or described by, a general term, are so commonly con- 
 founded. What different perceptions or reactions, for 
 example, are confounded by the loose way of using the 
 word sensibility ! The infusory animalcule, which has 
 no nervous tissue, is said to be sensible of a stimulus ; 
 the higher animal, with its special senses, to be sensible 
 of light, or of sound, as the case may be, and, if made 
 to suffer, to be sensible of pain ; while it is common 
 enough to speak of man being sensible of pleasure, 
 horror, or disgust, according to the nature of the active 
 ideas. Using the generic term sensibility to express the 
 fundamental reaction, as we may perhaps properly do, 
 it is highly important that we go on further to distinguish 
 by appropriate terms the special differences ; the sensi- 
 bility of pain is not the sensibility of sense, nor is the 
 sensibility of the infusory animalcule equivalent to 
 
n.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 95 
 
 either of these. So far we have taken pains to distinguish 
 that form of sensibility and reaction proper to the lowest 
 animals, which might be called irritability ; that form 
 of reaction, or reflex action, which is the lowest expres- 
 sion of nervous function ; and that form of reaction 
 to which the sensory ganglia minister, which is rightly 
 called sensorial- 
 
 It is found to be no easy matter to form a distinct 
 conception of the relations of consciousness to these dif- 
 ferent forms of sensibility. In order to do so, we must 
 at the outset abandon the notion of consciousness as 
 something of constant quality, which either is or is not, 
 and must realise the truth that it may exist in different 
 degrees, ranging from the highest display of self-conscious- 
 ness through grades of sub-consciousness down to uncon- 
 sciousness. In the ordinary vague use of the word 
 consciousness, what is implied, though not explicitly 
 asserted, is the reflex consciousness which is properly 
 self-consciousness. There is certainly a vast difference 
 between this highest development of consciousness and 
 that kind which accompanies the sensation of one of 
 the special senses ; much more between it and the con- 
 sciousness, if there be any, which accompanies the 
 sensibility of the infusory animalcule. The latter they 
 place on too high a level who rank it with self-con- 
 sciousness, as they practically do when they vaguely 
 apply the same word to both : deriving their notion of 
 consciousness from experience of self-consciousness, they 
 apply it to the sensibility of the lowest creatures. It 
 would be hardly less absurd to attribute to them the 
 possession of the complex nervous system which is 
 essential to the manifestation of self consciousness. 
 
 We might say, it is true, that as there are in the 
 tissues of the lowest animals the elements of a nervous 
 system which is in process of time differentiated from 
 them, so in the sensibility which they display there are 
 
96 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [ciur. 
 
 the elements of those special sensations and of that self- 
 consciousness which appear as their respective organs 
 are individualized in the highest animal ; but because we 
 can, by a survey of the course of evolution through the 
 ages, thus foresee in the germ potentially the full fruit, 
 we are not therefore qualified to find the properties of 
 the fruit in the germ : we do wrong to discover in the 
 functions of the lowest organisms the far more specialized 
 functions of the highest organisms, and to translate those 
 into terms of these. Generation is a function which is as 
 widely extended as sensibility through the animal king- 
 dom, but no one dreams of discovering the phenomena 
 which are part of the function of generation in man in the 
 phenomena of generation which the polype displays. 
 
 The question is whether we ought to attribute con- 
 sciousness at all to the sensibility or susceptibility of 
 creatures which have no nervous system. The adapted 
 impression certainly produces a definite effect which 
 issues in a definite movement, either to avoid it, if in- 
 jurious, or to embrace it, if profitable ; but what pretence 
 is there to affirm that consciousness has any part in 
 these events ? The phenomena of our own organic life, 
 which are of a much higher order, point the other way ; 
 we are not conscious of having a liver, which neverthe- 
 less produces marked effects upon our mental moods; 
 we are not conscious of the very powerful influence 
 which it is certain that our sexual organs exert upon our 
 ideas and feelings ; we are not conscious of a thousand 
 movements which we make daily, and which nevertheless 
 relieve some uneasy, or occasion some easy, feeling. I 
 know it may be said that we are conscious of these 
 things but do not attend to them ; to which I am tempted 
 to reply that it is the attention which is the conscious- 
 ness, and that a consciousness which is not conscious 
 because it does not attend is not properly called con- 
 sciousness. I know no reason why those who attribute 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 97 
 
 consciousness to the sensibility of the lowest nerveless 
 creatures should deny it to sulphuric acid when, by virtue 
 of its superior affinity for barium, it goes definitely to 
 work to displace nitric acid from its combination with 
 that base. 
 
 It is in fishes that the rudiments of cerebral hemi- 
 spheres first appear. In them they are represented by a 
 thin layer or projection of nervous matter in front of the 
 optic lobes, covering the corpora striata and the optic 
 thalami ; in the Amphibia they have already increased 
 somewhat in size ;* in Birds the optic lobes are pushed 
 out to some extent by their further increase; in the 
 Mammalia they begin to cover the optic lobes, and, as 
 we ascend in the scale of life, gradually increase back- 
 wards until, in some of the higher monkeys and in man, 
 they entirely cover the cerebellum. 
 
 In this ascent through the series of vertebrate animals, , 
 it is found that the relations of the sensory ganglia remain 
 alike throughout, the chief differences being differences in 
 the relative size of them. Their functions as primary 
 constituents of the brain may then fairly be reckoned the 
 same in all the vertebrata, and indeed in all the animals 
 in which they exist. As the hemispheres appear as 
 secondary constituents — secondary, be it noted, in the 
 order of development, but primary in dignity — we may 
 rightly conclude their function to be secondary in the 
 order of development to that which the primary con- 
 stituents or sensory ganglia fulfil. The impressions 
 received by the sensory centres when these do not react 
 directly outwards, as they may do where, hemispheres 
 exist and as they must do where hemispheres do not 
 exist, are in fact passed onwards in the brain to the cells 
 which are spread over the hemispheres, and are there 
 
 * The Perenni-branchiate reptiles retain the fish character of brain 
 all their lives; the Batrachians have it only during their tadpole 
 state. 
 
98 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 further fashioned into what are called ideas or concep- 
 tions. If the excitation is conveyed to the sensory- 
 centre, passes thence to a connected motor centre, and 
 is finally discharged along the motor nerve in motion — 
 if, that is, it passes along what may be called the 
 sensorial arc — the function is sensation and sensori-motor 
 action : if, however, the impression is conveyed to the 
 higher ideational centres in the hemisphere, passes thence 
 to motor centres, and is finally discharged along a motor 
 nerve in action — if, that is, it passes along the ideational arc 
 — it is perception and volition. Here then we come to 
 another kind of sensibility with its appropriate reaction, 
 to which special nervous centres minister; and it is 
 known as perception, or, more strictly, ideational percep- 
 tion. As the hemispheres have this function and are not 
 necessary to sensation, it is quite in accordance with what 
 might be predicted, that, as experiments prove, they are 
 insensible to pain, and do not give rise to any display of 
 that kind of feeling when they are injured.* They have, 
 agreeably to their special nature, a sensibility of their 
 own to the ideas that are fashioned in them ; so that 
 these may be pleasurable or painful or have other 
 particular emotional qualities. Emotion is strictly, per- 
 haps, the sensibility of the supreme centres to ideas. 
 
 Observation of the mental phenomena of those ani- 
 mals in which cerebral hemispheres exist confirms fully 
 the foregoing view of their function and import. In 
 Fishes there is the first distinct appearance of simple 
 ideas and of the lowest rudiments of emotion ; carp 
 will collect to be fed at the sound of a bell, thus 
 giving evidence of the association of two simple ideas ; 
 and a shark, suspicious of mischief, will avoid the baited 
 
 * Those who have made the painful experiment tell us that an 
 animal which makes violent movements while the skin is being cut 
 and the roof of its skull removed, remains quite quiet while its 
 hemispheres are being sliced away bit by bit. 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 
 
 99 
 
 hook. In Birds, conformably to the increased develop- 
 ment of the hemispheres, the manifestations of intelli- 
 gence are much greater ; the tricks which some of them 
 may be taught are truly marvellous, and those who teach 
 them know well how much different birds differ in intelli- 
 gence and temper. We look on such performances as 
 marvellous, because of our ingrained disposition to think 
 surprising all manifestations of intelligence in animals 
 below us in the scale of life ; but if we bear in mind the 
 fundamental plastic property of nerve element by which 
 it receives impressions and grows to its modes of exercise, 
 we may abate somewhat our surprise, and see reason to 
 think that animals might be made capable of much 
 higher displays of intelligence if only we took pains to 
 educate them through a few generations. Nor are simple 
 emotional exhibitions wanting amongst birds ; very 
 evident at times is the feeling, of rivalry or jealousy in 
 canaries, and there are undoubted instances on record 
 in which an orphan bird has owed its life to the kindly 
 care of birds of a different species.* In Mammalia a 
 gradual advance in intelligence may be traced from very 
 humble manifestations up to those highest forms of brute 
 reason which assuredly differ only in degree from the 
 lowest forms of human intelligence.-)- Consider how 
 deeply meditative the elephant sometimes shows itself ; 
 how apt in cunning schemes the monkey is ; how plainly 
 in the dog an inhibitory conception often intervenes 
 between the sensation and the usual respondent move- 
 ment, so that the animal refrains from doing what it has 
 a strong impulse to do, the impression having been passed 
 on to the hemispheres and their controlling action 
 brought into play. It is needless to speak of the various 
 
 * Anatomic Compar/edu Systems Nerveux,j>ar Leuret et Gratiolet. 
 
 + For examples of remarkable displays of intelligence in different 
 animals, I may refer to a paper by me on the " Genesis of Mind " 
 in the Journal of Mental Science, 1862. 
 
ioo THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 emotions, nay, the veritable moral feeling, displayed by 
 the dog and other domesticated animals. A single 
 reflection will show, what anatomy might lead us to pre- 
 dicate, how limited must be the range of animal intelli- 
 gence now that its development is checked by the 
 dominating ascendency of man ; for how can animal in- 
 telligence grow through the ages in face of a superior 
 hostile intelligence which has taken possession of the 
 earth, and is fast subduing all things therein to its uses? 
 If the fox, cunning as it is, had but the sense to learn to 
 climb a tree, like the cat, or always to run to earth, like 
 a rabbit, men would soon give up hunting it. But the 
 fox, like so many men, cannot get out of the accustomed 
 groove of automatic thought, cannot originate anything ; 
 and, like not a few intriguing plotters, it wastes a great 
 deal of low cunning in efforts which a little larger view 
 of things would render quite unnecessary.* 
 
 * If the fox did hit upon a discovery of the kind, it would soon be 
 exterminated as vermin and would frustrate the design or final cause of 
 its present existence, which presumably is to serve by its sufferings 
 for human amusement. Some persons have thought that man was 
 the only animal which found pleasure in inflicting torture on other 
 animals merely for amusement, but it would seem that his next-of- 
 kin, the monkey, takes delight in doing so when it gets the chance- 
 that it will catch a crow or pigeon and pluck its feathers off and 
 otherwise torture it, highly gratified with its victim's struggles the 
 while. The cat's play with the mouse might be thought perhaps 
 not to be an original invention, but an accomplishment first taught 
 by man, and now inherited as an instinct, which is still, however, 
 educated in the kitten both by man and by its mother. It may be 
 said truly that man is the only animal which,' having imagination 
 enough to realize that its victim suffers, yet delights in inflicting 
 suffering for his sport. Therefore we cannot properly describe 
 fox-hunting as brutal cruelty, or as barbarous cruelty, neither brutes 
 nor barbarians having the imagination to realize the sufferings which 
 they inflict, as civilized persons of this age presumably have ; one 
 must call it civilized cruelty, meaning thereby the most sinful cruelty, 
 because a sin against knowledge and riyht feeling. Thus much from 
 a moral point of view. From a philosophical point of view the 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 101 
 
 As we ascend through the Mammalian sefies, we find 
 that not only do the hemispheres increase in size by 
 gradually extending backwards, but that the grey surface 
 of them is further increased by being thrown into folds or 
 convolutions. While the lower Mammals are entirely 
 destitute of such convolutions, these are present, as a rule, 
 in simple forms in the Ruminantia and the higher Carni- 
 vora ; they are more fully developed in the marine Mam- 
 malia, and most fully developed in the apes and in man. 
 It is true that we cannot at present unfold an exact re- 
 lation between the development of the convolutions and 
 the degree of intelligence in different animals ; for the 
 brains of the ass, the sheep, and the ox, which do not 
 evince much intelligence, are more convoluted than those 
 of the beaver, the cat, and the dog, which certainly evince 
 more intelligence. But the relative size of the animals 
 must be taken into account in such comparison. The 
 volume of a body such as the brain which increases in 
 size increases in greater proportion than the superficies, 
 and the latter again in greater proportion than the diameter. 
 Now in each natural group or order of Mammalia, the 
 head, but especially the capacity of the skull, bears a 
 certain proportion to the body, a proportion which re- 
 mains pretty constant in different species ; the head of 
 the tiger or of the lion, for example, has about the same 
 proportion to the body as that of the cat's head to its 
 body, although the sizes of the animals are so different. 
 It follows then that, as the volume of the brain of the 
 tiger in relation to the size of the body is the same as in the 
 cat, and as the larger the brain the smaller the relative 
 
 amusement is interesting ; for it is a striking instance of the survival 
 in man of a primitive savage instinct, testifying to an animal kinship 
 which he has not yet outgrown. Thus animal nature is avenged 
 in some sort for the oppression which it surfers from human nature ; 
 since it declares through man in his pride of place, in accents which 
 cannot be mistaken, that after all he is one with his animal kind. 
 6 
 
102 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 superficies *the superficies of the brain is proportionately 
 greater in the cat ; and that, consequently, in order to 
 get a proportionate extent of grey surface in the tiger, 
 this must be convoluted in it, when it may remain nearly 
 smooth in the smaller animal. If in two animals of equal 
 size, and of like form of structure, the convolutions are 
 differently fashioned, then it may be said truly that one 
 will be more intelligent than the other in proportion as 
 its convolutions are more numerous and complicated and 
 the sulci deeper. Comparing the brains of different 
 species of dogs or of anthropoid apes, it is certain, too, 
 that the more intelligent animals have larger and more 
 convoluted hemispheres. 
 
 That proposition is true of man. The intellectual 
 differences which exist between the Bosjesman, or the 
 N egro, and the European are attended with differences 
 in the extent and complication of the nervous substance 
 of the brain. Gratiolet has carefully figured and de- 
 scribed the brain of the Hottentot Venus, who was no 
 idiot ; and what is at once striking in the figure is the 
 simplicity and regular arrangement of the convolutions 
 of the frontal lobe; they present an almost perfect 
 symmetry in the two hemispheres, "such as is never 
 exhibited in the normal brains of the Caucasian race," 
 and which involuntarily recalls the regularity and sym- 
 metry of the cerebral convolutions in the lower animals. 
 The brain of this Bosjes woman was, in truth, inferior to 
 that of a white woman at the normal stage of develop- 
 ment : " it could be compared only with the brain of a 
 white who is idiotic from arrest of cerebral development." 
 Moreover, the differences between it and the brain of the 
 white are unquestionably of the same kind as, though 
 less in degree than, those which exist between the ape's 
 brain and that of man, as Professor Huxley has pointed 
 out.* Mr. Marshall has carefully examined a Bushwoman's 
 * Man's Place in Nature, 
 
n.J THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 103 
 
 brain, and has found like evidence of structural inferi- 
 ority ; the primary convolutions, though all present, were 
 smaller than in the European, and much less compli- 
 cated ; the external connecting convolutions were still 
 more remarkably defective ; the secondary sulci and 
 convolutions were everywhere decidedly less developed ; 
 there was a deficiency of the system of transverse com- 
 missural fibres; and in size, and in every one of the 
 signs of comparative inferiority, " it leaned, as it were, 
 to the higher quadrumanous forms."* The brain of the 
 Negro is superior to that of the Bushman, but still it 
 does not reach the level of the white man's brain ; the 
 weight of the male Negro's brain is less than that of the 
 average European female ; and the greater symmetry of 
 its convolutions, and the narrowness of the hemispheres 
 in front, are points in which it resembles the brain of 
 the orang-outang, as even Tiedemann, the Negro's advo- 
 cate, has admitted. 
 
 Among Europeans it is found that, other circumstances 
 being alike, the size of the brain bears a general relation 
 to the mental power of the individual, although apparent 
 exceptions to the rule sometimes occur. The average 
 weight of the brain in the educated class is certainly 
 greater than in the uneducated ; and some carefully-com- 
 piled tables in a valuable paper by Dr. Thurnam prove 
 that, while the average brain weight of ordinary 
 Europeans is 49 oz., in distinguished men it is 54*6 oz.t 
 On the other hand, the brain is oftentimes very small in 
 idiots ; the parts being not only smaller, but less complex, 
 and the convolutions in particular being simpler and less 
 
 * Philosophical Transactions, 1865. 
 
 t On the Weight of the Human Brain, by John Thurnam, M.D. ; 
 journal of Mental Science, April 1866. Professor Wagner has care- 
 fully figured and described the brains of five very distinguished men. 
 The extremely complex arrangement of the convolutions was most 
 remarkable. — The Convolutions of the Human Cerebrum, by W. 
 Turner, M.B. 1866. 
 
104 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 developed. Mr. Marshall found the convolutions of the 
 cerebra of the two idiots which he examined to be fewer 
 in number than in the apes, the brains being in this 
 respect more simple than the brain of the gibbon, and 
 approaching that of the baboon. In fact, there are micro- 
 cephalic idiots which present a complete series of stages 
 in a gradual descent from man to the apes. As a general 
 proposition, it is certainly true that we find the evidence 
 of. a correspondence between the development of the 
 cerebral hemispheres and of the intelligence, when we 
 examine the different races or kinds of men, as we do 
 when we survey the scale of animal life. But in making 
 comparisons between the brains of men in the same 
 state of civilization we must not lose sight of the fact 
 that quality . has to be taken into account as well as 
 quantity. An increase in the rapidity of undulations 
 of vibrating ether makes that light which before was 
 darkness; and it is conceivable that, in like manner, an 
 increase in the number of vibrations in the nerve-tracts 
 of the brain might convert stupidity into genius. A de- 
 mented patient, whose mind seemed nearly extinguished, 
 has in some instances recovered temporary intelligence 
 in a marvellous manner during the excitement of a fever ; 
 and persons who have not been remarkable for mental 
 display will sometimes exhibit surprising intellectual 
 sparks at the commencement of an attack of acute 
 mania. It stands to reason that the susceptibilities of 
 nerve element to molecular vibrations should be de- 
 termined by that intimate condition of its nature which 
 the word quality denotes, and should be affected after- 
 wards by slight physical modifications of its condition. 
 
 As in the series of the manifold productions of her 
 creative art Nature has made no violent leap, but has 
 passed by gentle gradations from one species of animal 
 to another, and from the highest animal to the lowest 
 man, it is not surprising that the embryonic development 
 
ir.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 105 
 
 of man should present indications of the general plan.* 
 It admits of no question that man does, in the course of 
 his development, pass through stages closely resembling 
 those through which other vertebrate animals pass, and 
 that these transitory conditions in him are not unlike the 
 forms that are permanent in the lower animals j he 
 presents us in the microcosm with an abstract of the 
 evolution which has gone on through countless ages in 
 the macrocosm. There is a very close morphological 
 resemblance between the human ovum and the lowest 
 animals with which we are acquainted, the microscopic 
 Gregarinida;t in both, an outer membrane contains a 
 soft semi-fluid substance, at one end of which is a deli- 
 cate vesicle having in it a solid particle, or spot. At the 
 earliest stages of its development no human power can 
 distinguish the human ovum from that of a quadruped; 
 scrutinize it as carefully as you will with the highest 
 
 * " That there should be more species of intelligent beings above 
 us," says Locke, " than there are of visible or material below us, is 
 probable to me from hence, that in all the corporeal world we see no 
 chasms or gaps. " But how can it be safe to apply to the unseen a 
 generalization from the seen ? Between the corporeal and spiritual 
 world there is, at any rate, a vast chasm or gap. 
 
 + " The Gregarinida, " says Huxley, "are all microscopic, and 
 any one of them, leaving minor modifications aside, may be said to 
 consist of a sac, composed of a more or less structureless, not very 
 well defined membrane, containing a soft semi-fluid substance, in the 
 midst, or at one end, of Which lies a delicate vesicle ; in the centre 
 of the latter is a more solid particle. No doubt many persons will 
 be struck with the close resemblance of the structure of this body to 
 that which is possessed by an ovum. You might take the more 
 solid particle to be the representative of the germinal spot, and the 
 vesicle to be that of the germinal vesicle ; while the semi-fluid sar- 
 codic contents might be regarded as the yelk, and the outer mem- 
 brane as the vitelline membrane. I do not wish to strain the analogy 
 too far, but it is at any rate interesting to observe this close mor- 
 phological resemblance between one of the lowest of animals and 
 that form in which all the higher animals commence their existence. " 
 —Lect. on Comp. Anal. 1864. 
 
106 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 microscopical powers, you shall not be able to say 
 whether it contains the potentialities of a Socrates or of 
 a he-goat; and, as it proceeds to its destined end, it 
 passes through similar stages to those through which 
 other vertebrate embryos pass. 
 
 That which is true of the whole body is true also 
 of the development of the brain. The brain of the 
 human foetus at the sixth week may be described in 
 general terms as consisting of a series of vesicles, the 
 foremost of which, a double one, representing the 
 cerebrum, is the smallest, and the hindmost, represent- 
 ing the cerebellum, the largest. In front of the latter 
 is the vesicle of the corpora quadrigemina ; and in 
 front again of this, the vesicle of the third ventricle, 
 which contains also the thalami optici, and which, 
 as development proceeds, becomes covered, as do the 
 corpora quadrigemina, by the backward growth of the 
 hemispheres in front of it. At this stage the human 
 brain resembles the fully-formed brain of the fish, more 
 closely the brain of the foetal fish, in the small proportion 
 which the cerebral hemispheres bear to the other parts, 
 in the absence of convolutions, in the deficiency of com- 
 missures, and in the general simplicity of structure. 
 Later, about the twelfth week of embryonic life, there is 
 a great resemblance to the brain of the bird : the cerebral 
 hemispheres are much increased in size, and arch back 
 towards the thalami optici and the corpora quadrigemina, 
 though there are still no convolutions and the commis- 
 sures are very deficient. Up to this time the cerebral 
 hemispheres represent no more than the rudiments of 
 the anterior lobes ; they do not yet completely cover 
 the thalami optici, nor indeed pars the grade of develop- 
 ment which is permanent in the Marsupial Mammalia. 
 During the fourth and early part of the fifth months, the 
 middle lobes develop backwards and cover the corpora 
 quadrigemina; and, subsequently, the posterior lobes 
 
U.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 107 
 
 sprout out, so to speak, and gradually extend backwards 
 so as to cover and overlap the cerebellum. It was upon 
 the erroneous assumption that the posterior lobes were 
 peculiar to man, that Professor Owen grounded his divi- 
 sion of the Archencephala ; but it has now been proved 
 beyond doubt that the posterior lobes exist in the apes, 
 and that in some apes they extend as far back as they do 
 in man. It is easy to perceive^ then, that an arrest of 
 development of the human brain at one stage or another 
 of its formation may leave it very much in the condition 
 of an animal brain ; and it is found in some cases, as a 
 matter of fact, that congenital idiots have brains very like 
 those of the monkeys. 
 
 As man is thus a sort of compendium of animal 
 nature, paralleling nature, as Sir Thomas Browne has it, 
 in the cosmography of himself, we find exhibited in the 
 workings of his organism all the different modes or kinds 
 Of nervous function which are met with in the animal 
 kingdom. The so-called irritability of tissue, whereby it 
 reacts to a stimulus without the help of nerve, may be of 
 the same kind as that molecular energy of matter manifest 
 in the movements of the humblest animal : whether the 
 nerve ends outside the sarcolemma of muscle, or within 
 it, there can be no doubt that it is not distributed to 
 every particle of the sarcous element ; and, at any rate, 
 when all nervous influence is withdrawn, an energy still 
 exists sufficient to produce rigor mortis of the muscle.* 
 
 * It has furthermore been maintained by Bilharz and Kiihne that 
 the nerves pass by continuity into the muscular substance, as in the 
 electric organs of the fishes they pass continuously into the proto- 
 plasm of the electric plates. The controversy respecting the manner 
 in which nerves end in muscles seems, then, likely to terminate in 
 the conclusion that they do not end at all, but pass by continuity of 
 substance into the sarcous elements. The observations of Kiihne 
 and Rouget prove that the nerve fibre, reduced to its axis cylinder, 
 penetrates the sarcolemma, and is lost. The nervous filaments of 
 insects cannot sometimes be distinguished from the other elements 
 
ioS THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 The simplest mode of nervous action in man, compar- 
 able to that of the lowest animals that possess nerve, is 
 exhibited by the scattered ganglionic cells belonging to 
 the sympathetic system which are concerned in certain 
 organic processes. The heart's action, for example, is 
 due to the ganglionic cells dispersed through its sub- 
 stance ; Meissner has shown that nerve-cells disseminated 
 through the tissues of the intestines govern their motions ; 
 and Lister thinks it probable that cells scattered in the 
 tissues preside over the contractions of the arteries, and 
 over the remarkable diffusion of the pigment granules 
 which takes place in the stellate cells of the frog's skin. 
 The separate elements of the tissue are co-ordinated by 
 the ganglionic nerve-cells of the sympathetic system ; 
 and these co-ordinating centres, again, are found to be 
 under the control of the cerebro-spinal centres. In the 
 spinal cord the ganglionic nerve-cells are collected 
 together, and so united that groups of them and con- 
 nected groups of them become independent centres of 
 combined movements, simultaneous and successive, in 
 answer to stimuli ; this arrangement representing the 
 entire nervous system of those animals in which no 
 organs of special sense have yet appeared. The stimulus 
 conveyed by the afferent nerve does not go directly 
 across the cord and produce the first movement at hand, 
 but excites the energies of a plexus of interconnected 
 cells, which energies are expressed ultimately in the 
 efferent or motor effect ; not otherwise than, as we shall 
 see hereafter, a stimulus to the brain excites energies 
 in the plexuses of its convolutions which appear in con- 
 sciousness as reflection and issue finally in voluntary 
 movement. 
 
 Still higher in the scale of the nervous system, the sen- 
 
 by means of the microscope. Pfliiger has discovered that the nerves 
 to the glands penetrate the walls of the cells, and, as he believes, 
 end iu the nuclei. 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 109 
 
 sory ganglia, consisting of multitudes of cells differentiated 
 by their special connections, are clustered together, forming 
 a very important part of the brain of man, while in many 
 animals, as already seen, they constitute the whole of the 
 brain. In the cerebral hemispheres there is still greater 
 specialization and complication of structure with corre- 
 sponding exaltation of function ; and, conformably to its 
 highest degree in man, there are in him the highest and 
 the most complex manifestations of mental function. In 
 the human organism, then, is summed up the animal 
 kingdom, which actually presents us with a sort of ana- 
 lysis of it ; for in the functions of man we observe, as in 
 a microcosm, an integration and harmonious co-ordina- 
 tion of different vital actions which are separately 
 displayed by subordinate members of the animal 
 kingdom. 
 
 In dealing with the function of the nervous system in 
 man, it is, then, most necessary to distinguish different 
 nervous centres : — 
 
 1. The primary centres, or ideational centres, consti- 
 tuted by the grey matter of the convolutions of the 
 hemispheres. They are superordinate to 
 
 2. The secondary nervous centres, or sensory centres, 
 constituted by the collections of grey matter that lie 
 between the decussation of the pyramids and the floors 
 of the lateral ventricles. These are subordinate to the 
 primary and superordinate to 
 
 3. The tertiary nervous centres, or centres of reflex 
 action, constituted mainly by the grey matter of the 
 spinal cord ; which again are superordinate to 
 
 4. The organic nervous centres, as we might call 
 them, belonging to the sympathetic system. They con- 
 sist of a set of ganglionic bodies distributed mainly over 
 the viscera, and connected with one another and with 
 the spinal centres by internuntiant cords. 
 
 Each distinct centre is subordinated to the centre 
 
no THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 immediately above it, but is at the same time capable of 
 determining and maintaining certain movements of its 
 own without the intervention of its supreme centre. 
 For example, the rhythmical contractions of the heart 
 are kept up by the ganglia distributed through its sub- 
 stance, and accordingly continue for a time after the 
 removal of the organ from the body. But these local 
 powers are not left uncontrolled : terminal branches of 
 the vagus nerve, or rather branches of a motor nerve 
 called the spinal accessory, which go with the vagus to 
 the heart, are connected in some way with the ganglia; 
 and when the vagus is irritated the ganglia are controlled 
 and cease to act upon the heart, which comes to a stand- 
 still in a relaxed condition. The organization of the 
 entire nervous system is such that a due independent 
 local action is compatible with the proper control of a 
 superior central authority. The ganglionic cells of the 
 sympathetic co-ordinate the energy of the separate ele- 
 ments of the tissue in which they are placed, and thus 
 represent the simplest form of a principle of individua- 
 tion;* through the cells of the spinal centre the func- 
 tions of the different organic centres are so co-ordinated 
 as to have their subordinate but essential place in the 
 movements of animal life — and herein is witnessed a 
 further and higher individuation ; the spinal'centres are 
 similarly controlled by the sensory centres ; and these, 
 in their turn, are subordinate to the controlling action of 
 the cerebral hemispheres, and especially to the action 
 which, revealing itself in consciousness as will, represents 
 the most complete co-ordination of the functions of the 
 hemispheres, and is the highest display of the principle 
 of individuation. The more unlike the parts in any 
 animal and the more complex their subordination, the 
 
 * Coleridge, in his Hints towards the Formation of a Comprehen- 
 sive Theory of Life," takes from Schelling the definition — "Life is 
 the principle of Individuation." 
 
ll.] THE MIND AiXD THE NERVOUS SYSTEM, m 
 
 higher and the more perfect it is.* Were it not well if 
 man in his social life could contrive to imitate this excel- 
 lent organization? 
 
 Most important and varied functions having been 
 ascribed to nerve-cells, it may be asked : on what evi- 
 dence do the statements rest? On the evidence of 
 anatomical investigation, experiments upon animals, and 
 physiological and pathological researches. 
 
 (a) Anatomical Evidence. — It is cenainly not possible 
 to trace every nerve fibre to its connection with a cell, 
 and until lately no such connection had been distinctly 
 seen ; but it has now been observed in many instances, 
 and most investigators believe that neither in the brain 
 nor in the spinal cord does there exist an isolated apolar 
 nerve- cell ; such, if supposed to be seen, being in reality 
 one which has had its processes torn away, or a young 
 one that has not yet formed its connections, or not being 
 a nerve-cell at all, but a connective tissue corpuscle. 
 This is an inference which has scarcely less certainty than 
 an observed fact ; as Goethe has said, it is not neces- 
 sary to travel round the world in order to feel sure that 
 the heaven above is everywhere blue.t 
 
 Granting the constant connection of the fibre with the 
 cell, are the ganglionic cells so numerous and so arranged 
 as to render it conceivable that they can minister ade- 
 quately to the manifold and complex manifestations of 
 our mental life ? Most certainly they are : Dr. Lockhart 
 
 * After speaking of an organism- as a collection of individual 
 elements, Goethe ' goes on to say:— "Je unvdlkommener das 
 Geschopf ' ist desto mehr sind diese Theile einander gleich oder 
 ahnlich, und desto mehr glei'chen sie dem Ganzen. Je volkommener 
 das Geschopf wird, desto unahnlicher werden die Theile einander. 
 Je ahnlicher die Theile einander sind, desto weniger sind sie einander 
 subordinirt. Die Subordination der Theile deutet auf ein volkom- 
 meneres Geschopf." 
 
 + Um zu begreifen das der Himmel iiberall blau ist, braucht man 
 nicht um die Welt zu reisen. 
 
112 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 Clarke's GarefuJ and valuable researches into the struc- 
 ture of the cortical layers of the hemispheres reveal a 
 variety, delicacy, and complexity of constitution such 
 as answer to the varied and complex manifestations of 
 mind. The following concise summary of those import- 
 ant researches, for which I am indebted to Dr. Lockhart 
 Clarke's kindness, will indicate exactly how the com- 
 plexity of physical structure agrees with the complexity 
 of mental function : — 
 
 " In the human brain most of the convolutions, when 
 properly examined, may be seen to consist of at least 
 seven distinct and concentric layers of nervous substance, 
 which are alternately paler and darker from the circum- 
 ference to the centre. The laminated structure is most 
 strongly marked at the extremity of the posterior lobe. 
 In this situation all the nerve-cells are small, but differ 
 considerably in shape, and are much more abundant in 
 some layers than in others. In the superficial layer, 
 which is pale, they are round, oval, fusiform, and angular, 
 but not numerous. The second and darker layer, is 
 densely crowded with cells of a similar kind, in company 
 with others that are pyriform and pyramidal, and lie 
 with their tapering ends either toward the surface or 
 parallel with it, in connection with fibres which run in 
 corresponding directions. The broader ends of the pyra- 
 midal cells give off two, three, four, or more processes, 
 which run partly towards the central white axis of the 
 convolution and in part horizontally along the plane of 
 the layer, to be continuous, like those at the opposite 
 ends of the cells, with nerve fibres running in different 
 directions. 
 
 " The third layer is of a much paler colour. It is 
 crossed, however, at right angles by narrow and elon- 
 gated groups of small cells and nuclei of the same general 
 appearance as those of the preceding layer. These 
 groups are separated from each other by bundles of 
 
H.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 113 
 
 fibres radiating towards the surface from the central 
 white axis of the convolution, and together with them 
 form a beautiful fan-like structure. 
 
 "The fourth layer also contains elongated groups of 
 small cells and nuclei, radiating at right angles to its 
 plane ; but the groups are broader, more regular, and, 
 together with the bundles of fibres between them, pre- 
 sent a more distinctly fan-like arrangement. 
 
 " The fifth layer is again paler and somewhat white. 
 It contains, however, cells and nuclei which have a 
 general resemblance to those of the preceding layers, 
 but they exhibit only a faintly radiating arrangement. 
 
 "The sixth and most internal layer is reddish-grey. 
 It not only abounds with cells like those already de- 
 scribed, but contains others that are rather larger. It 
 is only here and there that the cells are collected into 
 elongated groups which give the appearance of radia- 
 tions. On its under side it gradually blends with the 
 central white axis of the convolution, into which its cells 
 are scattered for some distance. 
 
 " The seventh layer is this central white stem or axis 
 of the convolution. On every side it gives off bundles 
 of fibres, which diverge in all directions, and in a fan- 
 like manner, towards the surface through the several grey 
 layers. As they pass between the elongated and radiating 
 groups of cells in the inner grey layers, some of them 
 become continuous with the processes of the cells in the 
 same section or plane, but others bend round and run hori- 
 zontally, both in a transverse and longitudinal direction 
 (in reference to the course of the entire convolution), 
 and with various degrees of obliquity. While the 
 bundles themselves are by this means reduced in size, 
 their component fibres become finer in proportion as 
 they traverse the layers towards the surface, in conse- 
 quence, apparently, of branches which they give off to 
 be connected with cells in their course. Those which 
 
U4 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 reach the outer grey layer are reduced to the finest 
 dimensions, and form a close network with which the. 
 nuclei and cells are in connection. 
 
 " Besides these fibres, which diverge from the central 
 white axis of the convolution, another set, springing 
 from the same source, converge, or ratRer curve inwards 
 from opposite sides, to form arches along some of the 
 grey layers. These arciform fibres run in differen 
 planes — transversely, obliquely, and longitudinally — and 
 appear to be partly continuous with those of the diver- 
 gent set which bend round, as already stated, to follow a 
 similar course. All these fibres establish an infinite 
 number of communications in every direction between dif- 
 ferent parts of each convolution, between different convo- 
 lutions, and between these and the central white substance. 
 
 " The other convolutions of the cerebral hemispheres 
 differ from those at the extremities of the posterior lobes, 
 not only by the comparative faintness of their several 
 layers, but also by the appearance of some of their cells. 
 We have already seen that, at the extremity of the 
 posterior lobe, the cells of all the layers are small and 
 of nearly uniform size, the inner layer only containing 
 some that are a little larger. But, on proceeding forward 
 from this point, the convolutions are -found to contain a 
 number of cells of a much larger kind. A section, for 
 instance, taken from a convolution at the vertex, contains 
 a number of large,, triangular, oval, and pyramidal cells, 
 scattered at various intervals through the two inner 
 bands of arciform fibres and the grey layer between them, 
 in company with a multitude of smaller cells which 
 differ but little from those at the extremity of the 
 posterior lobe. The pyramidal cells are very peculiar. 
 Their bases are quadrangular, directed towards the cen- 
 tral white substance, and each gives off four or more 
 processes which run partly towards the centre to be 
 continuous with fibres radiating from the central white 
 
ii.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 115 
 
 axis, and partly parallel with the surface of the convolution 
 to be continuous with arciform fibres. The processes fre- 
 quently subdivide into minute branches, which form part 
 of the network between them. The opposite end of the 
 cell tapers gradually into a straight process, which runs 
 directly towards the surface of the convolution, and may 
 be traced to a surprising distance, giving off minute 
 branches in its course, and becoming lost, like the others, 
 in the surrounding network. Many of these cells, as 
 wells as others of a triangular, oval, and pyriform shape, 
 are as large as those in the anterior grey substance of 
 the spinal cord. 
 
 " In other convolutions the vesicular structure is again 
 somewhat modified. Thus, in the surface convolution of 
 the great longitudinal fissure, on a level with the anterior 
 extremity of the corpus callosum, and therefore corres- 
 ponding to what is called the superior frontal convolu- 
 tion, all the three inner layers of grey substance are 
 thronged with pyramidal, triangular, and oval cells of 
 considerable size and in much greater number than in 
 the situation last mentioned. Between these, as usual, is 
 a multitude of nuclei and smaller cells. The inner 
 orbital convolution, situated on the outer side of the 
 olfactory bulb, contains a vast multitude of pyriform, 
 pyramidal, and triangular cells, arranged in very regular 
 order, but none that are so large as many of those found 
 in the convolutions at the vertex. Again, in the insula, 
 or island of Reil, which overlies the extra- ventricular 
 portion of the corpus striatum, a great number of the 
 cells are somewhat larger, and the general aspect of the 
 tissue is rather different. A further variety is presented 
 by the temporo-sphenoidal lobe, which covers the insula 
 and is continuous with it ; for while in the superficial 
 and deep layers the cells are rather small, the middle 
 layer is crowded with pyramidal and oval cells of 
 considerable and rather uniform size. But not only in 
 
n6 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chak 
 
 different convolutions does the structure assume, to a 
 greater or less extent, a variety of modifications, but even 
 different parts of the same convolution may vary with 
 regard either to the arrangement or the relative size of 
 their cells. 
 
 " Between the cells of the convolutions in man and 
 those of the ape tribe I could not perceive any difference 
 whatever ; but they certainly differ in some respects from 
 those of the larger Mammalia — from those, for instance, 
 of the ox, sheep, or cat."* 
 
 Dr. Herbert Major has recently made a careful ex- 
 amination of the minute structure of the convolutions of 
 the brain of the Chacma Baboon, and he finds that the 
 general characters thereof agree with those that are met 
 with in the human brain — that the forms and relations of 
 the cells show no variation. There was only one doubt- 
 ful exception to this general rule, and that was tie second 
 layer of the frontal and parietal convolutions, the large 
 cells of which are more rare in the baboon than in man. 
 Whether such predominance of large cells in man is 
 
 * In the first edition of this work an error occurred in the brief 
 abstract made of Dr. Clarke's investigations, as they appeared in the 
 Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. xii. 1863. I regret the mistake 
 the less, as it has been the occasion of my receiving, from Dr. 
 Clarke's own pen, the above clear and concise description of his 
 latest researches. 
 
 Schroeder van der Kolk found a different structure of the grey 
 substance of the convolutions in the anterior and posterior lobes of 
 the dog and the rabbit : in the anterior lobes of the rabbit there are 
 bundles of fibres, with cells, mostly tripolar, between them ; in the 
 posterior lobes there is a regular series of pedunculated cells, which 
 are placed close to one another, like organ pipes ; there are also 
 single larger cells. As the result of his investigations, continued 
 through an industrious lifetime, he states positively that, wherever 
 there are differences of function, there differences of structure and 
 composition and connexion do exist; "microscopical investigation 
 has established this in the completest manner." — Die Pathologieund 
 Therapie der Geisleskrankheiten auf Anatomisch-Physiologisclier 
 Grundlage. Von J. L. C. Schroeder van der Kolk. 1863. 
 
H.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 117 
 
 connected with superior function in him, must of course 
 be entirely conjectural. Dr. Major was, however, led 
 by a close comparison of numerous sections of brain to 
 the distinct conclusion that in man the number of the 
 cell processes, and, as a consequence, the extent of their 
 connections, are greater than in the baboon ; and he be- 
 lieves that the more numerous and complex anastomoses 
 have relation to the superior functional activity in man.* 
 
 Assuredly we are lost in the vastly intricate and 
 complicated mechanism of cerebral cells and fibres 
 when we attempt to trace the way in which function 
 goes on, but we may perhaps realise how sufficient 
 or more than sufficient for all the variety of our mental 
 processes is the multitude of cells and extremely 
 delicate fibres which constitute the convolutions. It 
 is certain that in one cubic inch of convolution there 
 would be found, if they could be counted, several 
 hundred thousand nerve-cells and fibres, and in all 
 the convolutions cells more in number than the stars 
 of heaven ; and when we compare these numbers with 
 the number of words made use of by the most "fertile 
 writers, we shall perhaps be tempted to think that only a 
 small portion of our intellectual instruments are actually 
 utilized.t Out of a possible number of English words 
 amounting to ninety or a hundred thousand, Shakespeare 
 uses about fifteen thousand, Milton about eight thousand, 
 and an agricultural labourer about three hundred. 
 
 Complex, however, as is the structure of the convolu- 
 tions, we find the same type as in the spinal cord- 
 namely, the nerve-cell forming the junction of fibres 
 
 * " Observations on the Brain of the Chacma Baboon. "—Journal 
 of Menial Science, January, 1876. 
 
 f " A portion of grey matter upon the surface of a convolution, 
 not larger than the head of a very small pin, will contain portions 
 of many thousands of nerve-fibres, the distal ramifications of wh.ch 
 may be in very distant and different parts of the body."— Bioplasm, 
 p. 321. Dr. Beale, 2nd Ed. 
 
n8 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 and of other cells; this structure being multiplied in 
 the brain in innumerable plexuses. Moreover, we find 
 suitable anatomical provision for uniting in common 
 function different parts of the same convolution, dif- 
 ferent convolutions of the same hemisphere, and corre- 
 sponding convolutions of the two hemispheres. Besides 
 the fibres which are a continuation of the central 
 white axis, and which conduct to and from the grey 
 matter, there are the commissural fibres connecting cor- 
 responding parts of the two hemispheres and effecting 
 simultaneous or successive function of these parts; and 
 there are also the arciform fibres passing between different 
 parts of the same hemisphere and combining in function 
 both adjacent and more distant convolutions. Anatomy 
 clearly reveals a structure destined to subserve varied 
 and intimate intercommunion of function. And we may 
 conceive, as we survey these manifold uniting fibres and 
 the innumerable multitude of junction-making cells, how 
 it happens that the functions of the cortical layers are 
 soon restored after a partial destruction thereof; in the 
 grey matter of these layers, as in the grey matter of the 
 spinal cord, it is probable that equivalent parts connected 
 in the most intimate and complex way may take the 
 place of each other functionally. We may conceive, also, 
 how it is that with two distinct hemispheres we have not 
 a divided but a single consciousness ; one hemisphere is 
 so intimately united by commissural fibres with the other 
 that they are bound together in function and their con- 
 sciousness is made one ; were the cortical centres of the 
 brains of two men as closely united by commissural 
 fibres as are the two hemispheres of one brain, they 
 perhaps would not have a double but a single conscious- 
 ness. The phenomena of hemiplegia prove that when 
 two corresponding motor centres, which have to do with 
 opposite parts of the body, lie near together and are 
 closely united anatomically, and have been accustomed 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 119 
 
 to act together functionally, their functions are coinci- 
 dent, and one will do the work of the other when the 
 latter is damaged. 
 
 Although there are observable differences in the size 
 and configuration of the cells of the cortical layers, as of 
 the cells of other centres, yet it is clear that we cannot 
 at present penetrate those intimate special differences in 
 constitution or composition, or trace those special con- 
 nections, which the variety of their functions implies. 
 These essential differences of constitution are not such, 
 indeed, as the microscope is ever likely to reveal ; for 
 they probably depend on the intimate chemical composi- 
 tion, and are not likely, even if we could isolate cells as 
 required, to be disclosed until chemistry has arrived at 
 microscopical application, or until some means has been 
 discovered of penetrating the molecular constitution of 
 nerve element. Those who may be disposed to think 
 it impossible that such important constitutional differ- 
 ences should exist in so small a compass, might reflect 
 with advantage on the various undetectable conditions 
 which may confessedly exist in the minutest organic 
 matter ; as, for example, in the delicate microscopic sper- 
 matozoon, or in the intangible virus of a fever. And yet 
 it is from the conjunction of a minute spermatozoon 
 with a minute germinal vesicle that are produced the 
 muscles, vessels, nerves, and brain — the intellectual 
 organs of a Socrates or a Caesar. The single sperm-cell, 
 integrating the qualities of generations of male and 
 female ancestors, unites with the germ-cell, integrating 
 in like manner the qualities of generations of male and 
 female ancestors, and gives birth to a new organic 
 product which,, minute as it is, contains in latent form 
 all the potentialities, and displays actually in evolution 
 many of the qualities, of "ancestors on both sides, and 
 furthermore evinces new qualities as a result of the 
 organic combination ; not otherwise than as a chemical 
 
120 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 compound evinces properties that are unlike those of 
 its constituents. There is nothing extravagant in the 
 supposition that a single nerve-cell may contain like 
 potentialties.* Consider, again, the infinite littleness of 
 the odorous particles that affect the smell, and, more 
 wonderful still, the marvellous discriminating suscep- 
 tibility of sense to these undetected agents. The ex- 
 quisite minuteness and consummate delicacy of the 
 operations going on in the most intimate recesses of 
 nature are even more striking and wonderful than the 
 vastness and grandeur with which the astronomer is 
 concerned. " What the immensity is to the astronomer 
 or geologist," says Sir H. Holland, " such are these 
 infinitely small dimensions of matter in space to the 
 physiologist." Of what may happen in a world into 
 which human senses have not yet found means of en- 
 tering we are no better entitled to speak than the 
 blind man is to talk of the appearance of objects. 
 In such matter it would be more wise to adopt Ter- 
 tullian's maxim, " Credo quia impossible est," than that 
 which is so much favoured by the conceit of human 
 ignorance — that a thing is impossible because it ap- 
 pears to be inconceivable.t 
 
 (b) Experiments on Animals have distinctly proved 
 
 * It is worth remark that similar complex chemical compounds 
 have been found in nerve-substance and in the semen and the ovum, 
 calling to mind the statement of Alcmzeon, an ancient writer on 
 medical subjects, that a drop of semen is a drop of brain. 
 
 + The latest speculations concerning the actual constitution of 
 atoms render it probable that even chemical atoms are really very 
 complicated structures, and that in them there are complex intestine 
 motions of which we have not the least conception. "An atom ol 
 pure iron is probably a vastly more complicated system than that of 
 the planets and their satellites."— Jevons, Principles of Science. 
 The smallest particle of solid matter will consist of a number of such 
 systems united in regular order, the problem of their forces and 
 motions being beyond the reach of our mathematical powers, even 
 were the systems accessible to observation. 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 121 
 
 the differences between the functions of the ganglionic 
 cells that constitute the principal different nervous 
 centres ; but such results will more properly find their 
 place afterwards. Let it suffice here to say that the 
 sight of an animal may be destroyed by injury to its 
 corpora quadrigemina as surely as by burning out its 
 eyes. By the experiments of Fritsch and Hitzig, which 
 have been repeated and extended by Dr. Ferrier, some- 
 thing has lately been done towards distinguishing the 
 functions of different convolutions. 
 
 (c) Physiological, Evidence. — The study of the plan of 
 development of the nervous system through the animal 
 kingdom, with the corresponding progress in complexity 
 of function, undoubtedly furnishes the best testimony in 
 favour of differences in the constitution and function of 
 the nerve centres. That evidence has already been suffi- 
 ciently set forth. 
 
 The hopeless vanity of all discussions concerning 
 infinite or absolute truth might well have been made 
 manifest by this physiological reflection : that our per- 
 ception of external nature is the effect which the object 
 produces, through an adapted medium, in certain of our 
 central nerve-cells, an effect on which we can exercise no 
 influence ; it is, as Hobbes puts it, "but an apparition 
 unto us of the motion, agitation, or alteration, which the 
 object worketh in the brain, or spirits, or some internal 
 substance of the head." Excite that condition of the 
 central cell otherwise than by the stimulus from without, 
 the perception does not fail to ensue : a blow on the 
 eye produces flashes of light ; on closing the eyes after 
 looking at the sun a spectrum of it remains, which, as it 
 slowly fades away, may- be brightened and darkened 
 alternately for a time by pressing the eye and removing 
 the pressure ; luminous spectra are sometimes seen after 
 complete destruction of the retina ; a disturbance of the 
 circulation in the auditory ganglia gives rise to noises in 
 
122 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 the ears • an insane person who is quite deaf will some- 
 times hear what he believes to be the voices of persons ad- 
 dressing him, and will dispute with them • in fact, all the 
 senses may be excited subjectively. The reason is evi- 
 dent : because the perception depends upon the nature 
 of the special centres and the mechanism by which the 
 stimulus is conveyed to them. The idea in the mind is 
 the result of an action excited in the nerve centres ; the 
 external impression not being conveyed to them, but 
 exciting the physiological property of the nerve, which 
 thereupon gives rise in them to the special effect. 
 Accordingly, the effect of any stimulus capable of affecting 
 one of the special senses is, as Miiller pointed out, of the 
 same kind as that produced by the proper stimulus of the 
 particular sense : thus the effect of the electric stimulus 
 on the optic ganglia is to cause a sensation of light; on 
 the olfactory nerves, some kind of smell ; on the gusta- 
 tory nerves, some kind of taste. In like manner, whether 
 irritation of a nerve shall produce a muscular move- 
 ment, a secretion, or a sensation, depends not upon 
 the constitution of the nerve, nor upon the means of 
 irritation, but upon its connections — whether it is con- 
 nected with a muscle, gland, or sensory centre. It is 
 clear then that the qualities of our sensations do not 
 represent corresponding* qualities in objects — that our 
 senses do not give us anything like an exact impression 
 of the outer world. Whether the rays of the sun appear 
 to us as colour or heat depends not upon any properties 
 of colour or heat in them, but simply upon the fact 
 whether they stimulate the fibres of the optic nerve or 
 those of the skin ; and of what colour rays of light shall 
 appear to us will depend entirely upon the length of the 
 undulations, those of red being the longest, those of 
 violet the shortest. If the nerve fibres which answer 
 to the undulations of what appears in us as red were 
 wanting in our eyes, we should not have the least 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. i 2 j 
 
 conception of red* That man is by nature thus limited 
 to the reception of certain special impressions through a 
 few avenues, proves how limited must be his knowledge 
 at the best : it may well be, of a truth is, that there are 
 many things in nature of which he has not, and cannot 
 have, the least apprehension ; and that a new sense con- 
 ferred upon him might alter the whole aspect of the 
 universe and transform entirely the character of that 
 which he calls knowledge. 
 
 What is true of the sensory ganglia is probably no less 
 true of the higher centres of intelligence. There is 
 reason to assume differences, not merely between gan- 
 glionic centres in one lobe of the brain and in another, 
 but also between centres in the same lobe and even in 
 the same convolution. The law of progress from the 
 general to the special in organic development does not, 
 it may be presumed, stay its action suddenly at the cere- 
 bral hemispheres. The philosopher is not, it is true, in 
 
 * Suppose that men and all animals that have similar organs of 
 sight were swept off from the face of the earth : there would be no 
 light, for light is something relative to the eye ; without which it could 
 have no existence as such. And if the earth were inhabited by beings 
 so differently constituted as to have entirely different kinds of senses 
 from what we have, it is impossible to conceive what the world 
 would be to them. We find ourselves in a position in which we are 
 acted upon and react, and, being conscious of this action and re- 
 action, we get the notions of object and subject ; we are constrained 
 to believe in an external something, not ourselves, which is beneath 
 the phenomena of which we are conscious, and which includes us in 
 its operations, and we may represent it as we will as nature, or a 
 universally immanent spirit, or as personal God, or personal devil. 
 But we never can know more of this external something which is not 
 ourselves than in its relation to ourselves — can never by any possi- 
 bility know what it is in itself. Men should amuse' themselves by 
 trying to develop a new sense in some individual or in his progeny 
 by selective breeding, as the bees, having lost their queen, take in 
 hand a common young one, and feed and foster it into a queen bee. 
 He might amply repay their pains by teaching them how little they 
 really knew of the external something which is not themselves. 
 
124 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 possession of more senses than the savage ; but he un- 
 questionably has more numerous and complex convolu- 
 tions, and, therefore, many more differentiated centres in 
 the primary centres of intelligence. The differences be- 
 tween persons notably become greater as civilization in- 
 creases; and outer differences assuredly mean differences 
 in the innermost. It is a common remark that all savages 
 are much alike, and it is certain that uneducated labourers 
 are more like one another than educated persons are. 
 By intending his mind to the realities of external nature 
 the scientific inquirer acquires information through the 
 senses, but his intelligence reacts advantageously upon 
 the senses ; he constructs instruments which extend their 
 power of observation, — thus acquires, as it were, new 
 artificial senses ; so that hitherto obscure relations of 
 external nature are disclosed to him, and he attains to 
 more special and complex relations therewith. If in the 
 nervous centres cortical cells of a higher quality and of 
 more complicated connections than the savage has, do 
 not answer to this increased speciality and complexity of 
 external relations, it is contrary to all the analogy of 
 organic development. 
 
 (d) Pathological Evidence. — This will be brought for- 
 ward in detail at a later period. Let it suffice here to 
 say, that Schroeder van der Kolk could venture to assert 
 that he never failed to discover morbid changes of struc- 
 ture in insanity, and that, when intellectual disorder espe- 
 cially had existed, he had found the cortical layers under 
 the frontal bones to be darker coloured, more firmly con- 
 nected with the pia mater, or softened ; in melancholia, 
 on the other hand, where the feelings mainly were excited 
 or depressed, the pathological changes were found prin- 
 cipally in the convolutions of the upper and hind lobes. 
 In old age when the memory fails, he found the cells of 
 the cortical layers visibly atrophied. The very many and 
 various disorders to which the memory is liable, failures 
 
11.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 125 
 
 of such variety, degree and character as can only be 
 described by being given in detail, surely indicate in no 
 uncertain way the different functions of different centres 
 in the cortical layers of the hemispheres. 
 
 Thus much, then, by way of setting forth facts which 
 will not easily be discredited. What is the unavoidable 
 conclusion ? That no true scientific result can possibly 
 proceed from a vague and general descriptive employment, 
 without further discrimination, of mental action to embrace 
 phenomena of such manifestly different nature. If the 
 psychologists had duly minded the old but wholesome 
 maxim, that whosoever distinguishes well teaches well, 
 they might have found in the revelations of self-con- 
 sciousness, when interpreted without bias, those dis- 
 tinctions which an investigation of the physiology of the 
 nervous system in man and animals establishes beyond 
 question. But the metaphysical conception of mind, the 
 abstraction made into an entity, has overridden all dis- 
 cerning observation, and, confounding well-marked dif- 
 ferences in a vague obscurity, has constructed a loose 
 system of undefined words in place of an exact and posi- 
 tive science of facts. Instead of mind being, as assumed, 
 a wondrous spiritual entity, the independent source of 
 power and self-sufficient cause of causes, an honest obser- 
 vation proves incontestably that it is the most depend- 
 ent of all the natural forces. It is the highest develop- 
 ment of force, and to its existence all the lower natural 
 forces are indispensably prerequisite. 
 
 It is most needful, if we would avoid confusion and 
 error, once for all to form a just and definite conception 
 of what we intend to mean by mental force, and of its 
 position in nature. The various definitions of mind 
 which philosophers have tendered do not help us far on 
 our way. It is the substantia cogitans, says Descartes; 
 "that which thinks, reasons, wills," says Reid; "the 
 subject of the various internal phenomena of which we 
 
126 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 are conscious, or the subject of which consciousness is 
 the general phenomenon — that which perceives, thinks, 
 feels, wills, desires," says Sir W. Hamilton ; " the sum 
 total of subject experiences, that which has not extension." 
 according to Mr. Bain. But what is the thinking substance : 
 that which thinks, reasons, wills ; that of which conscious- 
 ness is the phenomenon ; that which is the subject of ex- 
 periences ; when we resolutely pierce the vague abstrac- 
 tion and get as near as we can to the concrete fact ? The 
 physiologist answers that it is the brain, not any supposi- 
 titious metaphysical entity of the existence of which he 
 has no evidence whatever, and of the need of which as a 
 hypothesis he is not conscious. To him the hypothesis 
 .is as superfluous in thought as it is unfounded in obser- 
 vation. By observation of mental phenomena wherever 
 displayed and of whatever sort, by experiment, by rea- 
 soning — by all the means of knowing which serve him 
 in other scientific inquiries, he has come to the assured 
 conviction that mind does not exist in nature apart from 
 brain : all his experience of it is in connection with brain 
 just as all his experience of gravitation is in connection 
 with matter : he has never met with gravitation without 
 a heavy body, chemical force without chemical sub- 
 stances, life without organic matter, thought without 
 nervous tissue. Mind he holds to be nothing more than 
 a general term denoting the sense of those functions of 
 brain which are accompanied by consciousness, and which 
 are commonly described as thought, feeling, and will. (3) 
 To deal with mind as a force in nature apart from the 
 consideration of the matter through the changes of which 
 it is manifested, is truly no less vain and absurd than it 
 would confessedly be to attempt to handle electricity and 
 gravitation as forces apart from the changes in matter by 
 which alone we know them. No man in his senses 
 would attempt to develop a child's mind without paying 
 any regard to its bodily nutrition. Many persons,' however, 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 127 
 
 seem to labour under the impression that they have the 
 right to demand from the physiologist who deals with 
 mental functions that he shall tell them more about the 
 real nature of mind than they know of the real nature 
 of any other natural force, and to exult over him when 
 he fails to do so. Not content with his efforts to trace 
 uniformities of sequence, they insist that he shall explain 
 how or why a certain mental sequence is the result of 
 certain antecedent cerebral states. Were they to con- 
 sider fairly how much they know and do not know 
 concerning other natural forces, they would perceive 
 that it is a preposterous demand to make in respect 
 of mind. 
 
 I know not why they should suppose it impossible 
 that a Creator whom they believe to be omnipotent can 
 have endowed matter in its most complex development 
 with feeling and thought, nor why they should be hor- 
 rified at the suggestion that he has done so. They 
 strangely overlook the fact that the brain is not a dead 
 instrument, but a living organ, with functions of a higher 
 kind than those of any other bodily organ, insomuch as 
 its structure far surpasses in organic dignity that of any 
 other organ. What, then, are these functions if they are 
 not mental ? It were wise to ponder well the remark- 
 able operations of which matter is capable, and to 
 reflect upon the wonderful works which it is continually 
 . doing before our eyes. Consider the seed dropped into 
 the ground: in due season it springs up as a tender 
 shoot, which grows into a plant that puts forth first its 
 • leaves and then its blossoms, making use in the process 
 of a more subtile chemistry than man can yet compre- 
 hend or attain unto, until finally it is clothed in such a 
 floral beauty that "Solomon in all his glory was not 
 arrayed like one of these." It is not a spiritual plant 
 which does these things through the agency of matter; 
 they are operations of matter, and wonderful enough, 
 
128 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 rightly considered, to satisfy any one of the properties 
 that are inherent in it. We cannot choose but believe 
 that the highest and most complex development of 
 organic structure is capable of even more remarkable 
 operations. In truth, when we trace the development 
 of the nervous system step by step through the animal 
 series, from its first germ to its most complex evolu- 
 tion, we shall find it a hard matter to declare at what 
 point it suddenly loses all its inherent properties as 
 living structure, and becomes the passive instrument of 
 an immaterial entity. Those who repudiate such mate- 
 rialism may comfort themselves by conceiving a fine 
 matter of extreme subtility and tenuity, a sort of im- 
 material matter : whether they spiritualise matter in this 
 way, or materialise mind, is a question of words, not of 
 facts. 
 
 The truth is that it has been the custom to dispute 
 violently and vaguely about matter and motion, and 
 about the impossibility of matter affecting an immaterial 
 mind, without being at the pains to reflect carefully upon 
 the different kinds of matter and the corresponding 
 differences of kind in its motions. All sorts of matter, 
 diverse as they are, were vaguely matter — no discrimina- 
 tion was made ; and all the manifold and special proper- 
 ties of matter were comprised under the general term 
 motion. This was not, nor could it lead to, good. As 
 there are different kinds of matter, so there are dif- 
 ferent modes of force, in the universe ; and as we 
 rise from physical matter in which physical properties 
 exist and laws hold sway up to chemical matter and' 
 chemical forces, and from chemical matter again up to 
 living matter and its modes of force, so do we rise in the 
 scale of life from the lowest kind of living matter, with its 
 corresponding force or energy, through different kinds of 
 organic elements, with their corresponding energies or 
 properties, up to the highest kind of living matter and 
 
n.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 129 
 
 corresponding mode of force with which we are ac- 
 quainted, viz. nerve element and nerve force. But, when 
 we have arrived at nerve element and nerve force, it 
 behoves us not to rest content with the general idea, but 
 to bestow pains on the patient and careful discrimination 
 of the different kinds of nerve-centres in the nervous 
 system, and to study their different manifestations of 
 energy. So shall we ascend to the most exalted agents 
 of mental function, and so only shall we obtain the 
 ground-work of a true conception of the relations of 
 mind and the nervous system. 
 
 In like manner as men have disputed vaguely con- 
 cerning matter, without reaching an adequate conception 
 of that most complex combination of elements and ener- 
 gies, physical and chemical, in a small space, which exists 
 in the smallest atom of nerve element, so has much barren 
 discussion been owing to the undiscriminating inclusion 
 of all kinds of mental manifestations under the vague and 
 general term mincl. These are important differences in 
 the nature and dignity of so-called mental phenomena, 
 when they are carefully observed and analyzed. By 
 rightly submitting the understanding to facts, it is made 
 evident that, on the one hand, matter rises in dignity and 
 function until its acknowledged energies merge insensibly 
 into functions which are assumed to be purely mental, 
 and, on the other hand, that there are gradations of the 
 so called purely mental functions, the lowest of which 
 confessedly do not transcend the functions of matter. 
 The burden of proving that the Deus ex machind. of an 
 immaterial agent intervenes somewhere, and where it 
 intervenes, lies therefore upon those who make the asser- 
 tion or need the hypothesis. They are not justified in 
 arbitrarily fabricating an hypothesis entirely inconsistent 
 with what we know of the orderly development of nature, 
 and which postulates a domain of nature that human 
 sense cannot take cognizance of, and in then calling 
 
130 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 upon those who reject their assumption to disprove it. 
 These have done enough when they have shown'' that 
 there are no grounds for nor need of the hypothesis. 
 
 The chief feature to be noted in this upward trans- 
 formation of matter and correlative metamorphosis of 
 force is, that the exaltation or transpeciation on each 
 occasion represents an increased speciality of elements, 
 and a greater complexity of combinations, in a smaller 
 space : all exaltation of matter and force is, as it were, 
 a concentration thereof. As one equivalent of chemical 
 force corresponds to several equivalents of inferior force, 
 and one equivalent of vital force to several equivalents of 
 chemical force ; so in the scale of tissues the higher kind 
 represents a more complex elementary constitution, and 
 a greater number of simultaneously acting forces, than 
 the kind of tissue below it in dignity. If we suppose a 
 higher' tissue to undergo decomposition, or retrograde 
 metamorphosis of its matter, with which must necessarily 
 coincide a resolution of its energy into lower modes, then 
 we might say that a single monad* of the higher tissue, or 
 one equivalent of its force, would equal in value several 
 monads of the lower kind of tissue, or several equivalents 
 of its force. The characteristic of living matter is the 
 complexity of combinations and the variety of elements 
 in so small a compass that we cannot yet trace them ; 
 and in nerve structure this complication and concentra- 
 tion is carried to its highest pitch. We may suspect, 
 but we cannot conceive, the complexity of systems and of 
 motions of molecules which exist in the smallest atom of 
 nerve element. Nervous tissue with its energy is, there- 
 fore, dependent for its existence on all the lower kinds of 
 tissue that have preceded it in the order of development : 
 all the force of nature could not develop a nerve-cell 
 directly out of inorganic matter. The highest energy in 
 nature is really the most dependent ; in the fact that it is 
 so dependent, that it implicitly contains the essence or 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 131 
 
 abstraction of all the lower kinds of energy, lies the 
 reason of the powerful influence which it is able to ex- 
 ercise over all the lower forces that are subservient to 
 its evolution. As the man of genius implicitly contains 
 humanity, so nerve element implicitly contains nature.* 
 
 What is the progress or nisus that is manifest on sur- 
 veying nature as a whole? Is it not the struggle to arrive 
 at consciousness, to attain to self communion ? In the 
 series of her manifold productions man was, so to speak, 
 says Goethe, the first dialogue that Nature held with 
 God. Every poet, then, who is sensitive to a hitherto 
 unrevealed subtlety of human feeling, every philosopher 
 who apprehends and reveals a hitherto unobserved rela- 
 tion in nature, opens the door to new discoveries, and 
 is, each in his place, aiding the onward progress ; in his 
 art nature is undergoing evolution j in him the world is 
 more or. less regenerate. 
 
 " To whom the Winged hierarch replied : — 
 O Adam, one Almighty is, from whom 
 All things proceed, and up to Him return, 
 If not depraved from good, created all 
 Such to perfection, one first matter all, 
 Indued with various forms, various degrees 
 Of substance, and in things that live, of life ; 
 But more refined, more spirituous, and pure, 
 As nearer to Him placed, or nearer tending, 
 Each in their several active spheres assigned, 
 Till body up to spirit work, in bounds 
 Proportioned to each kind. So from the root 
 Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves 
 More aery, last the bright consummate flower 
 Spirits odorous breathes ; flowers and their fruit, 
 Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed, 
 To vital spirits aspire, to animal, 
 
 * For the further development of this view of life, I may refer to 
 an article on the "Theory of Vitality," in the British and Foreign 
 Mcd.-Chir. Review, October 1863, which is republished in the second 
 edition of Body and Mind, 1873. 
 
i 3 2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 To intellectual ; give both life and sense, 
 Fancy and understanding ; whence the squl 
 Reason receives, and reason is her being, 
 Discursive, or intuitive ; discourse 
 Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours, 
 Differing but in degree, of kind the same." ( 4 ) 
 
 Paradise Lost, B. v. 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 1 (p. 88). In the first chapter I attributed to Von Baer the formu- 
 larization of the law of progress from the general to the special in-or- 
 ganic evolution ; and it is true that he traced it admirably through 
 the differentiations of the fundamental tissues of the embryo. But it 
 would appear that Von Baer never claimed the law as his discovery, 
 for he says of it — " This law of development has indeed never been 
 overlooked." Mr. Lewes (Life and Works of Goethe, 1855) claims 
 it for Goethe. "The law," he says, "announced by Goethe, and I 
 believe distinctly announced by him for the first time, is now to be 
 met with in every philosophic work on zoology. One form of it is 
 known in England as Von Baer's law ; viz., That development pro- 
 ceeds from the Like to the Unlike, from the General to the Particular, 
 from the Homogeneous to the Heterogeneous." However, Wolff, 
 in his Theoria Generationis, anticipated Goethe. 
 
 * (p. 91). The doctrine of the relation of the organism to its en- 
 vironment, so far as it belongs to anyone in particular, ought perhaps 
 to be credited to Comte, who, at any rate, recognised its important 
 bearing and laid very great stress upon it when treating of Biology. 
 Lamarck had not, however, failed to perceive and appreciate the 
 powerful action of external circumstances upon the organism, while 
 Blainville, in his Cours de Physiologic gineVale et comparie, clearly 
 points out the modifying effects which are thus produced. The fol- 
 lowing extracts will suffice to exhibit Comte's conception of the 
 doctrine : — " All biological conceptions must of necessity depend 
 upon two kinds of adjustment ; that of the Organism to its Environ- 
 ment, and that of Organs to Functions, or rather of Agents to Acts. 
 . . . No conception in systematic biology can be considered as 
 thoroughly complete until it exhibits these two elementary relations 
 coherently combined." (Positive Polity, vol. i. p. 517, Eng. Trans.) 
 ..." Their study " (that of the special relations of functions to 
 organs) " will be begun and carried on with a distinctly systematic 
 purpose ; that of forming a clearer conception of the general rela- 
 tion between the Organism and its Environment ; for this, and this 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 133 
 
 only, is the ultimate goal at which the science of Life aims " (p. 519). 
 . . . "In this more systematic conception of Biology, Function will 
 be regarded as the special result of a determinate relation between 
 Environment and Organism" (p. 520). He speaks of the general 
 theory of organic environments as "an entirely new branch of 
 biology, of which Lamarck must be considered as the true founder, 
 although with him it was too much mixed up with unfounded hypo- 
 theses as to the indefinite variability of species" (p. 537). Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer has given the most complete and elaborate de- 
 velopment to the doctrine in his Principles of Biology ; but as Mr. 
 Spencer does not on any occasion give references to or make quota- 
 tions from authors who have preceded him, but works up their re- 
 sults systematically into his lucid exposition, those who gain all their 
 knowledge of philosophy from the most recent and popular exposi- 
 tions of it, and ascribe to their authors all they find there, are prone 
 to think original that which is often a legacy from the past. This 
 practice of ignoring authorities, though it no doubt has its conveni- 
 ences, bears hardly and disagreeably sometimes on those who may 
 have occasion to write upon the same subjects, inasmuch as they 
 are liafale to be charged by ignorant persons with borrowing from an 
 eminent contemporary what the contemporary has really derived 
 from the same well-known source, and would not claim as his own. 
 This is trying : the most serenely pankleptic appropriator of the 
 fruits of past thought will become recalcitrant when he is charged 
 with specific appropriation of material, not from the real proprietor 
 of the property, who may perhaps not be known by name, but from 
 one who, indebted for it to the same sources in the stores of the 
 past as himself, does not make specific acknowledgments. 
 
 3 (p. 126). The definition of Descartes makes the function the sub- 
 stance. Instead of mind being the thinking substance, the substantia 
 cogitans, it is the thinking which is mind-^the function of the sub- 
 stance ; the substance being the brain. Hamilton's definition is de- 
 fective on its own ground. By defining mind to\be the subject of the 
 various internal phenomena of which we are conscious, he leaves all the 
 mental phenomena of which we are not conscious, and the existence 
 of which he admitted, without any subject ; he does not deal with 
 that substratum of mentality which is beneath mentation or con- 
 scious mental function, and which is in the cerebral organization. 
 Cerebral mental function may be conscious or unconscious, active, 
 subactive, or in abeyance ; and it is only when the intimate organs 
 of thoughts, desires, &c, reach a certain height of energy that their 
 functions become conscious— that they, in fact, function as con- 
 sciousness. Mr. Bain's definition seems still more open to animad- 
 
134 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 version, as will appear if we alter the wording of it, when it will 
 run thus — mind is the sum total of the experiences of that which 
 has not extension, that which has not extension being a subject! 
 What, we may ask, is this subject which has not extension? Surely 
 it stands in need of some definition. Psychologically speaking, 
 moreover, we cannot properly say that a sensation has or has , not 
 extension ; consciousness does not tell us ; the word extension has 
 no meaning when applied to its revelations ; the meaning of the 
 word is entirely objective. And if we come to objective experience, 
 we cannot conceive something which has not extension ; it is a con- 
 tradiction, not something but nothing. We never meet with mind 
 except in connection with matter— with a subject that has extension, 
 and cannot, it seems to me, think of it otherwise. By a process of 
 abstraction, it is true, we may separate mind from matter, as we 
 separate weight from a heavy body, but it is a mere abstraction 
 which corresponds to nothing in nature. 
 
 4 (p. 132). That Milton intended this passage to be sound philo- 
 sophy is shown by what he says in his Treatise on Christian Doctrine. 
 After declaring the inconceivability of God having created the world 
 out of nothing, arguing that it was framed out of pre-existent 
 matter, which proceeded from God, and is incapable of annihilation, 
 he goes on to propound the doctrine that there is no ground 
 for the supposed distinction between body and soul. Matter 
 being ' ' an efflux of the Deity " is plainly capable of intellectual 
 functions. " That man is a living being, intrinsically and properly 
 one and individual, not compound or separable, not, according to 
 the common opinion, made up and framed of two distinct and 
 different natures, as of soul and body, but the whole man is soul, 
 and the soul, man ; that is to say, a body or substance, individual, 
 animated, sensitive, and rational. . . . Hence the word used in 
 Genesis to signify soul is interpreted by the apostle, 1 Cor. xv. 45, 
 'animal.' Again, all the attributes of the body are assigned in 
 common to the soul; the touch, Lev. v. 2 — 'if a soul touch any 
 unclean thing' ; the act of eating, vii. 8 — 'the soul that eateth of 
 it shall bear its iniquity,' and in other places ; hunger — Prov. xiii. 
 25, xxvii. 7; thirst, xxv. 25, 'as cold waters to a thirsty soul,' 
 Isaiah xxix. S; capture — 1 Sam. xxiv. 11, 'thou huntest my soul 
 to take it.' ... . But that the spirit of man should be separate 
 from the body, so as to have a perfect and intelligent existence inde- 
 pendently of it, is nowhere said in Scripture, and the doctrine is 
 evidently at variance both with nature and reason, as will be shown 
 more fully hereafter. For the word soul is also applied to every kind 
 of living being; Gen. i. 30, 'to every beast of the earth, &c, 
 
II.] THE MIND AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 135 
 
 wherein there is life ' ; vii. 22, * all in whose nostrils was the breath 
 of life, of aU that was in the land, died ' ; yet it is never inferred from 
 these expressions that the soul exists separate from the body in any 
 of the brute creation. .... It would seem, therefore, that the 
 human soul is not created daily by the immediate act of God, but 
 propagated from father to son in a natural order. .... There 
 seems, therefore, no reason why the soul of man should be made an ex- 
 ception to the general law of creation. For, as has been shown before, 
 God breathed the breath of life into other living beings, and blended 
 it so iniimately with matter, that the propagation and production of 
 the human form were analogous to those of other forms, and were the 
 proper effect of that power which had been communicated to matter 
 
 by the Deity For the original matter of which we speak is 
 
 not to be looked on as an evil or a trivial thing, but as intrinsically 
 good, and the chief productive stock of every subsequent good." 
 Vol. i. p. 188. 
 
 Robert Hall, the great Baptist preacher, at one peiiod of his life, 
 held a similar opinion. "I am," he says, "and have been for a 
 
 long time, a materialist My opinion upon this head is that 
 
 the nature of man is simple and uniform ; that the thinking powers 
 and faculties are the result of a certain organization of matter ; and 
 that after death he ceases to be conscious until the resurrection. " 
 However, "attentive to the voice of heavenly admonition," his 
 biographer tells us, he afterwards abandoned these dangerous specula- 
 tions, and "buried materialism in his father's grave." — Memoir of 
 Robert Hall, p. 32. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE SPINAL CORD, OR TERTIARY NERVOUS 
 CENTRES; OR NERVOUS CENTRES OF REFLEX 
 ACTION. 
 
 Omitting for the present any mention of the lowest 
 nervous centres of the body — first, because they minister 
 chiefly to the organic life, and little is definitely known 
 about them ; and secondly, because something will be 
 said of them incidentally when treating of the Passions 
 — I go on to show forth the functions of the spinal cord. 
 It is not a conducting, organ between the outer world and 
 the brain only, but contains many independent nerve 
 centres. A large part of human activity notably takes 
 place without any voluntary control, or even without any 
 consciousness, on the part of the individual ; and of 
 these unconscious or involuntary actions a great part is 
 as plainly due to the independent power of reaction 
 which the ganglionic cells of the spinal cord have. If it 
 be cut across at a spot below where the respiratory 
 nerves are given off, all sensation and voluntary motor 
 power are lost in the parts of the body below the section ; 
 but if the sole of the foot be then tickled with a feather, 
 the leg is drawn up, though the man is unaware of it 
 unless he sees or is told by others what happens. John 
 Hunter mentions the case of a patient suffering from 
 paraplegia, that is, paralysis of the lower half of the 
 body, in whose legs violent movements which he did not 
 
chap, in.] THE SPINAL CORD. 137 
 
 feel were produced when the soles of the feet were irri- 
 tated. When asked whether he felt the irritation which 
 excited the movements, he replied, " No, sir ; but you 
 see my legs do." Such automatic action of the spinal 
 cord, manifest enough in the actions of man, but still 
 more so in those of the lower animals, may be illustrated 
 both from the animal kingdom and from the phenomena 
 of human life. 
 
 When the earliest actions of the new-born infant are 
 observed, it is plain that, like the movements of the 
 foetus within the mother's womb, or the movements of 
 many of the lower animals, they are simply reflex to im- 
 pressions, and take place without will, or even without 
 consciousness. The anencephalic infant, in which ab- 
 sence of brain involves an absence of consciousness, not 
 only exhibits movements of its limbs, but is capable also 
 of the associated reflex acts of sucking and crying. An 
 infant does not require to be taught to cough ; it can 
 expel irritating matter from the bronchial tubes by simple 
 reflex action ; but it cannot spit until it has learnt the art. 
 Hence, when it coughs up a quantity of mucus it is al- 
 most choked by it, or, another reflex act coming into play, 
 swallows it. The same thing happens in the apoplectic and 
 the dying person when the original reflex functions sur- 
 vive the decay of the acquired automatic functions. 
 But it is from experiments on animals that we have 
 gained our clearest ideas of reflex action. When the 
 head of a male frog which is clinging to the female at 
 the season of sexual congress is cut off, the body main- 
 tains its hold, and even when a foot is cut off, clings to her 
 with the stump ; if the posterior half of the body be cut 
 away, the anterior half still holds on ; but if that part of. 
 the cord from which the nerves to the anterior limbs go is 
 destroyed, the hold is loosened at once, just as the grasp 
 of a vice is loosened when a backward turn is given to the 
 tightening screw. A similar relaxation is produced in 
 
138 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 higher animals by discharge of the energy of the nerve- 
 centres concerned : compare the spasmodic grasp of eager 
 love with the relaxed hold of sated lust. A decapi- 
 tated frog will draw up its leg with mechanical regularity 
 whenever its foot is pinched or acetic acid is applied to it, 
 the time which elapses between the application of the irri- 
 tant and the withdrawal of the foot varying according to 
 the strength of the irritant, and hardly varying more than 
 a second at each application if the strength of the irritant 
 is the same. 
 
 But there is a well-known experiment which yields 
 even more striking results. Pfliiger touched with acetic 
 acid the thigh of a decapitated frog over its internal 
 condyle ; it wiped it off with the dorsal surface of the 
 foot of the same side : he thereupon cut off the foot, 
 and applied the acid to the same spot ; the animal 
 attempted to wipe it off again with the foot of that side, 
 but, having lost its foot, of course could not. After some 
 fruitless efforts, therefore, it ceased to try in that way, 
 seemed unquiet, "as though it were searching for some 
 new means," and at last it made use of the foot of the 
 other leg, and succeeded in wiping off the acid. When 
 it has done that, the animal will remain at rest for hours, 
 until some new stimulus is applied; it makes no spon- 
 taneous movements. Notably we have in this striking 
 experiment not merely contractions of muscles, but com- 
 bined movements in due sequence for a special purpose ; 
 we have actions that have all the appearance of being 
 instigated by will and guided by intelligence in an animal 
 the recognized organ of whose intelligence and will has 
 been removed. So much was Pfliiger impressed by this 
 wonderful adaptation of means to an end in a headless 
 animal, that he actually inferred that the spinal cord, like 
 the brain, was possessed of sensorial functions. We have 
 clearly, however, no knowledge that the frog feels the 
 irritation ; all we know certainly is that this has induced 
 
I".] THE SPINAL CORD. 
 
 139 
 
 certain definite movements. Others, who would scarce 
 admit Pfluger's supposition to be true of man, have 
 thought that it might be so of some of the lower ani- 
 mals. Instead of grounding their judgment of the com- 
 plex phenomena in man on their experience of the 
 simpler instances exhibited by the lower animals, they 
 have applied to the lower animals what I believe to be 
 their subjective misinterpretation of the complex pheno- 
 mena in man.( z ) 
 
 It is obviously quite possible to draw another inference 
 from f Auger's experiment : that the so-called design of 
 an act does not necessarily witness to' the co-existence of 
 will, forethought, or consciousness ; that actions " having 
 the semblance of pre-designing consciousness " may, 
 nevertheless, be unattended with consciousness.* No 
 doubt there is a definite purpose in the movements which 
 the maimed frog makes, as there is definite purpose in 
 the movements of the anencephalic infant's lips, in the 
 respiratory movements of man or animal, or in such 
 movements as are necessary for coughing, sneezing, and 
 swallowing ; but jn all these instances the co-ordinate 
 activity is the result of an innate nervous constitution, 
 an original endowment of the nervous centres. In the 
 
 * Very interesting, in relation to this matter, are Prochaska's ob- 
 servations, published in 1784 : — " Cum itaque precipua functiosen- 
 sorii communis consistat in reflexione impressionum sensoriarum in 
 motorias, notandum est quod ista reflexio vel animd inscid vel verj 
 atiimA conscid fiat." He gives numerous examples, often given since 
 by other authors, and adds : — " Omnes istse actiones ex organismo et 
 physicis legibus sensorio communi propriis fluunt, suntque propterea 
 spontanea? et automaticae." — Commentatio de Functionibus Systematis 
 Nervosi, p. 88. 1784. It must be remembered that Prochaska in- 
 cluded the spinal cord under the tentorium commune. To the same 
 effect are Unzer's remarks : — " What in them appears to be voli- 
 tional, only ap-bears so, because we draw conclusions as to other 
 animals from the nature and working of cur own minds. What ap- 
 pears to be designed arises from the preordination of nature. " Unzer 
 and Prochaska on the Nervous System. Syd. Soc. Transl., p. 323. 
 
Ho THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 physiological mechanism of the frog's spinal cord are the 
 faculties of the movements which it makes for self-pre- 
 servation ; it has inherited them as a part of its nature, 
 and without them could hardly live a day. Accordingly 
 we see that the frog acts necessarily and blindly ; though 
 it has lost its foot, acts as if the foot were still there, 
 which, were there intelligent consciousness, it plainly 
 should not; and only employs other means when the 
 irritating action of the stimulus continues unaffected by 
 its fruitless movements. As the movement which takes 
 place in a sensitive plant — the Mimosa pudica for in- 
 stance — when it is irritated, is not limited to the spot 
 where the irritation acts, but extends, if this be sufficiently 
 intense, to the whole plant ; or as when an insect settles 
 on a leaf of the Dioncea muscipula, it is held first by the 
 bending round of the hairs, and afterwards the whole 
 leaf gradually rolls itself round it ; or as in certain mor- 
 bid states of the human organism the continuance of an 
 irritation, which at first only causes slight reflex action, 
 may produce a more general involuntary reaction, or 
 convulsions; so in the frog, the enduring stimulus, which 
 has not been affected by the customary reflex movement, 
 now gives rise to those further reflex movements which 
 are the physiological sequences of the former, and would 
 have been made use of had the creature still possessed 
 its brain. In the constitution of the spinal cord are 
 implanted the capabilities of such co-ordinate energies ; 
 and the continuance of the irritation determines the ex- 
 tension of the activity. There takes place an irradiation 
 of the stimulus. But this happens unquestionably with- 
 out the frog's consciousness, whether or not it happens 
 without a consciousness on the part of its spinal 
 cord; all the design which there is in the movement 
 is of the same kind as the design which there is in 
 the formation of a crystal, or in the plan of growth 
 of a tree. A crystal cannot overstep the laws of its 
 
III.] THE SPINAL CORD. 
 
 141 
 
 form, nor can a tree grow up into heaven ; the particles 
 of the crystal aggregate after a certain definite plan, and 
 thus strictly manifest design. Are we then to assume 
 that, because of the design, there is consciousness in 
 the forming crystal or the growing tree ? Assuredly not ; 
 and yet it is to such extreme conclusion that the argu- 
 ments of those who look upon the so-called design of an 
 act as testifying to consciousness logically lead. The 
 design of an act is nothing else but the correlate in the 
 mind of the observer of the law of the matter in nature ; 
 and each observer will see in any event exactly that 
 amount of design which he brings with him the faculty of 
 seeing. 
 
 Although we have good grounds for affirming that the 
 movements of the frog which has been deprived of its 
 hemispheres may be explained satisfactorily without the 
 assumption that its spinal cord possesses feeling and will, 
 there are persons of eminence who hold positively that 
 the experiments prove the diffusion of these functions 
 through the nerve-centres of the lower animals. In sup- 
 port of this opinion, they instance further the fact that 
 when an insect is cut in two the forepart of the body 
 may continue to eat, while the hind part continues the 
 act of sexual congress, as proof that the will to eat and 
 the feeling of appetite lie in the former, the will to sexual 
 congress and the feeling thereof in the latter. It some- 
 times happens, again, when an earwig is cut in two, that 
 the divided parts of the body turn on each other, and 
 fight with fury and passion until 'death or exhaustion ends 
 the fray ; an event which could not be, they say, unless 
 there were consciousness and will in each part. They 
 believe, therefore, that consciousness and will may undergo 
 as many divisions as there are separate nerve-centres in 
 the body. Some go yet farther, and refuse to limit will to 
 the nervous system, holding that they observe clear evi- 
 dence of its action where there is no trace of either 
 
142 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 muscular or nervous fibres. If a polype be placed in a 
 glass of water, and if a living infusory animalcule be put 
 in the water, and brought near to the polype, the latter 
 perceives it somehow, and thereupon raises a whirlpool 
 with its tentacles in order to bring it within their grasp 
 and drag it into its stomach : an instance, it is said, of 
 feeling and will in a creature which has neither muscle 
 nor nerve. Assuredly they are logical in this extension 
 of their theory ; but when they have endowed the polype 
 with these conscious functions, they will do well to take 
 heed that they are not suffering themselves to be beguiled 
 by words, and to reflect whether there lurks not some 
 obscurity and confusion in the use which they make 
 of the words consciousness and will ; whether, in .fact, 
 they mean anything like the same things when they 
 speak of the consciousness and the will of a polype, 
 and when they speak of human consciousness and 
 will. The dispute with their opponents must be vague 
 and endless unless they agree upon some more precise 
 definition of terms in accordance with the undoubted 
 diversities of the facts. It will not advance knowledge 
 to identify phenomena of a different kind by giving them 
 the same name ; on the contrary, the progress of know- 
 ledge lies in following the specializations of develop- 
 ment, and in defining differences by a precise use of 
 terms. The matter may be put briefly thus : does feel- 
 ing imply that which a person means when he says—/ 
 feel, I am conscious? If it does, one cannot believe 
 that the polype or the spinal cord has feeling ; if it does 
 not, then some other term than feeling should be used 
 to denote organic susceptibilities, or that so-called feel- 
 ing which the individual has not as an ego, but which the 
 least particle of his living protoplasm is assumed to 
 have. 
 
 In trying to determine whether the spinal cord is 
 endowed with feeling and will, we shall do well to con- 
 
in.] THE SPINAL CORD. 143 
 
 sider how very small a part of a conscious and voluntary 
 movement we are really conscious of. We know the end 
 or aim of the movement, and we know that we give the 
 order to accomplish it ; but the actual execution of it is 
 left to the organized mechanism, innate or acquired, of 
 the motor centres and their connections. The main part 
 of a voluntary act is truly the automatic action of the 
 spinal cord ; and the will is absolutely dependent upon 
 the automatic mechanism for the accomplishment of its 
 acts, while this may operate by itself independently of the 
 will. It is clear, then, that the conscious has essential 
 need of the automatic, while the latter has no need of it. 
 Consciousness is a superfluity so far as the execution of 
 the- act is concerned, being, when it occurs, merely a co- 
 effect. Instead of attributing consciousness to the func- 
 tion of the spinal cord, the lesson of nature teaches us 
 rather to proceed in the opposite direction, and to take 
 out of a voluntary act the large part which is strictly auto- 
 matic, and which, the impulse once given, would be done 
 as well without as with consciousness. It is well known 
 that the impulse to an act which was first voluntary may, 
 after the act has become habitual, be a stimulus from with- 
 out; for movements that were at first executed consciously 
 oftentimes become unconscious, and are done in answer to 
 external stimuli. We remove an irritation which is acting 
 upon some part of the body, as for instance a fly on the 
 forehead, without being conscious of what we have done, 
 unless we reflect afterwards. We have certainly no clear 
 conception of the place of the irritation, or of the 
 character and measure of the muscular exertion which we 
 make, and we can hardly suppose that a dim conscious- 
 ness or obscure conception would suffice to make so 
 nice and exact an adaptation as takes place : a suppo- 
 sition which would nevertheless have to be made if the 
 adaptation were dependent on consciousness. Are we then 
 to entertain seriously the. more improbable assumption 
 
144 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 that the spinal cord has such an exact • consciousness ? 
 And yet this is an assumption which those must make 
 who believe that the spinal cord feels impressions and 
 responds to its feelings by exact purposive movements. 
 The organized mechanism is the real automatic agency, 
 and we shall see hereafter that the exact faculty of ac- 
 complishing the act has been organized in it, built into its 
 nature, so to speak, by previous training and experience. 
 
 What we have to realize is that the afferent nerve 
 is adapted to receive a certain impression and to 
 convey it to the nervous centre, and that, the impression 
 made, it does so receive and convey it whether we are 
 conscious of it or not ; that when the impression reaches 
 the centre, it stimulates the energy which is latent in it, 
 whether we are conscious of it or not; and that this 
 energy then acts upon the afferent or motor nerve, and 
 accomplishes the movement through the agency of the 
 proper muscles, which we could not even select con- 
 sciously if Ave would. It is entirely a physical pro- 
 cess, which is nowise prevented from taking place 
 because it is not accompanied by consciousness. Our 
 own experience, rightly interpreted, is adverse, then, to 
 the opinion that the movements of the decapitated frog 
 evince that its spinal cord is endowed with consciousness. 
 It is hardly conceivable, if it were so endowed, that the 
 creature should never make a single spontaneous move- 
 ment ; that it should remain perfectly quiet until a 
 new stimulus is applied ; that its activity should be pro- 
 portionate to the stimulus; and that it should not profit 
 by its experience of previous excitations, notwithstand- 
 ing that it is supposed to have so nice a consciousness of 
 the place of the irritation and of the exact movements 
 proper to relieve its sufferings. 
 
 The way in which such movements as the mutilated 
 frog makes may be prevented, furnishes further evidence 
 of their mechanical nature. In the experiment in which 
 
"I-] THE SPINAL CORD. 145 
 
 its leg is regularly drawn up on irritating its foot, it has 
 been found by Nothnagel that no effect is produced if 
 the sciatic nerve of the other leg is irritated by a faradic 
 current This is an instance of what is called inhibition : 
 some change is produced in the motor centres of the 
 cord, which operates to inhibit or prevent the movement. 
 Does not this experiment strengthen our conception of 
 the entirely physical nature of the movements ? Take 
 another example of reflex action similarly prevented. 
 After division of the spinal cord in dogs, Goltz discovered 
 that by touching the anus with a wet sponge, or tickling 
 it, and by touching or pressing the foreskin, the sphincter 
 of the bladder was relaxed, and a stream of urine ex- 
 pelled, at first in a steady stream, and afterwards in jets, 
 from the action of the bulbo-cavernous muscles. The con- 
 traction of these muscles was at once arrested by press- 
 ing on the foot of the animal. It may, of course, be 
 said that these facts really furnish evidence that the 
 spinal cord feels, and that the proper interpretation of 
 them is in this wise : feeling the stimulus to the foreskin 
 it responds by relaxation of the sphincter and contraction 
 of the bulbo-cavemous muscles, but when a new impres- 
 sion from the foot reaches it, its attention is distracted 
 thereby, and it no longer feels the first impression. Let 
 who will choose this conception : to me it appears to be 
 the imagination of the phenomena of an unconscious 
 consciousness, and an unwarranted application of ideas 
 derived from experience of the highest nerve-centres to 
 the interpretation of the phenomena of much lower 
 centres. It is because of the adaptation to a purpose 
 which these movements effected by the spinal cord show, 
 because of the design manifest in them, that so many 
 people find it hard to believe them to be purely reflex 
 and unconscious ; the)' seem to have an insuperable 
 difficulty in realising that adaptive reaction is a radical 
 property of living organic matter, and that conscious 
 
i 4 6 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 design is itself but a manifestation of this property in the 
 highest nerve-centres. 
 
 Much fruitless theory would have been avoided if the 
 real nature of design had been kept distinctly in mind. 
 The notion that the soul works unconsciously in the build- 
 ing up of the organism, which has at different times been 
 so much in vogue, rests entirely upon the assumption 
 that an intelligent principle or agent must be immanent 
 in organic matter which is going through certain definite 
 changes. But if in the development of an animal, why not 
 in the growth of a tree, which fulfils an equally definite 
 plan, adapting itself wisely to its surroundings ? If in the 
 formation of an organ, why not also in the formation of 
 a chemical compound with its characteristic properties? 
 The function is the necessary result of a certain definite 
 organic structure under certain conditions, and in that 
 sense must needs minister to the furtherance of its well- 
 being.* But an organic action, with never so beautifully 
 manifest a design, may, under changed conditions, be- 
 come as disastrous as it is usually beneficial ; the peri- 
 staltic movements of the intestines, which serve so 
 essential a purpose in the economy, may, and actually do, 
 in the case of some obstruction, become the cause of 
 intolerable suffering and a painful death. Where, then, 
 
 * The proper course would be to reverse the method of our in- 
 quiries and conclusions, and, instead of discovering the operations of 
 soul in the processes of organic growth and development, to discover 
 the properties of matter that are evinced by organic growth and de- 
 velopment to operate in the construction of soul — to place our feet 
 firmly upo.i the lower steps before we attempt to go up higher. That 
 appropriation of matter of force and concentration thereof in its sub- 
 stance which organic element accomplished when it was first formed 
 out of inorganic matter, 'and accomplishes constantly now when it in- 
 creases and multiplies in plants and animals at the cost of inorganic 
 matter, is what a higher tissue, like nervous tissue, does, with increas- 
 ing complexity, when it is developed out of a lower tissue, and what 
 is displayed, in a still higher degree of complexity, in the development 
 of the mental structure and functions of the supreme cerebral centres. 
 
HI.1 THE SPINAL CORD. 147 
 
 is the design of their disastrous continuance ? The pro- 
 cess of repair in a ruptured urethra will, instead of 
 restoring the integrity of the canal and then coming 
 to a stop, go on, with a final purpose singularly and 
 obstinately mischievous, to produce an obliteration of 
 the canal, unless human art come to the rescue. M. 
 Bert has made many extremely interesting experiments 
 on grafting parts cut from the body of one animal on to 
 that of another. For example, he cut off the paw of a 
 young rat, and grafted it in the flank of another rat ; it 
 took root there, and went through its normal growth, be- 
 ginning to dwindle after a time. Where was the design 
 of its going through its regular development there ? Or 
 what, in the temporary adoption and nutrition of this 
 useless member, was the final purpose of the so-called 
 intelligent vital principle of the rat on which the graft 
 was made ? 
 
 The idea of design is really a conception which we 
 form from repeated experiences of the law of the matter 
 
 a law fulfilling itself in the effect necessarily, fatally, 
 
 blindly — and to which we transfer our experience of an 
 event or end willed by us, and accomplished, not 
 directly, but indirectly through intermediate steps or 
 means. We are not in the habit of speaking of an im- 
 mediate effect as the aim or design of the cause— of the 
 evolution of heat, for example, as the design of combus- 
 tion, or of the properties of a chemical compound as the 
 design of its combining elements ; but when a cause 
 works effects, which in turn become causes of further 
 effects and so accomplish finally a certain definite result, 
 or when a concurrence of circumstances has led to an 
 event, we recognize in the series of operations or the con- 
 currence of conditions a suitability or so-called adaptation 
 of causes and conditions to the final effect; thereupon we 
 pronounce this to be the aim or design of them, because 
 if we consciously willed the effect, and brought it about 
 
148 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 through such a chain of means, we should say rightly that 
 we had designed it. The more complex the process, so 
 long as we perceive that it works out a definite result, the 
 more we are struck with admiration of the design. Hence 
 it is that organic nature is the fruitful field of final causes. 
 But it is certain that when men have thus transferred to 
 nature the experience of their imperfect working through 
 means to an end, and have concluded the existence in it 
 of a mind like their own, they have made a conception of 
 God after their own image, which, as Spinoza remarked, 
 divests him of his perfection. " For if God acts for an 
 " end or purpose, he necessarily desires something which 
 " he is without."* 
 
 It will not be, amiss to take note here of the very 
 different way in which we are in the habit of regarding 
 dead matter and living matter. In dead matter the 
 form is looked upon as the attribute of the matter; 
 whereas, on the other hand, in living bodies the matter is 
 treated as the attribute of the form : in inorganic nature 
 the matter is the essential thing, in organic nature the 
 form is all in all. We cannot get rid of the notion of 
 some mysterious potency in organic form which controls 
 the action and determines the disposition of matter, be- 
 cause we cannot get rid of the notion of matter as inert 
 or dead. But matter is not inert ; not the smallest par- 
 ticle of it which is not a complex system of atoms in. most 
 active and complicated movements ; and to neglect the 
 exact consideration of the conditions and combinations of 
 matter, as determining organic form, is not less mis- 
 chievous than it is to concentrate all attention upon 
 matter in inorganic nature. What are inseparably joined 
 together in nature let us not vainly attempt to put asun- 
 der. Mindful of this maxim we shall not be so much 
 tempted to fall back upon that vague and shifting 
 
 * Spinoza. Ethics : Part I. , Appendix. Translated by R. Willis, 
 M.D. p. 448. 
 
hi.] THE SPINAL CORD. 
 
 149 
 
 doctrine of final causes which has done so great harm 
 in science, or, as Bacon has it, has strangely defiled philo- 
 sophy, and which, though often rejected absolutely, and 
 now banished from the more advanced sciences, still works 
 injuriously in biology, where so much is yet recondite 
 and obscure. (") The human understanding can indeed 
 best impose its own rules on nature in that province 
 where the truth is most inaccessible and least known. 
 Not only does it in biology look for a final cause answer- 
 ing to its own measure, but, having found this, or created 
 it, proceeds straightway to superadd its own attribute of 
 consciousness, so that wherever evidence of design is 
 met with, be it only in the function of the spinal cord of 
 a decapitated frog, there consciousness is assumed. Is it 
 not a marvel that no teleologist has yet been found to 
 maintain that the final cause of the moon is to act as a 
 " tug" to the vessels on our tidal rivers; or that the final 
 cause of the redness of human blood is to facilitate the 
 detection of the murderers who shed blood ? 
 
 There can be no difficulty in admitting that the spinal 
 cord is an independent centre of so-called aim-working 
 acts that are not attended with consciousness. It is the 
 centre, however, not only of co-ordinate action the capa- 
 bility of which has been implanted in its original consti- 
 tution, but also of co-ordinate action the power of which 
 has been gradually acquired and matured through indi- 
 vidual experience. Like the brain, the spinal-cord has, so 
 to speak, its memory, and must be educated ; the reaction 
 which it displays, in consequence of a particular impression 
 conveyed to it from without, does not vanish issueless, 
 leaving the track unmodified after the function has been 
 discharged. With the display of energy there is a coin- 
 cident change or waste of nerve element ; and, although 
 a subsequent regeneration or restoration of the statical 
 equilibrium takes place by the quiet process of nutrition, 
 yet the nutritive repair, following the track of the energy 
 8 
 
ISO THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 and coincident material change, registers the experience. 
 It is not an integration only which is accomplished, but a 
 re-dintegration ; the substance is made whole after a par- 
 ticular exercise of function — after in pattern as well as 
 time. Thereby the definite activity is to some extent real- 
 ized or embodied in the structure of the spinal cord, exist- 
 ing there for the future as a motor residuum, or as, so to 
 speak, a potential or abstract movement ; accordingly 
 there is thenceforth a tendency to the recurrence of the 
 particular activity — a tendency which becomes stronger 
 with each repetition of it. Every impression which is 
 made leaves behind it, therefore, its trace or residuum, 
 which is again quickened into activity on the occasion of 
 an appropriate stimulus ; the faculties of the spinal cord 
 are thus gradually formed and matured. We may easily 
 note in the acquirement of a complex purposive movement 
 the difficulty which there is at first in defining the path of 
 the stimulus and directing it exactly to the proper muscles 
 — in limiting the excitation ; and we shall not fail to note 
 hereafter that this is done, not by willing to put these 
 muscles in action, but by clumsily imitating the move- 
 ment until we attain to an exact imitation, or by making 
 many trials of movements until we find out the most 
 suitable one, and so get an unconscious mastery of the 
 proper muscles. The path must be made, and the more 
 often it is trodden the more distinct will it be : awk- 
 wardly through trials and blunders we fall into the 
 adjustment which we afterwards perfect by experience. 
 
 When a series or group of movements is, after many 
 voluntary efforts, associated, they notably become more 
 and more easy, and less and less separable, with every 
 repetition, until at last they are firmly fixed in the consti- 
 tution of the cord, become a part of the faculty of it, and 
 may be accomplished without effort or even without con- 
 sciousness : they are the secondary or acquired automatic 
 acts, as described by Hartley. ( 3 ) Once the track has 
 
in.] THE SPINAL CORD. i S r 
 
 been laid down it is easier for the stimulus to follow it 
 than to leave it, just as it is easier for a train to run on 
 the rails than to run off them, or for water to run in 
 its channel than to run out of it. In this way walk- 
 ing becomes so far a reflex or automatic act that a 
 man in a profound abstraction may continue to walk 
 without being conscious where he is going, and find 
 himself, when he is aroused from his reverie, in a 
 different place from that which he intended to visit. 
 In that form of epilepsy known as the petit mal an 
 individual sometimes continues automatically, whilst 
 consciousness is in abeyance, the act which he was 
 engaged in when the attack seized him : a shoemaker 
 used frequently to wound his fingers with the awl as he 
 went on with his work, and on one occasion walked into a 
 pond of water during the suspension of consciousness ; 
 and a woman whom Schroeder van der Kolk knew used 
 to continue eating or drinking, or the occupation she 
 was about, being quite unconscious on recovery of what 
 had happened. Trousseau mentions a young amateur 
 musician subject to epileptic vertigo, who sometimes had 
 a fit lasting for ten dr fifteen seconds whilst playing the 
 violin. Though he was perfectly unconscious of every- 
 thing around him, and neither heard nor saw those whom 
 he was accompanying, he still went on playing in time 
 during the attack. The same author also mentions an 
 architect who had long been subject to epilepsy, and 
 did not fear to go up the highest scaffoldings, though 
 perfectly aware that he had often had fits while walking 
 across narrow planks at a considerable height. He had 
 never met with an accident, although, when in a fit, he 
 ran rapidly over scaffoldings, shrieking out his own name 
 in a loud and abrupt voice. A quarter of a minute 
 afterwards he resumed his occupation and gave his 
 orders to the workmen ; but unless he was told of it 
 afterwards, he had no idea of his strange behaviour 
 
152 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 during the fit.* In fact, if any one attends to his ordi- 
 nary actions during the day, it will be surprising how 
 small a proportion of them are consciously willed, how 
 large a proportion of them are the results of the acquired 
 automatic action of the organism. It is sufficiently evi- 
 dent that the faculties of the spinal cord are, for the 
 most part, not inborn in man, but gradually built up by 
 virtue of experience and education ; in their formation 
 they illustrate the progress of human adaptation to ex- 
 ternal nature. 
 
