The Complete Works of William James. Illustrated - William James - E-Book

The Complete Works of William James. Illustrated E-Book

William James

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William James was a philosopher who spoke out against the arrogant attitude of scientists who viewed religion as a biased relic of the past. His writings frequently examined the relationship between science and religion. He also tried to defend society from the inhumane tendencies of science. His arguments against the cult of science and technitzism were quite effective and led to the new philosophical pragmatism movement. Many consider The Varieties of Religious Experience as one of the seminal works in establishing a psychology of religion. This collection also includes The Principles of Psychology and Pragmatism. Contents: The Principles of Psychology Psychology (Briefer Course) The Will to Believe and Other Essays Human Immortality Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals The Varieties of Religious Experience Pragmatism A Pluralistic Universe The Meaning of Truth Some Problems of Philosophy Memories and Studies Essays in Radical Empiricism Collected Essays and Reviews

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THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM JAMES

The Varieties of Religious Experience. The Principles of Psychology. Pragmatism

Illustrated

William James was a philosopher who spoke out against the arrogant attitude of scientists who viewed religion as a biased relic of the past.

His writings frequently examined the relationship between science and religion. He also tried to defend society from the inhumane tendencies of science. His arguments against the cult of science and technitzism were quite effective and led to the new philosophical pragmatism movement.

 Many consider The Varieties of Religious Experience as one of the seminal works in establishing a psychology of religion. This collection also includes The Principles of Psychology and Pragmatism.

 

The Principles of Psychology

Psychology (Briefer Course)

