on our brain to be a fact are often the loudest to insist that the fact is inexplicable, and that the intimate essence of consciousness can never be rationally accounted for by any material cause. It will doubtless take several generations of psychologists to test the hypothesis of dependence with anything like minuteness. The books which postulate it will be to some extent on conjectural ground. But the student will remember that the Sciences constantly have to take these risks, and habitually advance by zigzagging from one absolute formula to another which corrects it by going too far the other way. At present Psychology is on the materialistic tack, and ought in the interests of ultimate success to be allowed full headway even by those who are certain she will never fetch the port without putting down the helm once more. The only thing that is perfectly certain is that when taken up into the total body of Philosophy, the formulas of Psychology will appear with a very different meaning from that which they suggest so long as they are studied from the point of view of an abstract and truncated natural science,' however practically necessary and indispensable their study from such a provisional point of view may be. The Divisions of Psychology.-So far as possible, then, we are to study states of consciousness in correlation with their probable neural conditions. Now the nervous system is well understood to-day to be nothing but a machine for receiving impressions and discharging reactions preservative to the individual and his kind-so much of physiology the reader will surely know. Anatomically, therefore, the nervous system falls into three main divisions, comprising 1) The fibres which carry currents in; 2) The organs of central redirection of them; and Functionally, we have sensation, central reflection, and motion, to correspond to these anatomical divisions. In Psychology we may divide our work according to a similar scheme, and treat successively of three fundamental conscious processes and their conditions. The first will be Sensation; the second will be Cerebration or Intellection; the third will be the Tendency to Action. Much vagueness results from this division, but it has practical conveniences for such a book as this, and they may be allowed to prevail over whatever objections may be urged. CHAPTER II. SENSATION IN GENERAL. Incoming nerve-currents are the only agents which normally affect the brain. The human nerve-centres are surrounded by many dense wrappings of which the effect is to protect them from the direct action of the forces of the outer world. The hair, the thick skin of the scalp, the skull, and two membranes at least, one of them a tough one, surround the brain; and this organ moreover, like the spinal cord, is bathed by a serous fluid in which it floats suspended. Under these circumstances the only things that can happen to the brain are: 1) The dullest and feeblest mechanical jars; 2) Changes in the quantity and quality of the bloodsupply; and 3) Currents running in through the so-called afferent or centripetal nerves. The mechanical jars are usually ineffective; the effects of the blood-changes are usually transient; the nerve-currents, on the contrary, produce consequences of the most vital sort, both at the moment of their arrival, and later, through the invisible paths of escape which they plough in the substance of the organ and which, as we believe, remain as more or less permanent features of its structure, modifying its action throughout all future time. waves. Each afferent nerve comes from a determinate part of the periphery and is played upon and excited to its inward activity by a particular force of the outer world. Usually it is insensible to other forces: thus the optic nerves are not impressible by air-waves, nor those of the skin by lightThe lingual nerve is not excited by aromatic effluvia, the auditory nerve is unaffected by heat. Each selects from the vibrations of the outer world some one rate to which it responds exclusively. The result is that our sensations form a discontinuous series, broken by enormous gaps. There is no reason to suppose that the order of vibrations in the outer world is anything like as interrupted as the order of our sensations. Between the quickest audible air-waves (40,000 vibrations a second at the outside) and the slowest sensible heat-waves (which number probably billions), Nature must somewhere have realized innumerable intermediary rates which we have no nerves for perceiving. The process in the nerve-fibres themselves is very likely the same, or much the same, in all the different nerves. It is the so-called 'current'; but the current is started by one order of outer vibrations in the retina, and in the ear, for example, by another. This is due to the different terminal organs with which the several afferent nerves are armed. Just as we arm ourselves with a spoon to pick up soup, and with a fork to pick up meat, so our nerve-fibres arm themselves with one sort of endapparatus to pick up air-waves, with another to pick up ether-waves. The terminal apparatus always consists of modified epithelial cells with which the fibre is continuous. The fibre itself is not directly excitable by the outer agent which impresses the terminal organ. The optic fibres are unmoved by the direct rays of the sun; a cutaneous nervetrunk may be touched with ice without feeling cold.* The *The subject may feel pain, however, in this experiment; and it must be admitted that nerve-fibres of every description, terminal organs as well, are to some degree excitable by mechanical violence and by the electric current. fibres are mere transmitters; the terminal organs are so many imperfect telephones into which the material world speaks, and each of which takes up but a portion of what it says; the brain-cells at the fibres' central end are as many others at which the mind listens to the far-off call. The Specific Energies' of the Various Parts of the Brain. To a certain extent anatomists have traced definitely the paths which the sensory nerve-fibres follow after their entrance into the centres, as far as their termination in the gray matter of the cerebral convolutions.* It will be shown on a later page that the consciousness which accompanies the excitement of this gray matter varies from one portion of it to another. It is consciousness of things seen, when the occipital lobes, and of things heard, when the upper part of the temporal lobes, share in the excitement. Each region of the cerebral cortex responds to the stimulation which its afferent fibres bring to it, in a manner with which a peculiar quality of feeling seems invariably correlated. This is what has been called the law of 'specific energies' in the nervous system. Of course we are without even a conjectural explanation of the ground of such a law. Psychologists (as Lewes, Wundt, Rosenthal, Goldscheider, etc.) have debated a good deal as to whether the specific quality of the feeling depends solely on the place stimulated in the cortex, or on the sort of current which the nerve pours in. Doubtless the sort of outer force habitually impinging on the end-organ gradually modifies the end-organ, the sort of commotion received from the endorgan modifies the fibre, and the sort of current a so-modified fibre pours into the cortical centre modifies the centre. The modification of the centre in turn (though no man *Thus the optic nerve-fibres are traced to the occipital lobes, the olfactory tracts go to the lower part of the temporal lobe (hippocampal convolution), the auditory nerve-fibres pass first to the cerebellum, and probably from thence to the upper part of the temporal lobe. These anatomical terms used in this chapter will be explained later. The cortex is the gray surface of the convolutions. |