 Certainly the capability of associated voluntary move- 
 ments, or the germ of such capability, does appear to 
 exist as an innate endowment of the spinal cord even in 
 man ; ready to come into action at the proper epoch of 
 that development which goes on in him after birth, under 
 the influence of suitable external conditions, until he 
 reaches maturity. As the young animal, directly it is 
 born, can sometimes use its limbs with complete effect, 
 or as the infant, previous to any experience, is capable of 
 that association or catenation of movements necessary to 
 crying, breathing, or coughing, so soon as it meets with 
 suitable external conditions ; so likewise does there 
 appear to be, as Mr. Bain argues,+ the germ of a loco- 
 
 * " Their condition may be compared to somnambulism, or better 
 still to what happens in the case of certain individuals who answer 
 questions during sleep, but do not recollect anything when they wake 
 up." — Trousseau, Clinical Lectures, vol. i., p. 60. 
 
 + The Senses and the Intellect, 2nd ed. It has long been dis- 
 tinctly recognized as a general law that when a moderate stimulus 
 excites several motor nerves, these are physiologically connected : 
 first, inasmuch as all the fibres going to a particular muscle are 
 simultaneously excited, so that partial movement of the muscle does 
 not take place ; secondly, as the regular reflex activity implicates 
 such muscles as are functionally co-ordinated, the associated action 
 of which produces certain physiological effects — e.g., coughing, 
 sneezing, swallowing. In the electric fish, the malapterus, the nerve 
 going to the electric apparatus is at first a single fibre which divides 
 and subdivides in its course, until it furnishes as many branches as 
 
HI.] THE SPINAL CORD. 153 
 
 motive harmony in the original conformation of the 
 nervous centres of man which develops japidly at the 
 proper epoch. Not only does the analogy of the lower 
 animals favour the belief in the original existence of such 
 an associating link, but the tendency to an alternate 
 action of the lower limbs, and of the two sides of the 
 body, observably precedes any acquisition of experience. 
 Before a child can walk it will make alternate move- 
 ments of its legs when it is held with its feet touching the 
 ground. There is, furthermore, a proneness to the in- 
 voluntary association of the motions of corresponding 
 parts of the two sides of the body ; and, as Muller has 
 observed, the less perfect the action of the nervous 
 system in man, or the less developed volition is, the 
 more general are the associate movements. It would be 
 a fruitless task, however, to attempt to fix. the value of 
 this pre-established arrangement in man, where it is 
 obviously at best rather a potentiality than an actuality ; 
 for all practical purposes, we must view the faculties of 
 
 there are electric plates ; so that the creature cannot isolate a part of 
 the apparatus, but must put all the plates into action together. As 
 Sir C. Bell has remarked, "a child smiles before anything incon- 
 gruous can enter the mind, before even pleasure can be supposed a 
 condition of the mind. Indeed, the smile on the infant's face is first 
 perceived in sleep. " Its forefathers have smiled, and it is the heir of 
 their acquisitions. Contortions of its face from pain or uneasiness 
 are witnessed long before smiles (The Hand; its Mechanism and 
 Vital Endowments). The locomotive harmony is the result of the 
 connections of certain cells and groups of cells in the nerve-centres. 
 " Si l'homme, le lapin, le moineau, le pigeon, ne marchent pas des 
 leur naissance, c'est uniquement a cause du developpement incom- 
 plet des divers organes, et surtout, sans doute, des centres nerveux. 
 Si l'enfant naissait en presentant un degre de developpement egal a 
 celui qu'offre le cochon d'Inde, il marcherait desle premier jour." — 
 Vulpian (op. cit.), p. 529. What happens in the infant's nerve- 
 centres when it does learn to walk, we know not : it may be that an 
 actual growth of nerve-cells and of their connections takes place in 
 the course of such education ; or it may be that pre-existent cells and 
 connections are gradually differentiated in function. 
 
154 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chak 
 
 his spinal cord as acquired by education. The child 
 certainly has the capability of learning to walk, but the 
 actual process of learning involves the expenditure of 
 much time and energy, and represents a progressing 
 development of the spinal cord : it is the faculty thereof 
 in the making. Of course it is not to be supposed that 
 the spinal centres of themselves suffice ordinarily for all 
 the complicated movements of walking, although they 
 may do so : all that is claimed is, that they are the 
 automatic centres of certain associate movements which 
 have been acquired, and which constitute a large part of 
 our daily action.* 
 
 This power of co-ordinate action, which the spinal 
 centres acquire by assimilation of the influence of the 
 individual's surroundings and respondent reaction thereto, 
 is plainly a most useful, as it is a most necessary, provi- 
 sion of nature. For if an act became no easier after being 
 done several times, if the careful direction of conscious- 
 ness were necessary to its accomplishment on each occa- 
 sion, it is evident that the whole activity of a lifetime 
 might be confined to one or two deeds — that no progress 
 could take place in development. A man might be oc- 
 cupied all day in dressing and undressing himself; the 
 attitude of his body would absorb all his attention and 
 energy ; the washing of his hands or the fastening of a 
 
 * Schroeder van der Kolk, after saying that the production of 
 harmonized movement is due to the ultimate connection of certain 
 groups of ganglionic cells in the spinal cord, goes on to say— "It 
 has always been incomprehensible to me, how any one could ever 
 have referred it (co-ordination) to the cerebellum. If the cause of 
 the co-ordination lay in the cerebellum, no harmonixed reflex move- 
 ments could take place in a decapitated frog." — On the Minute 
 Structure of Spinal Cord and Medulla Oblongata, p. 72. The sup- 
 position that the cerebellum is the sole centre of co-ordination of 
 movements is now, in fact, abandoned as untenable. There never 
 was any real scientific evidence to support it, while there was positive 
 evidence against it. (See Versuch einer physiologischen Pathologic 
 der Nerven, von. G. Valentin, 1864, vol. ii., p. 68.) 
 
ill.] THE SPINAL CORD. 155 
 
 button would be as difficult to him on each occasion as 
 to the child on its first trial ; and he would furthermore 
 be completely exhausted by his exertions. Think of the 
 pains necessary to teach a child to stand, of the many 
 efforts which it must make, and of the ease with which it 
 at last stands, unconscious even of an effort. For while 
 secondary automatic acts are accomplished with com- 
 paratively little weariness — in this regard approaching the 
 organic movements, or the original reflex movements — 
 the conscious efforts of the will soon produce exhaustion. 
 A spinal cord without that power of retention which in 
 • the higher centres we call memory would simply be an 
 idiotic spinal cord incapable of culture— a degenerate 
 nervous centre in which the organization of special 
 faculties could not take place. It is impossible for an 
 individual to realise how much he owes to its automatic 
 agency until disease has impaired its functions : and it is 
 the lesson of a good education so consciously to exercise 
 it in reference to its surroundings that it shall act auto- 
 matically, in accordance with the relations of the indi- 
 vidual in his particular walk of life. 
 
 The phenomena of secondary automatic action are 
 well fitted to exhibit the mode of origin and the nature of 
 what we call design. It is here seen to be an acquisition 
 that is gradually organized in respondence to particular 
 experience and education ; representing as it does, the 
 acquired nature of the nervous structure, its manifesta- 
 tion is the simple result of the constitution of the mate- 
 rial substratum, just as the properties of any chemical 
 element are the unavoidable result of its nature. To say 
 that means are adapted to the production of an end in 
 the phenomena of life, is but another way of saying that 
 what we please to call life exists ; for if means or causes 
 were not adapted to the end or effect, there could plainly 
 be no end ; and if we perceive, or choose to assume, a 
 certain result to be the end of certain means, then we 
 
156 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 are but saying that, according to our experience, certain 
 combinations of matter have certain definite properties. 
 The vulgar doctrine of final causes contravenes nature 
 entirely, assuming as effect that which is truly cause, and 
 as cause that which is truly effect. In the building up of 
 the secondary automatic faculties of the spinal centres, 
 we are able to trace through the course of its formation 
 in individual life that design which we meet with fully 
 formed in the innate faculties of so many animals ; but 
 which even in that case has been, as we shall hereafter 
 see, gradually organized through generations. If it be 
 said that the gradual building up by education of this 
 embodied design into the constitution of the nervous 
 centres is itself evidence of design, then we can only 
 answer that such proposition is merely a statement in 
 other words of the fact that things are as they are, and 
 add the expression of a conviction that science cannot 
 enter into the councils of creation. Certainly nothing is 
 gained by taking refuge in that ' asylum of ignorance — the 
 Will of God.' The growth of a cancer until it kills the 
 body, or of a vice until it ruins the mind, is neither more 
 nor less evidence of design. Should these considerations 
 not be satisfactory to the teleologists, it will be sufficient 
 to recall to them the already quoted remark of Spinoza, 
 and to congratulate them on their power of diving into 
 "the mysteries of things, as if they were God's spies.'' 
 Were it not well, however, that they should condescend 
 to humble things, and unfold to us, for example, the final 
 cause of the rudimentary mammary gland and nipple in 
 the male animal ? * 
 
 * A task which, after all, is perhaps not inconceivably difficult. 
 For example : we know that the male integrates the qualities of its 
 ■male and female ancestors, having them potential or actual, and 
 transmits them to its progeny : may we not conceive, then, that the 
 rudimentary gland in it is a necessary condition of such complete 
 inheritance and transmission, integrating the mammary characters ; 
 and that, if the male were without it, it would be impossible for the 
 
in.] THE SPINAL CORD 157 
 
 As the faculties of the spinal cord are built up by 
 organization, so must they be kept up by due nutrition. 
 If not so preserved in vigour, if exhausted by excesses of 
 any kind, the ill effects are manifest in degenerate action ; 
 there is, so to speak, a decomposition of its composite 
 motor functions ; instead of definite co-ordinate action 
 ministering to the well-being of the individual, irregular 
 spasmodic or convulsive movements ensue, which, though 
 inevitable consequences of the degenerate condition of 
 the nerve centres, serve no good end, but have strangely 
 forgotten their beneficial design.* Sir James Paget has 
 made the probable suggestion that the rhythmical organic 
 movements, such as those of the heart, of respiration, of 
 the cilia, are due to a rhythmical nutrition ; that is, "a 
 method of nutrition in which the acting parts are, at 
 certain periods, raised, with time-regulated progress, to a 
 state of instability of composition, from which they then 
 decline, and in their decline discharge nerve-force." t It 
 may be easily conceived, therefore, why they are never 
 tired when acting naturally ; between each succeeding act 
 of function a nutritive repair takes place, and the time of 
 each occurrence of the movement represents the time-rate 
 
 influences of its female ancestors to take effect in the mammary de- 
 velopment and function of its female progeny, as we have good reason 
 to believe they do ? But, it may be said, if this argument is valid, 
 it would involve this necessity : that the male shall have every organ 
 which the female has, and the female every organ which the male 
 has. Well, so they have ; or, at any rate, they have organs that are 
 the homologues of one another. At one period of development we 
 cannot distinguish the male from the female ; the subsequent differ, 
 ences being produced by the female stopping short on, and diverging 
 a little from, the track of development on which the male goes 
 forwards. 
 
 * They have, no doubt, their design quite as much as the healthy 
 movements, in so far as they accomplish what they cannot he'p 
 iloing, their destiny —in other words, fulfil the law which necessitates 
 them. 
 ■ t Croonian Lecture before the Royal Society, 1857. 
 
158 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [cHAr. 
 
 of nutrition. When the heart is made to beat slowly by 
 stimulation of the vagus nerve it will continue to beat for 
 a long time, but when its pulsations are quickened by 
 irritation of the sympathetic nerve, it soon becomes 
 exhausted and stops, owing no doubt to exhaustion of its 
 motor centres in consequence of nutrition being unable 
 to keep pace with the quickened action. But the spinal 
 centres are equally dependent on nutrition for the main- 
 tenance of the functions which they discharge in the 
 animal life ; the structural or chemical change produced 
 by the ordinary activity of the day must be repaired 
 during a period of cessation of action. This restoration 
 we believe to take place during sleep ; and there is some 
 reason to believe that the periodical action of the spinal 
 centres is, like rhythmical organic movement, dependent 
 upon, or closely related to, the time-rate of nutrition. 
 The unconscious quiet manner in which the automatic 
 function of the spinal centres is performed, though in one 
 way or another the work is continuous during waking, 
 might seem at first sight to render no cessation of action 
 necessary ; but a little reflection shows that, here as else- 
 where, the expenditure of force must be balanced by a 
 corresponding supply ; there must be alternation of acti- 
 vity and repose. If no rest be allowed, the exhaustion is 
 evinced, first, in an inability to accomplish successfully the 
 most delicate or complex associated movements— in a 
 loss, that is, of design ; then in trembling incapacity, 
 which, if the degeneration increases, may pass on to 
 actual spasmodic movements and finally to paralysis. 
 Therein we have sure evidence that the constitution ot 
 the nerve element has suffered from the drain of energy. 
 A reflection which occurs, in considering the nervous 
 mechanism by which the action and reaction between 
 the individual and nature take place, is as to the dispro- 
 portionate exhibition of force by the organism to the 
 force of the simple impression which may happen to be 
 
ill.] THE SPINAL CORD. j 59 
 
 made upon it. How, with due regard to the principle of 
 the conservation of force, do we account for this seeming 
 generation of energy? In the first place, the central 
 nerve cell is not a simple impassive body, which merely 
 reflects or passes onwards a received current of activity, 
 without affecting it or being affected by it : on the con- 
 trary, it is the complexly constituted, supremely endowed 
 centre in which force is released, or evolved on the occa- 
 sion of a suitable stimulus ; and that which is perceived, 
 as it were, in the spinal cord is not the actual impression 
 made upon the afferent nerve, but it is the effect pro- 
 duced in the particular central nerve cell or cells. It 
 is not hard to conceive how this force or energy is 
 evolved, or, as it were, let loose in the cell. By the dis- 
 turbance of the statical equilibrium of an intensely vital 
 structure ; by a change of the material into lower kinds, 
 or a degeneration of it, and a correlative resolution of its 
 force into lower modes and larger volumetrical display. 
 There is not any actual generation of energy ; there is a 
 transformation of the high quality of latent or potential 
 energy which the nervous monad implies into actual 
 energy of a lower quality and larger display. The little 
 change or motion which the impression makes at the 
 extremity of the afferent nerve is propagated along the 
 nerve and produces a much greater change or motion in 
 the unstable nerve element of the central cell; an ex- 
 plosion of molecular energy, so to speak, is occasioned, 
 which thereupon is propagated in different directions to 
 other cells, where it is similarly multiplied ; the final re- 
 sult being the release of sufficient-energy to accomplish 
 the act. If, as has been calculated, the consumption of 
 half a pound of carbon would produce an amount of heat 
 which, if expressed in its equivalent of mechanical force, 
 would be enough to raise a man of average weight to the 
 highest summit of the Himalayas, it is clear that the oxi- 
 dation of the complex carbon compounds of the nerve 
 
160 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 element is sufficient to account for the nerve force which 
 is liberated in its function. Consider what has been pre- 
 viously said as to the nature of nerve element and its posi- 
 tion in the universe, it will then be sufficiently evident what 
 manner of process it is that takes place. Slowly and, as 
 it were, laboriously, by a steady appropriation and ascent 
 through many gradations of vitality, does organic element 
 arrive at the complex and supreme nature of nerve 
 structure; quickly and easily does nerve element give 
 back force and matter to nature, in the rapid resolution 
 which the accomplishment of its function implies. ( 4 ) 
 
 Thus much, concerning the inherent force of the spinal 
 cord as a nervous centre. In the second place, bear in 
 mind the nature of its acquired faculties, and the great 
 expenditure of power made upon its education. In the 
 registration of impressions made upon it, in the assimi- 
 lation of their residua, there is slowly embodied a quantity 
 of energy as an organic addition of power ; force is being 
 stored up in the gradual organisation of its faculties. 
 The exhaustion which we feel from our efforts to acquire 
 any particular skill of movements, as in learning to dance, 
 the labour given to the frequent voluntary repetition of 
 the stimulus and adapted reaction thereto, until by prac- 
 tice the definite relation has been established, and the 
 desired skill acquired ; — these testify to the expenditure 
 of so much force which has been laid up as potential 
 in the constitution of the ganglionic cells of the cord, 
 rendering possible for the future the easy performance of 
 a group of associated movements in answer to a moderate 
 and, as might often seem, disproportionate stimulus from 
 without. Like the brain, the spinal cord lays up good 
 store of power in its memory. Man's life truly represents 
 a progressive development of the nervous system ; none 
 the less so because it takes place out of the womb instead 
 of in it. The regular transmutation of motions which are 
 at first voluntary into secondary automatic motions, as 
 
!«•] THE SPINAL CORD. 
 
 Hartley called them, is due to a gradually effected 
 organisation in the proper centres ; and we may rest 
 assured of this, that co-ordinate activity always testifies 
 to stored-up power, either innate or acquired.* 
 
 The way in which an acquired faculty of the parent 
 animal is sometimes distinctly transmitted to the progeny 
 as a heritage, instinct, or innate endowment, furnishes 
 a striking confirmation of the foregoing observations. 
 Power which has been laboriously acquired and stored 
 up as statical in one generation, manifestly in such case 
 becomes the inborn faculty of the next ; and the develop- 
 ment takes place in accordance with that law of increas- 
 ing speciality and complexity of adaptation to external 
 nature which is traceable through the animal kingdom ; 
 or, in other words, that law of progress from the general 
 to the special in development which the appearance 
 of nerve force amongst natural forces and the com- 
 plexity of the nervous system of man both illustrate. 
 As the vital force gathers up into itself inferior forces, 
 and might be justly said to be a development of 
 them, or as in the appearance of nerve force simpler 
 and more general forces are gathered up and con- 
 centrated in a more special and complex mode of 
 energy ; so, again, a further specialisation takes place 
 in the development of the nervous system, whether 
 watched through generations or through individual life. 
 Not by limiting our observation to the life of the indi- 
 vidual, who is but a link in the chain of organic beings 
 
 * The description of the spinal functions as reflex is not entirely 
 free from objection, because the term is apt to convey the idea that 
 the centripetal current of the afferent nerve is simply reflected on to 
 the efferent nerve and becomes the centrifugal current ; whereas, as 
 has been pointed out, the affair in the spinal centres is much more 
 complex than that. We mean by reflex action function which is 
 performed by the nervous centres, so far as we can judge, without 
 will or consciousness — mechanically ; not by virtue of any mysterious 
 mental agency, but by virtue of the properties of the nerve structure. 
 
162 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 connecting the past with the future, shall we come at the 
 full truth ; the present individual is the inevitable conse- 
 quence of his antecedents in the past, and through the 
 examination of these alone do we arrive at the adequate 
 explanation of him. It would be the function of an 
 exhaustive psychology, having found any faculty to be 
 innate, not to rest content there, but to follow steadily 
 backwards the line of causation, and thus to display, if 
 possible, its manner of origin. This is the more neces- 
 sary with the lower animals, where so much is innate. 
 
 Thus much concerning the general functions of the 
 spinal cord as an aggregation of independent nerve centres, 
 so far as they bear directly upon psychology. It must 
 not be supposed that I have given an exhaustive de- 
 scription of its functions in the animal economy. I have 
 spoken of ils intermittent activity, but it must be remem- 
 bered that it is also in a state of continuous activity ; the 
 permanent contraction of the sphincter being due ap- 
 parently to a continuous influence exerted upon the 
 motor nerves by its ganglionic centres. In like manner, 
 all muscles that have antagonists, as, for example, the 
 flexors and extensors of the arm, are kept in a certain 
 degree of counter-activity, maintain a certain tonicity, as 
 is immediately evident when their antagonists are para- 
 lyzed ; this tonicity disappearing at once when the part of 
 the spinal cord from which the motor nerves proceed is 
 destroyed. It appears also to be of a reflex character, as 
 it disappears when the excito-motor or sensory nerves of 
 a part in a state of tonicity are cut. But we may go even 
 farther, and discover the functions of the spinal cord at 
 work in the intimate processes of organic activity. Take 
 one example of this far-reaching action. Certain blood- 
 vessels are kept in a state of moderate contraction by the 
 influence of vasomotor nerves proceeding from ganglia 
 lying close to the vessels, which ganglia are connected 
 by nerves with the spinal cord. When these nerves are 
 
'"•] THE SPINAL CORD. 163 
 
 irritated the action of the ganglia is inhibited ; they cease 
 to stimulate the walls of the vessels, which thereupon dilate 
 and are filled with blood, so that the organ in which they 
 are distributed becomes swollen and turgid. After the 
 irritation of the nerves has ceased, the ganglia regain 
 their power and cause the vessels to contract, so that the 
 organ becomes flaccid. It appears, then, that a stimulus 
 to the nerve centres of the spinal cord has several out- 
 going channels of activity : it may act on the muscles, 
 voluntary or involuntary, of the body, producing visible 
 movements; or it may act upon the vessels, enlarging 
 or diminishing their calibre, and so modifying the nutri- 
 tion and function of the parts supplied by them ; or it 
 may, as other experiments have shown, act directly upon 
 the elements of a tissue, and so affect directly nutrition and 
 secretion ; or it may pass to other nerve centres, and so 
 occasion a variety of indirect effects. How manifold, far- 
 reaching, and important these indirect effects may be, the 
 experiments before-mentioned on the frog and the dog 
 will help us to realise. When we find movements that are 
 going on to be suddenly arrested by a new stimulus to the 
 spinal cord, and consider what a complicated mechanism 
 it is, and how many stimuli it receives, we may imagine 
 vaguely what a variety of intricate and complicated 
 functions, though we wot not of them, it is continually 
 discharging every moment of our lives. 
 
 It is not within the scope of this work to describe those 
 special functions of the spinal cord which belong more 
 properly to a treatise on physiology ; I am mainly con- 
 cerned with those more general reflex functions which 
 play so large a part in human activity, and which have, 
 therefore, an essential place in psychology. An accurate 
 knowledge of them affords the only solid basis from which 
 to prosecute inquiry into the functions of the higher 
 cerebral centres. We have seen that the spinal cord pos- 
 sesses that power of retention which in the higher centres 
 
164 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 A 
 
 we designate memory ; that by virtue of this power an act 
 done for the second time contains something from the 
 first act, and is done easier on that account ; that the 
 faculty is strengthened by exercise, as memory is, until it 
 becomes completely automatic ; and that an association or 
 catenation of movements may be organised in the nerve 
 centres, whereby movements that have taken place 
 together several times may finally be so firmly bound 
 ' together that there may be the greatest difficulty, or it 
 maybe actually impossible, to separate them, just, in fact, 
 as ideas may be associated in the supreme cerebral centres. 
 A spinal cord will do the acts, simple or complex, which 
 it has inherited from ancestors or acquired by education 
 the faculties to do, but if required to do new and strange 
 acts, to associate in action muscles which have not acted 
 together before, it will manifest an utter, stupidity and 
 impotence. It is an organised mechanism for the accom- 
 plishment of the former ; it must be gradually organised 
 as a mechanism in order to accomplish the latter. 
 
 It may not be amiss to add that the reflex functions of 
 the spinal cord were distinctly recognised by the physio- 
 logist long before the anatomist was in a condition to 
 give the physical explanation. It is only recently that 
 the nerve fibres which pass to or from the spinal cord 
 have been proved to be connected with the unipolar, 
 bipolar, and multipolar cells of its grey substance ; and 
 this so plainly as to justify the belief that an isolated 
 apolar nervous cell does not exist in the spinal cord or 
 brain. For the conveyance of an impression to the 
 grey centres, and for the passage of the reacting force out- 
 wards, there is thus revealed a definite physical path, along 
 which the current of molecular activity travels. From 
 the cells with which nerves are connected, again, other 
 processes go to join neighbouring cells, and thus, forming 
 a connecting path between them, enable them to act 
 together : hundreds of ganglionic cells are yoked together 
 
III.] THE SPINAL CORD. 165 
 
 by such anastomoses, and, functionally co-ordinated there- 
 by, represent the centres of innervation of corresponding 
 systems of motor nerves. By similar anastomoses the gang 
 lionic cells of different nervous centres are connected, and 
 in this way a means is afforded for the communication of 
 the activity of one centre to another. A consideration of 
 the nervous system of the Annelida will assist in the con- 
 ception of the physiological nature of the spinal cord. In 
 those humble creatures the central nervous system con- 
 sists of a ganglionic apparatus, each separate ganglion of 
 which is united to that which precedes it, and to that 
 which follows it, by longer or shorter nervous connexions.* 
 Now the spinal cord of the Vertebrata may be considered 
 as an analogous ganglionic apparatus, the connecting 
 cords of which are not seen by reason of the coalescence 
 of the ganglia. From a physiological point of view, there- 
 fore, the grey substance may be considered as formed of 
 distinct segments, each segment consisting of a group or 
 association of cells, and having connected with it the 
 roots of two anterior motor and two posterior sensory 
 nerves. Many, therefore, are the channels by which the 
 activity excited in the nerve-cell by the stimulus of the 
 efferent nerve may be discharged : it may be at once 
 reflected on an efferent nerve, and through it discharge 
 one or other of the functions which we have previously 
 described ; or it may pass to other interconnected cells, 
 and, acting thus upon a system of nerves, produce associ- 
 ated movements, either such as proceed from the cord 
 
 * Or take the bee as an illustration. If its head be suddenly cut 
 off, and honey applied to its proboscis, sucking movements are made, 
 showing that the co-ordinating centres for these movements are in 
 the head segment. The body, when separated from the head, 
 makes movements as if for collecting pollen, and if it be placed upon 
 its back, it gets on to its feet again ; the centres for these movements 
 being in the thoracic segment. If the abdomen be cut off, it is 
 found that the centre for stinging movements is in this segment. 
 Reichert and Du Bois' Archiv. H. I. 47, 1875. 
 
166 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 nearly on the same level as the afferent nerve enters, or 
 from a different level ; or, lastly, it may pass upwards, 
 and excite the higher functionally co-ordinated centres. 
 
 To Pfliiger belongs the merit of having first attempted 
 to systematise the laws of the reflex movements. They 
 are : — i. The law of simultaneous conduction for one-sided 
 reflex movements. When a reflex movement takes place 
 on one side of the body only, in answer to a stimulus, it 
 is always on that side of the body on which the irritation 
 of the afferent nerve operates ; the reason being pro- 
 bably that the motor nerves proceed from ganglionic 
 cells which are in direct connection with the stimulated 
 afferent nerves. — 2. The law of symmetry of reflex action. 
 When a stimulus has produced reflex movements on one 
 side, and its continuance or its further extension in the 
 spinal cord produces movements of the opposite side, 
 then the corresponding muscles only of this side are 
 affected. This is owing, no doubt, to the commissural 
 system, which connects together the corresponding gang- 
 lionic cells of the two halves of the cord. — 3. The un- 
 equally intense reflex action of the two sides in the event 
 of both being affected. When the reflex action is 
 stronger on one side than upon the other, the stronger 
 movements take place upon the side of the irritation. — 
 4. The law of irradiation of reflex action, by which an 
 extension of reflex action takes place from the nerves in 
 which it first appears to neighbouring ones, owing to the 
 communications between the different systems or groups 
 of ganglionic cells. When the excitation of an afferent 
 cerebral nerve is transferred to motor nerves, it is 
 observed that the roots of both sorts of nerves are 
 placed nearly upon the same level in the central organ, 
 or that the motor nerve lies a little behind or below, 
 never in front of or above, the afferent nerve. If the 
 reflex action spreads further, the way of irradiation is 
 downwards to the medulla oblongata ; stimulation of the 
 
IH.] THE SPINAL CORD. 167 
 
 optic nerve, for instance, produces contraction of the 
 iris. In the spinal cord the primarily affected motor 
 nerve lies nearly on the level of the stimulated sensory 
 nerve. But if the reflex action spreads, then it passes 
 upwards towards the medulla. When the irritation has 
 arrived at the medulla, then it may pass downwards 
 again. — 5. The reflex action produced by the irritation 
 of a sensory nerve can only appear in three places, 
 whether one-sided or occurring on both sides of the 
 body, (a) It appears in the motor nerves which lie 
 nearly on the same level with the excited sensory nerve. 
 (6) If reflex action implicates the motor nerves on a 
 different level, these motor nerves are constantly such as 
 spring from the medulla oblongata : tetanus and hysteri- 
 cal convulsions in consequence of local irritations fur- 
 nish examples, (c) The reflex action affects the muscles 
 of the body generally ; the principal focus of irradiation 
 thereof being the medulla oblongata. 
 
 I go on next to indicate briefly the causes which affect 
 the functional activity of the spinal cord ; the interest of 
 the study lying in the fact that similar causes affect the 
 functions of the higher nerve centres, and are the morbid 
 conditions of the various phenomena of mental dis- 
 orders : — 
 
 1. As an original fact, the ganglionic cells may have 
 a greater or less stability of composition. It sometimes 
 happens that a child is born with so great an instability 
 of nerve element, that the most violent convulsions ensue 
 on the occasion of very slight irritation. Or the evil 
 may be less serious, and the individual may be equal to 
 the ordinary emergencies of a quiet, favourably spent 
 life; but there is an absence of that reserve power 
 necessary to meet the extraordinary emergencies and 
 unusual strain of adverse events. When, therefore, an 
 unaccustomed stress is laid upon the feeble nerve ele- 
 ment, it is unequal to the demand made upon it, and 
 
168 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 breaks down into a rapid degeneration. This innate 
 feebleness is evinced by an excessive irritability ; it is 
 truly an irritable weakness .; and its most common cause 
 is an unfortunate inheritance, the curse of a bad descent. 
 Any sort of disease of the nervous system in the parents 
 seems to predispose more or less to this ill condition of 
 the child ; the acquired deterioration of the parent be- 
 coming the inborn organic feebleness of the offspring. 
 
 The degeneration of nerve element in the ganglionic 
 ceils reveals itself in a disturbance of the co-ordinate or 
 aim-working activity which, as we have already seen, 
 marks the highest development of its function. Convul- 
 sions . are the sure signs of a weakness or lowered 
 vitality of nerve element, — a defect which, though we 
 cannot yet ascertain its exact nature, certainly implies an 
 unstable equilibrium of its organic constitution. Each 
 central nerve-cell exists in close relations, physical and 
 physiological, with other nerve-cells ; when, regardless of 
 these relations, it reacts directly outwards on its own 
 account, it is very much like an individual in a social 
 system who, by reason of madness, or of a criminal dis- 
 position, rejects the restraint of social relations and 
 breaks out in mischievous anti-social activity. 
 
 Not only may an excess of irritability be a defect in 
 the nature of the ganglionic cell, but this may be defec- 
 tive also by reason of a great insensibility of nature and 
 a want of power of assimilation. In congenital idiots 
 the central cells of the cord do plainly sometimes partake 
 of the degeneracy of the brain, and are idiotic also ; 
 they are incapable of receiving impressions with any 
 vividness, and of retaining the traces or residua of such 
 as they do receive — incapable of education. Spasms of 
 the limbs, sometimes limited to the toe, to one arm or 
 leg, at other times more general ; contractions of a 
 foot, or of the knees to such degree as to make the 
 heels touch the buttocks ; more frequent still, paralytic 
 
in.] THE SPINAL CORD. 169 
 
 conditions of varying degree and extent, and atrophied 
 limbs, now and then indulging in convulsive movement 
 — all these morbid states are met with in idiots, and, 
 though in part attributable to the brain, are certainly in 
 part due to degeneration of a spinal cord utterly obli- 
 vious of its design or final purpose in the universe. In 
 some cases where the morbid degeneration is not so 
 extreme, it is not impossible to teach such combinations 
 of movements as are necessary for the common work of 
 ljfe. It may be observed incidentally that the ease and 
 rapidity with which those idiots who have by persever- 
 ance been taught difficult feats of action perform them, 
 and the machine-like exactness of their movements, dis- 
 play well the important functions of the spinal cord as an 
 independent nerve centre ; for they display its functions 
 in a case in which the influence of the cerebral hemi- 
 spheres is sometimes almost excluded. 
 
 2. The functional action of the spinal ganglionic cells 
 may suffer from the too powerful or prolonged action of 
 an external stimulus, or from an activity continued with- 
 out due interval of rest. The molecular degeneration or 
 waste, which is the condition of functional activity, must 
 be repaired by rest ancl nutrition ; the nerve-cell is no 
 inexhaustible fountain of force, but must take in from 
 one quarter what it gives out in another ; and if due 
 time be not allowed and proper material be not supplied 
 for the development of its highly vital structure by assi- 
 milation of matter of a lower quality, it is certain that, 
 notwithstanding the best innate constitution, deterioration 
 must ensue as surely as a fuelless fire must go out. In 
 that degeneration of the spinal cord which sometimes 
 occurs in consequence of sexual vice or excess, one of 
 the first symptoms is a loss of co-ordinating power over 
 the motions of the legs — a loss, in other words, of that 
 which is the last organized faculty of the spinal centres. 
 The startings of the limbs and the partial contractions of 
 
170 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 certain muscles which may follow do not evince in- 
 creased power, as some have heedlessly fancied, but are 
 the indications of lowered vitality ; they are the inco- 
 herent manifestations of a degenerate instability of nerve 
 element. When such a morbid condition of things is 
 brought about, there is necessarily a failure in the power 
 of the ganglionic cells to receive and assimilate impres- 
 sions : hence it is that in general paralytics, in whom the 
 memory of each independent nervous centre is decayed, 
 there is not only an inability to accomplish successfully 
 the actions to which they have been accustomed — as, for 
 example, an inability of a musician, whom from his con- 
 versation one would deem quite capable of his work, to 
 perform on his accustomed instrument ; but there is also 
 the impossibility of teaching them new combinations of 
 movements. In other sorts of lunatics this is often 
 possible : though mentally much degenerate, and actually 
 lost for ever to the world, they may by persevering train- 
 ing be made useful in certain simple relations to which 
 they grow and react as automatic machines, their own 
 cerebral hemispheres not interfering ; the general para- 
 lytics, in whom the disease has advanced so far as to 
 affect the spinal cord, cannot thus be utilized. 
 
 3. The supply of blood and the condition of it are 
 manifestly of the greatest consequence to the welfare of 
 the spinal cells. The grey matter of the cord is ver y 
 richly supplied with capillaries, to the end that there may 
 be a quick renewal of blood ministering to the active 
 interchange that goes on between the ganglionic cell and 
 the nutrient fluid ; the enormous consumption of force 
 in nervous function demanding such an abundance of 
 supply. What Mr. Bain describes as the spontaneous 
 energy of nerve centres, and lays so much stress on as 
 the foundation of volition, is probably the result of the 
 state of the blood in them — either of its compostion 
 or of its distribution. We know at any rate that the 
 
m.] THE SPINAL CORD. vji 
 
 movements of inspiration are provoked by an excess of 
 carbonic' acid in the blood circulating through the medulla 
 oblongata and the spinal cord. How many modifications 
 of nutrition, of secretion, and of the distribution of 
 blood in the different organs, of which we can give no 
 account, may be due to the character or the distribution 
 of the blood circulating in the spinal cord ! When the 
 supply of blood is suddenly cut off, as in the well-known 
 experiments of Stannius, Brown-Se'quard, and Schiff, the 
 nervous activity is presently paralysed, and rigor mortis 
 of the muscles ensues. When the supply of blood is 
 soon restored to a part in which rigor mortis has taken 
 place, as in Brown-Se"quard's experiment of injecting 
 warm blood into the stiffened arm of an executed 
 criminal, the muscles presently regain their contracti- 
 lity, and the nerves their irritability. As a complete 
 cutting-off of the blood is paralysis of nerve element, 
 so a deficiency of blood, or of material in it fitted for 
 the nutrition of nerve, is to the extent of its existence a 
 cause of degeneration or instability of nerve element. 
 Such deterioration is exhibited by cachectic and anaemic 
 persons in a great irritability, and in a disposition to 
 spasms or convulsions — an acquired condition not unlike 
 that which is sometimes inherited. 
 
 The state of the blood may be vitiated by reason of 
 the presence of some foreign matter which, whether bred 
 in it or introduced from without, acts injuriously or as a 
 direct poison on the individual nerve-cells. Strychnia 
 notably so affects them that, on the occasion of the 
 slightest stimulus, they react in convulsive activity ; while 
 the curare poison, on the other hand, produces a sort of 
 stupor or coma, and paralyses all activity. Curiously 
 enough the methyl derivatives of strychnia, the iodide of 
 methyl-strychnium and the sulphate of methyl : strychnium, 
 according to the observations of Drs. Frazer and Crum 
 Brown, produce exactly the same symptoms as the 
 
172 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 curare ; showing that a slight difference in the chemical 
 composition of a substance may occasion a great differ- 
 ence in its physiological effects. Moreover, if a suffi- 
 ciently large quantity of strychnia be introduced under 
 the skin of a frog, the effects may closely resemble those 
 produced by the curare; death taking place without any, 
 or with only very feeble, convulsions. Opium, which 
 usually produces coma in man, produces convulsions in 
 frogs, and sometimes in children. We might, were it 
 needful, accept these different effects of poisons, which 
 are alike positively injurious to the integrity of nerve 
 element, as evidence that convulsions do not mean 
 strength : they are not the result of an increase in the 
 proper vital activity of parts; on the contrary, they evince 
 degenerate function and are the forerunners of paralysis. 
 The various vegetable poisons indicate also, by their 
 different effects upon the same and upon different struc- 
 tures, the fine differences of composition in the gang- 
 lionic centres of the central nervous system ; in this 
 way they throw some light as chemical reagents upon 
 the nature of physiological functions, and they are the 
 most sensitive reagents in this regard which we yet 
 possess. 
 
 There is reason to believe that the presence of too 
 much blood in the spinal cord may be as baneful as an 
 insufficient supply. All the symptoms of disorder of 
 nerve element which accompany ana?mia may certainly 
 be produced also by congestion or congestive hyperemia ; 
 the proper nutritive interchanges, the supply of suitable 
 nutrient products and the removal of effete products, 
 being as much impeded or checked by stagnation as by 
 deficient supply of blood. The blood-vessels are fur- 
 nished with vaso-motor nerves which regulate their calibre 
 and therefore the amount of the supply of blood, and 
 these nerves are more or less plainly under the control of 
 spinal centres. It is obvious that an undue contraction 
 
m.] THE SPINAL CORD. 173 
 
 or dilatation of the vessels may affect temporarily the 
 function, or permanently the nutrition, of the nerve 
 centres, and so occasion morbid phenomena. 
 
 4. The existence of a persistent cause of eccentric 
 irritation, whether the result of injury or disease in some 
 part of the body, may give rise to a morbid state of the 
 spinal nerve-cells by a so-called sympathetic or reflex 
 action. This may be considered a pathological appli- 
 cation of physiological function which is in constant 
 operation. Volkmann has observed movements to be 
 produced in the limbs of a decapitated frog by stimula- 
 tion of the intestinal canal ; the results being much more 
 evident if the animal has previously been poisoned with 
 strychnia. In a well-known experiment by Goltz a sharp 
 tapping upon the abdomen of a frog produces a sudden 
 arrest of the heart's action ; and it has been recently- 
 shown by Tarchanoff that when a loop of the intestine 
 with its corresponding piece of mesentery is pulled out 
 of the abdomen of a frog, and exposed to the air for a 
 few hours until it becomes inflamed, the slightest touch 
 of the inflamed loop will suffice to produce a stoppage 
 of the heart's action within from a few seconds to half a 
 minute.* The stimulus is carried to the medulla oblon- 
 gata, there reflected upon the vagus nerve, and operates 
 through it upon the ganglia of the heart ; for the effect 
 does not take place if conduction be arrested by section 
 of the vagus or by poisoning with curare. The convulsions 
 which sometimes take place during teething in children, 
 owing to the presence of worms in the intestines, are 
 familiar examples of sympathetic or reflex effect upon a 
 susceptible growing nervous system. It is necessary to 
 distinguish two kinds of effects of this reflex action — or, 
 perhaps, different degrees of the same kind of effect — 
 namely, a reflex functional modification and a reflex nu- 
 tritive modification. 
 
 * Archiv de Physiologic, 1875, p. 408. 
 
174 -THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 The irritation of a decayed tooth may, as is well known, 
 give rise to a contraction of the muscles of one side of 
 the neck, or to a violent facial neuralgia, or to blindness 
 or deafness, all which presently disappear upon the re- 
 moval of the cause of the mischief. A functional derange- 
 ment only has existed so far. But the irritation of a bad 
 tooth produces a greater and more lasting effect, when, 
 as does now and then happen, an abscess in the glands 
 of the neck takes place in consequence of it, and remains 
 an incurable fistula until the removal of the scarce sus- 
 pected cause. The nutritive derangement has been 
 caused and kept up by the reflex irritation. It must cer- 
 tainly be allowed that the functional disorder, when it 
 alone seems to exist, does testify to some kind of change 
 in the molecular relations of the ganglionic cells ; but as 
 the abnormal modification vanishes the moment the real 
 cause of mischief, the bad tooth, is gone, it is scarcely 
 possible to view the disturbed function as evidence of any 
 serious chemical or organic derangement in the nerve-cells. 
 With the continuance of the cause of irritation, the func- 
 tional disorder undoubtedly may, and is liable to, pass 
 into disorder of nutrition. The relations of these differ- 
 ent degrees or kinds of derangement to the morbid cause 
 are such that we might not unfairly represent the sole 
 existing functional derangement as due to a modification 
 of the polar molecules of the nerve element, while the 
 abnormal nutrition may be supposed to mark an actual 
 chemical change in its constitution. 
 
 Again, as the spinal centres minister both to our animal 
 life and to our organic life, they necessarily have, in the 
 former case, a periodical function ; in the latter case, a 
 continuous function. When, therefore, a morbid condition 
 of the ganglionic cells subserving animal life exists, the 
 functional derangement will probably be not continuous 
 but intermittent. Intermittence of symptoms is indeed a 
 common, almost a constant, feature of nervous disease, 
 
in.] THE SPINAL CORD. 175 
 
 and I know not why we should be surprised thereat, if we 
 reflect that alternation of rest and activity is the law of 
 the nervous functions of animal life. Thus, in epilepsy, 
 it appears as if the reacting centres must be gradually 
 charged until they reach a certain tension or instability, 
 when the statical equilibrium is destroyed, and they dis- 
 charge themselves violently. Something of the same kind 
 takes place in the poisonous action of strychnia : a dog 
 so poisoned will fall down in convulsions, but, according 
 to Schroeder van der Kolk, they cease after a time, and 
 the animal seems to be perfectly well ; even for so long 
 as an hour it may be touched or stroked without harm ; 
 after which the susceptibility again becomes so great that 
 by simply blowing upon the skin convulsions are repro- 
 duced. The molecular explosions in the intimate elements 
 of nerve tissue produce molecular exhaustion ; and when 
 the energy of the parts is restored by respite and repair, 
 the morbid instability is restored, so long at any rate as 
 the morbid conditions remain. If the dog can be kept 
 alive until the strychnia is eliminated by the secretion, 
 then the restoration of energy will be the gradual restor- 
 ation of a stable equilibrium of molecules; the convulsions 
 will become less and less violent and finally cease ; and 
 the animal will recover. 
 
 When, on the other hand, the function of the spinal 
 centres ministering to the organic life is deranged, the 
 morbid effect will most likely be continuous. The 
 experiments of Lister, showing that .the movements of 
 the granules in the pigment cells of the frog's skin 
 are under the control of the spinal system, and the 
 investigations of Bernard and others, agree to prove 
 that the cerebro-spinal axis may not only control the 
 contractions of the small arteries, but that it directly in- 
 fluences the organic elements engaged in nutrition and 
 secretion. The moment food is introduced into the 
 mouth there is a flow of saliva and of gastric juice. 
 
176 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 Numerous examples have been of old quoted of distant 
 modifications of nutrition in consequence of some irrita- 
 tion of a centripetal nerve : a large secretion of extremely- 
 acid gastric juice has been cured by the extirpation of 
 painful piles ; ptyalism is produced sometimes, as lachry- 
 mation frequently is, by neuralgia of the fifth nerve; 
 irritation of the uterus, or of the skin of the breasts, or of 
 the mucous membrane of the vagina, has been known to 
 give rise to the secretion of milk ; and menstruation may 
 follow irritation of the ovaries, or the application of warm 
 poultices to the breasts. We witness phenomena due to 
 this reflex nutritive action again in the sympathy which 
 .one eye so often exhibits with disease of the other ; in 
 the congestion of the eye or the actual amaurosis which 
 sometimes accompanies severe neuralgia ; in the para- 
 plegia due to displacement or disease of the uterus ; and 
 in many other instances too numerous to be mentioned. 
 Pfluger quotes from Dieffenbach a striking case, which 
 admirably illustrates the effects of an eccentric irritation 
 upon the spinal cord. A young girl fell upon a wine-glass, 
 and cut one hand with a piece of the broken glass; for 
 years afterwards she suffered from^yiolent neuralgic pains 
 and emaciation, with contraction and complete useless- 
 ness of the hand; she was afflicted also with severe 
 attacks of epilepsy. On cutting through the cicatrix of 
 the old wound, a minute splinter of glass, which had 
 wounded the nerve, was detected ; the nerve was also 
 thickened and hardened. After removal of the glass, the 
 neuralgia and epilepsy disappeared, and the girl recovered 
 the entire use of her hand. These instances of morbid 
 reflex function prove how complete is the unity of the 
 bodily life, and how important and far-reaching may be, 
 through the 'agency of the unifying nervous system, the 
 effects of disorder of what seems a trivial part. In truth, 
 we can call nothing trivial in the marvellous consensus of 
 energies which a living organism is ; and a prudent man 
 
til.] THE SPINAL CORD. i 77 
 
 will deem it a sacred duty to keep holy,' i.e. healthy, the 
 temple of his body.* 
 
 5. Lastly, the severance of the connection between the 
 brain and the ganglionic cells of the spinal cord seems 
 in some degree to affect their function. When a nerve 
 is cut across in the living body, the peripheral end soon 
 undergoes fatty degeneration, while the central end re- 
 mains unchanged after years; and this degeneration is 
 not owing solely to the inactivity of the nerve, for it still 
 takes place when the nerve is regularly stimulated, and 
 takes place much less quickly in frogs and cold-blooded 
 animals, in which nutrition is sluggish, than in warm- 
 blooded animals, in which it is active. It is perhaps a 
 fair conclusion that the nerve fibres have their nutrition 
 subjected in some measure to the nerve centres; that 
 these play in relation to them the part of nutritive 
 centres. After apoplexy in or about the corpus stria- 
 tum, Turck professes to have found granular cells in the 
 course of the fibres as they, pass downwards, so that such 
 cells were met with in the spinal cord on the opposite 
 side to the seat of disease. It is known, too, that the 
 removal of the brain in the lower animals increases the 
 ease with which reflex movements take place ; and there 
 are many cases on record in which the reflex action 
 has been increased in man when disease or injury has 
 interrupted the continuity of the spinal centres with the 
 brain. May we not, then, conclude from such facts that 
 a positive nutritive influence is exercised by the brain 
 upon the ganglionic cells of the cord and upon the nerve 
 fibres which proceed from the cerebro-spinal axis, as well 
 
 * It is known that a small cause of irritation may cause tetanus. 
 Dr. Taylor (Medical yurisprudence) mentions a fatal case of tetanus, 
 which was at first thought to be' idiopathic, but which was found to 
 have been really caused by a small splinter of wood that had pene- 
 trated the thumb. And Dr. G. Johnson has recorded a case of 
 tetanus which was cured by the removal of a small piece of the fibre 
 of cloth from the scar of an old wound. 
 
178 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 as by the spinal centres on the nerve fibres which proceed 
 directly from them and upon the subordinate ganglia? 
 In fact, may we not justly conclude that this influence, 
 which was expressed by old writers as the secretion of the 
 vital spirits by the brain, is exerted by every nerve centre 
 on the centre which is subordinate to it,* and on the nerves 
 which proceed from it ; and that the inhibitory action 
 which a higher nerve centre is observed to have upon the 
 function of a lower centre may be really an instance of its 
 exercise ? The inference would be agreeable to what we 
 know of the direct functional action of the brain upon that 
 of the cord ; the reflex acts in health being for the most 
 part notably subordinate to the control of the will. As a 
 guiding influence passes from above downwards when the 
 cerebro-spinal system is ministering to the functions of 
 animal life, so it is not improbable that the brain, in the 
 accomplishment of its function as an organ of organic 
 life, exerts some power which is favourable to the nutri- 
 tion of the parts which lie below it, and which are the 
 instruments through which it acts. This influence being 
 withdrawn, an exaggeration of the excitability of the cord 
 occurs, such as a wound causing tetanus may produce, or 
 such as was produced by Brown-Sequard in guinea-pigs, 
 when, having injured their spinal cord two or three weeks 
 before, he was able to excite epileptiform convulsions at 
 will by pinching the skin over a certain area of the face. 
 It is true that some have thought to explain in another 
 way the increase in the reflex movements which follows 
 the severance of connection between the brain and cord ; 
 
 * "As the brain secretes the vital spirits, and as in animals endowed 
 •with brain it is requisite that the nerves be supplied with these, as 
 the medium for the transmission of impressions, the brain must 
 be considered as being necessary, at least, to the continued pro- 
 duction of nerve-actions ; unless the animal be so constituted that 
 the vital spirits are secreted in the medulla of the nerves, or in their 
 ganglia, as in avertebrate animals." — Unzer (op. at.), p. 225 
 
hi.] THE SPINAL CORD. 179 
 
 they have attributed it to the augmented energy of the 
 spinal centres, and to the concentration of the stimulus, 
 now that a path for the dispersion of its force is cut off. 
 Such theory is hardly innocent of the vulgar error of 
 regarding as increased energy that which is truly a 
 diminution or deterioration of the higher vital energy of 
 the part. The co-ordinate reflex acts which take place 
 in answer to the natural tactile impressions are not 
 made more energetic or effective by cutting off the 
 influence of the brain ; only the irregular reflex move- 
 ments that follow chemical, electrical, or strong me- 
 chanical stimuli are increased. One most important 
 function of the brain is to exert an inhibitory power over 
 the nerve centres that lie below it, just as man exercises 
 a beneficial control over his fellow animals of a lower 
 order of dignity ; and the increased irregular activity of 
 the lower centres that have escaped from control betokens 
 degeneration : it is like the turbulent, aimless action of a 
 democracy without a head. 
 
 Such, then, are the disturbing causes which may affect 
 the activity of the spinal cord, both as a conducting path 
 and as an independent centre of the generation of nerve- 
 force. When we reflect upon the great proportion of the 
 daily actions of life that are effected by its unconscious 
 agency, we cannot fail to perceive how important is 
 the due preservation of its integrity. No culture of the 
 mind, however careful, no effort of the will, however 
 strong, will avail to prevent irregular and convulsive 
 action when a certain degree of instability of nerve ele- 
 ment has, from one cause or another, been produced in 
 the spinal cells. It would be as absurd to preach control 
 to the spasms of chorea, or restraint to the convulsions of 
 epilepsy, as to preach moderation to the east wind, or 
 gentleness to the hurricane. That which in such case 
 has its foundation in a definite physical cause must have 
 its cure in the production of a definite physical change. 
 
180 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 So certain and intimate is the sympathy between the 
 individual nerve-cells in that well-organized common- 
 wealth which the nervous system represents, that a local 
 disturbance is soon felt more or less distinctly throughout 
 the whole state. When any serious degenerationiof the 
 ganglionic cells of the cord exists, there is not only an 
 indisposition or inability to carry out as subordinate 
 agents the commands which come from above ; but there 
 is a complaint sent upwards — a moan of discontent or 
 pain reaches the supreme authority. That is the meaning 
 of the feelings of weariness, heaviness, achings of the 
 limbs, and utter lassitude which accompany disorder of 
 the spinal centres ; and the convulsive spasms and the 
 local contractions or paralysis of muscles are the first 
 signs of a coming rebellion. If the warnings do not 
 receive timely heed, a riot may easily become a rebellion ; 
 for when organic processes, which normally go on without 
 consciousness, force themselves into consciousness, it is 
 the certain mark of a vital degeneration. If the appeal 
 is made in vain, then further degeneration ensues. Not 
 only is there irregular revolutionary action of a subordi- 
 nate, but there is pro tanto a weakening of the supreme 
 authority ; it is less able to control what is more difficult 
 of control. • When due subordination of parts exists, and 
 the individual cell conforms to the laws of the system, 
 then the authority of the head is strengthened. A foolish 
 despot, forgetting in the pride of his power that the 
 strength and worth of a government flow from .and rest 
 upon the well-being of the governed, may fancy that he 
 can safely disregard the cry of the suffering and the 
 oppressed ; but when he closes his ears to complaints, he 
 closes his eyes to consequences, and finally wakes up to 
 find his power slipped from him, and himself entered 
 upon the way of destruction, So is it with the nervous 
 system : the cells are the individuals, and, as in the 
 state, so here, there are individuals of higher dignity and 
 
in ] THE SPINAL CORD. 181 
 
 of lower dignity; but the well-being and power of the 
 higher individuals are entirely dependent upon the well- 
 being and contentment of the humbler workers in the 
 spinal cord, which do so great a part of the daily work of 
 life. The form of government is that of a constitutional 
 monarchy, in which every interest is duly represented 
 through adequate channels, and in which, consequently, 
 there is a proper subordination as well as co-ordination 
 of parts. 
 
 I have lingered thus long upon the spinal cord, because 
 most of what has been said concerning its functions may, 
 with the necessary change of terms, be applied to the 
 higher nervous centres. A distinct conception of the 
 nature and mode of development of the functions of the 
 spinal centres is the best, is indeed the only adequate, 
 preparation for an entrance upon the study of cerebral 
 function ; it is an indispensable prerequisite to the right 
 understanding of the higher displays of nervous function, 
 and alone fixes the sure basis whereon to build a true 
 mental science.* In this way we apply the laws gene- 
 ralised from the more simple cases to disentangle the 
 phenomena of the more complex cases. Any system not 
 
 * In the Archiv. fiir Physiolog. Heilkunde, 1843, there ' s an ex " 
 cellent paper by Prof. Griesinger, " Ueber psychische Reflexactionen, 
 mit einem Blick auf das Wesen der psychischen Krankheiten ; " and 
 another in the same Journal for 1854, "Neue Beitrage zur Physio- 
 logie und Pathologie des Gehims." 
 
 In the Journal of Mental Science (January 1876) is an histori- 
 cal and critical paper by Dr. Laycock, entitled "Reflex, Auto- 
 matic, and Unconscious Cerebration," in which he gives a full 
 and detailed account of the first promulgation by himself, in this 
 country, of the doctrine of the reflex action of the brain, and of 
 its subsequent development. It appears from this paper that he 
 first broached the doctrine in 1840, in his " Treatise on the Nervous 
 Diseases of Women," although he did not fully expound it until he 
 read a paper "On the Reflex Function of the Brain" before the 
 British Medical Association in 1844. The paper was afterwards 
 published in Ihe British and Foreign Medical Review, January 1845. 
 
i82 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 so founded follows not the order of development in 
 nature, and must be unstable and insecure : Nature 
 herself protests against it with energetic eloquence when 
 she makes, as she unquestionably sometimes does, 
 morbid action of the cells of the cerebral hemispheres 
 vicarious of the morbid action of the spinal cells. 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 1 (/■ !39)' — Pfliiger compares the movements of a decapitated 
 animal with those of a sleeping man, deeming the movements in 
 both to be conscious. He tickled the right nostril of a sleeping boy, 
 and the lad rubbed it with his right hand : when Pfliiger tickled the 
 left nostril the lad rubbed it with his left hand. If he held the 
 sleeper's right hand without waking him, and tickled his right 
 nostril, the boy first made attempts with his right hand to rub it, but 
 when this did not succeed, and the irritation continued, he then 
 made use of the left hand. 
 
 " Crickets allure to sexual congress after decapitation by the 
 vibration of their wings ; and Redi, Bibiena, and others, have ob- 
 served that butterflies, after having copulated but once in their lives, 
 repeat the function repeatedly when decapitated, and the females, 
 after sexual congress, deposit their eggs as carefully as if excited 
 thereto by their instinct. " Unzer. — On the New System, Syd. Soc. 
 Trans, p. 287., Thus the fluttering of the wings of the female butter- 
 fly excites the sexual organs of the male, but only when the route 
 has been laid down by an accomplished sexual act ; for no such 
 effect is produced unless sexual congress has taken place at least once 
 before decapitation. On the first occasion a sensory stimulus must 
 co-operate with the purely reflex stimulus ; the latter suffices after- 
 wards. 
 
 The following quotation is from Spinoza, as translated by M. 
 Saisset : — " Personne, en effet, n'a determine encore ce dont le corps 
 est capable; en d'autres termes, personne n'a encore appris de 
 1' experience ce que le corps peut faire et ce qu'il ne peut pas faire, 
 par les seules lois de la nature corporelle et sans recevoir de l'ame 
 aucune determination." "This is not astonishing," he adds, "as 
 no one has sufficiently studied the functions of the body," and in- 
 stances the marvellous acts of animals and somnambulists — "toutes 
 choses qui montrent assez que le corps humain, par les seules lois de 
 la nature, est capable d'une foule d'operations qui sont pour l'ame 
 
III.] THE SPINAL CORD. 183 
 
 jointe a ce corps un objet d'etonnement J'ajoute enfin que 
 
 le mecanisme du corps humain est fait avec un art qui surpasse in- 
 finiment l'industrie humaine." The associating link of many move- 
 ments — as, for example, of those of the heart, of the eye, of breath- 
 ing — plainly exists in the conformation of the nervous centres ; the 
 wisdom or design is exhibited in the primary arrangement, whereby 
 the reactions of the organism necessarily following do, as a rule, 
 minister to the furtherance of its well-being. 
 
 2 (p. 149). — "And therefore it was a good answer," said Bacon, 
 '* that was made by one, who, when they showed him, hanging in a 
 temple, a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped 
 shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknow- 
 ledge the power of the gods, 'Ay,' asks he again, 'but where are 
 they painted that were drowned after their vows?' " Speaking of 
 final causes, upon which the human understanding falls back, he 
 says that they " have clearly relation to the nature of man rather 
 than to the nature of the universe ; and from this source have 
 strangely defiled philosophy." — -Nov. Org. Aphorism xlvi. 
 
 To the same effect Spinoza wrote : — "But we are not to overlook 
 the fact, that they who advocate this doctrine, and who have desired 
 to find scope for the display of their ingenuity in assigning causes, 
 have had recourse to a new style of argument to help them in their 
 conclusions, namely, by reduction not to the impossible or absurd, 
 but to ignorance or the unknown ; a procedure which shows very 
 plainly that there was no other course open to them. If, for instance, 
 a stone or tile fell from a house-top on the head of any one and 
 killed him, they demonstrated in their way that the stone or tile fell 
 to the end that the man might be killed. For if not to this end, and 
 the special will of God, how should so many concurring circum- 
 stances (and very many circumstances do often concur in such a 
 case) have led to the event? You will reply, perhaps, that the 
 event happened because of the rough wind, the loose tile, and the 
 presence of the man on the spot. But they will then urge : wherefore 
 blew the wind so rudely? Why was the man at the particular 
 instant on the very spot on which the tile must fall? If you 
 answer, that the wind blew because of the neighbouring tempest, 
 whose approach was indicated by the heaving of the sea on the pre- 
 ceding day, though the weather was then fine, and because the man 
 had been invited, and was on his way to the house of a friend, they 
 will still go on to ask— for in such a case there is no end of asking- 
 why the tempest arose at a distance on the day before, and why the 
 man was invited at that particular time, — the cause of a new cause 
 inquired for in endless sequence, until shelter is sought in what in 
 
184 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 such a case is called the Will of God, the asylum of ignorance. So 
 also when they regard the structure of the human body they are 
 amazed ; and because they are ignorant of the cause of so much 
 art, they conclude that it has been contrived and put together by no 
 mechanical, but by some divine or supernatural art, in such wise 
 that each part in serving its own purpose is not injurious to another. 
 And thus it comes that he who inquires into the true causes of 
 miracles and prodigies, and who admires the harmony of natural 
 things as a person of knowledge and understanding, and not as a 
 simpleton, is everywhere proclaimed an infidel and impious per- 
 son, and is so regarded by those whom the vulgar bow before as 
 the interpreters of nature and the Divine decrees. For these men 
 know that with ignorance removed wonder ceases, and the only 
 means they have of enforcing their dicta and preserving their 
 authority comes to an end." 
 
 3 CA I 5°)- — "After the actions which are most perfectly voluntary 
 have been rendered so by one set of associations, they may, by 
 another, be made to depend upon the most diminutive sensations, 
 ideas, and motions, such as the mind scarce regards, or is conscious 
 of ; and which, therefore, it can scarce recollect the moment after 
 the action is over. Hence it follows that association not only con- 
 verts automatic actions into voluntary, but voluntary ones into 
 automatic. For these actions, of which the mind is scarce con- 
 scious, and which follow mechanically, as .it were, some precedent 
 diminutive sensation, idea, or motion, and without any effort of the 
 mind, are rather to be ascribed to the body than the mind, i.e. are 
 to be referred to the head of automatic motions. I shall call them 
 automatic motions of the secondary kind, to distinguish them both 
 from those which are originally automatic, and from the voluntary 
 ones ; and shall now give a few instances of this double transmuta- 
 tion of motions, viz. of automatic into voluntary, and of voluntary 
 into automatic" He instances the manner in which children learn, 
 and especially the way we learn to speak, to play on the' harpsi- 
 chord, &c " The doctrine of vibrations explains all the original 
 automatic motions ; that of association the voluntary and secondarily 
 automatic ones." — Hartley's 1'heory of the Human Afind, edited 
 by Priestley, pp. 31, 37. 1795. 
 
 Unzer clearly recognised the nature of the acquired automatic 
 acts : — " And, on the contrary, we seek at first to avoid many pains 
 and other unpleasant external sensations by voluntary movements, 
 which afterwards become purely automatic, as, for example, shout- 
 ing, writhing and retracting when in pain ; the quickened walk and 
 the drawing up the legs to the body in severe cold ; the contraction 
 
in.] THE SPINAL CORD. 185 
 
 of the eyelids in a strong light, and a thousand other movements, 
 the objects of instincts, formerly volitional, but become mechanical 
 from frequent repetition. Neither can we infer that the sentient 
 actions of an instinct, which in us or in another animal are volitional 
 movements, must have been such formerly, or will be for the future, 
 or are such in any other creature." — Op. cit., p. 152. 
 
 4 Xp- 160). — " Impressionum sensoriarum in motorias reflexio, quae 
 in sensorio communi fit, non peragitur juxta solas leges physicas, 
 ubi angulus reflexionis aequalis est angulo incidentiae, et ubi, quanta 
 fit actio, tanta etiam sequitur reactio ; sed leges peculiares, a natura 
 in pulpam medullarem sensorii quasi scriptas, sequitur ista reflexio 
 quas ex solis effectibus tantum noscere, neutiquam vero assequi 
 nostro ingenio valemus. Generalis tamen lex, qua commune sen- 
 sorium impressiones sensorias in motorias rellectit, est nostri con- 
 servatio : ita ut impressiones externas corpore nostro noscituras 
 sequantur certse impressiones motorise, motus producturae eo colli- 
 mantes, ut monumentum a corpore nostro arceatur, amoveaturque ; 
 et vice versa impressionesexternas seu sensorias, nobis profuturas, 
 sequantur impressiones interna; seu motoriae, motus producturse eo 
 tendentes, ut gratus ille status ultra conservetur." — Prochaska, 
 op. cit. p. 88. 
 
 Unzer had upheld the same doctrine, describing the effects re- 
 spectively as connatural and contranatural (naturlich und wider- 
 naturlieh), according as they are in accordance with the well-being 
 of the organism or not. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES, OR SENSORY 
 GANGLIA ; SENSORWM COMMUNE. 
 
 The different collections of grey matter in the medulla 
 oblongata, and at the base of the brain, consist chiefly 
 of the nervous centres of the senses with corresponding 
 centres of motor reaction. They are really continuations 
 of the grey substance of the spinal cord, from which they 
 are differentiated by more specialised functions. Con- 
 tinuing the grey substance as high as the floor of the 
 lateral ventricles, they include the optic thalami, the 
 corpora striata, the corpora quadrigemina, and the 
 different sensory centres that are placed in the medulla 
 oblongata, the tuber annulare, and the cerebral pedun- 
 cles. The olfactory bulbs, which lie at the base of the 
 anterior cerebral lobes, must also be included in the 
 sensorium commune. Any one of the senses may be 
 destroyed by injury to its sensory ganglion as surely as 
 by actual destruction of its organ ; blindness is pro- 
 duced by injury to the corpora quadrigemina, smell is 
 abolished by destruction of the olfactory bulbs. These 
 ganglionic centres are thus intermediate between the 
 hemispherical ganglia above and the spinal centres 
 below ; to those they are subordinate, to these they are 
 superordinate. In many of the lower animals, as already 
 pointed out, the brain consists of nothing more than 
 the sensory ganglia, with centres of motor reaction ; 
 there are no superimposed cerebral ganglia. 
 
chap. IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 187 
 
 It is not the place here to enter into a discussion of 
 the different opinions which have been entertained con- 
 cerning the exact centres of the different senses ; much of 
 what is said on these difficult questions being still conjec- 
 tural. It has for some time been supposed that the seat 
 of common sensation is in the thalami optici, because it 
 is in these bodies that the posterior or sensory columns 
 of the spinal cord seem to terminate ; and that the cor- 
 pora striata, to which the anterior or motor columns of 
 the cord pass, are the corresponding motor centres. 
 Vulpian, however, has brought forward strong arguments 
 in favour of assigning the seat of common sensation to 
 the tuber annulare. After the removal of the corpora 
 striata, the tubercula quadrigemina, and the cerebellum 
 — the tuber annulare and the medulla oblongata being 
 the only parts of the encephalon left — he found that dogs 
 and rabbits evinced, by violent agitation and decided 
 cries of suffering, the pain felt when severely pinched or 
 otherwise irritated. Moreover, injuries of the thalami 
 optici, pathological or experimental, do not weaken 
 sensibility, but do often produce motor paralysis. He 
 concludes that we are yet in entire ignorance of the 
 special functions both of the thalami optici and the cor- 
 pora striata. Notwithstanding this opinion, those who 
 have examined the arguments on this subject will pro- 
 bably conclude that Vulpian's theory concerning the 
 tuber annulare has blinded him to the import of the 
 evidence in favour of the thalami optici and the corpora 
 striata as sensory and motor centres respectively. It 
 may well be that they are not the entire centres, and that 
 there are other centres of .sensibility" and motion in the 
 tuber annulare and cerebral peduncles ; but that they do 
 minister to those functions it is hardly possible to doubt. 
 Luys looks upon the thalami optici as a kind of sen- 
 sorium commune in which all sensations meet. But it is 
 not by any means certain that all the sensory nerves go 
 
1 88 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 to them, some of these nerves apparently going_directly 
 to the cortex of the hemispheres, while it is tolerably 
 certain that some motor nerves are connected with them. 
 Wundt makes the conjecture that they are centres of 
 reflex functions in which the impressions of touch are 
 received and transformed into corresponding movements. 
 That destruction of them is not followed by loss of 
 sensibility of the skin' may be owing to the fact that some 
 sensory fibres ascend beneath them directly to the hemi- 
 spheres. He looks upon the chief portion of the cor- 
 pora striata as a motor centre through which the impulses 
 of the will coming downwards from the cerebral hemi- 
 spheres act upon the motor nerves ; the remaining small 
 portion at their base being a centre in which the central 
 olfactory fibres and certain motor fibres terminate.* 
 Meanwhile all that concerns us here, in dealing with the 
 cerebral functions from a psychological point of view, is 
 to have some general term to embrace and designate all 
 the centres of sensation ; and for this purpose I shall 
 employ the term sensorium commune, using it as a generic 
 term to denote the common centres of sensation, and 
 not, as Vulpian and some others have misused it, as 
 a special term to designate the centres of common sen- 
 sation. In a similar psychological sense I shall subse- 
 quently use the terms motorium commune and intettectorium 
 commune. 
 
 The ganglionic centres of the sensorium commune 
 are formed of numerous nerve-cells, which, like those of 
 the spinal cord, are in connection with afferent and 
 efferent nerves ; the afferent nerves in this case coming 
 mostly from the organs of the special senses. The im- 
 pressions which the afferent nerves bring are, therefore, 
 special in kind, as also are the grey nuclei to which they 
 are brought ; a progressive differentiation of structure and 
 function is manifest ; and we might describe the sen- 
 * Grundzuge der Physiologischen Psychohgie, p. 198. 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 189 
 
 sorium commune, physiologically, as a spinal cord, the 
 afferent nerves of which are the nerves of the special 
 senses, or rather of the various kinds of sensibility. For 
 although we usually distinguish only between the special 
 senses and general sensibility, yet there are really diffe- 
 rent kinds of the latter, each perhaps having its special 
 nucleus : the tactile sense, the sense of temperature, the 
 muscular sense, differ not in degree only, but in kind. 
 An exact knowledge of the anatomical relations of the 
 different grey nuclei is still wanting, notwithstanding the 
 patient investigations of many inquirers. All that we 
 are certain of is, that the fibres of the nerves are 
 connected with the cells, as may be most easily seen in 
 the case of the auditory nerve and ganglion ; that mani- 
 fold connections exist between different nuclei ; and that 
 fibres may sometimes be traced from the nucleus of a 
 sensory nerve to a motor nerve upon which it is known 
 to exert a reflex action. The trigeminus, or fifth nerve, 
 for example, passes from above downwards through the 
 medulla, and in its downward course forms reflex con- 
 nections with all the motor nerves of the medulla as it 
 reaches the level of their nuclei ; in this way the facial, 
 the glossopharyngeal, the vagus, the spinal accessory, 
 and the hypoglossal nerves receive communications from 
 it. The ganglionic cells of different nuclei also differ in 
 form and size ; and Schroeder van der Kolk held that, 
 as a general rule, at every spot where fibres are given off 
 for the performance of any special function, there fresh 
 groups of ganglionic cells giving origin to them appear. 
 
 We justly conclude, then, that, as we should d priori 
 expect, special ganglionic centres minister to special 
 functions ; that the central cells are, as it were, the work- 
 shops in which, on the occasion of a suitable stimulus, 
 the peculiar current necessary for the performance of the 
 specific action is excited. A message is sent up to them 
 by the appointed channels, and they reply by sending 
 
190 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 through the regular motor channels the particular ener- 
 gies which it is their function to supply. Charged with 
 their proper force during the assimilating process of 
 nutrition, it exists in them in a potential or latent form ; 
 and the condition of unstable vital equilibrium is upset, 
 the force being then discharged, as the Leyden jar is, 
 when a certain stimulus meets with a sufficient tension. 
 
 The natural course of a stimulus, all the force of which 
 is not reflected upon an efferent nerve in the spinal 
 centres, is upwards to the sensorium commune, where it 
 becomes the occasion of a new order of phenomena ; 
 the law of extension of reflex action excited by a spinal 
 nerve observably being, as Pfliiger has shown, from below 
 upwards to the medulla. Having arrived at the gan- 
 glionic cells of the sensorium commune, the stimulus may 
 be at once reflected through the motor nuclei on a motor 
 nerve, for which there is provision in a direct physical path, 
 and involuntary movements may thus take place in answer 
 to a sensation, just as involuntary movements take place 
 from the spinal centres without any sensation. The gan- 
 glionic cells of the sensory centres are unquestionably 
 centres of independent reaction, and, in association with 
 their proper motor nuclei, give rise to a class of reflex 
 movements of their own. When a man lies with the lower 
 half of his body paralysed in consequence of injury or 
 disease of his spinal cord, the tickling of the soles of his 
 feet will sometimes produce reflex movements of which 
 he is unconscious. When a man lies with no paralysis of 
 his limbs, but with a perfectly sound spinal cord, the 
 sudden application of a hot iron to his foot or leg will 
 give rise to a movement quite as involuntary as 
 that which takes place in the paralysed limb, but, in 
 this case, in answer to a painful sensation ; the reaction 
 takes place in the sensory ganglia, is accompanied by 
 feeling, and the movement is sensori-motor. Had the 
 hot iron been applied to the paralysed limbs, no move- 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 191 
 
 ment would have followed, because the path of the 
 stimulus was cut off as completely as the current of the 
 electric stimulus is interrupted when the telegraphic 
 wires are cut across. 
 
 Experiments on animals have yielded the most striking 
 instances of complex acts, simultaneous and sequent, in 
 answer to sensory stimuli. Take away that part of the 
 brain of an animal which lies above the sensory ganglia, 
 namely, the cerebral hemispheres, and it is still capable 
 of a variety of sensori-motor movements, though it does 
 not display the least evidence of intelligence, emotion, or 
 will. Flourens, whose experiments have been repeated 
 by Longet, Schiff, and others, removed the cerebral 
 hemispheres of a pigeon, and observed the results. It 
 ceased at once to evince intelligence and power of spon- 
 taneous action, and remained in a state of torpor, as if it 
 were asleep. But if thrown into the air, it would fly ; if 
 laid on its back, it struggled on to its legs ; the pupil of 
 the eye contracted to light, and if the light was very 
 bright, the eyelids were closed. It dressed its feathers 
 when they were ruffled, and sometimes followed with 
 a movement of its head the movement of a candle 
 before its eyes ; and, when a pistol was fired off, it 
 opened its eyes, stretched its neck, raised its head, 
 and then fell back into its former torpid attitude until 
 another stimulus was applied. To each sensory stimulus 
 it answered by making the proper movement in a mechani- 
 cal way : the impressions of sense reached and affected 
 the sensory centres, which in turn instigated the proper 
 reflex or automatic acts. There was neither intellectual 
 perception nor volitional action ; and it would have died 
 of hunger with a plateful of food before it, though it 
 would swallow food when this was pushed far enough 
 into its mouth to come within the range of the reflex 
 movements of deglutition. The animal was brought to 
 the level of the invertebrata, which have no higher nerve 
 
ig2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 centres than sensory ganglia, no centres of intelligence 
 and will, and which execute all their varied and active 
 movements, seeking what is good for them, avoiding 
 what is hurtful to them, and providing for the propagation 
 of their kind, through sensory and associated motor 
 nuclei. 
 
 Similar experiments have been made on other animals 
 with similar results. Vulpian made a complete transverse 
 section of the nerve centres of the rat immediately above 
 the medulla oblongata, and then pinched its foot severely : 
 it uttered a short, sharp cry of pain which presumably 
 was reflex or sensori-motor, just like the cry which an 
 an encephalic infant may make. He then destroyed the 
 medulla oblongata, and again pinched the foot : there 
 were reflex movements, but there was no cry. In another 
 experiment he removed the cerebral hemispheres, the 
 corpora striata, and the optic thalami of a rat, when it 
 remained perfectly quiet ; but immediately a sound of 
 spitting was made in imitation of that which a cat makes 
 sometimes, it made a bound away, and repeated the 
 jump each time that the noise was made.* The rat, by 
 reason probably of having been hunted through many 
 generations, is very fearful, scampering away on hearing 
 the least unusual sound ; and, though its cerebral hemi- 
 spheres were removed, it still responded to the sensory 
 stimulus to the auditory ganglion by the proper automatic 
 movements. Longet having removed the cerebral hemi- 
 spheres of young cats and dogs, introduced into their 
 mouths a concentrated bitter decoction ; he observed 
 that they performed active movements of mastication, 
 and made grimaces with their lips as if they sought to 
 get rid of a disagreeable taste ; they made, in fact, the 
 same movements as he observed were made by an 
 uninjured animal of the same kind when it was made to 
 swallow a similar bitter decoction. 
 
 * Vulpian, op cit., p. 548. 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 193 
 
 Many more experiments of a like kind might be 
 adduced, but it will suffice to mention the recent 
 experiments of Goltz upon frogs. When a frog, the 
 cerebral hemispheres of which have been removed, is 
 placed on the palm of the hand held horizontally, it 
 remains there crouched quietly ; if the hand be now 
 gently turned, it will move first one paw and then the 
 other, so as gradually to get upon the upper border of 
 the hand as this rises, and to prevent itself from falling ; 
 and if the turning be slowly continued, it finally gets 
 carefully on to the back of the hand, when this is upper- 
 most, and there sits quietly until the hand is gently 
 turned backwards again, when it goes through the reverse 
 operations. To the sensory stimuli from the muscular 
 sense it responds by the adapted automatic movements, 
 as exactly as if it still possessed its nerve centres of 
 intelligence and will. In fact, the same agency is put in 
 motion by the sensory stimulus to accomplish the proper 
 movements as would have been made use of had the 
 stimulus come from the will of the animal ; and while 
 the sensory stimulus can excite the movements without 
 the will, it would be quite impossible for the will to 
 accomplish them without the automatic agency of the 
 lower nerve centres. 
 
 Another interesting experiment is the croaking ex- 
 periment (Quakversuch). If the frog which has been 
 deprived of its cerebral hemispheres be gently stroked 
 between the shoulders or along the flanks, it will croak 
 once at each stroke with machine-like regularity} dif- 
 fering in this respect from an unmutilated frog, which 
 either will not croak at all, or will croak several times, 
 its cerebral hemispheres enabling it either to control or 
 to strengthen the reflex act. But even frogs which do 
 not croak so long as they possess their cerebral hemi- 
 spheres will croak readily and regularly when these have 
 been removed. However, none of them so mutilated will 
 
194 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 croak their gratification in this way if the stimulus be 
 painful instead of pleasant. If touched or stroked with 
 a sharp instrument, or if electrical or chemical irritation 
 be applied to the skin of the back, they execute defen- 
 sive movements and may make a cry of pain, but will 
 not make the croak of contentment. 
 
 The movements in answer to impressions on the senses 
 are, like the simplest reflex movements, primary and 
 secondary automatic. Examples of primary automatic 
 movements are to be found in the contraction of the 
 pupils and the involuntary closure of the eyelids when 
 a strong light falls upon the eye ; in the distortion of the 
 face in consequence of a sour taste ; in the quick with- 
 drawal of the hand when it is touched by something hot ; 
 in the cry which excessive pain calls forth ; in the motions 
 of sucking which take place when the nipple is put 
 between the infant's lips ; in coughing and sneezing ; 
 and in yawning on seeing some one else yawn. Illus- 
 trations of acquired or secondary movements of this class 
 are seen in the adaptation of the walk to the music of a 
 military band ; in the maintenance of the balance and 
 attitude of the body, through combined impressions on 
 sight and touch, during walking, running, leaping, dancing; 
 in the articulation of words on seeing their appropriate 
 signs, or hearing their sounds ; in playing from notes on 
 a musical instrument when the mind is occupied ; and in 
 many other of the common actions of life of which we are 
 not conscious at the time, but of the necessity of which, 
 were there no power of performing them automatically, 
 we should soon become actively conscious * ( J ). We little 
 
 * Mr. James Mill clearly recognised this class of movements, as 
 Hartley had done before him. " Innumerable facts are capable of 
 being adduced to. prove that sensation is a cause of muscular action," 
 p. 258. After instancing, as examples, sneezing, coughing, the con- 
 traction of the pupils, and the movements of the eyelids, he says : 
 " We seem authorised, therefore, by the fullest evidence, to assume 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 195 
 
 think, indeed, how much we owe to the acquired auto- 
 matic functions of the nerve centres of the different 
 senses. In the expression of thought by speech, it is 
 not certain whether the idea acts directly upon the motor 
 ganglia ; it may be that it acts first upon the auditory 
 
 that sensation is the mental cause, whatever the physical links, of a 
 great proportion of the muscular contractions of our frame ; and 
 that among those so produced are found some of the most con- 
 stant, the most remarkable, and the most important of that great 
 class of corporeal phenomena." — Analysis of the Human Mind, 
 p. 265. 
 
 Their nature was also distinctly pointed out by Unzer, who cited 
 instances, e.g., many movements made during sleep, especially by 
 somnambulists. " But the principal point is, that on this depends 
 the secret of the instincts in those animals which probably do not feel 
 the sensational stimuli of the instincts." Unzer's work was pub- 
 lished in 1 77 1. Op. cit., p. 242. 
 
 Hartley's Observations on Man were published in 1749 ; and they 
 are certainly surprising when we consider how little was known at 
 that lime of the anatomy and jjhysiology of the nervous system. 
 He supposed that when external objects affected the sensory nerves, 
 they excited vibrations in the small particles of the medullary sub- 
 stance, which were propagated to the brain ; " as soon as the 
 vibrations enter the brain, they begin to be propagated freely 
 eveiy way over the medullary substance." .... "The subtle 
 motions excited in the sensory nerves and medullary substance of 
 the brain during sensation and intelligence, must, of whatever kind 
 they be, pass into the motory nerves, and when they are arrived 
 there, it is probable that they cause the contraction of the muscles. " 
 .... "The same motion that occasions sensation and intel- 
 lectual perception passes through the seats of these into the 
 motory nerves, in order to excite there the automatic and volun- 
 tary motions." As examples of this reflex action he instances 
 sneezing, swallowing, coughing, hiccoughing, vomiting, and ex- 
 pelling the excretions, and "general convulsions from acidities, 
 and other irritations in the bowels." He even extends this doctrine 
 of reflex action to the secretory and excretory vessels of the glands, 
 which "must be constantly agitated with a like motion from the 
 same causes, performing their ordinary secretions and excretions 
 thereby." Here then we have as clear an anticipation as could be 
 desired of the doctrine of reflex action, and of its application to all 
 nerve-centres. 
 
196 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 ganglia and so excites the sensation of the sound of the 
 proper word, or what would be the sensation were we 
 actively conscious of it, and that this thereupon acts 
 upon the motor ganglia and gives rise to the appropriate 
 reflex movements of speech. It may be observed in 
 regard to the automatic acts that, when completely 
 organised, they are more perfectly performed the less we 
 are conscious of them, that is, the more entirely reflex they 
 are ; wherefore it is that somnambulists are able to walk 
 and run safely where they would not dare to walk or run 
 if they were wide awake. 
 
 The instinctive actions of animals fall under the cate- 
 gory of consensual acts : without the intervention of 
 any conception, the sensation at once excites the ap- 
 propriate movement, and the animal is almost or quite 
 as skilful on its first trial as it. is after a life experi- 
 ence. It is true that the instinctive life is extremely 
 limited in man, but sensori-motor action plays a large 
 part in such manifestations of it as are witnessed; 
 in the taking of food the movements of mastication and 
 deglutition, like the earlier ones of sucking, are in answer 
 to sensational stimuli, as also are some of the co-ordinated 
 movements necessary to the gratification of the sexual 
 instinct. The adjustment of the human eye to distances, 
 which takes place with such marvellous quickness and 
 accuracy, is effected, according to the best authorities, by 
 a change in the convexity of the lens and perhaps of the 
 cornea, and by an alteration in the direction of the axes of 
 the eyes. It is not a voluntary, not even a conscious act, 
 but a consensual act in respondence to a visual sensation, 
 and it is well suited to convey a notion of what an in- 
 stinctive act in an animal is. 
 
 It is plain enough that the intuitions of the distance and 
 form of objects, which are acquired by man, are innate 
 in many of the lower animals. The young swallow can 
 apparently seize its small prey with as exact a skill on 
 
iv.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 197 
 
 the first occasion as the old one can after a life-experience ; 
 and there is a certain Indian fish which brings down the 
 insects on which it feeds by shooting a drop of water at 
 them from its snout as they move above the surface of 
 the water, and which is said seldom to miss its aim. 
 When we consider that the refraction of the rays of light 
 on entering the water will cause the insect to appear at a 
 different spot in the air from that at which it really is, and 
 that the difference between the real and apparent position 
 will vary according as the rays of light enter the water 
 more or less obliquely, we shall wonder the more at the 
 remarkable intuition displayed. There can be no doubt, 
 however, that the act is entirely automatic ; innate func- 
 tions of the kind are limitations which compel and con- 
 fine the animal to fixed routes of machine-like action ; 
 and the absence of such limitation in man's original 
 nature marks his higher freedom. Still it is interesting 
 to observe how much even he is indebted to original 
 endowment in this very matter of estimating distance. 
 For what is the immediate cause that determines the 
 muscular adjustment of the eye to distance ? The act is 
 consensual, or, using the vaguer term, instinctive, in re- 
 spondence to a visual sensation or picture — an act of 
 which there is no direct consciousness, and over which 
 the will has no direct control. Though the process is 
 confused and uncertain at first, unlike in that regard 
 the process in the lower animals, yet it is not long before 
 the proper muscular adaptations are acquired and definite 
 motor intuitions organised. Plainly, then, very much is 
 due to the pre-arranged constitution of the nervous cen- 
 tres even in man. 
 
 We are under no little difficulty when we try to realise 
 how far consciousness accompanies many so-called sen- 
 sations and their respondent movements ; the question 
 being whether consciousness is an essential element in 
 the action, not of a sensation because the word implies 
 10 
 
ig8 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 consciousness, but of a sensational stimulus upon the 
 sensory ganglion, the passage of the resulting molecular 
 motion to the associated motor nucleus, and its ultimate 
 issue in the proper movement. But that, it may be 
 objected, is nothing else than a question whether con- 
 sciousness is a necessary part of sensation ; a question 
 which can hardly be seriously asked. Not quite so, as 
 will be evident if we do not suffer ourselves to be satis- 
 fied with a somewhat vague term, but resolve to appre- 
 hend the facts as distinctly as possible. 
 
 When an impression on sense has affected the sensory 
 ganglion, the resulting disturbance may be discharged in 
 two ways : it may either travel upwards to the cerebral 
 centres, where it is perceived, and is without doubt then a 
 conscious state ; or it may pass along the sensori-motor arc 
 into some movement, when it is not so certain that it is a 
 conscious process. Certain it is that our natural bias is 
 to attribute too much or too distinct consciousness to a 
 sensori-motor act, because we are apt to deduce from our 
 experience of self-consciousness. In our mental func- 
 tions the action of the cerebral centres and of the sensory 
 centres are so intimately intermingled that we are unable 
 to separate them by self-conscious analysis, and so run 
 the unavoidable risk of assigning to the latter, when they 
 act independently, qualities which may be derived from 
 the former. Could we get inside the nervous system of 
 the insect which has no cerebral hemispheres, or of an 
 infant as soon as it is born, before its cerebral hemi- 
 spheres begin their functions, and observe directly what 
 part, if any, consciousness plays in sensori-motor action, 
 it would be a vast help in our analysis. Inasmuch as we 
 cannot obtain that insight, the right method is, first, to 
 observe carefully the simplest instances, making no 
 further inferences than they warrant, before we go on 
 to study the more complex phenomena of intermixed 
 sensation and perception in man; and, secondly, to 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 199 
 
 make use of those in the interpretation of these, rather 
 than to apply these to the interpretation of those.* 
 
 Bearing in mind that the sensory ganglia are a continu- 
 ation of the grey tract of the spinal cord, differentiated 
 by their connections with the nerves of the special senses, 
 I would call to mind what was said in the foregoing 
 chapter concerning the supposed consciousness of the 
 spinal cord. The conclusion reached was that it was 
 capable of responding automatically to stimuli by co-or- 
 dinate or adaptive movements, without possessing con- 
 sciousness in any definite sense of the word. We may 
 fairly suppose it possible then that the sensory ganglia, 
 with their higher functional endowments, are capable of 
 more complex automatic acts in answer to their special 
 stimuli without the intervention of consciousness; the 
 more so as there is no line of demarcation between sen- 
 sori-motor and reflex acts. Let us take a simple instance 
 — the contraction of -the pupils to light : certain undula- 
 tions strike upon the retina, are transmitted to the optic 
 ganglia, reflected thence upon a motor nucleus, and the 
 circular muscular fibres of the iris presently contract, 
 whether we wish it or not, whether we know it or not ; 
 if the light be brighter, contraction of the eyelids follows. 
 We are not in truth conscious of the contraction of the 
 pupils unless we watch it in a glass. The efferent part 
 of the process is clearly unconscious, whatever be thought 
 of the afferent part. But are we conscious of the 
 
 * In adopting this canon one is liable to be met with the reproach 
 from the metaphysician, that it is a setting to work to deduce the 
 greater from the less and to subordinate the higher to the lower. 
 But it is an empty reproach : we believe the greater to include the 
 less, the higher to rest on the lower, and think that a knowledge of 
 the less will help to a knowledge of the greater, of the lower to a 
 knowledge of the higher, without supposing that the greater or 
 higher does not contain something which will not be so explained. 
 To apply this something to the less or lower is, we say, an entirely 
 false method. 
 
200 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 sensational stimulus in this instance ; in other words, have 
 we a conscious sensation of light ? I think not, unless the 
 sensation becomes perception, in which case it has passed 
 beyond the sphere of sensory- function to the higher sphere 
 of the cerebral centres. The pupils of a person in apo- 
 plexy who is unconscious of sight or sound will contract, 
 just as those of the pigeon deprived of its hemispheres 
 will, when a strong light is thrown upon them. The pure 
 sensation is not strictly a conscious state ; we may rightly 
 speak of an organic sentience and an ensuing movement 
 that are not conscious. 
 
 This is a conclusion which may certainly be disputed, 
 and the more easily because of the want of anything 
 like a precise definition of consciousness. It may be 
 said that the before mentioned experiments on the frog 
 show plainly that it feels, that is, consciously feels, 
 the stimulus ; for it utters the cry of pain when it is 
 scratched, the croak of gratification when it is stroked 
 gently. How should the frog respond to the gratification 
 or the pain unless it felt it? But we go beyond the 
 facts when we assume that it does respond to the gratifi- 
 cation or the pain ; what we know is, that it responds to 
 the stimulus, of which consciousness may be an incidental 
 coeffect and by no means an essential accompaniment ; 
 that the croak and the cry are made in answer to their 
 respective stimuli. The surprise would be if they were 
 not, the constitution of the frog being what it is, so long 
 as the properties of its tissues are maintained by the due 
 circulation of blood in them. Let us take the, other ex- 
 periment in which the frog cleverly balances itself on the 
 hand, as this is slowly turned, so as to prevent itself from 
 falling off. Here it makes a series of complex move- 
 ments in answer to a succession of stimuli from its mus- 
 cular sense that are occasioned by its changing relations 
 to the hand as this is turned. Is it conscious of these 
 stimuli ? If we refer to our own experience of similar 
 
iv.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 201 
 
 stimuli operating in the maintenance of the attitude of 
 the body and in the various adapted movements which 
 we make for the accomplishment of special acts, it would 
 appear that we are not conscious of them, so far as we 
 know, and that those who affirm that we are so do really 
 assume a consciousness which is not conscious. They, in 
 fact, beg the entire question by the tacit assumption that 
 we could not perform the adapted movements unless we 
 were, without knowing it, conscious of the sensory 
 stimuli of the muscular sense. So much concerning 
 that which we learn from observation of simple 
 instances. 
 
 Let us now go on to consider a more complex instance. 
 It is well known that the fly-catcher will, immediately it 
 is out of the egg, catch an insect with its beak. In like 
 manner a chicken, very soon after its escape from the 
 egg, pecks at a grain and takes good aim ; that is to say, 
 in answer to a visual sensation it adapts a set of move- 
 ments with the most exact appreciation of the proper 
 muscles to be put in action and of the degree of contrac- 
 tion required in each muscle — with the nicest accuracy of 
 judgment — to the accomplishment of a difficult feat. The 
 lives of most chickens would be far too short to enable 
 them to learn this skilful art, were they under the neces- 
 sity of learning it Mr. Spalding has made some experi- 
 ments on chickens which prove that they do not need to 
 be taught As soon as they emerged from the egg he 
 put hoods over their heads so that they could not see, and 
 kept them in this state of darkness for two or three days 
 until they could run about; when he uncovered their 
 eyes they appeared stunned or dazed for a minute or 
 so, owing no doubt to the diffused molecular action 
 through their nervous centres produced by the sudden 
 impression of the undulations of light ; but immediately 
 upon their recovery from this state, when the molecular 
 action was limited to the proper tracks, they followed 
 
202 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [CHAP. 
 
 the movements of insects and pecked at them with 
 precise aim. In like manner, they made their way straight 
 towards a box in which a hen with chicks was shut up, 
 when they heard her chuck, struggling through grass and 
 over rough ground, though hardly able to stand steadily 
 on their legs. Even chickens that were still hooded tried 
 in this way to get to the hen when th'ey heard her chuck. 
 He observed also that a young turkey only ten days old, 
 which had never seen a hawk, was so frightened by the 
 note of a hawk which was concealed in a cupboard, 
 that it fled away from the cupboard in the greatest 
 terror. 
 
 It will hardly be affirmed in these instances of so-called 
 instinct that there is a distinct consciousness of the nature 
 of the stimulus and of the ensuing actions ; the simple 
 sensory impression — in one case, of sight, in the other 
 case, of sound — is the spring which puts in motion auto- 
 matically the proper muscles.* This it does by a physical 
 necessity, not by the will, nor perhaps with the conscious- 
 ness, of the chicken. In like manner, when ducklings 
 are hatched by a hen, they make their way into water as 
 soon as they see it ; the impression on the sense of sight 
 determines their action, notwithstanding the consternation 
 of the hen, and notwithstanding that they cannot have 
 fore-knowledge' of the qualities of water or prevision 
 of what will happen to them when they get into it ; 
 and when they get into the water, the impression 
 which it makes upon their bodies sets going the proper 
 movements of swimming, just as happens when the frog 
 
 * The metaphysical psychologists, who make most of conscious- 
 ness, do not seemingly attribute consciousness to instinct in man. 
 Most strange, from their point of view : but so it is ! " Man is 
 indeed furnished with instincts, so far as he needs them, to impel 
 and direct his movements, before his intellect is developed, or with 
 respect to objects of which the intellect take no cognizance. Instinct 
 is a blind, unconscious force ; it is not knowledge." — The Human 
 Intellect. By Noah Porter, D.D., LL.D., p. 176. 
 
[V.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 203 
 
 that has been deprived of its hemispheres is put into 
 water. On the other hand, chickens that have been 
 hatched by a duck are not moved by her example to 
 follow her into the water : she cannot educate them in 
 the way she would have them go. It would be strange 
 if ducklings and chickens did not thus act, in relation to 
 water, in conformity with their nature ; their differences 
 of constitution representing, in the one case, a mechanism 
 which has been organised through past ages in that special 
 adaptation to water which enables them to swim in it ; 
 and, in the other case, a mechanism which has not been 
 organised in relation to it at all. Could we penetrate the 
 intimate construction, and disclose the secret springs of 
 action, of the organic mechanism, we should without 
 doubt perceive the result to be as clearly physical as are 
 the successive motions of the piston and wheels of a 
 steam-engine when the valve is opened which lets in the 
 steam to act upon the piston. That the duckling swims 
 and the chicken drowns in water is no more surprising 
 than that wood floats and iron sinks in water. If we 
 clearly realize this conception of an organic machine 
 which has, through past ages of function, been now 
 definitely organised to respond by physical necessity in 
 special ways to special sensory stimuli, it will appear 
 that consciousness, whether it exists or not, is not required 
 for its operations — is, if it occurs, an incident rather than 
 of the essence of the function. 
 
 Having once got this conception fixed in the mind, 
 we shall be the better fitted to estimate the phe- 
 nomena of sensori-motor or instinctive action, without 
 bias from our self-conscious experience. It is easier 
 to believe that the chicken is unconscious of the auto- 
 matic movements which it makes when it pecks at the 
 grain, than to admit that it is unconscious of the sen- 
 sory stimulus when it sees the grain. But why should 
 we endow the special susceptibility or reaction of the 
 
204 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 sensory ganglion to the external stimulus with a quality 
 of consciousness which it is not thought necessary to 
 attribute to the special susceptibility or reaction which the 
 associated motor nucleus shows to the stimulus from the 
 sensory ganglion ? Here, in fact, we are involved in the 
 confusion which comes of the want of an exact agree- 
 ment as to what is meant by consciousness ; we suffer 
 from the want of an exact definition in which men agree. 
 When pressed hard by their opponents, those who uphold 
 a diffusion of consciousness throughout the nervous sys- 
 tem will say that although the chicken may not be con- 
 scious of grain or of insect, yet it is impossible to believe 
 that its sensory ganglion is not conscious of the stimulus 
 which the grain or insect is to it. But what is the mean- 
 ing of this consciousness which is not the consciousness 
 of the individual, but which is, nevertheless, attributed 
 to the separate organs or parts of the body? Is it 
 consciousness at all? Let the metaphysical psycholo- 
 gists answer to that question, who define consciousness 
 as the knowledge which the mind of the individual 
 has of its own acts and states. It is surely the fact that 
 / am conscious only as an individual, as an ego, by the 
 power which I have of introspective observation of my- 
 self: I cannot know anything subjectively of an alleged 
 consciousness of separate organs or parts of my body 
 which is not part of my consciousness as an ego, and 
 assuredly I cannot know it objectively; it is therefore 
 an assumption, which may be true or not, but for 
 which we have no warrant, to ascribe consciousness to 
 them. 
 
 If it be said that although / am not conscious of a sen- 
 sational stimulus my sensory ganglion is, and that its simple 
 consciousness does, unconsciously to me, affect the com- 
 plex consciousness which I, as an ego, have, its special 
 waves being merged and lost in the more complex waves 
 of general consciousness, I cannot deny the possible 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 205 
 
 influence ; but at the same time cannot but think that to 
 call it consciousness is to take a license of assumption 
 which is unwarrantable, and to render discussion futile ; 
 it is to introduce a consciousness which defies subjective 
 analysis and objective inquiry, and to rob the word of a 
 definite meaning. Moreover, as I have already pointed 
 out, it is an unnecessary assumption, once we have 
 realised the purely automatic nature of the complex 
 sensori-motor acts which excite our wonder. 
 
 However, if it be still insisted that the sensory 
 ganglion is always conscious, even when the indi- 
 vidual to whom it belongs is not, it will be necessary 
 to ascribe the quality, as some logically do, to the 
 spinal cord also, and, in those creatures which, like 
 the hydra, have no nervous system, to the sensitive ele- 
 ments of their substance ; and I know not how, having 
 got so far, we can forbear ascribing consciousness to the 
 structure of the sensitive plant, to chemical elements 
 which display affinities for one another, and to the aspir- 
 ing ascent of water in a capillary tube. It will only be 
 going back on the road to the old philosophy which found 
 the explanation of natural phenomena in sympathies and 
 antipathies, in loves and in hates. If anyone chooses to 
 affirm that the sun, by an act of will attracts the earth 
 and keeps it in its orbit, in spite of the voluntary resist- 
 ance which the earth, anxious to get away into space, 
 opposes to the compulsion, I cannot argue with him ; he 
 silences me effectually, though he does not convince me. 
 Certainly it behoves those who discover the diffused ele- 
 ments of a rudimentary consciousness in the movements 
 of the sensitive plant and of the hydra, if not in the 
 affinities of chemical elements, which becomes more 
 specialised as we ascend to more highly vital structures, 
 to take scrupulous heed to discriminate plainly between 
 these low modes of consciousness, the existence of which 
 they infer objectively, and that consciousness which alone 
 
206 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 we know directly ; and to refrain from tacitly investing 
 the former with all the qualities of the latter. 
 
 It must be borne in mind that the foregoing remarks 
 have had reference to the primordial sensation of the 
 chicken, while it was yet pure sensation, unmixed with 
 perception. But in an animal with cerebral hemispheres 
 this period of pure sensation must be brief and transitory. 
 The moment the chicken has made the proper movements 
 and picked up the grain, it has enlarged its experience of 
 sensory stimuli by the coalescence with them of those 
 which it has received from the muscular sense during 
 the movements ; and it is in the association of these ex- 
 periences of the muscular sense with the visual sensation 
 of the grain, that the perception of the latter as an external 
 object begins to dawn. These associated sensations, 
 retinal and muscular, when they have been agglutinated, 
 constitute the perception. 
 
 The nearest thing in human experience with which we 
 can compare the pure sensation, free from admixture of 
 perception, is probably the so-called organic sense through 
 which, the brain is affected by the special stimuli of the 
 several internal organs. Each organ is in intimate re- 
 lation with the brain through internuncial nerve fibres, 
 having, so to speak, a special correspondence with 
 it ; and we have good reason to believe that each 
 exerts its constant and specific influence upon it, and, 
 through it, upon the constitution and function of mind. 
 This intimate and essential sympathy is exhibited and 
 observed most plainly in the great mental revolution 
 which is produced by the development of the functions 
 of the reproductive organs at puberty. Coming into 
 action abruptly at a certain period of life, they display 
 their specific effects in a decided and somewhat abrupt 
 manner; the effects being necessarily less evident with 
 the specific sympathies of other organs which come into 
 functional action directly after birth. 
 
iv.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 207 
 
 Now these organic stimuli, which affect us so essen- 
 tially though we are not conscious of their operations, 
 may provoke answering movements. I am not now 
 referring to the contraction and dilatations of blood- 
 vessels and the consequent disturbances of nutrition 
 and secretion which they may undoubtedly occasion 
 in other parts of the body, but to the movements of 
 animal life. Flourens observed birds which had been 
 deprived of their hemispheres to stand on one leg, 
 and, after a time, owing probably to the sensory 
 stimulus of fatigue, change to the other leg ; shake 
 their heads, and put them under the wings for sleep ; 
 ruffle their feathers, and sometimes plume them with their 
 beaks. Neither intelligence nor will could have any part 
 in the movements ; they were sensori-motor, and some of 
 them probably in answer to stimuli arising within the 
 body. Similar movements to relieve fatigue or an uneasy 
 position take place' in ourselves when we are asleep, or 
 when our attention is so deeply absorbed in thought that 
 we have not the least consciousness of them. Let any 
 one who is accustomed to write while standing at a desk 
 request some person to mark and record the various 
 movements of his body which he makes while his atten- 
 tion is so intently engaged in thought and composition 
 that he is unconscious of what else he is doing, and he 
 will be surprised how many he has really made. In 
 animals the actions respondent to the organic stimuli 
 constitute a great part of their daily activity ; and in man, 
 when the influence of the highest nervous centres is 
 weakened by disease, or when an organic stimulus has an 
 abnormal energy, as happens sometimes in insanity, we 
 may see the instinct for food or the sexual instinct mani- 
 fested in a perverted and shameless manner. So far 
 there is truth in a remark made by Jacobi, that the 
 actions of the insane have an instinct-like character, as 
 their physiognomies assume an animal-like look. In a 
 
zq8 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 complete description of sensori-motor function it will be 
 necessary to take account of the organic stimuli from 
 within the body as causes of various purposive move- 
 ments. 
 