The Will to Believe and Other Essays

Human Immortality

Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals

The Varieties of Religious Experience

Pragmatism

A Pluralistic Universe

The Meaning of Truth

Some Problems of Philosophy

Memories and Studies

Essays in Radical Empiricism

Collected Essays and Reviews

Table of Contents
THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY
Chapter 1. The Scope of Psychology
Chapter 2. The Functions of the Brain
The Frog’s Nerve-Centres.
General Notion of Hemispheres.
The Education of the Hemispheres
The Phrenological Conception.
The Localization of Functions in the Hemispheres.
Man’s Consciousness Limited to the Hemispheres
The Restitution of Function.
Final Correction of the Meynert Scheme.
Conclusion.
Chapter 3. On Some General Conditions of Brain-Activity.
The Summation of Stimuli
Reaction-Time.
Cerebral Blood-Supply.
Cerebral Thermometry.
Chapter 4. Habit 1
Chapter 5. The Automaton-Theory
Reasons for the Theory.
Reasons against the Theory.
Chapter 6. The Mind-Stuff Theory
Evolutionary Psychology Demands a Mind-Dust.
Some Alleged Proofs That Mind-Dust Exists.
Refutation of These Proofs.
Self-Compounding of Mental Facts is Inadmissible.
Can States of Mind Be Unconscious?
Do Unconscious Mental States Exist?
Difficulty of Stating the Connection Between Mind and Brain.
The Material – Monad Theory.
The Soul – Theory.
Chapter 7. The Methods and Snares of Psychology
Psychology is a Natural Science.
The Methods of Investigation.
The Sources of Error in Psychology.
Chapter 8. The Relations Of Minds To Other Things.
Time-Relations.
Relations of Consciousness to Space.
The Relations of Minds to Other Objects
Chapter 9. The Stream of Thought. 1
Five Characters in Thought.
Chapter 10. The Consciousness of Self.
The Empirical Self or Me.
Rivalry and Conflict of the Different Selves.
What Self is Loved in ‘Self-Love’?
The Pure Ego.
The Pure Self or Inner Principle of Personal Unity.
The Transcendentalist Theory.
The Mutations of the Self.
Summary.
Chapter 11. Attention.
To How Many Things Can We Attend at Once?
The Varieties of Attention.
The Effects of Attention.
The Intimate Nature of the Attentive Process.
Is Voluntary Attention a Resultant or a Force?
Inattention.
Chapter 12. Conception.
The Sense of Sameness.
Conception Defined.
Conceptions Are Unchangeable.
‘Abstract’ Ideas.
Universals.
Chapter 13. Discrimination and Comparison.
The Principle of Mediate Comparison.
Are all differences Differences of Composition?
The Conditions of Discrimination.
The Process of Analysis.
The Process of Abstraction.
The Improvement of Discrimination by Practice.
Practical Interests Limit Discrimination.
Reaction-Time After Discrimination.
The Perception of Likeness.
The Magnitude of Differences.
The Measure of Discriminative Sensibility.
Weber’s law is probably purely physiological.
Chapter 14. Association. 1
The Rapidity of Association.
The Law of Contiguity.
The Elementary Law of Association.
Impartial Redintegration.
Ordinary or Mixed Association.
Association by Similarity.
Association in Voluntary Thought.
Similarity No Elementary Law.
The History of Opinion Concerning Association.
Chapter 15. The Perception of Time. 1
The Sensible Present Has Duration.
Accuracy of Our Estimate of Short Durations.
We Have No Sense for Empty Time.
The Feeling of Past Time is a Present Feeling.
To What Cerebral Process is the Sense of Time Due?
Chapter 16. Memory.
Primary Memory.
Analysis of the Phenomenon of Memory.
Memory’s Causes.
The Conditions of Goodness in Memory.
One’s Native Retentiveness is Unchangeable.
Exact Measurements of Memory
Forgetting.
Chapter 17. Sensation.
Sensation and Perception Distinguished.
The Cognitive Function of Sensation
The Law of Contrast.
The ‘Eccentric Projection’ of Sensations.
Chapter 18. Imagination.
Our Images Are Usually Vague.
Individuals Differ in Imagination.
The Neural Process which Underlies Imagination
Chapter 19. The Perception of ‘Things’
Perception and Sensation Compared.
Perception is of Definite and Probable Things.
The Physiological Process in Perception.
Apperception
Is Perception Unconscious Inference?
Hallucinations.
The Neural Process in Hallucination.
Chapter 20. The Perception of Space. 1
The Feeling of Crude Extensity.
The Perception of Spatial Order.
Space-relations.
The Meaning of Localization.
‘Local Signs.’
The Construction of ‘Real’ Space.
The Sensation of Motion over Surfaces.
Feelings in Joints and Feelings in Muscles
How the Blind Perceive Space.
Visual Space.
The Third Dimension.
Helmholtz and Reid on Sensations
The Theory of Identical Points.
The Projection-Theory.
Ambiguity of Retinal Impressions
Ambiguous Import of Eye-movements.
The Choice of the Visual Reality.
Sensations which seem Suppressed.
General Summary.
Historical
Chapter 21. The Perception of Reality. 1
Belief.
The Various Orders of Reality.
The Many Worlds.
The World of ‘practical Realities.’
The Paramount Reality of Sensations.
The Influence of Emotion and Active Impulse on Belief.
Belief in Objects of Theory.
Doubt.
Relations of Belief and Will.
Chapter 22. Reasoning. 1
“Recepts.”
In Reasoning, We Pick Out Essential Qualities.
What is Meant by a Mode of Conceiving.
What is Involved in General Propositions.
Thus, There Are Two Great Points in Reasoning
Sagacity; or the Perception of the Essence.
The Intellectual Contrast Between Brute and Man.
Different Orders of Human Genius.
Chapter 23. The Production of Movement.
Chapter 24. Instinct 1
Instincts Not Always Blind or Invariable.
Two Principles of Non-Uniformity in Instincts.
Special Human Instincts.
Chapter 25. The Emotions. 1
Emotion Follows upon the Bodily Expression in the Coarser Emotions at Least.
Difficulty of Testing the Theory Experimentally.
Objections Considered.
The Subtler Emotions.
No Special Brain-Centres for Emotion.
Emotional Differences Between Individuals.
The Genesis of the Various Emotions.
Chapter 26. Will.
Ideo-Motor Action.
Action After Deliberation.
Five Types of Decision.
The Feeling of Effort.
The Explosive Will.
The Obstructed Will.
Pleasure and Pain as Springs of Action.
Will is a Relation Between the Mind and its ‘Ideas.’
The Question of ‘Free-Will.’
The Education of the Will.
Chapter 27. Hypnotism.
Modes of Operating, and Susceptibility.
Theories About the Hypnotic State.
The Symptoms of the Trance.
Chapter 28. Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience.
What is Meant by Experience?
Two Modes of Origin of Brain Structure.
The Genesis of the Elementary Mental Categories.
The Genesis of the Natural Sciences.
The Genesis of the Pure Sciences.
Series of Even Difference and Mediate Comparison.
Classificatory Series.
The Logic-Series.
Mathematical Relations.
Consciousness of Series is the Basis of Rationality.
Metaphysical Axioms.
ÆSthetic and Moral Principles.
Summary of What Precedes.
The Origin of Instincts.
PSYCHOLOGY (BRIEFER COURSE)
PREFACE.
CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY.
CHAPTER II. SENSATION IN GENERAL.
CHAPTER III. SIGHT.
CHAPTER IV. HEARING . 18
CHAPTER V. TOUCH, THE TEMPERATURE SENSE, THE MUSCULAR SENSE, AND PAIN.
CHAPTER VI. SENSATIONS OF MOTION.
CHAPTER VII. THE STRUCTURE OF THE BRAIN. 28
CHAPTER VIII. THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN.
CHAPTER IX. SOME GENERAL CONDITIONS OF NEURAL ACTIVITY.
CHAPTER X. HABIT.
CHAPTER XI. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
CHAPTER XII. THE SELF.
CHAPTER XIII. ATTENTION.
CHAPTER XIV. CONCEPTION.
CHAPTER XV. DISCRIMINATION.
CHAPTER XVI. ASSOCIATION.
CHAPTER XVII. THE SENSE OF TIME.
CHAPTER XVIII. MEMORY.
CHAPTER XIX. IMAGINATION.
CHAPTER XX. PERCEPTION.
CHAPTER XXI. THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE.
CHAPTER XXII. REASONING.
CHAPTER XXIII. CONSCIOUSNESS AND MOVEMENT.