 The difficulty which one has in bringing forward ex- 
 amples of sensori-motor action in man springs from the 
 impossibility, in many instances, of eliminating the action 
 of the cerebral hemispheres. As soon as a reflex sensori- 
 motor act is performed it awakens an echo or repeating 
 movement of itself in the convolutions. In some instances, 
 however, the function of the hemispheres is suspended. 
 The somnambulist, who walks in dangerous places and 
 goes through a series of performances when asleep, clearly 
 receives information from some of his senses, by which he 
 guides his movements. In those cases of epilepsy, 
 quoted in the last chapter to illustrate reflex action, 
 in which the person, during the transient unconscious- 
 ness, goes on with the work which he was engaged upon 
 when the fit seized him, and when he comes to himself 
 is unaware of what has happened, it is evident that the 
 acts are respondent to sensory stimuli. When a person 
 is put under the influence of chloroform in order to have 
 a surgical operation performed painlessly, it occasionally 
 happens, if he is not completely narcotized, that as soon 
 as the operation is begun he shrieks violently and strug- 
 gles with all his might, displaying all the ordinary indica- 
 tions of suffering so plainly that a bystander is convinced 
 he is in great agony ; and yet when his consciousness is 
 restored after the "operation he is surprised when he is 
 told that it has been done, declares positively that he felt 
 no pain, and is unaware of his shrieks and struggles.* 
 
 * Chloroform narcotizes the brain from above downwards — first, 
 thought being affected, then sensation, and lastly the purely reflex 
 acts. In these cases, it may be supposed that the cerebral hemi- 
 spheres are narcotized, but that the sensory ganglia are not fully 
 under the influence of the chloroform. Dr. Lauder Brunton has 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 209 
 
 Two explanations offer themselves : either he really felt 
 the pain at the time, as he seemed to do, and when he 
 came to himself had clean forgotten it ; or the phenomena 
 were entirely sensori-motor, the cries and struggles being 
 as purely automatic as the cry and struggle which the 
 frog deprived of its cerebral hemispheres makes when the 
 skin of its back is sharply scratched. Schroeder van der 
 Kolk mentions a case of a lady who had her breast ampu- 
 tated while she was under the influence of chloroform, 
 and who, though she felt no pain, was perfectly con- 
 scious on awakening of having heard herself shriek. If 
 she remembered the shriek, why should she not have 
 remembered the pain had she really felt it ? The same 
 observer has also noticed violent shrieking in apoplexy, 
 where there was not the least trace of consciousness 
 manifested. Children learn to speak by reason of an in- 
 voluntary impulse which they notably evince to reproduce 
 a sound that is heard; and any one who has walked 
 through a parrot-house, and heard the discordant screams 
 which make the place hideous, must surely have some- 
 times felt an involuntary inclination to shriek also. The 
 clenching of the teeth and hands during severe pain is 
 probably a sensori-motor action, like the shrieking which 
 is another motor expression of it, both acts unquestion- 
 ably relieving it in some measure ; indeed, were the spas- 
 modic clenching to become a general convulsion, the 
 pain would probably be no longer felt. One might per- 
 haps inhibit the pain of acute neuralgia by producing 
 violent convulsions, and in like manner inhibit convul- 
 sions by producing an agonizing neuralgia. 
 
 ingeniously surmised that sudden deaths under chloroform, during 
 surgical operations, are not always to be ascribed to an overdose of 
 the chloroform, but to the shock of the operation, which shock pro- 
 duced the fatal effect simply because the chloroform had not been 
 given freely enough to narcotize the basal ganglia as well as the 
 hemisj»heres of the brain. Brit. Med. Journal, Dec. 4th, 1875. 
 
210 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 The instinctive acts of animals, however, as I have 
 already pointed out, furnish the most striking instances of 
 sensori-motor action. Instinctive acts differ from reflex 
 acts, such as the decapitated frog performs, in being more 
 complicated ; they are equally automatic, but in them a 
 combination and succession of movements take place in 
 answer to a combination and succession of impressions. 
 When we observe the wonderful operations which insects 
 perform, it is hard to conceive that they are little more 
 than automata, acting with almost mechanical constancy 
 in answer to the stimuli which they are adapted to receive; 
 but in reflecting upon their operations, it is incumbent 
 upon us to take heed that we do not rashly measure the 
 nature and range of their senses by the nature and range 
 of our own. As Mr. Wallace has remarked,* their sight 
 may far exceed ours both in delicacy and range, and may 
 possibly give them knowledge of the intimate constitu- 
 tion of bodies analogous to that which we obtain by the 
 spectroscope. Insects certainly appreciate sounds of ex- 
 treme delicacy. Besides the minute organs plentifully 
 supplied with nerves which are presumed to be the organs 
 of hearing, the orthoptera (such as grasshoppers, &c.) have 
 what are supposed to be ears on their forelegs. In flies 
 the third joint of the antennae contains thousands of 
 nerve fibres which end in small open cells ; these have 
 been supposed to be organs of smell ; or, it may be, 
 although it is not so probable, that they are organs of 
 some sense which man has not, and receive impressions 
 
 * "That their visual organs do possess some powers which ours 
 do not, is indicated by the extraordinary crystalline rods radiating 
 from the optic ganglion to the facets of the compound eye, which 
 rods vary in form and thickness in different parts of their length, 
 and possess distinctive characters in each group of insects. This 
 complex apparatus, so different from anything in the eyes of verte- 
 brates, may subserve some function quite inconceivable by us, as 
 well as that which we know as vision." — On Natural Selection. A. 
 R. Wallace, p. 202. * 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 211 
 
 of which he has not the least perception. Certain it is 
 that insects have an acuteness of sense by virtue of 
 which they are in intimate relations with surroundings 
 which we cannot perceive ; wherefore the automatic 
 movements that are organically linked on to the im- 
 pressions they receive appear to us marvellous and in- 
 explicable. 
 
 Not long since, a correspondent of a public journal 
 related the following facts in a letter to it : — He 
 raised a female tiger-moth some years ago from the 
 caterpillar state, and put it in a gauze-cage in a smok- 
 ing-room opening into a town garden ; in less than two 
 hours five male tiger-moths flew to the cage, although 
 no flutter of wings or other sound was audible. He 
 had sat in the same room with the window open and 
 a light burning hundreds of nights without ever seeing 
 a tiger-moth. It may fairly be presumed that the 
 female moth made some peculiar noise inaudible to 
 human ears, or emitted some emanation, imperceptible to 
 human smell, by which the male moths were attracted. 
 Were we to measure the delicacy of the dog's sense of 
 smell by our own, we should gaze in wonder on what 
 would seem the mysterious instinct by which it pursues 
 its patient and sinuous course through field after field 
 until it drives the hare from its hidden seat ; or were we 
 to allow the vultures no keener sight or smell than we 
 possess, it would be impossible to understand how it is 
 that, when not a creature of the kind was previously 
 visible in the heavens, they should be instantly gathered 
 together from the remotest quarters of the horizon to the 
 spot where the carcase is. It is well known with what 
 speed and certainty the carrier pigeon finds its way to its 
 far distant home ; and there are many stories telling how 
 a cat or a dog which has been removed to a strange place 
 far away from its home, under circumstances which ren- 
 dered it impossible that the animal could have made 
 
212 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 observations by sight to guide it in returning, will never- 
 theless find its way back. If one might venture a con- 
 jectural explanation of so obscure a matter, it would be 
 that it is guided back by a train of smells which it re- 
 members as they are re-excited, just as a man who was 
 finding his way home would be guided by remembering 
 objects which he had seen. As we know that these 
 animals have the same number and the same kind of 
 senses which we have, we must suppose a much more 
 acute susceptibility in one or more of their senses ; but 
 even then we cannot easily conceive how they should act 
 at so great a distance. It helps not to assume a co- 
 operation of reason, for the reason of the greatest philo- 
 sopher would not prevent him from losing his way hope- 
 lessly under like circumstances.* 
 
 There can be no doubt that human senses, especially 
 those of touch and smell, are capable of a much more 
 acute development than that which they commonly re- 
 ceive. The loss of one sense is notably followed by an 
 increase in the functions of those which remain, in conse- 
 quence of the greater attention given to them. There is 
 good evidence that blind persons may learn to distinguish 
 colours by the touch. Dr. Abercrombie mentions two 
 instances of blind men who were much esteemed as 
 
 " But let us suppose a nation of men, blind from their infancy, 
 among whom a stranger arrives, the only man who can see in all 
 the country ; let us suppose this stranger travelling with some of the 
 natives, and that one while he foretells to them that in case they 
 walk straight forward, in half an hour they shall meet men or cattle, 
 or come to a house ; that, if they turn to the right and proceed, they 
 shall in a few minutes be in danger of falling down a precipice ; that, 
 shaping their course to the left, they will in such a time arrive at a 
 river, a w ood, or a mountain. What think you ? Must they not 
 be infinitely surprised that one who had never been in this country 
 before should know it so much better than themselves ? And would 
 not those predictions seem to them as unaccountable and incredible 
 as prophecy to a minute philosopher V— Divine Visual Language : a 
 Dialogue, liishop Berkeley. 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 213 
 
 judges of horses : one of them declared a horse to be 
 blind — though several persons had failed to observe the 
 fact — by recognising a peculiar and unusual caution in its 
 manner of putting down its feet ; the other pronounced 
 a horse to be blind of one eye, by feeling the blind eye 
 to be colder than the other. He had known, too, several 
 instances of persons affected with that extreme degree of 
 deafness which occurs in the deaf and dumb, who had a 
 peculiar susceptibility to particular kinds of sounds, de- 
 pending apparently upon an impression communicated to 
 their sense of touch. They could tell, for instance, the 
 approach of a carriage in the street without seeing it, 
 before it was taken notice of by persons who had the 
 use of all their senses. They were, in fact, in the posi- 
 tion of those lowly organised beings which have no 
 special organs of hearing or of sight, but which are 
 clearly in some degree sensible of vibrations of sound 
 and undulations of light.( 2 ) 
 
 All the senses have proceeded by evolution from 
 the simple and primordial sense of touch ; and when 
 the higher senses fail, this sense is capable of re- 
 suming to some extent, even in the highest animals, 
 its primordial and general functions. Mr. Levy de- 
 clares that whether in a house or in the open air, 
 whether walking or standing still, he can, although quite 
 blind, tell whether he is opposite an object, and can per- 
 ceive whether it is tall or short, slender or bulky ; he can 
 also detect whether it be a solitary object or a continuous 
 fence, and whether it be a close fence or consist of open 
 rails. Currents of air have nothing to do with this power ; 
 nor has the sense of hearing. It seems to him that he 
 perceives objects through the skin of his face, which he 
 has ascertained by experiments to be the only part of 
 his body possessing this power. Stopping his ears does 
 not interfere with it, but covering his face with a thick 
 veil destroys it altogether ; and it is not diminished by 
 
2i 4 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 ordinary darkness, but it is by a fog.* This peculiar sus- 
 ceptibility would appear to be a modification of tactile 
 sensation, existing only in that part of the skin which is 
 habitually exposed, and specially educated in conse- 
 quence ; and it is of great interest, as marking an inter- 
 mediate condition of development between touch and 
 sight through which animals have probably passed, in the 
 course of evolution, before the latter, sense was distinctly 
 differentiated and specialised. It helps us to conceive 
 how, before a special organ of vision was formed, a 
 portion of the covering of the body in the lowest organ- 
 isms may have been differentiated so as to receive im- 
 pressions which were neither impressions of touch, nor of 
 sight exactly, but intermediate between the two — transi- 
 tion stages in the development of touch into sight. Bats 
 at the present day display a susceptibility of the same 
 kind ; for they will fly about a room without striking 
 against the objects in it after their eyes have been put 
 out.t 
 
 The sense of smell may also be cultivated to a perfec- 
 tion of which we little think until we set ourselves to 
 observe or collect instances and to reflect upon the 
 matter. Digby tells of a man who, like the negroes, 
 could distinguish the approach of an enemy by the smell, 
 and his wife from other women by the same sense. A 
 certain religious person possessed almost divination in 
 this respect, for he was said to be able to recognise 
 persons by their different odours, and even to distinguish 
 
 * Mr. Levy expresses his conviction that none of the five senses 
 have anything to do with the existence of this power, which he con- 
 siders to be an unrecognised sense, and calls by the name of ' ' Facial 
 Perception." — Blindness and the Blind, by W. Hanks Levy. 
 
 t The use of the same words to describe the qualities of the 
 sensations of different senses points to this fundamental analogy — 
 e.g., softness of touch and softness of colour, a harsh sound and 
 Harsh colouring, a sweet taste and a sweet sound, &c. 
 
iv.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 215 
 
 chaste from unchaste women in the same way.* Haller 
 remarks that negroes in the Antilles can distinguish by 
 scent the footsteps of a negro from those of a French- 
 man ; t and Humboldt affirms that the Peruvian Indians 
 in the darkest night can not merely perceive by their 
 sense of smell the approach of a stranger, but can say 
 whether he is Indian, European, or Negro. % Dugald 
 Stewart relates that James Mitchell, who was deaf, dumb, 
 and blind, could tell by his sense of smell whether a 
 stranger was present in the room or not, and indicate in 
 what part of the room he might happen to be; it is 
 probable that any dog would easily do the same thing. 
 Idiots sometimes display a remarkable susceptibility of 
 smell, accepting or rejecting, like animals, particular 
 articles of food after sniffing them, or manifesting their 
 liking or dislike for particular persons after applying the 
 same test. § These instances prove that we might obtain 
 a much more intimate knowledge than we do of the pro- 
 perties of many natural objects by our senses of smell, 
 taste, and touch, were we to cultivate them systemati- 
 cally, and did we not depend so much as we habitually 
 do upon the sense of sight ; and they serve well to indi- 
 cate not only how much the senses of animals may sur- 
 pass ours in range and delicacy, but how probable it is 
 that many of their complex instinctive acts which strike 
 us with wonder have their springs in sensational stimuli 
 by which we are not affected. Could we unravel the 
 intricacies of their sensori-motor functions, there can be 
 little doubt that we should discover the explanation of 
 their most complex instincts. Unfortunately the neces- 
 sary data are wanting. 
 
 * Traiti Philosophique et Physiologique de PHerediti Naturelle. 
 Par le Dr. Prosper Lucas, vol. i., p. 162. 
 
 + White, On the Gradation of Man, p. 148. 
 
 X Humboldt's Cosmos. 
 
 § A case of the kind is related in Body and Mind, 2nd ed., 
 p. 51. 
 
216 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 I go on now to consider briefly the origin of instincts, 
 moved thereto more particularly by an expectation of the 
 light which the study of their mode of origin will throw 
 upon the education of the nervous system of man. In 
 the first place, there can be no dispute that instincts pass 
 by hereditary transmission : the ant inherits the instincts 
 of the ant, the bee those of the bee, the beaver those of 
 the beaver, as distinctly as each inherits the anatomical 
 and physiological characters of its progenitors. Indeed 
 the fixedness of instincts is so great, and their transmis- 
 sion so certain, that, as Mr. Darwin has pointed out, they 
 persist long after the conditions of life to which they were 
 adapted have been changed. Among other instances, he 
 mentions that young pigs sometimes squat when fright- 
 ened, and in this way try to conceal themselves even in 
 an open and bare place ; that young turkeys, when the 
 mother gives the danger cry, run away and try to hide 
 themselves, like young partridges or pheasants, in order 
 that their mother may take flight, of which she has lost 
 the power ; that the dog, however well and regularly fed, 
 often buries, like the fox, superfluous food, and turns 
 round and round on a carpet before lying down, as if to 
 trample down grass to form a bed ; and that lambs and 
 kids discover the traces of their former alpine habits by 
 the way in which they crowd and frisk on the smallest 
 hillocks.* 
 
 From these examples we learn — first, that the tend- 
 ency of instincts to pass by hereditary transmission is 
 so strong that traces of them may be found centuries 
 after a change in the external conditions to which they 
 were adapted, and when they have long ceased to be of 
 the least service to the animal ; and, secondly, that the 
 continued action, through generations, of changed ex- 
 ternal conditions, such as domestication implies, does 
 modify the organism of the animal, causing a decay of 
 * On the Origin of Species by weans of Natural Selection. 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 217 
 
 the old instincts which are not in use, and the develop- 
 ment of new instincts suited to the changed conditions. 
 The original instinct of the dog was to howl like a wolf; 
 its acquired instinct, which it has possessed so long that 
 it has become natural, is to bark. We are brought face 
 to face then with two laws : the law of heredity, and the 
 law of variation ; and it is in the operation of these two 
 laws that we discover the mode of origin of new instincts 
 and the probable mode of origin of all instincts from the 
 beginning. 
 
 Adopting the Darwinian law of evolution, we assume 
 instincts to have been formed, as species have been 
 formed, by the accumulation of slight differences which 
 have been inherited. Unknown causes acting upon the 
 brain have produced what have been called spontaneous 
 variations of simpler instinctive actions ;* if these vari- 
 ations were adapted to the external conditions, and gave 
 the animal an advantage in the struggle for existence, 
 they would survive by natural selection and be trans- 
 mitted by heredity ; and thus in the course of time 
 they would be fixed in its nature. The occurrence 
 of a variation, the perpetuation of an advantageous 
 variation by natural selection, and its hereditary trans- 
 mission have been the main factors in the develop- 
 ment of the greater number of the more complex 
 
 * But why should they be called spontaneous, seeing that the terra 
 is so apt to occasion misunderstanding ? They are surely the effects 
 of antecedent causes, though we know not what these causes may 
 he. They may be conceived to arise in two ways : either by a 
 variation in the external conditions provoking an organic adapta- 
 tion ; or by a new impulse being generated from the combination of 
 the organic antecedents, in like manner as a chemical compound 
 displays properties that are not those of its constituents. It would 
 be strange if while the simplest chemical combination develops 
 entirely new properties, the infinitely more complex organic com- 
 bination of two beings — each of which again is a complex result of 
 organic combinations— did not develop new impulses or properties 
 in the product. 
 
218 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 instincts. If it be asked whence came the simpler 
 instincts which have been assumed as a basis for the 
 development of the more complex, we must seek for 
 the basis of them in the complex reflex actions from 
 which, as already pointed out, they have proceeded by 
 successive complications in accordance with the same 
 laws of natural selection and hereditary transmission of 
 variations ; from the more complex reflex actions we may 
 descend in like manner to the more simple, and from 
 these to more simple still, until at last we reach the 
 primordial reaction of the apparently homogeneous sub- 
 stance of the lowest forms of animal life. So we trace a 
 gradual progression from the most simple and general 
 reaction, through successive complications of reflex 
 action, to those most special and complex sensori-motor 
 actions which are called instinctive. 
 
 Another way — though it is at bottom not another, but 
 the same way — in which we observe instincts to be formed 
 in the higher animals is by the transformation of intel- 
 lectual into instinctive acts. It is certain that intelligent 
 actions which were acquired by experience or education in 
 the first instance have, after being performed during many 
 generations, been converted into instincts and inherited. 
 G. Leroy made the observation long ago that in districts 
 where war is made against foxes the young ones, before 
 they have had any experience, display more caution and 
 cunning than old foxes in districts where they are not 
 persecuted ; and he accounted for the fact by attributing 
 language to animals. While admitting that old foxes 
 may use means to instruct their young, we may agree 
 with F. Cuvier, who suggested the more probable explan- 
 ation that the greater natural cunning displayed was 
 owing, not to education, but to the hereditary transmission 
 of acquired instincts. Birds in desert islands evince no 
 fear of man when they first make acquaintance with him, 
 but after they have had experience of the wanton 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 219 
 
 destruction which he works among them, the sight of his 
 near presence instantly excites an instinct to escape. It 
 may be taken for granted that birds in inhabited countries 
 would show no more fear of him than they do of sheep, 
 were»it not for the embodied memories which they have 
 of the enemy which he is to them ; Darwin has remarked 
 that large birds are much more shy than small ones, 
 because they have been more persecuted by man ; and I 
 may add that among small birds robins approach him 
 more boldly than others because it hasJong been incul- 
 cated on children as almost a sin to kill a robin. 
 
 Many other facts of the same kind might be quoted, 
 some of which were carefully observed and recorded half a 
 century ago by Knight. He made trial with some pointer 
 pups, having taken great care that when they were first 
 taken into the field they received no instruction from the 
 old dogs. The very first day one of the pups stood 
 trembling with excitement, its eyes fixed, and all its 
 muscles strained, pointing at the partridges, as its ances- 
 tors had been taught to do. A young polecat terrier was 
 thrown into a state of great excitement the first time he 
 ever saw a polecat, while a spaniel remained calm and 
 indifferent. The taming by man of the animals which 
 are now domesticated without doubt cost him great 
 pains originally ; and had there been no tendency to the 
 fixation of acquired modifications by hereditary trans- 
 mission, had the primitive instincts continued to display 
 themselves with their original force in each succeeding 
 generation, he would never have succeeded in domesti- 
 cating them.* " Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, 
 
 * The following quotation shows what a clear conception Cabanis 
 had formed of the modification of an organism by its environment, 
 and of the fixation of the new organic habits or dispositions by 
 hereditary transmission through successive generations: — "Des im- 
 pressions particulieres, mais constantes et toujours les memes, sont 
 done capable de modifier les dispositions organiques et de rendre 
 leur modifications fixes dans les races. . . . £t si les causes deter- 
 
220 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 or abide by thy crib ? Canst thou bind the unicorn with 
 his band in the furrow ? or will he harrow the furrows 
 after thee ? " * 
 
 These instances of instincts that have been acquired 
 by the transformation of intellectual acts illustrate really 
 the operation of the same laws which are manifested, in 
 the acquisition of complex instincts by the so-called 
 spontaneous variation of simple instincts ; the only differ- 
 ence being that the variation is produced, not by an 
 unknown cause„but by human agency, and that its sur- 
 vival is brought about, not by natural, but by human 
 selection. They may be regarded in the light of experi- 
 ments which test and support the theory of the natural 
 origin of instincts. We observe in our own experience 
 that intellectual acts, when frequently repeated, are done 
 easily by habit, and finally become automatic ; habit may 
 indeed be regarded in such case as instinct in the making. 
 What we have to realize is that the nervous system of 
 man and animal is moulded structurally according to the 
 modes of its functional exercise, and that if these be defi- 
 nite in character and frequently repeated, it becomes in 
 time an automatic machine which performs its habitual 
 functions with mechanical certainty on occasions of 
 the suitable stimuli. The formation of a certain con- 
 clusion in logic by an intelligent mind, when the 
 
 minantes de 1'habitude premiere ne discoritinuent pas d'agir pendant 
 la dure'e de plusieurs generations successives, il se forme une nouvelle 
 nature acquise, laquelle ne peut, a son tour, etre changee, qu'autant 
 que ces me'ities causes cessent d'agir pendant longtemps, et surtout 
 que des causes differentes viennent d'imprimer a l'economie animale 
 une autre suite de determinations." — Rapports du Physique tt du 
 Moral de I' Homme, J. G. Cabanis. 
 
 " Qu'est-ce que nos principes naturels, sinon nos principes ac- 
 coulume's?" says Pascal. "La coutume est une seconde nature 
 qui detruit la premiere. Pourquoi la coutume n'est-elle pas 
 naturelle? J'ai bien peur que cette nature ne soit elle-meme qu'une 
 premiere coutume, comme la coutume est une seconde nature." 
 
 * Job xxxix. 9, 10. 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 221 
 
 premises are clearly apprehended, is as much an auto- 
 matic necessity, or, if you will, an instinct, as the act of 
 swimming by a duck when it is thrown into water. 
 What is physical necessity, regarded objectively, is, as 
 Wundt has remarked, logical necessity, regarded sub- 
 jectively. 
 
 Not to anticipate what will come afterwards, I for- 
 bear to proceed farther with this matter now. Enough 
 has been done by the foregoing short exposition of the 
 nature and of the mode of formation of instincts to pre- 
 pare the way for what I have to say touching those 
 actions in man which may be described as acquired 
 sensori-motor acts. To understand their nature, it is 
 necessary to pass for a short time beyond the region of 
 pure sensation into the higher region of perception, and 
 to consider what relation the latter bears to the former. 
 Sensation expresses merely the state of simple feeling 
 without reference to an external cause ; it is wholly 
 within, entirely subjective : perception includes not only 
 the internal feeling, but the reference of it to an external 
 cause ; it embraces the without as well as the within, is 
 the synthesis of subject and object ; wherefore every 
 distinct perception implies actually a judgment. In 
 order to acquire a perception, it would seem that two_ 
 senses at least must co-operate; and in order to acquire 
 the completest perception possible of an object, there 
 must be a co-operation of all the senses which it is cap- 
 able of affecting. Men are often one-sided or defective 
 in judgment because they do not bring themselves into 
 intimate relations with all the aspects of an object or 
 event : they cannot understand it thoroughly unless 
 they so stand under it that they perceive all its bearings. 
 
 Let us take the simplest perception conceivable : that 
 of something external to us, something which is not our- 
 selves. The muscular feelings co-operate with the sense 
 of touch to give us this information. The order of events 
 11 
 
222 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 is presumably in this wise : the object excites the sensa- 
 tion, which is at first entirely subjective ; the immediate 
 outcome of the sensation is a simple movement, which 
 thereupon brings into action the muscular sense, exciting 
 certain muscular feelings; the effect of the muscular 
 feelings is to produce further movements of. the limb, 
 whereby, pressing against the object or moving over its 
 surface, or otherwise acting upon it, its position in rela- 
 tion to the limb is changed ; the consequences of which 
 are further modifications of the original sensation of 
 touch in correspondence with further modifications of 
 muscular feeling. In the association, fusion, agglutination, 
 consilience, or synthesis, call it what we will, of these 
 different impressions of the tactile and the muscular 
 senses arises perception, which is necessarily at first 
 of a very vague and obscure character. However, we 
 have now, got our perception, such as it is, of an ex- 
 ternal object, which on any future occasion of touch 
 is represented mentally in relation to these other simul- 
 taneously or successively experienced sensations.* We 
 
 * Our perceptions of space depend upon experience ; our visual 
 sensations are not images, but signs, the meaning of which we have 
 to learn by experience. This we do by comparing them with, the 
 result of our movements, with the changes which we make in the 
 outer world. The infant as it learns to grasp, to turn its eyes and 
 hands to an object, to turn it over and over, so as to see it in all posi- 
 tions, learns to recognise the different views of it in connection with 
 the movements. Thus a conception of the object is obtained, and 
 we are ever afterwards able to imagine what appearance it would 
 present if looked at from some, other point of view, and what move- 
 ments we should have to make in order to put it in that point of 
 view. "I have often," says Helmholtz, "noticed a striking in- 
 stance of what I have been saying in looking at stereoscopic pictures. 
 If, for example, we look at elaborate outlines of complicated 
 crystalline forms, it is often at first difficult to see what they mean. 
 When this is the case, I look out two points in the diagram which 
 correspond, and make them overlap by a voluntary movement of the 
 eyes. Rut as long as I have not made out what kind of fo'in I lie 
 
VI.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 223 
 
 perceive then the importance for the perfection of 
 perception, in other words, for the acquisition of know- 
 ledge, of the capacity of a variety of movements of 
 the organ. The more movements it is capable of 
 and the more numerous the sensory nerves with which 
 it is furnished, the more frequent are the occasions of 
 sensations. We want to get every sensation which we 
 can of it, by bringing the organ into every possible rela- 
 tion with it, in order to perfect our perception. So much 
 truth then was there in the saying of the old Greek 
 philosopher that man is the wisest of animals by reason 
 of his having hands ; the hands being capable of so 
 great a variety of movements and being furnished with a 
 highly developed tactile apparatus. In like manner, it 
 might be said that the elephant is the most intelligent of 
 quadrupeds by reason of its having a trunk ; for the 
 trunk is an organ which has an extreme delicacy of touch, 
 and a great and varied range of action. 
 
 We infer then that the distinction between object and 
 subject is not given in our earliest sensations. The sen- 
 sation felt is all that the infant is at first conscious of; it 
 tastes before it perceives a cause of taste ; there is no 
 distinction of subject and object, of the ego and the non- 
 drawings are intended to represent, I find that my eyes begin to 
 diverge again, and the two points no longer coincide. Then I try 
 to follow the different lines of the figure, and suddenly I see what 
 the form represented is. From that moment my two eyes pass over 
 the outlines of the apparently solid body with the utmost ease, and 
 without ever separating. As soon as we have gained a correct 
 notion of the shape of an object, we have the rale for the movements 
 of the eyes which are necessary for seeing it. In carrying out these 
 movements, and thus receiving the visual impressions we expect, we 
 retranslate the notion we have formed into reality, and by finding 
 this retranslation agrees with the original, we become convinced of 
 the accuracy of our conception. " — Pop. Scient. Led. p. 304. We 
 may note by the way that the process is fundamentally the same as 
 that by which we form and test our generalizations in observation 
 and reasoning. 
 
224 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 ego. It is an organic part of nature and is not conscious 
 of being a self. But it makes movements which meet 
 with resistance, and it is out of this feeling of resistance 
 that the idea of an object grows ; when it has been ex- 
 perienced a sufficient number of times, the spontaneous 
 inference of an external world is organized in the mind. 
 The notion is really an induction spontaneously made from 
 experience, at so early a period of life that no one can have 
 the least memory of the moment or of the manner of it. 
 But the correlate of the idea of an external world is the idea 
 of a self to which it is external. This idea grows out of the 
 internal impressions and the feelings of pleasure and pain 
 accompanying them: the muscular feelings, the sensa- 
 tions of hunger and weariness, the double sensation which 
 we experience on touching a part of our own bodies — 
 these contribute gradually to the definite individualiza- 
 tion of the ego in relation to the non-ego. It is a long 
 time before a child attains to a definite conscious idea of 
 its ego and speaks of itself in the first person, although, 
 like the animal, it manifests from the earliest period a, so 
 to speak, instinctive feeling of self. Here, as elsewhere, 
 obscure instinct precedes definite knowledge. The lower 
 we descend in the animal scale the less distinct becomes 
 the consciousness of a distinction between the self and 
 the not self, until, as we have every reason to believe, it 
 ceases to exist. No one supposes a tree to possess it ; 
 and even those who think that the infusory animalcule 
 has the simple primordial consciousness of sensation, 
 will hardly go so far as to invest it with the higher con- 
 sciousness of perception. 
 
 In considering the mode of origin of the ideas of 
 subject and object in the human mind, it is import- 
 ant to remember, what some persons seem to forget, 
 that we have an individual body to begin with; that 
 there is a physiological union or consensus of organs 
 before consciousness appears on the scene, the organism 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 225 
 
 being a whole in which there is not a part but acts 
 upon the whole, as the whole again reacts upon and 
 through every part ; that this union or commonwealth of 
 organs, bound together by an intimate sympathy, is re- 
 presented unconsciously in the brain as the central organ ; 
 and that when it is awakened into consciousness by ex- 
 ternal impressions, it becomes naturally the idea of self. 
 The ego is the unity of the organism declaring itself in 
 consciousness. When I touch a certain part of my body, 
 I am conscious of a sensation of touching and of a 
 sensation of being touched, both sensations in my self : 
 the organism is the self, and consciousness only makes 
 it known. Is it any wonder then that the idea of self 
 should dawn as soon as conscious function begins, and 
 grow into definiteness with its development. 
 
 We should be ill furnished for life if we were entirely 
 dependent upon our tactile and muscular feelings, pri- 
 mordial and paramount as they are. In sight, hearing, 
 smell, and taste we possess other important inlets of 
 knowledge. When we perceive an object, such as an 
 orange, we associate together all the sensations which it 
 can produce in us — its colour, taste, smell, figure, and 
 consistence ; this combination of sensations constituting 
 the object as perceived by us. Whether the object has 
 an actual existence distinct from the sensation or per- 
 ception of it, as most persons think, and, if so, how far 
 it corresponds to the perception ; or whether, as Berkeley 
 stoutly maintained, " all those bodies which compose the 
 mighty frame of the world have not any subsistence • 
 without a mind" in which they are perceived ; I shall not 
 pretend to discuss. Suffice it for present purposes that 
 all the knowledge of them we have is through the effects 
 which they produce upon our senses — in fact, in percep* 
 don. The more carefully we have looked at the object, 
 touched it, experimented on it by the different senses, in 
 order to get the greatest number of possible sensations 
 
226 THE PHYSIQLOGY OF MTND. [chap. 
 
 which it is capable of exciting, and so to fulfil the condi- 
 tions of sound induction, the more complete is the per- 
 ception of it when present to sense, that is, when the 
 proper nerve-currents are excited by its presence, and 
 the more complete the idea or concept of it when it 
 is absent from sense, but present to memory, that is, 
 when the proper nerve-currents are excited by an in- 
 ternal cause. A person born blind would know an 
 orange by taste, or smell, or touch, but his perception 
 would of course want the sensation of those qualities 
 which sight alone imparts ; and if he were to acquire sud- 
 denly the power of seeing, it is certain he would not at 
 first recognise the orange by that sense alone ; before he 
 could do so, it would be necessary for him to associate 
 the new visual sensation with the experience of the other 
 senses, especially of tactile and muscular sensation. This 
 has been proved experimentally in several cases in which 
 persons born blind have gained sight by means of a 
 surgical operation on the eyes. In like manner, the 
 perception of one who was born without smell or without 
 taste would lack the information which the sensations of 
 these senses respectively furnish ; and if the absent sense 
 were suddenly acquired, he would not recognise the object 
 by it, until he had brought the new sensation into associa- 
 tion with the previous experiences of his other senses : 
 it would then take its place in the organized group or 
 cluster of sensations which constitute the object. Cul- 
 tivation of a sense whereby its susceptibility to impres- 
 sions is sharpened, or the use of instruments which are 
 adapted to increase its delicacy and range, will similarly 
 add to the perception, when the information gained is 
 brought into relation with the former sensations of 
 which it is composed. But not otherwise. Were any 
 one who had never seen a telescope or a microscope 
 asked to look for the first time through a telescope 
 at the moon, or through a microscope at a flea, he 
 
iv.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 227 
 
 would not in the least recognise the object he was 
 looking at. 
 
 The agglutination, blending, or organized grouping of 
 separate sensations which constitutes the perception of 
 an object, and which is fundamentally an induction or 
 judgment, takes place, we believe, in the cortical centres ; 
 these being the higher nerve-centres in which the sensa- 
 tions of the lower sensory ganglia are co-ordinated into 
 the idea of the object. This is what we mean when we 
 speak of the process as a mental synthesis.* We now go 
 
 * An acquired perception is truly an induction. The mind infers 
 from the perceptive signs of one sense that there are properties of 
 objects existing which, if trial were made, the other senses would 
 discover. The difference between this induction and that which we 
 call generalization is not in the process, but in the materials. The 
 infant is engaged in making such inductions from the moment its 
 mind dawns — at first, on a very few objects, which constantly recur, 
 its universe being very limited, and its whole soul being absorbed 
 in them ; it constantly repeats the sensation and responsive move- 
 ment, being gratified with trial and success, so that the perception is 
 fashioned and fixed ; it does not reflect upon the means by which it 
 arrives at the result, but makes its inductions, like the clodhopper, 
 unconsciously. 
 
 The perceptions which we thus derive from our senses cannot be 
 analyzed and expressed in logical conclusions ; but they involve the 
 same kind of mental process as the conclusions of logic. "There 
 appears to me to be in reality only a superficial difference between 
 the ' conclusions ' of logicians, and those inductive conclusions of 
 which we recognise the result in the conception we gain of the outer 
 world through our sensations. The difference chiefly depends upon 
 the former conclusions being capable of expression in words, while 
 the latter are not ; because, instead of words, they only deal with 
 sensations and the memory of sensations. Indeed, it is just the 
 impossibility of describing sensations, whether actual or remembered, 
 in words, which makes it so difficult to discuss this department of 
 psychology at all." — Helmholtz, Pop. Sec. Led. p. 308. " If I 
 know that a particular way of looking, for which I have learnt how 
 to employ exactly the right kind of innervation, is necessary in order 
 to bring into direct vision a point two feet off and so many feet to 
 the right, this also is a universal proposition which applies to every 
 
228 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MWD. [chap. 
 
 on to remark that when we have once acquired in this 
 way the definite perception of an object, it may on all 
 future occasions be aroused by any one of the separate 
 sensations of which it is constituted ; either the sight 
 of an orange alone, or the touch of it alone, or the 
 smell of it alone, or the taste of it alone, will excite 
 the idea of the orange, the other possible sensations 
 being, as it were, understood. We know right well 
 that these other sensations will be forthcoming if we 
 
 case in which I have fixed a given point at that distance before " 
 (p. 310). 
 
 " The sensations of our nerves of sense are mere symbols indicat- 
 ing certain external objects, and it is usually only after considerable 
 practice that we acquire the power of drawing correct conclusions 
 from our sensations respecting the corresponding objects. Now it 
 is a universal law of the perceptions obtained through the senses, 
 that we pay only so much attention to the sensations actually ex- 
 perienced as is sufficient for us to recognise external objects. In 
 this respect we are one-sided and inconsiderate partisans of practical 
 utility ; far more so indeed than we suspect. All sensations which 
 have no direct reference to external objects we are accustomed, as a 
 matter of course, entirely to ignore, and we do not become aware of 
 them till we make a scientific investigation of the action of the 
 senses." — Helmholtz. 
 
 After pointing out the most striking analogy between names and 
 objects, the connection of which must demonstrably be learnt, and 
 sensations and the objects which produce them, Helmholtz says : 
 "The elementary signs of language are only twenty-six letters, and 
 yet what wonderfully varied meanings can we express and communi- 
 cate by their combination ! Consider, in comparision with this, the 
 enormous number of elementary signs with which the machinery of 
 sight is provided. We may take the number of fibres in the optic 
 nerves as 250,000. Each of these is capable of innumerable different 
 degrees of sensation of one, two, or three primary colours. It 
 follows that it is possible to construct an immeasurably greater 
 number of combinations here than with the few letters which build 
 up our words. Nor must we forget the extremely rapid changes of 
 which the images of sight are capable. No wonder, then, if our 
 senses speak to us in language which can express far more delicate 
 distinctions and richer varieties than can be conveyed by words" 
 (1>- 3M-) 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 229 
 
 make the experiment, but it is as unnecessary to do 
 so on each occasion as it is to spell each letter in 
 a word when we have once learnt to read with ease. 
 The nerve-current of one sense is sufficient for our 
 purpose. Just as we pay away a cheque and other per- 
 sons take it as payment, because we know that it repre- 
 sents its value in cash which will be forthcoming when 
 it is presented, so we use the sensation as a sign of 
 former perception, without testing its value by exciting 
 the associated sensations. It is not only, however, in 
 observation and thinking that we thus employ it as a 
 sign. We employ it in the same way in acting, which 
 is the outward issue or completion of observation and 
 thinking : we observe in order to act, and judgment is 
 the internal representation of the outward act in relation 
 with the perception — that which would, if outwardly ex- 
 pressed, be the act. For this reason I have traced the 
 relations of sensation and perception in this chapter; I 
 could not else have placed our acquired sensorimotor 
 acts in their true light. 
 
 • Little observation is needed to show that the greatest 
 part of the habitual acts which we perform daily are 
 strictly automatic, and that the stimuli which excite them 
 are sensational. Let it be noted, moreover, that these 
 sensations act in their capacity of representative signs : 
 assuredly we do not perceive all the qualities of the 
 objects in reference to which we act ; but one sensation, 
 most commonly that of sight, serving as a sign of former 
 perceptions, is sufficient to excite the appropriate move- 
 ments. Here, indeed, we have the exact analogy of an 
 instinctive act in an animal, the only difference being 
 that in man has been acquired by education what in it 
 has been inherited. When any one moves about in a 
 house or room with the arrangements in which he is 
 quite familiar, he is scarcely more conscious of the 
 objects around him and of the greater part of his 
 
Z30 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 movements than he is of his movements of breathing or 
 of his particular steps in walking ; notwithstanding which, 
 he does not run against the chairs nor stumble against the 
 stairs, but fairly adapts his movements to the position 
 and forms of the objects. But if some new piece of fur- 
 niture be put in a part of the room where there was 
 nothing before, or if some old piece of furniture have its 
 figure changed, — if an additional leaf, for instance, be 
 placed in the table — the chances are that he does stumble 
 against it for a while, until, by familiarity or habit, the 
 new sensation has taken its proper place in the organic 
 groupings of former sensations and been associated with 
 corresponding movements. 
 
 The sensory stimuli of the objects to which we are 
 thoroughly accustomed affect us unconsciously, or 
 nearly so ; we see them, so to speak, without perceiv- 
 ing them, if we are used to them, when we are in 
 such a state of abstraction that we should not see them 
 at all, and we should not be affected by the stimuli of 
 them, if we were not used to them. Perhaps the most 
 striking illustration of automatic action is furnished by 
 the monotonous processes of dressing and undressing 
 which we have the trouble to go through every morning 
 and night of our lives. One operation follows another 
 in mechanical sequence, while consciousness is absorbed 
 in some train of thought, and it is only when something 
 has occurred to interrupt the habitual sequence of acts, or 
 when our attention has been aroused in some other way, 
 that we become conscious in what an automatic fashion we 
 are proceeding. The successive sensations do duty for 
 perceptions, and arouse the movements which are or- 
 ganically linked to them. So customary is it to wind up 
 one's watch after taking it out of the waistcoat pocket on 
 going to bed, that it must have happened to many persons 
 to have on some occasions wound up their watch without 
 intending it, indeed quite unconsciously, when changing 
 
iv.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 231 
 
 their waistcoats in order to dress for dinner ; and I have 
 known a person to go so far as to put on his nightshirt 
 instead of a clean shirt under the same circumstances. 
 Again, it has sometimes happened that, when the mind 
 has been deeply interested in a train of thought, a person 
 has walked from one place to another through streets 
 busy with the turmoil of traffic and the coming and going 
 of men, and yet been unable, on reflecting afterwards, 
 to say positively along which of two streets he came, 
 though he has undoubtedly had what may be called 
 sensory perception of the persons and objects which 
 he has avoided in his walk. 
 
 Many other instances of a like nature might be easily 
 adduced, but I shall content myself with calling atten- 
 tion to the firm association which is established by 
 education between particular sounds, or particular visual 
 sensations, and the adapted complex movements for 
 the articulation of the appropriate words. Children 
 plainly exhibit a tendency to imitate a particular sound, 
 when there is certainly not yet any idea of what 
 the sound means ; and, as every one knows, it is easy 
 enough to read aloud without paying the least atten- 
 tion to the meaning of what is read, the consciousness 
 being otherwise engaged. Dr. Radcliffe relates how he 
 once knew a bright little English girl, about five and a 
 half years of age, who coulcf speak English, French, and 
 German with equal readiness. If spoken to in English, 
 she invariably answered in English ; if in French, she 
 always answered in French ; and if in German, always in 
 German. When addressed in one language, and urged 
 to reply in one of the other languages which she under- 
 stood, she could not do so, and if pressed beyond a 
 certain point burst into tears : a good and obedient 
 child, she could not be coaxed, bribed, or urged to 
 reply in a different language from that in which she was 
 addressed. Dr. Radcliffe's attention was called to the 
 
232 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 fact by the governess, an intelligent person, who could 
 not account for what appeared so singular an act of 
 disobedience. The child died when she was about 
 eleven years old from some affection of the brain, which 
 was supposed to have been brought on by over-educa- 
 tion.* There was no doubt that the child connected 
 definite ideas with the words used in the questions put 
 and the replies made ; but the fact that it could not put 
 the same ideas into another language than that in which 
 it was addressed, showed the dominion exercised by the 
 sound over the articulating movements — the mechanical 
 connection established between them. Three special 
 sounds were adapted to excite one idea, which was 
 capable of expression in three special movements of 
 speech, having in fact its three special tracks through the 
 brain ; but the special sound in each case, acting in its 
 character of sign or excito-motor stimulus of the idea, 
 compelled the movement to which it had been organi- 
 cally linked by education.! It is hardly necessary to 
 point out that language, difficult as it is of acquisition, 
 ultimately gets all the unconscious facility of a reflex act ; 
 experience proving too well that many waste floods of 
 vain words are poured forth without fatigue by some who, 
 like officious Peter proposing to build three tabernacles, 
 know not what they say. Assuredly consciousness is 
 not an essential accompaniment of speech, which may 
 be conscious, sub-conscious, or entirely unconscious. 
 
 It is of the utmost importance to true conceptions of 
 mental function that the full meaning and real bearing 
 
 * Man Trans-Corporeal. Contemporary Review, December 1874. 
 
 + Narcisse Palletier, a Frenchman, who had lived so long among 
 savages as to have forgotten his own language, soon recovered it, 
 and forgot his savage language, when he was rescued. The, old 
 sounds, when once remembered, soon excited the old movements 
 to which they were linked ; no doubt, if he had fallen again among 
 savages, he would soon have recovered their language when he 
 heard the sounds of their words. 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 233 
 
 of the foregoing facts should be distinctly realized. When 
 the sensation excites an acquired sensori-motor act, we 
 must suppose that it does so by virtue of the acquired 
 nature of itself and of its sensory nerve-centre ; that, 
 in fact, it is by virtue of this acquired nature that an 
 object, which has been known by perception, is capable 
 of acting merely as the sensory excito-motor stimulus of 
 adapted movements. For we can hardly suppose in such 
 case that the molecular current excited by the stimulus 
 ascends from the sensory ganglion to the higher cerebral 
 centres, and descends from them to act upon the motoj 
 ganglia, or that, having so ascended, it re-acts upon the 
 sensory ganglion and then passes to the connected motor 
 ganglia. One of these events, no doubt, is what happens 
 when there is a distinct perception of the object, but it 
 is a superfluous and improbable journey to make when 
 the object is not really perceived, and when one quality 
 of it, signifying, if we choose to attend or to per- 
 ceive it, all its other qualities, excites a sensation which 
 acts in its artificial character of a sign of the perception 
 — by virtue, that is, of the acquired nature of its nerve- 
 centre. Moreover, notwithstanding the intimate struc- 
 tural and functional relations between sensory and cere- 
 bral centres, the supposition of an ascent of motion to 
 the latter is opposed to what we have learnt concerning 
 the instinctive acts of animals, and concerning the 
 sensori-motor acts of animals which have been deprived 
 of their hemispheres. These last experiments, if they 
 have been rightly interpreted, seem indeed to be decisive 
 against the argument of an ascent. 
 
 It is necessary to be constantly on our guard to pre- 
 vent physiological conceptions of mental phenomena 
 from being overruled or vitiated by psychological terms. 
 Sensation is not, as the psychological use of the word 
 might seem to imply, a certain inborn faculty of constant 
 quantity, but a general term embracing a multitude of 
 
234 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 particular phenomena that exhibit every degree of varia- 
 tion both in quantity and quality. Simple as a sensation 
 appears, it is in reality infinitely compound, being formed 
 by a fusion of elements. A simple tone is one which is 
 caused by a combination of simple wave-forms ; a ray 
 of light is notably a very complex affair; and even 
 our perception of colour is an induction. It has been 
 supposed that all our sensations of colour are com- 
 pounded of three elementary modes of sensation — red, 
 green, and violet ; Helmholtz adopting Young's hypo- 
 thesis, that there are three classes of optic-fibres distri- 
 buted pretty equally over the surface of the retina, which 
 answer to the undulations of these colours, in other 
 words, which minister to these three modes of sensation. 
 The purest coloured light of the spectrum excites 
 more than one class of fibres, so that our common 
 sensations of colour are never pure elementary feelings ; 
 the red rays, though they affect most powerfully the 
 fibres sensitive to red, affecting in a less degree the 
 other two classes of fibres. If these are incapacitated 
 by allowing the eye to rest for a time on the comple- 
 mentary colour and so exhausting them, and if the eye 
 be then turned to the required colour, a much purer 
 colour is obtained. Whether there are really three sets 
 of fibres, or whether the three colours are produced by 
 different excitations of the same fibres, matters not ; they 
 are still complex. It has been discovered that ordinary 
 sounds consist in like manner of complex aggregates of 
 undulations of different pitches. We perceive, then, 
 that sensations which seem elementary to consciousness 
 are actually compound, and learn furthermore that no 
 amount of skill in subjective analysis could ever have 
 given us the least conception of their complex nature. 
 
 If a sensation which seems to be elementary is thus 
 complex, how much more complex must be the acquired 
 sensation which is gradually matured in the proper 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 235 
 
 nervous centres from the residua or traces which previous 
 sensations of a like kind have left behind them ; the 
 sensation of a cultivated sense thus summing up, as 
 it were, a thousand experiences, as one word often sums 
 up the accumulated acquisitions of generations of men. 
 Education can assuredly improve every sense we have 
 in a remarkable manner. An experiment by Volkmann 
 has shown that when the finger or any limited portion of 
 skin on one side of the body is frequently experimented 
 upon with the compasses, in order to test the degree of 
 sensibility, its tactile sensibility is thereby increased above 
 the level of that of the adjacent parts; and what is 
 more remarkable is, that the sensibility of the symmetri- 
 cal portion of skin on the opposite side of the body will 
 be found to have been also rendered more acute. In- 
 stances of improved sensibility of smell, taste, and hear- 
 ing are too familiar to need mention. 
 
 A patient and thorough study of the phenomena of 
 vision is no doubt best suited to show how composite a 
 product a mature sensation really is, for it will show that 
 in the education of sight there is a gradual transformation 
 of elementary sensations into what finally stand for simple 
 intuitions of the mind : the cultivated visual sensation of 
 an object really being a complex sensori-motor process 
 which represents an implicit judgment of its distance, 
 magnitude, and direction. The experience of those who, 
 having been born blind, have afterwards gained sight, 
 proves that an object seen for the first time seems actually 
 to touch the globe of the eye, and is not recognised, if 
 it be even distinguished as an object ; not the least 
 information is given concerning its form, size, and 
 situation ; the information which cultivated sight gives 
 has been added unto it by education, and is a pro- 
 duct of its acquired nature. As Berkeley aptly says, 
 vision is a language speaking to the eye, which we are 
 not conscious of having learned, because we have been 
 
236 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 learning it ever since we were born, whenever our eyes 
 are open in the light (s). 
 
 The fact is, that we do not see, hear, or otherwise 
 feel by sense the object itself, and have no guarantee 
 that what we feel has any resemblance to the object ; 
 what we feel is the effect that is produced in the 
 nerve centre by the external stimulus, an effect which 
 must needs contain the complex results of the experience 
 embodied in the acquired or differentiated nature of the 
 nerve-circuit ; and if the sensori-motor current were ex- 
 cited in exactly the same way by an internal cause, no 
 external object being present, we should have exactly the 
 same feeling of it, just as dreamers and madmen have. 
 Innate in the constitution of the different ganglionic 
 centres is a specific power of reaction to certain im- 
 pressions made upon organs that are specially adapted 
 to receive them ; but as the waste following activity is 
 restored by nutrition, and a structural modification is 
 thus embodied in the constitution of the nervous centre, 
 becoming more complete and definite with each succeed- 
 ing impression, it comes to pass that an acquired nature 
 is gradually grafted on the original nature of the nerve- 
 centres, and that the sensation gains infinitely in com- 
 plexity. 
 
 The idea to be formed and fixed in the mind from a 
 consideration of the phenomena of the development of 
 sensation, and necessary to their proper interpretation, 
 as indeed to the interpretation of every manifestation of 
 life, is the idea of organization. The mind is not like a 
 sheet of white paper which receives just what is written 
 upon it, nor like a mirror which simply reflects more or 
 less faithfully every object, but by it is connoted a plastic 
 power ministering to a complex process of organization, 
 in which what is suitable to development is assimilated, 
 what is unsuitable is rejected. By the appropriation of 
 the like in impressions made upon the senses we acquire 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 237 
 
 a sensation, of which we might speak, as we do when 
 speaking of idea, as general or abstract ; there is a sort of 
 organic classification ; and there exists henceforth, latent 
 or potential, in the sensory centres, something that may- 
 be called a faculty, which on the occasion of the appro- 
 priate impression renders the sensation clear and definite 
 — in other words, gives the interpretation. It is exactly 
 like what happens in the spinal centres, and exactly like 
 what happens, as we shall hereafter see, in the supreme 
 cerebral centres. Coincident with the assimilation of 
 the like in impressions, there is necesssarily a rejection 
 of the unlike, which, being then appropriated by other 
 nerve tracts, becomes the foundation, or lays the basis, 
 of the faculty of another sensation, just as nutrient mate- 
 rial which is not taken up by one kind of tissue element 
 is assimilated by another kind. In the education of the 
 senses, then, there takes place a differentiation of cells — • 
 in other words, a discernment, as well as an improvement 
 of the faculty of each kind of sensation by the blending 
 of similar residua. There is an analysis separating the 
 unlike, a synthesis blending the like; and by the two pro- 
 cesses of assimilation and discrimination our sensations 
 are gradually formed and developed. The process illus- 
 trates the increasing speciality of individual adaptation 
 to external nature ; and the length of childhood in man 
 is in relation to the formation of his complex sensations. 
 Thus much concerning sensation and sensori-motor 
 action. It is a hard matter for those who take the psy- 
 chological view of mind to realize the firm organic con- 
 nection that is established between the sensory stimulus 
 and its proper movements — the feeling and the act — 
 whereby these finally become as automatic as the motions 
 of a clock's hands. When they observe an end to be 
 accomplished they fail not to fly incontinently to the 
 notion of design. The act, with whatsoever design it dis- 
 plays, is the necessary result of a certain constitution, 
 
238 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 innate or acquired, of the nervous centres, and is not 
 dependent either upon volition or consciousness. Whe- 
 ther consciousness exists or not as an accompaniment, 
 is another question ; automatism does not necessarily 
 exclude consciousness ; and' it is certainly conceivable 
 that some animals are conscious automata, and that, 
 though acting with mechanical necessity, they feel 
 pleasure or suffer pain in doing what they do. Those 
 persons go far beyond this supposition, however, who 
 assume that the nervous centres of man or animal, when 
 performing automatically a series of co-ordinate move- 
 ments, possess a notion of the end which they effect, or 
 display any degree of intelligence and volition. They 
 probably possess no more of such notion than the ele- 
 ments of a chemical compound have of the end which 
 they accomplish when they combine, or than the wind 
 has when it bloweth where it listeth ; * and accordingly 
 they do not fail sometimes, under conditions of disease, 
 to make terrible mistakes, and to cause much suffering 
 to and perhaps miserably to kill the individual by con- 
 tinuing violently reflex actions the cessation of which 
 was necessary to the preservation of life. Even so philo- 
 sophical a writer as Miiller inferred that the sensory 
 centres were endowed with some degree of voluntary 
 power, because of the remarkable actions to which they 
 minister ; thus introducing into his observation, and 
 applying to his interpretation, of the functions of the 
 secondary nervous centres conceptions derived from his 
 
 * "Whoever will examine the language of mankind, may find 
 that we apply expressions to bodies which belong properly to our 
 own manner of proceeding ; and, how well soever we know the 
 contrary, speak of them as voluntary agents, exercising powers of 
 their own ; thus it is said that the wind bloweth where it listeth, and 
 we say of water that it will not mingle with oil, that it will force 
 its way, &c. : terms expressive of a choice, compliance, and resolu- 
 tion similar to those exercised by man." — Tucker's Light of Nature, 
 vol. ii. p. 545. 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 239 
 
 knowledge of the functions of the higher or primary 
 centres. This was surely to reverse the natural order 
 of inquiry, and to apply the complex and obscure to the 
 interpretation of the simple, instead of ascending by in- 
 ductive steps to use the simple in order to disentangle 
 the complex. The before-mentioned experiments upon 
 the frog's spinal cord prove that movements seemingly 
 purposive may be purely automatic : why then introduce 
 a new agency, derived from experience of the highest 
 cerebral centres, in order to account for sensori-motor 
 functions which, though more complex than, are of the 
 same character as, those of the spinal cord ? 
 
 The answer which I conceive it probable may be made 
 is this — because the sensory centres are intermediate in 
 structural position and physiological dignity between the 
 spinal and the supreme cerebral centres, and may be 
 expected, while exhibiting reflex functions like those of 
 the spinal cord, to exhibit also the rudiments of func- 
 tions which attain their special development in the 
 cerebral convolutions. They are more special and com- 
 plex in structure than the spinal centres, receiving and 
 co-ordinating a greater variety of impressions, and it 
 may be argued that they possess not only some degree 
 of consciousness but the germs of intelligence and 
 volition. At any rate, if it be not so in man, there is 
 evidence that it may be so in some of the lower animals. 
 It would appear that the ant and the bee, which have no 
 higher nervous centres than sensory ganglia, and in which 
 the functions of these centres reach a remarkable perfec- 
 tion, are not simply organised machines that operate 
 with unvarying regularity and are destitute of any power 
 of shaping their acts to new experiences'; on the con- 
 trary, observation shows that these creatures do some- 
 times discover in their actions indications of a sensibility 
 to strange experiences and of corresponding adaptations 
 of movements. Take Ruber's account of the humble- 
 
240 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 bees which he put under a bell-glass along with a comb 
 which was of such a shape as not to be capable of stand- 
 ing steadily. Two or three of the bees got upon the 
 comb, and, stretching themselves over its edge with their 
 heads downwards, fixed their fore-feet on the table, so as 
 to make themselves props and to prevent the comb from 
 falling. When they were tired, others took their places, 
 and the series of reliefs went on for nearly three days, 
 until the bees had prepared sufficient wax to build pillars 
 of support. Moreover, when the first pillars were dis- 
 placed, they had recourse to the same operations in order 
 to rebuild them. We could scarcely have a more striking 
 instance of an apparent adaptation of means to an end 
 according to varying circumstances. And I know not 
 how those who would attribute such appropriate action 
 to instinct can distinguish it from understanding, even if 
 it be assumed that similar experiences must at some time 
 have occurred to the race of bees. After all, it is only 
 a manifestation of a power of adapting acts to circum- 
 stances by which we must suppose, and Mr. Darwin has 
 shown it to be probable, that bees have gradually ac- 
 quired their wonderful instincts, and which at bottom is 
 a property of nervous tissue, if not of organic substance.* 
 The power is evidently of a rudimentary kind in bees, 
 and must remain so in creatures that have not the higher 
 nerve- centres in which sensations are combined into 
 ideas, perceptions of the relations of things thus ac- 
 quired, and acts purposely shaped in consequence to 
 
 * Mr. Wallace has broached and upheld the opinion that bees 
 and ants do not act without instruction and blindly. He thinks 
 that birds build their nests, as men build their houses, from obser- 
 vation, memory, and imitation, using the material which each kind 
 can most readily obtain, and building in situations most congenial 
 s habits. Indeed, he asserts that " the peculiar notes of birds 
 are acquired by imitation, as surely as a child learns English or 
 French, not by instinct, but by hearing the language spoken by its 
 parents. " 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 241 
 
 accomplish ends whether the circumstances are changed 
 or not. But because bees have possessed, and still pos- 
 sess, this rudimentary understanding, which differs in 
 simplicity rather than in kind from human understand 
 ing, it does not follow that the sensory ganglia of man 
 are endowed with similar rudimentary functions. On 
 the contrary, it might be argued that as higher nervous 
 centres are differentiated in the course of evolution, 
 functions are localised in them which were more gene- 
 rally diffused in the lower animals, not otherwise than as 
 the fore limbs in man, which in the' ape and some o'ther 
 animals serve both for grasping and walking, are special- 
 ised in structure and function as prehensile organs. In 
 the absence then of positive evidence of intelligence and 
 voluntary power in the sensory ganglia of man, it is a 
 scarcely warrantable assumption to endow them even 
 with the rudiments of these functions.* 
 
 But it is impossible to feel an equal assurance when 
 the question is made one not of the existence of intel- 
 ligence and will, but of the existence of consciousness 
 in the sensory centres. Three considerations occur to 
 the mind in reference to this question. The first is, 
 that in the higher animals properties are localised in 
 particular organs which in lower animals are diffused 
 throughout the organism ; and while this may be used as 
 an argument in favour of the supposition that conscious- 
 ness is entirely limited to the cerebral hemispheres in 
 man, it certainly does not exclude the possibility of its 
 existence in the sensory centres. For it may well be 
 
 * Unless, as I have already pointed out, we take all heart of 
 meaning out of the word volition, by calling the adaptive power of 
 organic element by the name. After referring to Spallanzani's 
 observations on polypes, Prochaska says — "From these and other 
 facts it is manifest that these infusory animalcules feel, and have 
 volition, and possess the character of the true animal ; consequently, 
 they are endowed with a sentient and volitional principle, however 
 destitute they may be of a nervous system." 
 
242 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 that organs which are only a little lower in dignity than 
 the supreme cerebral centres, which are essential to the 
 development of their function, and which are in such 
 intimate functional relation with them throughout life 
 that a functional separation appears to be pure abstrac- 
 tion, do possess that property which is most highly, 
 but not exclusively, developed in 'the higher centres. 
 
 Secondly, it admits of no doubt that consciousness is 
 not a constant quantity, but that there are gradations of 
 consciousness from its most vivid manifestations through 
 stages of lessening subconsciousness down to actual un- 
 consciousness. It may well be then that the sensory 
 centres possess it in a less degree than the centres above 
 them. The plain proof that they do possess it, some 
 might argue, is that we feel pain when we are hurt ; and 
 that the pain is .felt in a sensory centre is further proved 
 by experiments on animals which cry out when they are 
 hurt, after their cerebral hemispheres have been re- 
 moved. The argument, however, is by no means con- 
 clusive. In the first place, we have no proof that the 
 animals feel the pain ; all we know is that they cry. out 
 as if they felt it ; and if we may trust our inferences from 
 other experiments on animals and from observations of 
 men under chloroform and in comatose states, we must 
 admit .that the cry may be purely a reflex act. In the 
 second place,.it is doubtful whether we ever are conscious 
 of a sensation without perceiving, whether in fact we can 
 have consciousness of a pure sensation: when we say 
 we feel it, we feel it in a particular part of the body; and 
 what is that but to perform internally a sensori-motor act 
 and to recognise more or less clearly its where, in other 
 words, to perceive it according to forms of space? We 
 infer the existence of simple sensations out of which 
 ideas are formed by a mental synthesis, but it is a ques- 
 tion whether a consciousness of them does not imply 
 that our higher cerebral centres have come into play 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 243 
 
 and that we are exercising perception. To adopt the 
 metaphysical theory which has been broached by some 
 psychologists, that the organism in its relation to per- 
 ception belongs neither to the ego nor to the non-ego, 
 but occupies an intermediate position between them, is 
 to dupe ourselves with vain words, which do not carry 
 us a step farther towards an understanding of the facts ; 
 whether we accept it or not, the problem remains just 
 what it was. 
 
 The third consideration is, that although the cere- 
 bral centres, as representing the highest and most com- 
 plex co-ordination of functions, are undoubtedly the seat 
 of clear consciousness, of the individual's conscious- 
 ness as an ego, the sensory centres may still be conscious 
 after a fashion of their own, and may send their un- 
 perceived contributions to make up the sum of that 
 general consciousness which is the consciousness of the 
 ego. This theory of an unconscious consciousness I 
 ' have already discussed, and I need say no more about 
 it now. The conclusion of the whole matter is, that 
 while many plausible arguments may be brought forward 
 on the one side and on the other, we have not the data 
 to warrant us in deciding positively whether conscious- 
 ness, or, if any, what sort of consciousness, is a property 
 of the sensory ganglia, and that the question must for 
 the present remain open. 
 
 One reflection we may profitably educe from the dis- 
 cussion, before passing from the subject — namely, how 
 artificial and unwarranted is the absolute division which 
 is made between the conscious and the unconscious, 
 between psychology and physiology. Notwithstanding 
 that nature everywhere reveals the law of continuity, and 
 notwithstanding that the progress of knowledge has been 
 a history of the breaking down of arbitrary divisions in 
 knowledge where none existed in nature, we still go on 
 to make nature conform to our divisions, and as soon as 
 
244 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chaJ. 
 
 we are driven from one artificial barrier flee for refuge 
 to another and insist on holding that at any cost. All 
 creation's endless changes proclaim the continuity and 
 the becoming of things : man proclaims the divisions of 
 science and the immutability of knowledge. How much 
 idle discussion would have been saved in times past, 
 and would be prevented in times to come, had the 
 true lesson been taken to heart ! When it was found 
 out that the earth was not fixed and immovable, men 
 opposed the new doctrine as if all their faith and hope 
 depended upon their holding fast to the old and false 
 doctrine which they had so long cherished; when the 
 geologists announced that, the surface of the earth had 
 been undergoing continuous changes through the ages, the . 
 mountains having been built up and the valleys scooped 
 out by natural agencies, and the sea having become dry 
 land and the dry land sea, the new doctrine was opposed 
 with might and main ; and now that in this day and gene- 
 ration it has been all but proved that the species of 
 living things are not immutable creations, but have been 
 formed by the gradual operation of natural causes through 
 successions of ages, there is the same angry opposition 
 made to the new doctrine, and the same passionate cling- 
 ing to the old doctrine of fixedness is displayed. When 
 a new and great truth is discovered, men too often act 
 as if the earth were giving way beneath their trembling 
 feet and heaven vanishing from their longing gaze, when 
 it is merely the fabric of their ideas which is giving way, 
 and when they ought to set earnestly to work to re- 
 construct it. 
 
 Has not the time come when we may justly ask 
 ourselves whether there really is so great a gulf fixed 
 as it has been the fashion to assume between brain and 
 mind ? It may be worth while at any rate to adopt by 
 way of experiment the theory that consciousness, though 
 the usual, is not the indispensable accompaniment 
 
IV. ] SECOND A R Y NER VO US CENTRES. 245 
 
 of mental function — a constant concomitant, if you 
 will, but not an essential factor — and that all the 
 operations which are considered mental and to belong 
 to psychology may be performed as pure functions of 
 the nervous system, without consciousness giving evi- 
 dence of them or having any part in them ; and then to 
 observe how far the theory will throw light upon the 
 phenomena of the mental life. Reasoning would go on 
 as before in that case, only there would be no inner 
 sense of it. What appears to the outer senses as 
 physical law appears to the inner sense of consciousness 
 as logical necessity ; they are two aspects of the same 
 fact ; were consciousness suspended or abolished, the fact 
 and the function would remain though the logical cogni- 
 tion was lost ; the physiological mechanism would per- 
 form its work whether its process and results appealed to 
 the inner sense of consciousness or not, just as it would 
 do whether it was watched or not by the outer senses 
 of another person. To ascribe to consciousness an active 
 part as cause in the cognition of a logical necessity is 
 therefore no less absurd than it would be to ascribe to 
 the outer senses of a scientific observer an active part in 
 the causation of the physical law which they are making 
 known to him. Whatever else may be thought, it can 
 hardly be doubted that too much has been made of con- 
 sciousness in times past, and that instead of mental phe- 
 nomena revolving round it as the sun of the system, it 
 is rather a sort of satellite of mind — the indicator which 
 makes known what is being done, not the agent in 
 doing it. 
 
 Let us suppose that one half of the brain may suffice 
 to do all our mental work, as there is some reason to 
 believe it may, and let us make the purely hypothetical 
 supposition that the other half serves, by reason of its 
 intimate communion and sympathy with it, to make us 
 conscious of what is going on in the working half; 
 12 
 
246 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 it is not difficult to conceive that something might 
 occur to interrupt close intercommunion between the 
 two halves, in which case it is plain that mental func- 
 tions would go on without consciousness. That the 
 division of the brain into two halves is the physiologi- 
 cal condition of self-consciousness may be an unten- 
 able hypothesis, but there is nothing unwarrantable in 
 the assumption that there is a certain unknown "action of 
 the brain which is the condition of consciousness, and 
 that this action may be suspended without entailing an 
 entire or perhaps even a partial suspension of those 
 cerebral functions which, when conscious, are called 
 mental. However, let the truth concerning the cerebral 
 hemispheres be what it may, it hardly admits of question 
 that sensations and their respondent movements, which 
 are accompanied by consciousness when first experienced, 
 are gradually organised in the proper nerve-centres, 
 thus become automatic, and then take place as effectually 
 without consciousness as with it. 
 
 The reaction of the motor ganglia that are in con- 
 nection with sensory centres, whether designed or 
 undesigned, co-ordinate or irregular, may be excited not 
 only by impressions conveyed to them by the afferent 
 nerves of the senses, and by the so-called organic stimuli, 
 but also by a stimulus descending from the cerebral 
 hemispheres. That cerebral activity which coming from 
 above appears in consciousness as an idea or an impulse 
 of the will, acts upon the secondary motor centres, 
 and calls forth those movements which are commonly 
 reflex to impressions from without. In such case it is 
 tolerably certain that the idea or volitional impulse does 
 not act directly on the motor nerve-fibres, but that it acts 
 either upon the sensory nuclei and through them upon 
 the connected motor nuclei, or, as is more probable, 
 directly upon the ganglionic cells of the motor nuclei, in 
 which the potentiality of the movement exists latent, 
 
iv.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 247 
 
 statical, or, as it were, abstract ; the stimulus from above 
 disturbing the organic equilibrium, and releasing or 
 setting free the movement together with whatsoever of 
 design there is in it ; the same operations are performed, 
 and through the same instrumentality, as when the im- 
 pression conveyed by the afferent nerve from without 
 excites the movement Thus the will is entirely de- 
 pendent for its outward realisation in action upon that 
 mechanism of automatic function which is gradually 
 organised in the subordinate centres ; it cannot, as we 
 shall hereafter see, at once instigate successfully a new 
 movement, nor can it execute any movement without a 
 guiding sensation of some kind : the cultivation of the 
 senses, and the special adaptations of their motor re- 
 actions which are .gradually organised, are necessary 
 antecedents, essential prerequisites, to the due formation 
 and operation of will. The sensorium commune repre- 
 sents, in fact, various independent nervous centres, and 
 never does act merely as a conductor transmitting un- 
 modified the stimulus, whether this ascend from without 
 or descend from the cerebral hemispheres. Bear this 
 clearly in mind, and the memory of it will help to get rid 
 of some difficulties, when we come to deal with the will. 
 
 It is not needful to say anything here of the seeming 
 disproportion between the amount of energy expended in 
 the answering movement, and the moderate stimulus to 
 the sensory ganglia by which the movement is excited ; 
 inasmuch as what was said in this regard of the spinal 
 centres is strictly applicable to the secondary nervous 
 centres. A special inquiry would only serve here, as 
 elsewhere, to set forth needless evidence in support of 
 the principle of the conservation of force. 
 
 And now let me briefly indicate the general causes of 
 disorder of the functions of the sensory ganglia : they are 
 in the main such as have been already pointed out to be 
 causes of disturbance of the functions of the spinal cord : — 
 
248 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 i. As a natural fact, there may be an innate vice, 
 feebleness, or instability of composition of the ganglionic 
 cells. Such fault of nature is commonly owing to the 
 existence of some nervous disease in the hereditary ante- 
 cedents ; but it may of course be due to any other of the 
 many recondite causes of degeneration of nerve element. 
 Hallucinations of vision are by no means infrequent 
 amongst some children at an early age, especially among 
 such as suffer from chorea. And in those rare cases in 
 which insanity occurs in children soon after they are 
 born, it is chiefly exhibited in violent and irregular sen- 
 sori-motor movements ; herein resembling essentially the 
 insanity that sometimes ensues in animals. The un- 
 natural laughter, the shrieking, the biting, and the tearing 
 of the insane infant assuredly testify to a degenerate state 
 of the motor and sensory cells in the sensorium commune : 
 one might even venture to say that there was a true 
 sensorial madness. It is most interesting to add that the 
 disorder may alternate with, or be replaced by, general 
 convulsions, the madne.ss ceasing when the convulsions 
 supervene; 'in such case a transference of the disturb- 
 ance from one system of nervous centres to another takes 
 place. 
 
 Again, there may be every degree of deficient sensi- 
 bility down to actual insensibility of the ganglionic cells 
 of the sensory ganglia. It is obvious that people differ 
 naturally in the acuteness of their senses : there are un- 
 dulations of light to which one person's retina is not 
 sensitive, which nevertheless produce the sensation of 
 light in another person; and there are vibrations of 
 sound audible to one person which, either by reason of 
 being too rapid or too slow, are inaudible to another. 
 Moreover, singular idiosyncrasies in regard to the sus- 
 ceptibility of a particular sense are displayed in some in- 
 stances, one person being overpowered by the scent of a 
 rose, another fainting away if a cat be concealed in the 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 249 
 
 room, and a third almost falling into convulsions if a 
 piece of silk be sharply brushed with the finger. In 
 idiots the senses commonly partake of the general 
 stupidity, although a remarkably acute smell is now and 
 then exhibited. • The hearing is frequently defective ; 
 smell is often imperfect, the olfactory bulbs being insuffi- 
 ciently developed ; taste absent or extremely vitiated, so 
 that they will eat unconcerned the filthiest or the most 
 pungent matters ; and the sensibility- of the skin is some- 
 times extensively absent, or it is generally dull, so that 
 they suffer very little pain from injuries. The idiots of 
 the lowest class have usually no other affection but that 
 of hunger, which they exhibit by unrest, grunting, or the 
 like ; but even some of these miserable creatures have at 
 times attacks of fury, without evident reason, in which 
 they scratch, strike and bite, as the insane infant does. 
 
 Dulness of sensibility, when not nearly reaching the 
 stage of idiotic degeneration, is of course unfavourable to 
 intellectual acquisition ; but, on the other hand, a very 
 acute and delicate sensibility is attended with evils and 
 dangers of its own. In the former case, although there 
 is a hindrance to assimilation, yet that which is appro- 
 priated is commonly retained with great persistence ; in 
 the latter case, there is certainly quick reaction, but no 
 lasting appropriation, and,- if the sensibility is intensified 
 beyond a certain point, there may even be a lapse into 
 that degenerate state in which, not the special sensation, 
 but pain is felt, and irregular and convulsive reaction 
 takes place. When the sensory centre is acutely affected, 
 perception is incomplete or absent, just as when there is 
 strong emotion there is little knowledge. To know an 
 object there must be little feeling; the organic sensations, 
 which are all feeling, yield no knowledge. It is of no 
 small importance that these natural differences in the 
 constitution of the ganglionic cells should be plainly 
 recognised, for they unquestionably are at the root of 
 
250 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 certain differences in individual character and intellect. 
 The direction of a man's pursuits in life may be deter- 
 mined by the capacity of a particular sense, which 
 naturally selects the class of impressions agreeable to it; 
 and so determines the corresponding. reactions, that is, 
 the general course df the life-work. 
 
 2. An excessive use of the senses, without due inter- 
 vals of rest, produces exhaustion, and, if continued, actual 
 degeneration of them ; here, as elsewhere, the force ex- 
 pended must be restored if the energy of the matter is to 
 be maintained. A too powerful impression made upon 
 any sense may also diminish, or actually destroy, its power 
 of reaction ; immediate paralysis of sight, of hearing, or 
 of smell has followed a sudden and powerful impression 
 upon the particular sense ; and if the paralysis is not 
 complete, the sensibility of the sense for weaker im- 
 pressions may still be lowered fqr some time. After 
 looking at a green colour for a while the sensibility of 
 the retina to green rays is exhausted, so that when the 
 eye is afterwards directed to white light the part, of the 
 retina susceptible to the green elements of white light is 
 unaffected, and. a sensation of the complementary colour, 
 purple, is produced. Moreover, the sensation itself may 
 persist for a while after the cause of it has disappeared, as 
 when an image of the sun remains after we have ceased 
 to look at it, or the roar of the cannon abides in the ears 
 after the firing has ceased. The molecular vibrations 
 excited in the nerve-centres continue for a few moments, 
 and subside gradually. Such persistence of action in the 
 ganglionic centre will serve to convey a notion of the con- 
 dition of things which exists when a hallucination has 
 been produced by internal causes. One of the best 
 illustrations of the persistence of a sensation is afforded 
 by the well-known experiment of rotating a circular disc 
 with alternate black and white sectors. Above a certain 
 rate of rotation there are no longer separate impressions 
 
[V.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 251 
 
 of black and white, but a continuous impression of grey- 
 is produced. The impression made upon the retina by 
 a white sector continues during the short interval occupied 
 by the passage of the black sector over the same point ; 
 the result being the same as if the quantity of light from 
 the white sectors were distributed uniformly over the 
 whole surface of the disk. In this way the maximum 
 duration of an impression has been measured. 
 
 3. The state of the blood has a most direct effect 
 upon the functions of the sensory ganglia. Too much 
 blood, as is well known, gives rise to subjective sensa- 
 tions, such as flashes of light before the eyes and roaring 
 in the ears ; but it is not so generally known that when 
 the abnormal action reaches a certain intensity, move- 
 ments responsive to, or sympathetic with, the hallucina- 
 tions may take place. N evertheless, they may : as the 
 sensory ganglia have an independent action in health, so 
 also may they act independently in disease ; and as in 
 health there is co-ordinate or designed sensori-motor 
 action, so in disease there may be convulsive sensori- 
 motor action evincing more or less co-ordination or 
 design. Of violent, but more or less co-ordinate, action 
 we have, I think, an example in the raving and danger- 
 ous fury which often follows a succession of severe 
 epileptic fits, and which I take leave to describe as in 
 the main a setisorial insanity. The patient's senses are 
 possessed with hallucinations, his ganglionic central cells 
 being in a state of what may be called convulsive action ; 
 before the eyes are blood-red flames of fire, amidst which 
 whosoever happens to present himself appears as a devil, 
 or otherwise horribly transformed ; the ears are filled 
 with a terrible roaring noise, or resound with a voice 
 imperatively commanding him to save himself; the smell 
 is perhaps one of sulphurous stifling ; and the desperate 
 and violent actions are the convulsive reactions to such 
 fearful hallucinations. The individual in such state is a 
 
252 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 sensori-motor machine set in destructive motion, and he 
 perpetrates the extremest violence or the most desperate 
 murder without consciousness at the time, and without 
 memory of it afterwards. 
 
 A deficiency of healthy blood is a cause of disorder of 
 the sensory centres. A great loss of blood powerfully 
 affects the senses ; the anaemia of chlorotic and hysterical 
 women is the probable cause of the many anomalous 
 sensations and motor disturbances which disappear as 
 the condition of the blood improves ; and a manifest 
 poverty of blood often accompanies the chorea of chil- 
 dren with its hallucinations. 
 
 A perverted condition of the blood, whether from 
 something bred in the body or introduced from without, 
 is known to be a powerful cause of sensory disorder. 
 Evidence of such injurious influence we have in the 
 hallucinations which sometimes follow for a time certain 
 acute diseases, as well as in the delirium which occurs 
 in the course of them ; in the effects which alcohol pro- 
 duces upon the senses ; in the actions of poisons, such 
 as belladonna and aconite, which markedly affect the 
 senses ; and especially in the operation of haschisch, a 
 poison which appears to concentrate its action upon the 
 sensorium commune. In hydrophobia the presence of 
 a virus in the blood notably gives rise to most violent 
 nervous disturbance ; the sight or sound of a fluid, a 
 movement in the room, or a current of air, being suffi- 
 cient to excite terrible convulsions. 
 
 4. An irritation operating by reflex action is un- 
 doubtedly the occasional cause of sensorial disturbance. 
 Pressure upon or wound of a sensitive nerve has some- 
 times produced extensive paralysis of sensibility; a bad 
 tooth may notably give rise • to amaurosis ; vertigo, hal- 
 lucinations, and illusions are now and then plainly the 
 result of an irritation proceeding from a centripetal 
 nerve, not perhaps felt in any other way than as it is 
 
IV.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 253 
 
 testified by effects which disappear with the removal of 
 the irritation. An interesting example of severe dis- 
 turbance of the nervous centres from a slight eccentric 
 irritation is related by Dr. Brown-Sdquard, to whom it 
 was communicated by Mr. C. De Morgan. A lad, aged 
 fourteen, as he was getting up in the morning, was heard 
 by his father to be making a great noise in his bedroom. 
 On the latter rushing into the room, he found his son in 
 his shirt, violently agitated, talking . incoherently, and 
 breaking to pieces the furniture. His father caught hold 
 of him and put him back into bed, where at once the 
 boy became composed, but did not seem at all conscious 
 of what he had done. On getting out of bed he had 
 'felt something odd, he said, but he was quite well. A 
 surgeon who was sent for found him reading quietly, 
 with clean tongue and cheerful countenance, and wishful 
 to get up. He had never had epilepsy, but had enjoyed 
 good health hitherto. He was told to get up ; but on 
 putting his feet on the floor and standing up his coun- 
 tenance instantly changed, the jaw became violently 
 convulsed, and he was about to rash forward, when he 
 was seized and pushed back on to the bed. At once he 
 became calm again, said he had felt odd, but was sur- 
 prised when asked what was the matter with him. He 
 had been fishing on the previous day, and, having got 
 his line entangled, had waded into the river to disengage 
 it, but was not aware that he had hurt his feet in any 
 way, — that he had even scratched them. " But on hold- 
 ing up the right great toe with my finger and thumb, to 
 examine the sole of the foot, the leg was drawn up, and 
 the muscles of the jaw were suddenly convulsed, and on 
 letting go the toe these effects instantly ceased." There 
 was no redness, no swelling, but on the bulb of the toe 
 a small elevation, as if a bit of gravel, less than the head 
 of a pin, had been pressed beneath the cuticle. On 
 compressing this against the nail cautiously, a slight 
 
254 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 ■ convulsion ensued ; there was no pricking when pressed, 
 but he said something made him feel very odd. The 
 slightly raised part was clipped away; no gravel was 
 found, but the strange sensation was gone, and never 
 returned.* 
 
 The general bodily feeling which results from the sum 
 of the different organic processes is not attended with 
 any definite consciousness or perception of the causes 
 that give rise to it ; the organic stimuli are, in fact, 
 organically felt, but do not in the natural state of health 
 excite, as a stimulus to one of the special senses does, 
 a particular state of consciousness ; and when the organic 
 stimuli do force themselves into consciousness, as hap- 
 pens in disease, then it is in pain that their action is felt. 
 In respect of our organic feeling we are, in reality, on a 
 level with those humble animals that have a general sen- 
 sibility without any organs for special discrimination and 
 comparison ; and if this were the only feeling which an 
 individual had, he would probably not know that he 
 was an ego. Having no idea of the particular cause of 
 any modification in this general feeling, we are plainly 
 most favourably placed for the generation of illusions 
 with regard to the cause. Consequently it is not sur- 
 prising to find that the insane frequently have extravagant 
 
 * Lectures on the Physiology and Pathology of the Central Nervous 
 System, by Dr. Brown-Sequard, i860. A case singularly and sus- 
 piciously like the one above related is quoted by Burrows {Com- 
 mentaries on Insanity, p. 215) from Hufeland. A boy between 
 thirteen and fourteen years of age suddenly began to talk in a very 
 wild and incoherent way, and at length became ungovernable. This 
 state was assuaged by soporifics. But the paroxysm was observed 
 to recur whenever he was placed on his feet. On examination, a 
 reddish spot was noticed oh one foot, which, when pressed, always 
 occasioned a fresh paroxysm. Upon an incision being made, a 
 minute piece of glass was discovered and extracted. During the 
 operation the patient was furious, but every symptom of violence 
 vanished when the offending cause was removed. 
 
rv.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 255 
 
 hallucinations and illusions respecting the cause of an 
 abnormal sensation which is actually due to a morbid 
 state of some internal organ ; they think to interpret it 
 as its unusual character seems to demand, and conform- 
 ably with their experience of the definite perceptions 
 of the special senses; accordingly they attribute the 
 anomalous feeling to frogs, serpents, or other such crea- 
 tures that have got into their insides. 
 
 5. Whether any beneficial influence is exerted upon 
 the nutrition of the nervous centres of the sensorium 
 commune by the centres that lie above it, must remain 
 uncertain, though it is probable enough! No trustworthy 
 conclusions can be drawn from experiments in which the 
 cerebral hemispheres have been removed, for the mis- 
 chief done is far too great to warrant any inference. It 
 is certain 'that an area of morbid activity in the cerebral 
 hemispheres may act injuriously upon the sensory centres 
 and give rise to secondary derangement of their func- 
 tions; but the result is then perhaps due to reflex or 
 sympathetic action, the morbid centre acting as a morbid 
 centre of irritation in another internal organ notably does. 
 
 In concluding this account of the sensory nervous 
 centres, I have only to add that a review of their relations 
 and functions does certainly establish a close analogy 
 with the relations and functions of the spinal centres. 
 In both cases there are nervous centres which have the 
 power of independent reaction, though they are usually 
 subordinated to the control of higher centres ; in both 
 cases the faculties are for the most part organised gradu- 
 ally in relation to outward circumstances through the 
 plastic power of the nervous centres ; and in both cases 
 the independent power of action of the centres may, by 
 reason of disease, be exhibited in explosive demonstra- 
 tion. The paroxysm of hallucination which affects the 
 cells of the sensorium commune excites, a corresponding 
 convulsive energy of the motor centres, and drives the 
 
256 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 furious epileptic to desperate violence, is as little within his 
 control as is the convulsion of his limbs that is owing to 
 disease of the spinal cord. 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 1 (p. 194). — It ought not to be forgotten that Dr. Darwin distin- 
 guished voluntary from sensori-motor movements. " Many common 
 actions of life are produced in a similar manner («. e. , by sensation). If 
 a fly settles on my forehead, whilst I am intent on my present occu- 
 pation, I dislodge it with my finger without exciting my attention or 
 breaking the train of my ideas." — Zoonomia, vol. i. p. 40. "Other 
 muscular motions, that are frequently connected with our sensations, 
 as those of the sphincter of the bladder and anus, and the musculi 
 erectores penis, were originally excited into motion by irritation, for 
 young children make water, and have other evacuations, without 
 attention to these circumstances — ' et primis etiam ab incunabulis 
 tenduntur ssepius puerorum penes, amore nondum expergefacto. 
 So the nipples of young women are liable to become turgid by irri- 
 tation, long before they are in a. situation to be excited by the 
 pleasureof giving milk to the lips of the child." — Ibid. p. 38. "There 
 is a criterion by which we may distinguish our voluntary acts or 
 thoughts from those that are excited by our sensations. The former 
 are always employed about the means to acquire pleasurable objects, 
 or to avoid painful ones ; while the latter are employed about the 
 possession of those that are already in our power. " And he goes on 
 to say that the ideas and actions of brutes, like those of children are 
 almost perpetually produced by their present pleasure or their 
 present pains ; they seldom busy themselves about the means of pro- 
 curing future bliss or avoiding future misery. — Ibid., vol. i. p. 184. 
 
 One of the best examples of acquired sensori-motor action is 
 furnished by the story of the old soldier who was carrying home his 
 Sunday dinner, when some one behind him called out suddenly in a 
 tone of command, "Attention." Instantly he dropped his dinner 
 and stood in the attitude of attention. Dr. Jackson tells another 
 equally illustrative story : he was riding on an omnibus one day 
 when, after the vehicle had stopped, one of the horses turned stupid 
 and would not start again, notwithstanding all that the driver could 
 do. The conductor thereupon opened the door of the omnibus and 
 shut it with a bang, when the animal started at once. 
 
 * (p. 213). — In the Forty- third Report of the Massachusetts 
 Asylum for the Blind, Dr. Howe relates the following instances of 
 
iv.] SECONDARY NERVOUS CENTRES. 257 
 
 the greater keenness to which the remaining senses may be brought 
 when one sense is absent : — 
 
 "Julia Brace, a deaf and blind mute, a pupil of the American Asylum, 
 had a fine physical organization and highly nervous temperament. 
 In her blindness and stillness her main occupation was the exercise 
 of her remaining senses of smell, touch, and taste, so that through 
 them she might get knowledge of all that was going on around 
 her. Smell, however, seems to be the sense on which she most 
 relies. She smells at everything which she can bring within range 
 of the sense ; and she has come to perceive odours utterly insensible 
 to other persons. When she meets a person whom she has met 
 before she instantly recognizes him by the smell of his hand, or of 
 his glove. If it be a stranger she smells his hand, and the impres- 
 sion is so strong that she can recognize him long after by smelling 
 his hand, or even his glove, if just taken off. She knows all her 
 acquaintances by the smell of their hands. Surprising things are told 
 of the nicety of her sense. She was employed in sorting the clothes 
 of the pupils, after they came out of wash, and could distinguish 
 those of each friend. If half a dozen strangers should throw, each 
 one his glove into a hat, and they were shaken up, Julia will take 
 one glove, smell it, then smell the hand of each person, and unerr- 
 ingly assign each glove to its owner. It is even said that if, among 
 the visitors, there is a brother and sister, Julia can pick out their 
 gloves by a certain similarity of smell, but cannot distinguish the 
 one from the other." Does not this case furnish a strong argument 
 in support of the conjecture that a dog removed to a distant place 
 finds its way home by following backwards a train of smells which 
 it has experienced ? 
 
 He gives another instance illustrating the remarkable acuteness of 
 the sense of hearing in a blind boy : — 
 
 "Many years ago, an ingenious locksmith applied to me for the 
 ' loan ' of a blind boy, as he said, who had quick ears and a silent 
 mouth. On giving satisfactory answers, he got his 'loan.' He 
 wanted a boy to help him (o open a new and complicated lock to a 
 safe. An inventor had exhibited a locked safe and the key, saying that 
 there was money within, which should be given to whoever could 
 open the lock without deranging it. The peculiarity of the lock was 
 that it had ten bolts which could not be seen from the outside. 
 These ten bolts seemed, from all that could be ascertained, exactly 
 alike ; but, in reality, one of them was an inch longer than the 
 others, so that when all were thrown forward, that one alone 
 reached the projecting part of the safe, and held the door closed. 
 The key, when iusened, would lift any of the ten bolts ; but, in 
 
258 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. iv. 
 
 order to open the safe, it must be applied to the long bolt, and to 
 that only, and that one must be lifted and turned back, in order to 
 open the lock. But, if any other of the ten were lifted and turned 
 back, ever so little, it deranged the combination, and the lock could 
 only be opened by a peculiar instrument. The object, then, was to 
 ascertain which of the ten was thrown forward, without turning back 
 any other one. 
 
 "The mechanic lifted each bolt carefully with the key, and let it 
 fall, but without trying to throw it back ; and he then tried to 
 ascertain if in falling it made any peculiar noise ; for he inferred 
 that, as the only one which held the door was an inch longer than 
 the others, it must fall with a slightly greater force. But the 
 difference was too slight for his ear. He took the blind lad, and 
 asked him to listen carefully to the sound which each bolt made as 
 he lifted it and let it fall. After listening to each one intently, the 
 lad said the sixth one struck a little the loudest. The mechanic 
 lifted and let fall each one carefully several times, and each time the 
 boy insisted that the sixth bolt sounded the loudest. Upon this, 
 the mechanic lifted and turned back the sixth, and the lock was 
 opened without the combination being deranged." 
 
 3 (p. 236). — " Alciphron : — If vision be only a language speak- 
 ing to the eyes, it may be asked, when did men learn this language ? 
 To acquire the knowledge of so many signs as go to the making up 
 a language, is a work of some difficulty. But will any man say lie 
 hath spent time, or been at pains, to leam this language of vision ? 
 
 "Euphranor: — No wonder we cannot assign a time beyond 
 our remotest memory. If we have been all practising this' language, 
 ever since our first entrance into the world : if the author of nature 
 constantly speaks to the eyes of all mankind, even in their earliest 
 infancy, whenever their eyes are open in the light, whether alone or 
 in company : it doth not seem to me at all strange that men should 
 not be aware they had ever learned a language, begun so early, and 
 practised so constantly, as this of vision. And if we also consider iliat 
 it is the same throughout the whole world, and, not like other 
 languages, differing in different places, it will not seem unaccount- 
 able that men should mistake the connexion between the proper 
 objects of sight and the things signified by them to be founded in 
 necessary relation, or likeness, or that they should even take them 
 for the same things. Hence it seems easy to conceive, why men 
 who do not think should confound in this language of vision the signs 
 with the things signified, otherwise than they are wont to do in the 
 various particular languages formed by the several nations of men." 
 —Bishop Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, vol. i. p. 231. Ed, 1732. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA; CORTICAL CELLS OP 
 THE CEREBRAL HEMISPHERES ; IDEATIONAL 
 NERVOUS CENTRES;* PRIMARY OR SUPREME 
 NERVOUS CENTRES; INTELLECTORIUM COM- 
 MUNE. 
 
 By the study of physiology it has been placed beyond 
 doubt that the nerve-cells which exist in countless numbers 
 — about 600 millions in number, according to Meynert's 
 calculations — in the grey matter spread over the surface of 
 the hemispheres are the nervous centres of ideas. The 
 cerebral hemispheres represent, in reality, two large ganglia 
 that lie above the sensory and motor centres, and are 
 connected with them by a multitude of nerve-fibres, de- 
 scribed by Reil as the fibres of the internal sense; they 
 are superadded in man and the higher animals for the 
 further fashioning of sensory impressions into ideas or 
 conceptions. 
 
 This important step in the evolution of the human 
 mind consists in an abstraction of the essential trom 
 the particular and its re-embodiment in idea ; it is in fact 
 an idealisation of the sensory impressions, and may be 
 
 * " We have not a name for that complex notion which embraces 
 as one whole all the different phenomena to which the term Idea 
 relates. As we say Sensation, we might say also Ideation ; it 
 would be a very useful word ; and there is no objection to it, except 
 the pedantic habit of decrying a new term." — James Mill, Analysis 
 of the Human Mind, p. 42. 
 
2 6o THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 regarded as an epigenetic development of nature : what the 
 true artist does in his art nature does continually in the 
 development of the human mind. Looking not at the 
 individual man and his work as the end, but looking at 
 him as a small and subordinate part of the vast and har- 
 monious whole, as a means to a far-off end, it is suffi- 
 ciently evident that the history of mankind is the history 
 of the latest and highest organic development ; that in 
 the evolution of the human mind nature is undergoing its 
 consummate development through man. And the law 
 manifest in this highest display of organic development 
 is still that law of progressive specialisation and in- 
 creasing complexity which has been traceable through 
 the long chain of organic beings. So exquisitely deli- 
 cate, however, are the organic processes of mental de^ 
 velopment which take place in the nerve-centres of the 
 cortical layers, that they are certainly, so far as our pre- 
 sent means of investigation reach, quite impenetrable to 
 the senses ; the mysteries of their secret operations can- 
 not be unravelled ; they are like nebula? which no tele- 
 scope can yet resolve. Nor will it be thought reasonable 
 to ask such knowledge, when we reflect that we have not 
 yet the means of knowing the properties and structure of 
 the molecule of any liquid or solid — what are its internal 
 motions and what are the parts and shape of it ; and that 
 it would require a microscope capable of magnifying from 
 12,000 to 16,000 times to show the molecular structure 
 of water.* 
 
 The cerebral hemispheres are not alone the nerve cen- 
 tres of ideas, but they are also the centres of emotion and 
 volition. In animals that are deprived of their hemi- 
 spheres, all trace of spontaneity or will disappears from 
 their movements ; this effect being, as might be expected, 
 
 * According to Sir W. Thomson's calculations, the distance 
 between two molecules of water is such that there are between five 
 hundred millions and five thousand millions of them in an inch. 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 261 
 
 much more evident in experiments on the higher than on 
 the lower Vertebrata. In Fishes, as for example in the 
 carp, scarcely any difference is observed in its swimming 
 after its hemispheres have been removed ; but if its move- 
 ments be watched more carefully, and compared with 
 those of a carp which has not been mutilated, a certain 
 change will be recognised. According to Vulpian, it 
 moves forward in a straight line, never turning to one 
 side or the other except when it meets with an obstacle, 
 and not stopping until it is completely fatigued; it seems 
 impelled to move by some necessity, a necessity occa- 
 sioned probably by the stimulus of the water on its body. 
 The more marked effects produced in the higher Verte- 
 brata by the removal of the hemispheres have already 
 been described. 
 
 It has long been surmised that different convolutions 
 of the brain discharge different functions in the mental 
 life, and the phrenologists, by inferring organ from func- 
 tion, went so far as to precisely map out the cerebral 
 surface into definite regions and to assign its particular 
 mental faculty to each region. The localisation which 
 they made has not been borne out by anatomical re- 
 search, nor do the faculties which they assume receive 
 adequate support from psychological analysis. That the 
 high, broad, and prominent forehead marked intellectual 
 power, was a belief which the ancient Greeks entertained, 
 and which has long been popularly held ; and the notion 
 that lowness and narrowness of the forehead indicate 
 intellectual inferiority is in harmony with the observa- 
 tions that in the negro, and more markedly in the Bosjes- 
 man, the anterior part of the hemispheres is narrower 
 than in Europeans, and that the narrowing of the frontal 
 lobes to a point is one character by which the brain of 
 the monkey differs from that of man. It has been con- 
 jectured also that the upper part of the brain and the 
 posterior lobes have more to do with feeling than with the 
 
262 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 understanding ; Huschke found them to have a propor- 
 tionately greater development in women than in men ; 
 and Schroeder van der Kolk's pathological researches 
 afforded him what he considered convincing proofs that 
 the anterior lobes of the brain were the seat of the higher 
 intellectual faculties, and that the upper and posterior 
 lobes ministered rather to the emotional life. 
 
 Comte elaborated a phrenological scheme which was a 
 modification of that put forth by Gall, holding confidently 
 that from the study of cerebral functions it was possible to 
 determine the number of cerebral organs and their rela- 
 tive position. But the details of his scheme will hardly 
 strengthen the authority of his method. Regarding the 
 brain as forming an anatomical connection between the 
 two external mechanisms of sensory and of motor nerves, 
 as it manifestly does, he surmised that the arrangement 
 of the two parts of the central apparatus would be ad- 
 justed to these two extreme terms in the system, and was 
 led to place the intellectual organs in front, as being 
 more connected with the various mechanisms of sensa- 
 tions. The rest of the brain was appropriated by him to 
 affective functions, which were placed backwards because 
 of their connection with the principal mechanisms of 
 motion ; the centres of intellectual operations, which do 
 not of themselves lead to motion, being more remote 
 from its mechanism. The cerebral functions were sup- 
 posed to be higher in quality and inferior in force as we 
 proceed from behind forwards ; and in conformity with 
 this view the anterior part of the affective region was 
 appropriated to the social or altruistic feelings, which 
 were thus in proximity to the intellectual organs, the 
 hinder part being reserved for the less noble personal or 
 egoistic propensities. 
 
 In consequence of pathological observations it was 
 insisted by Dr. Todd, contrary to general opinion at 
 that time, that the seat of the convulsive phenomena of 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 263 
 
 epilepsy was in the cerebral lobes, but this theory found no 
 favour, because of the general belief that the grey matter 
 was insensible to stimulation and had nothing to do with 
 movements. Nevertheless the observations of «Dr. Wilks 
 led him subsequently to a decided conviction of the 
 correctness of Dr. Todd's opinion; he had no hesitation 
 in saying that for one case of disease in the pons varolii 
 with epilepsy, fifty cases might be found in which the 
 morbid changes were on the surface of the brain ; and he 
 could not see any grounds for the theory that the seat of 
 epilepsy was in the pons or in the central ganglia of the 
 brain. He felt sure that the fons et origo mali was in the 
 cortical layers of the brain, and that improved methods 
 of examination would disclose morbid changes there in 
 cases of long-standing epilepsy.* Before this, Broca had 
 . propounded a theory that the seat of articulate language 
 was in the posterior part of the third convolution of the 
 left side of the brain, founding it upon certain patholo- 
 ■ gical observations in which loss of speech was accom- 
 panied by destruction thereof; and the theory, though it 
 seemed startling and improbable to many persons, had 
 received competent support. Dr. HUghlings Jackson 
 next made a conjectural step farther in our knowledge 
 of epilepsy; noticing that the convulsive phenomena 
 often commenced in certain muscles, different in different, 
 cases, and then spread to the whole body, he inferred 
 that the commencement of the morbid irritation which 
 led to the epileptic discharge was in the special convolu- 
 tions presiding over the group of muscles first affected, 
 and that it afterwards spread to the other convolutions. 
 He ventured even in some instances to fix upon the 
 special convolution which was presumably at fault. 
 
 Such, until quite recently, was all that was known or 
 conjectured concerning the functions of the different 
 
 * " Observations on the Pathology of Diseases of the Nervous 
 System." Guy's Hospital Reports. 
 
264 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [cHAr. 
 
 cerebral convolutions. There was great difficulty in the 
 way of acquiring more exact knowledge by means of 
 physiological experiments on animals and pathological 
 observations of man, the difficulty being much increased 
 by the fact that the hemispheres have a compensating 
 action ; for it has been observed that a pigeon which has 
 had one hemisphere or considerable portions of both 
 hemispheres removed does not, after a few days or 
 weeks, present any notable differences from an unin- 
 jured bird. In man, too, not only may there be consid- 
 erable destruction of a portion of one hemisphere by 
 disease without any disturbance of intelligence, the dis- 
 turbance, if any, being more often motor than mental, 
 but there may be a total destruction of one hemisphere 
 without any appreciable impairment of mental function. 
 The probable explanation of these facts is that different 
 parts of the cortical area replace one another in function 
 in a singularly complete manner, so that a disturbance 
 of function produced at first by sudden injury or disease 
 gradually disappears more or less completely. This 
 vicarious action will appear the less surprising when we 
 call to mind the infinite multitude of nerve-cells that 
 exist in the grey matter of the hemispheres, the great 
 majority of which are probably never used in our ordi- 
 nary mental functions. In fact, just as one spermatozoon 
 suffices for impregnation, while thousands are produced 
 only to go to waste, so it may be that a comparatively 
 small number of the multitude of nerve-cells which are 
 secreted in the brain are engaged in mental function, 
 while thousands come and go without being called upon 
 to perform any function under ordinary circumstances. 
 A profuse and reckless waste of life is in the regular 
 course of nature's operations. 
 
 Recent physiological experiments on animals have at 
 length thrown some light upon the functions of the cerebral 
 convolutions. Instead of being insensible to all kinds of 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 265 
 
 stimuli as was so long supposed, Fritsch and Hitzig dis- 
 covered that the application of a weak galvanic stimulus 
 to the cortical layer excited movements ; they observed 
 furthermore that these movements were of a definite co- 
 ordinate character, and might be uniformly excited by 
 stimulating particular convolutions. Not all the con- 
 volutions thus reacted, for stimulation of some was fol- 
 lowed by no external phenomena whatever ; but in those 
 which did react to the stimulus the results were so defi- 
 nite and uniform that they might be predicted. Similar ex- 
 periments have been made in this country by Dr. Ferrier, 
 who made use of the more intense Faradic current of an 
 induction coil ; the results of which were to confirm and 
 extend the observations of Fritsch and Hitzig.* It has 
 been objected to these experiments that the electric 
 currents are conducted from the surface of the brain to 
 the motor centres in the ganglia beneath, and that the 
 results do not therefore prove that there are motor 
 centres in the cortical layers. An obvious answer to 
 this objection was that motor phenomena are not pro- 
 duced by stimulation of all the convolutions, not even 
 by stimulation of some which lie in much closer relation 
 to the corpora striata than those which do respond to 
 the stimulus, and that the stimulation of closely adja- 
 cent regions is followed by uniform results of a very 
 different character. 
 