CHAPTER XXIV. EMOTION.
CHAPTER XXV. INSTINCT.
CHAPTER XXVI. WILL.
EPILOGUE. PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
THE WILL TO BELIEVE AND OTHER ESSAYS
PREFACE.
THE WILL TO BELIEVE.[1]
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?[1]
THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY.[1]
REFLEX ACTION AND THEISM.[1]
THE DILEMMA OF DETERMINISM.[1]
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER AND THE MORAL LIFE.[1]
GREAT MEN AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT.[1]
THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALS.
ON SOME HEGELISMS.[1]
WHAT PSYCHICAL RESEARCH HAS ACCOMPLISHED.[1]
HUMAN IMMORTALITY
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
HUMAN IMMORTALITY
ENDNOTES
TALKS TO TEACHERS ON PSYCHOLOGY AND TO STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE’S IDEALS
PREFACE.
I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART
II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
III. THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM
IV. EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR
V. THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS
VI. NATIVE REACTIONS AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS
VII. WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS ARE
VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT
IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS
X. INTEREST
XI. ATTENTION
XII. MEMORY
XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS
XIV. APPERCEPTION
XV. THE WILL
TALKS TO STUDENTS
I. THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION
II. ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS
III. WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Preface.
Lecture I. Religion and Neurology.
Lecture II. Circumscription of the Topic.
Lecture III. The Reality Of The Unseen.
Lectures IV and V. The Religion Of Healthy-Mindedness.
Appendix
Lectures VI and VII. The Sick Soul.
Lecture VIII. The Divided Self, And The Process Of Its Unification.
Lecture IX. Conversion.
Lecture X. Conversion – Concluded.
Lectures XI, XII, and XIII. Saintliness.
Lectures XIV and XV. The Value Of Saintliness.
Lectures XVI and XVII. Mysticism.
Lecture XVIII. Philosophy.
Lecture XIX. Other Characteristics.
Lecture XX. Conclusions.
Postscript.
ENDNOTES
PRAGMATISM
Preface
Lecture I. The Present Dilemma in Philosophy
Lecture II. What Pragmatism Means
Lecture III. Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
Lecture IV. The One and the Many
Lecture V. Pragmatism and Common Sense
Lecture VI. Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth
Lecture VII. Pragmatism and Humanism
Lecture VIII. Pragmatism and Religion
A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE
LECTURE I. THE TYPES OF PHILOSOPHIC THINKING
LECTURE II. MONISTIC IDEALISM
LECTURE III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD
LECTURE IV. CONCERNING FECHNER
LECTURE V. THE COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS
LECTURE VI. BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF INTELLECTUALISM
LECTURE VII. THE CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE
LECTURE VIII. CONCLUSIONS
NOTES
APPENDICES
APPENDIX A. THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS
APPENDIX B. THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY
APPENDIX C. ON THE NOTION OF REALITY AS CHANGING
THE MEANING OF TRUTH
PREFACE
I
II
III
IV
V
II
III
IV
V A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH
VI
VII PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH
I
II
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII ABSTRACTIONISM AND ‘RELATIVISMUS’
XIV TWO ENGLISH CRITICS
XV A DIALOGUE
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
PREFATORY NOTE
CHAPTER I. PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
CHAPTER II. THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS
CHAPTER III. THE PROBLEM OF BEING
CHAPTER IV. PERCEPT AND CONCEPT-THE IMPORT OF CONCEPTS
CHAPTER V. PERCEPT AND CONCEPT – THE ABUSE OF CONCEPTS
CHAPTER VI. PERCEPT AND CONCEPT – SOME COROLLARIES
CHAPTER VII. THE ONE AND THE MANY
CHAPTER VIII. THE ONE AND THE MANY (continued) – VALUES AND DEFECTS
CHAPTER IX. THE PROBLEM OF NOVELTY
CHAPTER X. NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE – THE CONCEPTUAL VIEW
CHAPTER XI. NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE – THE PERCEPTUAL VIEW
CHAPTER XII. NOVELTY AND CAUSATION – THE CONCEPTUAL VIEW
CHAPTER XIII. NOVELTY AND CAUSATION – THE PERCEPTUAL VIEW
APPENDIX
MEMORIES AND STUDIES
PREFATORY NOTE
I. LOUIS AGASSIZ 1
II. ADDRESS AT THE EMERSON CENTENARY IN CONCORD 1
III. ROBERT GOULD SHAW 1
IV. FRANCIS BOOTT 1
V. THOMAS DAVIDSON: A KNIGHT-ERRANT OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. 1
VI. HERBERT SPENCER’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1
VII. FREDERIC MYERS’ SERVICES TO PSYCHOLOGY 1
VIII. FINAL IMPRESSIONS OF A PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER 1
IX. ON SOME MENTAL EFFECTS OF THE EARTHQUAKE 1
X. THE ENERGIES OF MEN 1
XI. THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 1
XII. REMARKS AT THE PEACE BANQUET 1
XIII. THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED 1
XIV. THE UNIVERSITY AND THE INDIVIDUAL
I. THE PH.D. OCTOPUS 1
II. THE TRUE HARVARD 1
III. STANFORD’S IDEAL DESTINY 1
XV. A PLURALISTIC MYSTIC 1
ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM
EDITOR’S PREFACE
I. DOES ‘CONSCIOUSNESS’ EXIST? 2
II. A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE 25
III. THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS 43
IV. HOW TWO MINDS CAN KNOW ONE THING 68
V. THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS IN A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE 75
VI. THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY 85
VII. THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM 105
VIII. LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE 116
IX. IS RADICAL EMPIRICISM SOLIPSISTIC? 119
X. MR. PITKIN’S REFUTATION OF ‘RADICAL EMPIRICISM’ 122
XI. HUMANISM AND TRUTH ONCE MORE. 129
XII. ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM 140
COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS
PREFACE
SARGENT’S “PLANCHETTE”
LEWES’S “PROBLEMS OF LIFE AND MIND”
GERMAN PESSIMISM
CHAUNCEY WEIGHT
BAIN AND RENOUVIER
RENAN’S “DIALOGUES”
LEWES’S “PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND”
REMARKS ON SPENCER’S DEFINITION OF MIND AS CORRESPONDENCE
QUELQUES CONSIDÉRATIONS SUR LA MÉTHODE SUBJECTIVE
THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY
CLIFFORD’S “LECTURES AND ESSAYS”
SPENCER’S “DATA OF ETHICS”
THE FEELING OF EFFECT
III. THE INSCRUTABLE PSYCHO-PHYSIC NEXUS IS IDENTICAL IN ALL INNERVATION AND LIES OUTSIDE THE SPHERE OF THE WILL
THE SENSE OF DIZZINESS IN DEAF-MUTES
WHAT IS AN EMOTION?
THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY
THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF LOST LIMBS
RÉPONSE AUX REMARQUES DE M. RENOUVIER, SUR SA THÉORIE DE LA VOLONTÉ
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF EXTENSION
A PLEA FOR PSYCHOLOGY AS A “NATURAL SCIENCE”
THE ORIGINAL DATUM OF SPACE- CONSCIOUSNESS
MR. BRADLEY ON IMMEDIATE RESEMBLANCE
IMMEDIATE RESEMBLANCE
LADD’S “PSYCHOLOGY: DESCRIPTIVE AND EXPLANATORY”
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF EMOTION
THE KNOWING OF THINGS TOGETHER
DEGENERATION AND GENIUS
PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS AND PRACTICAL RESULTS
HODGSON’S “OBSERVATIONS OF TRANCE”
PERSONAL IDEALISM
THE CHICAGO SCHOOL
HUMANISM
LAURA BRIDGMAN
G. PAPINI AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT IN ITALY
THE MAD ABSOLUTE
CONTROVERSY ABOUT TRUTH
REPORT ON MRS. PIPER’S HODGSON- CONTROL
BRADLEY OR BERGSON?
A SUGGESTION ABOUT MYSTICISM

THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY

Chapter 1.

The Scope of Psychology

PSYCHOLOGY IS THE Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and of their conditions. The phenomena are such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and the like; and, superficially considered, their variety and complexity is such as to leave a chaotic impression on the observer. The most natural and consequently the earliest way of unifying the material was, first, to classify it as well as might be, and, secondly, to affiliate the diverse mental modes thus found, upon a simple entity, the personal Soul, of which they are taken to be so many facultative manifestations. Now, for instance, the Soul manifests its faculty of Memory, now of Reasoning, now of Volition, or again its Imagination or its Appetite. This is the orthodox ‘spiritualistic’ theory of scholasticism and of common-sense. Another and a less obvious way of unifying the chaos is to seek common elements in the divers mental facts rather than a common agent behind them, and to explain them constructively by the various forms of arrangement of these elements, as one explains houses by stones and bricks. The ‘associationist’ schools of Herbart in Germany, and of Hume, the Mills and Bain in Britain, have thus constructed a psychology without a soul by taking discrete ‘ideas,’ faint or vivid, and showing how, by their cohesions, repulsions, and forms of succession, such things as reminiscences, perceptions, emotions, volitions, passions, theories, and all the other furnishings of an individual’s mind may be engendered. The very Self or ego of the individual comes in this way to be viewed no longer as the pre-existing source of the representations, but rather as their last and most complicated fruit.

Now, if we strive rigorously to simplify the phenomena in either of these ways, we soon become aware of inadequacies in our method. Any particular cognition, for example, or recollection, is accounted for on the soul-theory by being referred to the spiritual faculties of Cognition or of Memory. These faculties themselves are thought of as absolute properties of the soul; that is, to take the case of memory, no reason is given why we should remember a fact as it happened, except that so to remember it constitutes the essence of our Recollective Power. We may, as spiritualists, try to explain our memory’s failures and blunders by secondary causes. But its successes can invoke no factors save the existence of certain objective things to be remembered on the one hand, and of our faculty of memory on the other. When, for instance, I recall my graduation-day, and drag all its incidents and emotions up from death’s dateless night, no mechanical cause can explain this process, nor can any analysis reduce it to lower terms or make its nature seem other than an ultimate datum, which, whether we rebel or not at its mysteriousness, must simply be taken for granted if we are to psychologize at all. However the associationist may represent the present ideas as thronging and arranging themselves, still, the spiritualist insists, he has in the end to admit that something, be it brain, be it ‘ideas,’ be it ‘association,’ knows past time as past, and fills it out with this or that event. And when the spiritualist calls memory an ‘irreducible faculty,’ he says no more than this admission of the associationist already grants.

And yet the admission is far from being a satisfactory simplification of the concrete facts. For why should this absolute god-given Faculty retain so much better the events of yesterday than those of last year, and, best of all, those of an hour ago? Why, again, in old age should its grasp of childhood’s events seem firmest? Why should illness and exhaustion enfeeble it? Why should repeating an experience strengthen our recollection of it? Why should drugs, fevers, asphyxia, and excitement resuscitate things long since forgotten? If we content ourselves with merely affirming that the faculty of memory is so peculiarly constituted by nature as to exhibit just these oddities, we seem little the better for having invoked it, for our explanation becomes as complicated as that of the crude facts with which we started. Moreover there is something grotesque and irrational in the supposition that the soul is equipped with elementary powers of such an ingeniously intricate sort. Why should our memory cling more easily to the near than the remote? Why should it lose its grasp of proper sooner than of abstract names? Such peculiarities seem quite fantastic; and might, for aught we can see a priori, be the precise opposites of what they are. Evidently, then, the faculty does not exist absolutely, but works under conditions; and the quest of the conditions becomes the psychologist’s most interesting task.

However firmly he may hold to the soul and her remembering faculty, he must acknowledge that she never exerts the latter without a cue, and that something must always precede and remind us of whatever we are to recollect. “An idea!” says the associationist, “an idea associated with the remembered thing; and this explains also why things repeatedly met with are more easily recollected, for their associates on the various occasions furnish so many distinct avenues of recall.” But this does not explain the effects of fever, exhaustion, hypnotism, old age, and the like. And in general, the pure associationist’s account of our mental life is almost as bewildering as that of the pure spiritualist. This multitude of ideas, existing absolutely, yet clinging together, and weaving an endless carpet of themselves, like dominoes in ceaseless change, or the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope,-whence do they get their fantastic laws of clinging, and why do they cling in just the shapes they do?