 Moreover, it has been shown by Nothnagel and others 
 that the removal of the centres, the stimulation of which 
 produces certain co-ordinate movements, is followed by 
 
 * A complete account of these experiments is given in Untersuch- 
 ungen iibtr das Gehirn, von Dr. E. Hitzig, Berlin, 1874. But the first 
 paper on the subject appeared in Du Bois Reymond's Archiv, Heft 3, 
 1870. Dr. Hitzig severely criticises Dr. Ferrier, and roundly charges 
 him with "adorning his work, without acknowledgment, with dis- 
 coveries which belong not to him, but to us." Dr. Ferrier's experi- 
 ments are recorded in the West Riding Asylum Reports, voL viii. 
 P- 52, l873- 
 
266 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 paralysis of these movements. If the cortical area form- 
 ing the presumed centre be not entirely removed, but 
 only separated carefully from the parts beneath, so 
 as to form a flap, and if the stimulus be applied when 
 the flap is in position no motor result follows, showing 
 that there is no conduction ; if the flap be turned back, 
 and the fibres beneath be stimulated, the definite move- 
 ment follows. Dr. Burdon Sanderson had observed 
 that after complete removal of the supposed cortical 
 centres of a group of movements these might still be 
 excited by stimulation of the white fibres beneath, by 
 which the removed centres had been connected with the 
 corpora striata ; and quite recently he has succeeded in 
 some instances, by fixing the points in the corpus striatum 
 corresponding to the supposed cortical motor centres 
 and applying the stimulus to them, in exciting the same 
 definite movements as are produced by stimulation of 
 the cortical areas. 
 
 These experiments are quite in accordance with the 
 opinion that the actual co-ordination of movements 
 is effected in the motor ganglia, and with the observed 
 phenomena of sensori-motor action, but they are also 
 consistent with the theory that there are in the cor- 
 tical layers higher centres which are differentiated by 
 their special connections with the co-ordinating centres 
 below and minister to voluntary movements — which sup- 
 ply us with the mental presentations, so to speak, of the 
 movements. No doubt were our Senses acute enough, 
 and our instruments delicate enough, to limit the appli- 
 cation of a stimulus to the special centre of co-ordination 
 in the subordinate motor ganglia in all cases, we might 
 always produce exactly the same definite movements as 
 we do when we apply the stimulus to the higher cortical 
 centres, but as things are, we certainly should not fail, 
 in most instances, to excite a great many more centres 
 in the motor ganglion if we were to make the attempt. 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 267 
 
 The conclusion then which we are warranted in drawing 
 from the experiments is that there are in the cortical layers 
 of the hemispheres motor areas which are differentiated 
 by having their definite connections with the different 
 co-ordinating centres in the subordinate motor ganglia. 
 
 The question is, what is the actual function of these 
 cerebral motor areas ? Fritsch and Hitzig reject the 
 idea of an actual paralysis being produced by the extir- 
 pation of one of the centres; believing the apparent 
 paralytic phenomena to be due to a disturbance or 
 destruction of the muscular feelings of the special 
 movements. They fairly claim to have shown experi- 
 mentally that those parts of the cerebral cortex, of 
 which stimulation produces movements, and which act 
 therefore as motor centres, are the seat of muscular 
 feeling, of the conception of the measure and kind 
 of the muscular innervation, or, in other words, of the 
 so-called muscular intuitions. The sensory and motor 
 ganglia notably suffice to perform all forms of move- 
 ment in a purely reflex manner after the removal of the 
 hemispheres ; when the hemispheres are present, how- 
 ever, the impressions of such reflex acts are carried cen- 
 tripetally to the cortical centres, where they are, as it 
 were, echoed or repeated, and the feeling of their inner- 
 vation takes place, and so it comes to pass that the 
 motor intuitions are formed which afterwards take then- 
 part in the conscious movements of the will. This con- 
 clusion from experiment harmonizes well with what I 
 have always maintained that psychological analysis teaches 
 us concerning the nature of the motor intuitions and the 
 essential part which they play in our mental life.* 
 
 * In the first edition of this book, there was a chapter on " mo' or 
 intuitions " which attracted no attention ; the argument of which was 
 that while the immediate agents of definite movements were the 
 motor ganglia, these, when active, had definite functional relations 
 with the superordinate cerebral centres, in consequence of which they 
 produced the motor intuitions in the latter. 
 
268 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 The convolutions which respond to stimulation by 
 giving rise to movements are in the anterior portion of 
 the brain ; no motor effect is produced by stimulation of 
 the convolutions of the posterior lobes. It has been sur- 
 mised that the posterior convolutions are the seat of 
 sensorial perceptions, for while the motor tract of the 
 cerebral peduncles terminates principally in the cortex 
 of its frontal part, some of the nerves of sense have been 
 traced to the posterior convolutions, while others are 
 presumed to end there. Moreover, a resemblance in 
 some respects has been observed between the structure 
 of some of these convolutions and that which is met with 
 principally in parts that minister to sensation, to wit, the 
 retina, the olfactory lobes, the nucleus of the fifth nerve, 
 and the gelatinous substance of the posterior cornu of 
 the spinal cord. Lastly, the results of experiments on 
 animals, so far as they are definite and can be relied 
 upon, are in favour of this supposition.* It would appear 
 then that in the frontal part of the convolutions are con- 
 tained the residua of the feelings of movements, from 
 which we derive our so-called motor intuitions, and that 
 in the posterior part of the convolutions are contained 
 the residua of the sensory perceptions, from which the 
 sensory elements in ideas are obtained. 
 
 Here then we have disclosed to us the path of a psy- 
 chical reflex act. The activity excited in the posterior 
 convolutions passes to the anterior convolutions and 
 there gets expression in the appropriate movement or 
 speech. It is the simplest type of a mental process. We 
 have reached in fact the higher ideo-motor or percepto- 
 
 * The supposition has been recently strengthened by the results 
 of numerous experiments which Dr. Ferrier has made upon the 
 brains of monkeys. The briefest notices of these results have ap- 
 peared in one or other of the medical journals, but I am not aware 
 that any detailed description of the experiments has yet been 
 published. 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 269 
 
 motor arc, which is spread above or overarches the 
 sensori-motor arc ; perception answering to the afferent 
 impression, and the efferent effect being the issue of 
 the idea in movements. We may conceive the hemi- 
 spheres to be formed of a multitude of such arcs which 
 are interconnected in so many ways through junction- 
 cells as to form a number of inconceivably intricate 
 plexuses, such complication of structure producing cor- 
 responding mental complexity ; wherefore it must almost 
 always happen, after mind has been developed, that 
 many associated sensory residua and many associated 
 motor, residua, joining forces with or antagonizing one 
 another, are simultaneously or successively excited by a 
 stimulus. Although movement may be looked upon' as 
 the outgoing energy of which sensation is the incoming 
 supply, the expenditure of what has been gathered in, 
 yet so many perceptions have been capitalized in the 
 convolutions and may be drawn upon when a demand 
 is made, that the outgoing current represents, not merely 
 a reflected energy, but a motor effect which is charged 
 with the gains of past experiences, that is to say, is 
 enlightened by reason. 
 
 It may be asked, what is the nature of the ideas that 
 are formed in perception ? Are they impressions traced 
 upon the brain, as Haller argued, or are they of the 
 nature of minute vibrations or oscillations — currents of 
 molecular activity, along different nervous paths, as 
 Bonnet ingeniously surmised? * It is easy to under- 
 
 * " La faculty par laquelle les representations s'operent est 
 l'imagination, mais les idees sont attaches aux mouvements des 
 fibres sensibles. Pour qu'tme ide'e se presente de nouveaux a' Tame, 
 il faut done que les fibres appropriees a cette idee soient mues de 
 nouveau. La disposition du cerveau a repeter ces mouvements 
 constitue done rimagination." — Bonnet, Essai de Psych. 
 
 " Objections made to this opinion show how necessary to a know- 
 ledge of psychology is a thorough knowledge of physics and physi- 
 ology. It is said that the fibres are not capable of the tension and 
 13 
 
270 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chai>. 
 
 stand that the occurrence of such vibrations along a 
 nerve track on one occasion would render the delicately 
 organized matter more apt to fall into similar vibrations 
 on another occasion ; it has undergone a certain modi- 
 fication in consequence of its excitation, and it will the 
 more readily give back the same note, so to speak, or 
 fall into the same rate of vibration, when it is again 
 stimulated suitably, just as the stretched string of a 
 piano, when several notes are sung in the room, will 
 give back the note belonging to it. When we speak of 
 a trace, vestige or residuum, all we mean to imply is 
 that an effect is left behind in the organic element, a 
 something retained by it, which disposes it to a similar 
 functional act; a disposition has been acquired which 
 differentiates it henceforth, although we have no reason 
 to think that there was any original specific difference 
 between one nerve-cell and another. When we are con- 
 scious of this revival of the past, we say that we remem- 
 ber it ; but when it takes place, as it does every minute 
 of our lives, without consciousness, then we have no 
 proper name for it. What are we to call this mental 
 correlative of a nervous process which affects us not 
 consciously? Those who would call it memory are 
 charged with gross philosophical absurdity or with a 
 
 relaxation which more rapid and forcible vibrations, or those which 
 are slower and feebler, would require. As if the fibres were sup- 
 posed to vibrate in their places like strings ! Then again, that they 
 are not sufficiently numerous to answer to the myriads of millions 
 of states of thought and feeling which are represented in memory 
 and in the fancy. Again, it is objected, the theory, if complete and 
 adequate in every other particular, would fail entirely to account for 
 the creative energy of the imagination. Let it be granted that it 
 did so fail, it might not be an entirely unprofitable failure, if it moved 
 psychologists to reflect how little they account for by contentedly 
 using the word imagination to do duty for actual knowledge, and 
 helped them- to realise what a quantity of ignorance they hide under 
 its use." — The Human Intellect, Noah Porter, D.D. (p. 273.) 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 271 
 
 glaring contradiction of terms. Memory, it is said, im- 
 plies consciousness, and the term ' unconscious memory ' 
 is self-annihilating. So be it, if it is insisted that memory 
 shall only be used in this restricted sense, only we must 
 be careful not to let such use of the word blind us to the 
 facts : we ought to take heed that we do not lose grasp 
 of the important and incontestible fact that the physio- 
 logical process of retention is something which lies 
 beneath memory, which takes place unconsciously, and 
 which is the physical basis of memory and of every other 
 mental function. Believing then with Bonnet that ideas 
 are insensible motions of nerve-molecules, of the nature 
 of vibrations, or, as Hartley called them, vibriatuncles, we 
 may grant that in nailer's description of them as impres- 
 sions made upon the brain there was a just recognition 
 of this important physiological process of retention. 
 
 Ideas which arise from perception are naturally more 
 vivid than when they are excited by internal causes — ideas 
 of presentation tha.n ideas of representation — because the 
 motions are more easily and actively excited in the way 
 they were first and are habitually excited, and because 
 when excited by external causes, there is a vivid presen- 
 tation of the sensory as well as of the motor element of 
 the idea, which therefore occupies the attention more 
 exclusively ; but if intense attention be given to them when 
 internally aroused, they may be made more active, the 
 sensory element being excited by reaction of energy upon 
 its centre, and may sometimes become so vivid as to 
 generate actual hallucinations. Just as the expression 
 of an emotion by its suitable gesture will excite or in- 
 crease the emotion, causing it to fill the field of con- 
 scious vision, or, in other words, to engage the whole 
 attention, so the internal repetition or actual utter- 
 ance of the word which is the symbol of an idea re- 
 acts upon the perceptive centre of it and makes more 
 vivid, through this sensory representation, the concep- 
 
272 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 tion of what it represents. We are only describing the 
 same facts in different terms when we say that we are 
 directing attention to it. 
 
 In the foregoing chapter it was pointed out that a 
 perception groups or organizes several sensations into 
 one idea. Once the idea of the object has been thus 
 acquired, any one of the different sensations of which 
 it is constituted may suffice to arouse it ; it may be ap- 
 prehended through sight, or touch, or perhaps taste or 
 smell, not otherwise than as it may be apprehended 
 through the written word after we have learnt to read : 
 the sensation, like the word, is a symbol which serves to 
 excite it. Our perceptions are really a language that we 
 have been learning all our lives, and we no more per- 
 ceive by a single sense the actual object, as we appre- 
 hend it in idea, than we perceive the actual object in 
 the artificial word or sign which has been used to de- 
 note it Seeing alone, or smelling alone, for instance, 
 would not impart any definite notion of the properties 
 of an external object ; it could impart nothing more 
 than its special sensation until a definite knowledge of 
 the existence and nature of the object had been acquired 
 by association of the sensation with the experiences of 
 other senses, that is, by experience and observation. 
 The impressions of its different qualities or properties 
 received through the different senses are combined in 
 the idea of it, and thenceforth we can think and reason 
 about it abstractly through the idea when it is not pre- 
 sent to any sense. This abstraction is made essentially 
 easier by the fact that the object may be apprehended 
 through different senses; not being inseparably linked 
 to any one sensory impression, it is more easily thought 
 about abstractly from all sensation. The idea in fact is 
 organised as a separate mental existence in the cerebral 
 convolutions, being for us, when so organised, to all in- 
 tents and purposes the object, and may be aroused into 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 273 
 
 independent activity. Every idea is thus representative, 
 the abstract of many sensations, comprising implicitly 
 more than it displays explicitly ; in it the essential is 
 embodied, the unessential suppressed or rejected; it is 
 not the idea of any particular object or event, but the 
 idea of every object or event of a particular kind ; it is 
 fundamentally a generalisation or induction. We may 
 justly say, then, that the ideational nerve centres idealise 
 or ideate our sensory perceptions ; the process of idea- 
 tion, like other processes of organic evolution, being 
 one of progressive differentiation and integration, — of 
 discrimination of the unlike and assimilation of the like. 
 As mental development proceeds we get not only more 
 ideas, but ideas which are more and more abstract. 
 From the idea of a concrete man we rise to the general 
 idea of man, and from the general idea again we rise 
 in ascending abstraction to the abstract idea or concept 
 of benevolence, virtue, or other quality as belonging 
 to man. As a percept is the abstract of sensations, 
 so a concept is the abstract of percepts. It may 
 be conjectured — but it is a conjecture only — that the 
 superimposed layers of cells and fibres, of which the 
 convolutions consist, answer to these increasing com- 
 plexities of ascending abstraction ; the lowest layer 
 being concerned in concrete perception, the highest 
 layer ministering to the most abstract thought. No 
 animal, so far as we can judge, is capable of forming 
 an abstract idea any more than a young child is, 
 although there is good reason to think that the more 
 intelligent animals are able to form a few general ideas ; 
 a dog, for example, plainly having not only an idea of 
 a particular man, such as its master, but a general idea 
 of man apart from any particular man, and being pro- 
 bably capable of conveying that idea to another dog. 
 Savages occupy an intermediate position between ani- 
 mals and civilised men in this respect. The vocabulary 
 
274 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 of many savages, which we may study profitably in order 
 to ascertain what thoughts they have, is very limited, often 
 containing only such phrases as are required to describe 
 the most striking objects of nature, and those which enter 
 into the daily life of the people. They have no abstract 
 terms. In the North American languages a term suffi- 
 ciently general to denote an oak-tree is exceptional ; 
 the Chocktaw language has names for the black oak, 
 white oak, and red oak, but no generic name for an 
 oak.* The Tasmanians, again, had no general term for 
 a tree, though they had names for each particular kind 
 of tree ; and no abstract words to express qualities, 
 instead of hard, saying "stone-like," instead of round 
 "moon-like," instead of high "with long legs."t The 
 Bushmen, according to Lichenstein, could not count be- 
 yond two, and many other savages cannot count beyond 
 five. The language of the Friendly Islanders is said to 
 contain no words expressive of the higher qualities of 
 human nature, such as virtue, justice, humanity, or of 
 their opposites, vice, injustice, cruelty ; this is true also 
 of the languages of the Native Australians and other 
 savages. The Bongos of Central Africa have no words 
 for the most common of our abstract ideas, such as 
 spirit, hope, fear ; the words are absolutely wanting ; and 
 experience shows that in this respect other negro tongues 
 are not any better provided. % The Algonquin language, 
 one of the richest in North America, contained no verb 
 "to love," and when Elliot translated the Bible into 
 Algonquin in 1661, he was obliged to coin a word to ex- 
 press what was wanted. 
 
 It is plain then from these examples that savages 
 represent a much lower degree of mental development 
 than civilised nations ; they are like children, who can- 
 
 * On the Origin of Civilisation.. By Sir John Lubbock. 
 + Volkerkundc. Von Oscar Peschel, p. n6. 
 % Schweinfurth's Heart of Africa, p. 311. 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 275 
 
 not understand abstractions, and must be instructed 
 through sensible objects or pictures. The distance 
 between animals and savages is undoubtedly far greater 
 than that between savages and civilised people ; of the 
 most intelligent animals only can we believe that they 
 are capable of forming a few general ideas ; and we may 
 venture to assume that no animal ever possesses an ab- 
 stract idea. This destitution is closely connected with the 
 absence of articulate language ; for as there are no actual 
 objects, no external realities, corresponding to generaliza- 
 tions, some sort of language is necessary, taking the form 
 either of sound to the ear or of symbol to the eye, to fix 
 "the generalisations in order that they may be objects for 
 future revival and use. Now it is plain that animals are 
 without these necessary signs or symbols. Wanting 
 verbal language, they want the signs by which to denote 
 and express such ideas, but it would be an error to sup 
 pose that they are only destitute of abstract ideas because 
 they have not language ; constituted as their brains are 
 they would not have the capacity of abstract ideas, even 
 if they had some capacity of language, because their 
 brains have not the complication of nervous structure 
 which is necessary to subserve such ideas ; and it is 
 probable that, were they possessed of abstract ideas, these 
 would not fail to enforce some means of expression, and 
 that language would thus develop with the development 
 of their minds. 
 
 It is important to take notice of the nature of this 
 process of mental development through ascending de- 
 grees of abstraction, in order to estimate the true value 
 or meaning of an abstraction. This must always be 
 sought in the concrete, by resolving the higher abstrac- 
 tions into lower abstractions, and these into the concrete. 
 Had this searching method been pursued, instead of the 
 opposite method of finding the meaning of the concrete in 
 the abstract, many metaphysical entities would have died 
 
276 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 at their birth, and much vain and empty metaphysical dis- 
 cussion would have been spared to the world, It is 
 instructive to take note how, when we consider the nature 
 and origin of the language in which we express our intel- 
 lectual processes and our feelings, we are perforce brought 
 back to the senses and movements — that is, to our means 
 of actual contact with nature. " I see it," is commonly 
 used to mean " I comprehend it," and in a similar sense 
 we speak of the eyes of our understanding being opened. 
 In like manner we grasp or apprehend an argument, feel 
 a truth, have our feelings touched, disrelish or recoil from 
 a proposal, are disgusted with a person's conduct. The 
 French say Je goute cela in an intellectual sense, and 
 with them J 'attends cela means either " I hear that," or 
 " I understand that." It is the same with other languages. 
 The highest intellectual products betray their foundations 
 in sense and movement by the terms which are used to 
 denominate them. 
 
 Those who are metaphysically-minded have done with 
 idea as they have done with sensation ; they have con- 
 verted a complex notion or general term, summing up a 
 great number of varied phenomena, into an actual entity, 
 and thenceforth allowed it to tyrannize over the thoughts. 
 It is a great and mischievous error to suppose that an idea 
 of the same object or event has always a uniform quan- 
 titative and qualitative value ; and the way in which it 
 is the custom to speak of certain abstract ideas, as if 
 they were constant entities admitting of no variation, 
 nor of the shadow of a change, is a remarkable example 
 of that self-deception by which man fondly fools himself, 
 "with many words making nothing understood." An 
 idea may be definite, clear, and adequate, or it may be 
 indefinite, obscure, and inadequate ; it by no means 
 follows, therefore, that because the same name is given to 
 an idea in two persons, it has the same value in each. The 
 meaning which a child attaches to a particular word varies 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 277 
 
 according to its experience, being enlarged or reduced by 
 new experiences, until it becomes precise and adequate.* 
 Certain ideas will always have a different value in persons 
 at a different stage of cultivation. When the well-mean- 
 ing traveller or the ardent missionary thinks to find in 
 the miserable savage the idea of a God, he should take 
 heed that he is not erroneously interpreting the savage 
 mind by the text of his ; and he might do well to be at 
 the pains to define the idea which he supposes himself 
 to have. The ideas of virtue and vice, for which the 
 Australian savage confessedly has no words in his lan- 
 guage, cannot be implanted or organised in his mind, 
 until, by cultivation continued through generations, he 
 has been humanised and civilised. (") Within historical 
 and comparatively recent time such words as liberty, 
 honour, right, and the like, have gradually undergone 
 perceptible changes in meaning, and it is probable that 
 they may continue to do so in the time to come ; for 
 words, like creeds and laws, grow, change, decay, and 
 die. Ancestral nervous substrata gradually become 
 obsolete, as instincts in animals gradually become fixtinct, 
 and new substrata are formed, as new instincts are de- 
 veloped in animals, with changed conditions through 
 ages. 
 
 To acquire those so-called fundamental ideas, univer- 
 sal intuitions, or categories of the understanding, of 
 which, some metaphysicians make so much, as constant 
 elements, though they differ greatly in value in different 
 people, there is no other need but, using Hobbes' words, 
 " to be born a man, and live with the use of his five 
 senses." ( 2 ) Because all men have a common nature, 
 have the same number and kind of external senses, and 
 because the nature by which all men are surrounded is 
 
 * Beneke lays down the proposition "dass unter millionen 
 Auffassungen desselben Gegenstandes auch nicht zwei einander 
 gleich sind." Pragmatische Psychologic, p. 170. 
 
278 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 the same, therefore are developed certain ideas which 
 have a universal application, but they are nowise inde- 
 pendent of experience ; on the contrary, the universality 
 of their character is owing to the very fact that in every 
 experience they are implicitly suggested or involved, so 
 that they finally become fixed as endowments in the 
 acquired nature or organisation of the nervous centres ; 
 conscious acquisition becoming here, as elsewhere, un- 
 conscious faculty, by virtue of an organic process. But 
 their absolute truth, as expressions of certain fundamental 
 relations between man and nature, is only guaranteed by 
 the assumption of an unchanging persistence of these 
 relations ; a new sense conferred upon him would en- 
 tirely change the aspect of things, and render necessary 
 a new order of fundamental ideas. (3) 
 
 As it is with the faculties of the spinal and the sensory 
 centres, so it is with the faculties of the ideational 
 centres : they are not innate, but are developed by 
 education. The notion of innate idea, in the exact 
 meaning of the word, as connatural, or contemporary 
 with birth, is not less untenable and absurd than an 
 innate pregnancy. (*) But if by innate is only meant that, 
 by the necessity of his nature, an individual whose brain 
 is well- constituted will, when placed in certain circum- 
 stances, acquire certain ideas, then all the phenomena 
 of a man's life, bodily and mental, are just as innate or 
 natural. A civilised person certainly inherits, by virtue 
 of being born of civilised parents in a civilised country, 
 a predisposition to certain modes of conception and 
 feeling, just as he inherits a predisposition to certain 
 modes of perception or walking : in other words, he 
 inherits certain cerebral substrata which are ready to 
 come into functional action on occasions of their 
 suitable stimuli at the proper periods of life. He can 
 no more help conceiving of his experiences in a certain 
 way than he can help perceiving an object in a certain 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 279 
 
 way when he sees it, or than he can help feeling in a 
 certain way when his reproductive organs come into 
 functional action and arouse their cerebral representative 
 substrata. 
 
 It is necessary in fact to distinguish between what is 
 predetermined by the nature of cerebral structure, as 
 the so-called innate ideas are, and what is preformed, as 
 they are not. The formation of an idea is an organic 
 evolution in the appropriate nervous centres, which is 
 gradually completed in consequence of successive ex- 
 periences of a like kind. For our ideas of the size of 
 objects, of their solidity, of their distance, and of their 
 relations in space, we are dependent upon the move- 
 ments of the eyes, and in so far as these movements 
 presuppose an inborn mechanism by which they are 
 performed, as they certainly do, we may properly say 
 that the individual has an inborn aptitude or capacity to 
 have such ideas. Man, whose cerebral convolutions are 
 larger, more complex, and less symmetrical than those 
 of the monkey, has in like manner an innate capacity of 
 acquiring ideas which the monkey can never acquire, 
 because he has the nervous substrata necessary to such 
 functions. If he was made in the image of the ape, he 
 is assuredly now born in the image of something higher 
 than the ape. He is born with certain aptitudes which 
 he has inherited in consequence of ancestral accumula- 
 tions, is the heir of ages of acquisition, and so he 
 learns to reason as he learns to see or to walk : when 
 certain experiences are made through the effects of his 
 social and physical surroundings, they result in certain 
 developments, which could not be otherwise under the 
 existing internal and external conditions. As the hu- 
 man brain is constituted, it cannot, when certain facts 
 are apprehended, help forming certain conclusions con- 
 cerning them, the conclusion being as involuntary and 
 irresistible as the instinct of an animal; as Wundt has 
 
28o THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 remarked, the inner sense apprehends as a logical neces- 
 sity what outer sense perceives as mechanical connec- 
 tion, that which is given to us by psychological analysis 
 as a logical conclusion being revealed to us by physio- 
 logical analysis as physical effect. 
 
 What is the mechanism of ideation, and what is the 
 nature of the nervous action which is its physical basis, 
 must for the present be entirely conjectural. It can 
 hardly be doubted that there is a differentiation of parts 
 in the grey matter of the convolutions, corresponding to 
 differences of function, and that the cortical layers thus 
 consist of a multitude of distinct mind-centres, so to 
 speak, spread out in a sort of vault over the subordinate 
 centres with which they are connected, directly or in- 
 directly, by intercommunicating fibres, and spread out 
 perhaps also over one another in superimposed layers. 
 It is furthermore extremely probable that each sense has 
 its special aggregate or grouping of cells in the convolu- 
 tions, an area differentiated by its connections with the 
 sensory ganglion beneath, which constitutes its perceptive 
 centre, and has towards it, on the afferent side, the 
 same relation which the motor areas in the anterior 
 convolutions have towards the subordinate motor ganglia 
 on the efferent side. Could we remove or extirpate 
 exactly in any animal the perceptive centre of any one 
 sense, we should eliminate from its perceptions of an 
 object all those qualities thereof with which this sense 
 was adapted to bring it into relation. But, as has been 
 pointed out, a percept is a product of the combined 
 action of more senses than one ; we must necessarily 
 assume, therefore, the associated action of the perceptive 
 centres of these other senses. 
 
 Perhaps the most fit conception which we can form 
 of the mechanism of the operation of ideation is that 
 of a nervous circuit connecting a cell or a group oi 
 cells of each perceptive centre ; a current of molecular 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 281 
 
 action passing along this circuit would be the percept 
 or idea of the object, and the current would naturally 
 be excited at any point of the circuit to which the 
 suitable stimulus could be applied. Obviously, however, 
 the only points at which this could take place would be 
 the cell-junctions, or the stations, so to speak, formed by 
 the cell or group of cells of the respective . perceptive 
 centres included in the circuit. Herein then lies the 
 physical interpretation of the psychological fact that the 
 idea of an object may be aroused by any one of the sen- 
 sations of which it is formed. Furthermore, when an 
 idea is thus aroused through one sense, the perceptions 
 of the other associated senses being understood or not 
 realised, we may conceive that there is only a subactive 
 state of their cell-junctions, which may be supposed to 
 act as continuations of the nervous circuit, rather than in 
 the perceptive or receptive capacity in which they may 
 act when aroused into more intense activity by a stronger 
 stimulus : we may regard them in the light of stations on 
 the track through which quick trains pass without stop- 
 ping, but at which other trains stop to take in passengers, 
 and at which any train may be stopped if necessary. The 
 supposition is in entire accordance with what we know 
 concerning the regular process of conversion of nervous 
 actions which were at first conscious into actions that are 
 purely automatic. 
 
 When we rise from the percept to the concept, from 
 the abstract of sensations to the abstract of perceptions, 
 from representation to the representation of representa- 
 tions, by combining into one general idea that which is 
 common to several ideas and rejecting that which is 
 different in them, it will be necessary to imagine more 
 complex groupings of nerve circuits. We may imagine 
 a higher and more complex circuit in which the nerve cir- 
 cuits of the simple ideas now act as simple component 
 units, taking the place in this circuit which the cell-junc- 
 
282 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chai>. 
 
 tions of the perceptive centres have in the nerve circuit of 
 the simple idea; the current of activity in the higher circuit 
 will then be aroused by any one of these associated simple 
 circuits, just as the current of activity in the simple circuit 
 is aroused by any one of the associated perceptive cen- 
 tres, and may become, like it, after several repetitions of 
 function, automatic. In it the representatives are, so to 
 speak, re-represented. Multiplying these interconnected 
 plexuses in accordance with the multiplication of our 
 ideas, and associating them, as we must do, with corre- 
 sponding motor plexuses in the anterior convolutions, 
 we perceive the necessity of the infinitely complex me- 
 chanism of cells and fibres which form the cortical layers 
 of the hemispheres. They constitute such a complex 
 structure as the complex mental functions must needs 
 have ; for simple structures are capable only of simple 
 functions. We may perceive also the reason of the 
 necessity, if we would know the real value or mean- 
 ing of the most abstract ideas, of seeking for it in the 
 concrete; we must pass from the higher nerve-circuit 
 to the lower nerve-circuits of which it is representa 
 tive, and from these again to the respective perceptive 
 centres which they co-ordinate. If the abstract idea be 
 not truly representative of the percept, and if the percept 
 be not a just representation of the object, it is certain 
 that we run great danger of losing ourselves in mazes of 
 vague and erroneous reasoning. 
 
 It is well known how difficult a business it is to observe 
 an object or event accurately when we have a preconceived 
 idea of it; the ideational current answers to, or, as it were, 
 assimilates that which is like in the perception, and be- 
 comes more active in consequence ; there is no reception 
 or assimilation of that which is unlike in it, which is over- 
 looked altogether, or at any rate not adequately registered; 
 and the result is that the induction, which the perception 
 really is, and the subsequent inductions of the higher 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 283 
 
 mental processes are unsound. Most part of a percep- 
 tion is inference, for it is only when the mind actively 
 co-operates after several experiences that it is adequate : 
 and whether the inference be true or false will depend 
 on the care which we have previously taken in observa- 
 tion to build it up soundly, and on the care we now take, 
 by proper attention to the object, to excite the right 
 ideational current, if previous similar experience has fur- 
 nished us with one ; and if not, to appropriate a new 
 nerve-circuit to the registration of that in the perception 
 wherein it differs from former perceptions. The founda- 
 tion of right reasoning is accurate perception.* 
 
 How far men may go in vain reasonings about empty 
 abstractions, when they abandon observation and divorce 
 themselves from fact, refusing to bring their abstractions to 
 the test of experiment, the records of mental philosophy 
 yield abundant and instructive illustrations. The theory 
 of mind as a spiritual entity, which, having an existence 
 independent of the body, uses this as its instrument, owes 
 its origin, as other metaphysical entities have owed their 
 origin, to this tendency to convert abstractions into en- 
 tities. Certainly, if I could perceive and measure the 
 intimate and imperceptible currents of thought of another 
 person's brain, as men may learn to do in time to come, 
 they would be objective realities to me; but that is a 
 
 * It may be remarked by the way that two different classes of 
 intellect are marked by the relative predominance of the assimilative 
 or of the discriminative power : the superiority of one sort of in- 
 tellect being shown by the way in which it discovers slight and deli- 
 cate resemblances or analogies which are imperceptible to other 
 minds, and in the variety and wealth of the language by which it 
 expresses them ; the other sort of intellect being distinguished by its 
 capacity of recognising and recording points of difference which 
 other minds fail to observe. It is obvious that the just union of 
 both these faculties is necessary to the best observation and reason- 
 ing : they lie at the foundations of the method of agreement and the 
 method of difference in formal reasoning. 
 
2S4 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 very different thing from what metaphysicians have made 
 of them ; and the only question for me would be whether 
 they were as adequately representative — immediately 
 through presentation, or mediately through representa- 
 tion of representations — of the individual's surroundings 
 as his brain-mechanism was capable of making them : 
 the same question, in fact, as I should be required to con- 
 sider if I were observing in a similar way the brain- 
 currents of an ape or a frog, or if, being an accomplished 
 musician, I were watching another person's musical per- 
 formance in order to mark whether he brought out fully 
 the capacities of the instrument on which he was playing. 
 There is a question the answer to which one ought 
 perhaps to endeavour to make more clear than it has 
 been made thus far — namely, Of what precise part or pro- 
 cess in a reflex cerebral function is idea the mental cor- 
 relate ? There is the sensory impression ; there is the 
 motor outcome ; and between them there is the cerebral 
 track of the nervous current : of which stage then of the 
 nervous process is the idea strictly the conscious corre- 
 late ? The correct answer probably is that the entire 
 process is necessary to the formation of the idea in the 
 first instance, but that when its substrata have been de- 
 finitely organised, a mental representation, faint or vivid, 
 of either the first or the last stage, in connection with the 
 cerebral intermediate process, may suffice ; this mental 
 representation consisting in an internal excitation of the 
 proper perceptive or motor centre in the convolutions. 
 A faint or nascent sensory perception may suffice in the 
 one, it may be supposed, as a faint or nascent motor 
 percept or intuition may in the other. And if we go on 
 to reflect upon our ideas, we shall notice that with some 
 the sensory element plainly predominates, so that we 
 have the image vividly before our mental eye ; with 
 others, the motor intuition is predominant, so that the 
 word by which we denote the idea engages conscious- 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 285 
 
 ness ; while with other ideas of a more abstract character 
 the intermediate cerebral factor is chiefly in operation, 
 and little attention is paid to image or name. In the 
 latter case we allow thought to call up thought without 
 bringing it back to its sensory basis or to its motor ex- 
 pression, although at the same time we feel it necessary 
 to do both when we would positively satisfy ourselves 
 that we have a clear, definite and genuine idea. It will, 
 be noticed also in this relation that we can intensify an 
 idea either from the sensory or the motor pole of its 
 cerebral process — either by presentation and vivid repre- 
 sentation of the object, or by such active intuition of the 
 word denoting it as we get by repeating it to ourselves in- 
 ternally in a sort of mental whisper or by uttering it aloud. 
 In this way, when our attention is prone to wander from 
 a train of reflection, we hold it to its task by emphatic 
 internal repetition of the words or the motor expressions 
 of the ideas concerned, or by vivid sensory representa- 
 tion of what we are thinking about. It would appear 
 then that the idea is really the correlate of the entire 
 excito-motor process in the convolutions, and that when 
 either the sensory or motor element seems to be wanting, 
 the reason is because it is understood ; being in such a 
 state of faint or nascent excitation that it scarcely rises 
 into consciousness. 
 
 In using the physiological term 'excito-motor' to 
 describe the process which takes place in the convolu- 
 tions during ideation, and in referring it to the same 
 category as the processes which take place in the lower 
 nerve-centres, it behoves us to take heed that we do not 
 overlook the complex nature of the nervous substrata 
 which are subservient to it. .Reflex function is merely a 
 name, which neither conjures away difficulties magically 
 nor furnishes an adequate explanation of them ; indeed, 
 so far as it pretends to be an explanation, it is dis- 
 tinctly an inadequate one, inasmuch as there is a great 
 
286 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 deal more in mental reflection than a simple reflection of 
 energy through the supreme centres from an afferent on 
 to an efferent nerve. The central nervous substrata con- 
 tain in their structure, first, a vast original capacity, and, 
 secondly, a vast acquired capacity : they embody, as it 
 were, a certain pre-established harmony between their 
 functions and the environment, which has been inherited, 
 and a certain established harmony, which has been ac- 
 quired by education and experience : they capitalise in 
 a measure the acquisitions of the race, of ancestors, 
 and of the individual. We cannot in the least com- 
 prehend how it happens, but we cannot doubt, that the 
 individual inherits in his cerebral substrata not only 
 parental but ancestral qualities of mind which are ready 
 to come into function at different periods of life ; so that 
 the qualities of one ancestor may discover themselves 
 more evidently at one period, and those of another 
 ancestor more evidently at another period, of his life. 
 Reverting to the comparison which was previously made 
 between the nerve- cell and the germ-cell, and taking it 
 to be probable that the former, like the latter, contains 
 in latent form the potential qualities of many ancestors, 
 male and female, we may understand that it should, like 
 it, when placed under suitable conditions, display them 
 in its development. We may understand also how it is 
 that one part of the convolutions can so easily take on 
 the functions of another part, if we suppose, as we may 
 reasonably do, that the nerve-cells, like the germ-cells, are 
 endowed with very similar if not identical properties, and 
 are therefore equivalent before they begin to function and 
 to undergo that differentiation which, if not determined 
 by original differences of properties, is involved in develop- 
 ment under different conditions. It has been already 
 shown that they exist in the convolutions in such count- 
 less numbers that it is probable only a small proportion 
 of them is ever utilised. However that may be, it is 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 287 
 
 evident that when a stimulus excites the function of an 
 ideational track for the first time, it does not merely 
 excite a movement which passes along it without addition 
 of energy, but awakens echoes that sound from we know 
 not how far back in the past. 
 
 Having said thus much concerning the nature of ideas 
 and the manner in which they are acquired, I proceed 
 next to indicate the different ways in which observation 
 shows that the energy of an idea may be discharged : 
 having considered its formation, it now remains to con- 
 sider it in actual energy. 
 
 (a) The reflex action or reaction of an ideational nerve- 
 current is downwards upon the motor centres, and thus 
 gives rise to what has been called ideomotor movement.*( s ) 
 The energy may be exerted either upon the involuntary 
 or upon the voluntary muscles ; in the latter case, taking 
 
 * "To prove that Ideas, as well as Sensations, are the cause of 
 muscular actions, it is necessary to make choice of cases in which the 
 idea is in no danger of being confounded with that state of mind 
 called the Will. And hardly any case will answer this condition, 
 except some of those which are.held to be involuntary, for the Idea 
 itself never can be very clearly distinguished from the Will ." — J. 
 Mill, op. cit. p. 265. He instances yawning on seeing some one 
 yawn, the infectious power of convulsions, laughter, sobbing, the 
 swallowing of saliva, if assured that you cannot. "It seems, 
 therefore, to be established by a simple induction, that muscular 
 actions follow ideas, as invariable antecedent and consequent, in 
 other words, as cause and effect ; that, whenever we have obtained 
 a command over the ideas, we have also obtained a command over 
 the motions ; and that we cannot perform associate contractions of 
 several muscles, till we have established, by repetition, the ready 
 association of the ideas." — Ibid. p. 274. 
 
 + " The idea of a particular motion," says Miiller, " determines a 
 current of nervous action towards the necessary muscles, and gives 
 rise to the motion independently of the will." Again, of expectation, 
 he says — " It may be stated, as a general fact, that any state of the 
 body which is conceived to be approaching, and which is expected 
 with certain confidence and certainty of its occurrence, will be very 
 prone to ensue as the mere result of that idea. " 
 
288 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 place either with consciousness or without consciousness. 
 The idea that the bowels will act may notably sometimes 
 so affect their involuntary peristaltic movements as to 
 produce evacuation of them ; the idea that vomiting must 
 take place, when a qualmish feeling exists, will certainly 
 hasten vomiting ; and there is a very remarkable instance 
 in the Philosophical Transactions of a man who could for 
 a time stop the motions of his heart by composing him- 
 self, and then either conceiving vividly or directly willing 
 what was to happen.* ( 6 ) These are examples of the in- 
 fluence of idea upon the involuntary muscles, and they 
 accord with what has been previously said of the sub- 
 ordination of the organic nerve-centres to the cerebro- 
 spinal system. Some people even are able, through a 
 vivid idea of shuddering, or of something creeping over 
 their skin, to produce a cutis anserina or goose's skin : 
 the immediate effect of the idea in this case, however, 
 is probably to excite the appropriate' sensation, which 
 thereupon gives rise to the sequent phenomena. 
 
 Examples of the action of idea upon our voluntary 
 muscles are witnessed in every hour of our waking life. 
 Very few, in fact, of the familiar acts of a day call the 
 will into action : when not sensori-motor they are usually 
 prompted by ideas. Most of the earlier actions of child- 
 ren are prompted by ideas and feelings which, excited by 
 suggestions from without, immediately pass into move- 
 ments. In the adult, 'it sometimes happens that without 
 any intervention of the will, or even in direct defiance of 
 the will, an idea discharges itself in movement or produces 
 some other effect upon the body. The suddenly excited 
 
 * " There is an instance told in_the Philosophical Transactions of 
 a man who could for a time stop the .motions of his heart when he 
 pleased ; and Mr. D. has often told me he could so far increase the 
 peristaltic motion of his bowels by voluntary efforts as to produce 
 an evacuation by a stool at any time in half-an-hour." — Zoonomia, 
 vol. i. p. 39. 
 
v.! HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 289 
 
 idea of the ludicrous, for example, causes involuntary 
 laughter; the idea of an insult, a quick movement of 
 retaliation ; the idea of a beautiful woman, a glow of 
 amatorial passion ; the idea of a great impending danger, 
 or. of a sudden terrible affliction, serious or even fatal 
 disturbance of the organic life ; the idea of an object, 
 an actual hallucination sometimes. In the phenomena 
 of electro-biology or hypnotism, the mind of the patient 
 is possessed with the ideas which the operator suggests, 
 so that his body becomes an automatic machine, set in 
 motion by them. Every one's experience will recall to 
 him occasions on which an idea excited in his mind could 
 not be dismissed therefrom by the will, and perhaps 
 would not let him rest until he had realised it in action, 
 even though such realisation appeared to his judgment 
 inadvisable. But the point on which I would lay stress 
 here is, that such ideomotor movements may take place, 
 not only without any intervention of the will, but also 
 without consciousness; they are automatically accom- 
 plished, like the actions of the sleep-walker, in obedience 
 to an idea or a series of ideas of which there is no active 
 consciousness. 
 
 It may seem paradoxical to assert, not merely that 
 ideas may exist in the mind without any conscious- 
 ness of them — which every one admits that in their 
 dormant, latent, or statical condition they may — but that 
 an idea, or a train of associated ideas, may be quickened 
 into action, and actuate movements, without itself being 
 attended to. But those who reflect upon their actions 
 will acknowledge that it is unquestionably so : a great 
 part of the chain of our waking thoughts, and of the 
 series of our daily actions, never is attended to ; at 
 first consciously acquired, they have now become au- 
 tomatic, the effect being that which first arouses con- 
 sciousness, if it be aroused at all. Persons who have a 
 habit of talking to themselves are generally unaware that 
 
290 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 they are talking, and yet they are performing both asso- 
 ciated ideas and associated movements; and one who 
 has a lively interest in some performance which he is 
 watching intently, can hardly forbear making ludicrous 
 movements of imitation. The phenomena of table-turn- 
 ing, , spirit-writing, divining with the magnetic rod, and 
 the like, when they are not impostures, illustrate in like 
 manner the unconscious action of idea upon movement, 
 as do also the sudden cures of supposed paralysis which 
 have sometimes been effected by an impressive command 
 to rise and walk from one who claims a miraculous power 
 of healing, or by the application of some instrument 
 alleged and believed to have marvellous healing virtues. 
 In such cases the idea of the movement, the belief that 
 it will take place, is truly the movement in the inner- 
 most ; it is the current of nervous action which, when 
 transmitted along the proper nerves, will become the ex- 
 ternal movement. And it is not without interest to note 
 how in some of these instances the vivid idea of a move- 
 ment may produce a more powerful effect than a deli- 
 berate exertion of will could do ; for the idea represents 
 undivided energy operating in a definite channel, no other 
 ideas or feelings intervening to produce doubt or irresolu- 
 tion, while there is not, from want of a proper training of 
 mind, the power of effective co-ordination of its various 
 energies into a complete and definite act of wilk Indeed, 
 the miraculous cures of paralysis which are from time to 
 time recorded, take place commonly in hysterical persons 
 whose malady is a paralysis of will rather than a paralysis 
 of muscle. 
 
 It is surprising how uncomfortable a person may be 
 made by the obscure notion of something which he ought 
 to have said or done on some occasion, but did not say 
 or do, and which he cannot for the life of him remember. 
 There is a dim feeling of some impulse unsatisfied, an 
 effort, as it were, of the lost idea to get into conscious- 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 291 
 
 ness ; the activity thereof not being sufficient to excite 
 distinct consciousness, but sufficient to react upon the 
 unconscious mental life, and to produce a feeling of dis- 
 comfort or vague unrest, which is relieved directly the 
 idea bursts into consciousness. Certainly the tone of 
 mind at different times is much affected by obscure sub- 
 active ideational currents which do not reach the level of 
 distinct consciousness, not otherwise than as there are un- 
 dulations constantly striking upon the senses of sight and 
 hearing which are too feeble to excite definite sensations 
 of sight or sound. Then, again, when an active idea 
 has once taken ( fast hold of consciousness, how hard 
 a matter it is to dismiss it ! Some weak-minded persons 
 cannot do so until they have expended its force in suit- 
 able action : let a hysterical woman get a vivid idea of 
 some action that she must do or cannot do, the idea be- 
 comes a fate which she must sooner or later obey, not 
 otherwise than as a person who is in a state of so-called 
 mesmerism or hypnotism is dominated by the idea which 
 the operator suggests. Let a quick-tempered man con- 
 ceive a great insult suddenly done to him, in a moment, 
 without any intervention of the will, the idea reacts upon 
 the muscles of his body, and produces more or less 
 general tension of them. Let a man engaged in a fight 
 or a race get the idea that he will be beaten, his muscular 
 energy is weakened, and he is already half vanquished : 
 let another have the idea that he will win, his muscular 
 energy and skill are augmented, and he is already half 
 victor. 
 
 (Z>) The ideational nerve-current may operate down- 
 wards not only upon the motor nuclei, but also upon the 
 sensory ganglia. As the idea is excited into activity by 
 the impression on the senses, so it may in turn react back- 
 wards upon the sensory centres, giving rise even undei 
 certain circumstances to illusions and hallucinations. " I 
 am confident," John Hunter said, " that I can fix my 
 
292 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 attention to any part until I have a sensation in that part." 
 The idea of a nauseous taste or of a putrid stench may- 
 excite the sensation to such a degree as to produce vomit- 
 ing ; and the sight of a person about to run a sharp in- 
 strument over glass will set the teeth on edge. The 
 images of dreams, as Spinoza remarked, are sometimes 
 actually visible for a short time after the eyes are open on 
 awaking. " On awaking one morning out of a distress- 
 ing dream, just as. day was breaking, the images I had 
 had present to me in my dream floated before my eyes as 
 distinctly as if they had been actual objects. One form 
 in particular, that of a leprous negro, whom I had never 
 seen in my life, presented itself to me with singular dis- 
 tinctness, but faded and in a great measure disappeared 
 when, to turn my thoughts to something else, I fixed my 
 eyes on a book ; as soon, however, as I allowed my eyes 
 to wander from the page the vision of the blackamoor 
 presented itself with the same vividness as before. By 
 and bye it began to fade, and anon it disappeared en- 
 tirely." * " The celebrated Baron von Swieten," says Dr. 
 Darwin, who illustrates this kind of ideational action by 
 many instances, "was present when the putrid carcase 
 of a dead dog exploded with prodigious stench ; and, 
 some years afterwards, accidentally riding along the same 
 road, he was thrown into the same sickness and vomit- 
 ing by the idea of the stench as he had before experi- 
 enced from the perception of it." 
 
 The action of idea upon sensory ganglia is a constant 
 
 * Letter to P. Balling. See Willis's Translation of Spinoza, p. 289. 
 
 I have on several occasions experienced this persistence of dream- 
 images on awaking in the night out of a dream, notably after 
 tours in North Wales and Switzerland, in which I had made 
 mountain ascents. Pursued in dreams by vivid images of mountain 
 peaks and precipices, and steep and difficult paths, I could not, for 
 a little while after awaking, realise that I was safe in bed, for I con- 
 tinued to see the images of the dream, and was obliged to put my 
 hands out and grasp each side of the bed to convince myself. 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 293 
 
 part of our mental life; for the co-operation of sensory 
 activity is, as I have already pointed out, necessary to the 
 completeness of the idea — to clear conception and repre- 
 sentation. In order to form a distinct and definite concep- 
 tion of what is not present to sense, we are compelled to 
 form some sort of image of it in the mind ; the sense of 
 sight, which is anatomically in most extensive connection 
 with the cerebral ganglia, affording us the greatest assistance 
 in this regard. Men differ much in the power which they 
 have of thus rendering an idea sensible. Goethe could 
 call up the image of an object at will, and make it undergo 
 various transformations before his eyes in accordance 
 with the changes which he conceived in it ; and Shelley 
 appears to have been, on one occasion at least, the victim 
 of positive hallucinations generated by his ideas. But 
 the most remarkable instance of a habit of seeing his own 
 ideas as actual images was afforded by the engraver, 
 William Blake — " You have only to work up imagination 
 to the state of vision, and the thing is done," was his own 
 account of the genesis of his visions.* To render defi- 
 
 * Dickens used to allege that he heard his characters actually 
 ' speak to him. " Mes personnages imaginaires mVcrit le plus exact 
 et le plus lucide des romanciers modemes, m'affectent, me poursuivent, 
 ou plutot c'est moi qui suis en eux. Quand j'ecrivais l'empoisonne- 
 ment d'Emma Bonary, j'avais si bien le gout d'arsenic dans la 
 bouche, j'etais si bien empoisonne moi-meme, que je me suis donne 
 deux indigestions coup sur coup, deux indigestions tres reelles, car 
 j'ai vomi tout mon diner." — Taine, De V Intelligence, vol. i., p. 94. 
 The more striking, as arsenic has a scarce appreciable taste. " Dr. 
 Ferrier mentions of himself that, when at the age of fourteen, if he 
 had been viewing any interesting object in the course of the day, as 
 a romantic ruin, a fine seat, or a review of troops, as soon as evening 
 came the whole scene was brought before him with a brilliancy equal 
 to what it possessed in daylight, and remained visible for some 
 minutes." — Abercrombie, Un the Intellectual Powers. Sir I. Newton 
 could recall an ocular spectrum of the sun when he went into the 
 dark and directed his mind intensely, "as when a man looks 
 earnestly to see a thing which is difficult to be seen." From these 
 14 
 
294 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 nite the creations of the imagination, and to give fit ex- 
 pression to them, they must be accompanied by some 
 sensorial representation. The great writers whose vivid 
 descriptions of character, scenery, or events hold our 
 attention and stir our feelings, have this power in high 
 degree ; they create for themselves a world of sense by 
 the influence of idea, and then strive to present vividly to 
 us what they have thus represented to their own minds. 
 
 Natural endowments being equal, those writers who have 
 the greatest number of residua stored up in consequence 
 of much and varied experience, are best qualified to call 
 up vivid images, and best qualified to call up such as are 
 truly representative of nature ; whilst those who are 
 wanting in experience, or who have not sufficiently cul- 
 
 reeollected images of objects of sense, which the reason duly dis- 
 tinguishes from the realities around, we meet with examples marking 
 a gradual transition to those spectral images or illusions which can- 
 not be distinguished from realities, which, in fact, compel belief, and 
 excite emotions and actions in accordance with their character. 
 Abercrombie mentions the case of a gentleman who was all his life 
 affected by the appearance of spectral figures. Meeting a friend in 
 the street, he could not satisfy himself sometimes whether he really 
 saw the individual or a spectral figure, unless by touching the figure 
 or listening to the sound of his footsteps. He had also the power 
 of calling up spectral figures at will, by directing his attention 
 steadily to the conceptions of his own mind, whether figures or scenes 
 he had seen, or a composition of the imagination. " But though he 
 has the power of producing the illusion, he has no power of banish- 
 ing it ; and when he has called up any particular spectral figure or 
 scene, he can never say how long it may continue to haunt him." 
 An intense mental impression may produce such illusion involun- 
 tarily. "A step farther, and there is neither the power of calling up 
 an illusion at will^-for it rises in spite of the will — nor of distinguish- 
 ing it from realities, nor of dismissing it at will. It is excited by 
 some morbid cause, confounds itself with realities, compels belief, 
 and dominates the conduct. This is the case with those insane 
 persons who hear voices continually speaking to or of them, reply- 
 ing to their unuttered thoughts, suggesting blasphemous or obscene 
 ideas, and reviling or Ihrcalcning them. 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 295 
 
 tivated observation, are' sure to become visionary, vague, 
 and unreal. Even in matters of scientific research, the 
 scientific imagination by which hypotheses are succes- 
 sively framed until a fit one is obtained, its verification 
 completed, and a discovery thus made, is based upon a 
 previous careful training of the senses in scientific obser- 
 vation, and works by means of sensory representations. 
 Natural endowments not being equal, however, we then 
 perceive the wide difference which there is between one 
 who has adequate ideation and one who has not. The 
 latter, in describing character, scenery, or events, will give 
 a tedious picture characterised by minute industry and 
 overwrought detail, in which there is no due subordina- 
 tion of parts, no organic unity of idea— in which truly 
 soul is wanting — and from which, therefore, no one can 
 carry away a true idea of the whole : unpregnant of his 
 subject, he has gone about to give a photographic copy 
 or a minute delineation of what cannot be photographed ; 
 he has laboured to realize the appearance until at last 
 only something unreal remains.* The former, on the 
 other hand, produces, by virtue of the plastic power of 
 idea, a picture in which the unessential is suppressed, the 
 essential extracted and moulded into an organic unity, in 
 which due subordination and co-ordination of parts pre- 
 vail, and from which, therefore, a true idea of the whole 
 may be educed; truly comprehending or grasping his 
 subject, he has in fact idealised the sensory perceptions, 
 
 * " For facts," Lord Shaftesbury observes in bis Characteristics, 
 " unably related, though with the greatest sincerity and good faith, 
 may prove the worst sort of deceit : and mere lies, judiciously com- 
 posed, can teach us the truth of things beyond any manner. But to 
 amuse ourselves with such authors as neither know how to lye, nor 
 tell tt uth, discovers a taste which methinks no one should be apt to 
 ■envy. The greatest critic says of the greatest of poets, when he 
 extols him the highest, that above a'l others he understood limp to 
 lye : AeSiScurx e Se fxnXurra "O/ojpos (tal tous &A.\ovs irffeuSjj Ae , «» 
 (Sis Set." 
 
296 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 producing the illusion of a higher reality, and so displayed 
 a real development of nature. 
 
 This sort of difference between men is not less evi- 
 dent in scientific working. One man records, with a 
 praiseworthy but tedious industry, the unconnected im- 
 pressions made upon his senses, and never gets further 
 than that : fondly thinking that he sees with his eye, 
 and not through it, he is very much like one who 
 should, were he set to describe the sun for the first 
 time, delineate with great care and exactness its ap- 
 pearance to the eye, and rest content for the future 
 with this sensory representation of it. The other and 
 truer man of science succeeds in combining, by means 
 of the organising power of idea, the scattered impres- 
 sions made upon the senses, is able by comparison to 
 complement or correct the impression made on a particu- 
 lar sense, and to form to himself a true image of the sun, 
 not as a mere disc of fire, but as an immense central 
 body moving through space with its attendant planetary 
 system. Only those who are destitute of idea would 
 dream of rejecting entirely the aid of idea in scientific 
 inquiries. 
 
 These observations will not be a useless digression if 
 they serve to teach how essential to the completeness ,of 
 conception is the functional action of the sensory ganglia ; 
 how much our intellectual development depends, not 
 only upon the cultivation of careful habits of observation, 
 but also upon the co-operation of the sensory centres in 
 the subsequent intellectual action. The excitation and 
 cultivation of the sensorial centres are necessary antece- 
 dents, in the order of mental development, to the activity 
 of the ideational centres ; and the ideational centre in 
 turn performs its complete function in the formation of a 
 distinct conception by reacting downwards upon the sen- 
 sory centres. This secondary intervention of the sensory 
 ganglia is not peculiar to man, being, perhaps, more evi- 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 297 
 
 dently displayed in some of the lower animals in which 
 the ideas are so much fewer and so much less complex 
 than in man. When the dog scents the rabbit, and begins 
 to scratch furiously at the burrow, it is plain that the 
 sense of smell has excited either directly the visual image 
 of the rabbit, or rather, as the dreaming of the dog would 
 seem to indicate, the idea of the rabbit, which idea there- 
 upon calls up the appropriate visual image. It is worthy 
 of remark in this relation, how singularly effective in man 
 the sense of smell is in recalling vividly the ideas and 
 images of forgotten scenes and places : there are certain 
 smells which never fail to bring back to me instantly and 
 vividly scenes of my boyhood, though I was -not in the 
 least thinking of them at the time. 
 
 The reaction of ideas upon the senses is again very 
 notable in dreams : for my part, when dreaming, I 
 sometimes see pages of printed matter, which I read 
 with a conscious effort and, as it were, a straining of 
 the eyes, and understand; nay, more, I* may awake, 
 recognise it to be a dream, close my eyes, go in- 
 stantly to sleep again, and resume the reading, continu- 
 ing it by an effort, and conscious that the whole thing 
 will vanish if my attention be withdrawn. At one time 
 or another, most persons must have been awakened sud- 
 denly by the distinctly heard voice of a dream-image. In 
 insanity, when the nerve-centres are disordered and their 
 relations disturbed, actual hallucinations of a sense, such 
 as cannot be corrected by the evidence of unaffected 
 senses, or by reflection, are sometimes due to the influence 
 of morbid ideas. This disordered action is, after all, 
 only an exaggeration of a process which is natural in our 
 mental life. The idea cannot receive its stimulus directly 
 from the external world, nor can it react directly upon 
 the external world : both in its origin and in its expres- 
 sion are the senses concerned. 
 
 The idea of a sensation, which we have seen to be 
 
298 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 sometimes so vivid as to become an actual hallucination, 
 is no doubt an internal current or movement which is an 
 imperfect reproduction of the movement caused by the 
 external impression; it will naturally therefore increase 
 the susceptibility to such impression, forasmuch as the 
 movement in the nervous centre occasioned thereby 
 will be more easily and completely excited in conse- 
 quence of being already in partial action ; in other 
 words, susceptibility will be increased by attention.* The 
 madman who has the delusion that poison is secretly 
 put into his food, or that persons in the streets say 
 offensive things to him or of him, readily tastes the 
 poison which is not there, or misinterprets innocent 
 words to fit his thoughts ; the lover " sees Helen's beauty 
 in a brow of Egypt ; " and the poet finds his moods 
 of feeling in the aspects of nature. The external im- 
 pression easily produces the feeling which each is prepared 
 to feel. For the same reason expectant idea is a potent 
 cause of hallucination. The man who sees a ghost is he 
 who expects to see one. In making his experiments on 
 hypnotism, the phenomena of which are of the same 
 nature as those of mesmerism, Braid found that if sus- 
 ceptible persons believed that something was being done, 
 although they did not see it, by which they were to be 
 affected, they would become affected, while, on the con- 
 trary, the most expert hypnotist might exert all his en- 
 deavours in vain if the person did not expect it. He 
 relates the case of a lady who, when told to look intently 
 at a horse-shoe magnet in a dark closet, saw nothing ; but. 
 when told to look again and she would see sparks of fire 
 
 * This has been proved experimentally. Perception, like every 
 other mental process, takes time. This time, which has been 
 measured, and which may differ in different persons, or in the same 
 person at different times, is less if the nature of the impression to 
 be made is known beforehand, less still if the instant of its appear- 
 ance be foreseen. 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 299 
 
 issuing from it, presently saw fire burst forth from it, which 
 she continued to see when the magnet had- been secretly 
 removed. In like manner, at the so-called spiritual 
 seances, the idea of an event being about to happen will 
 produce in some persons a conviction that they actually 
 see or feel it happen. A person of a certain sort of ner- 
 vous temperament, sitting in the dark for some time in 
 complete silence, having the feeling of some mysterious 
 agency at work, and eagerly expectant, gets into such a 
 state of mind that he is ready to perceive what he is 
 confidently assured will occur, and perceives it accord- 
 ingly, when what really occurred was perhaps something 
 quite different. The rule of sound observation is that 
 the mind should be free from a preconceived idea ; the 
 rule of those who call spirits from the vasty deep is that 
 the mind should be possessed by the preconceived idea. 
 It has been the same with miracle-mongers in all ages. 
 The man who sees a miracle, like him who sees a ghost, 
 is the man who expects to see one ; wherefore the testi- 
 mony as to miracles when religious emotional excitement 
 prevails is of no value. As in a burning substance the 
 heat given off by the portion that is combining with oxy- 
 gen raises the adjacent part to a temperature at which it 
 also will combine with oxygen and burn, so a high tem- 
 perature of emotion in one person raises the temperature 
 of emotion in his neighbour, and the epidemic of excite- 
 ment and credulity spreads like wild-fire. It has always 
 been the perverse custom of miracles to happen in the 
 presence of those who were so full of faith that they did 
 not require their occurrence in order to testify of them, 
 and to fail to happen in the presence of those who were 
 of so little faith as to doubt. 
 
 It is a disputed question whether the idea or emotion, 
 when it acts upon the sensory centres so as to produce 
 a. hallucination, transmits the current of nervous action 
 along the sensory nerves to the organs of sense. Miiller 
 
300 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chai-. 
 
 believed that a current passed in this way from the centre 
 to the periphery, just as happens when the ideational 
 current affects nutrition or movement. Certainly it has 
 "been proved by the experiment of uniting the distal por- 
 tion of a divided sensory nerve with the proximal portion 
 of a divided motor nerve, that a current may traverse a 
 sensory nerve in a downward or efferent direction. On 
 the other hand, it is certain that the hallucination would 
 be generated if the sensory ganglia only were affected, 
 and that the mind will always in such case refer the 
 sensation to the peripheral end of the nerves. A person 
 may have a visual hallucination when the retina and the 
 optic nerve are so wasted as to be incapable of function, 
 and an auditory hallucination when the auditory nerve is 
 destroyed; and one who has had his leg or arm ampu- 
 tated feels sensations, as if he still possessed the lost 
 limb, for some time after its removal. The transmission 
 of the current to the periphery, whether it takes place or 
 not, is clearly not essential. Some writers are in the 
 habit of speaking of the sensation as not real but de- 
 lusive, when it is of subjective origin. But the sensation 
 is real, however it originate : the man who believes he 
 sees a ghost has a real sensation of it, although he does 
 not really see it, there being no object outside his eye 
 to make that impression upon it which we mean by see- 
 ing.* Like the dagger which Macbeth saw, it is before 
 his mind's eye, but not before his bodily eye. 
 
 (c) A third important, though little recognised, way in 
 which idea may operate, is upon the functions of nutri- 
 tion and secretion. Whether the idea act, as is probable, 
 directly upon the organic elements of the part through 
 its nerves, or indirectly by an effect upon the vaso-motor 
 system, or in both ways, it is certain that the energy of 
 idea may increase or lessen a secretion, and may modify 
 nutrition. The idea of food will cause a flow of saliva ; 
 a sympathetic idea, a flow of tears ; the idea of suckling, 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 301 
 
 a secretion of milk ; the idea of itching in a particular 
 spot will give rise to an itching there ; and the idea that a 
 structural defect will certainly be removed by a particular 
 manipulation does sometimes so affect the organic action 
 of the part as to produce a cure. The most successful 
 physician is ever one who inspires his patient with the 
 greatest confidence in the virtue of his remedies ; and he 
 is most likely to be attacked by epidemic diseases who 
 most fears them. Bacon rightly, therefore, would have 
 us inquire into the best means to " fortify and exalt the 
 imagination." " And here," he says, " comes in crookedly 
 and dangerously a palliation and defence of a great part 
 of ceremonial magic. For it may be speciously pretended 
 that ceremonies, characters, charms, gesticulations, amu- 
 lets, and the like, do not derive their power from any 
 tacit or sacramental contract with evil spirits, but serve 
 only to strengthen and exalt the imagination of him who 
 uses them." * 
 
 It is well known that a bread pill will sometimes purge 
 violently one who, believing that he has taken a strong 
 purgative, confidently expects the purgative effect, and 
 a perfectly innocent draught may produce sleep, when it 
 is believed to contain a narcotic. On one occasion I was 
 consulted about an old lady who for years had been in the 
 habit of taking two purgative pills, two or three times a 
 week or oftener, and a dose of chloral every night. Her 
 husband, who thought that she must be doing injury to 
 her health by this practice, substituted bread pills for 
 those which she bought, and greatly lessened the dose of 
 chloral, without saying anything to her ; the usual effect 
 being produced in both cases. But it was always neces- 
 sary that there should be a taste of chloral, however little 
 the quantity of the drug, for the effect to be produced. 
 The idea of a person that he will go to sleep, certainly pro- 
 motes the occurrence of sleep ; the idea that he will not, 
 
 * De Augmentis Scientiarum, B. iv. 
 
302 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 on the other hand, as certainly tends to keep him awake ; 
 and the idea that he must awake at a certain hour usually 
 causes him to awake at that hour, or perhaps more often 
 before it.* 
 
 The so-called stigmata which the ecstatic mystics pro- 
 fessed to show on their hands, feet, side, or forehead, in 
 imitation of the sufferings which Christ underwent from 
 the nails, spear and crown of thorns, were effects of the 
 action of idea upon nutrition, if they were not fraudu- 
 lently produced. But it is impossible for those who are 
 not eager to seize opportunities of practising faith, to 
 avoid the suspicion that they who thus professed to bear 
 in their bodies the marks of the Lord Jesus bore ulcer- 
 ations artificially produced, for the marks most often 
 occurred in women of highly nervous temperament, 
 whom experience . proves to be not unapt to simulate 
 strange bodily affections. It is to be regretted that the 
 examination in such cases, when they occur now, is seldom 
 made with such strictness as to exclude fraud : if the 
 hands are the seat of bleeding, it is evidently not enough 
 to put them in strong gloves and to take every precau- 
 tion that these cannot be taken off, if they are penetrable 
 by a needle. In a case of alleged spontaneous bleed- 
 ing from a part of the surface of the body which 
 occurred at one of the London Hospitals, the imposture 
 was detected by placing secretly in the covering which 
 was fastened over the bleeding surface a piece of tin- 
 foil, which was found on examination afterwards to 
 have many perforations by a pin or needle. It should 
 be borne in mind, when attributing such events to 
 
 * This is a curious fact, as it would appear to indicate that there 
 is an appreciation of the lapse of time during sleep. We observe 
 something of the same kind in the day, for a man who has not heard 
 a clock strike, or looked at a watch, has a tolerably accurate notion 
 what the hour is, especially if he has been going on in his usual 
 routine. 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL- GANGLIA. 303 
 
 fraud, that it may not be deliberate deception in all 
 cases. Deception is not a definite, constant mental state, 
 which either is or is not, and which therefore when it is 
 not, may be eliminated entirely from consideration. 
 There are various degrees of deception ranging from the 
 most wilful deception to the most innocent unconscious 
 self-deception ; and assuredly the greatest impostor is he 
 who imposes upon himself as well as upon others. We 
 ought in this relation to take account of those peculiar 
 states of abnormal consciousness which occur in dream- 
 ing, hypnotism, epilepsy, catalepsy, even ecstacy, and the 
 like morbid states, when it will appear not impossible 
 that a person might, in a so-called ecstatic trance or 
 vision, fabricate a stigma, and yet be unaware, when he 
 returned to normal consciousness, of what he had done 
 when he was, as it were, alienated from his proper self. 
 For it is certain that those who fall into these anomalous 
 states may, when they come to themselves, be quite 
 ignorant of what they did while in the state of abnormal 
 consciousness. I doubt not that some of those who 
 suffered from what I take leave to call theolepsy were of 
 this class. 
 
 (d) There is yet another path which the energy of an 
 idea may take. As, in the function of the spinal cord, 
 the current of nervous action which did not pass directly 
 outwards in the reaction travelled upwards to the sen- 
 sorium commune and excited sensation ; and as in sen- 
 sori-motor action the current of nervous force which 
 did not pass outwards- in the reaction travelled up 
 to the cortical cells, and gave rise to idea ; so in idea- 
 tional action the current which does not pass, or which 
 may be over and above what does pass, immediately out- 
 wards in the reaction, abides in operation in the cortical 
 centres, and passes therein from plexus to plexus of the 
 complicated mechanism. There is no superimposed 
 collection of nerve centres of a higher kind to which it 
 
304 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 might now ascend, and wherein it might excite a higher 
 kind of mental activity ; there is, instead, an infinite mul- 
 titude of nerve-cells in the cortical layers, having most 
 numerous, varied, and intricate connections, whereby ex- 
 citation may be communicated from one to another. This 
 communication is what does take place when one idea 
 calls up another by some association, itself partly, or 
 wholly disappearing in the act. It is probable that one 
 idea can only call another into activity through its own 
 partial or entire disappearance from consciousness, as one 
 wave disappears in the production of another ; but it is, 
 perhaps, doubtful whether this, which is Muller's simile, 
 expresses the condition of things so well as that of 
 Hobbes, who looked upon one idea as obscured by the 
 more active one, " in such manner as the light of the sun' 
 obscureth the light of the stars ; which stars do no less 
 exercise their virtue, by which they are visible, in the day 
 than in the night." * (?)■ There is as would appear, not 
 
 * Dr. Brown {Physiology of the Mind, p. 223) held, however, 
 that the slightest attention to the successive states of mind would 
 show, ' ' that a conception, after giving rise to some new conception, 
 does not always cease to be itself a part of our continued conscious- 
 ness." He thought that it often remained so as to co-exist with the 
 conception which itself had induced, and might afterwards suggest 
 other conceptions, or other feelings, with which it might then co- 
 exist in a still more complex group. " We compare, we choose, 
 in our internal plans, because different objects are together present 
 to our conceptions." Sir W. Hamilton limited to six the number of 
 objects which might exist in consciousness at the same time ; and 
 Mr. J. S. Mill, in his Examination of Sir W. Hamilton' s Philosophy, 
 allows a ' 'great multitude of states, more or less conscious, which often 
 co-exist in the mind!" On this question Sir H. Holland has some 
 excellent remarks in his " Chapters on Mental Physiology." German 
 philosophers differ also with regard to the answer, some upholding, 
 with Miiller, a single conscious state, others a co-existence of con- 
 scious states. It would appear that ideas are in this regard like 
 movements : several of them may be in simultaneous action, though 
 not simultaneously present to consciousness. For my part, it seems 
 to me clear that I can see more than one object at a tinle, but that 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 305 
 
 only a transference of energy from cell to cell within the 
 hemispherical ganglia but a transformation thereof in the 
 process ; and the energy of the particular current, or the 
 idea for the moment active, is attended with conscious- 
 ness. We are now come, then, to another sphere of 
 mental function, namely, function within consciousness, 
 or mental reflection. 
 
 It behoves us here to settle clearly in our minds the 
 relation of consciousness to ideational function, or at any 
 rate to be on our guard against considering consciousness 
 as co-extensive with such function. When the whole 
 energy of an idea passes immediately outwards in ideo- 
 motor action, then there is scarce any, or there may be 
 no, consciousness of it ; in order that there may be con- 
 sciousness of the idea, it is necessary not only that its 
 excitation reach a certain intensity, but that the whole 
 force of it do not pass immediately outwards in the re- 
 action. When an idea disappears from consciousness, it 
 does not necessarily disappear entirely ; it may remain in 
 latent action below the horizon of consciousness, the 
 currents of molecular motion subsiding gradually before 
 it ceases entirely. Moreover, it may produce an effect 
 upon movement or upon other ideas when thus active 
 below the horizon of consciousness ; for when we find 
 the same effect produced unconsciously which we know, 
 it to have produced when we were conscious, we 
 justly infer the activity of the same cause; the more 
 confidently so because we may sometimes, when our 
 consciousness is unexpectedly aroused to its operation, 
 or withdrawn from something else which was occupying 
 
 when I endeavour to think of two things at the same time, my con- 
 sciousness passes rapidly from one to Ihe other. When I do appear 
 to be conscious of two or more ideas at the same time, it is that the 
 ideas have coalesced into one complex idea, or so nearly so that 
 while I have active consciousness of the one, I am capable, at the 
 same time, of a subactive consciousness of the other. 
 
306 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 its field, catch it in the act. The persistence for a time 
 of a certain degree of intensity of energy in the idea- 
 tional circuit would certainly appear to be the condition 
 of consciousness. Accordingly when the process of re- 
 flection is going on quietly and rapidly, through the regular 
 association of ideas, there is no consciousness of the 
 steps ; in the train of thought one idea calls another into 
 activity without being itself attended to, so that the result 
 may appear sudden and accidental, and it may be very 
 difficult, or quite impossible, to retrace the steps or take 
 up the successive links by which it was evolved. In the 
 course of a day how many thoughts or ideas do thus 
 suddenly start into consciousness, or, as we may say, 
 suddenly strike us ! The excitation of one ideational 
 current would seem to be communicated immediately to 
 another, and the energy thus to run through a series by a 
 continuous transformation, with no persistence at any of 
 the intermediate stages. 
 
 A conception of the way in which a group or series of 
 movements is observably associated, and the faculty of 
 them is firmly organized in the nervous centres, so that 
 they are thenceforth automatically performed, will be 
 found most serviceable in the interpretation of the 
 phenomena of ideational activity. In the one case as in 
 the other, there must be an organization in relation to the 
 environment by means of education, a young child's 
 ideas and movements being alike vague, vivid, transient, 
 and incoherent. Like muscular motions, ideas are asso- 
 ciated in groups or series, getting closer and closer 
 together by repetitions, until they so coalesce as, like 
 sensations which appear simple to consciousness but are 
 really compound, to leave no trace of their separate ex- 
 istence in consciousness ; like movements, they become 
 easier with repetition ; like them, they are excited into 
 action by appropriate stimuli ; like them, when once asso- 
 ciated, they are not easily separated, and may become 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 307 
 
 indissoluble ; like them, they may be accomplished with- 
 out consciousness ; like them, they demand an appre- 
 ciable time for their accomplishment ; and, like them, 
 they are fatigued by prolonged exercise. The ques- 
 tion of the time necessary for the performance of an 
 idea is really a most important one, which has not 
 hitherto received sufficient attention. The time is ap- 
 preciable, and is sometimes not less than that required 
 for the performance of a muscular motion ; for, as Dr. 
 Darwin observed, a musician can press the keys of a 
 harpsichord with his fingers in the order of a tune which 
 he has been accustomed to play, in as little a time as he 
 can run over those notes in his mind. Nay, an idea may 
 even require more time than a movement : how many 
 times in a day do we cover our eye^s with our eyelids 
 without ever perceiving that we are in the dark ? In this 
 case, as Dr. Darwin has also observed, the muscular 
 motion of the eyelid is performed quicker than the idea 
 of light can be changed for that of darkness, the twink- 
 ling of an eye being quicker than thought. (?) 
 
 The interference of consciousness is often an actual 
 hindrance to the association of ideas, as it notably is to 
 the performance of movements that have attained the 
 complete ease of an automatic execution. It happens 
 that we try hard to recall something to mind, and are 
 unable by the utmost effort of volition and the strongest 
 direction of consciousness to do so : we thereupon re- 
 linquish the attempt, and direct our attention to some- 
 thing else : and, after a while, the result for which we 
 in vain strove flashes into consciousness : the automatic 
 action of the brain has worked it out. That is exactly 
 what we might expect to happen ; for if consciousness 
 implies a persistence of the tension of a nerve-cell's 
 energy, then in proportion to the degree of persistent 
 tension must be the retardation of, or hindrance to, the 
 process of association of ideas which is effected by a 
 
308 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 transference of energy from one to another of the 
 catenated cells. For the same reason strong emotion is 
 unfavourable to reflection : certain cells or cell-territories 
 continue in a state of molecular commotion, and only 
 excite by association sympathetic ideas, that is, ideas re- 
 lated to the strong feeling which is the exponent of their 
 activity ; the free course of a varied association being 
 prevented. Anger is a short madness, because, like the 
 fixed delusion of monomania, it marks the prepon- 
 derating activity of a certain area of cells, and the exclu- 
 sion of full and unimpeded transmission or reflection of 
 energy. How can there be true deliberation when one 
 end of the balance is falsely weighted ? 
 
 An active consciousness is always detrimental to 
 the best and most successful thought ; the thinker who 
 is actively attentive to the succession of his ideas is 
 thinking to little purpose ; what the successful thinker 
 observes is that he is conscious of the words which 
 he is uttering or writing, while the thought, uncon- 
 sciously elaborated by the functional action of the 
 brain, flows from unpenetrated depths into conscious- 
 ness. In reverie the train of meditation goes on with 
 little or no consciousness of its successive links, and 
 may go on until attention is aroused by some start- 
 ling thought which the person cannot at first imagine 
 how he came to have. It is only when he can deliber- 
 ately trace "backwards the succession of ideas that he 
 discovers how he conceived it. Reflection is then, in 
 reality, the reflex action of the cells in their relations to 
 the cerebral ganglia ; it is the reaction of one cell to a 
 stimulus from a neighbouring cell, and the sequent trans- 
 ference of its energy to another cell — the reflection of it. 
 Attention is the arrest of the transformation of energy 
 for a moment — the maintenance of a particular tension. 
 When the tension is maintained at a certain elevation, 
 without being excessive, there is a state favourable 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 309 
 
 to a radiation of energy in all directions, so that all the 
 related ideas are aroused ; and it is a condition of the 
 best mental development to establish and keep open a 
 great many channels of radiation, by means of a varied 
 cultivation and exercise of mind. There can be little doubt 
 that alcohol and opium sometimes aid imagination by 
 stimulating torpid molecules, and by so opening up unused 
 or obstructed paths of association. Bear in mind what was 
 said of the varying value of an idea and of the manner 
 of its gradual organization in the nervous centres, and 
 the applicability of the term deliberation to a process of 
 thought, as a weighing or balancing of one reason against 
 another, will be evident. Or if we prefer the term ratio- " 
 dilation, we may say, with Hobbes, that by it is meant 
 computation. " Now to compute is either to collect the 
 sum of many things that are added together, or to know 
 what remains when one thing is taken from another. 
 Ratiocination, therefore, is the same with addition and 
 subtraction." Subtract the energy of an opposing desire 
 from a more powerful one, and the energy left represents 
 the resultant force of impulse after deliberation ; add the 
 energy of a like desire to another, and the sum repre- 
 sents the force of the resolution. After severe reflection 
 or deliberation the decision or resolution may be held 
 to signify that the individual has resolved, to the best of 
 his ability, the complex equation set him ; that he has 
 guided the fundamental desire through the complex 
 processes of deliberation, adding ,here and subtracting 
 there, until it has come out in the best volition of which, 
 with his mental plexuses such as they are by constitution 
 and education, he is capable. 
 
 Though reflection is a process of mental activity 
 which takes place within consciousness, yet conscious- 
 ness itself, when fairly examined, will show how limited 
 is the power of mind over the train of its ideas. The 
 foundation of an idea is an organic process that takes 
 
310 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 place by imperceptible degrees beyond the range of con- 
 sciousness ; the idea, when formed, may be said to exist 
 in a latent, dormant or statical state ; and it may even 
 be made active, and its energy duly expended, without 
 consciousness. In like manner the catenation of a group 
 or series of ideas is an organic process of which con- 
 sciousness has no knowledge, and over which volition has 
 no control ; once the train is firmly linked together by 
 this organized coherence, the excitation of one must 
 needs bring on the excitation of the others, one after 
 another, as it traverses its appointed orbit, rising above 
 the mental horizon into consciousness, and in' due order 
 again sinking below it. The power of the mind over the 
 succession of its states is plainly at best but a limited 
 faculty ; herein corresponding with that limited control 
 which the individual has over the phenomena of his 
 bodily life, where conscious and unconscious, voluntary 
 and involuntary, acts are so intimately intermixed. To 
 make states of consciousness synonymous with states of 
 mind, as some have heedlessly done, is scarcely less un- 
 warrantable than it would be to assert all bodily acts to 
 be conscious acts. 
 
 It is not part of my design to attempt to give a full 
 exposition of the different mental processes and to go 
 into a complete analysis of their nature, and I pass 
 quickly therefore over many subjects concerning which 
 it would be interesting to speculate. One of these is the 
 nature and influence of attention. Whatever its nature, 
 it is plainly the essential condition of the formation and 
 development of mind. Children learn well or ill, as 
 monkeys do, according to the capacity of attention which 
 they display, and in after life fruitful reflection upon a 
 subject is possible only where there is the power of con- 
 centrating the attention.* It is plain that those who 
 
 * " A man who trains monkeys to act used to purchase common 
 kinds from the Zoological Society, at the price of five pounds for 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 311 
 
 attend carelessly to an object or event with which they 
 are concerned will receive only feeble and inadequate 
 impressions from it, and that the effects will be imper- 
 fectly registered in the appropriate nervous centres; • 
 wherefore it is improbable they should rightly under- 
 stand it, and impossible, if they collect other materials 
 of thought in the same heedless way, tnat they should 
 exhibit exact reasoning and exercise sound judgment. 
 Many persons assuredly give only a glancing attention to 
 other subjects than those which they have been drilled 
 to attend to by the education which they have received 
 and by the special pursuits and habits of their lives ; and 
 if we reflect upon the formation and action of the mechan- 
 ism of thought — how it is developed in adjustment to im- 
 pressions in order to react in definite ways, we shall 
 easily perceive how it is that they become automatic 
 machines for giving out unsound conclusions when they 
 pass judgment upon matters that" lie at all outside their 
 accustomed grooves of mental function. They are faith- 
 fully stamped, like bank-notes, with the same marks, and 
 their thoughts and feelings will alone pass current 
 among those of their sect, party or country who are 
 
 each ; but he offered to give double the price if he might keep three 
 or four of them for a few days, in order to select one. When asked 
 how he could possibly so soon learn whether a particular monkey 
 would turn out a good actor, he answered that ii all depended on 
 their power of attention. If when he was talking or explaining 
 anything to a monkey, its attention was easily distracted, as by a 
 fly on the wall or other trifling object, the case was hopeless. 
 If he tried by punishment to make an inattentive monkey act, it 
 turned sulky. On the other hand, a monkey which carefully 
 attended to him could always be trained." — Darwin's Descent of 
 Man, voli., p. 45. Very notable in imbecile or idiotic children is 
 the lack of power of attention ; when a new object is presented to 
 them they throw it aside or turn away from it directly, without get- 
 ting from it the informing impressions which it should produce ; 
 their defective nervous structure is deficient in or destitute of its 
 fundamental property of adaptation to the environing medium. 
 
312 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 similarly stamped. The revelatioris of modern science 
 are foolishness to those who have been trained to ac- 
 cept supernatural revelations, and who have remained 
 content with that training, and when the springs of their 
 thought are touched they will give out the same predict- 
 able results with mechanical uniformity. It is the same 
 with all men wfio have undergone a one-sided develop- 
 ment : when subjected to impressions to which their minds 
 have not been adjusted, these produce no intelligent effect 
 — are as sound to the deaf, as light to the blind. One 
 need not converse long with ordinary persons, if their 
 education, position and pursuits be known, without 
 feeling pretty confident what opinions they will express 
 on any social, political, or religious subject which may be 
 broached in their presence. To travel daily to a large 
 city by rail, and to listen to the usual conversation of the 
 commercial men who are on their way to business, be- 
 comes as wearisome as to watch the operations of a 
 thrashing machine, for the results are almost as automatic 
 in the one case as in the other. 
 
 It is an obvious distinction to make between involun- 
 tary and voluntary attention ; the interest of the object 
 or subject forcibly soliciting it in the former case, while 
 it is said to be directed by an effort of will in the latter 
 case. When a present object or event of interest engages 
 the attention earnestly, it is easy to understand that the 
 nervous centres which minister to the perception may be 
 in active operation and that an intense consciousness 
 may be thereby produced. When the object or event is 
 no longer present to sense, but the idea of it engages the 
 attention, it is reasonable to suppose that the same ner- 
 vous centres are in operation and in the same way ; not, 
 however, with the same intensity usually, whence it 
 happens that the attention is more apt to wander, in 
 other words, the energy is more apt to radiate along 
 other plexuses. The idea may be of such a nature as to 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 313 
 
 hold the attention fast without any auxiliary effort of will, 
 or even in spite of efforts of will to withdraw attention 
 from it. Now two observations in regard to attention 
 have been made which are of some interest : the first is 
 that it has the physical effect of increasing die sensibility 
 of the nerve to weak impressions, persons obviously 
 hearing, feeling, smelling more acutely when their atten- 
 tion is on the strain ; and the second, which is perhaps a 
 consequence of the first, is that the appreciable time 
 which elapses between the action of a stimulus upon a 
 sense and its perception is distinctly shorter when the 
 impression is attentively expected than when it is unex- 
 pected. This is in accordance with the previous inference 
 that an active idea is accompanied by a molecular change 
 in the nervous elements, which is propagated either along 
 the sensory nerve to its periphery, or, if not so far, at 
 any rate to the sensory ganglion,' the sensibility of which 
 is thereby increased. The result of this propagation of 
 molecular action to the ganglion is that the different 
 muscles in connection with the affected sense are put 
 into a certain tension by reflex action, and thereby in- 
 crease the feeling of attention, in accordance with the 
 law that associated feelings strengthen one another. Let 
 it be noted, moreover, that the increase of. sensibility by 
 attention is in entire harmony with what I have previously 
 said concerning the habitual operation of ideas upon 
 the sensory centres, and their occasional operation in 
 producing illusions and hallucinations. 
 
 When we give intense attention to a perception, or to 
 the performance of an act or of an idea, we are distinctly 
 conscious of a feeling of tension ; a feeling which, when 
 we search back through our experiences, we find to re- 
 semble the feelings of muscular tension more closely than 
 anything else, and refer accordingly to the category of 
 motor innervation. When we look intently at an object, 
 our ocular muscles are put into a state of tension ; 
 
314 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 when we listen intently, our auditory muscles; when 
 we sniff intently a scarce perceptible odour, our nasai 
 muscles ; when we touch intently some object, so as to 
 have a very nice feeling of it, the muscles of the part 
 which we are using : the result of the co-operating stimuli 
 of the muscular sense in all these instances being to in- 
 crease the activity of the original sensation. In fact, as 
 the perception of the .object consists of the affection of 
 sense plus the correspondent muscular feelings, it is ob- 
 vious that a greater excitation of the latter will compen- 
 sate for a feebler impression upon the former in bringing 
 the object clearly into the field of consciousness. It is 
 well known that impressions escape consciousness from 
 inattention j and it is well known also that a person may 
 sometimes, by deliberately practising attention, perceive 
 impressions of which he would otherwise have been un- 
 conscious, just as he can by attention and practice gain 
 a voluntary power over muscles which are commonly 
 beyond the control of will. For example, as he may 
 succeed in voluntarily moving the muscles of the ear and 
 even of the iris, so he may succeed in distinguishing 
 some of the tones which unite to constitute the quality 
 of a musical note which appears to be simple. In this 
 case there is obviously a tension of the auditory muscles, 
 the extremely delicate variations of which, answering to 
 the differences of vibrations of sounds, reveal themselves 
 in consciousness as discriminating perception : the pro- 
 cess corresponding exactly with that which takes place in 
 the ocular muscles when a person learns to measure with 
 his eye nice differences of distance. 
 
 But it may be asked, How can motor innervation 
 be a factor in the operation of will in a mental act 
 when, so far as appears, no muscular act is concerned ? 
 The reply which there seems good warrant to make 
 is that motor innervation invariably accompanies the 
 simplest effort of what seems to be pure will. When 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 315 
 
 we think of an object which is not present to sense 
 we exercise the same motor innervation which we do 
 when we actually perceive it and • think about it, the 
 only difference being that we do it, as it were, in an 
 internal whisper, or are content with a nascent excitation 
 — in other words, we have the same motor intuitions : in 
 like manner, when we exercise will in thinking, there is 
 always a tension, actual or nascent, of some muscles — 
 either of the ocular muscles, when our eyes look as if 
 they were straining to see or apprehend some distant 
 object; or of the auditory muscles, when we have the 
 appearance of one who is listening to catch a distant 
 sound; or of the muscles of head, nose, forehead and 
 face, when the looker-on can easily read earnest thought 
 in the resulting expression ; or in some other of the 
 muscles of the body which persons may have associated 
 with their thinking processes. 
 
 In support of this opinion let me instance — first, the 
 feeling of tension in or about the head which is some- 
 times experienced after long and earnest thought, and 
 which, if augmented, may not only become distress- 
 ing but may end in giddiness or vertigo, the motor 
 innervation losing its definite co-ordinate character, 
 and discharging its disorderly energy in consciousness ; 
 secondly, the frequent association of apparently useless 
 movements with the movements which are necessary for 
 the accomplishment of an act, as, for example, when one 
 who is making a strong exertion with his arms or a deli- 
 cate operation with his hands distorts or otherwise puts 
 in action the muscles of his face. Such movements have 
 been called sympathetic, as they indeed are, but at the 
 same time it may be justly argued that they actually 
 assist in the performance of the operation, forasmuch as 
 they strengthen the central energy by means of the sen- 
 sory reflex contributions which they supply through their 
 muscular sense. Lastly, I may adduce the fact that the 
 
316 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 character of a man's will is written in the character of 
 his physiognomy and of the muscular habit of his body, 
 as evidence that there has been an habitual muscular 
 tension during each operation of will. Just as the history 
 of a man's life is the revelation of his character, testifying 
 to what he has willed, so likewise the features of his body, 
 containing the history of what he had willed, would be 
 found to be an excellent record of character, could we 
 but acquire the skill to interpret the symbols accurately. 
 
 If one were required to specify the physical conditions 
 of an act of attention, it would be necessary to begin by 
 the fundamental postulate of an interest in the subject, 
 arising either from ancestral affinities in the individual's 
 nature, or from affinities developed in it in consequence 
 .of education or of the particular pursuit in life. After 
 this had been assumed, the requisite conditions might be 
 declared to be these : first, the excitation of the proper 
 ideational track either by external presentation or internal 
 representation ; secondly, the intensification of its energy 
 by the increment of stimulus resulting from the proper 
 motor innervation; thirdly, a further intensification of 
 energy by the subsequent reaction of the more active 
 perceptive centre upon the motor factor — the interplay 
 of sensory and motor factors augmenting the activity up 
 to a certain limit ; and, lastly, a probable increase in the 
 vascularity of the parts concerned, in consequence of the 
 greater activity of function. Of this last condition I have 
 not yet said anything ; but it is probable from these cir- 
 cumstances — that there is a more active circulation of 
 blood through the brain during function than when it is in 
 repose, and that the effect of fixing the attention upon a 
 part of the body is notably sometimes to increase the 
 activity of its circulation. We may fairly conclude, then, 
 that the effect of attention to a current of thought is 
 to quicken the circulation in the nervous subtrata which 
 minister to it ; not otherwise than as when some earnest 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 317 
 
 thought has taken hold of the mind, it keeps up an active 
 circulation in the brain, and will not let us go to sleep. 
 It determines an afflux of blood, and the increased afflux 
 of blood sustains the activity ; and when sleep is pro- 
 cured, it may be done either by an abatement of thought 
 and a sequent lowering of the circulation, or by a 
 lowering of the circulation and a sequent subsidence 
 of thought. Compare in regard to this action and 
 reaction the phenomena of blushing: an idea which 
 is connected with some feeling of shame causes an im- 
 mediate dilatation of the vessels of the face and neck, 
 and the individual blushes ; thereupon the feeling pro- 
 duced by the blushing reacts upon the idea, and augments 
 his shame and confusion ; and the consequence is that he 
 blushes still deeper, and is still more confused. 
 
 Bearing the foregoing considerations in mind, let us 
 endeavour to apprehend clearly what is meant by saying 
 that we voluntarily direct attention to a subject of thought 
 in order to reflect upon it What is accomplished in such 
 case is the excitation of certain nervous currents of ideas, 
 and their maintenance in action until they have called 
 into consciousness, by radiation of energy, all their 
 related ideas, or as many of them as it may be possible, 
 in the then condition of the brain, to stimulate into 
 action. If the reflection be fruitful, a new conception is 
 formed, co-ordinating or holding together the newly dis- 
 covered relations, which takes its place henceforth in due 
 association with, but on a higher level of abstraction than, 
 the ideas from which it has been developed. The 
 voluntary direction of attention to a subject of thought 
 implies an interest in it arising from some feeling con- 
 nected with it, or from the desire to understand it, 
 whereby it holds the attention; for if the subject be 
 utterly without interest to us, or if thinking about it fails 
 entirely to stimulate interest by the discovery of any new 
 relations, the attention is sure to wander. In fact, what 
 15 
 
318 THE PJIVSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 we do voluntarily is to impart an interest to the subject 
 by bringing suitable motives to bear, augmenting excita- 
 tion by appropriate stimuli, so that the attention is 
 attracted, or, in other words, consciousness actively 
 aroused, rather than, as common language implies, to 
 direct consciousness to it, and so to keep it before the 
 mind. It would appear then that the force which we 
 mean by attention is rather a vis a fronte attracting con- 
 sciousness than a vis a tergo driving it. If this be so, 
 voluntary and involuntary attention differ not in their 
 fundamental nature ; the actual difference being that 
 while in reflex or involuntary attention the ac.ivity of 
 the thought is such as immediately to arouse and hold 
 consciousness by itself, in voluntary attention the excita- 
 tion reaches the proper pitch of activity only .by help of 
 the increments of energy — the reflex contributions, so to 
 speak — which it receives from associated ideas. In the 
 one case consciousness is aroused to the pitch of attention 
 as a direct reflex act; in the other case, through the 
 intermediate aid of the energies reflected upon the sub- 
 ject of thought from associated ideas. 
 
 It is well known that a greater pain causes us to cease 
 to feel a less pain even though the cause of the latter con- 
 tinues in operation ; the consciousness is appropriated by 
 the former, and there is none left for the latter at the 
 same moment. In like manner, we are undoubtedly able 
 in some measure to relieve a sharp pain by biting the 
 tongue, or even by spasmodically contracting certain 
 muscles ; an inhibitory effect being produced upon the 
 centre in which the pain was felt, and the consciousness 
 being concerned with the sensation from the bitten tongue 
 or with the muscular sensibility of the contracted muscles. 
 When a bodily pain precludes attention to a subject of 
 thought, the stimulated sensory centre exerts an inhibitory 
 effect upon the supreme cerebral ■ centres. We have an 
 instance of the reverse operation when great mental 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 319 
 
 excitement produces an inhibitory anaesthetic effect : a 
 severe wound inflicted during the excitement of battle 
 may not be felt at the time ; persons suffering from mania 
 will sometimes sustain or inflict on themselves the severest 
 injuries without apparently feeling the least pain from 
 them ; the convulsipnists of St MeVlard were seemingly 
 insensible to the violent blows, the so-called " consola- 
 tions," with which the on-lookers vigorously belaboured 
 them. These facts show how localized a function con- 
 sciousness may be in the brain, and seem to me to suit 
 well with the interpretation which I have given of the 
 nature of attention. 
 
 I might mention many other facts which point to 
 the same conclusion, but it will suffice now to call to 
 mind the phenomena of the so-called mesmeric sleep. 
 In this artificially induced state, the person who is the 
 subject of the experiment is sometimes insensible to 
 all sensory stimuli except the sound of the operator's 
 voice, and it is certain that severe surgical operations 
 have been performed without the least indication of suf- 
 fering. He is unconscious too of all ideas except those 
 which the operator suggests to him, and is accordingly 
 under their influence entirely, their substrata being alone 
 active ; cannot sit down if he is told that he cannot 
 sit, or rise from a chair if made to believe that he 
 cannot rise ; he becomes, in' fact, an automatic machine, 
 dominated by the ideas that are aroused into action. In 
 somnambulism, the person is in like manner unconscious 
 of all ideas except those which constitute his dream, and 
 of all sensations except those which are related to the 
 ideas of his dream. His senses are not closed entirely, 
 but they are only open to such impressions as are in 
 relation with the ideas of the dream ; this phenomenon 
 being but an extreme instance of that operation of idea 
 upon sensory ganglia which we have pointed out as in- 
 creasing the susceptibility of the sense, and producing 
 
320 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 sometimes actual hallucination. He acts his dream, 
 insensible the while to other sensory stimuli - than those 
 which are necessary to enable him to do this ; these 
 being commonly, as we should expect, such as are de- 
 rived from the sense of sight and the muscular sense.( 8 ) 
 Probably, were a hound thus to act a dream of hunting, 
 the sense of smell would be alone open to impressions. 
 We have no data to warrant a conjecture as to the actual 
 condition of the brain under these circumstances ; but it 
 is not impossible, having regard to the manner of dis- 
 tribution of the arteries, that the state of the circulation 
 of the blood in the brain may be at the bottom of the 
 phenomena. We know that the vessels are contracted, 
 and that much less blood flows through the brain, during 
 sleep, the full force and activity of the circulation being 
 restored when the person awakes; we know, too, that 
 certain arteries supply certain areas of the convolutions ; 
 we may conjecture, therefore, that in the dream of the 
 somnambulist the activity of the circulation continues 
 in particular vascular areas, in consequence perhaps of a 
 stimulus from some internal organ which is in relation 
 with that area, and that the functions of these cerebral 
 areas persist partially in consequence. Whether this be 
 the physical explanation or not, it is certain that in these 
 abnormal states of sleep there is a discontinuity of func- 
 tion, portions of the cortical centres being cut off from 
 intercourse with the neighbouring centres, which are in 
 a .state of repose, and discharging their function inde- 
 pendently of them ; the ideas aroused are, for some un- 
 known physical reason, incapable of propagation through 
 neighbouring plexuses. 
 
 Let me briefly summarize and bring together the facts 
 which have been mentioned. They. are these : that the 
 idea of a certain sensation being about to occur quickens 
 the sense when the impression is made, rendering it both 
 more acute and quick to feel ; that in reflection the idea 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 321 
 
 habitually acts upon the sensory centre, becoming more 
 definite by being thus figured to sense; that this downward 
 action of idea upon sense is sometimes so intense as to 
 generate an actual hallucination; that the consequence of 
 the excitation of the sensory centre is a motor innervation ; 
 and that in certain anomalous states, when a particular train 
 of mental activity is going on, the senses are open only 
 to such sensations as are in relation with the current of 
 ideas, the person being capable only of attending to these 
 sensations. But this limitation of attention is a strictly 
 physical limitation arising from the isolated excitation of 
 particular ideational currents, and the consciousness is 
 the result, not the cause, of the excitation. The psycho^ 
 logical mode of expression puts the cart before the horse ; 
 the problem in reflection is not, as it is said, to direct con- 
 sciousness, or to direct the attention to an idea, but to 
 arouse consciousness of it by stirring it up to a certain 
 pitch of activity. And it is a question of no little im- 
 portance, whether we can reflect intently without either 
 figuring the ideas to sense, or exciting the associated 
 motor intuitions of the words by which we denote them, 
 and making, as it were, a mental repetition of the 
 word; the sensory representations and the motor in- 
 tuitions reacting upon one another, enhancing the 
 energy of the percepto-motor current of which the 
 idea is correlative, and so maintaining the attention. 
 I venture at any rate to pronounce the question to be 
 one well deserving of more consideration than it has 
 received. 
 
 It remains to say something more concerning the 
 association of ideas. The anatomical connections of a 
 nerve-cell, or of a group of nerve-cells, in the cerebral 
 ganglia do, of necessity, limit the direction and extent 
 of action upon other cells; one cell cannot act on other 
 cells indifferently, for it may be deemed tolerably cer- 
 tain that as the conduction in nerve-fibres demonstrably 
 
322 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 does not pass from one to another except by continuity 
 of tissue, so the activity of one cell cannot be communi- 
 cated to another except along an anastomosing process. 
 Before a nerve-cell has formed its connections in the 
 convolutions it can have no part in mental function. 
 Besides, or within, this necessary limitation, which exists 
 in the anatomical constitution of the nervous centres, 
 there is a further determination of the manner of associa- 
 tion by the individual life experience, just as is the case 
 with movements. " Not every thought to every thought 
 succeeds indifferently ; " but, as all ideas have been 
 acquired by means of experience, and we have "no 
 imagination whereof we have not formerly had sense in 
 whole or in parts," so the connections which ideas have 
 with one another in the brain must answer in some 
 manner the order of experience, and an individual's 
 habit of association of ideas will witness to the influ- 
 ence of his particular education and surroundings. The 
 same topic will give rise in different individuals to as 
 many different trains of. thought, each train being the 
 result of a line of suggestion determined by the pecu- 
 liarity of his temperament, and by the education of his 
 pursuit in life. A rumour of war will arouse anxious 
 ideas respecting the state of the funds or the state of 
 trade in the commercial mind ; the politician will im- 
 mediately bethink himself of the position and prospects 
 of nations ; and the soldier's thoughts will be of promo- 
 tion and honours and military arrangements. Behind 
 the effects of education, however, are those inherited 
 dispositions which have so much weight in determining 
 the character or temperament of the individual ; what his 
 forefathers have felt, thought and done, though he has 
 never known them, assuredly has some influence upon 
 what he will be inclined to feel, think and do ; he has 
 inherited nervous substrata in his convolutions which 
 are ready to take on, at the appropriate stages of his 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 323 
 
 experience in life, the same kind of function which they 
 displayed in his forefathers. 
 
 Social life would simply be rendered impossible if we 
 could not depend upon the uniformity of the laws of 
 nature in man as well as out of him ; if one idea fol- 
 lowed another not causally but casually, it would be all 
 one as if one event in nature occurred without connec- 
 tion with another. That one idea does seemingly follow 
 another casually, or at any rate without recognisable co- 
 herence, justifies us, we are in the habit of thinking, in 
 shutting a man up in a lunatic asylum ; and one of the 
 first signs of insanity confessedly is an unaccountable 
 change in, or disruption of, the particular uniformity of 
 an individual character. The foundation of our laws 
 and the maxims of life entirely rest upon the constancy 
 of laws in the human mind ; " a prisoner who has neither 
 money nor interest," Hume very aptly says, "discovers 
 the impossibility of his escape as well when he considers 
 the obstinacy of the gaoler as the walls and bars with 
 which he is surrounded ; and, in all attempts for his free- 
 dom, chooses rather to work upon the stone and iron of 
 the one than upon the inflexible nature of the other." 
 Although ideas are thus as definitely associated in the 
 mind by physical necessity as are cause and effect in 
 external nature, yet, because sometimes one idea has 
 succeeded another in our experience and sometimes 
 another, it is not certain- always in so obscure and com- 
 plex a labyrinth what idea shall in a given case ensue ; 
 only this is certain, that it shall be an idea which has 
 been associated with it at one time or another, or has 
 something similar in it— which has had to it relations of 
 contiguity in time or place, or of identity, or analogy, 
 or contrast. Necessity is, in truth, confessed in every 
 deliberation and in every act of our life. When we call 
 up and attend to an idea by means of what is called a 
 voluntary effort, we can only do so by making use of 
 
324 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 the fixed laws of association ; we attain our end not by 
 a sudden and direct command of will, but by pursuing 
 trains of thought likely to lead to the subject which it is 
 desired to recollect : not otherwise than as in willing a 
 complex movement we make use of the organised co- 
 hesion in the motor centres. When we are reading, or 
 listening to a conversation, or when the mind is in a 
 state of reverie, associations of ideas go on spontane- 
 ously, without any effort of will, and even without con- 
 sciousness of the train of thought, and we may be 
 surprised to find that an idea sometimes occurs to us 
 in this way through the revival of old associations 
 which seemed to have been lost. 
 