For this the associationist must introduce the order of experience in the outer world. The dance of the ideas is a copy, somewhat mutilated and altered, of the order of phenomena. But the slightest reflection shows that phenomena have absolutely no power to influence our ideas until they have first impressed our senses and our brain. The bare existence of a past fact is no ground for our remembering it. Unless we have seen it, or somehow undergone it, we shall never know of its having been. The experiences of the body are thus one of the conditions of the faculty of memory being what it is. And a very small amount of reflection on facts shows that one part of the body, namely, the brain, is the part whose experiences are directly concerned. If the nervous communication be cut off between the brain and other parts, the experiences of those other parts are non-existent for the mind. The eye is blind, the ear deaf, the hand insensible and motionless. And conversely, if the brain be injured, consciousness is abolished or altered, even although every other organ in the body be ready to play its normal part. A blow on the head, a sudden subtraction of blood, the pressure of an apoplectic hemorrhage, may have the first effect; whilst a very few ounces of alcohol or grains of opium or hasheesh, or a whiff of chloroform or nitrous oxide gas, are sure to have the second. The delirium of fever, the altered self of insanity, are all due to foreign matters circulating through the brain, or to pathological changes in that organ’s substance. The fact that the brain is the one immediate bodily condition of the mental operations is indeed so universally admitted nowadays that I need spend no more time in illustrating it, but will simply postulate it and pass on. The whole remainder of the book will be more or less of a proof that the postulate was correct.

Bodily experiences, therefore, and more particularly brain-experiences, must take a place amongst those conditions of the mental life of which Psychology need take account. The spiritualist and the associationist must both be ‘cerebralists,’ to the extent at least of admitting that certain peculiarities in the way of working of their own favorite principles are explicable only by the fact that the brain laws are a codeterminant of the result.

Our first conclusion, then, is that a certain amount of brain-physiology must be presupposed or included in Psychology1.

In still another way the psychologist is forced to be something of a nerve-physiologist. Mental phenomena are not only conditioned a parte ante by bodily processes; but they lead to them a parte post. That they lead to acts is of course the most familiar of truths, but I do not merely mean acts in the sense of voluntary and deliberate muscular performances. Mental states occasion also changes in the calibre of blood-vessels, or alteration in the heartbeats, or processes more subtle still, in glands and viscera. If these are taken into account, as well as acts which follow at some remote period because the mental state was once there, it will be safe to lay down the general law that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change. The ideas and feelings, e.g., which these present printed characters excite in the reader’s mind not only occasion movements of his eyes and nascent movements of articulation in him, but will some day make him speak, or take sides in a discussion, or give advice, or choose a book to read, differently from what would have been the case had they never impressed his retina. Our psychology must therefore take account not only of the conditions antecedent to mental states, but of their resultant consequences as well.

But actions originally prompted by conscious intelligence may grow so automatic by dint of habit as to be apparently unconsciously performed. Standing, walking, buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking, even saying one’s prayers, may be done when the mind is absorbed in other things. The performances of animal instinct seem semi-automatic, and the reflex acts of self-preservation certainly are so. Yet they resemble intelligent acts in bringing about the same ends at which the animals’ consciousness, on other occasions, deliberately aims. Shall the study of such machine-like yet purposive acts as these be included in Psychology?

The boundary-line of the mental is certainly vague. It is better not to be pedantic, but to let the science be as vague as its subject, and include such phenomena as these if by so doing we can throw any light on the main business in hand. It will ere long be seen, I trust, that we can; and that we gain much more by a broad than by a narrow conception of our subject. At a certain stage in the development of every science a degree of vagueness is what best consists with fertility. On the whole, few recent formulas have done more real service of a rough sort in psychology than the Spencerian one that the essence of mental life and of bodily life are one, namely, ‘the adjustment of inner to outer relations.’ Such a formula is vagueness incarnate; but because it takes into account the fact that minds inhabit environments which act on them and on which they in turn react; because, in short, it takes mind in the midst of all its concrete relations, it is immensely more fertile than the old-fashioned ‘rational psychology,’ which treated the soul as a detached existent, sufficient unto itself, and assumed to consider only its nature and properties. I shall therefore feel free to make any sallies into zoology or into pure nerve-physiology which may seem instructive for our purposes, but otherwise shall leave those sciences to the physiologists.

Can we state more distinctly still the manner in which the mental life seems to intervene between impressions made from without upon the body, and reactions of the body upon the outer world again? Let us look at a few facts.

If some iron filings be sprinkled on a table and a magnet brought near them, they will fly through the air for a certain distance and stick to its surface. A savage seeing the phenomenon explains it as the result of an attraction or love between the magnet and the filings. But let a card cover the poles of the magnet, and the filings will press forever against its surface without its ever occurring to them to pass around its sides and thus come into more direct contact with the object of their love. Blow bubbles through a tube into the bottom of a pail of water, they will rise to the surface and mingle with the air. Their action may again be poetically interpreted as due to a longing to recombine with the mother-atmosphere above the surface. But if you invert a jar full of water over the pail, they will rise and remain lodged beneath its bottom, shut in from the outer air, although a slight deflection from their course at the outset, or a re-descent towards the rim of the jar, when they found their upward course impeded, could easily have set them free.

If now we pass from such actions as these to those of living things, we notice a striking difference. Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet’s lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.

Suppose a living frog in the position in which we placed our bubbles of air, namely, at the bottom of a jar of water. The want of breath will soon make him also long to rejoin the mother-atmosphere, and he will take the shortest path to his end by swimming straight upwards. But if a jar full of water be inverted over him, he will not, like the bubbles, perpetually press his nose against its unyielding roof, but will restlessly explore the neighborhood until by re-descending again he has discovered a path around its brim to the goal of his desires. Again the fixed end, the varying means!

Such contrasts between living and inanimate performances end by leading men to deny that in the physical world final purposes exist at all. Loves and desires are to-day no longer imputed to particles of iron or of air. No one supposes now that the end of any activity which they may display is an ideal purpose presiding over the activity from its outset and soliciting or drawing it into being by a sort of vis a fronte. The end, on the contrary, is deemed a mere passive result, pushed into being a tergo, having had, so to speak, no voice in its own production. Alter, the pre-existing conditions, and with inorganic materials you bring forth each time a different apparent end. But with intelligent agents, altering the conditions changes the activity displayed, but not the end reached; for here the idea of the yet unrealized end co-operates with the conditions to determine what the activities shall be.

The Pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment, are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon. We all use this test to discriminate between an intelligent and a mechanical performance. We impute no mentality to sticks and stones, because they never seem to move for the sake of anything, but always when pushed, and then indifferently and with no sign of choice. So we unhesitatingly call them senseless.

Just so we form our decision upon the deepest of all philosophic problems: Is the Kosmos an expression of intelligence rational in its inward nature, or a brute external fact pure and simple? If we find ourselves, in contemplating it, unable to banish the impression that it is a realm of final purposes, that it exists for the sake of something, we place intelligence at tile heart of it and have a religion. If, on the contrary, in surveying its irremediable flux, we can think of the present only as so much mere mechanical sprouting from the past, occurring with no reference to the future, we are atheists and materialists.

In the lengthy discussions which psychologists have carried on about the amount of intelligence displayed by lower mammals, or the amount of consciousness involved in the functions of the nerve-centres of reptiles, the same test has always been applied: Is the character of the actions such that we must believe them to be performed for the sake of their result? The result in question, as we shall hereafter abundantly see, is as a rule a useful one,-the animal is, on the whole, safer under the circumstances for bringing it forth. So far the action has a teleological character; but such mere outward teleology as this might still be the blind result of vis a tergo. The growth and movements of plants, the processes of development, digestion, secretion, etc., in animals, supply innumerable instances of performances useful to the individual which may nevertheless be, and by most of us are supposed to be, produced by automatic mechanism. The physiologist does not confidently assert conscious intelligence in the frog’s spinal cord until he has shown that the useful result which the nervous machinery brings forth under a given irritation remains the same when the machinery is altered. If, to take the stock-instance, the right knee of a headless frog be irritated with acid, the right foot will wipe it off. When, however, this foot is amputated, the animal will often raise the left foot to the spot and wipe the offending material away.

Pfluger and Lewes reason from such facts in the following way: If the first reaction were the result of mere machinery, they say; if that irritated portion of the skin discharged the right leg as a trigger discharges its own barrel of a shotgun; then amputating the right foot would indeed frustrate the wiping, but would not make the left leg move. It would simply result in the right stump moving through the empty air (which is in fact the phenomenon sometimes observed). The right trigger makes no effort to discharge the left barrel if the right one be unloaded; nor does an electrical machine ever get restless because it can only emit sparks, and not hem pillow-cases like a sewing-machine.

If, on the contrary, the right leg originally moved for the purpose of wiping the acid, then nothing is more natural than that, when the easiest means of effecting that purpose prove fruitless, other means should be tried. Every failure must keep the animal in a state of disappointment which will lead to all sorts of new trials and devices; and tranquillity will not ensue till one of these, by a happy stroke, achieves the wished-for end.

In a similar way Goltz ascribes intelligence to the frog’s optic lobes and cerebellum. We alluded above to the manner in which a sound frog imprisoned in water will discover an outlet to the atmosphere. Goltz found that frogs deprived of their cerebral hemispheres would often exhibit a like ingenuity. Such a frog, after rising from the bottom and finding his farther upward progress checked by the glass bell which has been inverted over him, will not persist in butting his nose against the obstacle until dead of suffocation, but will often re-descend and emerge from under its rim as if, not a definite mechanical propulsion upwards, but rather a conscious desire to reach the air by hook or crook were the main-spring of his activity. Goltz concluded from this that the hemispheres are not the seat of intellectual power in frogs. He made the same inference from observing that a brainless frog will turn over from his back to his belly when one of his legs is sewed up, although the movements required are then very different from those excited under normal circumstances by the same annoying position. They seem determined, consequently, not merely by the antecedent irritant, but by the final end,-though the irritant of course is what makes the end desired.

Another brilliant German author, Liebmann2, argues against the brain’s mechanism accounting for mental action, by very similar considerations. A machine as such, he says, will bring forth right results when it is in good order, and wrong results if out of repair. But both kinds of result flow with equally fatal necessity from their conditions. We cannot suppose the clock-work whose structure fatally determines it to a certain rate of speed, noticing that this speed is too slow or too fast and vainly trying to correct it. Its conscience, if it have any, should be as good as that of the best chronometer, for both alike obey equally well the same eternal mechanical laws-laws from behind. But if the brain be out of order and the man says “Twice four are two,” instead of “Twice four are eight,” or else “I must go to the coal to buy the wharf,” instead of “I must go to the wharf to buy the coal,” instantly there arises a consciousness of error. The wrong performance, though it obey the same mechanical law as the right, is nevertheless condemned,-condemned as contradicting the inner law-the law from in front, the purpose or ideal for which the brain should act, whether it do so or not.

We need not discuss here whether these writers in drawing their conclusion have done justice to all the premises involved in the cases they treat of. We quote their arguments only to show how they appeal to the principle that no actions but such as are done for an end, and show a choice of means, can be called indubitable expressions of Mind.

I shall then adopt this as the criterion by which to circumscribe the subject-matter of this work so far as action enters into it. Many nervous performances will therefore be unmentioned, as being purely physiological. Nor will the anatomy of the nervous system and organs of sense be described anew. The reader will find in H.N. Martin’s Human Body, in G.T. Ladd’s Physiological Psychology, and in all the other standard Anatomies and Physiologies, a mass of information which we must regard as preliminary and take for granted in the present work3. Of the functions of the cerebral hemispheres, however, since they directly subserve consciousness, it will be well to give some little account.

ENDNOTES.

1 Cf. George T.Ladd: Elements of Physiological Psychology (1887), pt. III, chap. III, 9, 12

2Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit, p. 489

3 Nothing is easier than to familiarize one’s self with the mammalian brain. Get a sheep’s head, a small saw, chisel, scalpel and forceps (all three can best be had from a surgical-instrument maker), and unravel its parts either by the aid of a human dissecting book, such as Holden’s Manual of Anatomy, or by the specific directions ad hoc given in such books as Foster and Langley’s Practical Physiology (Macmillan) or Morrell’s Comparative Anatomy, and Guide to Dissection (Longman amp; Co.).