 Because each one has a certain specific nature as a 
 human being, and because the external nature in re- 
 lation with which each one exists is the same, therefore 
 are inevitably formed certain general associations which 
 cannot without great difficulty, or anywise, be dissociated, 
 just as different movements are so linked together in all 
 men that they cannot be dissociated. Such are what 
 have been described as the general laws of association of 
 ideas — those of cause and effect, of contiguity in time 
 and space, of resemblance, of contrast ; in all which ways, 
 it is true, one idea may follow another, though also pro- 
 bably in other ways. We are enabled, however, by virtue 
 of the general laws of association in which all men agree, 
 to foresee the general character of human belief, to pre- 
 dict the general course of human conduct, and to estab. 
 lish laws for the regulation of the social state. The 
 universality which is supposed to belong to the funda- 
 mental ideas of cause and effect, of the uniformity of 
 nature, of time and space, has been supposed to be- 
 tray an origin beyond experience, and many subtle 
 and elaborate arguments have been set forth at dif- 
 ferent times in order to prove that they never could 
 have been acquired by experience only. Nevertheless, 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 325 
 
 it is hard to conceive how men, formed and placed as 
 men are, could have failed to acquire them, and still more 
 hard to conceive how they should ever have been sup- 
 posed to have any meaning outside or beyond human 
 experience — to have an absolute not a relative truth. 
 The belief in the uniformity of the laws of nature — that 
 the setting sun will rise again, that the leafless trees of 
 winter will put on new foliage in the spring, that the seed 
 committed to the earth will come up in due time as herb 
 or plant, that the rains will descend and the rivers flow 
 in the time to come as they have in time past, that that 
 which has been is that which shall be — is a belief which 
 is developed of necessity in the mind in accordance with 
 the laws of that nature of which it is a part and product. 
 The uniformity of nature becomes conscious of itself, so 
 to speak, in the mind of man; for in man, a part of 
 nature and developing in accordance with natural laws, 
 nature attains to self-consciousness. The belief does not 
 spring up at once in the mind of the individual, but grows 
 gradually as a part and product of its intellectual growth ; 
 it is limited at first to some particular instance in which 
 it has its birth, is extended successively to other instances, 
 gaining strength thereby, receives fresh verification from 
 each new instance of uniformity as the mind comes into 
 more intimate and special relations with different parts of 
 nature by the discovery of new facts and laws, and ac- 
 quires at last such a certainty and universality within 
 human experience that its negation becomes inconceiv- 
 able to many persons. ' To say that a thing is inconceiv- 
 able, let it be noted by the way, is to declare that concep- 
 tion has limits based upon experience, not to limit the 
 possibilities of nature. Is it not true of animals that 
 they, in their limited sphere, base their actions upon an 
 instinctive recognition of or adaptation to the uniformity 
 of nature? It is not probable that they have, like us, 
 the conscious belief, but it is implicitly contained or 
 
326 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 unconsciously embodied in their simpler mental organiza- 
 tion, and is the basis of many of their actions. Were we 
 to conceive a tree to be endowed with self-consciousness, 
 and thus to know that each spring it put forth buds, and 
 in due season produced fruit after its kind, and not after 
 any other kind, it is impossible to conceive that it would 
 not have a conviction of the uniformity of nature; its 
 function as a fruit-bearer after its kind being a special 
 expression of this uniformity. In man himself the in- 
 stinctive feeling of uniformity is antecedent to the con- 
 scious enunciation of the belief; the reasoned utterance 
 is the explicit avowal of what was implicit in the struc- 
 ture of the mental organization. 
 
 It by no means follows that the present uniformity of 
 nature will continue for ever because we have a con- 
 viction of the reign of fixed and unalterable laws. It is 
 not impossible to conceive a gradual or a violent change 
 taking place in the order of nature, as it is known to 
 us, for it is certain that finite experience will not war- 
 rant us in making an induction of eternal uniformity 
 which infinite experience alone could warrant. If it be 
 incredible that a miracle, in the sense of a violation of 
 the laws of nature, has taken place in the past to which 
 the hurpan mind can look back, it is not incredible 
 that the whole course of nature may be changed, and 
 that new laws may come into action, in the future. For 
 anything we know, a great catastrophe might occur at any 
 moment to the earth which is our home, and no one be 
 left to tell the tale of it. The truth is that we are much 
 more apt to believe than to doubt the continued associa- 
 tion of events which we have been accustomed to see 
 happen together ; in this respect resembling children who 
 accept statements at first without hesitation, and antici- 
 pate that what has happened a few times will happen 
 again under like circumstances ; and savages, to whom a 
 new experience produces a positive shock and is most 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 327 
 
 unwelcome, and who cannot conceive that any other 
 justification of a belief or custom can be needed than 
 that it was the custom or the belief of their forefathers. 
 An illustration of the same tendency is seen in the 
 hostility to a new idea which is so often exhibited by 
 cultivated individuals and nations, who view with horror 
 the threatened disruption of the accustomed order of 
 their thoughts, and look upon scepticism, which really is 
 a condition of intellectual development, as a most danger- 
 ous enemy to the best interests of mankind. To be 
 " wise above that which is written " exposes a man to 
 obloquy as an " infidel " or " unbelieving ' dog ; " and 
 yet it is only by being wise above that which is written 
 that the race progresses. 
 
 The conception of the uniformity of nature I hold 
 then to be an induction which has been formed by the 
 human race through experience, and there is good reason 
 to suppose that other fundamental ideas have the same 
 foundation. It is becoming day by day more difficult 
 to understand why there should ever have been such 
 eager and long-standing disputes as have prevailed 
 between the supporters of the doctrine that all know- 
 ledge is gained by experience — d posteriori, and the sup- 
 porters of the doctrine that the mind contributes to the 
 result an element which is above experience — A priori. 
 In simple perception, as we have seen, the mind, after the 
 first experience, always contributes its element. Had 
 each party resolved to come to a clear and precise under- 
 standing of what the other meant by the terms used, one 
 is tempted to think that the dispute 'must have fallen to 
 the ground. 
 
 No one will deny that the construction of the human 
 organism, mental and physical, is such that certain 
 results will ensue when it is placed in certain con- 
 ditions;, when the nipple is put between the new-born 
 infant's lips it will suck, before it has learnt to do so ; 
 
328 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 when food is put into the mouth, saliva will flow, the 
 food be swallowed, and subsequently digested and 
 assimilated; and, in like manner, when objects and 
 events are presented to the senses there will be formed 
 what are called ideas, and the mind will function along 
 certain definite lines or paths which are known as per- 
 ception, memory, reasoning, emotion, and volition. In 
 a well-constituted brain, placed under suitable conditions, 
 such results will ensue, nor will they ensue in any brain, 
 however well constituted, unless the external conditions 
 be present ; wherefore experience is the essential condi- 
 tion of the development of every kind of knowledge— 
 not less so than air and food are essential to any sort of 
 development of the organism. But just as all the air 
 and food in the world would be useless to the organism, 
 would have no more nutritive effect upon it than upon a 
 statue of bronze, if it had not the power of digestion and 
 assimilation, so all the objects in the world. might be 
 presented in vain to senses capable of their respective 
 functions, if the brain had not a power of appropriating 
 the effects in the development of the various functions of 
 its mental organization. The idiot, like the animal, may 
 see, hear, smell, taste, feel, and yet be incapable of 
 reasoning to the end of its life. It is plain, then, that 
 the brain or mind does contribute an essential factor to 
 the result which we call knowledge, call this factor what 
 we will. 
 
 Let it not be overlooked, moreover, that the lines of 
 mental function in man are as definite, as necessary, 
 as the lines of instinct in bees or ants ; we cannot 
 dp otherwise than perceive, remember, reason, feel as 
 other men do — cannot transcend these lines any more 
 than we can transcend the modes in which other men 
 move. Bees and ants appear stupid when taken out 
 of the tracks of their instincts, because they cannot 
 adapt themselves to unfamiliar experiences to which we 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 329 
 
 with our superior insight perceive the easiest modes of 
 adaptation. We in like manner should appear not less 
 stupid if taken out of the automatic grooves of our mental 
 functions, to a higher order of beings furnished with 
 senses capable of unveiling varied and complex processes 
 of nature that are utterly inaccessible to us, and endowed 
 with such superior and more varied mental faculties as 
 would enable them to co-ordinate the variety of impres- 
 sions into a unity of effect. When in olden times twenty 
 men laboured hard to accomplish that which one man can 
 now, in consequence of discoveries in mechanics, do 
 with comparative ease, it would have seemed to one 
 watching them, who was possessed of these discoveries, 
 gross stupidity that they should go on automatically in 
 their routine of thought and action, and fail to perceive 
 the means of instant relief which lay close at hand. 
 
 Admitting that the mind contributes an essential factor 
 in the development of knowledge, the question is as to 
 the nature of this mental factor. All the varieties of 
 mankind have the same general type of cerebral con- 
 formation ; they have the same number and kind of 
 senses, and the same mechanisms of movements, which 
 act in an uniform manner ; therefore they have certain 
 common fundamental ideas. But when the mental 
 phenomena of one of the lowest savages are contrasted 
 with those of an intelligent European, a very wide differ- 
 ence is perceived, notwithstanding that some are common 
 to both ; and if a savage child and an European child 
 were subjected to the same external conditions from the 
 first moment of life to the age of fullest vigour, it can- 
 not be doubted that there would still be a vast difference 
 between their mental phenomena. The matter is not one 
 of external conditions alone, of mere acquisition by ex- 
 perience ; acquisition implying a power to acquire, and 
 the difference in the two cases being the consequence of 
 differences in the native powers of acquisition. It is 
 
33° THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 evident then that the value of the connate mental factor 
 in a process of knowledge differs much in different human 
 beings, and that the knowledge which some men are 
 capable of acquiring cannot be acquired by other men, 
 however similar the conditions of life, any more than 
 the extraordinary height of stature or weight of body 
 which one man reaches can be reached by all men. 
 
 If it be affirmed by those who uphold the d, priori 
 origin of certain ideas that the: same, fundamental forms 
 are imposed by the mind upon the materials of its 
 knowledge in every case, and that the difference in the 
 value of the mental factors contributed is one of de- 
 gree only, it will still be a question whence the differ- 
 ent degree of value possessed by one individual over 
 another has been derived. The obvious answer is that the 
 native superiority of organization is the result of inherit- 
 ance.* The savage has a less capacity of acquiring know- 
 ledge than the European, because his brain is fashioned 
 after the less developed type of the brains of his fore- 
 fathers, while the European inherits the superior organiza- 
 tion and capacity of the brains of his forefathers : the 
 plus mental factor contributed by the latter is a native 
 endowment inherited from ancestors and independent of 
 his individual experience. He has nervous substrata in 
 
 * In the first edition of his great work on the Origin of Species, 
 published in 1859, Mr. Darwin said — " Psychology will be based on 
 a new foundation, that of the' necessary acquirement of each mental 
 power and capacity by gradation," p. 488 ; foreseeing at that 
 time, as Mr. Huxley has remarked, that man and his highest faculties 
 arc as much products of evolution as the humblest plant. " Every 
 kind of improvement, static or dynamic, that has been realised in 
 the individual tends to perpetuate itself by generation in the species. 
 Thus by heredity modifications that were at first artificial are 
 rendered spontaneous." (Comte, Positive Polity, vol. i., p. 493> 
 Eng. Translation). He points out how this results necessarily in 
 the gradual elevation of the race, insisting notwithstanding on 
 the fixity of species. 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 331 
 
 his convolutions which the savage has not. We have no 
 more reason to doubt this than to doubt that the pointer 
 dog is indebted to inheritance for the facility with which it 
 learns to point. So far, then, those who uphold the d priori 
 doctrine are right in asserting that all knowledge does 
 not come to the individual from the senses, but that the 
 constitution of mind imposes upon the materials sup- 
 plied by the senses forms or intuitions which are an im- 
 portant element in the result — in other words, deter- 
 mines the lines of necessary function. 
 
 We are now brought to another question : whether these 
 forms, intuitions, fundamental ideas, categories of the 
 understanding, mental aptitudes, or by whatever other 
 name they may be called, have not themselves been ac- 
 quired by experience, not of the individual but of the 
 race, not of the unit but of the organism of mankind. 
 It is a fundamental principle of the Darwinian theory 
 that advantageous bodily and mental modifications which 
 arise from the tendency to the formation of variations are 
 inherited, and that thus by the accumulation of modifica- 
 tions through countless generations the mental faculties 
 of man have been acquired by gradation. Time was, 
 we know, when Europe was overrun by beings who were 
 no higher than existing savages, and who, could we 
 imagine them living in the complex social system of to- 
 day, would be as much out of place, as little able to 
 adapt themselves to it and to acquire what such adapta- 
 tion implies, as the savage ; nevertheless they were our 
 ancestors. All the mental endowments, therefore, in 
 which we surpass them and all the superiority of cerebral 
 organization which such endowments imply, have been 
 acquired by the accumulated effects of experience and 
 their transmission through generations. They are the 
 organically registered results of the more complex and 
 special relations between man and nature which have 
 been gradually effected through the ages ; wherefore they 
 
332 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 determine the forms of his thinking and feeling, not other- 
 wise than as the conformation and disposition of the mus- 
 cles determine the manner of his walking. They, are 
 independent of the experience of the individual, but not 
 of the experience of the race. 
 
 To acquire a knowledge of the genesis of these higher 
 native capacities of mind, induction must begin with mind 
 in its most primitive state, not, as metaphysicians do, with 
 mind in its most complex and highly developed state. 
 It will be found that factors which appear to be ultimate 
 and incapable of analysis in the latter are neither ultimate 
 nor incapable of analysis when we study their organjc 
 evolution. They make a vital mistake who, separating 
 mind from nature and its laws by an impassable barrier, 
 reject the doctrine of mental evolution, instead of iden- 
 tifying mind with the organism and proceeding to 
 enquire patiently into the common laws of their evolu- 
 tion. We grant them the general potentialities of feel- 
 ings and ideas which they call mental, forms, the a 
 priori forms of space, time, causality, moral sense, but 
 we go back to trace their origin and evolution in the 
 race, just as we trace the origin and evolution of the 
 more special forms of feeling and thought which are 
 manifested by each individual in consequence of his 
 special inheritance. The constancy and universality of 
 the general forms or categories of thought and feeling 
 are no more wonderful than it is wonderful that all 
 men should see, hear, taste, smell and feel in the same 
 way; they have been fashioned, as the senses have been 
 fashioned, by progressive internal adaptation to external 
 conditions through the long records of ages. 
 
 When the Darwinian doctrine of evolution is thus ap- 
 plied to mind, the dispute between those who take the 
 d priori side and those who take the d posteriori side 
 might seem to be at an end. But it is not; the. argu- 
 ment of the former, when pursued to its logical conse- 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 333 
 
 quences, being that the connate mental forms have not 
 been derived from experience at all ; that they are really 
 of supersensible origin, antecedent to and transcending 
 all experience alike of the race and of the individual. 
 That our senses never have made us, nor do now make 
 us, nor, being what they are, ever can make us ac- 
 quainted with more than a very small part of nature, 
 is a proposition which cannot be seriously disputed. 
 Assuredly what we learn concerning the processes of 
 nature by any sense is but a small fraction of what 
 we do not learn and is to be learned. But it is neces- 
 sary here to distinguish between that which lies beyond 
 the reach of our senses because of their limitation, 
 but of which our senses might give us information 
 if they could be brought into relation with it, and may 
 some day give us information, and that which could 
 not in any case be known through sense, but which is 
 assumed to be known through a faculty of intellectual 
 intuition, ecstatic contemplation, or spiritual insight. The 
 question is Whether man has or ever had any such extra- 
 ordinary faculty of gaining ideas from a higher source, 
 and of greater validity, than those which are gained 
 through experience ; in other words, whether he is ever 
 endowed with a supersensible sense which brings him into 
 relations with the infinite and absolute. Let the faculty 
 be admitted for argument's sake ; it would not then 
 follow necessarily that the so-called fundamental ideas 
 about which the present dispute is were acquired through 
 it ; on the contrary, it might still be argued that they were 
 inductive acquisitions of the race, could be clearly traced 
 as such in its development, and had only the validity of 
 inductions ; and I know not how the argument could be 
 successfully encountered. It is obvious, however, that 
 argument of any kind would be the idlest waste of labour 
 in face of a capacity of receiving supersensible revela- 
 tions, a faculty of sublime intuition ; those who possess 
 
334 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 it moving in an intellectual sphere to which the common 
 processes of reasoning cannot reach. But if man's 
 superiority to other animals lies in his higher and more 
 complex organism, and if his mind, like animal mind, is 
 a function of organization, a part of nature the evolution 
 whereof implies the most complex and subtle combina- 
 tions of matter and corresponding complexities of energy, 
 then the terms of such a discussion are meaningless im- 
 becilities. Supersensible intuition belongs to the same 
 order of ideas as supersensible pregnancy; and one might 
 as well discuss the foolish question whether pregnancy is 
 ever of supersensible origin. 
 
 Within the general forms of thought which are com- 
 mon to all men there are numerous subordinate differ- 
 ences ; the special character of an individual's association 
 of ideas being determined partly by his original nature, 
 and partly by his special education and life-experience. 
 That natural differences in the mental susceptibilities of 
 different persons do influence the character of their asso- 
 ciation of ideas, is shown, as Dr. Priestley long since 
 pointed out,* by the greater ease with which some men 
 associate those coexistences of sensory perceptions which 
 combine to constitute the idea of an object, while others 
 associate more readily those successive sensory impres- 
 sions which go to form the idea of an event. These dif- 
 ferent tendencies and dispositions are really at the 
 foundation of two different types of mind. In the for- 
 mer case, there is a mind attentive to the discrimination 
 of impressions, skilful in discernment, and susceptible to 
 the pleasurable and painful properties of things — in fact, 
 a mind good at description, and fond of natural history ; 
 in the latter case, there is a mind observant of the order 
 of occurrence of phenomena, prone to the investigation 
 of the genesis of things, or the connection of cause and 
 effect — in fact, a philosophic intellect, affecting science 
 * In his Introduction to Hartley. 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 335 
 
 and abstract truth, to which an event that can be nowise 
 explained or displayed as an evolution of antecedent 
 causes is a painful tribulation. Such mind is at the oppo- 
 site end of the scale to that of the " poor idiot born," 
 who, by reason of his defective cerebral constitution, has 
 but few ideas, and cannot duly associate those few, just 
 as he is capable of but few imperfectly associated move- 
 ments. Forget not, however, that between the idiot at 
 the bottom of the scale of human life, and the philoso- 
 pher at its summit, there are to be met with beings repre- 
 senting every grade of the transition. 
 
 Special adaptations to particular circumstances of life 
 also concur to lay the foundation of individual habits of 
 thought and conduct ; the direction of such habits being 
 sometimes determined in the first instance by the suscep- 
 tibility of a particular sense, whereby it is affected plea- 
 surably by certain impressions. The successful tact or 
 skill of one man in circumstances in which the awkward- 
 ness or failure of another is striking, is the consequence 
 of a rapid association of ideas which has, from repeated 
 special experience, become so familiar, so much a habit, 
 as to appear like an intuition. In such case the group 
 or series of ideas is so closely united, so firmly organized, 
 as to behave almost as one idea; while the excitation, 
 though sufficient for the desired end, does not rise to 
 such a height as to produce consciousness.* There is 
 
 * " Not only do simple ideas, by strong association, run together, 
 and form complex ideas ; but a complex idea, when the simple ideas 
 which compose it have become so consolidated that it always appears 
 as one, is capable of entering into combinations with other ideas, 
 both simple and complex. Thus two complex ideas may be united 
 together by a strong association, and coalesce into one, in the same 
 manner as two or more simple ideas coalesce into one. This union 
 of two complex ideas into one, Dr. Hartley has called a duplex 
 idea. Two also of these duplex ideas, or doubly compounded 
 ideas, may unite into one ; and these, again, into other compounds 
 without end." " How many complex or duplex ideas are 
 
336 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 a coalescence or integration of ideas into a compound 
 idea, just as there is a coalescence or integration of sen- 
 sations in the idea ; and so completely, that just as it is 
 difficult sometimes to analyse the idea into its compound 
 sense-elements, so it is difficult to analyse the complex 
 compound idea into its component single ideas. With- 
 out these groups of coalesced ideas, which, as before 
 said, may be compared with combinations of movements 
 that are acquired at first by practice and afterwards put 
 in action by an impulse of will as easily as a simple 
 movement, it would be necessary on each occasion of 
 thinking to go through the elementary process of acquiring 
 them, just as a child must at first go through the element- 
 ary process of spelling the separate letters in a word or 
 the separate words in a sentence, which he can afterwards 
 dispense with, and no progress in mental development 
 would be possible. The more of these complex ideas 
 there are organized in the mind, the more quick, free 
 and skilful will the thinking be. Even the instantaneous 
 and acute judgment of a much experienced and well- 
 trained mind, which is sometimes so rapid as to look like 
 an instinct or intuition, is founded upon a previous care- 
 ful training in observation and reflection ; it depends in 
 reality on an excellent association of ideas that has been 
 organized in correspondence with, or adaptation to, the 
 co-existences and successions in external nature ; and 
 thus it comes to pass that even the judgment of an indi- 
 vidual in his particular relations of life becomes almost 
 automatic. 
 
 When it is said, again, that a man's character is com- 
 pletely formed, we express thereby the fact that he 
 has acquired certain definite combinations and associa- 
 tions of ideas which, firmly organized, henceforth avail 
 
 all united in the idea of furniture ? How many more in the idea of 
 merchandise ? How many more in the idea called Every Thing? " 
 —]. Mill, op. tit. p. 82. 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 337 
 
 him in the different circumstances of life. Could we 
 unravel backwards the complexities of his mental fabric, 
 or decompose it by gradual steps in the retrograde order 
 of its composition, we should disclose the successive 
 steps of his gradually progressing adaptation to the com- 
 plex circumstances of his surroundings : we should have 
 the history of his life-experience, in the reverse order of 
 its acquisition, laid bare in the unwinding of his mental 
 plexuses. It is evident, then, that if we had a complete 
 knowledge of the inner nature of an individual, if we 
 could penetrate that most exquisitely organized fabric of 
 thought which by reason of his particular education and 
 life-experience has been grafted on the original capabili- 
 ties, it would be possible to foretell with certainty his 
 mode of thought and conduct under any given circum- 
 stances. Is not this a prediction which, as it is, those 
 who know a man best can often make with close approxi- 
 mation to truth ? But inasmuch as no two minds are 
 exactly alike originally, and as no two persons have pre- 
 cisely similar experiences, the specialities of human con- 
 ditions being infinite in variety, we cannot obtain the 
 exact and complete elements for a correct and definite 
 judgment respecting the operation of a given cause upon 
 any individual. None the less true is it that every cause 
 does operate definitely by as stern a necessity as any 
 which exists in physical nature. 
 
 Once more, then, it is rendered evident how necessary 
 to a complete psychology of the individual is the con- 
 sideration of the circumstances in which he has lived and 
 in relation to which he has developed, as well as the ob- 
 servation of his habits of thought, feeling, and action. 
 From what has been said of ideas and their associations, 
 it is obvious that in the same language, when used by 
 different people, there must often be considerable differ- 
 ence in regard to the fulness and exactness of the ideas 
 conveyed by it. ( 3 ) In translation from one language to 
 
338 TJJE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chai\ 
 
 another it plainly appears that ideas which have a general 
 resemblance have yet certain special differences accord- 
 ing to the depth of thought, the religion, the manners, 
 the customs of the different nations ; it is as hard a 
 matter to convey adequately in the French language the 
 meaning of German philosophy as it is to express ade- 
 quately, by the corresponding German words, the exact 
 meaning of the French names for different shades of 
 elegant vice or elegant cookery. And whosoever enters 
 upon the study of psychology with the assumption that 
 an idea deemed or called the same has the same con- 
 stant value in different people of the same nation, will be 
 led into the vainest errors by so false a metaphysical 
 conception. Do not men owe most of their errors and 
 disputes to the fact that they cannot come to a right 
 understanding of words ? How should they, . indeed, 
 when the same word frequently signifies an idea at very 
 different stages of its evolution ? 
 
 It remains only to add here, that the successive forma- 
 tion of ideas in mental development and the progressive 
 complexity of their association and of their interaction in 
 the supreme centres of the brain illustrate, as do the 
 development of the spinal centres and the development of 
 the sensory centres, an increasing organic specialization 
 in the relations of man to external nature ; that the law 
 of progress from the general and simple to the special 
 and complex has sway here as elsewhere in organic 
 development. 
 
 Thus far, then, we have exhibited the path of distri- 
 bution for the energy of an idea when it does not pass 
 outwards in a direct reaction to the stimulus from with- 
 out : it travels from cell-group to cell-group within the 
 cortical layers of the hemispheres, and thus gives rise to 
 reflection. But at the end of all this wandering or of the 
 various transformations, as the final result of reflection, 
 there may still be a reaction downwards and consequent 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 339 
 
 outward activity of the individual. When that takes place 
 it is volitional action. The will, abstractly speaking, is the 
 resultant of the complex interaction of the supreme gan- 
 glionic cerebral plexuses; these constituting a complicated 
 mechanism which intervenes between the ingoing and the 
 outgoing currents. We ascend gradually to this highest 
 manifestation of force by tracing upwards the fundamental 
 reaction of nerve-cell through reflex action, sensori-motor 
 action, and ideo-motor action : in our knowledge of the 
 more simple phenomena we obtain a light which lightens 
 the path of study of phenomena which are more complex 
 and obscure. As, however, there is present in the action of 
 will some desire of a good to be obtained or of an evil 
 to be shunned, which imparts its driving force, it will be 
 proper, before considering the nature of volition, to deal 
 with the emotions. To them, therefore, shall the next 
 chapter be devoted. 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 1 (p. 277). — " I cannot but think that the two main articles of 
 belief which have been set down to the credit of the Indian — namely, 
 the Great Spirit or Creator, and the Happy Hunting-grounds in a 
 future world, — are the results of missionary teaching, the work of 
 the Fathers Hennepin, Marquette, and their noble army of martyred 
 Jesuit followers." .... The Manitou, which we are obliged to 
 translate "Spirit," exists everywhere ; they believe there is a manitou 
 in water, in fire, in stars, in grass, &c. ; it is the essence of Fetishism. 
 " It is doubtful whether these savages ever grasped the idea of a 
 human soul." .... "I do not believe that an Indian of the 
 plains ever became a Christian. He must first be humanized, then 
 civilized, and, lastly, Christianized ; and, as has been said before, I 
 doubt his surviving the operation." — The City of the Saints, by 
 R. F. Burton, p. 133. 
 
 2 (p. 277). — "There is no other act of man's mind that I can 
 remember, naturally planted in him, so as to need no other thing in 
 the exercise of it, but to be born a man and live with the use of his 
 five senses. Those other faculties of which I shall speak by and 
 by, and which seem proper to man only, are acquired and increased 
 
340 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 by study and industry, and of most men learned by instruction and 
 discipline ; and proceed all from the invention of word and speech." 
 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. iii. 
 
 3 (p. 278).— "The first consideration I have upon the subject of 
 the senses is that I make a doubt whether or no man be furnished 
 with all natural senses. I see several animals who live an entire 
 and perfect life, some without sight, others without hearing ; who 
 knows whether to us also, one, two, three, or many other senses 
 may not be wanting ? For if any one be wanting, our examination 
 cannot discover the defect." " "Tis the privilege of the senses to 
 be the utmost limit of our discovery ; there is nothing beyond' them 
 that can assist us in exploration, not so much as one sense in the 
 discovery of another." .... 
 
 "There is no sense that has not a mighty dominion, and that does 
 not by its power introduce an infinite number of knowledges. If we 
 were defective in the intelligence of sounds, of harmony, and of the 
 voice, it would cause an unimaginable confusion in all the rest of 
 our science ; for, besides what belongs to the proper effect of every 
 sense, how many arguments, consequences, and conclusions, do we 
 draw to other things, by comparing one sense with another ? Let 
 an understanding man imagine human nature originally produced 
 without the sense of seeing, and consider what ignorance and trouble 
 such a defect would bring upon him, what a darkness and blindness 
 in the soul ; he will then see by that of how great importance to the 
 knowledge of truth the privation of such another sense, or of two or 
 three, should we be so deprived, would be. We have formed a 
 truth by the concurrence of our five senses ; but, perhaps, we should 
 have.the consent and contribution of eight or ten to make a certain 
 discovery of it in its essence."— Montaigne's Essays. 
 
 4 {p. 278). — "For what is meant by innate? If innate be equiva- 
 lent to natural, then all the perceptions and ideas of the mind must 
 be allowed to be innate or natural, in whatever sense we take the 
 latter words, whether in opposition to what is uncommon, artificial, 
 or miraculous. If by innate be meant contemporary to our birth, 
 the dispute seems to be frivolous ; nor is it worth while to inquire at 
 what time thinking begins, whether before, at, or after our birth. 
 Again, the word idea seems to be commonly taken in a very loose 
 sense by Locke and others as standing for any of our perceptions, our 
 sensations and passions, as well as our thoughts. Now, in this 
 sense, I should desire to know what can be meant by asserting that 
 self-love, or resentment of injuries, or the passion between the sexes, 
 is not innate ? "—Hume, Essay Concerning the Human Under- 
 standing. 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 341 
 
 3 (/. 288). — The following is Dr. Cheyne's description of Colonel 
 Townshend's case : — "He told us that he had sent for us to give 
 him some account of an odd sensation he had for some time ob- 
 served and felt in himself ; which was that, composing himself, he 
 could die of expire when he pleased, and yet, by an effort, or some- 
 how, he could come to life again, which, it seems, he had sometimes 
 tried before he sent for us. We all three felt his pulse : it was dis- 
 tinct, though small and thready, and his heart had its usual beating. 
 He -composed himself on his back, and lay in a still posture for 
 some time ; while I herd his right hand, Dr. Baynard laid his hand 
 on his heart, and Mr. Skrine held a clean looking-glass to his mouth. 
 I found his pulse sink gradually, until at last I could not feel any 
 by the most exact and nice touch. Dr. Baynard could not feel the 
 least motion in his heart, nor Mr. Skrine discern the least soil of 
 breath on the bright mirror he held to his mouth. Then each of 
 us by turn examined his arm, heart, and breath, but could not by 
 the nicest scrutiny discover the least symptom of life in him. This 
 continued about half-an-hour. As we were going away (thinking 
 him dead), we observed some motion about the body, and upon ex- 
 amination found his pulse and the motion of his heart gradually re- 
 turning ; he began to breathe gently and speak softly." In the 
 evening of that day the colonel really died. 
 
 6 (i*. 304). — " The decay of sense in men waking is not the decay 
 of the motion made in sense, but-an obscuring of it, in such manner 
 as the light of the sun obscureth the light of the stars ; which stars 
 do no less exercise their virtues, by which they are visible, in the day 
 than in the night. But because among many strokes which our 
 eyes, ears, and other organs receive from external bodies, the pre- 
 dominant only is sensible ; therefore, the light of the sun being 
 predominant, we are not affected with the action of the stars." — 
 Leviathan, ch. vi. 
 
 7 (A 3°7)' — "The time taken up in performing an idea is like- 
 wise much the same as that taken up in performing a muscular 
 motion. A musician can press the keys of a harpsichord with his 
 fingeis-in the order of a tune he has been accustomed to play in as 
 little time as he can run over these notes in his mind. So we many 
 times in an hour cover our eyeballs, without perceiving that we are 
 in the dark ; hence the perception or idea of light is not changed for 
 that of darkness in so small a time as the twinkling of an eye, so 
 that, in this case, the muscular motion of the eyelid is performed 
 quicker than the perception of light can be changed for that of dark- 
 ness." — 7-oonomia, vol. i. p. 24. 
 
 8 (p. 320). — In the Union Mhicale of July 21st and 23rd, 1874, 
 
 16 
 
342 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 Dr. E. Mesnet relates the particulars of an interesting case of auto- 
 matic mental action. His paper is entitled " De 1'Automatisme de 
 la Memoire et du Souvenir dans le Somnambulisme pathologique. " 
 
 A sergeant in the French army, aged 27 years, was wounded at 
 the battle of Bazeilles by a bullet, which fractured the left ' parietal 
 bone. He had power enough to thrust his bayonet into the 
 Prussian soldier who wounded him, but almost at the same instant his 
 right arm, and soon afterwards his right leg, became paralysed. He 
 lost consciousness, and only recovered it at the end of three weeks, 
 when he found himself in hospital at Mayence. Right hemiplegia 
 was then complete. 
 
 By the end of a year he had regained the use of his side, a slight 
 feebleness thereof only being left. Some three or four months after 
 the wound, peculiar disturbances of the brain manifested themselves, 
 which have recurred since periodically. They usually last from 
 fifteen to thirty hours, the sound intervals between them varying 
 from fifteen to thirty days. These alternating phases of normal and 
 abnormal consciousness have continued for four years. In his normal 
 condition, the sergeant is intelligent, and performs satisfactorily the 
 duties of a hospital attendant. The transition to the abnormal 
 state is instantaneous. There is some uneasiness or heaviness about 
 the forehead, which he compares with the pressure of an iron band, 
 but there are no convulsions, nor is there any cry. He becomes 
 suddenly unconscious of his surroundings and acts like an automaton. 
 His eyes are wide open, the pupils dilated, the forehead is contracted, 
 there is an incessant movement of the eyeballs, and a chewing 
 motion of the jaws. In a place to which he is accustomed, he walks 
 about freely as usual, but if he be put in a place unknown to him, 
 or if an obstacle is put in his way, barring his passage, he stumbles 
 gently against it, stops, feels it with his hand, and then passes on 
 one side of it. He offers no resistance to being turned this way or 
 that, but continues his walk in the way in which he is directed. He 
 eats, drinks, smokes, walks, dresses and undresses himself, and 
 goes to bed at his usual hours. He eats voraciously, and without 
 discernment, scarcely chewing his food at all, and devours .all that 
 is set before him without showing any satiety. General sensibility is 
 lost ; pins may be run into his body, or strong electric'shocks sent 
 through it, without his evincing the least pain. The hearing is com- 
 pletely lost ; noises made close to his ears do not affect him. The 
 senses of taste and smell are lost ; he drinks indifferently water, 
 wine, vinegar, assafcetida, and perceives neither good nor bad odours. 
 The sense of sight is almost, but not quite, lost ; on some occasions 
 he appears to be in some degree sensible to brilliant objects, but ftp 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 343 
 
 is obliged to call the sense of touch to his aid in order to apprehend 
 their nature, form, and position ; they produce only vague visual im- 
 pressions, which require interpretation into the language of touch. 
 The sense of touch alone persists irT its integrity ; it seems, indeed, 
 to be more acute than normal, and to serve, almost exclusively, to 
 maintain his relations with the external world. When he comes out 
 of the attack, he has no remembrance whatever of what has hap- 
 pened during it, and expresses the greatest surprise when told what 
 he has done. 
 
 Through the tactile sense, trains of ideas may be aroused in his 
 mind, which he immediately carries into action On one occasion, 
 when walking in the garden under some trees, he dropped his cane, 
 which was picked up and put into his hand. He felt it, passing his 
 hand several times over the curved handle, became attentive, 
 seemed to listen, and suddenly cried out, "Henri," and a little 
 while afterwards, " There they are, at least twenty of them ; we 
 shall get the better of them ! " He then put his hand behind his 
 back, a sif to get a cartridge, went through the movements of load- 
 ing his musket, threw himself full length upon the grass, and con- 
 cealing his head behind a tree, after the manner of a sharp-shooter, 
 followed, with his cane to his shoulder, all the movements of the 
 enemy whom he seemed to see. This performance, provoked in the 
 same way, was repeated on several occasions. It was probably the 
 reproduction of an incident in the campaign in which he was 
 wounded. " I have found," says Dr. Mesnet, " that the same 
 scene is reproduced when the patient is placed in the same conditions. 
 It has thus been possible for me to direct the activity of my patient 
 in accordance with a train of ideas which I could call up by playing 
 upon his tactile sensibility at a time when none of his other senses 
 afforded me any communication with him." 
 
 All the actions of the sergeant, when in his abnormal state, are 
 either repetitions of what he does every day, or they are excited by 
 the impressions which objects make upon his tactile sense. Arriving 
 once at the end of a corridor where there was a locked door, he 
 passed his hands over the door, found the handle, took hold of it 
 and tried to < pen the door. Failing in this, he searched for the 
 keyhole, but there was no key there ; thereupon he passed his 
 fingers over the screws of the lock, and endeavoured to turn them, 
 with the evident purpose of removing the lock. Just as he was 
 about to turn away from the door, Dr. Mesnet held up before his 
 eyes a bunch of seven or eight keys ; he did not see them ; they 
 were jingled loudly close to bis ears, but he took no notice of them ; 
 they were then put into his hand, when he immediately took hold of 
 
344 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 them, and tried one key after another in the keyhole without finding 
 one that would fit it. 
 
 Leaving the place, he went into one of the wards, taking on his 
 way various articles with which he filled his pockets, and at length 
 came to a little table which was used for making the records of the 
 ward. He passed his hands over the table, but there was nothing 
 on it ; however, he touched the handle of a drawer, which he 
 opened, taking out of it a pen, several sheets of paper and an ink- 
 stand. The pen had plainly suggested the idea of writing, for he 
 sat down, dipped it in the ink and began to write a letter, in which 
 he recommended himself to his commanding officer for the military 
 medal on account of his good conduct and his bravery. There were 
 many mistakes in the letter, but they were exactly the same mistakes 
 in expression and orthography as he was in the habit of makii g 
 when in his normal state. From the ease with which he traced the 
 letters, and followed the lines of the paper, it was evident that his 
 sense of sight was in action, but this was placed beyond doubt by 
 the interposition of a thick screen between his eyes and his hand ; 
 he continued to write a few words in a confused and almost illegible 
 manner, and then stopped without manifesting any impatience or 
 discontent. When the screen was withdrawn, he finished the un- 
 completed line and began another. Another experiment was made : 
 water was substituted for the ink. When he found that no letters 
 were visible, he stopped, tried the tip of his pen, rubbed it on his 
 coat sleeve, and then began again to write with the same results. On 
 one occasion he had taken several sheets of paper to write upon, and 
 while he was writing on the topmost sheet it was withdrawn quickly. 
 He continued to write upon the second sheet as if nothing had 
 happened, completing his sentence without interruption, and with- 
 out any other expression than a slight movement of surprise. When 
 he had written ten words on the second sheet, it was removed as 
 rapidly as the first ; he finished on the third sheet the line which he 
 had begun on the second, continuing it from the exact point where 
 his pen was when the sheet was remove 1. The same thing was 
 repeated with the third and fourth sheets, and he finished his letter 
 at last on the fifth sheet, which contained his signature only. He 
 then turned his eyes towards the top of this sheet, and seemed to 
 read from the top what he had written, a movement of the lips 
 accompanying each word ; moreover, he made several corrections on 
 the blank page, putting here a comma, there an e, and at another 
 place a t ; and each of these corrections corresponded with the posi- 
 tion of the words that required correction on the sheets which had 
 been withdrawn. Dr. Mesnet concludes from these experiments that 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 345 
 
 si),»ht really existed, but that it was only roused at the instance of 
 touch, and exercised only upon those objects with which he was in 
 relation through touch. After he had finished his letter the sergeant 
 jjot up, walked down to the garden, rolled a cigarette for himself, 
 sought for his match-box, lighted his cigarette and smoked it. 
 \\ hen the lighted match fell upon the ground, he extinguished it by 
 putting his foot upon it. When the cigarette was finished he began 
 to prepare another, but his tobacco pouch was taken away, and he 
 sought in vain for it in all his pockets. It was offered to him, but 
 lie did not perceive it ; it was held up before his eyes, but he took 
 no notice of it ; it was thrust under his nose, but he did not smell 
 it ; when, however, it was put into his hand he took it, completed 
 his cigarette directly and struck a match to light it. This match 
 was purposely blown out, and another lighted one was offered to 
 him, but he did not perceive it ; even when it was brought so close 
 to his eyes as to singe a few eyelashes he did not notice it, neither 
 did he blink. When the match was applied to the cigarette he took 
 no notice, and made no attempt to smoke. Dr. Mesnet repeated 
 this experiment on several occasions, and always obtained the same 
 results. The sergeant saw his own match, but saw not the match 
 which Dr. Mesnet offered to him. There was no contraction of the 
 pupil when the lighted match was brought close to the eye. He 
 had once been employed as a singer at a. cafe. In one of his 
 abnormal states, he was observed to hum some airs which seemed 
 familiar to him, after which he went to his room, took from a 
 shelf a comb and looking glass, combed his hair, brushed his beard, 
 adjusted his collar, and attended carefully to his toilet. When the 
 glass was turned round, so that he only saw the back of it, he 
 went on as if he still saw himself in it. On his bed there were 
 several numbers of a periodical romance ; these he turned rapidly 
 over, apparently not finding what he wanted. Dr. Mesnet took 
 one of these numbers, rolled it up so as to resemble a roll of music 
 and put it in his hand, when he seemed satisfied, descended the 
 stairs, and walked across the court of the hospital towards the gate. 
 He was turned round, when he started off in the new direction given 
 to him, entering the lodge of the door-keeper, which opened into 
 the hall. At this moment the sun shone brightly through a window 
 in the lodge, and the bright light evidently suggested the footlights 
 of the stage, for he placed himself before it, opened the roll of 
 paper, and sang a patriotic ballad in an excellent manner. When 
 he had finished this he sang a second and a third, after which he 
 took out his handkerchief to wipe his face. A wine glass con- 
 taining a strong mixture of vinegar and water was offered to him, 
 
; 4 6 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND: [chap. 
 
 of which he took no notice, but when it was put into his hand he 
 drank it off without exhibiting any sign of an unpleasant sensation. 
 Dr. Mesnet propounds the question whether in this perfect render- 
 ing of the three ballads he heard his own voice, or whether the sing- 
 ing was purely as automatic as his other actions. The attack came 
 to an end before they could make an experiment to test this question. 
 When the sergeant is in his abnormal slate, it is impossible to 
 awaken him to his normal state, whatever i ff jrts be made. No 
 effect is produced either by stimulation or by strong electrical cur- 
 rents. On one occasion he was seized suddenly by the shoulders 
 and thrown violently upon the grass ; he manifested no emotion, 
 but, &f er feeling the turf with his hands, raised himself again, calm 
 and impassive. 
 
 A remarkable f a ure in the case is that the' sergeant becomes a 
 veritable kleptomaniac during the attacks. He purloins everything 
 that he can lay his hands on, and conceals what he takes under the 
 quilt, the mattress, or elsewhere. This tendency to take and hide 
 has shown itself in each attack. He is content v.i h the most 
 trifling articles, and if he finds nothing belonging to some one 
 else to steal, he hides, with all the appearance of secresy, although 
 surrounded at the time by persons observing him, various things be- 
 longing to himself, such as his knife, watch, pocket-book. His 
 • other actions during an attack are repetitions of his former habits ; 
 these acts of stealing are not so. 
 
 If I understand Dr. Mesnet correctly, he is acc,uxinted with 
 another individual who contrives means for committing suicide when 
 he is in an abnormal somnambulistic state. "I have been pre- 
 sent," he says, "at two attempts at suicide, one by poisoning, 
 the other by hanging, which I have allowed to proceel to the 
 extreme limit of an experiment, having cut the cord at the moment 
 of asphyxia." He surmise3 that another peison might in the same 
 way perpetrate homicide or become an incendiary, not knowing 
 what he was doing at the time, and not remembering, after the attack 
 had passed off, what he had done. 
 
 The resemblance between the sergeant's abnormal states and those 
 transitory attacks of epileptic una ns :iousness during which the 
 patient, unconscious of surrounding obiects, continues automatically 
 the act which he was engaged in at the t me of his seizure, will be 
 apparent. In this relation it is interesting to note that Dr. Darwin, 
 the distinguished author of the Zoonomia, called attention long ago 
 to the affinity between epilepsy and somnambulism. 
 
 9 (/>■ 337)- — "It will easily appear from the observations here 
 made upon words, and the associations which adhere to them, that 
 
v.] HEMISPHERICAL GANGLIA. 347 
 
 the languages of different ages and nations must bear a general re- 
 semblance to each other, and yet have considerable particular differ- 
 ences ; whence any one may be translated into any other, so as to 
 convey the same ideas in general, and yet not with perfect precision 
 and exactness. They must resemble one another because the 
 phenomena of nature, which they are all intended to express, and 
 the uses and exigencies of human life, to which they minister, have 
 a general reseinb'ance. But then, as the bodily make and genius 
 of each people, the air, soil, and climate, commerce, arts, science, 
 religion, &c, make considerable differences in different ages and 
 nations, it is natural to expect that the languages should have pro- 
 portionable differences in respect of each other." — Hartley's 
 Theory of The Human Mind, by Dr. Priestley. 
 
 "Wherefore, as men owe all their true ratiocination to the right 
 understanding of speech, so also they owe their errors to the 
 misunderstanding of the same ; and as all the ornaments of phi- 
 losophy proceed only from men, so from man also is derived the 
 ugly absurdity of false opinions. For speech has something in it 
 like to a spider's web (as it was said of old of Solon's laws), for 
 by contexture of words tender and delicate wits are ensnared and 
 stopped; but strong wits break easily through them." — Hobbes, 
 voL i. p. 36. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 
 
 Man is patient and agent; he suffers certain passions 
 and does certain actions. A calm deliberation involves 
 an equilibrium between suffering and doing, between the 
 individual and his surroundings ; but in so far as an idea 
 is attended with some feeling, whether of pleasure or of 
 pain, or of a more special character, it is to that extent 
 emotional ; and if the feeling preponderate,, the idea is 
 obscured and the state of mind is then called an emotion 
 or a passion. The definite form of the idea . in the 
 material substratum is obscured or partially lost in the 
 agitation or commotion of the nerve elements. Every 
 definite emotion involves the presence of a more or less 
 clear idea of object or event, either presentative or repre- 
 sentative, wherefore it cannot be separated from the idea; 
 and the idea, being rooted in.sensation, always contains 
 some feeling, even if only a feeling that it is agreeable or 
 disagreeable. In the simplest mental experience there is 
 a subjective as well as an objective element ; for in the 
 earliest perception there is feeling. Strictly speaking, all 
 conscious psychical states are, at first, feelings; but, after 
 having been experienced several times, they are ade- 
 quately and definitely organized, and become almost auto 
 matic or indifferent under ordinary circumstances. So 
 long as the ideas or mental states are not adequately or- 
 ganized in correspondence with the individual's external 
 
ch.vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 34CJ 
 
 relations, more or less feeling will attend their excita- 
 tion : they will, in fact; be more or less emotional. When 
 the equilibrium between the subjective and objective is 
 duly established, there is no passion and there is but 
 little emotion.^) A person who is governed by his feel- 
 ings is much like one who should live in the stage of 
 simple sensation without going on to the higher stage 
 of perception ; and as the stronger the sensation the less 
 exact and complete is the perception, so the more active 
 the emotion the less adequate is the cognition. 
 
 It has been the custom to write of the phenomena of 
 the human mind as if they stood quite apart from other 
 natural phenomena, belonged to an order of their own, 
 and did not conform to the order of nature ; as if man 
 were a law unto himself, exercising an authority indepen- 
 dent of nature, whose function was to control, not to 
 conform to, its order. But he has .no such independent 
 authority ;■ he controls only by conforming, conquers only 
 by obeying ; he is controlled in spite of himself if he 
 does not conform, yielding painfully through suffering an 
 obedience which he might yield cheerfully through wise 
 action. Emotions, good or bad, are physical phenomena 
 ■ which have their roots in the organic life, conform to 
 natural laws in their origin, nature and expression, and 
 must be studied and discussed- like other natural pheno- 
 mena. With a boldness and thoroughness which horrified 
 metaphysicians, Spinoza treated of human actions, appe- 
 tites and emotions after the geometrical method, precisely 
 as if they were questions of lines, planes and solids 
 While recognising the service which he did to philosophy 
 by insisting upon their being. put in the same order with 
 other natural phenomena and studied by the samemethods, 
 one can easily see now that the exact method was not 
 suited to such complex phenomena, and that the best 
 hope of fruitful results lies in the careful adoption of the 
 inductive method of inquiry. 
 
350 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 Emotions betray their physical nature by their name, 
 which has been given them because of their being move- 
 ments of mind and body; the name is really an induction 
 embodying the experience of mankind, the old name of 
 commotions which they had evincing this still more plainly. 
 They act more powerfully upon the organism than ideas, 
 because they represent a more violent internal movement, 
 and because the whole system of the organic life is more 
 deeply implicated in their origin, nature and expression. 
 To all appearances a violent emotion may act sometimes 
 in the same way as a strong physical shock to the ner- 
 vous system, for it may produce in some instances con- 
 vulsions, fainting, loss of sensation, paralysis of move- 
 ment, deafness; exactly the effects which a strong electric 
 shock may produce. We have not then to do with 
 mysterious self-determining agencies : we have to do with 
 phenomena which, complex as they unquestionably are, 
 will eventually receive a complete analysis. 
 
 It has been sufficiently evident, up to the present 
 point, that the condition of the nervous centres is of the 
 greatest consequence in respect of the formation of the 
 so-called mental faculties, and of the manifestation of 
 their functions ; it will now be seen that this condition is 
 of still more manifest importance in regard to the pheno- 
 mena of the emotions. Every one's experience teaches 
 him that an idea which is at one time indifferent, being 
 accompanied by no feeling of pleasure or discomfort, 
 may, at another time, be attended by some feeling of 
 discomfort, or become positively painful. And it requires 
 no very attentive observation of men to discover that 
 different persons are very differently affected by one and 
 the same object, and often pass very different judgments 
 upon it in consequence. So much is this the case that 
 we are in the constant habit of distinguishing men by the 
 difference of their emotional disposition or of. the temper 
 of their minds, and of speaking accordingly of one man 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 35 1 
 
 as timid, of another as courageous, of one as irritable 
 and quick-tempered, of another as even-tempered and 
 placid. One of the earliest symptoms of an oncoming 
 insanity, and one that is almost universally present as the 
 expression of a commencing deterioration, howsoever 
 caused, of the nervous centres, is an emotional disturb- 
 ance, upon which follows more or less perversion of 
 judgment. It is feeling or the affective life that reveals 
 the essential nature of the man; it lies deeper in his 
 nature than intellect, as the organic life lies beneath ani- 
 mal life ; it expresses the fundamental tone of his nerve 
 element, which again is the result of its actual constitu- 
 tion or composition, inherited and acquired. 
 
 The first occurring observation which, following 
 Spinoza, Unzer, and Miiller, I shall make, is, that an idea 
 which is favourable to the impulses or strivings of the 
 individual, to self-expansion, is accompanied by a feeling 
 of more or less pleasure ; and that an idea which be- 
 tokens individual restriction, being opposed to the expan- 
 sion of self, is attended with a feeling of more or less 
 discomfort or pain. As the organic germ does, under 
 circumstances favourable to its inherent developmental 
 impulse, incorporate matter from without, exhibiting its 
 gratification by its growth, and, under unfavourable con- 
 ditions, does not assimilate, but manifests its suffering or 
 passion by its decay ; so likewise the ganglionic nerve- 
 cells of the hemispheres attest by a pleasant emotion the 
 furtherance of their development, and declare by a pain- 
 ful feeling of discomfort the restriction or injury which 
 they suffer from an unfavourable stimulus. 
 
 It is the fundamental nature of organic element, whether 
 of high or low degree, to feel as agreeable and therefore to 
 ensue all which favours its preservation and increase ; to 
 feel as disagreeable, and therefore to eschew, all which 
 hinders or prevents its activity and development. How in- 
 deed can that which is hurtful agree with it, and be there- 
 
352 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 fore agreeable ? Even in the earliest sensation, the exist- 
 ence of pain or pleasure is a sort of obscure judgment on 
 its advantage or disadvantage to the personality or self— a 
 judgment in which, as Herbart has remarked, the subject 
 cannot yet be separated from the predicate that expresses 
 praise or blame.* Among so many dangers, then, " to have 
 a care of one's self is," in the words of Hobbes, " so far 
 from being a matter scornfully to be looked at, that one 
 has neither the power nor wish to have done otherwise. 
 For every man is desirous of what is good for him, and 
 shuns what is evil, but chiefly the chiefest of natural 
 evils, which is death ; and this he doth by a certain im- 
 pulsion of nature, no less than that whereby a stone 
 moves downwards." ( 2 ) And when he projects his ima- 
 gination beyond the grave, it is by virtue of this same 
 impulsion of nature operating in relation to the future 
 that he aspires to attain the joys of heaven and hopes 
 to elude the torments of hell. All the component parts of 
 man, as well as the complex whole which they constitute, 
 seek for a larger activity and increased vitality ; whatever 
 contributes to this increase is the proper good of each 
 part; but it will be easily seen that the good of the whole, 
 demanding the due subordination and co-ordination of 
 parts, must often necessitate restraint on the undue 
 development of the parts, just as the welfare of the 
 social organism plainly demands the subordination of in- 
 dividual impulses. Children and savages best exhibit 
 in a naked simplicity the different passions which result 
 from the affection of self by what, when painful, is 
 deemed an ill ; when pleasurable, a good. 
 
 It is necessary to bear in mind that a stimulus which 
 in moderation gives rise to a pleasant idea, or rather 
 emotion, will, when too prolonged or too powerful, pro- 
 
 * " Ein Urtheil, in dem nur das Vorgestellte sich noch nicht 
 von dem Pradicate, das Beifall oder Tadel ausdriickt, sondern 
 lasst." — Herbart. 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 353 
 
 duce discomfort or pain, and consequent efforts to escape 
 from it. There is then a desire to shun the' stimulus, like 
 as one altogether noxious is shunned ; the desire becom- 
 ing the motive or spring of action. The impulse in such 
 case is described as desire, because there is consciousness 
 of it ; but it is without doubt the equivalent in a higher 
 kind of tissue of that effort which the lowest animal 
 organism exhibits, without consciousness, to get away 
 from an injurious stimulus. In both instances there is, 
 in truth, the display of the so-called self-conservative 
 impulse which is immanent in all living matter — an 
 impulse or instinct, which, whatever deeper facts of 
 intimate composition may be connoted by it, is the 
 essential condition of the continued existence of organic 
 element. Such reaction of organic element is as natural 
 and necessary as the reaction of any chemical compound, 
 because as much the consequence of the properties of 
 matter thus organically combined. 
 
 When the stimulus to a hemispherical nerve-cell is not 
 in sufficient force to satisfy the demands of the latter, — 
 when, in fact, it is inadequate, then there is the mani- 
 festation of an affinity or attraction by the nervous 
 centre, an outward impulse, appetence, or striving, which, 
 again, as it occurs in consciousness, is revealed to us as 
 desire, craving, instinct, or appetite. There is no differ- 
 ence, indeed, as Spinoza observes, between appetite and 
 desire, except in so far as the latter implies conscious- 
 ness ; desire is self-conscious appetite. (3) Because we 
 have an appetite or desire for something, therefore we 
 judge it to be good : it certainly is not because a thing is 
 judged to be good that we have an appetite or desire for 
 it. Here, again, there is an exact correspondence with 
 that attraction, impulse, or striving of organic element 
 towards a favourable stimulus manifested throughout 
 nature, the necessary correlate of which is a repulsion 
 of what is unfavourable. 
 
354 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 Because the affinity is exhibited in vital structure, we are 
 prone, when observing it, to transfer our own states of con- 
 sciousness to the organic element, and, therefore, to repre- 
 sent it on all occasions as striving, by means of a self-con- 
 servative impulse or instinct, for the stimulus favourable 
 to its growth. But the attraction is no less a physical ne- 
 cessity than the attraction of an acid for an alkali, of the 
 needle to the pole, or of positive for negative electricity ; 
 if there were no stimulus, there would be no reaction 
 on the part of the organic element ; if the stimulus were 
 in injurious excess, or otherwise unfavourable, there must 
 be disturbance of the statical equilibrium and a reaction 
 of repulsion; and when the stimulus is favourable but 
 deficient, the reaction is evinced in an attraction or affinity 
 for an additional amount, like as when a non-neutralized 
 acid takes up more alkali or as unsatisfied appetite craves 
 more nutriment. Now, it is most important that we do- 
 not allow the presence of consciousness to mislead us 
 as to what is the fundamental condition of things in the 
 ganglionic cells of the brain. Here, as elsewhere, healthy 
 organic element manifests its fundamental properties, 
 pursuing the good, eschewing the ill ; and consciousness 
 is something superadded which nowise either occasions 
 or abolishes them. The striving after a pleasing im- 
 pression, or the effort to avoid a painful one, is at bottom 
 a physical consequence of the nature of the ganglionic 
 cell in its relation to a certain stimulus ; and the reaction 
 or desire becomes the motive of a general action on the 
 part of the individual for the purpose of satisfying a want 
 or of shunning an ill. The care of himself no man in 
 good health has the power to neglect. To cease to 
 strive is to begin to die, physically, morally, and intel- 
 lectually. 
 
 It is plain then, not only how desires become the 
 motives of action, but how they are gradually evolved 
 into their complete form out of the unconscious organic 
 
vi.J THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 355 
 
 appetites. The appetites for food and drink and the 
 sexual appetite are the strongest motives of action, as 
 they are the fundamental and urgent appetites of the 
 organic being. In the desire of the adult there is neces- 
 sarily some sort of conception of what is desired, though it 
 is not a very definite one at times ; but in the child, as in 
 the idiot, we frequently witness a vague restlessness 
 evincing an undefined want of, or desire for, something 
 of which itself is unconscious, but which, when obtained, 
 presently produces quiet and satisfaction : the organic 
 life speaks out with an as yet inarticulate utterance. Most 
 striking and instructive is that example of the evolution 
 of organic life into consciousness which is observed at 
 the time of puberty, when new organs come into action 
 and exert their physiological influence upon the brain ; 
 vague and ill-understood desires give rise to obscure 
 impulses that have no defined aim, and produce a rest- 
 lessness which, when misapplied, is often mischievous : 
 the amorous appetite thus first declares its existence. 
 But to prove how clearly antecedent to individual experi- 
 ence it is, and how little it is indebted to the conscious- 
 ness which is a natural subsequent development, it is 
 only necessary to reflect that even in man the desire 
 sometimes attains to a knowledge of its aim, and to a 
 sort of satisfaction, in dreams before it does so in real 
 life. The same thing is exemplified in a forcible and 
 painful way by the lascivious features of certain forms of 
 insanity in young women who, of perfectly chaste and 
 modest life, then evince by speech, gesture and conduct 
 a knowledge of means which it is impossible they could 
 ever have acquired by observation or experience. The 
 most chaste young man and maiden do not require to be 
 taught how they shall gratify the passion which arises in 
 their minds in consequence of the physiological changes 
 which take place at a certain period of their growth. 
 And yet if one were to consider the process of gratifica- 
 
356 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 tion as a thing happening for the first time, what an ex- 
 traordinary and ludicrous thing it would appear that it 
 should enter into the minds of two persons to make such 
 use of their bodies in obedience to a blind desire. 
 
 These simple reflections might of themselves suffice 
 to teach psychologists, if they would condescend to 
 them, how far more fundamental than any conscious 
 mental state is the unconscious mental or cerebral life. 
 Given an ill-constituted or imperfectly-developed brain 
 at the time when the sexual appetite makes its appear- 
 ance, and what is the result ? None other than that 
 which happens with the lower animal, where love is 
 naked lust, and the sight of the female excites a desire 
 that immediately issues in uncontrollable efforts for its 
 gratification. Given, on the other hand, a well-con- 
 stituted and naturally- developed brain, the sexual 
 desire undergoes a complex development in conscious : 
 ness : its coarse energy undergoes refinement through 
 the manifold interlacing plexuses of the ideational organ- 
 isation, and from its basis are evolved all those delicate, 
 exalted and beautiful feelings of love that constitute the 
 store of the poet, and play so great a part in human 
 happiness and in human sorrow. What, however, is 
 true of these particular desires is true of all our desires : 
 it may be fitly said, with Bacon, " that the mind in its 
 own nature would be temperate and staid, if the affec- 
 tions, as winds, did not put it in tumult and perturba- 
 tion ;" or, with Novalis, that "life is a feverish activity 
 excited by passion.'' 
 
 When the circumstances are exactly adapted to the 
 capacity of the organic element, the stimulus exactly pro- 
 portionate to the need, then are the conditions most 
 favourable to the development of the latter ; and a steady 
 growth of it fails not to testify to the complete harmony 
 of the relations. Or, adopting the language proper in 
 such case to the highest relations of man, there is an 
 
vi.] THE EMO TJONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 357 
 
 equilibrium between the subjective and the objective, 
 and no passion : there is satisfaction or indifference on 
 the part of the subject, which has neither a painful feeling 
 with consequent desire to avoid a suffering, nor a feeling 
 of insufficient satisfaction with consequent desire to in- 
 crease or continue an enjoyment. The conception of 
 the qualities of the object is purer and clearer, and a 
 steady assimilation, promoting the evolution of idea, goes 
 favourably on. As there is no outward striving or craving 
 in such case, the energy of the response to the stimulus 
 is expended in the growth of the idea and in the reaction 
 of it upon other ideas, — in other words, in intellectual 
 development. Conception and desire, therefore, like 
 perception and sensation, stand in a sort of opposition to 
 one another, although in every mental act they co-exist 
 in greater or less relative degree ; in every conception 
 there is, or has once been, as previously said, some feel- 
 ing; and, again, in every distinct desire there is a conception 
 of something desired. But the opposition between them 
 is in reality a matter of the degree of formation of the 
 idea or conception ; for, whatever its nature, there is 
 always more or less feeling with it when first experienced, 
 which, however, disappears in proportion as it becomes 
 definitely organised ; and even though some little feeling 
 or desire remains connected with the idea, it may often 
 remain in consciousness, or only modify reflection, not 
 being of sufficient degree to pass into outward mani- 
 festation. 
 
 May we not then justly affirm, as we clearly perceive, 
 that the intellectual life does not supply the motive 
 or impulse to action ; that the understanding or reason 
 is not the cause of our outward actions, but that the 
 desires are ? Our most effective energies spring from 
 our most urgent needs. A strong desire or longing for 
 a certain object in life often brings its own accomplish- 
 ment. The desire is the fundamental expression of the 
 
358 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 individual's character, the manifestation of the essential 
 affinities of his nature ; accordingly he strives with all his 
 might to attain unto the aim which he sets before himself, 
 attracts to himself those influences which, coalescing with 
 and strengthening his desire, augment its ascendency, and 
 probably succeeds either in a direct or a circuitous way. 
 Thus it is that aspirations are often prophecies, the har- 
 bingers of what a man shall be in a condition to perform. 
 Men of great reasoning powers, on the other hand, are 
 notoriously oftentimes incapacitated thereby from ener- 
 getic action ; they balance reasons so nicely that no one of 
 them outweighs another, think so precisely over the event 
 that they can come to no decision : with them, as with 
 Hamlet, meditation paralyses action. From want of 
 some cogent feeling impelling them to carry reflection 
 into action, knowing what they ought to do they still do 
 nothing ; their judgment is in " the hapless plight of 
 having no effective forces to execute its decrees." In 
 fact, the power of the understanding is reflective and 
 inhibitory, being exhibited rather in the hindrance of 
 passion-prompted action, and in the guidance of our 
 impulses, than in the instigation of conduct ; its office in 
 the individual as in the race is, as Comte systematically 
 and emphatically pointed out, not to impart the habitual 
 impulsion, but deliberative. (*) 
 
 As there are two factors which go to the production 
 of an emotion— namely, the organic element and the 
 external stimulus — it is plain that the character of the 
 emotional result will not be determined by the nature of 
 the stimulus only, but will depend greatly upon the con- 
 dition of the organic element The equilibrium between 
 the individual and his surroundings may, in fact, be 
 disturbed by a subjective modification, or an internal 
 commotion, as well as by an unwonted impression from 
 without. When some bodily derangement has affected the 
 condition of the cells of the hemispherical ganglia, either 
 
VI.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 359 
 
 directly or by a sympathetic action, then an idea arising 
 is accompanied with certain emotional qualities, though 
 it is an idea which, in health, is commonly indifferent ; 
 just as when a morbid state of an organ of sense, or of 
 its sensory ganglion, renders painful an impression which 
 in health would be indifferent or even agreeable. Every 
 one's experience teaches how much his tone of mind 
 varies according to his bodily states. The drunken man, 
 at a certain stage of his degradation, becomes absurdly 
 emotional ; and the general paralytic, whose supreme 
 nervous centres are visibly degenerate, is characterised 
 by great emotional excitability, as well as by intellectual 
 feebleness. The general feeling of well-being which is 
 the result of a healthy condition of all the organs of 
 the body and the expression of a complete harmony of 
 functions is known as the aeruesthesis, and is sometimes 
 described as an emotion : but it is not a definite emo- 
 tion, although it determines the emotional tone ; it is the 
 body's sensation or feeling of its well-being, and marks 
 a condition of things, therefore, in which activity of any 
 kind will be pleasurable — in which an idea that arises 
 will be pleasantly emotional, not otherwise than as 
 bodily movement is then pleasurable. On the other 
 hand, the general feeling of discomfort which follows 
 upon a visceral disturbance, or some other cause, is a 
 condition in which activity of any kind will be rather 
 painful than otherwise ; there is a restricted or hindered 
 personality, and an idea arising is apt to be gloomily 
 emotional. 
 
 It plainly amounts to the same thing whether an 
 excessive stimulus acts upon nerve-element when in 
 a stable and' healthy state and produces suffering, or 
 whether a natural stimulus acts upon it when in an 
 enfeebled or unstable condition and similarly gives rise 
 to suffering : in both cases, there is, physically speak- 
 ing, a disturbance of the equilibrium of the nervous 
 
36o THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [ch.'.p. 
 
 element, or a resolution of it into lower but more stable 
 compounds; or, psychologically speaking, there is, in 
 both cases, an idea excited which is attended with 
 painful emotional qualities — an idea unfavourable to 
 individual expansion. The pain which is occasioned is 
 the cry of organic element for deliverance. The greater 
 the disturbance of nerve-element, however produced, 
 the more unstable is its state ; and an instability of 
 it, signifying, as it does, a susceptibility to rapid mole- 
 cular or chemical retrograde metamoiphosis, furnishes 
 the most favourable conditions for the production of 
 emotion, passion, or commotion, as the term was of old. 
 It is easy to perceive, then, how it is that great emotion, 
 which is of the nature of a molecular explosion in the 
 nerve-element, is exceedingly exhausting — for the same 
 reason, in fact, that repeated electrical discharges by the 
 gymnotus or torpedo produce exhaustion ; it is easy to 
 perceive, also, that whatever cause, moral or physical, 
 works an exhausting or depressing effect upon an in- 
 dividual, inclines him to become emotional and to be 
 distressed by ideas which trouble him not when he is 
 strong. 
 
 The original nature of nerve-structure is, however, but 
 one, though the main, element in the determination of 
 the fundamental character of the emotions ; we have to 
 take account also of its acquired nature as this has been 
 slowly organised by education, the relationships of life, 
 occupations and pursuits, and a thousand accidental 
 circumstances. Much discussion has taken place as to 
 whether an emotion is merely a feeling of pleasure or 
 pain accompanying a particular idea ; whether, for ex- 
 ample, benevolence is nothing more than the pleasant 
 feeling that accompanies the idea of accomplishing the 
 good of another, malice the feeling that attends the idea 
 of injuring another, and so on. But there is some danger 
 here of being confused or misled by words : it certainly 
 
VI.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 361 
 
 must be allowed that there is something in the emotion 
 more special than the general feeling either of pleasure 
 or pain ; such feeling is present, no doubt, but it does 
 not determine the special character of the emotion ; it is 
 something superadded which determines only the agree- 
 ableness or disagreeableness of the emotion. It is, in 
 reality, the specific character of the idea which de- 
 termines the specific character of the emotion ; and 
 accordingly emotions are as many and various as ideas. ( 5 ) 
 And it was before shown that the character of the idea 
 is determined by the nature of the impression from 
 without, and by the nature, as modified by a life ex- 
 perience, of the reacting nervous centre : this now con- 
 taining an organisation of ideas as its acquired nature, 
 or as the expression of its due development. But 
 inasmuch as the individual inherits a certain tempera- 
 ment, which is the expression of the entire constitution 
 of his body and displays its affective proclivities at the 
 earliest period of life, the general lines of his ideational 
 organisation are laid down for him in his nature : his 
 conscious evolutions will follow the leading bents of his 
 nature as they declare themselves in his fundamental 
 feelings and desires, and he will grow into the maturity 
 of that form of character which these radical tendencies 
 promote. 
 
 How difficult it is to explain matters from a psycho- 
 logical point of view is easy to perceive ; while we 
 are considering the relation of emotion to idea, they 
 are both concomitant effects of deeper lying causes. As 
 there are subjective sensations, so also are there sub- 
 jective emotional states. It depends upon the nature of 
 the fundamental elements, the internal reacting centre 
 and the external impression, whether in a given case we 
 shall have a definite idea with little or no emotional 
 quality, or whether we shall have the emotional quality 
 so marked that the idea is almost lost in it. The hemi- 
 
362 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 spherical centres are confessedly not sensitive to pain; 
 but they have a sensibility of their own to ideas, and the 
 sensibility which thus declares the manner of their 
 affection is what we call emotional. And as there may 
 be a hypersesthesia or an anaesthesia of sense, owing to 
 the condition of the sensory centre, so also there may 
 be a hyperesthesia or an anaesthesia of ideas, owing to 
 the conditions of the ideational centre. Certainly there 
 do not appear to be satisfactory grounds either in psy- 
 chology or physiology for supposing, as some writers do, 
 the nervous centres of the emotions to be situated else- 
 where than in the convolutions of the brain. 
 
 As we justly speak of the tone of the spinal cord, by 
 the variations of which its functions are so much affec- 
 ted, so we may fairly also speak of a mental ox psychical 
 tone, the tone of the supreme nervous centres, the varia- 
 tions of which so greatly affect the character of the 
 mental states that supervene. And as it appeared when 
 treating of the spinal cord that, apart from its original 
 nature and accidental causes of disturbance, the tone of 
 it was determined by the totality of impressions made 
 upon it, and of motor reactions thereto, which had been 
 organised in its constitution as faculties ; so with regard 
 to the supreme centres of our mental life, from the resi- 
 dua of past thoughts, feelings, and actions, which have 
 been organised as mental faculties, there results a certain 
 psychical tone or character in each individual. This is 
 the basis of the conception of the ego — the affections of 
 which best reveal the real nature — a conception which, 
 so far from being, as is sometimes said, fixed and un- 
 changing, undergoes gradual change with the change of 
 the individual's relations as life proceeds.* Whosoever 
 
 * " Thus you see that in th? course of a long life a man may be 
 several persons, so dissimilar that if you could find a real individual 
 that should nearly exemplify the character in one of these stages, 
 and another that should exemplify it in the next, and so on to the 
 
VI.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 363 
 
 candidly reflects upon the striking modification, or rather 
 revolution, of the ego which happens at the time of pu- 
 berty both in men and women, will surely not find it 
 hard to conceive how the self may imperceptibly but 
 surely change through life. The education and experi- 
 ence to which any one is subjected likewise modify, if 
 less suddenly, not less certainly, the tone of his charac- 
 ter. By constantly blaming some actions and praising 
 others in their children, parents are able so to form their 
 characters that, apart from any reflection, these shall 
 ever in after life be attended with a certain pleasure ; 
 those, on the other hand, with a certain pain. Men 
 become as automatic in their feelings as they notably 
 are in their thoughts and actions ; and they go on fos- 
 tering these feelings by seeking those things which 
 excite pleasant emotions and shunning those things 
 which excite painful emotions. Moreover, the whole 
 aim of the education which they give to their children 
 is to make them think, feel,, talk, and act just as they 
 themselves do, to make them react in the same way to 
 the same impressions ; so that one generation of men is 
 almost a repetition of the preceding one, and the marvel 
 is, not that men follow in the footsteps of their fore- 
 fathers, but that variations do take place, that an original 
 man who is inspired to go out of the" usual grooves of 
 thought, feeling and action ever is produced among any 
 people. Experience proves that the customs and re- 
 ligions of different nations differ most widely ; what one 
 nation views as crime another praises as virtue ; what 
 one nation applauds as a legitimate pleasure, another 
 
 last, and then bring these several persons together into one com- 
 pany, which would thus be a representation of the successive stages 
 of one man, they would feel themselves a most heterogeneous party, 
 would oppose and probably despise one another, and soon separate, 
 not caring ir they were never to meet again." Essays, John Foster, 
 p. 57, 27th Ed. 
 
364 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 reprobates as a shameful vice : there is scarcely a single 
 crime or vice that has not been exalted into a religious 
 observance by one nation or other at one period or 
 other of the world's history. The prayer of the Thug 
 was a homicide, his sacrifice a corpse. How much, 
 then, is the moral feeling or conscience dependent upon 
 the due educational development of the mind ! ( 6 ) 
 
 The manner in which music affects some persons, pro- 
 ducing a lively feeling of immediate pleasure, calming 
 mental agitation and exalting the mental tone, and there- 
 by indirectly much affecting mental activity, affords an 
 excellent example of a marked effect upon the psychical 
 tone by physical agency ; it might be adduced, if it were 
 necessary, to attest the corporeal nature of the process. 
 Such sentiments as the love of wife and the love of chil- 
 dren, various as they are in kind and degree in different 
 persons, are not so much definite emotions as a general 
 tone of feeling resulting from certain relations in life ; 
 they represent a mental state in which ideas in har- 
 mony with the tone of mind will be attended with a 
 pleasant emotion, and discordant ideas with a painful 
 emotion, just as harmony in music produces pleasure 
 and discord produces pain. So also of the refined feel- 
 ing of social propriety, which is easily recognised in one 
 who has it, and -the absence of which cannot be con- 
 cealed, is indeed made more evident, by the pretence of 
 it ; there is not a definite emotion, but a disposition or 
 tone of mind with which certain thoughts, feelings . and 
 actions harmonize so as to occasion pleasure. The re- 
 freshing and invigorating influence of some powerful 
 imaginative writers does not depend so much on the 
 actual sense of the words as upon the tone of mind 
 produced by them. Let a man read a chapter of Isaiah, 
 and whatever opinion he may have of it from a purely 
 intellectual point of view, he cannot fail, if he have any 
 harmony of soul in him, to be stirred to a high emotional 
 
VI.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 365 
 
 tone by its lofty strain of feeling and its grandeur of 
 conception. 
 
 Again, the higher aesthetic feelings are without question . 
 the result of a good cultivation, conscious development 
 having imperceptibly become a sort of instinctive en- 
 dowment, a refinement to which vulgarity of any kind 
 will be repugnant ; they are the bloom of a high culture, 
 and, like the ccenassthesis, represent a general tone of 
 mind which cannot be described as definite emotion, 
 but in which certain ideas that arise will have pleasant 
 emotional qualities. Moral feeling, however, furnishes 
 the highest example of this acquisition of excellence 
 of tone, by virtue of which certain actions instantly, 
 without reflection, attract as virtuous, others are re- 
 pelled as vicious. Reflect, again, on the powerful 
 effects which the aspects of nature produce upon philo- 
 sophic minds of the highest order: the vague mys- 
 terious feelings which such minds have, as instinctive 
 expressions of their fellowship with nature, thrills of 
 that deep harmonious sympathy with nature whereby 
 they are transported with an indefinite feeling of joy 
 in view of certain of her glories, or oppressed by 
 a dim presentiment of evil under different relations — 
 these are vague psychical feelings that in reality connote 
 the highest intellectual acquisition ; they are the con- 
 summate inflorescence of the highest psychical de- 
 velopment, the supreme harmonies of the most exalted 
 psychical tone. (?) 
 
 We must not lose sight of the fact that when we speak 
 of the original nature of nerve-element we have by no 
 means a simple factor to deal with ; on the contrary, it 
 is a very complex affair, and the study of its affections, 
 if thorough, must go deeper than the individual and his 
 consciousness. It admits of no doubt that capacities of 
 emotion which are now innate in the individual have been 
 acquired by the race. A well-born individual of the 
 17 
 
366 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 most cultivated nation in the most civilised age is capable 
 of feeling emotions which it would be impossible to 
 arouse in the mind of a low savage ; and even were the 
 two persons placed under the same external conditions 
 from the moment of birth, the difference in this respect 
 would undoubtedly still be vast. It is impossible to 
 believe that any circumstances, though ever so carefully 
 adapted, would produce in the savage, if placed under 
 their fullest influence from his childhood, the refined and 
 complex emotions of the highest civilisation. There is 
 not a being born into the world who does not carry in 
 his nature the cultivation of his epoch, marking, so to 
 speak, its stage of humanization ; even the idiot displays 
 something of it in his wreck of mind; and in order to bring 
 the low savage to the level of the cultivated European, it 
 would be necessary to carry on a process of humaniza- 
 tion, or, to coin a more special word for present use, a 
 process of emotionalization, through many generations. 
 It is in consequence of his natural inheritance that the 
 civilised person may have vague emotions aroused in his 
 mind before experience has given to them definite form, 
 diffused indefinite feelings such as the savage cannot 
 have, which fit him for subsequent special culture along 
 definite emotional tracks. The so-called preconscious soul, 
 of which some philosophers have written, is truly the pre- 
 conscious mental life of the race, incorporated and 
 awakening to consciousness in the latest embodiments of 
 humanity. Whosoever then would make a complete 
 analytical study of the emotions, must go backwards 
 through the course of evolution of mankind, resolving 
 into its simple elements much that now is a complex 
 whole ; must, as it were, fantastically imagine mankind 
 to live back again to its earliest infancy, through all the 
 scenes of its past history, and to give off from its mental 
 acquisitions at each step, as it goes backwards, that 
 which was gained when it was there in its progress ; thus 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 367 
 
 displaying the genesis of the emotions by stripping off one 
 contribution after another, and laying bare the naked 
 state of man at the beginning of the long train of mental 
 modifications and acquisitions.* 
 
 This resolution or retrograde metamorphosis of the 
 emotional nature is sometimes partially done for us by 
 disease. At any rate this is the best explanation which 
 I have to offer of the extraordinary precocity in cunning, 
 lying, and vicious propensities which is displayed some- 
 times by certain very young children who, descended 
 from families in which insanity or epilepsy prevails, are 
 afflicted with a genuine moral insanity. They are desti- 
 tute of all feelings of affection for father or mother, 
 brother or sister ; have no social sympathies, so that they 
 mingle not with other children in their play and their 
 pursuits ; delight in destruction and in "the infliction of 
 cruel tortures on such animals as' they dare meddle 
 with ; lie or steal with an ingenuity that is incredible to 
 those who have not experience of their extreme moral 
 perversion ; and display sometimes a surprising pre- 
 cocity of sexual feelings and propensities. They are 
 not in the least degree susceptible to moral influence, the 
 severest penal discipline and the most patient forbearance 
 alike utterly failing to work a reformation in their 
 character. The fact is that they are destitute of that 
 potentiality of moral development which should be innate 
 in the human constitution at this age, in this respect being 
 on a level with the monkey, which they resemble in their 
 conduct ; they are anti-social beings, bereft, through the 
 tyranny of a bad organisation, of the moral element 
 which is the latest acquisition of human evolution. But 
 their nature contains implicitly, as by involution, all the 
 lower elements of the human kind, all those which it 
 shares with the monkey and other animals, and which it 
 
 * Foster, ia his Essays, makes this conception of the individual 
 character. 
 
368 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 presumably displayed in unrestrained freedom in the 
 premoral ages of its existence. Consequently, when 
 such an insane being appears on the scene, we witness 
 an instance of decomposition of the human kind ; there 
 is not only an individual, but there is human nature, in 
 perverse action, in retrograde metamorphosis ; wherefore 
 are presented exhibitions of degenerate action which, 
 so far as regards the individual child, seem to mark an 
 inexplicable prematurity of vice. 
 
 Humanity is contained in the individual; whatever 
 act of vice, folly, crime, or madness one man has per- 
 petrated, each man has in him the potentiality of per- 
 petrating; for which reason men read and do well to 
 read regularly the ten commandments, and to pray 
 that their hearts may be inclined to keep them. As 
 in one word ages of human culture are summed up, 
 so in one mortal are summed up generations of human 
 existence : in his nature as in his knowledge man is the 
 inheritor of the acquisitions of the past — the heir of all 
 the ages. If we take the words which express the thoughts 
 of a high mental culture, and trace their origin and the 
 gradual development of their meanings, what a succes- 
 sion of human experiences, rising in complexity, is dis- 
 played ! What a slow process of growth unfolds itself, 
 answering to the slow gains of mankind, before the 
 abstract word reached that speciality and complexity of 
 evolution which it now marks ! There is not an abstract 
 term which does not mean generations of human culture. 
 Let us take, in like manner, the human being, and trace 
 back through the long records of ages the steps of his 
 genesis, or examine rather the resolution of his essential 
 human nature into its lower elements, as exhibited in the 
 degenerate acts and tendencies of the insane child, and 
 we shall cease to be surprised at phenomena which the 
 young creature never could have acquired, and which, so 
 far as its conscious life is concerned, appear strangely 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 369 
 
 precocious and inexplicable. We are witnesses of a 
 retrograde metamorphosis of humanity, of the undoing 
 of what has been done through the ages, of the form- 
 less ruin of carefully fashioned form. 
 
 Besides the emotional nature of his kind at the par- 
 ticular grade of its development which a man has innate 
 in him, he inherits also the more special emotional 
 nature of his own immediate ancestors. His father and 
 mother, his grandfather and grandmother, are latent or 
 declare themselves in him ; and it is on the lines thus 
 laid in his nature that his development will proceed. It 
 is not by virtue of education so much as by virtue of 
 inheritance that he is brave or timid, generous or selfish, 
 prudent or reckless, boastful or modest, quick or placid 
 in temper ; the ground-tone of his character is original in 
 him, and it colours all the subsequently formed emotions 
 and their sympathetic ideas. As the susceptibility of a 
 particular sense may draw the individual to certain pur- 
 suits in life and so affect greatly the character of his 
 intellectual development, so the predominance of a 
 certain emotional tone will operate to determine an 
 organization of sympathetic ideas. The influence of 
 systematic culture upon any one is no doubt great, but 
 that which determines the limit and even in some 
 degree the nature of the effects of culture, that which 
 forms the foundation upon which all the modifications 
 of art must rest, is the inherited nature. Many an ex- 
 perience in life teaches the individual who has had the 
 blessing of a good parentage how incalculable is his 
 debt ; when compelled to act at critical moments, or 
 under difficult and trying circumstances to which he was 
 not consciously equal, or under great temptation to 
 wrong, or in any other case in which his art has failed 
 him, he shall have had cause to bless the nature which he 
 has inherited, to give thanks for the reserve force of a 
 sound and vigorous character which his parents have 
 
3?o THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 endowed him with, and which has stood him in good 
 stead and inspired him, as his leisurely consideration 
 proves, to do rightly when he knew not what he was 
 doing. The individual's nature is beneath his art: if 
 sound, it will come to his rescue when culture fails 
 him ; if unsound, it will overthrow him in the hour 01 
 trial in spite of culture. Better than all that has been 
 taught him by his pastors and masters, it will enable him 
 to meet his last fate with becoming dignity in the hour 
 of death and in the day of judgment. 
 
 Those who have had the most experience of men 
 and affairs, and the insight to profit well by it, re- 
 cognize the unfailing constancy of the manifestations 
 of character ; they reckon upon the acts and feelings of 
 persons with whom they have to do, as they do upon 
 the outcome of an arithmetical calculation or upon the 
 effects of physical and chemical laws; looking to the tree 
 for fruit after its kind, they cannot be persuaded that 
 grapes will ever grow on thorns or figs on thistles. Com- 
 mon observation has always recognized, and has expressed 
 in various popular sayings in all languages, the vital in- 
 fluence of breed upon character, and the impossibility of 
 eradicating nature. It is more important to know what a 
 man's father or mother was than what his schoolmaster 
 was. If he has not got the basis of a strong character 
 in the original constitutional structure of his mind, he 
 will never acquire it ; for if he has it not, how can he 
 have sufficient force of will to make the complete ex- 
 periment ; and if he can exert the requisite will to 
 use the means for its attainment, he already has the 
 character. 
 
 In considering the complex nature of the emotions or 
 affections of mind, it is necessary not only to take ac- 
 count of the inherited acquisitions of the race, of the 
 more special inheritance from the immediate ancestors., 
 and of the effects of education, but it is necessary also 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 371 
 
 to take account of the effects which the different bodily 
 organs exert upon the mental life. They are the foun- 
 dations of the affective nature. As each sensory organ, 
 or as each group of movements, has its representative 
 centre in the grey matter of the cerebral convolutions, 
 so there is reason to believe that each internal organ 
 of the body has its representative centre in the supreme 
 cerebral centres, through which it takes its essential 
 part in the constitution and function of mind. The 
 nature of our sensory perception of light, sound, taste, 
 smell, is determined by the special organs of these 
 senses, the same impression on the different organs, if 
 capable of stimulating them, giving rise to their special 
 sensations ; in like manner, it may well be that other 
 organs of the body have their specific effects upon mind, 
 giving rise to specific emotions and their sympathetic 
 ideas. They are plainly bound together in the closest 
 union and sympathy, constituting a physiological com- 
 monwealth in which if one member surfer the other 
 members suffer with it ; for although they are insensible 
 to touch when exposed, they have a sensibility of their 
 own, different in kind from that of the skin, by virtue of 
 which they agree in a consent of functions, and feel and 
 sympathize with one another's affections. Now the brain 
 is the leading member of this physiological union, the 
 centre in which the different organic impressions meet 
 and are co-ordinated ; wherefore the supposition that it 
 carries on this important function of organic life quite 
 apart from and independently of its function as the 
 organ of mind would be most improbable, even if ob- 
 servation did not contradict it. 
 
 As a matter of fact, observation does contradict it 
 positively. We have the plainest instance of this in 
 the case of the reproductive organs, the functional de- 
 velopment of which, taking place somewhat abruptly at 
 puberty, works a complete revolution in the mental 
 
352 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [CHAP. 
 
 character. The individual is transformed: his entire 
 sentiency is changed, and he becomes susceptible to 
 impressions which before were completely indifferent to 
 him ; a look, a tone, an odour, a touch arouses emotion 
 that is quite new to him, and sympathetic ideas that 
 come he knows not whence or how. Strange and vague 
 feelings, aimless longings, obscure impulses, and novel 
 ideas witness to the commotion which the newly-deve- 
 loped function is making by its irruption into the mental 
 life : there is an " awakening of sensual impulses which 
 clothe themselves in mental forms, of mental necessities 
 which clothe themselves in sensual images." It is now, 
 too, that altruistic feeling begins to germinate in the 
 mind ; before puberty a boy. is the most complete 
 egoist, taking as a matter of course all the affection and 
 care which are lavished upon him ; but, after puberty, 
 he begins for the first time to have some sense of what 
 others do for him, and to display some feeling of his 
 obligation to them. If we were to go on to follow 
 the development of the sexual instinct to its highest 
 reach we should not fail to discover a great range of 
 operation ; for we might trace its influence in the high- 
 est feelings of mankind, social, moral, and religious. 
 These evolutional effects of the functional develop- 
 ment of the reproductive organs upon the mind do not 
 take place when such development is prevented by their 
 removal before puberty. The minds of eunuchs are 
 mutilated like their bodies ; they are said to be cowardly, 
 envious, liars, utterly deceitful, destitute of social and 
 moral feeling ; with the deprivation of sexual feeling, 
 they are deprived of all the mental growth and energy 
 which it inspires directly or remotely. How much that 
 is it would be hard to say j but were man deprived of the 
 instinct of propagation, and of all that mentally springs 
 from it, it is probable that most of the poetry,and per- 
 haps all the moral feeling, would be cut out of his life. 
 
Vi.] THE EMOTIONS OS AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 373 
 
 We have not the same opportunity of observing the 
 mental effects of other bodily organs which we have in 
 the case of the reproductive organs, because they are in 
 functional action directly we are born, or long before we 
 are capable of any mental function, and we have no 
 means of knowing what sort of mind we should have 
 without them. But it may well be that the general uni- 
 formity of passions and desires among mankind is owing 
 to the uniform operation of the bodily organs upon the 
 brain, just as the general uniformity of their ideas is 
 owing to the uniform action of the organs of the senses. 
 Because all men have the same number and kind of 
 senses, therefore they have the same kind of intellectual 
 function ; and, in like manner, we may suppose that 
 they have the same kind of passions because they have 
 the same number and kind of internal organs, each of 
 which has its more or less specific operation upon the 
 mind. To me it seems a scientific truth that there is 
 nothing outwardly displayed in the bodily function 
 which has not its internal representation in the central 
 nervous system — which is not, so to speak, contained 
 in the innermost — and I cannot doubt that the effect of 
 each different organic structure with its corresponding 
 function upon the brain is special ; that the outer differ- 
 entiations betoken corresponding inner differentiations. 
 As the internal organs have not any direct communica- 
 tion with the environment of the organism, they would, 
 had they not cortical representation in the cerebral hemi- 
 spheres, be without any means of adjustment to its ex- 
 ternal relations either directly or indirectly, notwith- 
 standing that such adjustment, in a direct or indirect 
 way, is a characteristic of life in all its forms ; but 
 having, as I believe, their cerebral representation, they 
 exert thereby such effect upon the so-called animal life 
 or the life of relation of the whole organism as is 
 fitting for them as co-ordinated parts of a complex 
 
374 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 whole. And that is no small effect ; for it is from the 
 affections of mind that the impulses to action spring — 
 from the organic life, therefore, that the motor force of 
 the body is fundamentally derived. 
 
 It need not be supposed that each organ is the direct 
 cause of a special passion or desire — that tenderness lies 
 in the heart, anger in the liver, envy in the spleen, as 
 old writers believed ; it is sufficient to assume that each 
 organ sends its unfelt contribution to the systemic con- 
 sciousness or ccenajsthesis, and modifies it accordingly. 
 The consciousness of the moment may be conceived 
 to be the complex product of an infinite multitude of 
 simple and compound vibrations coming from the ex- 
 ternal and internal organs of the body. And just as the 
 condition of the reproductive organs produces a certain 
 tone of the nervous system which renders it susceptible 
 to special impressions, and promotes the occurrence of 
 special ideas and feelings, so may the condition of a 
 particular organ so modify the tone of the nervous sys- 
 tem as to render it susceptible to particular impressions, 
 and to favour the occurrence of certain feelings and their 
 sympathetic ideas ; the differentiated cerebral centre of 
 the organ being in close relations with certain idea- 
 tional tracts. This is one reason why psychologists 
 have not succeeded in analyzing the emotions as they 
 have in analyzing some of our apparently simple intel- 
 lectual ideas — why they have not yet decomposed 
 them into their elements, as they have decomposed our 
 ideas of figure, size, position, distance. They are able 
 to study the separate action of each of the several senses 
 in the building up of an idea, but they are not able to 
 isolate the separate action of each of the internal 
 "organs of the body, and to estimate its particular func- 
 tion in the composition of an emotion. The method 
 of psychology is entirely at fault here, for self-con- 
 sciousness yields no help towards a discovery of the 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 375 
 
 connection between the emotional state and the bodily 
 organ. 
 
 The most hopeful method to pursue in this case would 
 be to observe patiently and carefully the mental symp- 
 toms of diseases of the different organs, so far as there 
 are any, and the effects of their disorders upon dreams. 
 The emotional or affective features of disease of the 
 heart, disease of the lungs, disease of the liver, are un- 
 questionably very different in some cases ; and although 
 it may be argued that the effect in each case is due not 
 to the direct nervous sympathies of the organ, but to an 
 indirect effect upon the nervous system through the 
 changes which the deranged organ produces in the com- 
 position or circulation of the blood, I doubt greatly 
 whether the explanation will be found sufficient to cover 
 the phenomena. The suggested inquiry is, without doubt, 
 a very difficult one, but it is probable that a careful 
 observation and record of the curious features of dreams 
 might yield valuable help. No one will dispute that we 
 dream different dreams according to our different bodily 
 states; the ground-tone of feeling being sometimes 
 manifestly determined by the state of an internal organ, 
 the irritation of which stimulates that part of the brain 
 with which it is presumably in specific sympathy. Ideas 
 that are associated with the particular feeling, the tracts 
 of them being presumably in special relations with its 
 centre, thereupon become active and combine in a more 
 or less coherent dream-drama. When the avenues of 
 impression upon the brain through the external senses 
 are closed by sleep, and the consciousness of the outer 
 world is in abeyance, there may well be a greater suscep- 
 tibility to impressions from within the body, and so the 
 physiological sympathies of organs may declare them- 
 selves more distinctly, just as the stars, invisible in the 
 day, shine forth brightly at night when the sun goes 
 down. These organic sympathies which are the condi- 
 
376 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 tions of affective function are not completely intermit- 
 tent like sensory and motor functions; they cease not 
 entirely day or night until the sun of life sets for ever in 
 death. " We tire of thinking and acting," says Comte ; 
 "we never tire of loving." 
 
 If it be thought that I lay too great stress upon the 
 influence of bodily organs upon mental states, and that 
 it is impossible we should owe so much to them without 
 being more conscious than we are of their operations, 
 let it be considered how much we owe to our muscular 
 sense without being ever conscious of its action until 
 we are deprived of it. When the muscular sense of a 
 limb is paralyzed, the motor power being unaffected, as 
 happens in one form of disease, the person cannot 
 regulate its movements and use it unless he makes use 
 of the sense of sight to inform him of his condition : 
 when the arm is thus affected he cannot grasp an object 
 unless he looks at it, and if he has laid hold of it he 
 instantly lets it drop when he turns his eyes away ; if his 
 legs are affected, he cannot stand but totters and falls 
 down when he shuts his eyes. He walks, sits, stands, 
 moves, performs all acts of his life by virtue of essential 
 information which he is constantly receiving through a 
 thousand channels from every part of his body without 
 ever knowing from consciousness that he is receiving it. 
 In like manner our mental functions may habitually re- 
 ceive specific contributions from specific organs without 
 being directly conscious of them, because they have been 
 constantly poured in from the first moment of life and enter 
 radically into the constitution of the ego. It is probable 
 that much of the mental characters of diseases may be 
 due to modifications of this kind of influence. Mind 
 represents a general consensus between affective, idea- 
 tional and active functions, all of which co-operate but 
 one or other of which may predominate on a particular 
 occasion. 
 
VI.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 377 
 
 It is easy to distinguish two different classes of 
 mind among mankind, — a subjective class marked by 
 the tendency to feel intensely rather than to see clearly, 
 or at any rate to mix feelings in observation and 
 reasoning, more often met with amongst women than 
 men ; and an objective class, more able to look at 
 things in the dry light of reason. It might fairly be 
 argued that these different views of things are due to the 
 relative predominance in consciousness of internal and 
 external impressions, emotional persons having suscep- 
 tible internal organs. Women at any rate appear to owe 
 the self-feeling which shows itself in quick and mobile 
 emotional susceptibility, in great part, to the cerebral 
 sympathies of their reproductive organs ; and certainly 
 the person who has fostered sejf-feeling until it has swal- 
 lowed up all other kind of feeling is the hypochondriac 
 who has cultivated his organic sensibilities into conscious 
 feelings. He is like a person who by careful attention 
 can become sensible, in listening to a simple musical note, 
 of the separate harmonic overtones which constitute its 
 quality, and which most persons never perceive. 
 
 It is probable that many vague feelings or indefinite 
 emotional states to which we have no adequate or cor- 
 responding ideas are produced by the operations of the 
 internal organs ; they are of a very vague character, and 
 cannot be expressed in definite objective signs, where- 
 fore they cannot become knowledge. We have the best 
 instances of what I mean in the vague overmastering 
 feelings to which pregnancy and the development of 
 puberty give rise ; and it is certain we must go deeper 
 than self-conscious analysis will evei get, to arrive at 
 their true nature and causation. Even the passion of 
 love itself has its source in the unconscious life, and can 
 no more be explained in consciousness than the feelings 
 of hunger and thirst ; it marks an elective affinity of the 
 organism which oftentimes enslaves consciousness and 
 
378 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [crur-, 
 
 overpowers volition. The weaker the conscious factors 
 in mental function, the more power have the unconscious 
 factors, as we plainly see by the examples of women and 
 of children, of persons labouring under sickness, and ot 
 those who are dying. 
 
 There is yet another cause of affection of the. emo- 
 tional tone which it is necessary to mention, namely}' the 
 condition of the blood supplied to the nervous system. 
 When its composition is altered, either by matter bred 
 in it, or introduced into it, its influence on the feelings 
 is most marked. Illustrations of this action being fa- 
 miliar to everybody, it will be sufficient here to call to 
 mind the influence of alcohol upon the mind, and to 
 instance the effect which Indian hemp or haschisch 
 produces when it is eaten. It occasions, according to 
 Moreau, a vague, happy, emotional expansion, not sen- 
 sual but spiritual as to form, and not unlike that which 
 is produced in one who has heard good news, or has met 
 with a great success ; he compares it also to the indefi- 
 nite and tender emotional feeling which is awakened at 
 the epoch of puberty. There is no sensual excitement 
 if there be no sensual provocation; if, however, the 
 sensual organs are excited by some means, the feeling 
 ceases to be vague and purely ideal, and takes definite 
 form and aim. In the East, therefore, it is said that the 
 haschisch is often mixed with substances having aphro- 
 disiac properties, in order to excite passion and to 
 give the desiderated sensual colour and form to the 
 dream-delirium. When the emotional tone is thus affect- 
 ed by a foreign substance introduced into the blood, we 
 cannot doubt that some physical or chemical effect is 
 produced in the nerve-element, which is the condition of 
 the changed function ; in fact, as strychnia acting upon 
 the motor nerve-centres so affects their composition that 
 they explode in convulsions, so there are substances 
 which acting upon the higher nerve-centres so affect 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 379 
 
 their constitution or composition that they discharge 
 their energy in molecular explosions of emotion. 
 
 When an emotion is excited its tendency is to dis- 
 charge itself externally by certain motor channels or 
 upon the internal organs of the body. In children and 
 savages simple emotions are easily excited, and- rapidly 
 discharged in movements. A young child, if delighted, 
 laughs with voice, face, limbs and body ; when in a vio- 
 lent rage it rolls on the ground, screaming, kicking, 
 scratching and biting. In the idiot an explosion of 
 passion is sometimes an explosion of convulsions. But 
 in educated persons, with whom the aim of culture is to 
 prevent the explosive display of emotion, the muscular 
 expressions thereof are more . limited, being confined 
 chiefly to the nose' and mouth— to the orbicular muscles 
 of the lips with the system of elevating and depressing 
 muscles. Still, when an emotion is violent it escapes 
 from control, overflows its ordinary channels, and pours 
 into neighbouring motor channels : laughter spreads 
 from the mouth to the muscles of respiration, and from 
 them perhaps to the arms and legs ; and terror may pro- 
 duce, in addition to its usual facial expression, short, 
 quick and impeded breathing, gasping, and tremulous 
 motion of- the lips, convulsive action of the muscles of 
 the neck and shoulder — the extraordinary muscles of 
 respiration — and tumultuous beating of the heart. When 
 a person is undergoing a gradual suffocation by preven- 
 tion of access of sufficient air to the lungs, he makes 
 what are called frantic efforts at inspiration, bringing into 
 action all the extraordinary or supplementary muscles 
 of respiration ; and he displays the same violent motor 
 phenomena when he is in a state of frantic terror. 
 
 It was long ago pointed out by Unzer that the motor 
 expressions of the emotions are really the movements 
 which would be manifested in greater degree if the emo- 
 tions and desires were realized in action, the same 
 
380 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 mechanical external machines being put into incomplete 
 action, and the emotions being a nascent excitation of 
 the mental states which would accompany the acts. 
 For instance, in the appetite for food, the gratification of 
 which is the taking of food, saliva is poured into the 
 mouth just as when food is taken; in the desire to give 
 suck, the satisfaction of which is the relief of the breasts 
 by the discharge of the milk from the nipples during 
 suckling, the nipples become erect and there is a flow 
 of milk to them. In the desire for revenge, the gratifi- 
 cation of which is to injure the offender, the natural 
 weapons of offence are put in action, animals ejecting 
 their poison, thrusting out their stings, attempting to 
 tear, bite, or kick, and man clenching his fist, stamping 
 his feet, and gnashing his teeth, as he would do if he 
 were actually taking his revenge. In terror, the satis- 
 faction of which is the averting of a great impending 
 danger, the struggles for preservation are seen in the 
 starting back, the shrinking, the sudden standing still, 
 and the open mouth by which a deep inspiration is 
 taken in order to prepare for exertion. In shame, the 
 satisfaction of which is the avoidance of the glance of 
 the person whose contempt is feared, the eyelids are 
 dropped in order to withdraw oneself as much as pos- 
 sible from the glance. The foreseeing of a fall from a 
 height excites us involuntarily to hold fast as we should 
 do if we were actually falling.* Mr. Darwin has pointed 
 out that in a large number of animals, belonging to 
 widely-different classes, an erection of the hair or fea- 
 thers takes place under the influence of anger, whereby 
 the animal appears larger and more terrible to its ene- 
 mies or rivals, and that the erection is almost always 
 accompanied by threatening gestures — opening of the 
 mouth, uncovering of the teeth, spreading out of the 
 
 * Unzer and Prochaska, On the Functions of the Nervous System, 
 p. 129. Svd. Soc. Transl. 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 381 
 
 wings and tails by birds, and by the utterance of harsh 
 sounds. In those animals which fight with their teeth, a 
 savage frame of mind is shown by the drawing back of 
 the ears, which are pressed close to the head, this being 
 the position given to them when the animals actually 
 fight, in order to prevent them from being seized by 
 their antagonists The retraction of the lips and the 
 uncovering of the teeth in man during rage is probably 
 a remnant or survival of a habit acquired during prime- 
 val times when his semi-human ancestors fought with 
 their teeth.* 
 
 We often use the same word to describe the quality 
 of an emotion which we use to describe the quality of a 
 a sensation ; speaking, for example, of piercing sorrow, 
 of soured feeling, of corroding grief, of revenge, " sweet 
 at first, but bitter ere long," just as we speak of a sour, 
 bitter, or sweet taste ; in like manner we use the same 
 movement to express an emotion which we use to pre- 
 vent, lessen, or increase a sensation. It would perhaps 
 be as true of emotion as of intellect to say that there is 
 nothing in the emotion which was not previously in 
 sense. The face of a person eagerly pursuing a- thought 
 is that of one trying eagerly to see something which is 
 difficult to be seen, pursufng it, as it were, with his eye ; 
 the expression of one who understands not a proposi- 
 tion made is like that of a deaf man who hears not but 
 tries to hear what is said ; the expression of one who 
 expects an unwelcome announcement to be made is that 
 of one who shrinks from a loud sound, as of a gun about 
 to be fired ; the expression of sneering seems very much 
 that of excluding an unpleasant smell from the nostrils, 
 if it be not, as is perhaps more likely, a partial snarl ; 
 the expression of disgust, that of ejecting from the 
 mouth and nostrils something offensive ; the attitude of 
 one who repels a repugnant suggestion is that of nascent 
 
 * Darwin. The Expression of the Emotions. 
 
382 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 bodily resistance ; the attitude of mental aversion, that 
 of turning away bodily from a disagreeable object; the 
 attitude of defiance, that of one who stands four square 
 to all the winds that blow; and the attitude of humility is 
 just the opposite. Thus it appears that emotional move- 
 ments are radically determined by, if they are not more 
 or less complete reproductions of, such movements as 
 have been produced by affections of the senses, or have 
 been performed for some definite end under the influ- 
 ence of the same emotions : they are survivals of past 
 adjustments to the social environment. 
 
 It is because emotions have their definite expressional 
 movements that there is an art of discovering the pre- 
 dominant mental characteristics of men in the lineaments 
 of the face. By frequent repetition of the movements 
 of predominant or habitual desires or emotions, these 
 mould the character of the features ; whence it happens 
 that we observe sometimes a positive assimilation of 
 features from similar pursuits, habits and sentiments, as, 
 for example, in the acquired resemblance which has been 
 observed to be brought about between man and wife. 
 The attempt to repress the natural expression of a pre- 
 dominant emotion, as when a person bites or compresses 
 his lips in order to prevent his anger finding vent in 
 speech, act, or features, necessitates a muscular action of 
 constraint which, though it hides the natural language of 
 the emotion, is sufficiently significant to those who can 
 interpret the more complex and artificial physiognomical 
 signs. Animals have their leading instincts and passions, 
 in the gratification of which they find their greatest 
 pleasure ; the features and figures being moulded to per- 
 form the movements which gratify these leading desires 
 do more or less plainly disclose their nature. The feline 
 structure, with its lithe movements, retractile claws, and 
 soft and treacherous tread, declares the feline nature. 
 Those who make a study of human faces cannot 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 383 
 
 fail to detect often in them resemblances to animal 
 physiognomies : one face will call to mind the fox, 
 another the tiger, a third the lion, a fourth the elephant ; 
 and any one who makes a study of these resemblances 
 will be surprised to find how closely these animal-like 
 peculiarities of features are often accompanied with 
 corresponding mental characters. Within the human 
 there is an animal nature, a brute brain within the 
 man's, and in some« persons the features plainly betray 
 the nature of the special animal. 
 
 It must be confessed that the discovery of the mind's 
 construction in the face is a matter of individual skill, 
 and not one which can be taught ; it is an art the 
 principles of which it has not yet been possible to for- 
 mulate ; but there can be no doubt of the extraordinary 
 skill which some persons acquire, or of the value 
 of the information which those who have the re- 
 quisite acuteness and experience may obtain thereby. 
 For, as Bacon said, " the lineaments of the body do 
 disclose the disposition and inclination of the mind in 
 general ; but the motions of the countenance and parts 
 do not only so, but do farther disclose the present 
 humour and state of the mind or will. And therefore a 
 number of subtle persons whose eyes do dwell upon the 
 faces and fashions of men, do well know the advantage 
 of this observation, as being most part of their ability ; 
 neither can it be denied but that it is a great discovery 
 of- dissimulation and a great direction in business.'' 
 
 Mr. Darwin has formularized three principles which 
 appear to him to account for most of the expressions and 
 gestures involuntarily used by man and the lower animals 
 under the influence of emotions. The first is the prin- 
 ciple of associated serviceable habits. Certain complex 
 actions are directly or indirectly useful in relieving or 
 gratifying certain sensations, desires, &c. ; and whenever 
 the same state of mind is induced, however feebly, there 
 
384 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 is a tendency through the force of habit and association 
 for the same movements to be performed, though they 
 may not then be of the least use. Some of these move- 
 ments may be partially repressed by the will, and the 
 muscles which are least under the control of the will are 
 then most liable to act, the movements caused by them 
 being recognised as expressive. In other cases the re- 
 pression of one movement may necessitate other mus- 
 cular contractions which, when their aim is recognised, 
 will likewise be expressive. The second principle he 
 calls the principle of antithesis. When there is produced 
 a directly opposite state of mind to that expressed by 
 certain habitual movements which were once or are still 
 serviceable, there is a strong and involuntary tendency 
 to the performance of movements of a directly opposite 
 nature, though these may not be of the least use. Such 
 movements are in some cases highly expressive. The 
 third principle is the so-called direct action of the 
 nervous system. When the sensorium is strongly ex- 
 cited, nerve-force is generated in excess, and must be 
 discharged, the channels of discharge being determined 
 by the connection of the nerve-cells and nerve-fibres, and 
 partly only by habit. The effects thus produced are 
 recognised often as expressive. It is natural to suppose 
 that when there is a large generation of nerve-force" in 
 one centre, the excess of that which can readily be dis- 
 charged by the nerve-fibres connected therewith will 
 overflow, pass to neighbouring interconnected nerVe- 
 centres, and be discharged in molecular movements 
 along the nerve-fibres proceeding from them. 
 
 But emotions have other channels of discharge besides 
 muscular movements. They may be expended in action 
 upon the secretions, or in nutritive changes, or in action 
 upon the ideational centres. When emotional excite- 
 ment is not discharged by motor channels it is apt to 
 affect the internal viscera ; it produces a disturbance or 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECIIONS OF MIND. 385 
 
 «/*ease of them, which may increase in degree to dis- 
 ease; the principal channel through which this takes 
 place being the complex vagus nerve, which regulates 
 the force and rapidity of the heart's beats and the fre- 
 quency of respirations, and influences to a great extent 
 the secretions and movements of the stomach and intes- 
 tines. It is through it that grief strikes the heart, getting 
 its name of heartrending, and through it that terror 
 affects violently the movements of the heart and of 
 respiration ; through it that the bated breath of suspense, 
 the nausea of disgust, and the impaired digestion of 
 sorrow are produced; and through it that the bowels 
 yearn in sympathy. A strong emotion, like an electric 
 shock through the vagus, may cause sudden death by 
 paralyzing the heart, just as it may cause paralysis or 
 convulsions of voluntary muscles. 
 
 Emotion will often increase, lessen, or alter a secre- 
 tion, bidding the tears flow, perverting the bile, mak- 
 ing the tongue cleave to the roof of the mouth ; and 
 it may be questioned whether there is a single act 
 of nutrition which emotion may not affect, inspiring 
 it with energy or infecting it with feebleness, accord- 
 ing to its pleasant or painful nature, and so aiding 
 or hindering recovery from disease. It is certain 
 that joy or hope exerts an animating effect upon the 
 bodily life, quiet and equable when moderate, but, when 
 stronger, evinced in the brilliancy of the eye, in the 
 quickened pulse and breathing, in an inclination to laugh 
 and sing; grief or other depressing passion has an oppo- 
 site effect, relaxing the arteries, enfeebling the heart, 
 making the eye dull, impeding digestion, and producing 
 an inclination to sigh or weep. Herein we perceive a 
 sufficient reason of the disease in an organ which is 
 sometimes the result of a prolonged depressing passion, 
 especially of depression in its highest degree — hopeless- 
 ness. And because the weak organ is ever the sufferer, 
 
386 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 because here, as elsewhere, to be weak is to be miser- 
 able, the effect of a passion is generally felt in the 
 affected organ by one who is the subject of any local 
 idiosyncracy ; it sympathises more easily and more 
 acutely with the centric commotion ; wherefore one who 
 has a weak organ should refrain from passion, if he 
 would live long. Passion, in its essential nature, be- 
 tokens the sympathy of the whole nervous system of 
 the organic and animal life ; and a great disposition to 
 passion means a great susceptibility to such sympathy. 
 Some of the terms which are used to describe emotional 
 states, such as splenetic, melancholy, cordial, and such 
 figurative expressions as pallid fear, pining love, envy 
 wan, faded care, livid horror, green-eyed jealousy, grim- 
 visaged despair, and the like, testify by their origin to a 
 general recognition of the influence of the emotions upon 
 the bodily functions ; and it is for science now to trace 
 out and classify the exact sequences of phenomena which 
 have long been familiar in household words.* 
 
 It is a matter of common observation that an emotion 
 may be diverted from one into another of its channels 
 of expression. A person who is grossly insulted may 
 vent his anger either in the quick movements of a reta- 
 liating blow, or in useless tears and lamentations, or in 
 the ideational activity of devising plans of future revenge 
 or of calling up Christian ideas of forgiveness or philo- 
 sophical ideas of indifference. If the" emotion be not 
 discharged in outward bodily activity or in suitable 
 inward mental action, it will act upon the internal viscera 
 and derange their functions ; sorrow is soon discharged 
 by passionate wailing and weeping ; it is the grief which 
 does not speak that whispers the overfraught heart and 
 
 * Nearly all these figurative expressions are made use of in a few 
 lines by Gray, who was skilful and industrious in culling apt phrases 
 from the works of his predecessors, in his Ode on a Distant View of 
 Eton College. 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 387 
 
 bids it break. But it is not a good use to make of emo- 
 tional energy to allow it to go to waste by discharging 
 itself outwardly in useless wailing, or to do harm by dis- 
 charging itself inwardly in derangement of the organic 
 functions ; it should be the aim of mental culture to 
 retain it within the sphere of the intellectual life, and 
 so to get the benefit of it in the supply of the interest 
 and energy required for effective volition. A wise man 
 soon perceives that he owes more in self-culture and 
 worldly success to the disappointments and griefs which 
 he has suffered than to the triumphs and joys which he 
 has had. 
 
 There is another consideration to be taken into ac- 
 count with regard to our emotions. When we fix the 
 countenance in the expression, or the body in the 
 attitude, which any passion naturally occasions, it is 
 certain that we acquire in some degree that passion ; 
 and if we try, while the features are fixed in the pattern 
 of one emotion, to call up in the mind a quite different 
 one, we shall find it impossible to do so. There is an 
 obvious fallacy in making the experiment, as in order to 
 produce the suitable movements of expression we are 
 compelled to imagine the passion ; but after allowance 
 has been made for this cause of error, there remains 
 sufficient reason to believe that the emotion is intensified 
 and made definite by the bodily action. In fact, as we 
 complete our intellectual activity by the participation of 
 the sensory centres, thereby rendering our abstract ideas 
 definite through a sensory representation of them; or 
 rather as our reasoning powers are developed by em- 
 bodiment of thoughts in words through the instrumen- 
 tality of speech ; so in our emotional life any particular 
 passion is rendered stronger and more distinct by the 
 existence of those bodily states which it naturally pro- 
 duces, and which in turn, when otherwise produced, tend 
 to engender it. There can be little doubt that each 
 
388 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 passion which is special in kind has its special bodily 
 expression ; this being truly an essential part of it. Mr. 
 Braid found, by experiment on patients whom he had 
 put in that state of artificial somnambulism which he 
 described as hypnotism, that by inducing attitudes of 
 body natural to certain passions he could excite those 
 passions. If the spine and legs were straightened and 
 the head thrown slightly back, the countenance assumed 
 an expression of lofty pride ; if the limbs and body were 
 slightly flexed and the head bent forward, a feeling of 
 great humility took its place ; if the fist were doubled 
 and the arm raised, the idea of fighting was excited ; if 
 the person were put on his knees, and his hands clasped, 
 his countenance and actions bespoke profound devotion. 
 We perceive, then, how close is the sympathy or con- 
 nection between the bodily system and the emotional or 
 affective life which supplies the habitual impulsion to 
 action ; while the intellectual life which, as deliberative 
 or regulative, controls and directs the activity of the 
 individual, has the closest relations with the senses. 
 From want of attention to the essential intervention of 
 the whole of the bodily in the mental life — a neglect 
 springing from the unjustifiable contempt of the body 
 inherited from the theologists— the physical expressions 
 of our mental states have not been studied with the care 
 and industry which their significance deserves. As the 
 Indian savage surely tracks the footsteps of his enemy 
 where the untrained eye can see no trace ; or as the 
 American hunter, by careful observation of the ap- 
 pearances of the trees, guides himself safely through 
 pathless forests in which the greatest philosopher would 
 lose his way and perish ; so it is probable that any 
 competent observer who devoted himself to study scien- 
 tifically, with close and patient attention, the manners of 
 a large number of persons, and the different expressions 
 of their features, their gestures, and their actions, might 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 3S9 
 
 discover a certain clue to their character, and be able to 
 read off with ease their feelings and desires. Our atten- 
 tion is distracted by the number of our senses, so that 
 no one of them receives half the development of which 
 it is capable. 
 
 It was the recognition of the intimate connexion 
 and mutual reaction between the passions and the 
 bodily life that moved Bichat to locate them, as the 
 ancients did and in common language is now sometimes 
 done, in .the organs of the organic life. But although 
 there was in this view the just acknowledgment of a 
 truth, it was only of part of a truth ; for, in the first 
 place, not the organs of the organic life only, but those 
 of the animal life also, are concerned in the expression 
 and production of passion; and, in the second place, 
 the feeling of the passion unquestionably takes place in 
 the brain. It is the display of its organic sympathies. 
 Consequently it is found that, as the effect of a depress- 
 ing passion is felt by the victim of a local idiosyncrasy 
 in his weak organ, so inversely the effect of a weak or 
 diseased organ is felt in the brain by an irritability or 
 disposition to passion, a disturbance of the psychical 
 tone — in fact, by a state of unease, which may become 
 a state of disease, of mind, if it go far enough. The 
 phenomena of insanity furnish the best illustrations of 
 this sympathetic interaction. 
 
 The study of disordered emotions will naturally find 
 a place afterwards, when I came to treat of the patho- 
 logy of mind. Suffice it here to say that disordered 
 emotion may act upon the animal life, the organic life, 
 and the intellectual life. It may grave itself in the 
 lineaments of the countenance, or declare itself in the 
 habit of the body ; it may initiate or aggravate organic 
 disease, producing, according to its duration, a transient 
 or lasting derangement; and it may temporarily obscure, 
 or permanently vitiate, the intelligence. When the 
 18 
 
390 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 emotions are disordered, as they are particularly in some 
 forms of insanity, and generally at the commencement 
 of insanity, pleasure is felt from objects and events 
 which should naturally excite pain, and pain from causes 
 which should naturally occasion pleasure in a healthy 
 mind : scenes of disorder, excess and violence are grate- 
 ful to the perverted feelings ; order and moderation are 
 irritating and repugnant. Instead of feeling and re- 
 sponding to those relations in the social environment 
 which would promote his well-being and development, 
 as in health he does, the degenerate individual exhibits 
 an affinity for those relations which are hostile to his 
 well-being, increase his degeneration, and tend to bring 
 about his extinction. 
 
 It may be thought, perhaps, that it would not be 
 amiss if something were now said of the difference be- 
 tween passion and emotion, inasmuch as. the terms have 
 hitherto been used almost indifferently. This, however, 
 is scarcely necessary in dealing only with their general 
 nature, which is fundamentally the same ; every so-called 
 emotion, when carried to a certain pitch, becomes a veri- 
 table passion. If it were thought well to distinguish 
 them in a special analysis of the particular emotions, as 
 it doubtless would be, the ground of distinction would 
 be in the egoistic or altruistic character of them— names 
 by which Comte distinguished respectively those feelings 
 which have entire reference to self and those which have 
 reference to the good of others. The passions, in fact, 
 lie much nearer to the fundamental instincts or desires 
 than do the emotions ; the instinct or sensational impulse 
 to which has been added a consciousness of its aim and 
 of the means of its gratification becoming a passion. 
 
 Spinoza, whose admirable account of the passions 
 will not easily be surpassed, only recognises three 
 primitive passions, on the basis of which all others are 
 founded — joy, sorrow, and desire, (a) Desire, he says, 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 391 
 
 is the very nature or essence of the individual, whence 
 it is that the joy or sorrow of each individual differs from 
 that of another as the nature or essence of one differs from 
 that of another, (b) Joy is the passage from a less de- 
 gree of perfection to a greater degree of perfection, and 
 accompanies, therefore, all actions that are called good, 
 (c) Sorrow is the passage from a greater degree of per- 
 fection to a less degree of perfection, and accompanies 
 all acts that are called evil. However, we perceive now, 
 by the light of knowledge acquired since Spinoza's time, 
 that he has not carried his analysis down to the physio- 
 logical foundations of the passions. 
 
 From what has gone before, it will plainly appear im- 
 possible to deal satisfactorily with the emotions by con- 
 sidering them only as accomplished facts, and grouping 
 them according to their characters as we observe them 
 in an adult person of ordinary cultivation. The psycho- 
 logical method fails us entirely, as we are driven by it 
 to study emotion under hopeless disadvantage ; we are 
 constrained to examine the complexity of an advanced 
 development instead of following up, as is the true 
 method, the genesis of emotion or the plan of its de- 
 velopment. In the classification of the animal kingdom, 
 the study of its plan of development is now acknow- 
 ledged to be the only valid . method of determining the 
 true relations between one animal and another : in like 
 manner the interpretation of the phenomena of mind 
 cannot be rightly grounded except on an analysis of 
 their development. Whosoever aspires to give an ade- 
 quate account of the emotions should , devote himself, 
 then, to a laborious investigation of their simplest mani- 
 festations in the higher members of the animal king- 
 dom ; to the study of the different grades of their 
 evolution in the savage and the civilized person, in the 
 child and the adult, the woman and the man, the idiot 
 and him who is in his right mind ; and to the patient 
 
392 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 observation of their bodily conditions, and the careful 
 delineation of their special bodily expressions. He 
 must patiently unfold that progressive specialization and 
 increasing complexity which prevail here as in every 
 other department of organic development. 
 
 Like as simple ideas are blended or coalesce into duplex 
 and complex ideas, and are connected in groups and series 
 so that, by complex development, a character is formed, 
 so are the feelings belonging to the ideas, and the desires 
 accompanying them, blended and grouped in a corre- 
 sponding complexity, and inclinations or disinclinations 
 of every variety and complexity are thus formed as a 
 part of the character. Again, the desire naturally at- 
 taching to a certain aim is often transferred after a time 
 to the means by which that aim is attained, so that 
 there ensue in this way manifold secondary formations : 
 the end of wealth is to give enjoyment and comfort, but 
 how often does a passion for the means oversway the 
 end ! By looking to a desirable end, an act naturally 
 very distasteful, but which is necessary as means, may, 
 by habituation, be rendered indifferent or even pleasing; 
 and some consummate scoundrels are thus gradually 
 fashioned, themselves unaware of the grievous issue in 
 which many slight effects have, insensibly culminated.* 
 Falsehood is sometimes the shortest and easiest way of 
 
 * Nemo repente fuit turpissimus is really the .expression of the 
 physical nature of the growth of character. 
 ' ' Custom .... 
 
 Constrains e'en stubborn Nature to obey ; 
 Whom dispossessing oft, he doth essay 
 To govern in her right ; and with a pace 
 So soft and gentle does he win his way, 
 That she unawares is caught in his embrace, 
 Andtho' deflowered and thralled nought feels her foul disgrace." 
 Stanza of Gilbert West, quoted by Coleridge in his 
 Biographia Literaria. 
 
VI.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 393 
 
 attaining an end, but the falsehood which succeeds 
 avenges itself inevitably in the deterioration of character 
 which it initiates or marks ; the individual who habitu- 
 ally practises it comes to love it for its own sake, not as 
 a means but as an end ; false to others, he is false to 
 himself in discernment, and is a known liar before he 
 ever suspects that he is thought so. 
 
 To make a profound study of the emotions one ought 
 to go very far back and begin with the fundamental 
 instincts or desires — certainly as far back as that of self- 
 preservation with the emotions of self-defence which it 
 entails, and that of propagation with the love of offspring 
 which is so nearly connected with it, and endeavour 
 to follow them from their most simple manifestations 
 through their most complex evolutions. Of their origin 
 we can give no further account than that they are pro- 
 perties of organic being ; their ends, and the means to 
 their ends, are not taught by experience, but are pre- 
 existent in their nature; they witness to a pre-ordained 
 reciprocal adaptation between organic being and the 
 nature around it whence it is derived and to which it 
 returns. Man cannot help feeling dimly through these 
 instincts of self in their relations to the not-self that there 
 is something beyond him, which was before he is and 
 will continue after he no longer is, of which his being is 
 but a passing phase ; something, therefore, in him, as a 
 transitory show of nature inspired by these instincts, of 
 which no interrogation of self-consciousness will ever 
 suffice to give an adequate account; something "which 
 cometh from afar." Hence the strange glamour sur- 
 rounding the overmastering passion of love ; it is the 
 mysterious instinct of universal nature thrilling through 
 his nature, and is truly an enchantment ; the individual 
 is possessed by it, being transported out of the prosaic 
 region of facts into a sort of ecstasy. It is nature's way 
 of inveigling man into the propagation of his kind, 
 
394 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap; 
 
 however little wisdom he may see in continuing the tale 
 of human misery upon earth. Hence also the expansive 
 ardour which inspires youth with faith and enthusiasm 
 that are sadly sobered by age. I know not whether the 
 instinct of propagation ought not to be considered as in 
 some sort a secondary display of the self- conservative 
 instinct, for it is certain that people proceed to indulge 
 it as a pure self-gratification, not with any design of 
 begetting heirs of immortality. When an organic being 
 has reached its fulness of life, and assimilation exceeds 
 expenditure, it gives off in an act of sensual gratification 
 a part of itself endowed with the same self-conservative 
 instinct, and so strives by propagating itself through 
 time to cheat death. 
 
 The intrinsic sense of or longing for the sustenance of 
 life, which is translated into the belief of immortality, 
 seems to me to be an evolution of the instinct of propaga- 
 tion in consciousness, and to spring fundamentally from 
 the self-conservative impulse. Certainly the love of life 
 and the fear of death are manifestations of the self-con- 
 servative instinct in consciousness. Hope and fear may 
 be called expectant ideas, that js, ideas having reference to 
 the future, into which a large emotional element enters, 
 based, in the former, upon a desire for that which pro- 
 motes the well-being, or fundamentally the life, and 
 increases the power, of self, and, in the latter, upon a 
 desire to escape that which is hurtful to self, threatening 
 its well-being or life, lessening its power, and so taking 
 part with death. Now hope acts like joy on the organic 
 structures, producing the same animating effects in less 
 degree ; fear, on the other hand, produces in the organic 
 structures the same destructive changes, in a nascent 
 form, as would be produced by actual experience of the 
 danger feared ; threatening the organic life, the organs 
 of which minister to the self-preservation, and by their 
 sympathetic communion with the brain — their intimate 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 395 
 
 physiological consensus with it — occasion the instinct. 
 Joy and life go hand-in-hand on the upward path, as 
 pain and death go together on the downward path. 
 Therefore, if Heaven and Hell were inventions, they 
 would still have been good inventions, as taking advan- 
 tage of the fundamental instincts of being to attract it to 
 the narrow path of development, and to avert it from the 
 broad path of degeneration. Here, again, we are brought 
 back to the instinct of self-preservation which runs through 
 all the special and complex evolutions of our hopes and 
 fears. Note in this relation how the word apprehend, 
 which originally meant to lay hold of, and afterwards to 
 grasp mentally, has now come to mean an expectant 
 idea with fear — an apprehension. 
 
 Continuing to trace the evolution of the instincts in the 
 mental life, we might go on to point out how fear first in- 
 vented the gods, the unknown powers that inflicted suffer- 
 ings the causes of which were beyond human ken, whom it 
 was necessary to propitiate in a spirit of abject humility by 
 prayers and sacrifices. From the instinct of self-preserva- 
 tion, translated into consciousness, springs the instinctive 
 passion of self-defence by means of the natural weapons, 
 mental and bodily, and, as secondary conceptions and 
 desires, rage, malignity, and the desire of revenge by the 
 most skilful use of the means that can be brought into play 
 are connected with it. From the sexual instinct springs not 
 only the complex emotion of love, as already mentioned, 
 but jealousy, and we observe a further development of it 
 in the love of offspring which is so strongly displayed in 
 the blind brooding of animals. As in the progress of 
 organic evolution from animal to man there has been an 
 ascent from the sensuous to the intellectual, so in the 
 sphere of the affective life there has been a progress from 
 the propensities to the sentiments — from the individual 
 to the social unit. The instincts accordingly have their 
 related conceptions and feelings which, having been 
 
396 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 originally evolved from them, revolve, as it were, round 
 them, and are directed to the attainment of their aim ; 
 so that the bias of a man's nature is determined by his 
 instincts; and he has a tendency, however many and 
 moral his higher conceptions, to lean to their side. 
 
 The highest emotional feeling to which mankind has 
 yet attained is the moral feeling or sense, and science is 
 now going about to trace it as an acquisition by the 
 race. The old question of the origin of evil, on the 
 discussion of which metaphysicians spent so much fruit- 
 less labour, was not the right question after all ; the right 
 question for discussion is the origin of good. Not how 
 evil but how good was acquired is the problem to be 
 solved. The internal organic adaptations which have 
 taken place in correspondence with the external condi- 
 tions of social existence have been propagated through 
 generations, and that which was a gradual acquisition by 
 the ancestors has become more or less an innate endow- 
 ment of the offspring. In this way, which is, so far as 
 we know, the way everlasting of mental evolution, has 
 been formed the potentiality of a moral sense. It will 
 be understood of course that in the environing medium 
 to which internal "adaptation takes place human nature 
 as well as physical nature is included ; we have to 
 take account in fact of the social medium, for it is as 
 a unit in the social organism that- the individual has 
 attained by degrees through the course of ages to a moral 
 sense and to his highest emotions and intellectual 
 faculties. As man gets a knowledge of physical nature 
 in order to act upon or modify it to his profit, his prac- 
 tical wants originating science, his necessity being the 
 mother of his invention, so by study of his relations to 
 human nature and corresponding action thereto he has 
 attained to social intelligence and feelings, the highest of 
 which feeling is moral feeling. He rises gradually to 
 comprehend that he is a unit in a complex social 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 397 
 
 organism, in which if one member suffers all members 
 suffer with it, and in which the highest good of the whole 
 and of the parts is one. 
 
 The larger, more numerous and complex cerebral con- 
 volutions which distinguish the brain of a civilized person 
 from that of a savage correspond with the capacities of the 
 exalted ideas of justice, virtue, mercy, love which the savage 
 has not and cannot have ; these demand for their full func- 
 tion and reproduce in their function the higher and more 
 varied activity through which they were first developed 
 in the race, displaying the kind of function which has de- 
 termined, and is embodied in, the structure ; the vesicular 
 neurine has increased in quantity and quality, and the 
 function of the more highly endowed structure is to dis- 
 play that intelligence and moral feeling which it uncon- 
 sciously embodies. The order of events is presumably 
 in this wise : by virtue of its fundamental adaptive pro- 
 perty as organic matter, nerve-element responds to envi- 
 roning relations by definite action; this action, when 
 repeated, determines structure ; and thus by degrees 
 new structure, or — what it really is — a new organ, is 
 formed, which embodies in its substance and displays 
 in its function the countless generalizations, so to speak, 
 or ingredients of experience, which it has gained from 
 past and contributes to present stimulation. Function 
 makes capacity ; and what I wish to make clear is that 
 in the actual substance of the new structure which 
 acquired capacity implies, are concentrated and em- 
 bodied the multitudinous adapted responses to manifold 
 impressions, simultaneous and successive, through which 
 the growth and development of the structure have taken 
 place. It is, as it were, an abstract of past experiences 
 and adjustments, an embodied complexity of co-ordina- 
 tions. The only way by which the low savage could be 
 raised to the capacity of ideas and feelings belonging 
 to the highest reach of human evolution would be by 
 
398 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chai>. 
 
 cultivation continued through many generations ; it Would 
 be necessary that he should undergo a gradual process 
 of humanization before he could attain to the capacity 
 of civilization. Certainly it does not appear likely that he 
 will survive the process as it has been undertaken and 
 carried out by the united gospels of commerce and of 
 Christianity ; but there is no need to be sorry on that 
 account, for why should we labour to carry on the evolu- 
 tion of the race by slow and tedious exaltation, of the 
 lowest specimens when we have higher specimens at 
 ban I available for the purpose ? 
 
 Here may fitly be asked the pertinent question — 
 Whence is derived the beginning or the first shoot of a 
 moral sense? The answer which may be thought not 
 so fit, but which nevertheless I propose to make, is that 
 the root of the moral sense must be sought in the instinct 
 of propagation. By the gratification of this instinct, 
 notwithstanding that it is an act of pure self-indulgence, 
 the individual does not appropriate matter to himself and 
 increase, bait dissipates energy, giving off from himself 
 something which goes to propagate the species ; the aim 
 of the instinct being not to benefit the individual— for 
 though its indulgence gratifies him he is the less by his 
 gratification — but to inveigle him through self-gratification 
 to continue the kind; it is not appropriative but distri- 
 butive, not egoistic, so to speak, but altruistic. We have 
 already had occasion to take note of the transforming 
 effect which it produces upon the mental functions so 
 soon as it declares itself in them, and it is obvious that, in 
 animals in which the sexes are separate, its gratification 
 involves at the least a temporary association of two 
 individuals, and so initiates or marks an advance to- 
 wards the social state. It is easy to perceive again that 
 the affection which is entertained for the product of its 
 activity and the constant and special care needed by the 
 offspring bring into play the maternal or paternal instinct, 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 399 
 
 thus modifying the primal instinct of self-preservation and 
 carrying the individual at once out of himself into feeling 
 for another, even though it be only a little way ; he passes 
 at any rate out of the circle of individual selfishness into 
 the larger circle of family selfishness. Now family feeling, 
 as Comte pointed out, is the foundation of social feeling ; 
 to cease to be governed entirely by personal instincts, 
 and to begin to conform to an environment or external 
 order of which individuals constitute a part, is to begin 
 to be subject to social or rudely moral discipline, and to 
 acquire a social or rudely moral feeling. 
 
 As the necessities of life compelled families to dwell 
 together in some kind of unity the tribe was formed, and 
 the interest and sympathies of the individual became one 
 with those of his tribe ; he passed from the circle of family 
 selfishness into the larger circle of tribal selfishness ; his 
 nearest approach to a moral feeling was a tribal feeling. 
 It was a momentous epoch, as has been remarked, in the 
 development of the human race when it first became more 
 or less clearly conscious that its maintenance and welfare 
 depended upon association, for it could not but be that 
 a primitive social feeling must spring from the relations 
 of the individual to the social medium. The rudest associa- 
 tion of men for the purposes of attack or defence in war 
 must have led to the development of certain altruistic 
 virtues in those who formed the fighting body; they 
 could not otherwise have held together. The subse- 
 quent more complex associations of men would pre- 
 sumably after a time engender a higher public moral 
 feeling, offences against the community being visited 
 with severe punishment. 
 
 Among savages now, as was the case everywhere 
 among mankind in the pre-moral ages, the ideas of 
 immorality and criminality do not exist; if one is 
 injured by another he takes his revenge, whatever that 
 may be, and when he has done that he is satisfied. 
 
4 oo THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 It is an affair of private vengeance with which public 
 morality is not concerned. A life for a life taken, 
 or adequate compensation for it, and then, as Ajax said 
 {Iliad, ix. 632 — 636), " The murderer remains among his 
 own people, having paid a large compensation, and the 
 injured person, having been compensated, is appeased 
 and abandons his resentment." The Greek word used 
 for compensation is ttoivti, from which are derived the 
 Lain poena, the French peine, and the English penal; the 
 idea of punishment having plainly sprung from the idea 
 of compensation. For with the Greeks, as with other 
 nations, when they became more civilized the enforce- 
 ment of retribution for wrong done, whether as compen- 
 sation or punishment, was taken out of the hands of the 
 individual and became the affair of the community ; and 
 this was a great step upwards. When matters had 
 reached this stage, the idea of punishment would pre- 
 dominate over that of compensation, and a certain public 
 moral feeling in regard of offences would be engendered. 
 The Germans, according to Tacitus, at the time when 
 they came into conflict with the Romans, were much like 
 the Greeks of Homer's time in their views of compensa- 
 tion for wrong done. Homicide was expiated by a gift 
 of cattle, part of which was paid to the king or state, 
 part to the injured person or his relatives ; and when 
 the transaction was completed, every one was satisfied 
 and no stigma attached to the murderer. Among the 
 existing Caffres development has gone so far that the 
 atonement-money is not paid to the injured party but to 
 the chief. 
 
 Among savages, however, an offence against the tribe 
 was not so easily expiated, death being often, the punish- 
 ment. The idea of criminality could hardly fail to be- 
 come attached to offences which were thus severely 
 punished. Certain tribal virtues must obviously have 
 been essential in order that the tribe might hold 
 
vi.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 401 
 
 together, and maintain itself against other tribes with 
 which it was in frequent conflict ; the tribe which was 
 most compact, which was held together by the strongest 
 bond of coherence, being most likely to win in the 
 struggle for existence. Now, that which was thus the 
 strongest tie to bind individuals into an organized body, 
 and to preserve their tribal existence, would be most 
 highly esteemed or worshipped by the tribe, would in 
 fact become its religion; a word, the derivation of which 
 betrays its origin, if the grammarians are right in obtain- 
 ing it from the Latin religarc to bind fast. A sound mo- 
 rality being like the connective tissue of an organism, 
 could not fail, even though of an elementary .kind, to have 
 been found so useful to a tribe that it would, like great 
 foresight or prudent self-denial, have made it superior to 
 other tribes that were without it ; and so the primitive 
 morality would become a religion, an offence against 
 which would occasion horror and entail punishment. 
 The history of the Jews, as recorded in the Bible, yields 
 a striking illustration of the advantage of the strong bond 
 of cohesion which they had in the possession of a spe- 
 cial God, the God of Israel, more powerful than the 
 gods of the heathen, and of laws of morality proclaimed 
 by him through his favoured servant Moses, who had, 
 moreover, the previous advantage of being learned in all 
 the wisdom of the Egyptians. 
 
 But the moral feeling of the Jews was entirely na- 
 tional; the commandments thereof had reference to their 
 relations with one another as a chosen people, not to 
 their relations with other nations. It was lawful and 
 right, for it was the direct command of Jehovah, to put 
 to the sword the Canaanites whom they invaded — them 
 and their wives and their children— and to make their 
 children pass under the harrow. " Thou shalt do no 
 murder " did not mean thou shalt not murder a Ca- 
 naariite ; " Thou shalt not steal " did not mean thou 
 
4 02 THE PHYSIOLOGY- OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 slialt not spoil the Egyptian and the Philistine ; " Thou 
 shalt not bear false witness" did not mean thou shalt 
 not betray an enemy to his destruction by falsehood and 
 guile.* So it was among other savage tribes or nations 
 who had not reached so high a state of development as 
 the Jews, by aid of the wisdom of Moses, had done : the 
 individual conformed to the moral feeling of his tribe, 
 but never dreamt that it had — what it could not well 
 have had in those days — any application to the mem- 
 bers of other tribes ; it was a religion with him to do 
 unto them what it was his religion not to do unto his 
 own people.t No doubt we have reached a much 
 higher pitch of moral feeling now, Christianity having 
 theoretically broken down the barriers of isolation and 
 proclaimed the universal brotherhood of man ; but it is 
 sad and humiliating to feel how small is the international 
 
 * The story of Jael and. Sisera is instructive in this respect ; the 
 light in which she was regarded for her abuse of the sacred rite of 
 eastern hospitality showing the limited range of moral feeling at that 
 time : — " Blessed above women shall Jael the wife Of Heber the 
 Kenite be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent. He asked 
 water, and she gave him milk ; she brought forth butter in a lordly 
 dish. She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the 
 workmen's hammer ; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she 
 smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his 
 temples. At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down ; at her feet 
 lie bowed, he fell ; where he bowed, there he fell down dead." 
 (Judges v. 24—27)., 
 
 1* The wife of an Australian savage having died of some disease, 
 he informed Dr. Lander that he would go and kill a woman of a 
 distant tribe, so that his wife's spirit might have rest. Forbidden 
 imperatively to do so, and threatened with imprisonment if he did, 
 he became wretched and wasted away ; but he disappeared event- 
 ually, and was absent for some time. When he reappeared he was 
 in good condition, for he had succeeded in killing a woman ; his 
 sorrow because of a sacred duty omitted had disappeared, his tribal 
 moral feeling was satisfied, and his bodily nutrition sympathised 
 with the restored animation of his mind. — American Journal of 
 Insanity, July 1871. 
 
VI.] THE EMOTIONS OK AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 403 
 
 application which good principles yet have. It is an 
 odd satire on the profession of Christian doctrines 
 which is afforded by the spectacle of two great armies 
 worshipping the same God and professing the same 
 religion of peace and goodwill among men, yet each on 
 the eve of battle putting up earnest prayers to him to 
 render its slaughter efficacious, and to give it the 
 victory over those who are, with equal earnestness, 
 invoking his special aid and protection. However, 
 these are amusements which men will relinquish as 
 they become wiser and better; and there can be no 
 doubt that in the time to come, though the day may be 
 yet afar off, there will be a progress from national to 
 international moral feeling, as there has in times past 
 been a progress from the family to the tribe, from the 
 tribe to the nation ; that men, perceiving clearly their 
 interests to be one, shall learn to put the interests of 
 humanity above those of the nation, and shall not learn 
 war atiy more ; that they will be bound compactly to- 
 gether by a strong feeling of brotherhood, and that this 
 bond of religion will inspire their efforts to promote the 
 welfare of humanity, and to further its evolution through 
 the ages that must pass before the earth becomes either 
 too hot by approaching the sun, or too cold by the ex- 
 tinction of the sun's fire, to sustain animal life upon its 
 surface.* 
 
 * The narrow and vulgar patriotism which takes the form of 
 asserting and upholding the interests of a nation, whether they be 
 the interests of justice and humanity or not, is a different thing 
 from, and of a lower order of virtue than (if it be a virtue) the true 
 patriotism which animates the individual who sacrifices his own in- 
 terests and, if need be, his life for his country. It is plain that the 
 righteous nation should subordinate its interests to those of humanity, 
 as the patriotic individual subordinates his interests to those of his 
 community or nation. The authorized British prayer for the head of 
 the state — "grant her in health and wealth long to live; strengthen her 
 that she may vanquish and overcome all her enemies," be her cause 
 
40 4 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 In the growth, in range and power, of the moral ele- 
 ment in human nature which marks its slowly proceed- 
 ing evolution, we see clearly exhibited a vast modification 
 of the operation of the law of natural selection by means 
 of the moral law. Whereas it is conformable to natural 
 selection that the strongest should make the best use of 
 its strength for its own advantage, and that the weak, 
 falling by the wayside in the struggle for existence, 
 should be trampled , upon, the moral law, as it has 
 received its latest and highest exposition in Christian 
 doctrine, ordains that those who are strong shall raise up 
 them that fall; that those who are in joy shall comfort those 
 that mourn ; that those who are prosperous shall help 
 those that are in affliction and distress ; that man on all 
 occasions shall do unto another as he would have another 
 do unto him, not using his advantages with eager selfish- 
 ness for his own profit, but having in all he does a larger 
 reference to the good of his kind. It is the survival not 
 of the fittest individual organism, but of the fittest social 
 organism, or rather the fittest organism of humanity, 
 which is the effect of its operation — the compact 
 cementing of human interests into solidarity by the prac- 
 tical recognition of universal brotherhood, which, being 
 its probable effect through the ages to come, we may 
 venture to foresee, and to describe accordingly, as its 
 arm now. Mr. Darwin has pointed out very clearly how 
 the operation of the law of natural selection is largely 
 modified in the lower animals by the operation of the law 
 of sexual selection ; and it is interesting to observe how 
 we are brought back to sexual association in man when 
 we go backwards over the course of the gradual de- 
 velopment of moral feeling, and trace it to its early 
 beginnings in the family ; and how, groping our way 
 
 right or wrong — characteristic as it is of the spirit of the country, 
 has a strong strain of Philistinism in it, which suits not well with 
 the expansion of moral feeling. 
 
vr.] THE EMOTIONS OS AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 405 
 
 still further back, we can go down at last to the instinct 
 of propagation in which, believing it to contain the pro- 
 phecy of a social organism, I have proposed to find the 
 root of the- moral sense. 
 
 Having clearly realised that the individual rightly de- 
 veloping in his generation is, by virtue of the laws of 
 hereditary action, ordaining or determining what shall 
 be pre-ordained or pre-determined in the original nature 
 of the individual of a future age, it behoves us not to 
 lose sight of the physical aspect of this development. 
 The moral feeling betokens an improved quality or 
 higher kind of nerve structure, or an additional develop- 
 ment of structure, which ensues in the course of a right 
 development, and which may easily again be disturbed 
 by a slight physical disturbance of the nervous element. 
 In the exaltation of mankind through generations — in 
 the progress of humanization, so to speak — this height 
 of excellence is reached : in the deterioration or de- 
 generation of mankind, as exhibited in the downward 
 course of insanity proceeding through generations, one 
 of the earliest evil symptoms is, as we shall hereafter 
 see, the loss of this virtue — the destruction of the moral 
 or altruistic feeling. Its formation is a matter of organic 
 evolution ; its destruction a matter of organic dissolu- 
 tion. Insane persons are entirely wrapped up in self, 
 though the self-feeling may take many guises. 
 
 The intimate and essential relation of emotions to 
 ideas, which they equal in number and variety, is suffi- 
 cient to prove that the law of progress from the general 
 and simple to the special and complex prevails in their 
 development. If such relation were not a necessary one, 
 it would still be possible to display that manner of evo- 
 lution from a consideration of the emotions themselves. 
 And the recognition of this increasing specialization and 
 complexity in the function compels us to assume a cor- 
 responding development in the delicate organization of 
 
4c6 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 the nervous structure, although, by reason of the imper- 
 fection of our means of investigation, we are not able to 
 trace a process of so much delicacy in those inmost re- 
 cesses to which our senses have not yet access. 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 1 (A 349)- — "Notre ame fait certaines actions et souffre certaines 
 passions ; savoir : en tant qu'elle a des idees adequates, elle fait 
 certaines actions ; et en tant qu'elle a des idees inadequates, elle 
 souffre certaines passions." — Spinoza, Des Passions, Prop. i. 
 
 * (P- 3S 2 )- — " Among so many dangers, therefore, as the natural 
 lust of men do daily threaten each other withal, to have a care of 
 one's self is so far from being a matter scornfully to be looked upon, 
 that one has neither the power nor wish to have done otherwise. 
 For every man is desirous of what is good for him, and shuns what 
 is evil, but chiefly the chiefest of natural evils, which is death ; and 
 this he doth by a certain impulsion of nature, no less than that 
 whereby a stone moves downwards." — Hobbes, vol. ii. p. 8. 
 
 3 (p. 353). — "Le desir, c'est l'appetit, avec conscience de lui- 
 meme. II requite de tout cela, que ce qui fonde l'effort, le vouloir, 
 l'appetit, le desir, ce n'est pas qu'on ait juge qu'une chose est bonne : 
 mais, au contraire, on juge qu'une chose est bonne par cela meme 
 qu'on y tend par l'effort, le vouloir, l'appetit, le desir."— Spinoza, 
 Des Passions, Schol. to Prop. ix. 
 
 4 (/• 3S8). — " But we must "frankly admit, on consideration, that 
 the political rule of intelligence is hostile to human progression. 
 Mind must tend more and more to the supreme- direction of affairs ; 
 but it can never attain it, owing to the imperfection of our organism, 
 in which the intellectual life is the feeblest part ; and thus it appears 
 that the real office of mind is deliberative ; that is, to moderate the 
 material preponderance, and not to impart its habitual impulsion. " 
 — Comte, Positive Philosophy, vol. ii. p. 240. (Martineau's 
 Abridgment.) See also Positive Polity, passim. It was a funda- 
 mental maxim of his philosophy, "We act from affection: we 
 think in order to act." Notwithstanding that the intellectual powers 
 increase in importance as we rise in the scale of animality up to man, 
 " these functions never become, even in our own race, the principal 
 and permanent motors of existence. The real unity of life depends 
 invariably upon affection of one kind or another." 
 
VI.] THE EMOTIONS OR AFFECTIONS OF MIND. 407 
 
 s (P- 361). — " For it is not his disputations about pleasure and 
 pain that can satisfy this inquiry ; no more than he who should 
 generally handle the nature of light can be said to handle the 
 nature of particular colours ; for pleasure and pain are to the par- 
 ticular affections as light is to particular colours." — Bacon, De 
 slugment. Scient. 
 
 " Autant il y a d'espece d'objets qui nous affectent, autant il faut 
 reconnailre d'especes de joie, de tristesse, et de desir ; et en general 
 de toutes les passions qui sont composees de celles-la, comme la 
 fluctuation, par exemple, ou qui en derivent, comme l'amour, la 
 haine, l'esperance, la crainte," &c. — Spinoza, Des Possums. 
 
 6 (P- 364)- — " Mais il faut en outre remarquer ici qu'il n'est nulle- 
 ment surprenant que la tristesse accompagne tous les actes qu'on a 
 continue* d'appeler mauvais, et la joie tous ceux qu'on nomine bons 
 On concoit-en effet par ce qui precede que tout cela depend surtout 
 de l'education. Les parents, en blamant certaines actions, et repri- 
 maudant souvent leurs enfants pour les avoir commises, et au con- 
 tiaire en louant et en conseillant d'autres actions, ont si bien fait que 
 l.i tristesse accompagne toujours celles-la et la joie toujours cclles-ci. 
 L'expenence confirme cette explication. La coutume et la religion 
 ne sont pas les menies pour tous les hommes : ce qui est sacre pour 
 les uns est profane pour les autres, et les choses honnetes chez un 
 peuple sont honter.ses chez un autre peuple. Chacun se repent done 
 ou se glorifie d'une action suivant l'education qu'il a re9iie." — 
 Spinoza, Des Passions; p. 159. 
 
 7 (P- 365).— Many illustrations might be adduced from Shak- 
 speare's plays of the wonderful harmony between the highest human 
 feelings and the aspects of nature ; some of these I have pointed ou' 
 in an essay on Hamlet in the Westminster Revieiv of January, 1865. 
 The best known passage is that in the Merchant of Venice: — 
 
 " Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven 
 Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. 
 There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubinr 
 Such harmony is in immortal souls ; 
 But whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
 Doth grossly close it in we cannot hear it." 
 
 Again, Milton in his Arcades : 
 
 ' ' But else in deep of night, when drowsiness 
 Hath locked up mortal sense, then listen I 
 To the celestial Sirens' harmony, 
 
408 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. vi. 
 
 That sit upon the nine enfolded spheres, 
 And sing to those that hold the vital shears, 
 And turn the adamantine spindle round, 
 On which the fate of gods and men is wound. 
 Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie, 
 To lull the daughters of necessity, 
 And keep unsteady Nature to her law, 
 And the low world in measured motion draw 
 After the heavenly tune, which none can hear 
 Of human mould with gross unpurged ear." 
 
 Sir T. Browne, in his Religio Medici, says : " It is my temper, 
 and I like it the better, to affect all harmony : and sure there is 
 music even in the beauty and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far 
 sweeter than the sound of an instrument : for there is music wherever 
 there is harmony, order, or proportion ; and thus far we may main- 
 tain the music of the spheres ; for these well-ordered motions, and 
 regular paces, though they give no sound to the ear, yet to the 
 
 understanding they strike a note most full of harmony 
 
 It is a hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world, 
 and creatures of God ; such a melody to the ear, as the whole world, 
 well undeistood, would.afford the understanding." Passages of like 
 import might be quoted from Goethe, Jean Paul, Humboldtj Emer- 
 son, Carlyle. and many other writers. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 VOLITION. 
 
 " Lei homines se trompent en ce point qu'ils pensent etre libres. 
 Or, en quoi consiste une telle opinion ? En cela seulement, qu'ils 
 ont conscience de leurs actions et ignorent les causes qui les de"ter- 
 minent. L'idee que les hummes se font de leur liberte' vient done 
 de ce qu'ils ne connaissent point la cause de leurs actions, car dire 
 qu'elles dependent de la volonte^ ce sont la des mots auxquels on 
 n'attache aucune idee. Quelle est en effet la nature de la volonte, 
 et comment meut-elle le corps, e'est ce que tout le monde ignore, et 
 ceux qui elevent d'autres pretentions et parlent des sieges de l'ame 
 et de ses demeures pr&ent a rire ou font pitieV' — Spinoza, Saisset's 
 Translation. 
 
 "En tout, ce que je puis dire a ceux qui croient qu'ils peuvent 
 parler, se taire, en un mot, agir en vertu d'une libre decision de 
 l'ame, e'est qu'ils revent lesyeux ouverts." — Ibid. 
 
 It is strange to see how some, who confidently base 
 their argument for the existence of a God on the ground 
 that everything in nature must have a cause, are content, 
 in their zeal for free-will, to speak of the will as if it were 
 self-determined and had no cause. As thus vulgarly 
 used, the term Will has no definite meaning, and cer- 
 tainly is not applicable to any concrete reality in nature, 
 where, in the matter of will, as in every other matter, we 
 perceive effect witnessing to cause, and varying accord- 
 ing as the cause varies. Nor is this the only incon- 
 sistency which those who vindicate a metaphysical will 
 are apt to perpetrate. While holding that there is an im- 
 passable gulf between the conscious and the unconscious, 
 
4io THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 and pronouncing the connection between matter and 
 mind to be unthinkable, they declare in the same breath 
 that they have incontestable proof of the existence 
 of will in the distinct consciousness which. they have of 
 the power of producing motion of their limbs by an act of 
 volition. In other words, every moment of their lives 
 almost they pass a gulf which they declare to be im- 
 passable, think a connection which they declare to be 
 unthinkable. 
 
 Let it not be thought that I shrink from encountering 
 a difficulty fairly if I pass rapidly over the long-standing 
 dispute concerning free-will and necessity. It would be 
 vain to pretend to throw any new light upon a subject 
 which has been discussed over and over again, although 
 it must be admitted that the result, owing perhaps to 
 ambiguity in the terms used, has commonly been to 
 leave matters much as they were, and the opponents on 
 each side convinced that they have gained the day. 
 Certainly to one who looks at the matter with the naked 
 eye of common sense it would appear that the term free, 
 if properly used, should be used of the man, not of his 
 will ; if he be free to do as he pleases, in other words, 
 as he wills, he is free , if he is hindered from doing so 
 by internal or external causes, or is obliged to do some- 
 thing else, he is not free ; a will free to will itself strikes 
 one as simply nonsense. The question, however, is one 
 which will not be settled by controversy, but I cannot 
 doubt that it will be settled gradually, without need of 
 controversy, by the progress of human knowledge ; the 
 time being probably not far distant now when men will 
 wonder that so much subtile ingenuity and zealous labour 
 should have been bestowed upon it. They will awake 
 some day to be conscious that there is no question for 
 discussion, that mankind has solved it by marching, and 
 that it only remains to display explicitly in knowledge 
 what is implicit in action. 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 411 
 
 The advocates of the doctrine of the so-called freedom 
 of human will — for animals are excluded from the benefit 
 of it — declare that every man's consciousness witnesses 
 emphatically that he can choose arbitrarily between two 
 motives, and that he is often free to do or to abstain 
 from doing what he does ; wherefore they maintain that 
 the will is free. Their opponents retort, in an equally 
 precise and dogmatic way, that there is a uniform con- 
 junction between motive and act, that the will follows 
 the strongest motive, and that human actions, like all 
 other natural phenomena, conform to constant laws ; 
 wherefore they maintain that the word free-will is an 
 unmeaning absurdity, and that the notion of a free will 
 in the microcosm of man is the equivalent of the explod- 
 ed notion of chance in the macrocosm of the universe. 
 Such are the conflicting theories of the opposing sides. 
 Meanwhile all human institutions, as well as human con- 
 duct, are practically founded on a recognition, implicit 
 or explicit, of the reign of law in the province of mind : 
 education, the penal code, social regulations, legislative 
 enactments rest upon this basis, and emancipation from 
 their sanctions is treated as crime or insanity. The plain 
 design of these enactments is to constrain people to act 
 in a certain way, by supplying the motives which shall 
 determine the will ; and the result of experience assur- 
 edly is to prove that they are efficacious, for the world 
 goes on making systematic use of them, which it would 
 not do if they were not proved efficacious by trial, that 
 is to say, if the constancy of their action were liable to 
 be interrupted at any moment by a capricious, arbitrary, 
 free will, such as metaphysicians have imagined and theo- 
 logians have extolled. Brethren could not dwell together 
 in unity, human society would in fact be impossible, 
 if men were not able to reckon upon one another's 
 thoughts, feelings, and actions under certain conditions ; 
 but they do rely on the general uniformity of human 
 
412 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap, 
 
 character and conduct as they rely on the uniformity of 
 physical nature, because there is a uniformity in the 
 operations of moral causes or motives as there is in the 
 operations of physical causes.* 
 
 A self-determining will is an unmeaning contradiction 
 in terms and an inconceivability in fact ; were there such 
 a power, there would be no reason to be surprised at any 
 act which a man might do, or to reprobate it, however 
 criminal; for to suppose a man to act by reason of it, with- 
 out its being influenced by reason, would be to suppose 
 him worse than a madman. Insane persons do not conspire 
 in asylums, because they cannot reckon upon one another, 
 and do surprise and alarm sane persons by their conduct,' 
 because it so often presents a deviation from the uni- 
 formity of action of moral causes. Were the will free, 
 as supposed, madmen would exhibit the most free 
 wills, inasmuch as their conduct would be the least to be 
 predicted. Animals which hunt in packs, or live in 
 herds, so hunt or live because they depend upon con- 
 stancy of action in each member, at any rate under the 
 
 * The general uniformity of human beliefs, and the more special 
 uniformities of beliefs among different parties, sects, nations, are 
 instances of corresponding internal adaptations to corresponding 
 external impressions. What else at bottom is a belief than the self- 
 conscious aspect of an excito-motor process in the cerebral convolu- 
 tions ? It is an induction from experiences — a conviction that when 
 certain impressions are made upon the senses, certain other definite 
 impressions will be received from certain adapted motor reactions. 
 There is always some feeling in the process, but the belief gains in 
 intensity according to the strength of the feeling or affective element 
 which enters into the process. Of course, it is not possible on all 
 occasions to make the adapted motor reactions, but one learns from 
 the experiences of others as well from one's own, and generalises from 
 particular experiences as to the permanent possibilities of similar de- 
 finite impressions, could the experience ever be made. A belief then 
 is my conviction that I, if acted upon by certain impressions, can or 
 might react definitely upon that which has produced them, and gain 
 thereby other definite impressions. 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 413 
 
 limited conditions of their union. The antipathy and 
 opposition which mankind show to a new idea when it is 
 first promulgated is probably due in great measure to 
 the shock which it occasions to the uniformity of their 
 ideas and feelings ; there is an instinctive repugnance to, 
 or apprehension of, a power which appears to be arbi- 
 trary, irresponsible and, so far as antecedents are con- 
 cerned, free. This hostility or want of receptivity is 
 most marked among savages, whose mental structures 
 are Jess complex, and more simple and. uniform in their 
 operations ; they can conceive no further justification of 
 a custom, however foolish, to be needed than that it was 
 the custom of their fathers, and no other justification of 
 their antagonism to something new, however excellent, 
 than that it was not the custom of their fathers. But 
 one need not go to savages in order to discover that 
 want of plasticity to accommodate the mind to new im- 
 pressions by reason of which the reformer is in the first 
 instance almost always reviled and rejected as an enemy 
 of the race. He whose hand or thought is against every 
 one will have every one's hand or thought against him ; • 
 if he can convince mankind that his new idea is not 
 capricious, undetermined, and hostile to their mental 
 organisation but that it really proceeds from it and re- 
 presents a development of it, they will accept it in the 
 end, though they may have stoned, crucified, poisoned, 
 or otherwise made a martyr of its author in the first out- 
 burst of their antipathetic fury. The whole nature of a 
 belief may be transformed, without those who hold it 
 ever receiving any shock from the change, if the new be 
 allowed to gently insinuate itself into the old and to. be 
 called by the old name : they then let go the old and 
 embrace the new without realising the transformation 
 which has taken place. 
 
 It would appear, then, that in the practical arrange- 
 ments of life mankind could not evince more distinctly 
 19 
 
414 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 than they do their tacit conviction of the uniformity of 
 events, both in the psychical and the physical worlds ; 
 in other words, their tacit recognition of the fact that 
 every event, mental or physical, is a necessary effect o 
 certain antecedent conditions, invariably produced when 
 they are present, and never produced when they are 
 absent. No man thinks it absurd to be asked why he 
 thought, or spoke, or acted in a particular way, or would 
 be flattered by the supposition that he had no motive or 
 reason for what he said or did. Men may amuse them- 
 selves with theoretical discussions about free-will, but 
 the provisions which they make practically for their wel- 
 fare are not disturbed by any doubt of the uniform 
 sequence of events in psychical nature. When they 
 shall have succeeded in displaying explicitly in reasoned 
 exposition what is implicit in their social evolution, there 
 will be an end of the controversy respecting free-will. 
 
 How comes it to pass, then, that, while so hostile practi- 
 cally to free-will, feeling that it would entail the-dissolution 
 of society, they nevertheless hold to it and extol it as the 
 foundation of morality ? When a person who perpetrates 
 a crime, not being insane, is punished, he is punished be- 
 cause he is deemed to have had the freedom not to have 
 done it ; at the same time a main object of the punish- 
 ment is declared to be to supply an adequate motive to 
 prevent him and others from perpetrating a similar crime 
 — to infuse such motives into his character as shall make 
 its expression in will more laudable. To reconcile the 
 theory of freedom openly proclaimed with the theory of 
 necessity tacitly acknowledged, the man is considered 
 to have acted with free-will in the past, whereby is a 
 justification of the* punishment as an atonement or an 
 act of social vengeance ; but it is thought right that his 
 will should be constrained or determined by a suffi- 
 ciently powerful motive for the future, whereby the 
 infliction of punishment is made to rest on a rational 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 4 J5 
 
 basis. For it is plainly a rational thing on the part of 
 society to determine the individual by his own sufferings, 
 or by the example of the sufferings of others, to do that 
 which shall conduce to the social welfare, and to abstain 
 from doing that which is detrimental to it — to make him 
 a social being who shall discharge his proper functions 
 in the social organism, and to prevent him from becom- 
 ing an antisocial being who must be isolated in prison 
 or asylum, and made functionless in it ; and what is this 
 but the practical repudiation of the doctrine of free- 
 will ? On the other hand, the idea of punishment as a 
 vengeance or an atonement for crime, which still lingers 
 in the criminal law, is irrational, and based upon the 
 metaphysical doctrine of free-will ; it is in truth a sur- 
 vival of the superstitious ideas which find their strongest 
 expression in the doctrine of eternal punishment. Neither 
 reformation of the individual nor any benefit of ex- 
 ample to others can be thought of in regard to the 
 end of the world and the day of judgment : there can 
 be no reformation, for the sentence is eternal ; there can 
 be no benefit of example, for the saints in heaven need 
 it not, having secured eternal bliss, and the damned 
 cannot profit by it, as their doom is irreversible ; for it 
 may be noted as a defect in the economy of hell that 
 there is no graduation of its fires according to the 
 measure of culpability or to the degree of remorse. 
 The entire basis of the doctrine of eternal punishment 
 is fiendish vengeance.* 
 
 * We lift up our hands and eyes in horror when we read of the 
 tortures and cruel deaths habitually inflicted by the barbarous tribes 
 of Africa under the influence of their savage superstitions. Let us 
 emancipate ourselves from the custom of our own ideas, and en- 
 deavour to see ourselves as we see others, and as others will some 
 day see us. Has there been in all history anything so gratuitously 
 horrible and barbarously superstitious, anything evincing such a 
 superfluous ingenuity of cruel imagination, as the doctrine of the con- 
 demnation of all but a select few of the human race to the most 
 
416 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 It is not difficult to understand why men should have 
 conceived the doctrine of free-will, and why they should 
 have advocated it as the foundation of morality. They 
 were wise in their generations. Self-consciousness does 
 undoubtedly reveal in relation to many acts a balance of 
 motives so nearly equal that it is impossible to predict on 
 what side the determination shall fall. The question 
 being whether we shall do a particular act or not, and 
 the act being an indifferent one, there is no preponderant 
 motive for doing it or from abstaining from doing it; 
 accordingly the result, whatever it be, looks like an arbi- 
 trary determination of the will, which of its own motion 
 has given the preponderance to one motive, more 
 especially when the result has proceeded from a caprice 
 of showing freedom. (') But is it really so ?* Or does 
 
 agonizing tortures through all eternity ? Is there anything so ridi 
 culously inconsistent as that amiable persons who go on believing 
 and promulgating that doctrine, and finding much spiritual comfort 
 in it, should grieve over stories of African cruelty and superstition ? 
 Perhaps the time will come, though it be yet afar off, when Milton's 
 Paradise Lost, with its story of the fall and doom of man, will be as 
 surprising evidence of the state of intellectual development of man- 
 kind of this age as the split bones of human thighs, discovering the 
 marrow-eating propensities of our savage ancestors, are to us of the 
 state of their development. 
 
 * The advocates of free-will do not mean that between motives 
 and volition there is no relation whatever ; what they seem to assert 
 is that the conjunction of motive and volition is not inseparable like 
 that of cause and effect in physics ; that there is an arbitrary or self- 
 determining power which enables men to choose any one of two or 
 more motives present to the mind, and to make that the operative 
 motive. But this theory only complicates the question without 
 making the least step towards solving it ; for it is obvious that so 
 far as the power is assumed to be exempt from all influence, to act 
 from a higher region upon the motives, to be absolutely free, there 
 is an assumption of the entire question ; there is an assumption of a 
 miraculous, supernatural power, subject to no laws, deriving its 
 energy from we know not where, and not therefore in any sense 
 measurable, which may do just as it pleases with motives. It is 
 a small matter, therefore, on this theory, whether motives are 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 417 
 
 self-consciousness deceive us in the matter, revealing to 
 us the determination come to and the foregoing inde- 
 cision, but not making known to us all the conditions, em- 
 bodied in our mental organization, on which the issue 
 has actually turned. Not only what we have felt and 
 thought and done in our lifetimes, but that which our 
 forefathers have felt and thought and done in their life- 
 times, entering into the constitution of the ego, will 
 operate in the determination, which we come to either to 
 do or not to do the most trivial and apparently indif- 
 ferent act. Now it is plain that self-consciousness tells 
 us nothing of all this ; as a temporary condition of the 
 ego, it reveals the particular mental state of the moment, 
 but tells us nothing of the manifold conditions or latent 
 motives, tacitly acting, on which the ego or seeming free- 
 will of the moment depends. How, then, can conscious- 
 ness undertake to deny the existence of what it can take 
 no cognizance of? It is not a witness at all in such a 
 case, any more than a man who observes what takes place 
 in the light is a witness to what is taking place in the 
 dark. And in truth when we think we are acting with 
 most freedom, because acting after full deliberation with 
 confident decision, unimpeded by any conflict of motives, 
 we are most determined by conditions of our nature that 
 are beneath consciousness and beyond control. On the 
 other hand, the firmest resolution or purpose sometimes 
 vanishes issueless when it comes to the brink of the act, 
 while the true will, which determines perhaps a different 
 act, springs up suddenly out of the depths of the being, the 
 unconscious surprising and overcoming the conscious 
 
 admitted or not ; for it would be just as easy to assume — and as im- 
 possible to conceive— an arbitrary self-determining power which could 
 do without motives as to assume one which works by picking and 
 choosing among motives, and, like a capricious despot, pleases 
 itself by making the least greatest and the greatest least according 
 to the whim of the moment. 
 
418 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 nature ; so that until action has taken place we cannot be 
 certain what was the real will.* 
 
 " By their fruits ye shall know them " is as true of 
 self-knowledge as of the knowledge of others ; but 
 as we cannot view our own deeds with impartial eye, 
 it often happens that other people know us better than 
 we know ourselves, and that we sincerely condemn 
 in another person's character what we are complacently 
 satisfied with in our own. Could we penetrate the 
 closest recesses of a character, and make ourselves in- 
 timately acquainted with all its inherited and acquired 
 impulses, knowing them as we know the properties of a 
 chemical compound and of its component elements, we 
 could foretell with certainty how the individual would act 
 in any given circumstances ; but although we cannot thus 
 reason forwards from unknown data, we can reason back- 
 wards from known data ; knowing what his acts and cir- 
 cumstances have been we may know his character, for 
 they declare what he has willed or failed to will, and 
 what he has willed or failed to will, as read in his history, 
 declares his character. To suppose that the acts of a 
 man's life, or any of them, are determined by a power 
 which, in so far as it gives the preponderance to one of 
 two motives, is assumed to be entirely arbitrary, abso- 
 lutely exempt from all influence, supernaturally infused, 
 free, is as wild a dream as ever entered into the imagi- 
 nations of metaphysicians to conceive. Were it true, all 
 attempts to acquire a knowledge of human nature would 
 be illusory and futile, and experience of men would go 
 for nothing in the practical affairs of life. 
 
 The aim of education in relation to the sphere oi 
 
 * Below the surface-stream, shallow and light, 
 Of what we say we feel — below the stream, 
 As light, of what we think we feel — there flows 
 With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep, 
 The central stream of what we feel indeed. 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 419 
 
 moral action is to produce a nature in which moral action 
 shall be not a matter of uncertainty and deliberation, but 
 a habit ; in other words, a nature in which spontaneity 
 shall disappear in automatism. Strange contradiction ! 
 for the man in whom moral action had thus become 
 habitual or automatic would be considered to have a 
 stronger and more free will than one in whom it was an 
 inconstant result of deliberation. This brings me to con- 
 sider why the doctrine of free will has been advocated as 
 the basis of morality. Moral action is certainly a neces- 
 sary condition of the evolution of the social organism, 
 that is, of the progress of the human race : the inductions 
 of experience have not failed to teach men that. It is 
 certain, too, that the desires of most men in times past 
 were, and perhaps still are, selfish, and that the tendency 
 of such desires is to become anti-social. The aim of 
 education, social sanctions, legal enactments is, therefore, 
 to check the selfish and anti-social inclinations by supply- 
 ing a powerful body of suitable motives, and to implant 
 and foster the moral or altruistic feelings which shall pro- 
 mote the evolution of the social organism. In this way 
 the social community of one age strives to form the social 
 units of the following age ; to establish in regard of 
 social relations a harmony in one generation which shall 
 be a pre-established harmony of nature in the generations 
 that follow. Such is the process expressed in terms of 
 physiology, although it would be expressed otherwise in 
 terms of religion. Now, how can men on each occasion 
 be most powerfully instigated to seek good and ensue 
 it, when the balance of personal desires and propensities 
 is commonly on the opposite side ? Clearly by inculcating 
 in the most impressive manner possible the doctrine of 
 freewill and responsibility, at the same time that are 
 presented to them the strongest motives for moral action 
 which can be fabricated — namely, the most vivid pictures 
 of the unspeakable joys of heaven as the reward of well- 
 
420 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 doing, and of the endless torments of hell as the punish- 
 men of ill-doing. In this way we constrain them at 
 the critical moment by a powerful motive to act rightly, 
 and aim, by enforcing the repetition of right acts, to 
 foster a habit of acting rightly, and to work by degrees 
 a better nature in them ; for each moral act, by the law 
 of nervous action which has been already illustrated 
 largely, renders the next more easy, and so the nature is 
 gradually modified. The process is really one of moral 
 manufacture. When a habit of nature has thus been 
 formed, the desire of the. organism is to display that 
 function which is embodied in its nature, and the pleasure 
 of gratifying the desire by doing right is itself a sufficient 
 motive.* Then the individual is said to have acquired 
 the greatest strength and to manifest the most perfect 
 freedom of will, because he is able to do right easily in 
 the midst of ever so many temptations to do wrong ; and 
 thus the highest freedom of will is cleverly identified with 
 the highest morality. Liberty is the voice of conscience ; 
 conscience is the voice of God, say the theologians. + 
 
 * " In the great majority of things, habit is a greater plague than 
 ever afflicted Egypt : in religious character, it is eminently a felicity. 
 The devout man exults to feel that in aid of the simple force of the 
 divine principle within him, there has .grown by time an accessional 
 power, which has almost taken the place of his will, and holds a firm 
 though quiet domination through the general action of his mind. He 
 feels this confirmed habit as the grasp of the hand of God, which 
 will never let him go." — Essays. By John Foster. 
 
 t The Divine grace helping, one might perhaps add. For they 
 seemingly deem not that kind of influence inconsistent with the 
 perfect freedom of the will, any more than they deem. the instigations 
 of the devil anywise inconsistent with the entirely spontaneous origin 
 of evil thoughts and actions. But they do not shrink from inconsist- 
 encies ; for while they admit the growth and development of the will 
 to take place by education and exercise, they still declare the power 
 so gained to be absolutely free, to owe nothing to that which has 
 made it, to be independent of its causation ; and to be most free when 
 it has become a confirmed religious habit which the individual feels 
 "as the grasp of the hand of God, which will never let him go !" 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 421 
 
 It would appear then from what, has been said that the 
 doctrine of free-will, like some other doctrines that have 
 done their work and then, being no longer of any use, 
 have undergone decay — comparable with certain bodily 
 organs, like the thyroid gland, which have their functions 
 in early development and then, not being wanted after- 
 wards, undergo atrophy — was necessary to promote the 
 evolution of mankind up to a certain stage. By incul- 
 cating strenuously upon the individual his absolute free- 
 dom of will, and by laying the greatest stress upon his 
 personal responsibility for what he does, it is evident that 
 we add greatly to the force of the motive which we pre- 
 sent to induce him to do right. On the one side is the 
 motive to do right, on the other side is the motive to do 
 wrong-^the former more difficult, the latter more easy 
 to do ; by proclaiming free-will we strengthen the former 
 motive, while by proclaiming necessity it is clear that we 
 should strengthen the latter motive, in the unenlightened 
 or inferior person who, with shortsighted ignorance, 
 would gladly go the easy way of his passions rather than 
 the arduous way of his true welfare. The notion of free- 
 will and its responsibilities was necessary, therefore, and 
 perhaps still is, to make for him a higher necessity than 
 the necessity of his passions. But it does not follow 
 that it ever was or is now necessary for him whom Con- 
 fucius would have described as the sage or superior per- 
 son, who looks to the endless consequences of his actions. 
 To him the clear recognition of the reign of law in the 
 human mind will furnish the strongest motive to do right,, 
 so to promote his own best development, and through 
 individual development the development of the race, the 
 highest interests of which he plainly perceives to be one 
 with his highest welfare ; while the doctrine of free-will 
 will appear to be an effete superstition, the offshoot of 
 ignorance, mischievously drawing men's minds away from 
 the beneficial recognition of the universal reign of law 
 
422 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 and of their solemn responsibilities under the stern 
 necessity of universal causation. 
 
 Having said all that it seems necessary to say here 
 concerning the question of free-will, I go on now to 
 sketch, so far as practicable, the physiological condition 
 of volition. But, I may remark first, by the way, that 
 we may be helped to trace the genesis of the will by 
 looking to the original meaning of the word and to its 
 use in common speech. We obtain the word from the 
 Latin volo, which meant what a person wished or would ; 
 so that here we come to the desire or wish as the funda- 
 mental element of will. Jonathan Edwards has argued 
 that there is no fundamental difference between volition 
 and preference ; a man's choosing, liking best, or being 
 best pleased with a thing, being the same with his willing 
 it. " Thus an act of the will is commonly expressed by 
 its pleasing a man to do thus or thus ; and a man doing 
 as he wills, and doing as he pleases, are the same thing in 
 common speech." If some one were advised to pursue 
 a certain course, and, impatient of advice, were to de- 
 clare angrily that he would do as he liked or pleased, he 
 would no doubt believe that he was claiming and main- 
 taining his freedom of will ; his adviser, if an acute psy- 
 chologist, would see good reason to entertain a different 
 opinion. Certainly the man would be claiming his free- 
 dom of choice between two desires or motives — his free- 
 dom to follow his own choice and not another man's ; 
 and this freedom of choice is nothing else than what is 
 often incorrectly described as the freedom of will to 
 make the choice ; for the so-called freedom of will is the 
 expression of the likings or affinities of the man's cha- 
 racter, and turns out, when closely analysed, to depend 
 upon all that has gone before to constitute his present 
 nature and inclination. If, overpowered by motives pre- 
 sented forcibly to his mind by others, he were to do some- 
 thing which he did not like, contrary to his inclination to 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 423 
 
 do something which he liked better, he would perhaps 
 say that he had done it unwillingly, which would be 
 nonsense ; for how could he have done unwillingly that 
 which was a present act of will operating in opposition 
 to the deep inclinations of his nature ? But that act of 
 will, however wise and good it may have been, was in no 
 sense free ; it was the direct consequence of the power- 
 ful motives excited in his mind by the persuasive argu- 
 ments of other persons, which overmastered for the 
 occasion the less conscious impulses of his nature. But 
 these latter will not fail to come up again, and the man's 
 habitual actions will be in conformity with his nature, 
 which, though it may be silenced for the nonce, can 
 never be expelled. 
 
 What in any event it shall please or like me to do will 
 depend upon my original and acquired nature, bodily and 
 mental — upon all that has gone before, either in the way of 
 inheritance from ancestors or of modification by education 
 and the circumstances of life, to constitute my present 
 complex ego; and although I may hold that, in acting, I 
 have really acted in conformity with the strongest desire 
 or motive, it does not at all follow that it shall always 
 have been a distinctly-formed motive, of which I am 
 clearly conscious and which I can set forth exactly to 
 others ; on the contrary, the difficulty sometimes is to say 
 what was the real motive, this having been of a complex 
 character, and the motive sincerely believed and declared 
 to have actuated me not having perhaps been the real 
 one. Nevertheless, it can admit of no doubt that I did 
 act as it liked or pleased me best under the actual cir- 
 cumstances to do — that the then inclinations or likings 
 of my nature were declared in the deed — that the act of 
 will was the expression of the affinities and energy of my 
 ego at the moment. Common language describes the 
 facts truthfully enough ; it is metaphysical ingenuity, 
 attempting subtile analysis by a wrong method, which 
 
424 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 has made confusion. Instead of analysing the con- 
 crete elements of individual character and forming a 
 body of sound inductions, it has constructed an ideal 
 mental philosophy, of which free-will is the chief corner 
 stone. 
 
 It is not difficult to see how philosophy was induced 
 to desert the solid ground of facts for the region of ab- 
 stract entities in its dealings with will. Though will has 
 its fundamental basis in desire, yet in the mind of a cul- 
 tivated person desire, when it issues not immediately but 
 mediately in action, undergoes so many processes of re- 
 finement in the manifold interactions of reasons and 
 feelings which we call deliberation, that its original cha- 
 racter as the motor factor in volition is masked. We get 
 to a higher stage of life in which there is an infinitely 
 complex co-ordination and subordination of functions. 
 The desire enlightened by reason, as it comes out from 
 the mental crucible through which it has passed, is of so 
 much more refined and abstract a nature that it. claims a 
 new name, and is accordingly called will. The next step 
 is to lose sight of the concrete acts of will, and to con- 
 vert the general term into an abstract entity, which is 
 supposed to have arbitrary powers. It would be just as 
 reasonable to invent an abstract faculty of desire existing 
 independently of particular desires, and operating with 
 arbitrary power in them. Besides the distinct conscious- 
 ness which we have of the formation of volition, after- we 
 have gone through the deliberations from which it has 
 issued, we are certainly conscious of a distinct feeling of 
 energy or power which is inseparably associated with 
 every active movement that we make. It is through this 
 feeling, which we have not when a part of our body is 
 moved by others, that we are conscious of our own effort, 
 whether the effect be a movement, or, if outward resist- 
 ance be too great, not; and it is presumably conveyed to 
 us by the muscular sense. Now it is obvious that this 
 
vu.] VOLITION. 425 
 
 consciousness of effort, or feeling of innervation, is well 
 suited to suggest the notion of a distinct power or faculty 
 capable of acting with abitrary energy. On the one side 
 we have the distinct consciousness of a volition, most of 
 the antecedents of which are clean out of sight ; on the 
 other side, we have the distinct consciousness of a power 
 or energy when the volition becomes active. What more 
 was needed to generate the illusion of a free-will? But 
 the testimony is one thing, the interpretation thereof 
 another : we may trust consciousness as a witness to the 
 fact of experience ; but its testimony covers no more than 
 that, and we cannot rely upon it as to the interpretation 
 of the fact. It makes known the volitional energy of the 
 moment ; it reveals not the derivation of that energy. 
 When a person regrets a certain act, and affirms that he 
 would do otherwise if he were in exactly the same cir- 
 cumstances again, it is an illusion ; if the circumstances 
 were exactly the same, it would be impossible for him to 
 do otherwise than as he did ; but if he introduces a new 
 element derived from subsequent reflections, he might 
 no doubt do differently, only he should then perceive 
 that the conditions have been changed, and a new factor 
 introduced to operate upon the will. It is by overlook- 
 ing the new element which is now introduced into his 
 deliberation that he imagines he might have done other- 
 wise on the first occasion. 
 
 These considerations, with others that have been 
 brought forward in foregoing chapters, must have suffi- 
 ciently proved the necessity of modifying the notion 
 commonly entertained of the will as a single, undecom- 
 posable faculty, of constant and uniform power. It has 
 been shown that under the category of voluntary acts, 
 as commonly made, are included very different kinds of 
 actions proceeding from different nervous centres ; and 
 it has been shown that we must either acknowledge each 
 of these centres to have its own volition, and human will 
 
426 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 to be divisible into as many parts as there are nervous 
 centres, or we must recognise in what are called true 
 voluntary acts of the convolutions the display of the 
 same fundamental properties of nervous tissue which the 
 lowest nervous centres display. A considerable propor- 
 tion of the daily actions of life is confessedly due to the 
 automatic functions of the spinal cord ; the sensory cen- 
 tres are clearly the independent causes of other actions ; 
 while many of the remaining actions that would by most 
 people be deemed volitional are really respondent to idea 
 or emotion. Each nervous centre embodies in its nature 
 a quantity of energy of a very high order, accumulated 
 by nutrition, which it is ready to discharge in its proper 
 function on the occasion of a suitable stimulus. This 
 just discrimination of functions is, notwithstanding, en- 
 tirely neglected by those who take the metaphysical view 
 of will ; by them the abstraction from the particular is 
 converted into an entity, and thenceforth allowed to 
 tyrannize in the most despotic manner over the under- 
 standing. The metaphysical essence thus created has no 
 other relation to a particular or concrete act of will, than, 
 using Spinoza's illustration, stonencss to a particular stone, 
 man to Peter or Paul. 
 
 It is obviously, then, of importance, in the first place, 
 to get rid of the notion of an ideal or abstract will un- 
 affected by physical conditions, self-determining, as existing 
 apart from the particular concrete acts of will which vary 
 according to physical conditions. When a definite act of 
 will is the result of a certain desire modified by reflection, 
 it represents physically a force available for action, conse- 
 quent on the communication of activity from one nerve- 
 circuit to other nerve-circuits within the cortical layers of 
 the hemispheres ; the final issue of the transformation of 
 energy being the impulse of volition. Any modification, 
 therefore, of the condition of these centres may, and 
 notably does, impede reflection, and affect the resultant 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 427 
 
 power of will — a power which, in reality, is seen to differ 
 both in quantity and quality in different persons, and in 
 the same person according to the varying conditions of 
 the nervous substratum. Let a disturbance of an abdo- 
 minal organ modify the affective tone of the brain, the 
 will instantly reflects, in its impaired energy, the disturb 
 ing change. Divide the nerve going to a muscle, and the 
 will issues its edicts in vain to the muscle ; it cannot leap 
 over the narrow gap made in the continuity of the nerve ; 
 for that which passes is a molecular motion along physical 
 paths, easily and absolutely barred by physical hindrances 
 to conduction. On the other hand, speaking psycholo- 
 gically, the definite will is the final issue of the process 
 of reflection or deliberation which a man's life-culture 
 has rendered him capable of; it represents a conception 
 or idea of the result with desire, such as have been deter- 
 mined by the character of the reflection. A man can 
 never will a virtuous end into whose reflection ideas of 
 virtue do not enter, nor can any one will an act of 
 vicious indulgence whose appetites or desires have not 
 been vitiated, and whose mind is not familiar with cor- 
 responding ideas. The will appears, then, to be radi- 
 cally the desire, or aversion, sufficiently strong to produce 
 an action after reflection or deliberation — an action 
 which, as Hartley observes, is not automatic primarily 
 or secondarily.*( 2 ) Since, then, it is generated by the 
 
 * " Appetite, therefore, and aversion are simply so called as long 
 as they follow not deliberation. But if deliberation have gone before, 
 then the last act of it, if it be appetite, is called mill ; if aversion, 
 unwillingness." — Hobbes. 
 
 "In a series of valuable articles "On the Nature of Volition," in 
 the Psychological Journal for 1863, Dr. Lockhart Clarke enters into 
 an able analysis of the different forms of volition, and shows that in 
 each case the process consists in the co-operation of two of the 
 psychical elements which together constitute our personal integrity ; 
 namely, the intellectual or regulative element, and the aesthetic or 
 dynamic element, the latter being either a sensation, an appetite, or 
 
428 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 preceding association, it must needs differ greatly in 
 quality and quantity according to the extent and char- 
 acter of the association, as this has been established 
 by. cultivation, or is temporarily modified by bodily 
 conditions. 
 
 Every one can easily perceive this to be true of the 
 will of an idiot or a child, which is palpably a very 
 different matter from that of a well-cultivated adult; 
 and he must be very much blinded by metaphysical 
 conceptions who fails to recognise the infinite variations 
 in the power of will which any given individual exhibits 
 at different times or in different relations. A person 
 whose reproductive organs are of so defective a develop- 
 ment, as to be incapable of function lacks all the ideas, 
 feelings, desires and will, that are connected with those 
 functions. When one of the higher senses is wanting in 
 any one, he necessarily wants also the ideas ( feelings, 
 desires and will which arise out of the perceptions of 
 that sense. The blind man cannot know the variety and 
 beauty of colouring, in nature, nor can he will in regard to 
 those external relations which are revealed only through 
 the sense of sight. Because, however, he knows not what 
 he lacks, he does not consider his will inferior in quality, 
 less complete, or less free. Were an additional sense 
 conferred upon any one, it would doubtless soon teach 
 him how much might yet be added to the will, how.little 
 his boasted freedom is, and might, perhaps, make him 
 amazed that he should ever have thought himself free. 
 
 When is it that man is most persuaded that he speaks 
 or acts with full freedom of will ? When he is drunk, or 
 
 an emotion. What are called "motives" to the "will" consist of 
 our various sensations, appetites, and emotions, when subjected 
 to the judgment of the understanding in deliberation. The " will," 
 therefore, as a peculiar power, comes into existence only at the time 
 of acting, by the combination and co-operation of its constituent 
 elements. 
 
vn.] VOLITION. 429 
 
 mad, or is dreaming. It may be a reflection, then, worth 
 dwelling upon, that man thinks himself most free when 
 he is most a slave; but at any moment, in whatever 
 mood he be, he would affirm that he is free. A person 
 under the influence of alcohol judges very differently 
 from what he does when in his sober senses, but is he in 
 his own estimation less free at the time ? Passion noto- 
 riously perverts the judgment, warping it this way or 
 that ; but will any appeal to the man who is in a passion 
 elicit from him a confession that he is not acting with 
 perfect liberty ? Place the very same arguments before 
 a man when he is elated by some joyous, or depressed 
 by some grievous event ; when he is in the full flow of 
 vigorous health, or when he is prostrate on the bed of 
 sickness or of death, and how different would be his 
 judgment upon them and his will in relation to them : 
 but whatever others may think of him, he will hold for 
 certain the conclusion of the moment, just as a man in 
 his sleep is fully persuaded of the reality of his dreams. 
 While the looker-on who has had great experience among 
 insane persons can often predict how a madman will act 
 under certain circumstances, with as much certainty as 
 he can predict an event conformable to a known law of 
 nature, — who thinks himself so free as does the madman ? 
 Whence comes this false opinion? It arises plainly 
 from the cause which has already been pointed out: 
 that consciousness reveals the particular state of mind 
 of the moment, but does not reveal the long series 
 of causes on which it depends. It is a deliberate fooling 
 of one's self to say that actions depend upon the will, 
 and then not to ask upon what the will depends. It is 
 as though, says Leibnitz, the needle should take pleasure 
 in moving towards the pole, not perceiving the insensible 
 motions of the magnetic matter on which it depends.* 
 
 * Speaking of a stone, which he supposes to have a certain 
 amount of motion communicated to it by an impulse from without, 
 
430 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 As in nature we pass from event to cause, and from this 
 cause again to an antecedent one, and so on till we are 
 driven to a first cause, so, in the sincere observation of 
 the mind, we see that it is determined to will this or that 
 by a cause or motive, which again is determined by 
 another, this again by another, and so on till we have 
 gone through the whole series of desires, aversions, 
 hopes and fears — the sum of which is deliberation — 
 that have preceded the last desire or aversion which we 
 call an act of will. Those who fondly think they act 
 with free will, says Spinoza, dream with their eyes open. 
 Now, if the final reaction after deliberation, which we 
 call will, is, like other modes of reaction of nerve ele- 
 ment previously described, a resultant of a certain mole- 
 cular change in a definitely constituted nervous centre, 
 then all the design exhibited in any given act of will 
 must, like the design displayed in the function of the 
 spinal cells, or the cells of the sensori-motor centres, be 
 a physical result of a particular and intimate constitu- 
 tion or organization of nervous matter. In other words, 
 the act of will which is the final expression of a process 
 of reflection must needs contain a conception of the end 
 desired — such a conception as has been determined by 
 the nature of the reflection ; the conception of the re- 
 
 and which will necessarily advance through the motion imparted, 
 Spinoza says : " Supposing the stone, as it proceeds in its motion, to 
 think and to know that it is striving, in so far as it can, to con- 
 tinue in motion ; inasmuch as it is only conscious of its endeavour 
 and by no means of its passiveness, it will believe itself perfectly 
 free, and conclude that it perseveres in its motion from no other 
 cause than that it wills to do so. And this is that freedom pre- 
 cisely of which all boast themselves possessed, but which consists 
 in this alone, that men are conscious of their desires, but are 
 ignorant of the causes by which these are determined. " — Spinoza's 
 Life, Correspondence and Ethics. By R. Willis, M.D., p. 143. 
 A falling stone, if conscious, would doubtless believe that it was, by 
 its will, pulling the earth, though ever so little, towards it. 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 431 
 
 suit, or the design, in the act of will constituting, in fact, 
 the essential character of the particular volition. In 
 order that desire may became voluntary action for its 
 gratification, a consciousness of the result of the action 
 is necessary — that is, a conception of the aim of it. The 
 desire, therefore, gives the special impulse which is 
 directed or regulated by reflection, and the particular 
 act of will is not the determining agent, but is the result 
 determined by the impulse acting in conformity with the 
 conception of the aim to be attained. The design, then, 
 which a looker-on discovers in any act of will — and, be 
 it remembered, there is no actual volition apart from the 
 particular volition — will depend upon the nature of the 
 individual whom he is observing, as that nature has been 
 inherited, and subsequently developed by the experience 
 of life. 
 
 The idiocy of any one, or his congenital inability to 
 adapt himself to external relations by correspondences 
 of internal cerebral reaction, is a physical fact : there is 
 no design in many of the idiot's conscious acts, because 
 such quality or property has not been built up by culti- 
 vation as a faculty of the supreme nervous centres, a 
 congenital defect of constitution having made such orga- 
 nization impossible ; in other words, the idiot is, by de 
 feet of nature, incapacitated from acquiring reflection, 
 and cannot, therefore, have in his mind the conception 
 of a result to be attained, cannot display conscious de- 
 sign. But the design manifest in any voluntary act of 
 the best cultivated mind is likewise physical necessity : 
 in consequence of reacting cerebral adaptations to the 
 varieties of external impressions, reflection has, as al- 
 ready set forth, been organized as a development of the 
 supreme nervous centres, or, in other words, as a faculty 
 of the mind ; and according to the extent and kind of 
 the reflection will be the completeness of the conception 
 of the end to be attained, «or the degree of design 
 
432 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 discoverable in any act of will. The particular volition 
 and whatever it contains, whether of folly or design, is 
 a product of the organized residua of all . former like 
 volitions, excited into activity by the appropriate stimu- 
 lus. For volitions, like sensations and ideas, leave be- 
 hind them their residua which are organized in the nerve 
 centres, and thus render future volitions of a like kind 
 more easy. In this sense only are we warranted in 
 speaking of abstract volition. 
 
 It may be thought that too much has been said of the 
 question of design, but it has been necessary to lay stress 
 upon it, because mistaken notions with regard to it ap- 
 pear to have been at the bottom of much error in philo- 
 sophy. The design manifest in a mental act has been 
 supposed to evince a power which transcended or anti- 
 cipated experience, instead of one which actually con- 
 forms in its genesis to experience ; and the spiritual 
 conception of will as a fixed and undecomposable entity, 
 in which was no variableness nor the shadow of a turn- 
 ing, is greatly indebted for its origin to that error. The 
 metaphysical doctrine of final causes, which Bacon, 
 Comte, Spinoza, Descartes, and others scarcely less 
 great, all agree to have done so much harm in philo- 
 sophy, has sprung from erroneous views of the nature of 
 design. Instead of patiently searching- out effects in 
 nature through observation and experiment, men per- 
 sisted for a long time in anticipating nature by divining 
 ends or purposes according to the measure of their own 
 imperfect experiences, and so prevented progress by set- 
 ting up these theories to bar the paths of exact investi- 
 gation. Supposing that the argument from design as to 
 the existence of will as a metaphysical entity were 
 pressed to its logical consequences, what must be the 
 result? Nothing less than this,— that the animal, with 
 its marvellous instinct of instant adaptation to the most 
 complex and unfamiliar conditions, is possessed of a 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 433 
 
 higher immaterial principle than the helpless child or the 
 erring adult. We know right well, however, that the in- 
 stinct of the animal is sometimes positively traceable to 
 the acquired power of former generations j that it has 
 been observably built up in the constitution of the ner- 
 vous centres, as habit is daily formed in the individual, 
 and transmitted to succeeding generations as an innate 
 endowment. It is exactly the same with the design 
 which is formed within the term of an individual life, 
 and which ever testifies to the previous cultivation of 
 the individual; the more cultivated the mind and the 
 more varied the experience, the better developed is the 
 will and the stronger its co-ordinating power over the 
 thoughts, feelings, and actions ; not otherwise, in truth, 
 than as the co-ordinate reflex action of the spinal cord 
 is developed by experience and culture. Design, there- 
 fore, when its nature is fairly analysed, so far from tend- 
 ing to make the will a fixed metaphysical entity, goes 
 really to prove that the will is an insensibly organized 
 result, and of varying value, quantitative and qualitative. 
 Having now adduced sufficient reasons to prove that 
 the will is not a self-generating, self-sufficing force of 
 constant quantity ; but, on the contrary, a force varying 
 in quantity and quality, and, like every other natural 
 force, determined by antecedent causes, I may proceed 
 to consider what power it actually has in our mental and 
 bodily life. It is manifestly ordained that will, as the 
 highest mode of energy of nerve element, and, when 
 at its best, the supreme co-ordination of all the complex 
 energies of body and mind, should control the inferior 
 modes of energy by operating downwards upon their 
 subordinate centres : the anatomical disposition of the 
 nervous system is in conformity with what psychological 
 observation teaches. But the undoubted fact that the 
 will of a man can and does control inferior functions has 
 led to a very extravagant and ill-founded notion as to 
 
434. THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [cHaf. 
 
 its autocratic power ; and it must be allowed that not a 
 little windy nonsense has been written concerning its 
 authority. Assuredly it is no irresponsible despot in 
 any mind, but is ever most obedient where it has most 
 power ; it conquers by obeying. Let us, then, consider 
 what the power of the will is (i) over the movements, 
 and (2) over mental operations, the two departments in 
 which its rule is felt. 
 
 1. (a) The will has no power whatever over certain 
 movements that are essential to the continuance of life. 
 Not only do such motions as those of the heart and the 
 intestines go on without any co-operation of the will and 
 in spite of any intervention on its part, but movements 
 that are only microscopically visible, such as the contrac- 
 tions of the small arteries, which are of so great im- 
 portance in nutrition; are not .under its direct influence: 
 Nature has been far too prudent to rely upon such an 
 uncertain and comparatively late appearing force for the 
 movements essential to the continuance of life, or to 
 admit its capricious interference : let a man try to as- 
 phyxiate himself by voluntarily preventing the re- 
 spiratory movements, and he will learn a lesson as to the 
 impotence of will which he might usefully remember 
 when studying mental phenomena. I say nothing here 
 ■of those insensible molecular movements of the physio- 
 logical elements which, like thermal oscillations, are yet 
 impenetrable to sense, but which are undoubtedly at the 
 foundation of all visible vital actions. 
 
 (b) The will has no power to effect movements that 
 are confessedly voluntary, until they have been very 
 carefully acquired by practice. Every one knows that 
 the theory of a particular skill of movement is a very 
 different matter from the practice of it, and that the 
 complete capacity of performance is gained, not simply 
 by desiring and willing it, but by patient exercise and 
 cultivation ; the faculty of the movement is thus gradually 
 
vil.] VOLITION. 435 
 
 organized in the proper nervous centre. A special and 
 complex act, never hitherto attempted, will be as little 
 likely to be done in obedience to the commands of the 
 so-called " autocrat of the mind " as an act of flying.* 
 When volition has been trained to the greatest perfection 
 it becomes automatic : we never do a thing well until we 
 have learnt to do it without thinking about it ; and when 
 we have reached this ease and skill of execution, if per- 
 chance our conscious attention is aroused, the chances 
 are that we boggle and do badly. It is the unconscious 
 element, inborn in the nature of the individual, or ac- 
 quired as automatic power through the influence of 
 education and experience, that constitutes the basis of 
 character and conduct. 
 
 (c) When the will does dictate a movement, it is the 
 event which is determined ; it sets free, so to speak, the 
 movement which has been organized in the motor nerve 
 centre; there is no direct volitional control over the 
 means by which the result is accomplished ; so that it 
 may even happen, and does sometimes happen, that in 
 a man struck with a palsy of his Jimbs the will, all 
 unaware of its impotence, commands a result which 
 never takes place. Questionless, some would still not 
 shrink, in face of such an experience, from affirming that 
 consciousness never deceives. When the will dictates 
 a certain event, its power is propagated, first through 
 certain nerves, and then through them to certain muscles, 
 in a manne of which we have no consciousness what- 
 ever : all we do know is, that if we wish to select a 
 certain muscle and to put it singly in action, we have 
 
 * " We know how slowly the child acquires the power of sc 
 balancing his body as to hold it erect." '. . . . "We observe how 
 slowly the child learns to perform, with the requisite precision, 
 the contractions on which the operation of walking depends," 
 . . . . " There is another very familiar instance, that of learning to 
 write." — J. Mill, Analysis of the Human Mind, pp. 271 — 273. 
 
 ¥ F 2 
 
436 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 not the power to do so, and that, if certain movements 
 have been habitually associated, it is a very hard matter 
 to dissociate them ; a thing which a simple effort of the 
 will certainly will not do, but which a disease like chorea 
 will sometimes do in spite of the will. Moreover, the 
 will cannot determine a motor event unless the. acting 
 muscles are guided by sense ; wherefore persons born 
 deaf who have been taught speech are not able to 
 modulate their voices, but speak in a loud, harsh, mo- 
 notonous tone, not having the sense of sound to guide 
 them to practise the proper motor adaptations, and so 
 to acquire the requisite delicacy and flexibility of move- 
 ments. 
 
 2. The extent of voluntary power over the mental 
 operations is not nearly so great as is commonly assumed; 
 much the same thing happening here as in its influence 
 over movements. It will not be difficult to understand 
 how this should be so, if we reflect that the immediate 
 action of the will, even when dictating movements, is 
 not upon muscles, but upon the motor .grey nuclei or 
 nervous centres of movement; that in both cases, there- 
 fore, the immediate operation is alike upon ganglionic 
 cells, which are, in the one case, the associated centres 
 of ideas, in the other, the associated centres of move- 
 ments. (3) 
 
 (a) As the formation of our ideas takes place gradually 
 through experience, and as the association between ideas 
 is also organized in accordance with experience, both 
 processes being based in the organic life and beyond 
 the domain of consciousness, it is plain that the will does 
 not determine either the material of thought or the laws 
 of the interworking of ideas : it must accept as accom- 
 plished facts, as organized results, the ideas and the 
 manner of their association. As with movements, so 
 here, the will has no control over the means by which it 
 works ; it cannot dissociate firmly established connections, 
 
vn.] VOLITION. 437 
 
 nor can it determine a new train of ideas without the 
 first link of it being in the thoughts ; and when the first 
 link, however originated, is, so to speak, grasped, the 
 train of ideas initiated is -not irregular and alterable at 
 will, but definite, in stern accordance with an order and 
 system previously established by cultivation.* It is true 
 that as it is with the power of will over movements, so 
 it is with its power over mental states ; it is a power 
 which may be greatly enlarged and increased by exercise 
 and cultivation. While some persons seem quite unable 
 to regulate the associations of their ideas, and to hold 
 their attention to a subject so as to pursue a consecutive 
 reflection, others are distinguished by the mastery which 
 they have over the subject and course of their thoughts, 
 and by their powers of dismissing what is frivolous or 
 irrelevant, and of adhering singly and steadily to the 
 matter on which the mind is employed. The will, how- 
 ever, always presupposes definite and fixed series of ideas 
 formed in the mind, series in which, without individual 
 co-operation, one idea must definitely and of necessity 
 follow another as one wave necessarily produces another 
 as itself disappears. 
 
 There is an order or a necessity in the mental or- 
 ganization of a sane person, then, reflecting the order 
 or necessity in the co-existence and succession of events 
 in external nature ; and the will can as little control 
 the fundamental laws of the one as it can those of 
 the other. The discovery of a new fact or law in the 
 operations of nature by the man of science, or of a new 
 
 * ' ' Deliberation and investigation are like the hunting of a hound ; 
 he moves and sniff's about by his own activity, but the scent he finds 
 is not laid, nor the trail he follows drawn, by himself. The mind 
 only begins a train of thinking, or keeps it in one particular track, 
 but the thoughts introduce one another successively .... which 
 shows they have a motion of their own independent of the mind, 
 and which they do not derive from its action, nor will lay aside upon 
 its command." — Tucker's Light of Nature, vol. i. p. 14. 
 2(1 
 
438 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 beauty in nature by the artist or the poet, is merely an 
 instance of a new and more exact internal adjustment to 
 external circumstances ; it is the evolution, as it were, of 
 a new organ of sensibility and reaction to new rela- 
 tions ; and when the connection between the action from 
 without and the adapted reaction from within has been 
 definitely organized in the brain, it is a belief. Certainly 
 will is not absolutely powerless in the mind, any more 
 than it is absolutely powerless in nature ; for by recogni- 
 tion of the laws which govern mental development we 
 can so arrange the conditions of their operations as to 
 produce secondarily considerable modification of effects; 
 and it may thus avail itself of these laws for its own 
 profit, using their power in an enlightened manner to 
 aid its development. In the one case as in the other 
 it conquers only by obeying; true liberty, as Milton 
 expresses it — 
 
 " Always with right reason dwells 
 Twinn'd, and from her hath no dividual being." 
 
 (b) Thus we come to a second consideration in regard 
 to the power of the will : it is that those who unwarrant- 
 ably exalt it derive their arguments entirely from the self- 
 consciousness of a well-cultivated mind, neglecting alto- 
 gether the instances of its simplest manifestations. It is 
 bare justice to insist upon a reference to the earlier 
 stages of development of cultivated mind, or to mind in 
 its least cultivated state, as offering the simplest and 
 most favourable instances for the formation of a sound 
 induction. Will any one be so bold as to maintain that 
 the young child or the idiot has \ olitional control over 
 such thoughts as it has ? Is any one so ignorant of the 
 genesis of mind as to uphold the existence of true voli- 
 tion in the earliest stages of mental development? The 
 child notably lives in the present, and its actions are 
 direct reactions to the feelings and ideas that are excited 
 in its mind. 
 
vu.] • VOLITION. 439 
 
 (c) But as the individual cannot originate voluntarily 
 an idea or a train of thought in the mind, so likewise he 
 is unable sometimes to dismiss one notwithstanding an 
 earnest will to do so. A painful idea will, as every one's 
 experience must have laught him, return again and again 
 into consciousness in defiance of every effort of the will 
 to get rid of it, just as a movement may take place in 
 spite of the will. The command which any one has over 
 his thoughts is very different at different times, and one 
 person may be able to dismiss a troublesome reflection 
 when another cannot for the life of him put it aside ; and 
 when he does so dismiss it, it is not any abstract will, but 
 he, the individual, who does it. We can give no exact 
 reasons for these variations ; the causes of them lie deeper 
 than consciousness can reach or will control. Those 
 who are able to conceive the notion of a self-determining 
 will, or are content with a vague and confused mental 
 state which they allow to pass for definite conception, 
 maintain that the will shows its autocratic power by 
 holding the attention to a motive until it has magnified 
 it into the strongest motive, and by then electing to obey 
 it. But they do not tell us what is the relation of this 
 undetermined and determining agency to brain and cha- 
 racter, or how it comes to pass that, notwithstanding its 
 freedom and independence, it depends upon cerebral 
 conditions, and is uniformly the expression of character 
 and circumstances. 
 
 So far from will being autocratic, it is manifestly at 
 the mercy of unknown conditions which may seriously 
 affect at any moment its power or energy. Moreover, 
 when an unwelcome idea is dismissed from the mind, 
 it is not done by a simple despotic order of the will ; 
 but by fixing attention on some other idea which 
 arises, by maintaining the tension of it, the latter is 
 made consciousness; and inasmuch as two ideas can- 
 not exist in consciousness at the same time, or at any 
 
440 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 rate cannot co-exist in equal intensity, that implies the 
 dismissal of the former idea into the background and 
 the initiation of a new current of reflection ; a current 
 which, however, is not uncommonly interrupted by the 
 irruption of the old idea which refuses to become 
 latent or dormant. Volitional control exercised over the 
 thoughts manifestly presupposes the existence of many 
 ideas in the mind, and the possibility of some of these 
 latent ones arising to influence those that may be active. 
 What power it is by which one idea calls up another we 
 do not know, but we do know that it is not by the will. 
 Locke is admitted to have made a great advance in 
 psychology when he demonstrated that there were no 
 innate ideas in the mind, but that all its ideas were 
 acquired by observation and reflection. The necessary 
 consequence of his demonstration plainly is, what the 
 foregoing considerations have shown, that there is no 
 inborn will -in the human mind. Let those'who think 
 otherwise endeavour to fix that period in the child's 
 mental development when volition can be affirmed to 
 have distinctly manifested itself. Whence and when 
 the first volition comes would indeed be perplexing 
 questions if the will were admitted to be a special 
 faculty of the mind, distinct from other faculties, of con- 
 stant quality, and never falling below a certain level of 
 energy. We are powerless to fix the time of the first 
 volition, because the will is not one and constant, but 
 infinitely variable in quantity and quality, having many 
 nervous centres, and not having any existence apart 
 from the concrete act. There are in reality as many 
 centres of volitional reaction in the brain as there are 
 centres of idea, and the operations of volition depend 
 as certainly upon modifications of cerebral substrata as 
 do the operations of ideation and sensation. To assume 
 one constant will is but a part of that metaphysical sys- 
 tem of making abstractions into entities by which also 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 441 
 
 is made one understanding, one reason, and the mental 
 functions are mischievously parcelled out into distinct 
 faculties that have no existence in nature. 
 