Chapter 2.

The Functions of the Brain

IF I BEGIN chopping the foot of a tree, its branches are unmoved by my act, and its leaves murmur as peacefully as ever in the wind. If, on the contrary, I do violence to the foot of a fellow-man, the rest of his body instantly responds to the aggression by movements of alarm or defence. The reason of this difference is that the man has a nervous system whilst the tree has none; and the function of the nervous system is to bring each part into harmonious co-operation with every other. The afferent nerves, when excited by some physical irritant, be this as gross in its mode of operation as a chopping axe or as subtle as the waves of light, conveys the excitement to the nervous centres. The commotion set up in the centres does not stop there, but discharges itself, if at all strong, through the efferent nerves into muscles and glands, exciting movements of the limbs and viscera, or acts of secretion, which vary with the animal, and with the irritant applied. These acts of response have usually the common character of being of service. They ward off the noxious stimulus and support the beneficial one; whilst if, in itself indifferent, the stimulus be a sign of some distant circumstance of practical importance, the animal’s acts are addressed to this circumstance so as to avoid its perils or secure its benefits, as the case may be. To take a common example, if I hear the conductor calling ‘ All aboard!’ as I enter the depot, my heart first stops, then palpitates, and my legs respond to the air-waves falling on my tympanum by quickening their movements. If I stumble as I run, the sensation of falling provokes a movement of the hands towards the direction of the fall, the effect of which is to shield the body from too sudden a shock. If a cinder enter my eye, its lids close forcibly and a copious flow of tears tends to wash it out.

These three responses to a sensational stimulus differ, however, in many respects. The closure of the eye and the lachrymation are quite involuntary, and so is the disturbance of the heart. Such involuntary responses we know as ‘reflex’ acts. The motion of the arms to break the shock of falling may also be called reflex, since it occurs too quickly to be deliberately intended. Whether it be instinctive or whether it result from the pedestrian education of childhood may be doubtful; it is, at any rate, less automatic than the previous acts, for a man might by conscious effort learn to perform it more skilfully, or even to suppress it altogether. Actions of this kind, into which instinct and volition enter upon equal terms, have been called ‘semi-reflex.’ The act of running towards the train, on the other hand, has no instinctive element about it. It is purely the result of education, and is preceded by a consciousness of the purpose to be attained and a distinct mandate of the will. It is a ‘voluntary act.’ Thus the animal’s reflex and voluntary performances shade into each other gradually, being connected by acts which may often occur automatically, but may also be modified by conscious intelligence.

An outside observer, unable to perceive the accompanying consciousness, might be wholly at a loss to discriminate between the automatic acts and those which volition escorted. But if the criterion of mind’s existence be the choice of the proper means for the attainment of a supposed end, all the acts seem to be inspired by intelligence, for appropriateness characterizes them all alike. This fact, now, has led to two quite opposite theories about the relation to consciousness of the nervous functions. Some authors, finding that the higher voluntary ones seem to require the guidance of feeling, conclude that over the lowest reflexes some such feeling also presides, though it may be a feeling of which we remain unconscious. Others, finding that reflex and semi-automatic acts may, notwithstanding their appropriateness, take place with an unconsciousness apparently complete, fly to the opposite extreme and maintain that the appropriateness even of voluntary actions owes nothing to the fact that consciousness attends them. They are, according to these writers, results of physiological mechanism pure and simple. In a near chapter we shall return to this controversy again. Let us now look a little more closely at the brain and at the ways in which its states may be supposed to condition those of the mind.

The Frog’s Nerve-Centres.

Both the minute anatomy and the detailed physiology of the brain are achievements of the present generation, or rather we may say (beginning with Meynert) of the past twenty years. Many points are still obscure and subject to controversy; but a general way of conceiving the organ has been reached on all hands which in its main feature seems not unlikely to stand, and which even gives a most plausible scheme of the way in which cerebral and mental operations go hand in hand.

The best way to enter the subject will be to take a lower creature, like a frog, and study by the vivisectional method the functions of his different nerve-centres. The frog’s nerve-centres are figured in the accompanying diagram, which needs no further explanation. I will first proceed to state what happens when various amounts of the anterior parts are removed, in different frogs, in the way in which an ordinary student removes them; that is, with no extreme precautions as to the purity of the operation. We shall in this way reach a very simple conception of the functions of the various centres, involving the strongest possible contrast between the cerebral hemispheres and the lower lobes. This sharp conception will have didactic advantages, for it is often very instructive to start with too simple a formula and correct it later on. Our first formula, as we shall later see, will have to be softened down somewhat by the results of more careful experimentation both on frogs and birds, and by those of the most recent observations on dogs, monkeys, and man. But it will put us, from the outset, in clear possession of some fundamental notions and distinctions which we could otherwise not gain so well, and none of which the later more completed view will overturn.

If, then, we reduce the frog’s nervous system to the spinal cord alone, by making a section behind the base of the skull, between the spinal cord and the medulla oblongata, thereby cutting off the brain from all connection with the rest of the body, the frog will still continue to live, but with a very peculiarly modified activity. It ceases to breathe or swallow; it lies flat on its belly, and does not, like a normal frog, sit up on its fore paws, though its hind legs are kept, as usual, folded against its body and immediately resume this position if drawn out. If thrown on its back, it lies there quietly, without turning over like a normal frog. Locomotion and voice seem entirely abolished. If we suspend it by the nose, and irritate different portions of its skin by acid, it performs a set of remarkable ‘defensive’ movements calculated to wipe away the irritant. Thus, if the breast be touched, both fore paws will rub it vigorously; if we touch the outer side of the elbow, the hind foot of the same side will rise directly to the spot and wipe it. The back of the foot will rub the knee if that be attacked, whilst if the foot be cut away, the stump will make ineffectual movements, and then, in many frogs, a pause will come, as if for deliberation, succeeded by a rapid passage of the opposite unmutilated foot to the acidulated spot.