 It is utterly at variance both with psychological analysis 
 of the nature of will, and with physiological observation of 
 the constitution of the supreme nervous centres, to assume 
 a single nervous centre from which will proceeds ; if we 
 must make a definite statement on so obscure a matter, 
 it is that every current of idea may be a current of 
 voluntary reaction. Let the active idea be attended by 
 its sympathetic feeling, and the enlightened desire is 
 volition. For consider this : although we describe the 
 effect as ideo-motor when an idea reacts directly out- 
 wards, yet if the energy of the idea is not instantly so 
 expended, but persists in the mind for a moment, and 
 displays relations to other ideas, so as to produce a 
 clearer consciousness of it before passing outwards into 
 act, and especially if there is some feeling or desire at- 
 tending it, then, when it does pass outwards, we com- 
 monly describe the effect as volitional. As consciousness 
 and desire may, however, exist in every degree of in- 
 tensity, it is plain that we cannot definitely fix a stage 
 at which ideational reaction may be supposed to become 
 volitional, nor determine the nature of the change which 
 then ensues. Volitional action is fundamentally a reflex 
 or excito-motor process in which a cerebral mechanism 
 of extreme delicacy and intricate complexity of con- 
 struction, embodying past experiences in its structure, 
 intervenes between the ingoing stimulus and the out- 
 going movement ; it is, if I may use such an ungainly 
 compound term, a complex afferent-cerebro-efferent pro- 
 cess. A volition or ideo-motor process which, though 
 active in the brain, stops short of expression in actual 
 movement, or in the inhibition of movement, is a belief: 
 it is a certain internal experience which we feel and 
 know can become a certain external experience, if 
 
+42 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [CHAr. 
 
 necessary. "The will and the intelligence are one and 
 the same thing," was the corollary of Spinoza from his 
 close reasoning. 
 
 Let us imagine the first appearing idea in the infant's 
 mind to react outwards, and to leave, as it will do, its 
 after-effect in the nervous centre : when the idea occurs 
 again, there will be a tendency to a similar reaction. 
 Suppose, however, that the action causes pain to the 
 child, and that thereupon a second idea is formed in 
 its mind, the energy of which is opposed to that of the 
 first. When the first idea recurs, it will, instead of pass- 
 ing outwards at once, excite into activity the second 
 idea, which is inhibitory or preventive.* That is, the 
 simplest case of volition : the child has voluntarily re- 
 frained from doing something, or has voluntarily done 
 something else, having gained by its experience a belief 
 that the act which it foregoes would be painful ; and the 
 impulse that prompted the choice was not any abstract 
 power, but sprang from that fundamental property of 
 organic element by which what is agreeable is sought, 
 what is painful is shunned. Bear in mind, when weigh 
 ing volition, that there is often more power demanded 
 for preventing or inhibiting action than for producing it. 
 As ideas multiply in the mind, and groups or series of 
 ideas are associated, of course the process becomes more 
 and more complicated ; the residua of volitions, like the 
 residua of sensations or ideas, remain in the mind and 
 render future volitions of a like kind more easy and more 
 definite ; abstract or general volitions, as it were, are 
 
 * This inhibition in the highest nerve-centres is just as mechanical 
 as that which we have seen . to take place in the spinal cord, and 
 does not betray any more mysterious agency in the one case than in 
 the other. In the complex organised union of nerve-centres one 
 has the power, when excited, either of discharging or of inhibiting 
 the activity of another centre : it is a common physiological function 
 of nerve-centres, and what we call volition is the subjective aspect 
 of it as it takes place in the supreme cerebral centres. 
 
VII.] VOLITION. 443 
 
 formed as the representatives of certain trains or groups 
 of ideas, or as the expression of their due co-ordinate 
 activity ; and by their persistence in the mind, when not 
 in consciousness, and their interaction there, the charac-: 
 ter of our thought, feeling, and action is modified in a 
 way which we cannot comprehend. Every one must 
 have felt that an act which was at first disagreeable and 
 demanded a painful effort of will may become, in fact 
 invariably does become, after several repetitions, much 
 less disagreeable or even an easy habit. Not only, how- 
 ever, does that particular act lose its painful qualities, 
 but all acts of a like kind or of the same genus are made 
 easier ; and our manner of feeling with regard to them, 
 and even our judgment concerning them, are greatly 
 modified. Though we can give no explanation of the 
 way in which we are aided by the traces of past volitions, 
 it is plain enough that we are so aided ; conscious ac- 
 quisition becomes unconscious power ; by an organic 
 assimilation of some kind, even the will becomes auto- 
 matic in certain relations. 
 
 I suppose that if man could ever succeed in attaining to 
 a perfect harmony with environing nature — including in 
 that word the nature of men and things around him — so 
 as to perceive and act in all relations with the unreflecting 
 certainty and precision of instinct, he would have neither 
 memory, nor reason, nor feeling, nor will, all which imply 
 a persistence of the mental excitation in consciousness, but 
 would act with the automatic regularity, precision and cer- 
 tainty of a perfect machine. For what are these functions? 
 Memory is the conscious recalling of former experiences 
 for. the purpose of comparison ; feeling the pleasing or 
 painful character of experiences ; reason the deliberate 
 weighing of them — whence are deliberation and hesita- 
 tion in consciousness ; and will the conscious impulse 
 at the end of deliberation. Ideas are, on -the efferent 
 or motor side, nascent movements — that is, intuitions 
 
444 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 of such movements as have been performed ; on the 
 afferent or sensory side, they are images of the sensory 
 impressions which have been experienced, the revival of 
 such sensory impressions on the occasion of a suitable 
 • external stimulus being perception. Plainly, then, none of 
 these conscious functions — neither memory, nor feeling, 
 nor reason, nor will, would be necessary or be displayed 
 if the complete harmony imagined were realised. 
 
 These conclusions may then be distinctly formulated 
 from the foregoing considerations : first, that wherever 
 an afferent nerve passes to a cell or group of cells in the 
 cortical layers of the hemispheres, and an efferent nerve 
 issues from the cell or group of cells, there is the possi- 
 ble or actual centre of a particular volition ; and, secondly, 
 that volition or will, used in its general or abstract sense, 
 does not denote any actual entity which existed anterior 
 to experience, but simply expresses the due co-ordinate 
 activity of the supreme centres of mental force, not 
 otherwise than as the co-ordinate activity of the spinal 
 cord or medulla oblongata might be said to represent its 
 will — the faculty in both cases being commonly an ac- 
 quired one in man. Consequently there is no normal 
 volitional power in the abstract ; that is the normal 
 power which each person develops for himself by in- 
 telligent exercise ; and that will be the most perfect 
 volition in any case which expresses the most perfect 
 consensus of all the energies, mental and bodily, of a 
 healthy organism. When an animal acts in answer to 
 some stimulus with direct and definite purpose, or, as 
 we are in the habit of saying, instinctively, it does so by 
 virtue of an endowment of its nerve centres which is ori- 
 ginal in it ; but in the formation of human volition we 
 observe the power of intelligent action in gradual pro- 
 cess of acquirement — we witness an illustration of design 
 in the making ; and if we only go far enough back through 
 generations, the acquisition by the animals may sometimes 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 445 
 
 be traced. It would belie observation less to place an 
 ideal entity behind the innate instinctive impulse of 
 the animal than behind the gradually fashioned will of 
 man. 
 
 To the fullest action of will in an individual two con- 
 ditions are obviously necessary ; first, an unimpeded 
 association of ideas, whereby one conception may readily 
 call up another, and complete deliberation ensue ; and, 
 secondly, a strong personality or character to give the 
 decision between conflicting ideas and desires. I shall 
 say something of the second condition first. 
 
 The strong or well-formed character which a well- 
 fashioned will implies is the result of a good training 
 applied to a well-constituted original nature; and the 
 character is not directly determined by the will, but in 
 any particular act directly determines the will.* Character 
 in truth settles not only what a person shall feel and do, 
 but even what he shall think and believe, as it must 
 needs do seeing that feeling and action lie deeper than 
 thought and belief. Men are in some sort predestined by 
 temperament to be spiritualists or materialists, orthodox 
 
 * Common language, Tucker observes, implies two wills or more, 
 opposing, impeding, restraining, and mastering one another ; when 
 an inordinate passion interferes with the prosecution of some design, 
 we still regard it as * voluntary result, because sensible of the in- 
 stigation. " But if we listen to the common discourses of mankind, 
 we shall find them speaking of several wills, several agents, in the 
 same person, resisting, counteracting, overpowering, and controlling 
 one another ; hence the so usual expressions of the spiritual and 
 carnal wills, of the man and the beast, of self-will and reason, of 
 denying our wills, subduing our passions, or being enslaved by them, 
 of acting unwillingly or against the will, and the like. All which 
 takes rise from a metonyme of the cause for the effect ; for our 
 actions being constantly determined either by the decisions of our 
 judgment, or solicitations of our desires, we mistake them for the 
 will itself; nor is it a little confirmation of the will being actuated 
 by motives, to find them so intimately connected therewith, that a 
 common eye cannot distinguish them apart," — Light of Nature, i. 547. 
 
446 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 or heretic, Evangelicals, Calvinists, Swedenborgians 
 and the like. They are not moved by argument, 
 discussion only feeding conviction ; wherefore it is that 
 abstract questions, which are of no real moment, are 
 contested with the greatest heat and acrimony, and with- 
 out altering belief one jot. A man cannot think truly, 
 cannot realise in belief, that which his character cannot 
 assimilate, any more than the string of a harp can respond 
 to a note which is not its own, and is honestly astonished 
 that others cannot be brought to see things as he sees 
 them : his range of thought and belief is conditioned by 
 his inherited ancestral and his acquired substrata. It is 
 not argument addressed to the understanding, not the dry 
 light of knowledge, which brings about reform in belief • 
 when a changed feeling has been engendered through an 
 unconscious modification of temperament, either in the 
 individual or through generations, the reform takes place, 
 as a crystal forms in a saturated solution ; the conclusions 
 of reason are accepted when the premisses are already 
 embodied in the character or temperament. The con- 
 scious is but a superficial wave moving over the silent 
 depths of the unconscious. 
 
 The way in which the will operates upon the character, 
 or affects the ego, is indirectly by determining the circum- 
 stances which subsequently gradually modify it ; we may 
 place ourselves voluntarily in certain conditions of life or 
 submit ourselves to certain influences, but all the energy 
 of the strongest will cannot then prevent some degree of 
 modification of character by them — cannot prevent an 
 equilibration taking place. In any future act of will the 
 altered character, or acquired nature, is expressed ; and 
 while we, perhaps, all unaware of any change, strenuously 
 uphold our constancy, a looker-on clearly perceives the 
 difference.* What we by a mental abstraction call the 
 
 * The quantity of effect produced upon character in the interaction 
 between the individual and the medium in which he lives will differ 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 447 
 
 ego, is in reality a combination in which are contained the 
 residua of all former feelings, thoughts and volitions, — a 
 combination which is continually changing and becoming 
 more and more complex. That it differs at different 
 times of life, and in consequence of different external 
 relations, those who uphold most zealously its so-called 
 identity do unconsciously admit when they acknowledge 
 that, by religious influence or otherwise, any one may be 
 made " quite another man," may be " converted," or be 
 " regenerate." The will of Saul of Tarsus was not the 
 will of Paul the apostle to the Gentiles, 
 
 The conversion may take place gradually in conse- 
 quence of the steady operation of suitable outer influence, 
 or it may sometimes take place suddenly after a great cere- 
 bral shock, of epileptic or other nature. Whosoever re- 
 flects upon his past life must look back upon scenes and 
 events in it which stand so far apart from his present 
 
 much in different cases. The character exhibits a life of its own, 
 tending to its own development independently of the medium, of 
 such potency in some instances that it makes circumstances conform 
 to it rather than conforms to them, but in other instances so feeble 
 that it is lost in the medium. We may compare the effect to what 
 happens in certain experiments on organic nutrition and absorption. 
 Bone is known to be formed by the cells of the internal layer of the 
 periosteum. M. Oilier proved by experiments the autonomy of 
 these elements : he took a portion of the periosteum with its in- 
 ternal layer of young cells and transplanted it to a part of the body 
 where there was no bone*— into the neck or under the skin of the 
 back. The piece developed there and produced a bony formation. 
 The elements thus exhibited a life of their own independent of the 
 medium in which they were born and in which they were placed. 
 But the influence of the medium was shown in their ulterior lot, for 
 M. Phillipeaux observed that the new bone disappeared after a time, 
 being absorbed. The proper activity of the elements yielded to the 
 influence of the medium. M. Ranvier removed a metatarsal bone 
 of a very young animal and grafted it under the skin of the back. 
 It grew at first, but after a time was absorbed. At the same time 
 a new metatarsal bone was formed in place of the one which had 
 Deen removed. 
 
448 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND, [chat. 
 
 personality that they seem almost as alien from him as if 
 they had happened to some one else ; he may feel a diffi- 
 culty in realising that his present ego was concerned in 
 them. Memory brings them back, but with very much of 
 the feeling of fading reality which attaches to dreams that 
 are past, the ego of them being so different from the ego of 
 now. When the ego is transformed in correspondence 
 with changed external circumstances, the changes are so 
 gradual as to be imperceptible at the time ; but a rapid 
 transformation of the ego may sometimes be effected by 
 a great event, internal or external, — as, for example, 
 when, at the development of puberty, new ideas and im- 
 pulses penetrate the old circle of thought, and become 
 constituent parts of it, producing no little subjective dis- 
 turbance until the assimilation is completed and an 
 equilibrium established. When a great and sudden 
 revolution in the ego is produced by an external cause, 
 it is full of hazard to the mental stability of the indivi- 
 dual, and very apt to become pathological : nothing is 
 more perilous to the equilibrium of a character than for 
 any one to be placed in entirely changed external cir- 
 cumstances without his inner life having been gradually 
 adapted thereto ; and madness, when its origin is fairly 
 examined, always means discord between the individual 
 and his circumstances.* 
 
 * Dr. Charming, in a sermon On the Evil of Sin, speaking of the 
 absurdity of the notion that in changing worlds there will be a change 
 of character, says : — " In the first place, it contradicts all our experi- 
 ence of the nature and laws of the mind. There is nothing more 
 striking in the mind than the connexion of its successive states. Our 
 present knowledge, thoughts, feelings, characters, are the result of 
 former impressions, passions, and pursuits. We are this moment 
 what the past made us ; and to suppose that, at death, the influences 
 of our whole past course are to cease on our minds, and that a 
 character is to spring up altogether at war with what has preceded 
 it, is to suppose the most important law or principle of the mind to 
 be violated, is to destroy all analogy between the present and future, 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 449 
 
 The history of a man is plainly the truest revelation 
 of .his character; for what he has done indicates what he 
 has willed ; what he has willed marks what he has 
 thought and felt, or the character of his deliberations 
 and feelings ; what he has thought and felt has been 
 the result of his nature then existing as the develop- 
 mental product of a certain original construction and 
 a definite life experience. Objectively considered, the 
 identity of the ego is neither more nor less than the 
 identity of the full-grown oak with the first slight shoot 
 from the acorn : subjectively considered, the strong and 
 sure conception which each one has of the ego is not 
 surprising, inasmuch as it is the most frequently active 
 idea, being concerned with more or less consciousness in 
 every event of his life, being that to which every action 
 has fundamental reference. The fashioning of the will 
 is the fashioning of the character • and this can only be 
 done indirectly by fasohining the circumstances which 
 determine the manner of its formation. But, however 
 formed, it is the character which determines what the 
 inclination shall prompt as most desirable, the judgment 
 decide to be most eligible, and the will carry into effect 
 If it were possible for any one to enter thoroughly into 
 the inmost character of another person, and to become 
 exactly acquainted with the moving springs of his con- 
 duct in his particular relations of life, it would be possible 
 not only to predict his line of action on every occasion, 
 but even to work him, free will notwithstanding,. like an 
 automaton, by playing on his predominant passions, 
 interests, or principles. 
 
 Secondly, there is manifestly required for the free 
 
 and to substitute for experience the wildest dreams of fancy. In 
 truth, such a sudden revolution in the character, as is here supposed, 
 seems to destroy a man's identity. The individual thus transformed 
 can hardly seem to himself or to others the same being. It is equiva- 
 lent to the creation of a new foul." 
 
4SO THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 action of will an unimpeded association of ideas, so that 
 the due materials for the formation of a sound judgment 
 may be available. But the ease, completeness, and 
 character of such association depend, as already shown, 
 on the condition of the nervous element, very slight dis- 
 orders of which accordingly quickly declare themselves 
 in a deterioration of the will. The person who has long 
 addicted himself to alcoholic excesses, or to the habitual 
 use of opium, or to some other pernicious vices, initiates 
 a degeneration in the intimate elements of nervous struc- 
 ture, which, though we cannot yet detect its nature by 
 microscopic observation, declares itself distinctly in a 
 deterioration of moral sense and a pitiful enervation of 
 will ; and if the degeneration increase, the further depra- 
 vation of will is shown by the loss of co-ordination of 
 mental functions. As the secondary automatic faculties 
 of the spinal centres soon suffer from any disorder of 
 nerve element, and reveal their suffering in the loss of 
 co-ordinate power over the movements, so in the loss of 
 co-ordinating power over the ideas and feelings, in their 
 irregular and independent reactions, is revealed the 
 deterioration of the will. And as, when the disorder 
 of the spinal centres is still greater, all co-ordination 
 is lost and convulsions ensue ; so in the supreme gangli- 
 onic cells of the hemispheres, when the disturbance is 
 great, there is no co-ordination of the thoughts and 
 feelings, convulsive reactions of the cells take place, and 
 the individual is a raving lunatic, or a dangerous one 
 dominated by a few persistent morbid ideas. Volition 
 is, as it were, resolved into the inferior constituents out 
 of which it is in the due course of things compounded, 
 as a ray of white light may be decomposed into several 
 coloured rays; and in place of the definite, calm, co- 
 ordinate activity of well-formed will, there is the aimless, 
 irregular, explosive display of inferior activity. It is 
 obvious, however, that even in the sound mind the 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 451 
 
 quantity and quality of the volition depend upon the 
 fulness of the reflection, and that any hindrance to the 
 due association of ideas will pro tanto affect the will : if 
 the particular volition were to be resolved by a retro- 
 grade metamorphosis into its component elements there 
 would be an explication or unfolding of all the ideas and 
 desires which had gone to form it ; and going still fur- 
 ther back in the analysis, there would be a revelation 
 even of those particular relations in life which have 
 helped to determine the individual's definite organiza- 
 tion of ideas, the character of his ego. 
 
 It will be proper, before finishing with the considera- 
 tion of the will, to say something more special con- 
 cerning the relations of the emotions to it than I have 
 done in pointing out that the dynamic impulse is derived 
 from the affective life. If an active emotional idea reacts 
 to its stimulus directly in outward action, as its tendency 
 is, it so far weakens the will ; duly controlled and co- 
 ordinated in reflection, as is the case after a right mental 
 cultivation, it strengthens the will. Before many ideas 
 have been acquired, and their multitudinous associations 
 fixed, as in the young child ; or where the state of the 
 development of the brain precludes intellectual develop- 
 ment, as in the idiot and in the animal, — the emotions 
 excited immediately expend their energy in outward 
 manifestation ; and when in the cultivated adult there 
 exists, from some cause, an unstable condition of nerve 
 element, or when the tension of the emotion or passion 
 is exceedingly great, it will also react directly outwards 
 in spite of the will : the law, admitting this, would 
 count it therefore no great crime for a husband to kill 
 a man whom he surprised in the act of adultery with his 
 wife. But whosoever takes careful note of his own 
 mental states may call to mind occasions on which a 
 suddenly excited emotion prompted strongly a particular 
 action, which he nevertheless withstood for an instant, 
 
452 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 and mighty if necessary, have forborne altogether; but 
 perceiving, with quick intuition, that he might do well to 
 manifest the emotion, he afterwards allowed the action 
 to take place. The looker-on, perhaps, sees only an im- 
 pulse and rashness ; and yet the rashness was in some 
 sort deliberate — an indiscretion which served the end 
 when wiser plots might have failed. Emotion was the 
 real motive force, but it was emotion acting under the 
 direction of reason, and, therefore, in accordance with 
 prudent insight into the external relations. The indi- 
 vidual might have done the same action in obedience to 
 a calm resolution of the will, and better so, perhaps, if 
 he had been operating upon inanimate objects ; but in 
 dealing with men it may sometimes be that a prudent 
 exhibition of feeling much aids the success of the ends 
 designed. Only let a man beware that, however he 
 impose upon others, he deceive not himself by his pas- 
 sion, by allowing it to obscure his reason and pervert his 
 judgment : restrained within the supreme centres, it is 
 apt to do that in all minds, and sure to do so in weak 
 minds ; but, duly subordinated and co-ordinated in re- 
 flection, it adds force to resolution. Restrained passion, 
 acting under the calm control of reason, is verily a most 
 potent force ; it gives a white heat, as it were, to the ex- 
 pression of thought, an intensity to the will. 
 
 An emotional person — who is literally an explosive 
 person — certainly often produces great effects in the world, 
 and especially such effects as are destructive of some 
 existing system or belief; it is, indeed, commonly their 
 great self-feeling that gives to the reformers their abandon- 
 ment, energy, and consequent success. But an evil often 
 outweighing these advantages is that there is no guarantee 
 that they are right ; for, necessarily one-sided, they see 
 but a part of a truth — that part which affects their self- 
 hood most keenly. The history of human labours and 
 failures furnishes many examples which teach how a great 
 
vn.] VOLITION. 453 
 
 principle has suffered seriously from the hasty, violent, 
 and ill-considered action of its sincere and earnest ad- 
 vocates : adverse events or circumstances, which they in 
 the torrent of their passion could not recognize, but 
 which, as rational beings looking to the operation of 
 causes, it behoved them to have recognized, have swept 
 them away, and the truth which they upheld has been for 
 a while the victim of their indiscretion. As in the mental 
 phenomena of the individual the power of reflection is 
 often best exhibited in the prevention of action prompted 
 by feeling — in an inhibitory function ; so amongst men 
 in the social state the power of a good understanding 
 is sometimes best shown by not pressing hotly forward 
 an immature reform. But it is a very hard matter for a 
 reformer who feels strongly to perceive that what is 
 theoretically desirable and right may also practically be 
 undesirable and wrong under existing social conditions ; 
 he is apt to treat adverse circumstances as if they were 
 accidents or anomalies in nature, having no right of 
 existence, and thus more or less wilfully shuts his eyes to 
 the force of events on which he proposes to operate, and 
 which will, in any case, operate upon his principle. He 
 hurls a favourite principle, which maybe a very just one, 
 into the world not sufficiently prepared for it, not having 
 reached the due level of its evolution, and which, there- 
 fore, is necessarily hostile to it ; and if his truth is op- 
 pressed and seemingly extinguished by the opposition 
 which it meets with, then he is disheartened and com- 
 plains, o»is angry and rails. However, it is not nature 
 which is wrong, if there be any wrong, but himself — the 
 reformer. The fact that he did not succeed proves that 
 he did not deserve to succeed ; he has not rightly 
 estimated the character and weighed the force of cir- 
 cumstances which have been too strong for his truth, 
 and by a simple law of nature have, for a time at least, 
 quenched its light. 
 
454 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chai>. 
 
 A great advance can never be superimposed upon 
 people miraculously ; in order to be genuine and last- 
 ing, it must be a natural evolution from pre-existing 
 events — must grow out of them ; and that which most 
 effectually demolishes an old error is not a passionate 
 attack upon it by the intensely feeling reformer, but 
 a new and better creation, which quietly undermines 
 it and takes its place. It is one good function of the 
 conservative instinct in human nature, by withstanding 
 change, to prevent reform taking place until the new has 
 absorbed that which is good in the old — to constrain re- 
 volution to be evolution. Creation is a far higher order 
 of Work than destruction ; it is the quiet, self-contained 
 activity of definite productive aim — in other words, of 
 will in its highest development — as opposed to the ex- 
 plosive and dissipated display of an inferior and mostly 
 destructive emotional force. But as the calm intellectual 
 contemplation of events, viewing all the relations of 
 them, is attended with no great spur to any particular 
 activity, but marks an equilibration between the indi- 
 vidual and his environment, it is easy to understand how 
 excellent, a thing to put the will in active motion, in a 
 particular case, is a passionate feeling or desire of good 
 to be attained or of ill to be shunned, in order to 
 establish, an equilibration. Then the will, enlightened 
 by an adequate reflection upon all the co-operating con- 
 ditions, is able to act with a calm, steady, intelligent and 
 potent energy. However, as emotion is strongly infectious, 
 running like an epidemic sometimes through multitudes 
 of people, it is impossible to foresee with certainty what 
 effect the emotional man may or may not produce ; he 
 sometimes raises a storm of agitation which sweeps all 
 before it, when reason looking calmly at the circum- 
 stances would prognosticate a fruitless labour. 
 
 The difference in quality and immediate energy be- 
 tween the will which is urged by strong desire and the 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 455 
 
 will which proceeds from a calm and full reflection, is 
 strikingly evident in the character of the work done by 
 two kinds of reformers. Surveying the men who have 
 exercised great effects on the progress of mankind in 
 this capacity, they appear broadly divisible into two 
 classes : the men of wide intellectual grasp, vast know- 
 ledge, serene feeling, and calm energy, and the men of 
 limited vision, intense feeling, and impetuous energy — 
 the extensive or many-sided, and the intensive or one- 
 sided men. The fonner, taking a comprehensive survey 
 of events, seeing in them the simple operations of na- 
 tural law, recognizing the character and the import of 
 existing relations, and the true value of the present 
 question, which is often exaggerated by its immediate 
 urgency, have their feelings subordinated to their reason, 
 and do not abandon themselves to an unrestrained im- 
 petuosity. They may do great work, but they do it, 
 not like lightning, rapidly and tumultuously, but like 
 light, slowly, quietly, and silently ; their work is con- 
 structive, not destructive ; they are reformers of opinion 
 rather than of practice; and the fertilizing influence of 
 their thought is felt through many generations. The 
 latter, on the other hand, are possessed with a conviction 
 so tremulous with intense self-feeling that it seems the 
 one important thing in the world, and they are more or 
 less blind to everything else ; they put all their energy 
 into explosive action, which, like lightning, is destructive ; 
 they are iconoclasts who beat down furiously the idols 
 that are worshipped in order to set up others in their 
 places ; they are reformers of practice rather than of 
 thought ; and though they often effect a great imme- 
 diate practical result, they have little or no fertilizing 
 influence upon the intellectual development of the future. 
 The earnest desire which inspires their energy springs 
 from a basis of strong self-feeling. 
 
 The most perfect display of will involves the full agree- 
 
456 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 raent of all the powers and dispositions of the mind, and 
 is the expression of their complete co-operation. If there 
 be any want of harmony between them, any feeling or 
 thought which does not work in entire consent with the 
 rest, holding back like a stubborn horse in a team, or 
 inclining to deviate from the track like a wilful one, the 
 act of will loses so much vigour thereby ; it is no longer, 
 as it were, the complete union of coloured rays into one 
 ray of pure white light, but is partially broken up into 
 dissentient forces. In postulating this complete har- 
 mony of the mental functions, we necessarily postulate 
 at the same time that complete harmony of the bodily 
 functions which is perfect health j so that the highest 
 display of will is the expression of the most perfect 
 health of mind and body. In order that the will on all 
 occasions may reach, as' near as possible, this height of 
 excellence, it is obviously necessary that care should be 
 taken to maintain the body in the best health, and so 
 habitually to fashion the mental character in relation to 
 the circumstances of life that it shall be itself a complete 
 harmony ; that on no occasion shall passion incline 
 where the judgment approves not, or conflicting passions 
 distract the mind, or inclination prompt what conscience 
 condemns ; that always the whole energies of being 
 shall consent in the will. 
 
 Without doubt, will is the highest force which Nature 
 has yet developed, the last consummate blossom of all 
 her marvellous works. The natural product of desire 
 illuminated by the highest and completest reflection, it 
 represents the exquisitely and subtly adapted reaction of 
 man to the best insight into the relations in which he 
 moves. Hence the vast power of the human will wit- 
 nessed in the lives of those eminent men of practical 
 genius who have exhibited its highest evolution. They 
 were in harmony with the current of events among 
 which they lived ; co ordinating in themselves the forces 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 457 
 
 that were at work around them, they accomplished what 
 the world had at heart in that age. Thus the force which 
 they displayed was a force not their own ; the power of 
 the universe was behind them, and they became the 
 organs of its manifestation. Beneath them were " the 
 everlasting arms." If we reflect upon the way in which 
 the social and intellectual forces of an age are thus co- 
 ordinated in the work of genius, and again upon the 
 manner in which the actions of the different nerve- 
 centres of the body are subordinated and co-ordinated 
 in the manifestation of will, — how there are, as it were, 
 in both cases, a gathering together and a concentration 
 of different forces into one definite mode of action, a 
 unifying of their energies, — we may be able to form a 
 conception, by help of what we can thus observe, of the 
 mode of that exaltation or transpeciation of force and 
 matter throughout nature which we cannot follow 
 through its inmost processes.* 
 
 By the power of a well-fashioned will man reacts with 
 intelligent success upon the external world, brings himself 
 into a complete harmony with its surroundings, assimi- 
 lates and incorporates nature, and thus carries forward its 
 organic evolution : he realises practically that there are 
 not two worlds, a world of physical nature and a world of 
 human consciousness, standing over against one another, 
 but that there is one world of nature whereof his con- 
 scious life is an event The highest action of the will is 
 therefore truly creative, for in it is initiated a new develop- 
 ment of nature through man ; it adumbrates the possibili- 
 ties of mankind, as a rudimentary organ in a lower species 
 of animal foretells obscurely the higher species in which 
 it will have full development. If we ask whence comes 
 the impulse which displays itself in this upward nisus, we 
 can only answer lamely that it comes from the same un- 
 
 * Transpeciation is a word used by Sir Thomas Browne which 
 might be found useful at the present day. 
 
458 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap.. 
 
 fathomable source as the impulse which inspires or moves 
 organic evolution throughout nature. He who reflects 
 upon himself and upon the universe is forced in the end 
 to the recognition, in the workings of the world, of a power 
 from which all life and energy proceed, which has been 
 from the beginning, is now, and, so far as we can see, 
 ever shall be, and which cannot be comprehended and 
 controlled by human thought and will, but comprehends 
 and controls human thought and will. We recognise an 
 impulsion outside ourselves, working also in our wills, 
 which is the moving energy of the evolution which went 
 on through countless ages before man appeared upon 
 earth, which is going on now in his progress, and which 
 will doubtless go on through countless ages after he has 
 ceased to replenish the earth and subdue it. We come 
 back indeed to something which, however we name 
 it, or forbear to name it, is very like the theological 
 Trinity — God the Unrevealed and Unrevealable, God 
 the Revealed, and God the Revealer. In human thought 
 and will nature has arrived at self-consciousness, but the 
 power which impels the highest evolution of life, as mani- 
 fested in the highest reach of human thought and will, 
 is fundamentally the same power as that which impels 
 the evolution of the lowest forms of life. For man to 
 seize upon this power as it works in him, to divorce it 
 from the rest of nature, to look upon it as supernaturally 
 infused and designate it free-will, and thereupon to base 
 claims for himself not only to a rank infinitely higher 
 than, and to a destiny entirely different from, that of 
 anything else in the universe, but to be the end and 
 purpose of creation, may be set down as a proof that 
 nature, having reached self-consciousness, is, like a youth 
 at the corresponding stage of development, afflicted with 
 an insufferable conceit. 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 459 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 1 (/. 416). — Jonathan Edwards asserts that there is no difficulty in 
 showing, by' attention to our own experience, not only that the will 
 must be influenced in its choice by something that has a prepon- 
 derating influence upon it, but also how it is so : — 
 
 " Thus, supposing I have a chess-board before me ; and because 
 I am required by a superior, or desired by a friend, or to make some 
 experiment concerning my own ability and liberty, or on some other 
 consideration, I am determined to touch some one of the spots or 
 squares on the board with my finger ; not being limited or directed 
 in the first proposal, or my own first purpose, which is general, to 
 any one in particular ; and there being nothing in the squares, in 
 themselves considered, that recommends any one of all the sixty- 
 four more than another ; in this case my mind determines to give 
 itself up to what is vulgarly called accident* by determining to touch 
 that square which happens to be most in view, which my eye is 
 especially upon at that moment, or which happens to be most in my 
 mind, or which I shall be directed to by some other such like acci- 
 dent. Here are several steps of the mind's proceeding (though all 
 may be done as it were in a moment) : the first step is its general 
 determination that it will touch one of the squares. The next step 
 is another general determination to give itself up to accident, in some 
 certain way ; as to touch that which shall be most in the eye or 
 mind at that time, or to some other such like accident. The third 
 and last step is a particular determination to touch a certain in- 
 dividual spot, even that square which, by that sort of accident the 
 mind has pitched upon, has actually offered itself beyond others. 
 Now it is apparent, that in none of these several steps does the mind 
 proceed in absolute indifference, but in each of them is influenced 
 by a preponderating inducement. So it is in the first step ; the 
 mind's general determination to touch one of the sixty-four spots : 
 the mind is not absolutely indifferent whether it does so or no ; it 
 is induced to do it, for the sake of making some experiment, or by 
 
 * I have elsewhere observed what that is which is vulgarly called 
 accident ; that it is nothing akin to the Arminian metaphysical 
 notion of contingence, something not connected with any thing fore- 
 going ; but that it is something that comes to pass in the course of 
 things, in some affair that men are concerned in, unforeseen, and nnt 
 owing to their design. 
 
460 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 the desire of a friend, or some other motive that prevails. So it is 
 in the second step j the mind's determining to give itself up to acci- 
 dent, by touching that which shall be most in the eye, or the idea of 
 which shall be most prevalent in the mind, &c. The mind is not 
 absolutely indifferent whether it proceeds by this rule or no ; but 
 chooses it because it appears at that time a convenient and requisite 
 expedient in order to fulfil the general purpose aforesaid. And so it 
 is in the third and last step ; it is determining to touch that individual 
 spot which actually does prevail in the mind's view. The mind is 
 not indifferent concerning this ; but is influenced by a prevailing in- 
 ducement and reason ; which is, that this is a prosecution of the pre- 
 ceding determination, which appeared requisite, and was fixed before 
 in the second step 
 
 "As the acts of will, in each step of the fore-mentioned procedure, 
 do not come to pass without a particular cause, every act is owing to 
 a prevailing inducement : so the accident, as I have called it, or that 
 which happens in the unsearchable course of things, to which the 
 mind yields itself, and by which it is guided, is not anything which 
 comes to pass without a cause ; and the mind, in being determined 
 to be guided by it, is not determined by something that has no 
 cause, any more than if it determined to be guided by a lot, or the 
 casting of a die. For though the die's falling in such a manner be 
 accidental to him that casts it, yet none will suppose that there is no 
 cause why it falls as it does. The involuntary changes in the suc- 
 cession of our ideas, though the cause may not be observed, have as 
 much a cause as the changeable motions of the motes that float in 
 the air, or the continual, infinitely various, successive changes of the 
 unevenness on the surface of the water." An Inquiry into the 
 Modern prevailing notions of that Freedom of the Will which is sup- 
 posed to be essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and 
 Punishment, Praise and Blame, p. 67. 
 
 2 (/. 427). — " Sixthly, the will appears to be nothing but a desire 
 or aversion sufficiently strong to produce an action that is not auto- 
 matic primarily or secondarily. At least it appears to me that the 
 substitution of these words for the word will may be justified by 
 the common use of language. The will is, therefore, that desire or 
 aversion which is strongest for the present time. Since, therefore, 
 all love and hatred, all desire and aversion, are factitious and gener- 
 ated by association, i.e. mechanically, it follows that the will is 
 mechanical also." Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind, 
 p. 205. 
 
 " Appetite, therefore, and aversion are simply so called as long 
 as they follow not deliberation. But if deliberation have gone 
 
vii.] VOLITION. 461 
 
 before, then the last act of it, if it be appeti'e, is called will ; if 
 aversion, unwillingness. .... Neither is the freedom of willing or 
 not willing greater in man than in other living creatures. For where 
 there is appetite the entire cause of appetite hath preceded ; and, 
 consequently, the act of appetite could not choose but follow ; that 
 is, hath of necessity followed. And, therefore, such a liberty as is 
 free from necessity is not to be found either in the will of men or of 
 beasts. But if by liberty we understand the faculty or power, not of 
 willing, but of doing what they will, then certainly that liberty is to 
 be allowed to both, and both may equally have it, whensoever it is 
 to be had." — Hobbes, vol. i. p. 409. 
 
 " The whole sum of desires, aversions, hopes, and fears, con- 
 tinued till the thing be either done or thought impossible, is that we 
 call Deliberation." — Leviathan, vii. 
 
 3 (P- 436)' — I extract the following remarks of Hume : — 
 
 1. " But do we pretend to be acquainted with the nature of the 
 human soul, and the nature of the idea, or the aptitude of one to 
 produce the other? .... We only feel the event, namely, the 
 existence of an idea, consequent to a command of the will. But the 
 manner in which this operation is performed, the power by which it 
 is produced, is entirely beyond our comprehension. " 
 
 2. "The command of the mind over itself is limited as well as 
 its command over the body ; and these limits are not known by 
 
 reason Will any one pretend to assign the ultimate reason 
 
 of these boundaries, or show why the power is deficient in one 
 case, not in another? " 
 
 3. "Self-command is very different at different times 
 
 Can we give any reason for these variations, except experience? 
 Is there not here, either in a spiritual or material substance, or 
 both, some secret mechanism or structure of parts, upon which the 
 effect depends, and which, being entirely unknown to us, renders 
 the power or energy of the will equally unknown and incomprehen- 
 sible?" 
 
 4. " The motion of our body follows upon the command of our 
 will. Of this we are every moment conscious. But the means by 
 which this is effected, the energy by which the will performs so ex- 
 traordinary an operation ; of this we are so far from being imme- 
 diately conscious, that it must for ever escape our most diligent 
 inquiry." 
 
 After explaining that volition does not act directly on a limb 
 
 itself, but through certain muscles and nerves, through which the 
 
 motion is successively propagated, he asks — " Can there be a more 
 
 certain proof that the power by which this whole operation is per- 
 
 21 
 
462 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. vn. 
 
 formed, so far from being directly and fully known by an inward 
 sentiment or consciousness, is to the last degree mysterious and un- 
 intelligible. Here the mind wills a certain event ; immediately 
 another event unknown to ourselves, and totally different from the 
 intended, is produced. This event produces another equally un- 
 known ; till, at last, through a long succession, the desired event is 
 produced." — Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES OR MOTORIUM COM- 
 MUNE, AND ACTUATION OR EFFECTION. 
 
 Thus far I have been engaged in considering the de- 
 velopment of the mental organization, as it takes place in 
 the production of simple or presentative ideas out of 
 sensory impressions, with their associated motor reac- 
 tions, — that is, in apprehension; in the production of 
 representative ideas or conceptions by abstraction from 
 the simple ideas, — that is, in comprehension ; and in the 
 production of volition as the result of the complex inter- 
 working of desires and conceptions. But it is not man's 
 function in life merely to think and feel ; his inner life 
 he must express or utter in action of some kind. In all 
 animals there is an instinct or impulse to perform move- 
 ments, either spontaneously or in answer to conscious and 
 unconscious stimuli; for bodily exercise is necessary to the 
 procuring of food, to the preservation of health, and to 
 defence against their enemies. When there is no exercise 
 of the proper movements, sensations of discomfort and 
 restlessness are produced which impel the animal to per- 
 form movements in order to obtain relief from the 
 discomfort which is felt, and to procure the agreeable 
 sensations which will follow activity. After exertion 
 there is an instinct for repose ; the energy stored up 
 by nutrition in the nervous centres having been spent, 
 and requiring renewal. The instincts to movements in 
 
464 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 the different organs with which animals are thus furnished 
 to fulfil the ends of their life produce the habits and 
 actions of their so-called animal life, and the movements 
 are really complex manifestations of sensori-motor action. 
 Just as centripetal and centrifugal nerve fibres united by 
 nerve cells and commissural fibres are the simple elements 
 out of which the complicated structure of the nervous 
 system is built up, so sensation and motion are the simple 
 functional units from which the complex mental processes 
 are evolved. The natural consequence of a sensation is 
 a movement, which follows necessarily, unless it be inhi- 
 bited, or unless it be transformed into an equivalent 
 activity, as happens when its energy is expended in 
 acting upon the blood-vessels and affects secretion and 
 nutrition. 
 
 It is evident then that there are other residua besides 
 those which have already been specially dealt with, which 
 enter as constituents into his mental life — the residua, 
 namely, that are left behind by movements or actions. 
 The movements that are instigated or actuated by a 
 particular nerve centre do, like the ideas, leave behind 
 them their residua, which, after several repetitions, be- 
 come so completely organized into the nature of the 
 nerve centre that the movements may henceforth be 
 automatic. There is then, intervening between the 
 volitional impulse and the action, a department or re- 
 pository of motor residua, in which exist the immediate 
 agents of movements— a region, psychologically speaking, 
 of abstract, latent, or potential movements. If recourse 
 be had to physiology, it is found that, conformably with 
 what psychological analysis teaches, there are numerous 
 special motor nervous centres, or nuclei of ganglionic 
 cells, cerebral and spinal, from which motor nerves pro- 
 ceed, and by the experimental irritation of which move- 
 ments may be artificially excited. These motor centres 
 have their special connections, by means of intemuncianf 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 465 
 
 fibres, with regions of the anterior convolutions of the 
 brain, so that, as recent experiments have shown, the 
 definite movements may be excited by stimulation of the 
 cortical representatives. As the sovereign deals with his 
 subjects through their representatives, so the will deals 
 with movements through their representative centres in 
 the convolutions. The term which I have taken leave 
 to use for the purpose of designating, psychologically, 
 the common centres of movement is the motorium 
 commune. 
 
 This region of motor residua, or, as I have ventured 
 to call it, this motorium commune, is related to concep- 
 tion on the reactive side of human life, as sensation is 
 on the receptive side. As the residua of sensorial acti- 
 vity, as already seen, minister and are necessary to a 
 definite representative conception, so the residua of 
 motorial activity in their turn enter essentially into con- 
 ception, and are indispensable to its realization in action. 
 It may not be amiss, then, to take notice here, again, 
 how the highest mental action comprehends or contains 
 the whole bodily life. The sensory life enters essentially 
 into conception ; the organic life, as previously set forth, 
 participates in the emotional quality of it ; and the 
 motorial activity of the body is essential to its exact 
 definition and outward expression. How mischievously 
 unjust, then, is the absolute barrier set up between mind 
 and body ! How misleading the parcelling out of the 
 mind into separate faculties that answer to nothing in 
 nature ! 
 
 What name may most properly be given to this neg- 
 lected but important motorial region of our mental life ? 
 The motor residua that mingle in our conceptions have 
 been called, in Germany, motor intuitions or percepts 
 (Bewegungs-anschauungen). This name is applicable 
 only to those motor substrata that are concerned in 
 voluntary movements — those the functions of which 
 
466 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 intervene between volitions and acts and which may be 
 excited by stimulation of the cortical representative 
 motor centres. But it must not be overlooked that the 
 subordinate motor ganglia are the real motor centres, 
 containing the organized faculties of the different move- 
 ments, and that these may be excited to action by a 
 sensational or reflex stimulus as well as by an impulse 
 from the hemispheres. In this case it plainly would not 
 be proper to speak of motor intuitions or percepts : it is 
 only when the impression of the definite movement has 
 been conveyed upwards to the frontal brain that the 
 motor intuition is produced. The whole region of motor 
 residua might be described generically as the department 
 of actuation; a department containing the powers or 
 faculties through which the nervous centres, when excited 
 to activity, act upon the muscular system, and, by thus 
 uttering or expressing their energies, restore the equili- 
 brium between the individual and the environment. 
 It contains the means by which will, idea, or sensation 
 actuates definite movements, or prevents their occur- 
 rence. To give the name of locomotive faculty to this 
 province of mind would land us in the inconsistency of 
 denominating locomotive an agency which often acts to 
 inhibit or prevent motion. 
 
 However it be named, there can be no doubt that such 
 a region of mental activity exists, and that in it are con- 
 tained, fashioned and co-ordinated, the faculties of 
 different groups and series of movements. It is easy 
 to perceive why will can only determine the result 
 when it dictates an act, and cannot determine the ac- 
 tion of a particular muscle, or the combined actions of 
 certain muscles which have not acted together before. 
 All it does is to let loose, as it were, the proper agency 
 in the motor centre; and this is done by willing the 
 event, which it is enabled to do by means of the proper 
 motor intuition. When I will to utter a certain word, I 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 467 
 
 will the event, the complex articulating movements being 
 possible to me only through the medium of the proper 
 motor intuition. The impulse plus the special motor 
 intuition constitutes the particular volition. A voluntary 
 movement is truly a reflex act in the cortical centres of 
 the brain ; differing from the lower reflex movements in 
 these circumstances — first, that it does not immediately 
 follow the stimulus, but is caused by the excitation of 
 many associated sensory residua which have been laid 
 up in consequence of former experiences ; and, secondly, 
 that it contains or evinces a distinct adaptation to an end 
 or purpose, by reason of the excitation of associated motor 
 residua which have been organized effects of former 
 adjustments. If the result wished is a new, unfamiliar 
 one, no residua thereof from previous experiences exist- 
 ing in the motor centres, then the will is unequal to the 
 accomplishment of it ; there is not an exact and definite 
 idea of the end to be effected, the necessary motor in- 
 tuition being wanting. After repeated trials, the desired 
 skill is firmly acquired, and the movement is thenceforth 
 automatic, the motor intuition having been gradually 
 organized in the proper nervous centres : the result 
 stored up strictly corresponds with that which in other 
 nervous centres we describe as abstract idea. It is pro- 
 bable that the so-called motor centres in the cerebral 
 convolutions are really the centres of these motor in- 
 tuitions ; in other words, they are the centres in which 
 the subordinate motor centres act upon consciousness, 
 and they thus constitute the physiological agency of 
 voluntary movements. 
 
 In animals the motor intuitions, like their other facul- 
 ties, are mostly innate. There are no distinct, clear 
 conceptions accompanying their instinctive actions ; but 
 obscure sensations and feelings excite the motor centres, 
 which then determine the action of the proper muscles. 
 In man, on the other hand, although the faculties of 
 
468 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 certain co-ordinate movements do exist, preformed in the 
 nervous centres, the motor faculties are mostly acquired ; 
 in this regard corresponding with the formation of his 
 other mental faculties. Our ideas of distance, size, and 
 solidity furnish striking examples of the manner in which 
 we are indebted to our motor intuitions, and of the dif- 
 ference in respect of them between us and the animals. 
 The young swallow's intuition of distance appears to be 
 as perfect when it begins to fly as it is after a life-experi- 
 ence ; but it is not so with the young child, which cannot 
 for some time tell how distant or how near an object is. 
 In the first instance, the child's body moves with the 
 eyes, when these are fixed upon a light that is moved 
 about before it. After a few weeks the moving light is 
 followed by a motion of the head only ; next the eye-ball 
 itself is turned also; and ultimately objects are followed 
 with the eye without any motion of the head. As this is 
 going on, a recognition of the position and distance of an 
 object is acquired gradually, and the convergence of the 
 axes of the eyes is seen to change regularly and quickly 
 with the approach of the object to, or its removal from, 
 the eyes. 
 
 Now it is well known that the accommodation of the 
 eyes to distance is effected, for near objects, by a con- 
 vergence of their axes and an accommodation of their 
 lenses, two actions which are from the first very firmly 
 associated ; so much so that a congenital defect in the 
 lens is now recognised to be the frequent cause of 
 squinting in children. And it is quite possible, by expe- 
 rimentally modifying, by the use of suitable glasses, the 
 customary consentaneous convergence of the axes, to 
 deceive perception and to cause it to be a false induction 
 concerning the object. It infers certain things from cer- 
 tain movements, and when these are deranged it makes 
 false inferences for a time. But these accommodating 
 movements of the eye are not determined by any act of 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 469 
 
 will, nor are they within consciousness ; they are con- 
 sensual movements in respondence to the visual sensa- 
 tion, and strictly comparable with the instinctive move- 
 ments of the animals. It is not the visual sensation 
 directly which gives us the idea of intuition of distance, 
 but the motor intuition of the accommodating movement 
 in association with the visual impression, which, though 
 uncertain and confused at first in man, soon gets precision 
 and distinctness. And, after all, it gets this precision and 
 distinctness in so short a time only because it inherits an 
 anatomical mechanism which represents the accumulated 
 experiences of countless ancestors : if the individual 
 were obliged to acquire it himself from the foundations, 
 all his life would not suffice for the work. 
 
 In this example we have a type of that which happens, 
 with greater or less rapidity, in the case of every movement 
 in the body. The infant at first kicks out its leg — whether 
 from a so-called spontaneous outburst of energy, or by 
 reason of some organic or of some external stimulus, 
 matters not — and bringing it in contact with some ex- 
 ternal object, gets thereby a sensation, in respondence to 
 which, as in the consensual accommodation of the eyes, 
 adaptations of movements take place, and muscular 
 intuitions are more or less quickly and completely 
 organized.* There is a fusion of different local sensa- 
 tions with different muscular feelings ; certain sensations 
 and certain movements are thus associated, and the 
 residua of the muscular movements, or the motor intui- 
 tions, are henceforth essential constituents of our mental 
 life, whether we are distinctly conscious of them or not. 
 
 Consider, if further illustration be needed, the gradual 
 
 * The innate mechanism soon comes into action, being in a state 
 of waiting preparation, so to speak, to respond to the suitable 
 stimulus. As Sir C. Bell remarked, an infant evinces an apprehen- 
 sion of falling while it is still in the nurse's arms. A young kitten 
 will stretch its neck in search of the teat when it is only half born. 
 
470 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 acquisition of the complex movements of speech, 
 and the intimate connection which they have with the 
 formation of our conceptions. We acquire articulate 
 speech through imitation of the sounds of words ; the 
 sensory residua of the sound of the word are associated 
 -by practice with definite muscular articulating move- 
 ments ; the motor intuitions are thus organized in their 
 proper centres ; and these motor intuitions may then be 
 excited, and give expression to ideas, by stimuli pro- 
 ceeding from the associated sensory residua of other 
 senses than sound. Thus the sight, or touch, or taste 
 of an object will excite the proper word without inter- 
 vention of the auditory residua, when speech has been 
 learned. A weak-minded person, or a person of low 
 cultivation, often cannot content himself with the mental 
 representation of a word, or clearly comprehend a ques- 
 tion put to him, without bringing the actual movement 
 to his assistance ; he must utter the word or repeat the 
 question aloud, in order to get his conception distinctly. 
 Education consists fundamentally in the association 
 of certain definite sensory currents, excited by ex- 
 ternal impressions, with certain definite motor currents, 
 which are the adapted reactions of the individual to 
 the impressions which affect him. No wonder then 
 that we find so much automatic action when we look 
 closely into the mental processes of men ; the whole 
 aim of education on the part of one generation being 
 to produce upon the next generation the same impres- 
 sions which it has experienced, and to teach the same 
 reactions which it has performed. It is most neces- 
 sary, however, to guard against the strong disposition 
 which there is to look upon certain movements, those of 
 the eye and the tongue, as having a special connection 
 with the mental life which other movements of the body 
 have not ; they have a specially intimate connection, but 
 not a special kind of connection. Unwarrantably sepa- 
 
vni.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 471 
 
 rating by an absolute barrier the mind from the body, 
 and then locating it in a particular corner of the latter, as 
 is commonly done, we are prone to forget that in mental 
 action the whole bodily life is comprehended — that what 
 is displayed outwardly exists in the innermost — that every 
 motor intuition has its essential place and influence in 
 our mental life. 
 
 It is not without instruction to note how very 
 far the limit of possible utterance by speech is from 
 being reached. Of the possible sounds which man is 
 able to pronounce and distinguish a great variety is 
 never made use of. " Each language or dialect of the 
 world is found in practice to select a limited series of 
 definite vowels and consonants, keeping with tolerable 
 exactness to each, and choosing what may be called its 
 phonetic alphabet."* In the different languages of the 
 world there is an abundant variety of sounds, many of 
 which are now used to express the same ideas, but which 
 might, if need were, be used at some future time to 
 express the new ideas and feelings which mankind will 
 presumably acquire. Moreover, as Mr. Tylor has re- 
 marked, there are many sounds capable of being used in 
 articulate speech, such as varieties of chirping, blowing, 
 hissing, whistling, &c, which no tribe is known to have 
 brought into their alphabet. Meanwhile we are very far 
 from having exhausted the resources of the English 
 alphabet. It appears that if the combinations of the 
 twenty-six letters of the English alphabet were free, " so 
 that any letter could be indifferently sounded with any 
 other, the number of words which could be formed with- 
 out any repetition would be z a6 — 1, or 67,108,863.'^ 
 But as the formation of our vocal organs is such as to 
 prevent us using the greater part of these conjunctions of 
 letters, inasmuch as at least one vowel must be present 
 
 * Trior's Primitive Culture, vol. i. p. 155. 
 t Jevons's Principles of Science, vol. i. p. 197. 
 
472 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 in each word and more than two consonants cannot 
 usually be brought together, the actual number of avail- 
 able words is 100,000 ; an ample store for the present, 
 seeing that Shakespeare uses no more than 15,000, a 
 person of ordinary cultivation between 3,000 and 4,000, 
 and an agricultural labourer only about 300. 
 
 In continuation- of the foregoing exposition of the 
 agency of motor residua in mental function, let me direct 
 attention to their mental effects when they have been 
 directly excited. In that condition which Mr. Braid 
 called " hypnotism," it has been pointed out already that 
 if the face or limbs of the patients are placed in an atti- 
 tude which is the normal expression of a certain emotion, 
 thereupon that emotion is actually excited ; the motor 
 intuition immediately awakening the appropriate con- 
 ception. This is in accordance with what we frequently 
 observe in watching the genesis of mind in young chil- 
 dren, where it is plain that an attitude or gesture, uncon- 
 sciously or involuntarily evoked, sometimes awakens in 
 the mind the correlative idea or emotion, and where, on 
 the other hand, every thought is immediately translated 
 into some movement.* 
 
 It was taken notice of by Mr. Burke that when the 
 body is disposed by any means whatsoever to such emo- 
 tions as it would acquire by means of a certain passion, it 
 will of itself excite something very like that passion in 
 the mind. And he relates in confirmation a curious story 
 told of the celebrated physiognomist Campanella : — 
 " This man, it seems, had not only made very accurate 
 observations on human faces, but was very expert in 
 mimicking such as were any way remarkable. When he 
 had a mind to penetrate into the inclinations of those he 
 
 * Vulpian (op. cit. p. 290) formularizes the general physiological 
 law, that every excitation of a nerve, at any point in its length, is 
 transmitted immediately and simultaneously both in a centripetal 
 and centrifugal direction. 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 473 
 
 had to deal with, he composed his face, his gesture, and 
 his whole body, as nearly as he could, into the exact simili- 
 tude of the person he intended to examine ; and then care- 
 fully observed what turn of mind he seemed to acquire 
 by this change. So that, says my author, he was able to 
 enter into the dispositions and thoughts of people as 
 effectually as if he had been changed into the very men."* 
 Let any one make the experiment of fixing the coun- 
 tenance in the expression of a certain passion, and, while 
 retaining that expression, of trying to call up in the mind 
 a quite different passion ; he will find it impossible to 
 succeed until he alters the expression of his face. 
 
 It may be remarked in this relation that these physiog- 
 nomical expressions of the emotions are not really invented 
 by the emotions which they express. The physiological 
 mechanism which subserves them is innate in the indi- 
 vidual, having been inherited by him as heir of the 
 organized experiences of the race ; wherefore the mus- 
 cular expression of a passion is uniform in different per- 
 sons, and may be excited into action before the feeling 
 of which it afterwards seems to become a necessary part. 
 The smile on an infant's cheek, which in after years cor- 
 responds with pleasurable emotions, is, as Sir C. Bell 
 remarked, oftenest first seen when it is asleep, and is 
 ascribed by the sage nurse to internal convulsions or 
 irritation. Here the definite muscular action precedes 
 the development of the mental state with which it is 
 afterwards firmly associated. One observes the same 
 thing sometimes on the face of a dying person, when the 
 
 * Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, p. 261. "I have often 
 observed," he says, "that on mimicking the looks and gestures of 
 angry, or placid, or frightened, or daring men, I have involuntarily 
 found my mind turned to that passion whose appearance I en- 
 deavoured to imitate ; nay, I am convinced it is hard to avoid it, 
 though one strove to separate the passion from its correspondent 
 gestures." 
 
474 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 flitting smile, which might at the first glance seem to 
 denote a happy thought, or the frown which would seem 
 to mark a painful thought, is plainly the passing effect of 
 some internal irritation. Here the special action of the 
 features has survived the decay of the conscious state. 
 I pointed out in a former chapter how essential a 
 part the internal organs of the body play in the produc- 
 tion of the passions, and how probable it is that the 
 uniformity of passions among mankind is due to the 
 uniform operation of these organs upon the brain ; it is 
 now seen that the motor expressions of the passions may 
 be produced by stimuli from the internal organs before 
 the development, and after the extinction, of the con- 
 scious mental states ; the question, then, may fairly be 
 raised whether the development of the conscious mental 
 state is not in great measure owing to this sensori- 
 motor activity of the organic life. When, for instance, 
 the infant, immediately after its birth, performs the 
 movements of sucking as a purely reflex operation, it is 
 presumed to have no more conscious feeling of the act 
 than the anencephalic infant which does the same thing; 
 but is it not probable that the operation awakens in its 
 mind by degrees the appropriate conscious state, the 
 current of sensori-motor activity exciting centripetally 
 its representative current in the convolutions, and that it 
 acquires by this means the knowledge and the feeling 
 of pleasure which are afterwards associated with the con- 
 scious gratification of the appetite for food ? At an early 
 period, when the feeble muscles of the arms and legs can 
 hardly make a few indefinite movements, the muscles of 
 the face, Cabanis has remarked, already express, by dis- 
 tinct movements, nearly all the series of general feelings 
 peculiar to human nature, so that the attentive observer 
 easily recognises in the picture the characteristic traits of 
 the future man. It is, he says, not in external impressions 
 that the causes of such complicated movements are to be 
 
vin.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 475 
 
 found, for, with the exception of touch, the senses hardly 
 exist ; it is in internal impressions, in their simultaneous 
 concurrence, in their sympathetic combinations, that we 
 find the, source of this language of the physiognomy. 
 
 The condition of disease known as aphasia, which has 
 been so much studied during the last few years, is espe- 
 cially interesting in its bearing on the doctrine of motor 
 intuitions. A person loses the power of expressing his 
 thoughts by articulate language, understanding all the 
 time perhaps what is said to him.; and although in the 
 majority of cases in which this happens there is hemi- 
 plegia of. one side, generally of the right, there may be 
 no paralysis at all. Moreover, in those cases in which 
 there is hemiplegia, there is not any paralysis' of the 
 muscles of articulation ; the loss of speech is not due to 
 any defect in the actual instruments of utterance ; nor is 
 the loss of power of intelligent expression by speech 
 owing in all cases, or entirely in any case, to the loss of 
 intelligence, though it is certainly true that there is in 
 many cases of hemiplegia some degree of mental failure — 
 some degree of enfeebled intelligence and of emotional 
 excitability. Intelligence, however, often fails or is lost 
 without loss of the power of speech.; and we certainly 
 meet with occasional instances of the latter defect with- 
 out any appreciable loss of intelligence — instances in 
 which the patient is able to communicate his thoughts 
 by gesture-language, or by writing. It is to be borne in 
 mind, in regard to this question, that language consists 
 essentially in the establishment of a definite relation 
 between the idea and the sign by which it is outwardly 
 manifested; that it may be verbal, vocal, graphic, or 
 mimic ; and that the general faculty of language includes 
 all these modes of expressing the thoughts. The per- 
 sistence of one or more of these other modes of expres- 
 sion, where the faculty of speech is lost, proves that, 
 notwithstanding the intelligence is most probably weak- 
 
tf6 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 ened in most cases of aphasia, it is certainly not then 
 weakened to such an extent that the loss of speech can 
 be due to the abolition of ideas. It may happen in some 
 cases that the power of speech is not entirely lost, the 
 person making use of wrong words, either conscious or 
 unconscious that he is doing so ; in other cases, that he 
 can make an apt emotional ejaculation under the influ- 
 ence of excitement when he is quite unable to speak his 
 thoughts. 
 
 Where, then, does the immediate mischief in aphasia 
 lie ? The first movements of speech which a child makes 
 are made in imitation of the sounds which it hears ; they 
 are of a reflex nature, and* are executed by means 'of 
 those parts of the pons and the medulla to which the 
 auditory nerve goes — the nuclei of the facial, the vagus, 
 and the hypoglossal nerves, which are in anatomical con- 
 nection with the nucleus of the auditory. They are a 
 development, so to speak, of the inarticulate cry which 
 the new-born infant makes; itself a muscular action 
 which implies the combined action of the expiratory 
 muscles and of the muscles which narrow the rima 
 glottidis. When in due time the definite co-brdinate 
 movement of a word has been executed as a reflex act 
 of the auditory nerve and the proper associated motor 
 nuclei, it is echoed, as it were, in the higher representa- 
 tive centres in the convolutions, through the agency of 
 the intercommunicating fibres which make the special 
 connections between the lower and the higher centres— 
 the sensorial and the ideational arcs. By repetition of 
 this centripetal action the perceptive residua of the 
 special sound are formed in the proper sensorial or 
 afferent centre of the convolutions, and the associated 
 motor residua of the special movements which effect its 
 utterance are formed in the proper motor or efferent 
 department of the convolutions ; so that when the word 
 is afterwards uttered voluntarily the stimulated sensory 
 
vin.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 477 
 
 residua in the former excite the motor intuitions in the 
 latter centres, which thereupon act centrifugally upon the 
 motor nuclei. It is reflex action in higher centres — along 
 the ideational arc. 
 
 This being the probable physiological mechanism of 
 voluntary speech, we can easily perceive that disorder 
 or loss of the function may be produced in more ways 
 than one. If the continuity of a person's auditory 
 nerve be interrupted, he will be deaf: deaf only, if 
 residua of vocal sound have been stored up before 
 he became deaf; deaf and dumb, if he was deaf before 
 such residua had been acquired, that is, if he was 
 born deaf. If the perceptive centres of the auditory 
 nerve in the convolutions were clean cut out artificially, 
 or entirely destroyed by disease or injury, all names 
 would vanish from his memory ; he would not be able to 
 understand or to repeat voluntarily a word spoken to 
 him. It is conceivable, however,, that he might even 
 under these circumstances occasionally repeat a word as 
 a reflex or sensori-motor act if the auditory nucleus and 
 its motor connections were uninjured. Moreover, he 
 would not be without ideas, forasmuch as having still 
 the residua of the perceptive centres of the other senses 
 of taste, touch, sight, his ideas might be excited through 
 these, and might even be uttered in speech by means of 
 their action upon the proper motor residua. Hearing is 
 necessary to learn to speak, as men do learji speech, but 
 once speech has been learned, it may be excited by the 
 action of other sensory residua which have been asso- 
 ciated with its motor residua. His mind would be an 
 utter blank when the name of an object was spoken 
 to him, but he might recognise the object and utter its 
 name when it was shown to him, or might know it 
 through touch when it was put into his hands. 
 
 If the connecting fibres between the auditory centres 
 in the convolutions and the associated motor residua 
 
478 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap; 
 
 in the frontal convolutions were destroyed, the person 
 would understand everything said to him, and might 
 certainly be able to speak freely, his motor residua 
 being unimpaired, but he clearly could not make the 
 connections between the sensory residua of sound and 
 their proper motor residua. He could not select the 
 right word through sound, although he might be per- 
 fectly conscious of his mistake if he used a wrong 
 one, and would certainly be able to stimulate the right 
 motor residua through the perceptive centres of the 
 other senses. If the motor residua of speech in the 
 frontal convolutions were entirely destroyed, the person, 
 while understanding what was said to him, would not be 
 able to speak a single word voluntarily ; he could neither 
 repeat voluntarily a word spoken to him, nor name an 
 object placed before his eyes or made to affect any other 
 sense, although it is possible that he might sometimes 
 utter a word as a reflex sensori-motor act through the 
 agency of the auditory nucleus and its motor connec- 
 tions. It may be supposed that the result of destroying 
 the nerves connecting the motor arrangements in the 
 frontal convolutions with the subordinate motor ganglia 
 would, so far as speech was concerned, be the same as 
 that which would follow the destruction of the motor 
 arrangements in the convolutions. Looking to these 
 different ways in which injury to the anatomical substrata 
 of speech may affect its function, and bearing in mind 
 that the injury will seldom be of so defined a character 
 as that which has been assumed for illustration in the 
 supposed cases, we shall not be surprised to witness the 
 varying phenomena which are actually met with in dif- 
 ferent forms of aphasia. As will easily be understood, 
 the difficulty is to observe accurately in a given case the 
 exact nature and extent of the deficiencies which the 
 person presents. 
 
 I am inclined to think that: the intelligence is often 
 
vni.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 479 
 
 more deeply affected in aphasia than is supposed by on- 
 lookers, and than the patient himself is apt to believe. 
 Reflecting upon the important, indeed the essential, 
 part which the motor intuitions play in the mental life, it 
 is hard to conceive how the loss of them can take place 
 without secondary injury to the ideational functions — to 
 the intelligence ; this may not be primarily affected by 
 the disease, but it cannot fail to suffer secondarily. Is it 
 possible to think definitely and consecutively without that 
 power of internal representation which we have in the 
 motor intuition, and which, in thinking, stands for the 
 outward utterance ? * We may think, it is true, of con- 
 crete perceptions, but can we pursue a train of abstract 
 thought ? Even though the aphasic patient may not be 
 himself aware of any mental failure, and may feel con- 
 vinced that it is only the words to express his ideas that he 
 lacks, yet it is not unlikely that his condition resembles 
 somewhat that of a person in a dream, who fancies that 
 he is thinking most logically, and discoursing most elo- 
 quently, when his thoughts are confused and his words 
 incoherent. The history of cases of aphasia proves that 
 this is certainly so sometimes. It is easy to comprehend 
 the disputes which arise among on-lookers who endea- 
 vour to test the intelligence in these cases : when the 
 regular channel by which intelligence expresses itself is 
 closed, it must obviously, be very difficult to appraise 
 accurately the degree of intelligence. The simple ques- 
 tions which are usually put, for this purpose, to aphasic 
 patients certainly do not decide the question : a 
 
 * " Herein lies the necessity of utterance, the representation of 
 thought, " says Heyse. " Thought is not even present to the thinker, 
 till he has set it forth out of himself. Man, as an individual endowed 
 with sense and mind, first attains to thought, and, at the same time, 
 to comprehension of himself, by setting forth out of himself the con- 
 tents of his mind ; and in this his free production, he comes to the 
 knowledge of himself, his thinking 'I.' He comes first to himself 
 in uttering himself." 
 
480 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 demented person, whose mental faculties were almost 
 abolished, might answer sensibly when he was asked 
 so commonplace a question as what he would do if the 
 room were on fire ; and many patients in lunatic asy- 
 lums whose intelligence is in a very shattered state are 
 able to play cards and draughts skilfully. It is certainly 
 quite possible for an aphasic patient to evince intelligent 
 appreciation of simple questions and obvious suggestions 
 when he has lost all power of sustained and definite 
 thought. And, apart from all theoretical considerations, 
 the evidence which exists at present is in favour of the 
 opinion that the intelligence is often weakened in 
 aphasia. 
 
 There is one observation more .to be made before pass- 
 ing from this subject. Some writers are in the habit of 
 affirming' that it is in names we think, and that they 
 are the indispensable instruments of thought. " I there- 
 fore declare my conviction,'' says Max Muller, " whether 
 right or wrong, as explicitly as possible, that thought in 
 one sense of the word, i.e., in reasoning, is impossible 
 without language." Assuredly this sounds too absolute 
 a statement. Is not the deaf and dumb man a living 
 refutation of the proposition that man cannot reason 
 without speech ? The example of Laura Bridgman, who 
 was deaf, dumb, and blind, as her case is admirably 
 described by Dr. Howe, proves that a person may have 
 human thought without being able to speak ; and the 
 instances of aphasic patients who can express their ideas 
 in writing point in the same direction. But neither these 
 instances, nor the case of Laura Bridgman, can be used 
 to prove that it is possible to think without any means of 
 physical expression. On the contrary, the evidence is 
 all the other way. The deaf and dumb man invents his 
 own signs, which he draws from the nature of objects, 
 seizing the most striking outline, or the principal move- 
 ment of an action, and using them afterwards as tokens 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 481 
 
 to represent the objects.* The deaf and dumb gesticulate 
 also as they think, and Laura Bridgman's fingers worked, 
 making the initial movements for letters of the finger- 
 alphabet, not only during her waking thoughts, but in her 
 dreams.f If we substitute for " names " " the motor 
 intuitions," or take care to comprise in language all the 
 modes of expressing thoughts, whether verbal, vocal 
 writing, or gesture-language, then it is unquestionable 
 that thought is impossible without language. In man the 
 tongue has been almost exclusively appropriated for the 
 expression of thought, but there is no absolute reason 
 why his fingers, hands, and arms might not be used, like 
 the antennae of ants, and the hands and fingers of the 
 deaf mute, to express all the results of mental action. J 
 
 * " And whilst he silently elaborates the signs he has found for 
 single objects, that is, whilst he describes these forms for himself in 
 the air, or imitates them in thought with hands, fingers, and gestures, 
 he develops for himself suitable signs to represent ideas, which 
 serve him as a means of fixing ideas of different kinds in his mind, 
 and recalling them to his memory. And thus he makes himself a 
 language, the so-called gesture-language (Geberden-sprache) ; and 
 with these few scanty and imperfect signs, a way for thought is 
 already broken, and with his thought as it now opens out, the 
 language cultivates and forms itself further and further." Many 
 artificial signs are added by teachers to enrich the language. Kruse, 
 Uber Taubstummen, 1853. He was a learned deaf mute, who 
 is quoted by Mr. Tyler in his Early History of Mankind, p. 20. 
 
 + Tyler's Early History of Mankind, p. 70. 
 
 J And even to communicate such results by touch without the 
 help of sight. In a Report of the Massachusetts Asylum for the 
 Blind, Dr. Howe relates that a blind child, during the vacation, 
 contracted St. Vitus's dance. When the school reassembled, another 
 child soon manifested the disease, and soon afterwards a third. It 
 was necessary to send these children home in order to prevent the 
 whole school being infected through the imitative tendency. They 
 soon recovered after separation. As the children were blind, it was 
 not through sight that they were infected ; but a knowledge and 
 imitation of the disordered movements were acquired by close con- 
 tact of the children with one another at their school-desks, in their 
 sports. &c. 
 
482 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 The reasons why the tongue has been specially selected 
 for this purpose are obvious : first, because of its con- 
 nexion with the vocal organs, whereby its movements, in 
 conjunction with those of the lips, modify in a great 
 variety of ways the different sounds, and thus make 
 audible language, which is plainly on the whole more 
 useful to man than visible language, for it would be 
 extremely inconvenient if one person could not com- 
 municate with another without seeing or touching him ; 
 secondly, because of the great variety, delicacy, and com- 
 plexity of movements of which the numerous muscles of 
 the tongue are capable in so small a space, whereby the most 
 delicate shades of thought and feeling can be expressed ; 
 and, thirdly, because the movements of the hands are 
 required for other purposes, while it is difficult to per- 
 ceive, what other purpose the wonderful variety of the 
 tongue's movements could have served, when it was not 
 engaged in co-operating in the taking and mastication of 
 food.* 
 
 The influence of the motor department of mental 
 action, the region of actuation, might receive further 
 illustration from the phenomena of insanity and of certain 
 convulsive diseases. It scarcely admits of question that 
 some of the delusions of the insane have their origin in 
 what may justly be called motor hallucinations; a dis- 
 order of the nervous centres of the motor intuitions gene- 
 rates in consciousness a false conception or delusion as 
 to the condition of the muscles, so that an individual 
 lying in his bed believes himself to be flying through the 
 air, or imagines his legs, arms, or head, to be separated 
 from his body, just as he has hallucinations of sense when 
 
 * It is a fact — nowise surprising when we consider what they in- 
 herit — that deaf mutes, who have been born so, do of their own 
 accord, untaught, make vocal sounds more or less articulate, attach- 
 ing a definite meaning to them, and using them afterwards in the 
 same sense. In some these sounds are very clear and well defined. 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 483 
 
 the sensorial centres are disordered. In dreams we may 
 sometimes observe the same kind of thing, as when from 
 hindered respiratory movements a person suddenly wakes 
 up with the idea that he is falling over a precipice. 
 Illusory movements, or illusory positions, are the charac- 
 teristic traits of vertigo, which is the subjective aspect of 
 the deranged motor factors ; other subjective sensations, 
 such as noises in the ears, flashes before the eyes, and 
 pkinful sensations in the head, accompanying them. Tn 
 dreams, and in drunkenness also, there is no power of 
 correcting these subjective motor experiences ; and. the 
 brain or mind, rendering them conscious, converts them 
 into false conceptions of space.* Such motor illusions 
 
 * " I had some years since," Dr. Whytt writes, "a patient affected 
 with an erysipelas in his face, who, when awake, was free from any 
 confusion in his ideas ; but no sooner did he shut his eyes, although 
 not asleep, than his imagination began to be greatly disturbed. He 
 thought himself carried swiftly through the air to distant regions ; 
 and sometimes imagined his head, arms, and legs to be separated 
 from his body, and to fly off different ways." — 06s. on Nature, Causes, 
 and Cure of Nervous, Hypochondriacal, and Hysteric Disorders. 
 1765. A drunken man who may be fairly steady while his eyes 
 are open, or while his motor centres are associated with sensory 
 stimuli, gets subjective sensations of swimming in the head, sinking 
 of his body, &c. , when his eyes are shut. 
 
 The illusive effects which follow injuries of single ngiscles of the eye 
 illustrate in a striking mariner how the movements of the eye minister 
 to our visual conceptions of space and of relations of position. If the 
 external rectus of the eye is suddenly rendered powerless by an 
 injury, the disposition to occasionally turn the eye outwards per- 
 sists ; but it is, of course, without result. The eye may be turned 
 in all other directions, and the position of objects in the field of 
 vision is correctly perceived. So soon, however, as it is attempted 
 to turn it outwards, an apparent movement of the objects occurs 
 towards the same side to which the futile effort to move the eye 
 is made. This is owing to the fact that the person believes the 
 eye, which is motionless, to move ; the consciousness of the effort to 
 move it is objectified, and produces the hallucination of an actual 
 movement, and as the eye notwithstanding does not move, the 
 objects appear to move. If the external rectus is only partially 
 
484 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 or hallucinations can of course only ensue when the 
 reaction of the disordered motor intuition is into con- 
 sciousness ; if, as may happen, and commonly does 
 happen, the reaction takes place outwards, there are 
 irregular or convulsive movements, but no delusion is 
 generated. In fact, when the molorium commune is dis- 
 ordered, its morbid function may be displayed in irre- 
 gular or convulsive muscular action, and, if the deterior- 
 ation proceed far enough, in paralysis ; or.it may reall 
 upon the mental life and give rise to disorder of intelli- 
 gence. According as the disordered function acts in an 
 upward or downward direction, centripetally or centri- 
 fugally, that is, according as it invades the sphere of con- 
 sciousness or passes into outward expression, it occasions 
 mental disorder or convulsions. 
 
 The phenomena of convulsions, properly examined, 
 serve to illustrate the existence and to exhibit the inde- 
 pendent action of the motor intuitions ; their discon- 
 nected movements show plainly that there are special 
 motor nerve-centres which may, when co-ordination 
 is deranged, act independently. Be it noted that every 
 kind of movement which may be normally excited by 
 the will may occur as a convulsive act, when, of 
 course, there is no question of the exercise of will, 
 and when there is often an entire absence of conscious- 
 paralyzed, the eye may be fixed upon an outward-lying object, but a 
 stronger effort will be needed to do so. Accordingly the object will 
 appear to be placed farther outwards than it actually is, and if the 
 person makes a grasp at it, his hand will go beyond it. Thus the 
 judgment of the position of an object in space is essentially de- 
 termined by the feeling of effort which accompanies every im- 
 pulse to movement. See Wundt, Grundziige der physiologischen 
 Psychologic, p. 553, who has deeply discussed this subject ; also 
 Bain, The Senses and the Intellect, where it is treated in thorough 
 detail. It appears that Mr. Bain's theory and exposition of the 
 nature of our perception of space agrees in essential points with that 
 ofSteinbuch. (Beitrag zur Physiologic der Sinne. Niimberg, 181 1.) 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 485 
 
 ness. As the individual in sound health must give in- 
 tense attention in order to isolate a certain muscular 
 movement which usually takes place as a part of a com- 
 plex series, and cannot always then succeed, it is nowise 
 surprising that there should often be more or less co- 
 ordination of movements in spasmodic or convulsive 
 muscular action. Indeed, it would be surprising if there 
 were not. In cases of cerebral haemorrhage, it sometimes 
 ^kppens that the articulating movements of single sounds, 
 or of a certain series of sounds, syllables, or words, are 
 produced without any mental act or even against the will 
 of the patient ; in like manner, other co-ordinate move- 
 ments take place sometimes without the least trace 
 of consciousness being evinced. We shall not be sur- 
 prised at the occasional occurrence of speech movements 
 and of other dennitcacts during complete unconscious- 
 ness if we call to mind how poetry which has been 
 thoroughly learned may be repeated mechanically, while 
 the attention is engaged on something quite different ; the 
 repetition, once started, being indeed most successful 
 when done with least consciousness. As examples of 
 general spasmodic action of the body, co-ordinated never- 
 theless into a particular outcome, Romberg relates a 
 remarkable case of what he calls rotatory spasm in a 
 girl ten years of age, and another case of co-ordinated 
 spasm in combination with chorea, which occurred in a 
 boy aged six, who was occasionally attacked with an 
 irresistible desire to climb in spite of every impediment ; 
 in the intervals he was affected with chorea. Conscious- 
 ness is not always entirely abolished ; and in that case 
 the patients are able to give an account of the impulse 
 which instigates the movements, and which they are un- 
 able to withstand successfully. 
 
 It is a well known fact that the idea of convul- 
 sions, whether excited by present perception or through 
 memory, may express itself in convulsive movements 
 22 
 
486 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 — movements which, nevertheless, often display a con- 
 siderable amount of co-ordination. Everybody perceives 
 how, in a healthy person, swallowing, coughing, and 
 yawning are excited by the observation of these acts in 
 another ; and as instances of similarly produced morbid 
 actions, Romberg adduces those dancing epidemics of 
 the Middle Ages, in which co-ordinate spasmodic move- 
 ments were notoriously excited in delicate women, and 
 continued by them with a violence and persistence whi^ 
 would soon have exhausted the strongest man who was 
 in a normal mental state. Persons who are labouring 
 under acute mania frequently keep up an unintermitting 
 succession of purposeless, irregular, and mischievous or 
 destructive acts, which nevertheless evince a considerable 
 amount of co-ordination — a complex co-ordination of 
 acts, I mean, not of individual movements simply ; their 
 actions, like their ideas, are delirious and incoherent. 
 They are complex machines which, being out of order, 
 go on in deranged action. Will represents the highest 
 co-ordination of the ideas, feelings, and movements ; when 
 disease has destroyed this highest acquisition of evolu- 
 tion, we have, so to speak, a resolution of will into the 
 component factors, which now act on their own account 
 — automatically : the uncontrolled act of passion, or the 
 convulsion of a limb, is a loss of power of will, because 
 it is an independent act, no longer in due co-ordination 
 with, or subordination to, other functions of the mental 
 organization. It behoves us to keep well in mind, and 
 to appreciate the full bearing and import of, the fact that 
 as so many of our co-ordinate actions are done automa- 
 tically in health, so there may be much co-ordinate 
 automatic action in the convulsive phenomena of 
 disease. 
 
 There yet remain further important considerations. 
 Let a man have the will to command a certain move- 
 ment and a conception of the result desired, without 
 
vui.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 487 
 
 any paralysis of motor power, he may still be impotent 
 to perform the movement. And why? Because there 
 may be a paralysis of sensibility in the muscles of the 
 part, by reason of which he has no means of knowing 
 what is the condition of the instruments which he has 
 to use — cannot tell whether they are acting or not ; he 
 lacks that information which the muscular sense should 
 rightly yield him.(') In order that the will may actuate a 
 movement, there are necessary, then, not only a concep- 
 tion of the end desired and a motor intuition of the 
 muscular movements subserving that end, but also a 
 sense of the action of the muscles. Any psychological 
 arguments as to the value of this guiding muscular feel- 
 ing are rendered needless by pathological experience, 
 which plainly proves that,- when the muscular sense is 
 paralysed, the movements cannot be performed, except 
 some other sense come to the rescue ; or, at any rate, 
 that when all the other senses are seemingly perfect the 
 movement cannot be performed, presumably because of 
 the loss of the muscular sense. It is not to be looked upon 
 as an actively conscious sense, like sight or touch, but 
 rather as of the nature of organic sense, giving its in- 
 formation and working its effects without definite con- 
 sciousness. The sense of sight may take its place when 
 it is lost : a woman whom Sir Charles Bell saw, who had 
 lost the muscular sense in her arm, could nevertheless 
 hold her child when she kept her eyes upon it ; but the 
 moment she turned her eyes away she dropped the child. 
 I have seen a similar instance of a woman, epileptic in 
 consequence of syphilis, who had lost the muscular sense 
 in her left arm, and who did not know, except she fixed 
 her eyes upon the limb, whether she had got hold of 
 anything with her hand or not; if she grasped a jug, she 
 could hold it quite well as long as she looked at it, but 
 if she turned her eyes away she dropped it : she had no 
 loss of tactile sensation. 
 
488 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 In such morbid states the difference between tactile sen- 
 sation and the muscular sense is well marked.* " Ollivier 
 details a case in which the patient had lost the cutaneous 
 sense of touch throughout the side in consequence of 
 concussion ; at the same time he was able to form a 
 correct estimate of the weight of bodies with his right 
 hand. The physician observed by Marcet, who was 
 affected with anaesthesia cutanea of the right side, was 
 perfectly able to feel his patient's pulse with the fingers of 
 the right hand and to determine its frequency and force, 
 but in order to determine the temperature of the skin he 
 was obliged to call in the aid of his left hand." Anaes- 
 thesia of the muscle, without loss of tactile power, does, 
 according to Romberg, invariably accompany the disease 
 
 * Those who deny the existence of a special muscular sense hold 
 that the information which we have of the position and movements 
 of our limbs is furnished by the tactile sense, and by the sensory 
 nerves distributed to the ligaments, the joints, &c. Certainly we are 
 conscious of the position of a limb in passive movements, when, as 
 it is moved for us, we appear to make no muscular exertion. But 
 it is not then as passive as a dead man's limb. There is some 
 muscular tension. Moreover it is true that, when there is cutaneous 
 insensibility without loss of muscular feeling, the perception of 
 our own movements is considerably disturbed. It would appear 
 that the perception of the position of a limb is really a complex 
 product produced by the fusion of manifold local sensations ot 
 touch with our various muscular feelings, and that, once formed, it is 
 excited by stimulation of any one of the simple sensations from the 
 fusion of which it has proceeded — by any one of its constituent sen. 
 sations ; just, in fact, as a perception is excited by the stimulation ot 
 any one of the special senses from the sensations of which it has been 
 constituted — e.g. the perception of an orange through touch, or smell, 
 or taste, or sight. When we are lying in bed at perfect rest, with- 
 out the least movement of a muscle being made, and without the 
 least movement of.anything that is in contact with the surface of a 
 limb, we may be uncertain or unaware what its exact position is j 
 but the moment a slight muscular contraction is made, or the moment 
 a sensation of touch is produced by the least movement of the limb, 
 or by the slightest movement of the clothes covering it, we have 
 an instant perception of its position. 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 489 
 
 called tabes dorsalis."* The eyes of patients so affected 
 are their regulators or feelers, and consequently their 
 helplessness, when their eyes are shut, or they are in the 
 dark, is extreme ; if told to shut their eyes while in the 
 erect posture, they begin to oscillate until they fall down, 
 unless supported. The skin remains sensitive except 
 during the last stage of the disease. 
 
 Romberg, Duchenne, and others have, moreover, 
 described similar morbid conditions in anagmic and 
 hysterical women, which can hardly be called paralysis, 
 as they are manifest only in the night or when the eyes 
 are shut : the patients can perform movements, but these 
 do not answer accurately to the will ; they are deceived as 
 to the amount of force necessary to be put forth, and some- 
 times cannot undertake the movement of a limb without 
 the help of sight. In these cases there is the desire to 
 effect a certain action, there is the motor intuition of the 
 movement necessary to the end desired, but the guiding 
 sensation of the muscular sense is defective or wanting 
 accordingly the action cannot be done unless the sense of 
 sight takes upon it the function of the defective muscular 
 sense. 
 
 These and similar cases ot disease seem to me to 
 throw some light upon the nature of that which we mean 
 when we speak of directing the attention and exerting 
 the will strongly. In order to direct the attention and 
 exert the will sufficiently in these cases in which there is 
 
 * It must be remembered that simple loss of muscular feeling is not 
 tabes dorsalis. In tabes dorsalis, the characteristic phenomenon is a 
 loss of the power of co-ordination of the muscles, and the morbid 
 appearances are those of degeneration of the posterior columns of the 
 spinal cord — the motor repository or centres of co-ordination of the 
 movements of the limbs. Hence the disease is now more properly 
 called progressive locomotor ataxy. Loss of muscular feeling is a 
 symptom that may occur in different diseases ; if another sense 
 lakes its place, movements are still effected; so that the power of 
 movement, the repository of motor residua, is not affected. 
 
49" THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 some temporary exhaustion or morbid enfeeblement oi 
 the motor faculties, and a powerful stimulus is necessary 
 to do what a moderate stimulus will usually do, the 
 sensory stimulus of the muscular sense must be strength- 
 ened by the co-operation of the stimulus from the sense 
 of sight, to which will be added the stimuli from the 
 acting muscles of the eye. In this way the excito-motor 
 process is aroused by a more active stimulus ; for the 
 sum of the- contributions of co-operating stimuli from 
 different senses amounts to the same thing in this relation 
 as the more powerful action of a single stimulus. The 
 direction and the exertion of will are really a solicita- 
 tion or excitation of greater excito-motor energy, and 
 consequently of more active consciousness (i.e. attention) 
 through the agency of co-operating sensory stimuli : the 
 process is purely physiological. It is in the same way. that 
 the exhausted debauchee, who is impotent in response to 
 the natural sensory stimuli, succeeds in arousing the 
 excito-motor function of sexual gratification by bringing 
 to bear upon each sense all the depraved stimuli to which 
 it is sensible, thus accumulating a sufficient stimulus to 
 produce the desired excitation. If he be a person of 
 strong imagination he may perhaps succeed in producing 
 the effect by a vivid mental representation, without actual 
 presentation, of the impressions which are adapted to act 
 as stimuli on the different senses. Thus it appears that, 
 as was before set forth, what we call directing conscious- 
 ness by a voluntary effort is really the excitation of con- 
 sciousn ess in consequence of the greater activity of cere- 
 bral processes which is produced through the co-opera- 
 tion of as many stimuli, internal or external, as it is 
 possible to bring into action. 
 
 What relation has the muscular sense to the motor 
 intuition ? It -is not an easy question to answer 
 either from a psychological or from a physiological basis, 
 inasmuch as it is not easy to put asunder in thought 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 491 
 
 what nature has joined together. The relation appears 
 to be not unlike that which the sensation of a special 
 sense has to the corresponding idea : as the sensation 
 of the special sense is necessary to the formation 
 of the idea, but, the idea once formed, not necessary 
 to its existence or function, so the muscular feeling 
 would seem to be an essential prerequisite to the for- 
 mation of the motor intuition, but, this once formed, not 
 necessary to its latent existence, or indeed to its active 
 function, provided only another sense furnish the guiding 
 information. Like other senses, the muscular sense is 
 receptive ; it ministers to the building up of the funda- 
 mental ideas of solidity, size, figure, and distance, 
 through the impressions which it receives from without 
 and conveys inwards, and the subsequent internal adapta- 
 tions which take place ; and in the outward intelligent 
 reaction of the individual upon external nature, by virtue 
 of these ideas, it furnishes the guiding feeling by which 
 he is enabled to direct the action and to regulate the 
 amount of force applied in any given case. In point 
 of fact, the consolidation of its different impressions 
 with the adapted movements constitutes the percep- 
 tion of the object — constitutes what is, so far as we 
 are concerned, the object: how then can we act practi- 
 cally in relation to the perception, when the sensory 
 contributions are taken out of it, and when it is no longer 
 therefore to us the definite object, unless some other 
 sense supplies what is wanting and so completes the 
 perception — in other words, reconstitutes the object 
 for us ? How admirably graduated is the application of 
 force by the skilful hand in delicate handicraft operations ! 
 How clumsy and incapable is the beginner in such crafts 
 until, by frequent practice, the requisite motor intuitions 
 have been acquired ! Consider how awkward any one 
 is at so simple a matter as winding up a watch for the 
 first time, and how quick, easy, and precise the operation 
 
492 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 afterwards becomes. Observations made upon persons 
 born blind prove that there is nothing essential to the 
 highest intellectual processes which may not be acquired 
 in the absence of sight, mainly through the muscular 
 feeling in combination with touch. ( 2 ) 
 
 Because the muscular feelings in combination with 
 tactile and other sensations gradually build up the motor 
 intuitions in accordance with the order, synchronous or 
 successive, of our experience, it is not difficult to de- 
 ceive them by a new experience modifying or reversing 
 that order. They are inductions, and, like all in- 
 ductions per enumerationem simplicem, they are liable 
 to be upset by the instantia contradictoria. We have 
 already shown how the eye may be deceived, and 
 there is a familiar example of similarly produced illu- 
 sion in the case of touch. It is well known that, if 
 the middle finger be crossed over the fore-finger, and 
 a pea or a like round body be put between them 
 and the fingers rolled over it, while the eyes are turned 
 away, there will be the sensations of two bodies ; the 
 impression on that side of the fore-finger which is habi- 
 tually associated in action with the thumb excites inde- 
 pendently its residua, and the impression on that side of 
 the middle finger which is accustomed to act with the 
 third finger excites also its residua ; the consequence is 
 a feeling of two bodies which it requires the evidence of 
 another sense to correct. So closely and definitely are 
 our different senses associated in their functions that 
 they may, instead of aiding and correcting one another, 
 as is their proper function, thus actually help to deceive 
 one another when the order of their experiences is un- 
 expectedly deranged. When the metal potassium was 
 first shown to an eminent philosopher, he exclaimed, on 
 taking it into his hand, " Bless me, how heavy it is ! " 
 and yet potassium is so light as to float on water. 
 The metallic appearance had suggested a certain resist- 
 
vni.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 493 
 
 ance, or the putting forth of so much muscular energy 
 as previous experience of substances having a similar 
 look had proved necessary ; the consciousness of the 
 effort made instigated the false judgment, the suggestion 
 of the visual sense overswaying the actual experience of 
 the muscular and tactile senses : the latter were deceived, 
 as the man is who concludes that a certain co-existence 
 or succession in nature must always exist because he has 
 observed it in a great many instances ; or as, at the 
 supposed disinterment of a body suspected to have been 
 murdered, one of the spectators who fainted on account 
 of the bad smell was deceived ; for, when the coffin was 
 opened, it was found to be empty. 
 
 It is well-known that a person feels sensations in 
 a limb, and is conscious of its different positions, 
 as if it were present, for some time after it has been 
 amputated. "Urging a patient who had lost his leg 
 to move it," says Sir Charles Bell, "I have seen him 
 catch at the limb to guard it, as if forgetting that it 
 had been removed. Long after his loss he experi- 
 enced* a sensation not only as if the limb remained, 
 but as if it were placed or hanging in a particular 
 position or posture, I have asked a patient, ' Where 
 do you feel your arm now ? ' and he has said, ' I feel it 
 as if it lay across my breast,' or that it is ' lying by my 
 side.' It seems also to change with the change of pos- 
 ture of the body. These are additional proofs of a 
 muscular sense ; that there is an internal sensibility cor- 
 responding to the changing condition of the muscles ; 
 and that as the sensations of an organ of sense remain, 
 after the destruction of the outward organ, so a decep- 
 tious sensibility to the condition of the muscles, as well 
 as to the condition of the skin, will be felt after the re- 
 moval of a limb." * 
 
 * The Hand, its Mechanism and Vital Endowment. Dr. Weir 
 Mitchell has found that electrical stimulation of the nerves of a stump 
 
494 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 The perfect functions of the motor residua are not 
 only essential to the expression' of our active life, but, 
 like the functions of the special senses, they are essential 
 constituent elements of our mental life. In the common 
 form of the disease which is known as general paralysis 
 of the insane there are two prominent characteristics : the 
 first is the general paralysis, in greater or less degree, of 
 the muscles of the body ; and the second is the extraor- 
 dinary delusions of grandeur. It is a question well worth 
 consideration, whether these characteristic symptoms do 
 not stand in some degree of causal connection with one 
 another. A tailor who is suffering from general paralysis 
 will readily promise to make a magnificent coat or waist- 
 coat, and, if the materials are supplied to him, will at 
 once set to work. It is not improbable that, deceived by 
 his quiet assurance, and knowing that to sew is his busi- 
 ness, one may believe that he can make the garment. 
 But, in a little while, it will be found that his stitches are 
 most unequal in size, and are placed in the most dis- 
 orderly way ; and it is made clear that, whatever he 
 himself may think, he certainly cannot sew properly, 
 He has a sufficient desire to accomplish the result, an 
 adequate general notion of the end desired, a full belief 
 in his ability to effect it ; but he fails because his motor 
 residua are disordered, and because he cannot regulate 
 precisely ' the action of the necessary muscles. And 
 because his disordered motor intuitions have invaded 
 consciousness, he does not realise his failure, but is happy 
 under the delusion that he has accomplished his work 
 admirably. We must not overlook the effects upon con- 
 sciousness as well as the effects upon movements : as the 
 sleeper, whose external senses are so closed as to shut out 
 the controlling influence of external objects, often, does 
 in his dreams the most wonderful things, and finds little 
 
 will give rise to vivid feelings of different positions of the lost limb 
 long after it has been removed. 
 
via.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 495 
 
 or no hindrance to an almost miraculous activity, intel- 
 lectual and bodily ; so the general paralytic, whose dis- 
 ordered motor residua cut him off from the due apprecia- 
 tion of external relations, and suggest false intuitions of 
 these relations, has the most extravagant notions as to his 
 personal power and prowess engendered in his mind ; he 
 dreams with his eyes open.* As we owe mainly to the 
 muscular sense the development of our fundamental 
 ideas of resistance, form, size, and space, it will easily be 
 understood that, when this sense is deficient throughout 
 the body, as in the general paralytic, there cannot be 
 that intelligent accord between the inner life and the 
 outward relations which, when in a perfect state, it main- 
 tains. Here, again, we perceive how impossible it is to 
 separate the mental from the bodily life; how plainly, 
 when we scan the deeper relations of things in their 
 genesis, there are displayed the closest connection "and 
 continuity of parts and functions. 
 
 To the action of the will, as already pointed out, a 
 conception of the result is essential, whether the voli- 
 tional exertion be for the purpose of causing a movement, 
 of preventing or checking a movement, or of dismissing 
 a painful idea from the mind. When a sensation excites 
 a co-ordinate movement in so-called sensori-motor action, 
 we do not say there is a conception of the result, because 
 of the absence of consciousness ; but at the same time we 
 must admit that there is a definitely organized residuum 
 in the proper motor nervous centre, which, as it were, 
 
 * I once had under my care a general paralytic who was occa- 
 sionally much excited, believing that he was fighting great battles, 
 and winning great victories with his fists ; he believed, too, that he 
 won immense sums of money as wagers on his prowess. The dis- 
 order of his motorium commune entered into his thoughts and 
 engendered corresponding delusions. He was confined to his bed 
 or couch by reason of having lost one leg, or he would have been a 
 violent and dangerous patient. 
 
VJO lUJi fMYSlVL.VUX US < MIND. [CHAP. 
 
 implicitly contains the movement. Now it is important 
 to bear in mind, when the movement is cerebro-motor 
 the will exciting that co-ordinate movement which a sen- 
 sation alone may do, as not unfrequently happens, that 
 it cannot operate directly on the motor nerves, but must 
 necessarily operate through the medium of the same 
 motor agency as that through which the sensation acts : 
 in other words, the movement in both cases proceeds 
 directly from the motor nervous centre in which the 
 movement is latent. In both cases it is truly reflex, the 
 stimulus in one case coming round by the convolutions, 
 in the other case more directly across from the senses. 
 If we could excite the motor centres artificially, not over- 
 exerting and injuring them, as in our gross experiments 
 we necessarily do, then we should not fail to set free the 
 definite movements. Speaking psychologically, the con- 
 ception of the result becomes in the execution of volun- 
 tary movements the motor intuition, and the motor in- 
 tuition excited into activity expresses itself in the designed 
 movement through the agency of the subordinate motor 
 centres. 
 
 Thus, then, it appears that, as in the action of nature 
 upon man, the stimulus which is not reflected in the 
 spinal cord passes upwards and excites sensation, and 
 the stimulus which is not reflected in sensori-motor action 
 passes upwards and becomes idea, and the stimulus 
 which is not reflected in simple ideomotor action passes 
 from cell to cell in the hemispheres and excites complex 
 ideation or reflection ; so in the reaction of man upon 
 nature, the energy which we designate psychologically the 
 will, passes downwards through the subordinate centres in 
 an opposite direction : the will involves a conception of 
 the result or a definite ideational action ; the conception 
 of the result demands for its further transformation the 
 appropriate motor intuition; and the motor intuition 
 gets its due expression in movement through the perfect 
 
viil.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 497 
 
 function of the muscular feeling and the integrity of the 
 motor nerves and the muscles. There is an orderly 
 subordination of the different nervous centres ; a chain 
 of means such as is revealed in every department of 
 nature. Taking a survey of the different sciences, we 
 perceive that chemistry is dependent on physics, while 
 physics is independent of chemistry ; physiology is de- 
 pendent on chemistry, while chemistry is independent of 
 physiology ; sociology is dependent on physiology, while 
 physiology is independent of sociology : and so the just 
 analysis of our mental life proves that sensori-motor 
 action is dependent on reflex action, while reflex action 
 is independent of sensori-motor action; ideomotor ac- 
 tion is dependent on sensori-motor action, while sensori- 
 motor action is independent of ideomotor action ; the 
 will is dependent on ideomotor action, while ideomotor 
 action is independent of the will. These different 
 epochs, as we might call them, in the order of develop- 
 ment of the nervous system are represented by different 
 classes of the lower animals : and it is interesting to 
 note that, as in man there is a subordination of parts, 
 and the will, as the highest energy, controls the inferior, 
 modes of nervous energy, so in the animal kingdom there 
 is a subordination of minds, and the mind of man, as the 
 highest development, controls and uses the inferior minds 
 of many of the lower animals. There can be little 
 doubt that his supremacy has checked the evolution of 
 other animals which would probably have gone on had 
 he not appeared on the earth. 
 
 If execution has been in any wise answerable to con- 
 ception, I have now said enough to prove the importance 
 of that region of mental activity in which' dwell the motor 
 residua, and which may properly be named the region of 
 actuation. I have only to add that men differ much 
 naturally as to the perfection of this as of other mental 
 faculties. There are some who, with great intellectual 
 
498 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 power, never can attain to the ability of successfully 
 expressing themselves; there are others, on the other 
 hand, who can pour forth endless talk with the most 
 facile fluency. The art of expression in speech, or 
 in writing, or even in eloquence of action, is one which, 
 if there is not an innate faculty for it, can never be 
 acquired in its highest perfection : unseen fetters hinder 
 the full utterance, and lame execution falls far short of 
 ambitious conception : with the distinct conception of 
 what they would say, and the best will to say it, there is 
 something wanting in the region of actuation, whereby 
 they are prevented from doing justice to their thoughts, 
 and are compelled, like Moses, to delegate that func- 
 tion to others. " There is Aaron : he shall be thy 
 speaker, and thou shalt be to him instead of God." 
 (Exodus iv. 1 6.) * 
 
 It might be said perhaps that when a person is unable 
 to express his thoughts clearly in suitable language it is 
 that he has not the thoughts clearly conceived in his 
 mind, that they are vague and only half formed, floating 
 in an undefinable, hazy, or nebulous state.. Without doubt, 
 when a thought can be properly expressed it has acquired 
 a precision and a definiteness of relation to other thoughts 
 which it had not before it was embodied in language ; 
 but it may be fairly doubted whether it is correct to 
 describe as only half formed all those thoughts which 
 cannot have full justice done to them in speech or 
 in writing. There are few persons accustomed to think 
 who have not experienced occasions when the mind has 
 seemed to be illuminated by a vivid flash of intuition, 
 or the emotions to have reached a strain of exaltation 
 which transcended the capacities of expression in ade- 
 quate words ; true or not, they have believed themselves 
 
 * And a greater than Moses or Aaron was so gifted with the 
 faculty of excellent expression, that it was said of Him that " Never 
 man spake like this man." 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 
 
 499 
 
 to have had thoughts too deep for words and feelings 
 that were unutterable. To me it seems that this occurs 
 sometimes in coherent dreaming, and that one awakes 
 with a feeling of despair at the inability to grasp de- 
 finitely and to fix in words what has passed through the 
 mind ; with a conviction, moreover, that what has been 
 lost was not a mere illusion, but of genuine worth. 
 How much, again, of the depth and subtilty of thought 
 is sometimes lost in the feeble and inadequate expres- 
 sion ! How great a part of the mental effect produced 
 by the highest poetry or the best art is that which is 
 not expressed, but suggested, and which cannot be ex- 
 pressed, being unutterable ! It would not be prudent 
 to predict what the course of human evolution will 
 be through the ages to come, but, whatever it be, it 
 can hardly fail to be accompanied by a more complex, 
 special, and subtile development of the powers of 
 expression. 
 
 Certain it is that there has been a continuous develop- 
 ment of language through the past ages of human life. 
 Language was not a gift miraculously bestowed upon 
 man, nor a conscious invention which was designedly 
 improved by him, but it is essentially an organic growth 
 which has proceeded from the instinctive or unconscious 
 life, and has been brought to its present completeness by 
 . the accumulated contributions of successive generations 
 of men. It would be obviously absurd to conclude con- 
 cerning the beginnings of human language from the 
 multitude of words possessed by any language of the 
 earth at the present day. If the history of a language 
 be traced back for a few hundred years, it will at once be 
 seen how much it has changed in that time ; how many 
 new words have been added to it; and how much some 
 old words have gradually changed their meanings, while 
 others have fallen into disuse and become obsolete. 
 Could we trace back language to its earliest beginnings, 
 
SCO THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 and strip from it each fresh acquisition at the time and 
 place where it was made, we should gradually lay baje 
 its early nakedness and poverty, discovering it to consist 
 of a few primitive roots answering to the feeble intel- 
 lectual shoots of the race. But we cannot go so far 
 back. When we follow the course of development of 
 the Indo-European languages backwards as far as we 
 can, there is no certainty that the roots which we 
 reach are original ; on the contrary, it is almost certain 
 that they are not; that they are transformations; that 
 what we know to have been going steadily on in his- 
 toric times has gone on in the pre-historic times of 
 which we can only darkly guess. 
 
 Language in all its forms consists of signs, and a sign 
 is a particular movement which is in definite connec- 
 tion with a certain sensation or thought; sensory im- 
 pressions or subjective states being reflected in objec- 
 tive movements. The definite movement is accordingly 
 the sign of the internal state, and its relations are essen- - 
 tially social not individual. To the action of the envi- 
 ronment upon the individual there is reaction by him in 
 a modification of the environment — he feels and under- 
 stands what is in order to determine what is to be; were 
 he a solitary being, he. would require to make only those 
 adapted movements that were necessary to self-preserva- 
 tion, such movements being, as it were, a silent language 
 addressed to, and understood of, nature ; but as he is not 
 a solitary but a social being, as he must react upon 
 human nature, he makes, in answer to social impressions, 
 for the purpose of mutual communication, movements 
 that are of social meaning, and these movements develop 
 into the different forms of language. Language, there- 
 fore, is truly a social growth, giving unity and cohesion 
 to the social organism.* 
 
 There is every reason to suppose that the earliest form 
 
 * Comte, System of Positive Polity, vol. ij., Social Statics. 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 501 
 
 of language was the involuntary language of action and 
 of cries, giving expression to feelings, and that the 
 voluntary language of speech, giving expression to 
 thoughts, was a later development. In the higher ani- 
 mals definite acts are the constant signs of the feelings 
 which actuate them ; they are the language of action, 
 understood by all creatures similarly organized, and 
 understood by man in virtue of the groundwork of or- 
 ganization which he has in common with them. Gestures 
 and cries are largely used in like manner by the lower 
 races of mankind, among whom the social life is very 
 imperfect, to communicate their feelings. The Bosjes- 
 men are said to make so much more use of gestures than 
 of speech that they are unintelligible to one another 
 in the dark, and are compelled, when they want to con- 
 verse at night, to assemble round their camp-fires. To 
 this basis of emotional gesture-language must be traced 
 the source or root of the voluntary language of speech 
 which has reached so complex a development in man. 
 For as social relations were multiplied and expanded, 
 and became more special and complex, answering 
 multiplications and complexities of movements were 
 necessitated ; the interchange of feelings passed into an 
 interchange of thoughts ; and the requisite means of in- 
 tellectual expression were found in the numerous, com- 
 plex and delicate movements of speech, the convenience 
 of which has led to its almost exclusive adoption. Be- 
 cause of this development of the complex voluntary 
 language of speech in man, the involuntary basis of 
 language is best studied in the lower animals, where it 
 is presented in its simplest form ; for they, checked in 
 evolution by the ascendency of man, have never passed 
 from the language of feeling — gestures and cries, to the 
 language of thought— speech. Cries and gestures are 
 also the language of infants ; and under the influence of 
 strong excitement the vocal organs of the adult act 
 
502 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 involuntarily, the cries of joy, horror, fear, amazement 
 which give utterance to the internal feelings being in- 
 telligible, without instruction, to all beings similarly 
 organized. When feeling is expressed in speech, it is 
 by modification of the vocal tone; and tone is original, in- 
 voluntary, not acquired and designedly used. In mono- 
 syllabic languages the same word has different meanings 
 at the present day according to the tone in which it is 
 uttered. Thus, in the child and in the least developed 
 languages we find what may be justly considered as sur- 
 vivals of an operation which has had large sway in the 
 original formation of language. 
 
 By whatever differences of tone of voice, or by what- 
 ever differences of movements, an animal may express 
 its different feelings, it is doubtful whether any animal 
 has ever got so far as to appropriate a special call to a 
 special person or object — to name it ; unless it be in a 
 few rare instances in which it has been taught to do so 
 by man. Certain it is that if animals have such a power 
 it is of the most rudimentary kind, and has not under- 
 gone any development. So soon, however, as a child 
 has consciously called its father or its mother, which it 
 soon learns to do by using the special call for each, 
 language in its true sense has commenced.* In the same 
 way, no doubt, language began with the race of man : 
 special names were given to special objects, and special 
 words appropriated to express special feelings whereby 
 mutual communication was accomplished. When, as 
 we are informed, the Lord God, having formed out of 
 the ground every beast of the field and every fowl of the 
 air, brought them unto Adam to see what he would call 
 
 * It appears that the earliest sounds made by the child— Afa and 
 Pa, are met with in all languages. They are natural sounds, the 
 special meaning being given to each by the parents. For in some 
 languages Pa is mother, and Ma father. Volkerkunde, von Oscar 
 Peschel. 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 503 
 
 them, " Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl 
 of the air, and to every beast of the field, and whatso- 
 ever Adam called every living creature, that was the 
 name thereof." The story indicates the mode of origin of 
 language as a product of man's development; and if 
 Adam be interpreted to mean the successive generations 
 of men that have in turn contributed to the formation of 
 language, as scientific theologians or theological scientists 
 interpret the formation of every living thing out of the 
 ground to mean the process of evolution going on 
 through successive ages, pious hearts need not be 
 troubled, but may take courage and exult that each new 
 scientific discovery is a new confirmation of faith, when 
 Biblical history is interpreted in the largely liberal spirit 
 of those who think " there be not impossibilities enough 
 in religion for an active faith." 
 
 It does not seem hard to conceive how, once the first 
 step was reached, once the communication of a thought, 
 feeling, or want was designedly made by one being, by 
 means of a definite vocal expression, and was understood 
 by another, the development of language gradually took 
 place coincident with, or sequent to, the development of 
 intelligence. But how was the first step made — the first 
 mutual understanding come to between the maker of the 
 sound and the hearer of it ? We may conceive perhaps 
 how this was if we call to mind what may be observed 
 any day in the barn-yard when the cock,- having dis- 
 covered a grain, calls the hens by a special note, who 
 understand and flock round him. It may be observed 
 too that he will astutely pretend to have made a dis- 
 covery, and will use a similar call, when he wishes to 
 bring the hen to him in order to gratify his sexual 
 want. That the hen is sensible of the difference of call 
 and apprehends guile is plain, for it often shows itself 
 coy, making a timid approach as if suspecting mischief, 
 and will not come close to him, but must be pursued. 
 
504 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 Here, then, in the food-wants and the sexual wants we 
 perceive how there must have arisen vocal communi- 
 cation and understanding thereof among primeval human 
 beings. In like manner, other feelings would have their 
 expression which would be understood : an angry bite or 
 blow or scratch could not fail to give meaning to, and 
 to teach the meaning of, the accompanying tone or 
 gesture. 
 
 It is probable, as I have already explained, that the 
 earliest vocal language consisted of these vocal expres- 
 sions of wants and feelings, and that the " naming Of 
 objects, or the development of language as an instru- 
 ment of the intellect, was subsequent. How this 
 naming of objects was done is a question the answer 
 to which must be left to those who are learned in the 
 knowledge of the origin and development of languages, 
 when they have come to an agreement among themselves. 
 /To one who has no pretence to special knowledge of the 
 subject it would seem that it was done then, in the main, 
 as it is done now by children, by the imitation of the 
 sounds by which attention was attracted to the object ; 
 that the word was formed by imitation of the sound, 
 and the connection of the idea with it made subse- 
 quently, sensori-motor having preceded ideo-motor 
 function. Thus for example, the child hears the 
 dog bark, and thereupon imitates the sound, making 
 a bow-wow; the idea of a dog is expressed afterwards 
 by making this sound. It is when a child is born 
 deaf, and hears therefore no sounds to imitate, that it is 
 dumb ; it is not dumb when it is born blind, though it is 
 then deprived of the chief avenue of ideas, because it 
 does hear sounds which it imitates. There is in man an 
 innate aptitude to imitation, which may be regarded as an 
 expression of the reflex function of the nervous system ; 
 it is very evident in children, and more so in the mimicry 
 of his next-of-kin, the monkeys. It is obvious that this 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 505 
 
 process of verbal naming by imitation could take place 
 only in relation to sounds, and that the perceptions of the 
 other senses must have been named in another way. Still, 
 if a person had got so far as to name the perceptions of 
 one sense, it would not be a great step forward to desig- 
 nate the perceptions of the other senses by arbitrary signs ; 
 for the deaf and dumb have invented their own signs, 
 drawing them from the nature of the objects or from the 
 outlines or principal movements of actions, and many of 
 their signs are said to be the same as those used by the 
 Indians from Hudson's Bay to the Mexican Gulf. Men 
 all over the world do in fact hit upon the same gesture- 
 language to express themselves, and we may justly. con- 
 clude that if they had not had speech they would still 
 have acquired a means of communicating with one 
 another by signs ; they could not well have helped it, so 
 long as they were beings endowed with a capacity of re- 
 acting to multitudinous impressions by answering varie- 
 ties of movements. 
 
 So much then concerning the origin and development 
 of language ; it is the highest display of reflex function, 
 and the most complex and special evolution of man's re- 
 lations to his social environment. Using the words of 
 Comte, we may say that "it is the expression of that 
 essential unity which religion creates," being essentially 
 relative to the social and not to the individual side of 
 man, and presupposing the co-operation of men in associ- 
 ation through successive generations. "The very sophism 
 by which they [retrograde philosophers] blaspheme 
 humanity itself could not be uttered at all, but for a 
 system of expressions which are the work of long genera- 
 tions of men."* These embody the slowly won experiences 
 of past ages ; and in teaching them to those who will 
 come after us and carry forward the torch when it falls 
 
 * System of Positive Polity, vol. ii. Translated by Frederic 
 Harrison. 
 
5°6 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 from our failing grasp, we are exerting upon them through, 
 words all the influences which the objects in nature 
 denoted by them have, during countless ages, exerted 
 upon those who have gone before us ; for it is in lan- 
 guage that the wisdom of past generations is enshrined, 
 and through it that each succeeding generation inherits 
 the accumulated knowledge of preceding generations. 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 1 (/. 487). — " When a blind man, or a man blindfolded, stands 
 upright, neither leaning upon nor touching aught ; by what means 
 does he maintain the erect position ? The symmetry of his body 
 is not the cause. A statue of the finest proportion must be Soldered 
 to its pedestal, else the wind will cast it down. 'How is it, then, 
 that a man sustains the perpendicular posture, or inclines in due 
 degree towards the wind that blows upon him? It is obvious 
 that he has a sense by which he knows the inclination of his body ; 
 and that he has a ready aptitude to adjust the parts of it, so as to 
 correct any deviation from the perpendicular. What sense is this ? 
 He touches nothing, and sees nothing; there is no organ of sense 
 hitherto observed which can aid him. Is it not the sense which 
 we have seen exhibited so early in the infant, in the fear of falling, 
 and which caused its struggles while it yet lay in the nurse's arms ? 
 It can only be by the adjustment of muscles that the limbs «are 
 stiffened, the body firmly balanced, and kept erect ; and there is 
 no other source of knowledge but a sense of the degree of exertion 
 in the muscular frame by which a man can become conscious of the 
 position of the body and action of the limbs, while he has no point 
 of vision, or the contact of any external body, to direct his efforts. 
 In truth, we stand by so fine an exercise of this power, and the 
 muscles, from habit, are directed with so much precision, and with 
 an effort so slight, that we do not know how we stand. But if we 
 attempt to walk on a narrow ledge, or rest in a situation where we 
 are in danger of falling, or balance on one foot, we become sub- 
 ject to apprehension : and the actions are then, as it were, magnified 
 and demonstrative of the degree in which they are excited. Although 
 we touch nothing, and see nothing, yet we are sensible of the posi- 
 tion of our limbs ; that the arms hang by the side, or that they are 
 raised and held out. And it must be by a property internal to the 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 507 
 
 frame that we know this. At one time I entertained a doubt whether 
 this knowledge proceeded from a sense of the condition of the 
 muscles, or from a consciousness of the degree of effort which had 
 been directed to them in volition. But I reasoned in this manner — 
 we awake with the knowledge of the position of our limbs ; this can- 
 not be from recollection of the action which placed them where they 
 are ; it must, therefore, be a consciousness of their present condition. 
 When a person just after awaking moves his body, it is with a 
 determined object ; and befox - e he can desire a change or direct a 
 movement, he must be conscious of a previous condition." — Sir C. 
 Bell, The Hand, its Mechanism and Vital Endowments. The 
 question is whether we do awake with the knowledge of the posi- 
 tion of our limbs — whether we are not without that knowledge until 
 some movement, it may be ever so slight, is made. 
 
 2 (p. 492). — In the forty-third Annual Report of the Massa- 
 chusetts Asylum for the Blind, Dr. Howe gives an interesting 
 description of the method which he employed for the instruction of 
 Laura Bridgman, who was totally blind and deaf, and who had 
 only a very indistinct sense of smell. I quote Dr. Howe's descrip- 
 tion entire : — 
 
 "I found in a little village in the mountains a pretty and lively 
 girl, about six years old, who was totally blind and deaf, and who 
 had only a very indistinct sense of smell ; so indistinct that, un- 
 like other deaf-mutes, who are continually smelling at things, she 
 did not smell even at her food. This sense afterwards developed 
 itself a little, but was never much used or relied upon by her. She 
 lost her senses by scarlet fever so early that she has no recollection 
 of any exercise of them. Her father was a substantial farmer ; 
 and his wife a very intelligent woman. My proposal to try to 
 give regular instruction to the child seemed to be a very wild 
 one. But the mother, a woman of considerable natural ability, 
 animated by warm love for her daughter, eagerly assented to my 
 proposal, and in a, few days little Laura was brought to my house 
 in Boston, and placed under regular instruction by lessons impro- 
 vised for the occasion. 
 
 " I shall not here anticipate what I intend to write about her, 
 further than to say that I required her by signs, which she soon 
 came to understand, to devote several hours a day to learning to use 
 her hands, and to acquiring command of her muscles and limbs. 
 But my principal aim and hope was to enable her to recognize the 
 twenty-six signs which represent the letters of the alphabet. She 
 submitted to the process patiently, though without understanding 
 its purpose. 
 
508 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND- [chap. 
 
 • ^__________ 
 
 " I will here give a rough sketch of the means which I contrived 
 for her mental development. I first selected short monosyllables, 
 so that the sign which she was to leam might be as simple as pos- 
 sible. I placed before her, on the table, a pen and a pin, and then, 
 making her take notice of the fingers ■ of one of my hands, I placed 
 them in the three positions used as signs of the manual alphabet of 
 deaf-mutes for the letters pen, and made her feel them, over and 
 over again, many times, so that they might be associated together 
 in her mind. I did the same with the pin, and repeated it scores 
 of times. She at last perceived that the signs were complex, and 
 that the middle sign of the one, that is the e, differed from the middle 
 sign of the other, that is _'. This was the first step gained. This 
 process was repeated over and over, hundreds of times, until, 
 finally, the association was established in her mind between the 
 sign composed of three signs, and expressed by three positions ot 
 my fingers, and the article itself, so that when I held up the pen to 
 her she would herself make the complex sign ; and when I made the 
 complex sign on my fingers she would triumphantly pick up the 
 pen, and hold it up before me, as much as to say, ' This is what 
 you want.' 
 
 "Then the same process was gone over with the pin, until the 
 association in, her mind was intimate and complete between the 
 two articles and the complex positions of the fingers. She had thus 
 learned two arbitrary signs, or the names of the two different things. 
 She seemed conscious of having understood and done what I 
 wanted, for she smiled, while I exclaimed inwardly and trium- 
 phantly, "euCTKo! ei/pijira!" I now felt that the first step had 
 been taken successfully, and that this was the. only really difficult 
 one, because by continuing the same process by which she had 
 become enabled to distinguish two articles, by two arbitrary signs, 
 she would go on and learn to express in signs two thousand, and, 
 finally, the forty and odd thousand signs or words in the English 
 language. 
 
 "Having learned that the sign for these two articles, pin and 
 pen, was composed'of three signs, she would perceive that in order 
 to learn the names for other things she had got to learn other signs. 
 I went on with monosyllables, as being the simplest, and she learned 
 gradually one sign of a letter from another, until she knew all the 
 arbitrary, tangible twenty-six letters of the alphabet, and how to 
 arrange them to express various objects : knife, fork, spoon, thread, 
 and the like. Afterwards she learned the names of the ten numerals 
 or digits ; of the punctuation and exclamation and interrogation 
 points, some forty-six in all. With these she could express the 
 
viii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 509 
 
 name of everything, of every thought, of every feeling, and all the 
 numberless shades thereof. She had thus got the 'open sesame' to 
 the whole treasury of the English language. She seemed aware of 
 the importance of the process ; and worked at it earnestly and inces- 
 santly, taking up various articles, and inquiring by gestures and 
 looks what signs upon her fingers were to be put together in order 
 to express their names. At times she was too radiant with delight 
 to be able to conceal her emotions. 
 
 " It sometimes occurred to me that she was like a person alone 
 and helpless in a deep, dark, still pit, and that I was letting down 
 a cord and dangling it about, in hopes she might find it ; and that 
 finally she would seize it by chance, and, clinging to it, be drawn up 
 by it into the light of day, and into human society. And it did so 
 happen : and thus she, instinctively and unconsciously, aided in her 
 happy deliverance. After she had mastered the system of arbi- 
 trary signs, made by the various positions of the fingers used by deaf- 
 mutes, and called dactylology, the next process was to teach her to 
 recognize the same signs in types, with the outlines of the letters 
 embossed upon their ends. Thus with types, two embossed with p, 
 two with n, one with e, and another with i, she could, by setting 
 them side by side in the quadrilateral holes in the blind man's 
 slate, make the sign of pen or pin, as she wished ; and so with other 
 signs. 
 
 " The next process was to teach her that when a certain kind of 
 paper was pressed firm'y upon the ends of these types, held close 
 together, and side by side, there would be a tangible sign on the 
 reverse of the paper, as pin or pen, according to the position of the 
 three types ; that she could feel this paper, distinguish the letters, 
 and so read ; and that these signs could be varied and multiplied, 
 and put together in order, and so make a book. 
 
 " Then she was provided with types having the outlines of the 
 letters made with projecting pin-points, which, when pressed upon 
 stiffened paper, pierced through, and left a dotted outline of each 
 letter upon the reverse side. This she soon ascertained could 
 serve for writing down whatever she desired, and be read by 
 herself ; and also could be addressed to friends, and sent to them 
 by mail. 
 
 " She was also taught to write letters and words with a lead 
 pencil, by the aid of the French writing-board, which is the most 
 simple, most effective, and cheapest method ever yet invented. This 
 apparatus is made out of a piece of stiff pasteboard of the size of a 
 common sheet of letter-paper, and has grooved lines or channels, 
 about the eighth of an inch deep, running, an inch apart, trans- 
 23 
 
510 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 versely across the pasteboard plate. This pasteboard is inserted 
 between the two pages of a common sheet of letter-paper, and the 
 first leaf is pressed with the forefinger into the grooves. This leaves 
 depressions or channels, the upper and lower edge of which can be 
 felt by the pencil-point, and this, a little pressed, leaves it marked 
 with an o, or an /, or a /. The sides of the grooves also give to the 
 paper which is pressed between them rounded edges, so that the 
 pencil can slide upwards and downwards over and under them, and 
 also be guided from left to right 
 
 " It would occupy more space than can be spared here to explain 
 how, after she had learned the names of substantive nouns, or names 
 of things in the concrete, she came to understand words expressive 
 of the various material or moral qualities thereof. The process was 
 slow and difficult, but I was so aided by her native shrewdness, and 
 her love for learning new things that success followed. For instance, 
 she knew that some girls and women of her acquaintance were very 
 sweet and amiable in their tempers, because they treated her so 
 kindly, and caressed her so constantly. She knew, also, that 
 others were quite different in their deportment ; that they avoided 
 or repelled her, and were abrupt in their motions and gestures 
 while in contact with her ; and might be called, therefore, sour in 
 their tempers. By a little skill she was made to associate in hermind 
 the first person with a sweet apple, the other with a sour apple, and 
 so there was a sign for a moral quality. This is a rough illustration ; 
 but it is hard to explain the process by which any children come 
 to understand the names of things in the abstract, or moral qualities. 
 Success came of faith, and patience, and reliance upon her having 
 the native desire and capacity for acquiring a complete arbitrary 
 language, which desire had now become quickened to a passion for 
 learning new signs. Moreover, I was greatly aided from the start 
 by young lady teachers s who became in love with the work, and 
 devoted themselves to it with saintly patience and perseverance. 
 Then great assistance was given by the blind pupils, many of whom 
 learned the manual alphabet and took every opportunity of using it 
 and conversing with Laura. Thus early in the process the 
 material and moral advantages of language began to show them- 
 selves. Without it the girls could only manifest their interest in 
 Laura, and their affection for her, as one does with a baby, by 
 caresses, sugar-plums and other gifts, and by leading her up and 
 down, and helping her in various ways. With it they began human 
 intercourse through regular language. 
 
 " And so she went on, diligently and happily, for a score or more 
 of years, until at last she acquired a large vocabulary of words, and • 
 
vtii.] MOTOR NERVOUS CENTRES. 511 
 
 could converse readily and rapidly with all deaf-mutes, and all 
 persons who could use these signs. She could read printed books 
 readily and easily, finding out for herself, for instance, any chapter 
 and verse of Scripture. She could also read letters from her friends 
 in pricked type, or by the Braille system of points. She could 
 also write down her own thoughts and experiences in a diary ; and 
 could keep up a correspondence with her family and friends by send- 
 ing to them letters in pencil, and receiving their answers either in 
 pricked letters, which she could read by the touch, or letters written 
 with ink or pencil, which would be read to her by some confidential 
 seeing person. 
 
 "Thus was she happily brought at last into easy and free 
 relations with her fellow creatures, and made one of the human 
 family. 
 
 " During many years Laura passed most of her time in exercises 
 such as those above described, new ones being devised as she pro- 
 ceeded. She spent as many hours daily in her studies and mental 
 work as was consistent with her health ; but all the rest of the time 
 was given to gymnastics, or learning to handle domestic implements, 
 as the broom, the dish-cloth, and the needle j to sew, to knit, to 
 braid, to occupy herself in simple house-work, sweeping floors, 
 dusting furniture, making beds ; finally, to more difficult kinds of 
 work, as crochet-work and the like. 
 
 " In all these things she succeeded so well, that she is now 
 capable of earning a livelihood as assistant to any kind and in- 
 telligent housekeeper who would accommodate her work to Laura's 
 ways. 
 
 " The method of instruction was of course novel, and the pro- 
 cess long and tedious, extending over several years, until she came 
 to be able to read and understand books in raised letters ; to mark 
 down variously shaped signs upon a grooved paper, and so write 
 letters legible by the eye ; to attain a pretty wide command of the 
 words of the English language, to spell them out rapidly and cor- 
 rectly, and so express her thoughts in visible signs and in good 
 English. To make all this fully understood by specimens of her 
 style as she used the language of childhood, will require a good- 
 sized volume ; and I confine myself now merely to saying that in 
 the course of twenty years she was enabled to do it all. She has 
 attained such facility for talking in the manual alphabet, that I 
 regret that I did not try also to teach her to speak by the vocal 
 organs, or regular speech. The few words which she has learned 
 to pronounce audibly prove that she could have learned more." 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 MEMORY AND IMAGINATION. 
 
 " You tell me it consists of images or pictures of things. Where 
 is this extensive canvas hung up ? or where are the numerous re- 
 ceptacles in which these are deposited? or to what "else in the 
 animal system have they any similitude? That pleasing picture 
 of objects represented in miniature on the retina of the eye seems 
 to have given rise to this illusive oratory. It was forgot that this 
 representation belongs rather to the laws of light than to those of 
 life ; and may with equal elegance be seen in the camera obscuri 
 as in the eye ; and that the picture vanishes for ever when the object 
 is withdrawn." — Dr. Darwin, Zoonomia. 
 
 Hitherto nothing special has been said concerning 
 memory, although its existence has been necessarily as- 
 sumed, and its nature indicated, in the foregoing pages. 
 No mental development would be possible without it, 
 for if a man possessed it not he would be obliged to 
 begin his conscious life afresh with each impression made 
 upon him, and would be incapable of any education. 
 We cannot perhaps better define memory than, following 
 Locke, as the power which the mind has " to revive per- 
 ceptions which it once had, with this additional perception 
 annexed to them, that it has had them before ; " in other 
 words, as the power or process by which that which 
 has been once known is, when represented to the mind, 
 known as a previous mental experience, that is, is re- 
 cognised. When people speak of ideas being laid up in 
 the memory, they of course speak metaphorically ; there 
 
chap, ix.] MEMORY AND IMAGINATION. 513 
 
 is no such repository in which ideas are stored up, ready 
 to be brought out when required for use ; when an idea 
 which we have once had is excited again, there is simply 
 a reproduction of the same nervous current, with the 
 conscious addition that it is a reproduction — it is the 
 same idea plus the consciousness that it is the same. The 
 question then suggests itself, What is the physical condi- 
 tion of this consciousness ? What is the modification of 
 the anatomical substrata of fibres and cells, or of their 
 physiological activity, which is the occasion of this plus 
 element in the reproduced idea ? It may be supposed 
 that the first activity did leave behind it, when it sub- 
 sided, some after-effect, some modification of the nerve 
 element, whereby the nerve circuit was disposed to fall 
 again readily into the same action ; such disposition 
 appearing in consciousness as recognition or memory. 
 Memory is, in fact, the conscious phase of this physio- 
 logical disposition when it becomes active or discharges 
 its functions on the recurrence of the particular mental 
 experience. To assist our conception of what may 
 happen, let us suppose the individual nerve-elements 
 to be endowed with their own consciousness, and let us 
 assume them to be, as I have supposed, modified in a 
 certain way by the first experience ; it is hard to conceive 
 that when they fall into the same action on another 
 occasion they should not recognise or remember it ; for 
 the second action is a reproduction of the first, with the 
 addition of what it contains from the after-effects of the 
 first. As we have assumed the process to be conscious, 
 this reproduction with its addition would be a memory 
 or remembrance. 
 
 Psychology affords us not the least help in this matter, 
 for in describing memory as a faculty of the mind or the 
 conservative faculty it does no more than present us with 
 a name in place of an explanation. But we do get nearer 
 realities when we go down to the organic aptitude which, 
 
Si4 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 in consequence of an action, there is to the recurrence 
 of a similar action on another occasion. And physiology 
 presents us with many illustrations of such organized 
 aptitudes. Take, for example, the education of our 
 jnovements : a designed movement is performed at first 
 slowly and clumsily, and it is only by giving great pains 
 to it and frequently repeating it that we acquire the skill 
 to perform it easily and quickly; the aptitude thereto 
 being at last so completely organized ■ in the proper 
 nervous centres that it may be performed without con- 
 sciousness on our part, quite automatically. Thus it 
 appears that memory in this case becomes less conscious 
 as it becomes more complete, until, when it has reached 
 its greatest perfection and is performed with the most 
 facility, it is entirely unconscious. After which, if we 
 are psychologists who are content to rest in words 
 and forbear to pursue the facts which they denote, we 
 must cease to speak of it as memory : it has become 
 custom, or habit, or automatism. But if we go beneath 
 words to the property of the motor nerve-centres whereby 
 they react in a definite way to impressions made upon 
 them, organically register their experience, and so acquire 
 by education their special faculties, we perceive that we 
 have not to do in the higher nerve-centres with funda- 
 mentally different properties of nerve element, but with 
 different functions which depend upon the same fun- 
 damental property. Substitute the highest nerve-centres 
 for the motor nerve-centres, and the complex idea €or the 
 complex movement, and what has been said of the latter 
 is strictly true of the former ; the idea, like the move- 
 ment, is accompanied with less consciousness the more 
 completely it is organized, and when it has been com- 
 pletely organized it takes its part automatically in our 
 mental operations, being performed, as a habitual move- 
 ment is performed, automatically. (') The physiological 
 condition of memory is, then, the organic process by 
 
IX. ] MEMOS Y AND IMA GIN A TION. 5 1 5 
 
 which nerve-experiences in the different centres are 
 registered ; and to recollect is to revive these experi- 
 ences in the highest centres, the functions of which are 
 attended with consciousness — to stimulate, by external 
 or internal causes, their residua, aptitudes, dispositions, 
 or whatever else we may choose to call them, into 
 functional activity. Stimulated from without, they con- 
 stitute recognition, that is, cognition with memory of 
 former cognition; stimulated from within, they constitute 
 recollection. 
 
 It must be borne in mind, as Dr. Darwin remarked 
 many years ago, that in dealing with memory we have to do 
 not with laws of light, but with laws of life, and that the 
 misleading notion of images or ideas of objects being 
 stored up in the mind has been derived from our ex- 
 perience of the action of light upon the retina. If we 
 would understand the laws of organization in the highest 
 nerve-centres, we shall certainly do well to study organic 
 processes generally ; it would be not less absurd to at- 
 tempt to understand the higher processes without giving 
 attention to the lower, than it' would be to attempt to 
 build a house without taking pains to lay its foundations 
 securely. It is a plain matter of observation that other 
 organic elements besides nervous elements perpetuate 
 impressions made upon them, which they may accord- 
 ingly in a certain sense be said to remember ; the virus 
 of small-pox, for example, makes an impression upon all 
 the elements of the body, which they never lose, although 
 it becomes fainter with the lapse of time ; in some un- 
 known way it modifies their constitution so that ever 
 afterwards their susceptibilities are changed. The scar 
 which is left after the healing of a wound in a child's 
 finger keeps the same relative proportion to the finger 
 through life, growing as it grows ; for the elements of the 
 new tissue not only renew themselves particle by particle, 
 and thus perpetuate it, but they extend it in relation with 
 
516 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 the growth of the surrounding parts. Perhaps the most 
 remarkable example of the exceeding impressionability 
 of organic element is afforded by the minute germ-cell 
 or sperm-cell, which carries in its constitution not only 
 the particular dispositions of the several tissues of the 
 parent, but even, as there is good reason to believe, the 
 particular mood of mind which prevailed at the time of 
 its secretion. We need not brave the fire of psycho- 
 logical scorn by calling this retention of impressions 
 memory, or care greatly what it is called, so long as due 
 heed is given to the fact ; but we may be permitted to 
 perceive in it the same physiological process which, in 
 the cortical layers of the cerebral hemispheres, is the 
 condition of memory, and of habit in thought. More- 
 over, it may be fairly demanded of the psychologists 
 that they be consistent, and that they no longer use the 
 word memory to denote those mental processes which 
 have been so completely organized that they take place 
 without consciousness ; if it be wrong, as they profess, 
 to assume or imply an unconscious memory, it must 
 be still more wrong to assume or imply an unconscious 
 consciousness, as they sometimes do. 
 
 In any case, the foregoing considerations cannot 
 fail to show how misleading it is to look upon per- 
 ceptions as mere pictures of nature, and upon the 
 mind as a vast canvas on which they are cunningly 
 painted ; the real process is one of organization, and 
 is rightly conceivable only by the aid of ideas derived 
 from the observation of organic development — namely, 
 the fundamental ideas of Assimilation of the like and 
 Differentiation of the unlike. Nowhere is it more 
 necessary than in the study of memory to apprehend 
 clearly that what we call mind is the function of a 
 mental organization ; for thereby we get rid at once of 
 many empty discussions which have been carried on 
 without definite result ; as, for example, whether memory 
 
IX.] MEMORY AND IMAGINATION. 517 
 
 is a knowledge of the past, or a knowledge of the pre- 
 sent with a belief of the past, and the like. Moreover, 
 this conception of a mental organization is indispensable 
 to the explanation of the manifold varieties of partial or 
 general loss of memory which are produced by injury, 
 disease, and decay of brain ; for memory is good or bad 
 according to bodily states, is impaired in various ways by 
 disease, decays with the decay of structure in old age, 
 and is extinguished with the extinction of life in the 
 brain. 
 
 From of old two kinds of memory have been distin- 
 guished, according as the object remembered occurs to 
 the mind spontaneously, or is voluntarily sought for; 
 the former being known as memory proper, the latter as 
 recollection. It is certain that we do recognise this differ- 
 ence, which common language attests, between that which 
 is revived without any effort, and that which we endea- 
 vour to recover by an effort ; and that men differ much, 
 by virtue of natural capacities, both in memory and in 
 power of recollection. No doubt much of the difference 
 in both cases is due to the degree of attention which is 
 given to the subject when it is first presented to the 
 mind, but this will not account satisfactorily for all the 
 difference which is observed ; some persons being able 
 to repeat with great ease a row of figures, a number of 
 dates, or several lines of poetry, after reading them over 
 once, while others fail to do so with equal success after 
 reading them over many times. Extraordinary instances 
 have been recorded of this exactness of memory for de- 
 tails reaching back to the earliest periods of life. I have 
 seen an imbecile in the Earlswood Asylum for idiots 
 who can repeat accurately a page or more of any book 
 which he has read years before, even though it was a 
 book -which he did not understand in the least; and I 
 once saw an epileptic youth, morally imbecile, who would, 
 shutting his eyes, repeat a leading article in a newspaper 
 
Si8 TtlE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 word for word, after reading it once.* This kind of 
 memory, in which the person seems to read a photographic 
 copy of former impressions with his mind's eye, is not 
 indeed commonly associated with great intellectual power ; 
 for what reason I know not, unless it be that the mind 
 to which it belongs is prevented by- the very excellence 
 of its power of apprehending and recalling separate facts 
 from rising to that discernment of their higher relations 
 which is involved in reasoning and judgment, and so 
 stays in a function which should be the foundation of its 
 further, development ; or that, being by some natural de- 
 fect prevented from rising to the higher sphere of com- 
 prehension of relations, it applies all its energies to the 
 apprehension of details.! Certainly one runs some risk, 
 by overloading the memory of a child with details, of 
 arresting the development of the mental powers : stereo- 
 typing details on the brain, we prevent that further de- 
 velopment of it which consists in rising from concrete 
 perception to conception of relations. However, it must 
 be allowed that there have been a few remarkable in- 
 stances of extraordinary men who have combined a 
 wonderful memory for details with the possession of 
 the highest intellectual powers.} 
 
 If we now proceed to examine closely the nature of 
 recollection, it will be found that the difference between 
 it and simple memory is not fundamentally so great as 
 appears on the surface. When we voluntarily try hard 
 
 * I have been informed of a similar case in which the person 
 could repeat backwards what he had just read. ' 
 
 ■)■ We know that the convolutions consist of several layers or strata, 
 the higher of which may be presumed to have higher functions than 
 the lower ; it is possible that in the defective brain of the idiot these 
 higher strata of cells and fibres may be imperfectly developed or 
 altogether wanting. 
 
 J Maca'ulay may be cited as a remarkable instance ; for in hirh 
 great intellectual powers were associated with an extraordinary 
 memory for words, dates, facts, &c. 
 
IX.] MEMORY AND IMAGINATION. 519 
 
 to remember something which has been forgotten, and 
 succeed in the end, the actual revival is done uncon- 
 sciously and, as it were, spontaneously; for it is plain 
 that if we were conscious of what we want we should 
 not need to recollect it, inasmuch as it would already 
 be in possession ; and it is furthermore plain that a defi- 
 nite act of volition recalling it must imply a conscious- 
 ness of it, inasmuch as it is impossible to will what we 
 are not conscious of. Arbitrary recollection by an act of 
 will is therefore nonsense. What we really do when we 
 try to recollect- is to apply attention to words or ideas 
 which have, in our past experience, accidental or es- 
 sential relations to, or associations with, the forgotten 
 word or idea, voluntarily to keep these ideas active by 
 making them consciousness, and to trust to their power 
 of awakening into activity that which it is desired to 
 recall; indeed, it is notorious that the best way of 
 succeeding is, having held the related ideas energeti- 
 cally in attention for a time, to allow the thoughts to 
 pass to other things, when the lost idea will, after a 
 longer or shorter time — sometimes indeed after days- 
 recur to the mind. The actual process of reproduction 
 is therefore one of simple or spontaneous memory ; we 
 prepare the way for it by stimulating into action the 
 related ideas, but we positively interfere with its success if, 
 by continuing to keep them in attention, we do not permit 
 them to do their work spontaneously ; the reason of this 
 being that we thereby, as set forth in a former chapter, 
 hinder the propagation of their activity to other nerve- 
 circuits. We shall understand this the better if we 
 realize that consciousness is the result ol a certain activity 
 of idea, not driven to it but drawn by it, and get rid of 
 the metaphysical notion that it is some mysterious power 
 which we direct voluntarily to the idea in order to make 
 it active.. 
 
 It will not be amiss, before passing from this subject, to 
 
520 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 lake note of and to ponder that certainty which, in try- 
 ing to recollect something, we have of our possession of 
 what we are thus striving to regain consciously, though 
 we are not conscious what it is. We have the clearest 
 conviction that, although we have forgotten it, we still 
 have it and may recover it. How comes it to pass that 
 we are so sure of the existence of that of which we are 
 not conscious ? In the first place, it would appear to 
 supply an argument in support of the theory that some- 
 thing has been left behind in the nerve-circuit ministering 
 to the forgotten idea, in other words, retained by it, 
 which differentiates it from other nerve-circuits, disposes 
 it to a repetition of its former activity, and produces the 
 conviction of a latent possession, even when it is not 
 active, or at any rate not active enough to awaken con- 
 sciousness. In the second place, it must be remembered 
 that the forgotten idea had associations with other ideas, 
 which are really part of its meaning ; it may well be, there- 
 fore, that when these are active and occupy the attention, 
 while it remains inactive and below the horizon of con- 
 sciousness, there is a tendency or sort of effort to reopen 
 the former paths of association, in order to their com- 
 pleteness — to make the circuit, so to speak ; and that it is 
 the consciousness of this tendency or effort which gives 
 rise to the certainty which we have of something for- 
 gotten. Certain it is, that when a stimulus excites one 
 of two movements which have taken place together or 
 in succession on former occasions, there is a tendency, 
 when the stimulus is powerful or continued, to the re- 
 production of the associated movement ; there is a diffu- 
 sion of the stimulus along the accustomed path to the 
 associated motor centres, and a synergy of movements is 
 the result. A piece of poetry which has been thoroughly 
 learnt may be repeated mechanically, as a tune may be 
 whistled, when the proper verbal movements have been 
 once started ; indeed, the repetition in such case is most 
 
IX.] MEMORY AND IMAGINATION. 521 
 
 successful when consciousness is not too much occupied 
 with it ; for it frequently happens, if we think about the 
 words which we are repeating, that we become uncertain 
 and forget, and are obliged, in order to succeed, to begin 
 again and to allow the succession of movements to go 
 on automatically. We impede the operation of the spon- 
 taneous memory, upon which we really depend, when, by 
 maintaining the activity of a word in consciousness as 
 attention, we hinder the propagation thereof to the asso- 
 ciated nerve-circuits. 
 
 When a person who is conscious of an idea is striving 
 to revive a related idea which he has forgotten, he presents 
 an example of memory in the making ; for he is striving 
 to revive the yet incomplete organic union between them, 
 which was the result of the original apprehension of their 
 relations, and which, when complete, will cause the one 
 idea to recall the other instantly and without the least 
 effort, just as a single sensation of an object at once re- 
 vives the cluster of sensations which are combined in 
 the perception of it. The process of intellectual de- 
 velopment consists in the mental organization of related 
 ideas, as internal representatives of external relations in 
 nature, and in making this organization so complete that 
 a number of associated ideas shall act like a single idea, 
 being combined into a complex product and recalled 
 instantly and without conscious effort, just as a complex 
 movement is. Then the memory is so complete that we 
 must cease to call it memory, because it is unconscious. 
 In fact, spontaneous recollection is at an end when in- 
 voluntary memory begins, and involuntary memory 
 merges gradually into a reproduction of former mental 
 experiences which is as completely automatic as the 
 habitual movements of our daily life. And well it may 
 be ; for the same organic property of nerve element — 
 indeed, I might say, the same fundamental property of 
 organization — is at the bottom of both. 
 
522 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 Thus much concerning the nature and function of 
 memory. Upon its basis rests the possibility of mental 
 development, in which there are, as we have already seen, 
 the organic registration of the simple ideas of the senses ; 
 the assimilation of the like in ideas which takes place in 
 the production or evolution of general ideas ; the assimi- 
 lation of the properties common to two or more general 
 ideas into an abstract idea; the special organization, or 
 differentiation, or discrimination, of unlike ideas ; the 
 organic combination of the ideas derived from the differ- 
 ent senses into one complex idea, with the further mani- 
 fold combinations of complex ideas into what Hartley 
 called duplex ideas. In fact, no limit is assignable to 
 the complexity of combinations which may go to the 
 formation of a compound idea. Take, for example, the 
 idea of the universe. But how comes it to pass that a 
 new imaginative creation of the mind, to which nothing 
 in nature answers, is, effected? By the same process 
 fundamentally as that by which our general and abstract 
 ideas are formed. For when we consider the matter, it 
 appears that there are no actual outside existences an- 
 swering to our most abstract ideas, which are, therefore, 
 so far new creations of the mind ; in their formation 
 there is a blending or coalescence of the like relations 
 in two concrete ideas — the development of a concept , 
 there is, as it were,, an extraction of the essential out of 
 the particular, a sublimation of the concrete; and, by 
 the creation of a new world in which these essential 
 ideas supersede the concrete ideas, the power of the 
 mind is most largely extended. Now, although there 
 are no concrete objects in nature answering to these 
 abstract ideas, yet these are none the less, when rightly 
 formed, valid and real subjective existences expressing 
 or signifying the essential relations of things, as the 
 flower which crowns development expresses the essential 
 nature of the plant. Thus it is that we rise from the 
 
IX.] MEMORY AND IMAGINATION. 523 
 
 idea of a particular man to the general idea of man, and 
 from that to the abstract idea of virtue as a quality of 
 man; so that for the future we can make use of the 
 abstract idea in all our reasoning, without being com- 
 pelled to make continual reference to the concrete.* 
 Herein, be it remembered again, we have a process cor- 
 responding with that which ministers to the production 
 of our motor intuitions ; the acquired faculty of certain 
 co-ordinate movements by means of which complicated 
 acts are automatically performed, and we are able to do, 
 almost in the twinkling of an eye, what would cost hours 
 of labour if we were compelled on each occasion to go 
 deliberately through the process of special adaptation, 
 is the equivalent, on the motor side, of the general idea 
 by which so much time and labour are saved in reason- 
 ing : in both cases there is an internal development in 
 accordance with fundamental laws, and the organized 
 result "is, as every new phase of ■ development is> a new 
 creation. Creation is not by fits and starts, but it is 
 continuous in nature. 
 
 These considerations are of the;utmost importance in 
 respect of the nature of Imagination, which must ever 
 be incomprehensible on the mischievous assumption of 
 ideas being pictures or images of things painted on the 
 mind, by memory. Though, imagination is certainly de- 
 pendent on memory, there is unquestionably something 
 more in imagination than memory only ; it is not repro- 
 ductive only, as memory is or should be, but productive ; 
 it brings back the old, but with a new form— -that is, is 
 
 * Not overlooking, as so many do, that the meaning of the 
 general or abstract is to be sought in the concrete, not the interpre- 
 tation of the concrete in the general or abstract. If we have any 
 doubt about the meaning of an abstract idea, or doubt whether it has 
 any meaning, we ought to trace it dgwriwafds to its root in per- 
 ception, and discover itsmeaning there ; above all we ought not to 
 convert it into an objective entity, and then to spin webs of argu- 
 ment concerning it as the schoolmen did. 
 
524 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 productive as to form, reproductive as to material. When 
 any one affirms that he can imagine something — as, for 
 example, some animal of which he has not had experi- 
 ence, what he does is to combine into one form certain 
 selected characters of different animals of which he has 
 had experience ; creating in this way, as nature is con- 
 tinually doing, new forms out of old material. When 
 the artist embodies in ideal form the result of his faithful 
 observation, he has, by virtue of that mental process 
 through which general ideas are formed, abstracted the 
 essential from the concrete, and then by the shaping 
 power of imagination given to it a new embodiment. 
 In every great work of art, poem or painting, there is 
 thus an involution of the universal in the concrete : it 
 is pregnant in its meaning, yielding a wide range to the 
 action of another's imagination when he contemplates it. 
 If it is merely a copy or exact reproduction of nature, it is 
 clever artifice rather than great art, and excites a feeling 
 of gratified interest at the skill displayed rather than vague 
 and elevating emotions of sympathy with a deep truth 
 embodied in beautiful form. So it is that high art does 
 not express anything essentially evanescent : it confers on 
 the moment the steadfastness of eternity, representing 
 the " shows of nature frozen into a motionless immor- 
 tality." The man of science, who unlocks the secrets of 
 Nature by means of observation, experiment, and re- 
 flection, thus systematically training his mind in con- 
 formity with Nature by exact interrogation and faithful 
 interpretation of her works, foresees future combinations, 
 and when he proceeds to react upon nature, is enabled, 
 by means of a scientific imagination thus carefully culti- 
 vated, to construct wonderful works of art that are truly 
 an advance upon, or a development of, nature — new 
 creations ; forming combinations in harmony with these 
 real and essential relations of things which he has by 
 patient and sympathetic observation made a part of the 
 
IX.] MEMORY AND IMAGINATION. 525 
 
 furniture of his mind, he creates something which is a 
 result of the nisus of evolution working in him, a pro- 
 gress of nature through him, and which serves ever after- 
 wards to inform, elevate, and better mankind. 
 
 What else then, fundamentally, is the true imagination 
 but the rnsus of nature's organic development displaying 
 itself in man's highest function ? It is the evolution of 
 the mental organization. What is human art but nature 
 developed- through man ; nature as it has been moulded 
 by the infused spirit — the inspiration — of man? In- 
 formed of nature, in turn he informs nature. There is 
 going on a recreation of nature by human means, but 
 nature makes the means.* The productive or creative 
 power of Imagination, which seems at first sight to be 
 irreconcilable with knowledge gained entirely through 
 experience, is then at bottom another, though the high- 
 est, manifestation of that force which impels organic 
 development throughout nature ; and the imagination of 
 any one either creates truly, or brings forth abortions 
 and monstrosities, according as the mind is well stored 
 with sound knowledge and has true concepts, or as it is 
 inadequately furnished with knowledge and has erroneous 
 concepts — according, in fact, as the individual is or is 
 not in harmony with nature. 
 
 In order to the full function of imagination, in order, 
 that is, that it may combine into new form, according to 
 higher laws, the ideas and feelings which have been fur- 
 nished by the senses and the bodily organs — it is plainly 
 indispensable that the several pre-necessary mental opera- 
 
 * " Yet nature is made better by no mean, 
 
 But nature makes that mean ; so, over that art, 
 Which,, you say, adds to nature, is an art 
 That nature makes 
 
 This is an art 
 
 Which does mend nature — change, rather : but 
 The art itself is nature." — Winters Tale. 
 
526 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 tions should be performed correctly: it is essential, in fact, 
 that there should be, in the first place, accurate perception 
 ■ — that the mind or brain should respond truly and ade- 
 quately to impressions ; secondly, that there should be 
 accurate memory, the mind retaining or registering accu- 
 rately what has been received ; thirdly, that there should 
 be good recollection, the mind being able to reproduce and 
 use with ease and completeness what it possesses ; and 
 that, lastly, the mind or brain should be endowed with 
 that productive power by which it is enabled to combine 
 and create. Though a person may be capable of per- 
 forming well the first three mental operations, if he 
 have not also productive power, he is incapable of the 
 highest imagination ; he lacks the highest function of mind. 
 He may be able to gather material together, but he can- 
 not truly combine it, according to mental laws, into a true 
 creative product ; for production is not merely a binding 
 together of material, but an organic combining and de- 
 velopment of it. As Wieland aptly remarked, the eyes of 
 Juno, with the nose of Apollo, the brow of Minerva, and 
 the smile of Venus, would form an absurdity, not a 
 masterpiece of fancy ; it would be like a mixing together 
 of several chemical elements that would not combine, 
 not a combination of them into a new product having 
 properties unlike those of its constituents. 
 
 When we look back through the lower forms ot 
 mind we find that this productive or plastic power in- 
 creases with the increase of mind. So far as we can 
 judge, the imagination of animals is mainly, if not en- 
 tirely, reproductive ; when they dream, as dogs evidently 
 sometimes do, it is presumably memory rather than 
 imagination which is at work. The imagination of savages 
 is certainly much more limited to reproduction than that 
 of highly civilized persons; it is occupied with the ideas 
 of perception, or with such incongruous and often gro- 
 tesque mixing together of ideas as may serve for an 
 
tx.] MEMORY AND IMAGINATION. 527 
 
 explanation of natural phenomena that are not understood. 
 The imagination of young children is very much like that 
 of savages, and they are pleased and satisfied with the 
 same kind of fabulous explanations of phenomena. In 
 dreaming, the imagination commonly runs riot, wildly 
 mixing together incongruous ideas into the most absurd 
 forms, but still evincing its wonderful shaping power in 
 the vivid dramas which it represents. In the man of 
 genius, whose mind is in intimate sympathy with the laws 
 of nature and strong with their strength, imagination 
 shapes truly, for it is nature working in him ; it is the 
 highest display of organic evolution, and, like nature, 
 works unconsciously. ( 2 ) 
 
 Although there is something more in imagination than 
 perception and memory, which are its necessary founda- 
 tions, it may be remarked that many times much of what 
 we call memory is really imagination. When we think 
 to recall the actual, the concrete, it is often the ideal, the 
 general, that we reproduce ; and when we believe that we 
 are remembering, we are often w/wremembering, being 
 swayed by the feelings of the moment which colour our 
 remembrance, and unable to reproduce the feelings of the 
 past under which we had the actual experience. How 
 much of perception too is actually imagination ! The 
 past perception unavoidably mingles in the present act, 
 prevents us often from discriminating minute differences 
 which exist, and thus causes us to perceive wrongly or 
 observe incorrectly. What shall be admitted as a. fact in 
 scientific observation depends entirely upon the ob- 
 server's previous knowledge and training. So strong is 
 the disposition to assimilate a previous observation with 
 a past perception, to blend together the like in two 
 ideas, that it is the easiest thing in the world to overlook 
 those special differences which demand a discrimina- 
 tion or organic differentiation ; there is, indeed, as great 
 a danger of hasty generalization in perception as there is 
 
528 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 in reasoning. That which in a present perception is the 
 like of something in a former perception easily stimulates 
 the same nervous current, which accordingly occupies 
 attention, to the neglect or overlooking of that in which 
 the perceptions are unlike ; whence it frequently happens 
 that a misperception occurs, and that facts not the same 
 are declared to be the same. It is always a pleasure 
 when a new experience blends with an old one ; if a new 
 observation will not easily assimilate with existing ideas, 
 there is a feeling of dissatisfaction and of positive dis- 
 comfort, and one is apt to pass the unwelcome fact by. 
 But if a proper mental training prevents such neglect, the 
 fact is deliberately appropriated or registered as a special 
 fact, although small satisfaction is felt in the martyrdom 
 of thus registering it, isolated as it appears ; after a while, 
 however, other observations cluster about it, some 
 blending with it, others connecting it with ideas to which 
 it seemed entirely unrelated, until this pariah of the mind 
 is found perhaps to bridge over a gap in knowledge, and 
 organically to unite distant ideas. It may be supposed, 
 indeed, that while this is going on its nervous substratum 
 is forming its organic connections in the plexuses of the 
 convolutions. The habit of observing accurately, of 
 carefully noting minute differences, and of scrupulously 
 registering them so as to effect an exact internal corre- 
 spondence with external specialities, is indispensable to 
 the true cultivation of mind. 
 
 When a past perception of a fact vitiates a present per- 
 ception, it is hardly correct to ascribe the erroneous per- 
 ception to imagination ; it is really a false perception 
 arising from imperfect observation and hasty generaliza- 
 tion ; but when the fact that has been erroneously or im- 
 perfectly observed is used in inference to warrant an anti- 
 cipation or prediction, then certainly imagination is at 
 work, and future observations are likely to be falsified by 
 the erroneous anticipation or theory of what will be seen. 
 
ix.] MEMORY AND' IMAGINATION. 529 
 
 That is what we mean to imply when we say of an un- 
 trustworthy scientific observer that he resorts to his 
 imagination for his facts ; his present observation is viti- 
 ated by the perverting influence of an incorrect theory 
 based upon imperfectly observed facts. Accurate per- 
 ception and exact memory are the fundamental basis of 
 sound reasoning and imagination. As we perceive more 
 accurately, so shall we remember more correctly, judge 
 more soundly, and imagine more truly. The habit of 
 hasty and inexact observation, the unwarranted blending 
 of residua that are not truly like, is necessarily the founda- 
 tion of a habit of remembering wrongly ; and the habit of 
 remembering wrongly is of necessity the cause of incor- 
 rect judgment and of erroneous imagination : exact in- 
 ternal correspondence and external relations being the 
 basis of an imagination true to nature, — in other words, 
 of a true organic mental development. For these reasons, 
 " the whole powers of the soul may," as Hartley observes, 
 " be referred to the memory, when taken in a large sense. 
 Hence, though some persons may have strong memories 
 and weak judgments, yet no man can have a strong 
 judgment with a weak original power of retaining and 
 remembering." 
 
 If the imagination have not a sound basis in habits of 
 accurate observation, it degenerates into fancy ; a term 
 which, though originally it was considered to mean the 
 same thing as imagination, is now used to denote a well- 
 founded difference.* Fancy represents the productive 
 or creative power of imagination working without that 
 due restraint of law which is imposed upon its operation 
 by habits of accurate observation, and without that 
 proper and sufficient material of facts which such obser- 
 
 * Imago, image, imagination, were once synonymous with - 
 QivTBffpa, phantasm, fancy ; it is interesting to note how the latter 
 have now received their special meanings, phantasm being an illusion 
 or hallucination, and fancy a riotous imaginalion. 
 
530 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 vation furnishes ; consequently it wildly or whimsically 
 yokes together by means of accidental coincidences 
 things that have no essential relations to one another. 
 The productive power of imagination can create form, 
 but cannot create the material with which it must work ; 
 for that it must go to nature ; nor will it create true forms 
 unless it be itself informed by nature. Yellow and blue 
 mixed together produce green ; "but he who has never 
 seen this colour," says Feuchtersleben, " can never create 
 it in his fancy." Thus,, in regard to the highest mental 
 function as in regard to the lowest, we perceive that man 
 is a complex medium, through which impressions are 
 translated into action ; he is a complex and intricate 
 mechanism of so-called reflex function. 
 
 As organic growth and development take place in 
 obedience to the laws of nature, and yet constitute an 
 advance upon them, so it is with the well-cultivated or 
 truly developed imagination, which brings together 
 images from different regions of nature, yokes them 
 together by means of their occult but essential relations, 
 and, thus making the whole one image, gives a unity to 
 variety — displays the one in the many : there is an 
 obedient recognition of nature, and there is a develop- 
 mental advance upon it. This esemplastic faculty, as 
 Coleridge, following Schelling, named it, has been fanci- 
 fully supposed to be indicated by the German word for 
 imagination, namely, Einbildung, or the one-making 
 faculty* Its highest working in our great poets and 
 philosophers really affords us an example of creation 
 going steadily on as a natural process ; and creative or 
 productive activity is assuredly the expression of the 
 highest mental action : whosoever has such capacity has 
 more or less genius ; whosoever has it not will do nothing 
 original, though he work never so hard. What an amount 
 
 * More correctly Ein for en (in), and Bildung (formation,) — in- 
 ternal image, i.e. imagination. 
 
ix.] MEMORY AND IMAGINATION. 531 
 
 has been unwisely written by the sedulous followers of a 
 so-called inductive philosophy in disparagement of imagi- 
 nation and in favour of simple observation ! '.' Men 
 should consider," says Bacon, " the story of the woman 
 in iEsop, who expected that with a double measure of 
 barley her hen would lay two eggs a day ; whereas the 
 hen grew fat and laid none." .It were as wise in a man 
 to load his stomach with food which it cannot digest, as 
 to load his mind with facts which it cannot digest and 
 assimilate. It is in the great capacity which it has of 
 assimilating material from every quarter, and of develop- 
 ing in proportion, that the superiority of genius consists ; 
 and it is in the excellence of its creative imagination, 
 whether poetic, artistic, philosophic, or scientific, that its 
 superior energy is exhibited. 
 
 Because the least things and the greatest in Nature 
 are indissolubly bound together as equally essential 
 parts of the mysterious but harmonious whole, therefore 
 the intuition into one pure circle of her works by the 
 high and subtile intellect of the genius contains implicitly 
 much more than can be explicitly displayed in it ; and 
 therefore it comes to pass at times that, in the investiga- 
 tion of a new order of events by an intellect which is in 
 genial sympathy with nature, the law of them explicitly 
 declares itself as by a flash of intuition, after compara- 
 tively few observations. The imagination successfully 
 anticipates the slow results of patient and systematic 
 research, flooding the darkness with the light of a true 
 interpretation, and thus illuminating the obscure relations 
 and intricate connections. Therein a well-end»wed and 
 well- cultivated mind manifests its unconscious harmony 
 with nature. The brightest flashes of genius come un- 
 consciously and without effort : growth is not a voluntary 
 act, although the gathering of food is. 
 
 Certainly the intuition of truth can never be the rule 
 amongst men, inasmuch as the genius capable of this 
 
532 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 rapid and brilliant intuition, so far from being common, 
 is a most rare exception amongst them. And the result, 
 however brilliantly acquired, can never be safely accepted 
 as lasting, until it has been further subjected to the tests 
 of observation, experiment, and logical reasoning, — until 
 it has undergone verification. The man of genius who 
 has revealed a great trujh may perhaps, on some other 
 occasion, promulgate an equally great error. Not, how- 
 ever, is this likely to happen often : for a well-trained 
 intellect is truly a most delicate, potent, and finished in- 
 strument, which has been fashioned with great pains and 
 skill, and which, when applied to the investigation of any 
 department of nature, places its possessor at an enormous 
 advantage over one who is not so gifted ; not otherwise 
 than as one who uses a microscope or a telescope has 
 vast advantages over him who uses his naked eye only. 
 Happily his errors, if they. are made, are indirectly most 
 useful ; for the experiments and observations provoked 
 and directed by them, and prosecuted for the purpose of 
 displaying their instability, often lead to valuable dis- 
 coveries. Mischief is undoubtedly wrought by the rash 
 promulgation of ill-grounded theories on the part of those 
 who have neither superior original capacity, nor a mind 
 well stored with the results of observation, nor an 
 imagination properly cultivated. It is the ignorant only, 
 however, whom such persons deceive : those who possess 
 an adequate knowledge of the subject can usually detect 
 in the unwarranted theory the exact amount of know- 
 ledge which its author has had, and the character of the 
 defect in. the reasoning by which it is supported. 
 
 Those who take a philosophical view of things, and look 
 upon the progress of human knowledge as a development 
 which is going on continuously through the ages, will find 
 it conformable to their experience of every other form of 
 vital growth that there should be, coincidently with 
 advance, a retrograde metamorphosis, degeneration, or 
 
IX.] MEMORY AND IMAGINATION. 533 
 
 corruption of that which is not fitted for assimilation, and 
 which is ultimately rejected j for as the body dies daily 
 as the condition of its life, so false theories and corrupt 
 doctrines are conditions of the progress of knowledge. 
 In the growth and development of the body there is a 
 correlative degeneration or retrograde metamorphosis of 
 organic element going on — a daily death in strict relation 
 with the activity of life ; so likewise in the organic growth 
 of thought through the ages, there is a corresponding 
 decay or corruption of erroneous doctrines — a death of 
 the false in strict relation with the growth of the true ; 
 thus healthy energy, throws off effete matter, which, in the 
 very act of undergoing decay, gives up force that is avail- 
 able for the development of the higher doctrine which 
 supersedes it. That men should evince a distrust of 
 hasty generalization, and an unwillingness to accept new 
 doctrines, is a healthy manifestation of the self-conserva- 
 tive instinct of their nature ; for this aversion from new 
 things prevents the human mind from being, led astray by 
 every vain and windy dootrine, opens the way for criticism 
 and verification, and thus in the end promotes a sound 
 development. Not in the individual, however, where so 
 much active change takes place in so short a time, will 
 the regular corruption and decay of false doctrines be 
 clearly perceived, but in the historical development of 
 the race, where the gradual evolution of mind may be 
 observed and traced in its successive stages. 
 
 Thus much concerning memory and imagination, the 
 examination of which reveals, better perhaps than the 
 analysis of any other of the so-called mental faculties, 
 the complex organization which mind really is. It re- 
 mains only to add, that the manifold disorders to which 
 memory is liable illustrate in the most complete manner 
 its organic nature. Its disorders are numberless in 
 degree and variety ; for not only every degree of dulness, 
 but every variety of partial loss, as of syllables in a 
 24 
 
534- THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 particular word, of certain words,' places, names, is met 
 with in particular cases. So various and numerous are 
 its possible defects, that it has not yet been practicable to 
 reduce them to any system, although it is probable that 
 a careful classification of them would '. be a most useful 
 contribution to the construction of a mental science. 
 All that we can at present conclude from them is, first, 
 that memory is an organized product ; and, secondly, 
 that it is an organization extending widely 'through the 
 cortical layers of the cerebral hemispheres. It is easy 
 to observe that differences exist in different persons in 
 the character of the organic function which ministers to 
 memory : one man, for example, has a good memory for 
 particular facts, but is no . way remarkable for. reasoning 
 power, or is even singularly deficient therein— ^-the regis- 
 tration of the concrete impressions taking place with 
 great ease and completeness, but the further digestion of 
 the residua not being accomplished ; another, on the 
 other hand, has no memory for particular isolated facts, 
 — they must have some relation to ideas already appro- 
 priated, or must fall under, some principle, if. he. is to 
 recollect them ; in this case the digestion of residua is 
 well effected, so that there exists a great power of gene- 
 ralization. The latter is the memory of intellect; the 
 former, as I have already pointed out, is not unfrequently 
 the memory of idiots. 
 
 It is well-known that memory is greatly affected 
 by bodily states: it differs much at different times; 
 and in a state of complete bodily exhaustion from 
 temporary causes it may sometimes become a com- 
 plete blank for a time, being restored to its accus- 
 tomed function with the restoration of bodily vigour. 
 These occasional variations in its function are of no 
 great moment ; they merely prove that memory, like any 
 other bodily function, is well and easily, or ill and pain- 
 fully, performed according to the state of the general 
 
IX.] MEMORY AND IMAGINATION. 535 
 
 health. But it must also be borne in mind that some flaw 
 in the memory, some breach in its exquisite organization, 
 is one of the first indications of a disorder or degenera- 
 tion of the nerve element of the cortical layers. Its 
 slight, early affections are very apt to be overlooked, 
 forasmuch as they do not reveal themselves in a con- 
 scious inability to remember something, but in an un- 
 conscious deterioration of the highest mental functions, 
 and especially of the moral sense. The most delicately 
 organized residua, representing the highest acquisitions 
 of organic evolution, are here the first to attest by their 
 sufferings any interference with the integrity of nerve- 
 element, just as disorders of the most delicate and 
 complex associated movements of the spinal cord are 
 the first to declare the commencing degeneration of its 
 centres. There is a decomposition or undoing of that 
 which constitutes the latest and highest mental develop- 
 ment — an analysis of it, so to speak ; disease rudely 
 unravelling that which has been intricately and delicately 
 woven into a complex woof of associated nervous 
 plexuses. Long before there is any palpable loss of 
 memory in insanity, even before an individual is re- 
 cognised to be becoming insane, there is a derangement 
 of his highest reasoning and of his moral qualities ; his 
 character is seen to be more or less altered, though what 
 the exact change is cannot perhaps be described in 
 words ; as it is said, " he is not himself." If the degene- 
 ration of nerve element proceeds we witness successively 
 every stage of declension in the disorder of the complex 
 organization of the memory ; namely, manifest perversion 
 of the higher social feelings, next greater or less destruc- 
 tion of the organic connexions of ideas, whence follows 
 incoherence of thought, and, finally, general forgetfulness, 
 declining into complete abolition of memory. 
 
 It is not difficult to understand how it is that the old 
 man sometimes has a tenacious memory of the past, and 
 
53$ THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 reasons tolerably correctly with regard to it, when he 
 cannot duly appropriate and rightly estimate the present. 
 The brain, like every other organ of the body, suffers a 
 diminution of power of activity with the advance of 
 age ; it is less supple, its ideas, like the movements which 
 it dictates, being performed slowly and stiffly ; it reacts 
 to impressions with less and less vigour and vivacity, and 
 there is less and less capacity to assimilate the influence 
 of them, so that there ensue dulness of perception and 
 an incorrect appreciation of events. Meanwhile, how- 
 ever, the past is a possession which is incorporated in 
 the organic nature of the brain, and may be sufficiently 
 remembered, though perhaps with less vivacity than 
 formerly, when the latest impressions have been ob- 
 literated by " decay's effacing finger." It is easy, again, 
 to perceive how it is that children, like animals, live 
 almost entirely in the present ; they have no store of 
 ideas organized in the mind which can be called into 
 activity to influence the present idea, and they react 
 directly to the impressions made upon them. The best 
 possible evidence of the gradual process of mental or- 
 ganization is indeed afforded by the mental phenomena 
 of young children ; for, the residua of impressions not 
 being completely organized, their memory is fallacious, 
 and, a firm organic association between ideas not being 
 established, their discourse is incoherent. 
 
 The old man and the child both fail in judgment : the 
 former, because he has forgotten more or less of the past 
 and has lost the standard by which to measure the present 
 perception, or because he cannot perform accurately the 
 present perception, and measures it entirely by the past ; 
 the latter, because it has not yet any past. By the neces- 
 sity of the case almost, an old man becomes conservative 
 and the laudator temporis adi; for the evolution of 
 events goes on when his nature has ceased to assimilate 
 and develop; he has accordingly no sympathy with them, 
 
IX. ] MEMOR Y AND IMA GIN A 7VCW. 537 
 
 shrinks from contact with them, and querulously brands 
 as revolutionary what is truly evolutionary. It were 
 a grievous thing if old men did not die; for in that 
 sad case the world's movement onwards to where it is 
 going would be very sluggish, if it were not actually 
 arrested. How different with the youth ! The curtain 
 of life rises, its illusions fascinate him, and he is en- 
 chanted with all he sees ; his nature expands trustfully 
 and joyfully, and though he may often mistake fleeting 
 shows for lasting truths, and come to no little sorrow 
 thereby, yet he assimilates, grows, and develops. Nature 
 lures him into young enthusiasm of faith and work, and 
 by the time he finds her out in age dispenses with 
 him. 
 
 Lastly, it will not be amiss to bear in mind, in regard 
 to the organic nature of memory, that we cannot well 
 remember pain. It is certainly possible to remember that 
 we have suffered a particular pain ; but vividly to recall 
 the pain, as we can recall a definite idea, is not possible. 
 And why ? Because the idea is an organized product 
 which abides, while the disorganization or disturbance of 
 nerve element which pain implies passes away with the 
 restoration of the integrity'of the nerve centre. To recall 
 an idea is to reproduce the same nervous current which 
 was experienced on the first occasion, to the recurrence 
 of which; there is an organic aptitude. To recall a pain 
 as we actually felt it would be to reproduce the condi- 
 tions of disorganization which accompanied it ; and that 
 we cannot do by an effort of will. For the same reason, 
 we cannot easily _ or adequately recall a very powerful 
 emotion in which the idea or the form has been almost 
 entirely lost in the commotion — where, in fact, the storm 
 among the intimate elements has been so great as to be 
 destructive of form : - Shakespeare's words, ""formless 
 ruin of oblivion," admirably expressing the state of 
 .things. When we do strive to bring to mind a particular 
 
538 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap. 
 
 sensation or emotion, it is by vivid representation of its 
 cause, and consequent secondary excitation of it : we 
 remember the idea, and the idea thereupon generates the 
 emotion or the sensation ; though seldom in so intense a 
 degree as when this was actually experienced. But the 
 sensation of pain is a different matter from the sensation 
 of one of the senses ; it is the outcry of suffering nerve 
 element, and cannot commonly be generated by an 
 idea ; it is not the result of organization, but the token 
 of disorganization. How, then, should it be accurately 
 remembered ? 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 1 {p. 514). — "The truth that memory comes into existence when 
 the connections among psychical states cease to be perfectly auto- 
 matic is in complete harmony with the obverse truth, illustrated in 
 all our experience, that as fast as the connections of psychical states 
 which we form in memory become, by constant repetition, automatic, 
 they cease to be part of memory. We do not speak of ourselves as 
 remembering those relations which become organically, or almost 
 organically, registered ; we remember those relations only of which 
 the registration is not yet absolute. No one remembers that the 
 object at which he is looking has an opposite side ; or that a certain 
 modification of the visual impression implies a certain distance ; or 
 that the thing which he sees moving about is a living animal. It 
 would be a misuse of language were we to ask another whether he 
 remembers that the sun shines, that fire burns, that iron is hard, and 
 
 that ice is cold And similarly, though, when a child, the 
 
 reader's knowledge of the meaning of successive words was at first 
 a memory of the meanings he had heard given to them ; yet now 
 their several meanings are present to him without any such mental 
 process as that which we call remembrance." — Herbert Spencer, 
 Principles of Psychology, p. 55 '• 
 
 * (A S 2 7)- — Jean Paul Richter, in one of his Letters, says : 
 " The dream is an involuntary art of poetry : and it shows that the 
 poet works more with the bodily brain than another man. How is 
 it that no one has wondered that in the detached scenes of dreaming, 
 he puts in the mouth of the actors the most appropriate language, 
 the words most exactly characteristic of their nature : or rather that 
 
IX. J MEMORY AND IMAGINATION. 539 
 
 they prompt him, not he them ? The true poet even is in writing 
 
 only the listener, not the language-teacher of his characters 
 
 Victor's observation that the opponent of his dreams often put before 
 him more difficult objections than a real bodily one, may be made 
 of the dramatist, who can in no manner be the spokesman of his 
 company without a. certain inspiration, though he is at the same 
 time easily the writer of their parts. That dream-forms surprise us 
 with answers with which we ourselves have inspired them is natural ; 
 even when awake every idea springs forth suddenly like a spark of 
 fire, though we attribute it to our attention ; but in dreams we lack 
 the consciousness of attention, and we must thus ascribe the idea 
 to the figure before us, to which also we ascribe the attention." 
 Again : — " Das Machtigste in Dichter, welches seinen Werkea 
 die gute und die bose Seele einblaset, ist gerade das Unbewusste." 
 — Aesthehk. 
 
 Carlyle, whose writings exhibit in a marked degree the influence 
 of Jean Paul and Goethe, says of Shakespeare : — " Shakespeare is 
 what I call an unconscious intellect ; there is more virtue in it than 
 he is himself aware of. His dramas are products of Nature, deep 
 as Nature herself. It is Nature's highest reward to a true, simple, 
 great soul, that he gets thus to be a part of herself. Such a man's 
 works, whatever he with utmost conscious exertion and forethought 
 shall accomplish, grow up withal a«consciously from the unknown 
 deep in him, as the oak-tree grows from the earth's bosom, as the 
 mountains and waters shape themselves." 
 
 Dr. Brown (Philosophy of the Mind, p. 200), when enumerating 
 what he calls the Secondary Laws of Suggestion, lays much stress 
 on constitutional differences in individuals — the differences of Genius, 
 Temper, or Disposition. The tendencies in some minds are wholly 
 to suggestions of proximity ; in other minds there is a powerful 
 tendency to suggestions of analogy. It is in this latter tendency to 
 the new and copious suggestions of analogy that the distinction of 
 genius appears to consist ; a mind in which it exists is necessarily 
 inventive ; " for all to which we give the name of invention, having 
 a relation to something old, but a relation to that which was never 
 before suspected or practically applied, is the suggestion of analogy." 
 There would be nothing new if objects were to suggest only, accord- 
 ing to proximity, the very objects that had co-existed with them ; 
 but there is a perpetual novelty of combination, when the images 
 that arise after each other, by that shadowy species of resemblance 
 which we are considering, are such as never existed before together or 
 in immediate succession. Hence the rich figurative language of 
 poetry— the expressions of resemblances that have arisen silently 
 
540 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. [chap, IX. 
 
 and spontaneously in the mind ; hence the discoveries and inventions 
 of science, &c He goes on, too, to point out that this novelty of 
 combination in imagination cannot , depend upon the will. It is 
 absurd, he says, to suppose that we can will directly any conception, 
 since, if we know what we will, conception must be already a part 
 of consciousness. 
 
 "Hence, in proportion as the memory is enriched and provided 
 with materials, in the same proportion the rational mind, if backed 
 by a happy genius, will be able skilfully, felicitously, and approxi- 
 mately and agreeably to the .truth; to distribute its analysis into 
 series, to adjust and conclude them, of many analytic conclusions 
 again to form new analyses, and in the end to evolve its ultimate 
 analyses. '— Swedenborg's Animal Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 348. 
 
 In a note he adds — ' ' This is corroborated by the common opinion, 
 that the knowledge and intelligence of an individual are in propor- 
 tion to the furniture of his memory. But it does not follow from 
 this, that a powerful memory is always accompanied with ability, or 
 by an understanding of equal grasp. For the faculty of reducing 
 the contents of memory to order is a fresh intellectual requisite. An 
 edifice is not built simply by the accumulation of implements, bricks, 
 tiles, and the materials. These and skill must be tasked to put all 
 things together in their places." 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abercromeie, Dr., 28, 93,212, 293. 
 
 Absolute, the, 10. 
 
 Abstractioni the meaning of, 275 ; 
 
 made' into entity, 83, 276, 283, 440, 
 . 426. ' 
 
 Acid, cerebrinic, 78. 
 Actuation, 463, 466. 
 Affections of mind, 348. 
 Alcmaeon, 120. 
 
 Amphibia, cerebral hemispheres of, 97 
 Amphioxus, the, 92. 
 Analysis, introspective, 60, 6x, 
 Anaximander, 3. 
 Anaesthesia, 316. 
 
 Annelida, nervous system of, 165. 
 Anthropomorphism, 4. 
 Animals, limited ideas of, 273, 275 J 
 ■ imagination Of, 526. 
 Antithesis, .the principle of, 384. 
 Ape, brain of, 103, 261; the attention 
 
 of the, 311. 
 Aphasia, 475 ; morbid conditions of, 
 
 477, 478 ; condition of intelligence 
 
 in, 479. 
 Appetites, 354. 
 Apoplexy, 200, 209. 
 Arc, the sensorial, 98 ; the ideational, 
 
 98. - 
 
 Archencephala, the, 107. 
 
 Aristotle^ 5, 7, 63. 
 
 Assimilation, 237. 
 
 Attention, effect of, upon sensibility, 
 298, 313 ; physical basis of, 308 ; 
 ' nature of, 310—321, 490 ', voluntary 
 andjnyoluntary, 312; physical con- 
 ditions of, 316. 
 
 Automatism, 238 ; remarkable case of, 
 342 ; and memory, 521. 
 
 Baboon, brain of the Chacma, J16. 
 Bacon, Francis, 6, 7, 15; 19, 23, 49, 50, 
 , 55. 57> 59. 61, 69, 70, 149, 183, 301, 
 
 35 6 > 3 8 3» W43a- 
 Bacon, Roger, 7. 
 
 Bain, Professor A., definition of mind, 
 126, 133 ; on the germ of locomotive 
 harmony, 152 ; on spontaneous 
 energy, 170. 
 
 Beaufort, Sir F., on the feelings dur- 
 ing drowning, 72. 
 
 Eees, the nervous centres of, 165 ; in- 
 telligence of, 240 ; stupidity of, 328. 
 
 Belief, the nature of, 412, 441'; manner 
 of reform of, 446. 
 
 Bell, Sir Charles, on the infant's 
 smile, 153, 473 ; on the infant's ap- 
 prehension of falling. 469 ; on the 
 muscular sense, 487, 493, 506. 
 
 Beneke, on residua, 20; on uncon- 
 scious mental function, 74; on con- 
 ceptions, 277. 
 
 Berkeley, Bishop, on visual language, 
 2T2, 235, 258; on the non-existence 
 of matter, 225. 
 
 Bert.on grafting animal structures, 147. 
 
 Bichat, on the seat of the passions, 37, 
 
 389- 
 
 Biography, import of, 13; the study 
 of, 52. 
 
 Birds, cerebral hemispheres of, 97 ; 
 the intelligence of, 99 ; the emo- 
 tions of, 99. 
 
 Blainville, on- the effects of environ- 
 ment on the organism, 132. 
 
 Blake, William, visions of, 293. 
 
 Blindness, 2x3, 
 
 Blushing, 317. 
 
 Bone, transplantation of, 447. 
 
 Bongos, the superstition of, 2. 
 
 Bonnet, on the nature of ideas, 269. 
 
 Bosjesman, brain of, 102, 261 ; gesture- 
 language of, 50X. 
 
 Braid, on hypnotism, 388, 472. 
 
 Brain, organic sympathies of, 35 ; 
 relations of, 40 ; waste and repair of, 
 40 ; education of, 83 ; development 
 of, 102 ; weight of, 103 ; the quality 
 of, 104 ; the foetal, 106 ; the structure 
 of convolutions of, 112—118; reflex 
 function of, 181. 
 
 Bridgman, Laura, the case of, 480, 
 507 ; the account of method of in- 
 struction of, 507—511. 
 
542 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Broca on the seat of articulate lan- 
 - guage, 263. 
 
 Brown, Dr. T., on a physiology of 
 mind, 77 ; on co-existence of con- 
 scious states, 304 ; on imagination, 
 
 539- 
 Browne, Sir T., 107; on the music of 
 
 the spheres, 408 ; transpreciation, 
 
 457- 
 Brown-Sequard, on the production of 
 
 rigor mortis, 171 ; on the production 
 
 of epilepsy, 178 ; on reflex delirium, 
 
 253- ' ■ 
 
 Bruntbn, Dr. Lauder, on chloroform 
 
 narcosis, 208. 
 Burke, on the mental effects of 
 
 mimicking looks and gestures, 473. 
 Burrows, Dr., a case of reflex delirium, 
 
 254- 
 Burton, R. F., 339. 
 
 Cabanis, on the secretion of thought, 
 77 ; on the transmission of organic 
 habits, 219 ; on the expression of 
 feelings, 474. 
 
 Campanella, the physiognomist, 472. 
 
 Causes, final, 146 — 149, 156, 183, 432. 
 
 Cerebnn, 78. 
 
 Channing, Rev. Dr f on change of 
 character, 448. 
 
 Character, 336; a change of, 362, 447 ; 
 the constancy of, 370 ; transforma- 
 tion, 372 ; its relation to will, 445. 
 
 Chloroform, action of, 208. 
 
 Christianity, the moral law of, 404. 
 
 Clarke, Dr, Lockhart, on the struc- 
 ture of the cerebral convolutions, 
 112; on the nature of volition, 427. 
 
 Ccenaesthesis, the, 359, 374. 
 
 Coleridge, 25, 82, no, 530. 
 
 Colloids, 87, 
 
 Colour, perception of, 234. 
 
 Commonwealth, the physiological, 37. 
 
 Compensation, 400. 
 
 Comte, Auguste, ^ on the social unit, 
 53 ; on the received psychology, 70 ; 
 on the relation of organism to en- 
 vironment, 132 ; on the cerebral 
 functions, 262 ; on heredity, 330 ; 
 on the impulses of action, 358, 407 ; 
 on continuous organic sympathy, 
 376; on egoism and altruism, 390; 
 on family feeling, 399; on final 
 causes, 432 ; on language, 505. 
 
 Concept, the, 273, 522 ; its mechanism, 
 281. 
 
 Confucius, 421. 
 
 Consciousness, interrogation of, 16— 
 42 ; the necessary condition of, 17 ; 
 nature and limits of, 45 ; grades of, 
 95, 242 ; relation to reflex acts, 
 138 — 146 ; relation to sensori-motor 
 acts, 197 — 205 ; relation to mental 
 
 function, 245 ; states of abnormal, 
 303 ; co-existence of states of, 304 ; 
 its relation to memory, 521. 
 
 Convolutions, the cerebral, 101 ; the 
 structure of, 112 — 118; differentia- 
 tion of, 124 ; morbid changes in, 
 ' 124 ; the functions of, 261 — 268. 
 
 Convulsion, co-ordinated, 485. 
 
 Corpora striata, functions of, 187. 
 
 Criminals, the study of, 52. 
 
 Curare, effects of, 171. 
 
 Custom, effects of, 220, 392. 
 
 Cuvier, F. t on the hereditary trans- 
 mission of acquired instincts, 21S. 
 
 D. 
 
 Darwin, Charles, on the- persistence 
 of instincts, 216; on attention, 311 ; 
 on the acquirement of mental capa- 
 . city by gradation, 330 ; on the ex- 
 pression of the emotions, 380, 383 ; on 
 sexual selection, 404. 
 
 Darwin, Dr. Erasmus, on sensori-motor 
 actions, 256 ; on ideo-motor, actions* 
 288, 292 ; on the performance of 
 ideas, 307, 341 ; on epilepsy and 
 somnambulism, 347 ; on memory, 512. 
 
 Deliberation. 309. 
 
 Delirium, reflex, 253, 254. 
 
 De Quincey, on opium dreams, 73. 
 
 Descartes, on the test of a true belief, 
 18 ; on the constant activity of mind, 
 29 ; his definition of mind, 38, 125 ; 
 exaltation of consciousness, 47 ; 
 automatic actions of animals, 48 ; 
 on final causes, 432. 
 
 Design, nature of, 146 — 148, 155, 430. 
 
 Desire, 353, 357, 390, 424. 
 
 Development, the law of organic, 7, 
 132, 133*338. 405- 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 293. 
 
 Dionasa muscipula, 140. 
 
 Discernment, 237. 
 
 Disease, emotional or affective features 
 pf» 375- . . . 
 
 Distance, intuition of, 201, 468. 
 
 Doctrine, degeneration or corruption 
 of false, 533. 
 
 Dreaming, 319, 375, 498 ; imagination 
 in, 527. 
 
 Dreams, persistence of images of, 292, 
 297. 
 
 Drowning, the feelings during, 72. 
 
 E. 
 
 Education, 84. 
 
 Edwards, Jonathan, on the will, 422, 
 
 459 
 
 Effort, the consciousness of, 424. 
 
 Ego, the conception of the, 224 ; modi- 
 fication of, 363, 372 ; the identity 
 of the, 449. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 543 
 
 Emerson, Ralph W., 553. 
 
 Emotion, 348—408; relation to idea. 
 ■348i" 361; influence of condition- of 
 nerve element upon, 358; evolution 
 of, 366 ; resolution of, 367 j basis of, 
 in the organic life, 371, 373; influ- 
 ence of disease upon, 375 ; influence 
 of state of blood upon,- 378; dis- 
 charge of, 379 ; expression of, 379 — 
 388 ; influence of bodily attitude 
 upon, 387; disorder of, 389 ; egoistic 
 and altruistic, 390; the complexity 
 of, 39 1 1 relation of, to will, 451— 
 457- 
 
 Entity, conversion of abstraction into, 
 83, 276, 283, 426. 
 
 Environment, organic adaptation to, 
 88, 132, 133. 
 
 Epilepsy, the artificial production of, 
 178 ; insanity after, 251 j the cerebral 
 seat of, 263. 1 
 
 Eunuchs, the mental character of, 372. 
 
 Evolution, intellectual, 33a — 334. 
 
 Expression, the art of, 498. 
 
 Faculty, imitative, 161. 
 Fame, the vanity of, 68. 
 Fancy, the, 529. 
 
 Faraday, on the formation of hypo- 
 theses, 65. 
 Feeling, social, 364, 399 ; aesthetic, 365 ; 
 
 philosophic, 365 ; muscular, 376 ; 
 
 tribal, 399; egoistic and altruistic, 
 
 390 ; moral. 400 — 404. ' 
 Ferrier, Dr. D., on stimulation of the 
 
 cerebral convolutions, 265, 268. 
 Feuchtersleben, on imagination, 530. 
 Fishes, cerebral hemispheres of, 97'; 
 
 appearance of ideas in, 98. 
 Flourens, on the removal of cerebral 
 
 hemispheres, 191, 207. 
 Foetus, the brain of, 106. 
 Foster, John, on change of character, 
 
 362 ; on habit, 420. _ 
 Foxes, acquired cunning of, 218. 
 Foxhunting, barbarity of, 100. 
 Fritsch, Dr., on stimulation of the 
 
 cerebral convolutions, 265. 
 Function, simplest reflex, 89, 161 ; sen- 
 
 sori-motor, 94; cerebral reflex, 269, 
 
 2S4, 285. 
 
 Ganglia, sensory, 91, 109, 186 — 256 ; 
 causes of disorder of, 248 — 2 5& » in- 
 nate defects of, 248 ; excessive func- 
 tion, 250 ; the supply of blood to, 
 251 ; reflex irritation of, 252 » trophic 
 influence of cerebral hemispheres on, 
 255; the hemispherical, 259— 339. 
 
 General paralysis, the motor and men- 
 tal phenomena of, 494- 
 
 Genius, assimilation by, 34 ; the 
 quality of, 64 ; the imagination of, 
 527- 
 
 Germ-cell, the, 119. 
 
 Goethe, 1, 59, 61, 64, 68, 111, 131, 132, 
 293. 
 
 Gohz, on inhibitory function, 145, 173 ; 
 on the removal of cerebral hemi- 
 spheres, 193. 
 
 Graham, on colloidal matter, 87. 
 
 Gratiolet, 99. 
 
 Gray, ode on Eton College, 386. 
 
 Gregarinida, the, 105. 
 
 Griesinger, on psychical reflex action, 
 181. 
 
 H. 
 Habit, 420. 
 
 Hall, Robert, on materialism, 135. 
 Haller, on the sense of smell in negroes, 
 ' 2I 5- 
 
 Hallucinations, 121, 236; 255, 291, 293, 
 297^ 300. t 
 
 Hamilton, Sir W., the veracity of con- 
 sciousness, 18 ; on latent modifica- 
 tions of mind, 38, 73 ; the meaning 
 
 , of,, consciousness, 45 ; definition of 
 mind, 126, 133 ; on co-existence of 
 conscious states, 304. 
 
 Hartley, on secondary automatic move- 
 ments, 150, 184 ; on reflex, cerebral 
 
 , function, 195 ; on the nature of ideas, 
 269 ; on complex and duplex ideas, 
 335 ; on different languages, 342 ; on 
 the will, 427, 460 ; on memory, 529. 
 
 Hartmann, E. von, on unconscious 
 mind, 84. » 
 
 Haschisch, the effects of, 378. 
 
 Heart, retardation of action of, 173 ; 
 apparent cessation of action of. 341. 
 
 Helmholtz, on the nature of perception, 
 223, 227 ; on perception of colour, 
 234. 
 
 Hemiplegia, 118. 
 
 Hemispheres, the cerebral, 93, 97, 259 ; 
 insensibility of, 98 ; convolutions of, 
 101 ; the removal of, 191 — 194, 207, 
 261 ; compensatory action of, 264. 
 
 Herbart, 352. 
 
 Heredity, 217, 330, 369. 
 
 History, the study of, 53. 
 
 Hitzig, Dr. E., on stimulation of the 
 cerebral convolutions, 265. 
 
 Hobbes, 121, 277, 304, 309, 340, 341, 
 347. 352, 406, 427, 461. 
 
 Howe, Dr. S. C., a case of aculeness 
 of smell, 257 ; on the case of Laura 
 1 Bridgman, 4_8o, : 597^511. 
 
 Huber, on the intelligence of bees, 240. 
 
 Humboldt, 15, 64 ; on the sense of 
 smell in Indians, 215. 
 
 Hume, David, on association of ideas, 
 323 ; on innate idea, 340 ; on will, 
 461. 
 
 Hunter, John, on paraplegia, 136 ; on 
 the effects of attention, 291. 
 
544 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Huxley, T. H,, on differences between 
 brains of ape and of man, 102 ; on 
 the Gregarinida, 105. 
 
 Hydra, the, 92. 
 
 Hypnotism, 388, 472. 
 
 Hypochondria, 377. 
 
 Hypothesis, the use of, 65. 
 
 Idea, the essential, 82; the cerebral 
 correlate of, 284 ; the action of, upon 
 movement, 287 ; the action 6f) upon 
 sensory centres, 291 ; the action of, 
 upon nutrition and secretion, 300 ; 
 the action of, upon other ideas, 303^ 
 different state of evolution of, 338. 
 
 Ideas, unconscious, 70, 71,73, 74, 305 ; 
 material, 85 ; first appearance of, 
 98 ; the nature of, 269 ; general and 
 abstract, 273, 522 ; fundamental or 
 innate, 277—286, 324—334.; like 
 movements, 366 ; association of, 
 321 ; complex, 335 ; hostility 'to 
 new, 413 ; power of will over, 436. 
 
 Ideation, 259, 272 ; mechanism of, 
 280. 
 
 Idiosyncrasies,- 248. 
 
 Idiots, the brains of, 104; sense of 
 smell of, 215; defective sensibility 
 of, 249 ; remarkable memories of, 
 518. 
 
 Imagination, 523 ; conditions of sound, 
 529 ; difference between fancy and, 
 529. 
 
 Individuation, the principle of, 88, no. 
 
 Infants, reflex acts of, 137 ; anence- 
 phalic, 137. 
 
 Inhibition, 145, 163, 318, 442. 
 
 Innervation, motor, 313 — 315 ; feeling 
 of, 425. 
 
 Insanity, the study of, 52; sensorial, 
 248, 251 ; moral, 367. 
 
 Insects, the powers of vision of, 209. 
 
 Instinctive actions, 196, 210. 
 
 Instincts, 201, 202, 393 ; ' origin of, 
 216—221; evolution of, 394. 1 
 
 Intellectorium commune, x88, 259. 
 
 Intuition, 11, 59, 333 ; motor, 267, 
 463 ; imaginative, 531. 
 
 JaCkson, Dr. Hughlings, on epilepsy, 
 
 263. 
 Jews, the national and moral feeling 
 
 of, 401. 
 
 Kant, on unconscious ideas, 74. 
 
 K whne. on the endings of nerves, 107. 
 
 Knight, on instincts in animals, 2x9. 
 
 L. 
 
 Lamarck, on the relation of organism 
 to environment,. 132, 133. 
 
 Language, analysis of, 5 ; study of, 
 51 ; the seat of, 263 ; origin, nature, 
 and development of, 499— 506V 
 
 Lay cock, Dr., on reSex cerebral func- 
 tion, 181. 
 
 Lecithin, 78, 8r. . 
 
 Leibnitz, on consciousness of free will, 
 46, 429; on unconscious ideas, 74. 
 
 Leroy, on the cunning of foxes, 2x8. 
 
 Leuret, 99. 
 
 Levy, W. H., on blindness, .214. 
 
 Lewes, G. H., on ncurility, 89^' oil the 
 
 . ' Jaw of organic development, 132. 
 
 Life, mind the highest development of, 
 
 43- 5°-* 
 Lister, Joseph, on the contractions of 
 
 arteries, 108 ; on the movements of 
 
 pigment granules, 175. 
 Locke, the psychological method of, 
 
 47 ; on spiritual beings, 105 ; on 
 
 innate ideas, 440. 
 Longet, on the removal of the cerebral 
 
 hemispheres, 192. 
 Love, the passion of, 377. 
 Lucas, Dr. Prosper, 215. 
 Luys, on the function of the thalami 
 
 optici, 187. 
 
 M. 
 
 Macaulay, remarkable memory of, 
 518. 
 
 Major, Dr. Herbert, on the brain of 
 the Chacma baboon, xi6. 
 
 Mammalia, cerebral hemispheres of, 
 97. 
 
 Marshall, J. , on the ape's brain, 103 ; 
 on the brain of an idiot, 104. 
 
 Materialism. 134, 135. 
 
 Matter, colloidal, 87 ; powers of, 127 ; 
 grades of, 130; the non-existence of, 
 225. 
 
 Max Muller, on the analysis of lan- 
 guage, 5 ; on the impossibility of 
 tbbught without language, 480. 
 
 Meissner, on scattered nerve-cells, 
 xo8. 
 
 Memory, the basis i of, ■ 271 ; persis- 
 tence of, 25 ; nature and function of, 
 512 — 523 ; unconscious, 5x4; dis- 
 orders of, 534 ; of old age, 536. 
 
 Mesmerism, 316. 
 
 Meshet, Dr. E., on a remarkable case 
 
 of automatism, 349. 
 Metaphysics, "barrenness of, 13, 
 Method, the metaphysical, 3, 4 ; the 
 inductive, 9 — 11; the psychological, 
 xr, 60 ; the union of subjective and 
 objective, 63 ; discussion of, in 
 study of mind, x— 76. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 545 
 
 Mill, James, on sensory movements, 
 194 ; on the term Ideation, 259 : on 
 complex ideas, 336 ; on the acquire- 
 ment of voluntary movements, 
 435- 
 
 Mill, John S., on the psychological 
 method, 75 ; on the co-existence of 
 states of consciousness, 304. 
 
 Milton, on truth in the making, 31 ; 
 on grades of matter, 131 ; on the 
 mental functions of tnatter, 134; on 
 the harmony pf the spheres, 407 ; 
 on liberty:, 438. 
 
 Mimicry, the mental effects of, 473. 
 
 Mimosa pudica, the, 140. 
 
 Mind, method of study of, 1—76 ; de- 
 notation of the word, 39, 78—84 ; 
 the most complex, vital function, 43 ; 
 plan Of development of, 50 ; degene- 
 ration of, 51 ; true .method 'of study 
 of, 54;, a physiology of, 77; uncon- 
 scious, 84 ; genesis- of, 99 ; defini- 
 tions of, 125, 126, 133. 
 
 Miracles, 299. 
 
 Montaigne, on additional senses, 340. 
 
 Moral sense, 396 ; the origin and de- 
 velopment of, 396 — 405. 
 
 Moreau, on haschisch, 378. 
 
 Motor hallucinations, 482. 
 
 Motor intuitions, 367, 463 — 510. 
 
 MotoriuiD commune, 188, 463. 
 
 Movements, potential, 150 ; secondary 
 automatic, 150, 184, 194 ; associated, 
 152 ; centre of co-ordination of, 154 ; 
 laws of reflex, r66 ; sensori-motor, 
 190, 194, 256 ; sensory stimuli of, 
 230 ; voluntary, • 246 ; ideo-motor, 
 287 — 291 ; power of will over, 434. 
 496. 
 
 Miiller, Joh., on the stimuli of the 
 special senses, 122 ; on associated 
 movements, 153 ; on the volition of 
 sensory centres, 238 ; on pleasure 
 and pain, 351. 
 
 Muscular sense, the, 487 — 495. 
 
 O. 
 
 Object, the perception of, 225. 
 
 Observation, introspective, 61 ; ob- 
 jective, 61, 62. 
 
 Old age, failing memory of, 536. 
 
 Oilier, on transplantation of peri- 
 osteum, 447. 
 
 Opium, dreams of, 73. 
 
 Ovum, the human, 105, 119. 
 
 Owen,, Professor, on the Archen- 
 cephala, 107. 
 
 P. 
 
 pAGET,Sir James, on rhythmical nutri- 
 tion, 157. 
 
 Pain, the foundation of, 351 ; the im- 
 perfect memory. of, 537- 
 
 Paraplegia, 136. 
 
 Pascal, on custom, 220. 
 
 Pelletier, Narcisse, 232. 
 
 Perception, 98, 206, 221—229 ; the 
 foundation of reasoning, 283 ; erron- 
 eous, 529. 
 
 Periosteum, transplantation of, 447- 
 
 Pfluger, on the terminations of nerves, 
 xo8 ; on reflex actions, 138 ; on sen- 
 sation in spinal cord, 138 ; on the 
 laws of reflex movements, 166, 182 ; 
 on reflex convulsions, 176. 
 
 Phantasy, 529. 
 
 Philistinism, 403. 
 
 Philippeau, 89. 
 
 Philosophy, Ionian school of, 3. 
 
 Physiognomy, study of, 382. 
 
 physiology, imperfection of, 50. 
 
 Plato, 5, 8, 15. 32. 64. 
 
 Pleasure, the foundation of, 351. 
 
 Polypes, sensibility of, 93 ; conscious- 
 ness and volition of, 142, 241. 
 
 Priestley, Px. J., 334. 
 
 Prochaska, on sensibility in polypes, 
 93, 241 ; on reflex , function, 1 39 ; on 
 the conservative law of reflex action, 
 185 ; on volition of polypes, 241. 
 
 Protagpn, 7Q. 
 
 Protozoa, 86. 
 
 Psychology, empirical, 15 ; need of 
 individual, 23 : the terms of, 43 ; 
 true method of, 63. 
 
 Puberty, mental effects of, 371. 
 
 Punishment, the idea of, 400, 414 ; 
 eternal, 4x5. 
 
 Pyrrhonism, 4 
 
 Pythagoras, 3. 
 
 Ratiocination, 309. 
 
 Recollection, 517 ; difference between 
 
 memory and, 519. 
 Reflection, 308. 
 Reflex actions, 137 — 182; cerebral, 
 
 181, 195, 269 ; sensory, 194. 
 Reformer,. the unwise conduct of, 453 ; 
 
 the intensive and the extensive, 
 
 +55- 
 Reid, Dr. J., his definition of mind, 
 
 Relations, integration of, 90. 
 
 Religion, 401. 
 
 Residua, 27 ; Beneke on, 70 ; the basj s 
 
 of memory, 513. 
 Responsibility, 419. 
 Richter, Jean Paul, 33, 36 ; on am- 
 
 ing, 538. 
 Rigor mortis, 171. 
 Romberg, on co-ordinate spasm, 485 
 
 on tabes dorsalis, 488. 
 Rosenthal, 89. 
 
54<5 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Sanderson, Dr. Burdon, on cerebral 
 
 motor centres, 266. 
 Savages, limited ideas ot, 274, 413 ; 
 
 limited moral sense of, 399 ; cruelties 
 
 of, 415 ; imagination of, 526. 
 Scepticism, 327. 
 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 44. 
 Schweinfurth, Dr., on Central African 
 
 superstition, 2. 
 Sciences, continuity of, 49. 
 Secretion, effects of emotion upon, 385. 
 Self-consciousness, interrogation of, 16, 
 
 r, 245 ' • 
 
 Sensation, seat of common, 187 ; re- 
 lation of consciousness to, 197 — 205, 
 242 ; pure, '206, 221 ; as sign or sym- 
 bol, 229, 272 ; compound, 234.. 
 
 Senses, development of special, 91 ; 
 stimulation of, 122 ; acuteness of, 
 an, 257 ; development of power of, 
 2Z2 — 215 ; tactile and muscular, 221; 
 visual, 226, 235. 
 
 Sensibility, kinds of, 94 ; symmetrical 
 increase of, 235. 
 
 Sensorium commune, 188. 
 
 Sentience, organic, 206. 
 
 Shaftesbury, Lord, on judicious lies, 
 
 Shelley, hallucinations of, 293. 
 
 Sight, instantaneous judgments of, 32. 
 
 Sleep, cerebral circulation during, 320. 
 
 Socrates, 5: 
 
 Somnambulism, 208, 316. 
 
 Sophistry, 5. 
 
 Spalding, experiments on chickens, 201. 
 
 Speech, 231 ; mode of learning, 429, 
 476; the possibility of future de- 
 velopment of, 471 ; the loss of power 
 of, 475 ; physiological mechanism of, 
 476. 
 
 Spencer^ Herbert, on ideas, 70 ; on 
 organism and environment, 133 ; on 
 memory, 538. 
 
 Sperm-cell, the, 1 19. 
 
 Spinal cord, education of, 160, 163 ; 
 grey, substance of, i6a ; continuous 
 activity of, 162 ; exhaustion and 
 repair of, 157 ; inhibitory function 
 of, 163 ; functions of, 137 — 182 ; in- 
 stability of, 167; excessive stimula- 
 tion of, 169 ; the supply of blood to, 
 170; reflex irritation of, 173. 
 
 Spinoza, on final causes, 148, 156, 183 ; 
 on automatic actions, 182 ; on dream- 
 images, 292 ; his mathematical me- 
 thod, 349 ; on pleasure and pain, 351 ; 
 on desire, 353 ;on the passions, 390, 
 406 ; on free-will, 409, 430 ; on final 
 causes, 432 ; on will and intelligence.* 
 44a> 
 
 Stewart, Dugald, 215. 
 
 Stigmata, 302. 
 
 Strychnia, effects of, 171, 175 ; deriva- 
 tives of, 171. 
 Substantia cogitans, 125, 133. 
 Sympathies, organic, 373. 
 
 Tabes dorsalis, 489. 
 
 Tarchanoft", on inhibiting the heart's 
 action, 173. 
 
 Tension, muscular, feeling of, 313. 
 
 Tertullian, 120. 
 
 Tetanus, 177. 
 
 Thalamus opticus, 1S7. 
 
 Thales, 3. 
 
 Theotepsy, 303. 
 
 Thompson, Sir W., the molecular 
 structure of water, 260. 
 
 Thought, secretion of, 77. 
 
 Thurnam, Dr. J., on the weight of the 
 brain, 103- 
 
 Tiger-moth, the, 211. 
 
 Todd, Dr., on the seat of epilepsy, 263. 
 
 Tonicity, muscular, 162. 
 
 Townshend, Colonel, remarkable case 
 of, 341. . 
 
 Transpeciation, 457. 
 
 Trousseau, on epileptic vertigo, 151, 
 152- 
 
 Truth, absolute, 121, 325. 
 
 Tuber annulare, 187. 
 
 Tucker, A., 238, 437, 445. 
 
 Tyler, E. JJ., on analogy between 
 colours and sounds, 93; on sounds not 
 used in speech, 471 ; on gesture- 
 language, 481. 
 
 U. 
 
 Unconditioned, the, 10. 
 
 Unconsciousness, epileptic, 151, 208, 
 347- 
 
 Unknowable, the, 10. 
 
 Unzer, on material ideas, 85 ; on reflex 
 functions, 139, 182; on acquired 
 automatic movements, 184 ; on sen- 
 sory movements, 195 ; on pleasure 
 and pain, 351 ; on the motor expres- 
 sions of emotions, 379. 
 
 Van der Koi.k, Schroeder, on the 
 structure of cerebral convolutions, 
 116; on morbid changes in insanity. 
 124, 262 ; on epileptic unconscious- 
 ness, 151 ; on the centre of muscu- 
 lar co-ordination, 154 ; on ganglionic 
 nuclei, 189; on unconscious shriek- 
 ing, 209. 
 
 Variation, the law ot, 217. 
 
 Vertigo, epileptic, 151. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 547 
 
 Vision, complex nature of, 235. 
 
 Vitality, the theory of, 131. 
 
 Volkmann, on symmetrical increase of 
 sensibility, 235 
 
 Volition, 309, 339, 409 — 462 ; self- 
 determining, 412 ; abstract, 432, 
 442 ; nervous centres of, 441, 444. 
 
 Yon Baer, on the law of development, 
 
 Vulpian, on properties of nerve-fibres, 
 89 ; on nerve-centres, 153 ; on the 
 seat of common sensation, 1S7 ; on 
 the removal of cerebral hemispheres, 
 192 ; on the law of transmission by 
 nerves, 472. 
 
 W. 
 
 Wallace, A. R., on vision in insects, 
 310 ; imitation by bees, ants, and 
 birds, 240. 
 
 West, Gilbert, stanza of, 392. 
 
 Wlivtt, Dr., on motor hallucinations, 
 
 * 8 3- . . . 
 
 Wieland, on imagination, 526. 
 
 Wilks, Dr., on the seat of epilepsy, 
 263. 
 
 Will, the, 409—462 ; free, 410 — 422 ; 
 its power over movements, 434 ; its 
 power over ideas, 436 ; inhibitory 
 function of, 442 ; relation of charac- 
 ter to, 44s ; relation of emotions to, 
 451 ; represents the most complete 
 consensus of energies, 456 ; is the 
 highest force in nature, 456 ; and 
 creative, 457 ; the resolution of, 
 486. 
 
 Wolff, on the law of organic develop- 
 ment, 132. 
 
 Wollaston, Dr., letter to, 72. 
 
 Wundt, on functional disposition, 72 ; 
 on the functions of the thalaini 
 opttci and corpora striata, 188 ; on 
 motor innervation, 484. 
 
 THE END.