The most striking character of all these movements, after their teleological appropriateness, is their precision. They vary, in sensitive frogs and with a proper amount of irritation, so little as almost to resemble in their machine-like regularity the performances of a jumping-jack, whose legs must twitch whenever you pull the string. The spinal cord of the frog thus contains arrangements of cells and fibres fitted to convert skin irritations into movements of defence. We may call it the centre for defensive movements in this animal. We may indeed go farther than this, and by cutting the spinal cord in various places find that its separate segments are independent mechanisms, for appropriate activities of the head and of the arms and legs respec- tively. The segment governing the arms is especially active, in male frogs, in the breeding season; and these members alone with the breast and back appertaining to them, everything else being cut away, will then actively grasp a finger placed between them and remain hanging to it for a considerable time.

The spinal cord in other animals has analogous powers. Even in man it makes movements of defence. Paraplegics draw up their legs when tickled; and Robin, on tickling the breast of a criminal an hour after decapitation, saw the arm and hand move towards the spot. Of the lower functions of the mammalian cord, studied so ably by Goltz and others, this is not the place to speak.

If, in a second animal, the cut be made just behind the optic lobes so that the cerebellum and medulla oblongata remain attached to the cord, then swallowing, breathing, crawling, and a rather enfeebledjumping and swimming are added to the movements previously observed.1 There are other reflexes too. The animal, thrown on his back, immediately turns over to his belly. Placed in a shallow bowl, which is floated on water and made to rotate, he responds to the rotation by first turning his head and then waltzing around with his entire body, in the opposite direction to the whirling of the bowl. If his support be tilted so that his head points downwards, he points it up; he points it down if it be pointed upwards, to the right if it be pointed to the left, etc. But his reactions do not go farther than these movements of the head.; He will not, like frogs whose thalami are preserved, climb up a board if the latter be tilted, but will slide off it to the ground.

If the cut be made on another frog between the thalami and the optic lobes, the locomotion both on land and water becomes quite normal, and, in addition to the reflexes already shown by the lower centres, he croaks regularly whenever he is pinched under the arms. He compensates rotations, etc., by movements of the head, and turns over from his back; but still drops off his tilted board. As his optic nerves are destroyed by the usual operation, it is impossible to say whether he will avoid obstacles placed in his path.

When, finally, a frog’s cerebral hemispheres alone are cut off by a section between them and the thalami which preserves the latter, an unpractised observer would not at first suspect anything abnormal about the animal. Not only is he capable, on proper instigation, of all the acts already described, but he guides himself by sight, so that if an obstacle be set up between him and the light, and he be forced to move forward, he either jumps over it or swerves to one side. He manifests sexual passion at the proper season, and, unlike an altogether brainless frog, which embraces anything placed between his arms, postpones this reflex act until a female of his own species is provided. Thus far, as aforesaid, a person unfamiliar with frogs might not suspect a mutilation; but even such a person would soon remark the almost entire absence of spontaneous motion-that is, motion unprovoked by any present incitation of sense. The continued movements of swimming, performed by the creature in the water, seem to be the fatal result of the contact of that fluid with its skin. They cease when a stick, for example, touches his hands. This is a sensible irritant towards which the feet are automatically drawn by reflex action, and on which the animal remains sitting. He manifests no hunger, and will suffer a fly to crawl over his nose unsnapped at. Fear, too, seems to have deserted him. In a word, he is an extremely complex machine whose actions, so far as they go, tend to self-preservation; but still a machine, in this sense-that it seems to contain no incalculable element. By applying the right sensory stimulus to him we are almost as certain of getting a fixed response as an organist is of hearing a certain tone when he pulls out a certain stop.

But now if to the lower centres we add the cerebral hemispheres, or if, in other words, we make an intact animal the subject of our observations, all this is changed. In addition to the previous responses to present incitements of sense, our frog now goes through long and complex acts of locomotion spontaneously, or as if moved by what in our- selves we should call an idea. His reactions to outward stimuli vary their form, too. Instead of making simple defensive movements with his hind legs like a headless frog if touched, or of giving one or two leaps and then sitting still like a hemisphereless one, he makes persistent and varied efforts at escape, as if, not the mere contact of the physiologist’s hand, but the notion of danger suggested by it were now his spur. Led by the feeling of hunger, too, he goes in search of insects, fish, or smaller frogs, and varies his procedure with each species of victim. The physiologist cannot by manipulating him elicit croaking, crawling up a board, swimming or stopping, at will. His conduct has become incalculable. We can no longer foretell it exactly. Effort to escape is his dominant reaction, but he may do anything else, even swell up and become perfectly passive in our hands.

Such are the phenomena commonly observed, and such the impressions which one naturally receives. Certain general conclusions follow irresistibly. First of all the following:

The acts of all the centres involve the use of the same muscles. When a headless frog’s hind leg wipes the acid, he calls into play all the leg-muscles which a frog with his full medulla oblongata and cerebellum uses when he turns from his back to his belly. Their contractions are, however, combined differently in the two cases, so that the results vary widely. We must consequently conclude that specific arrangements of cells and fibres exist in the cord for wiping, in the medulla for turning over, etc. Similarly they exist in the thalami for jumping over seen obstacles and for balancing the moved body; in the optic lobes for creeping backwards, or what not. But in the hemispheres, since the presence of these organs brings no new elementary form of movement with it, but only determines differently the occasions on which the movements shall occur, making the usual stimuli less fatal and machine-like; we need suppose no such machinery directly co-ordinative of muscular contractions to exist. We may rather assume, when the mandate for a wiping-movement is sent forth by the hemispheres, that a current goes straight to the wiping-arrangement in the spinal cord, exciting this arrangement as a whole. Similarly, if an intact frog wishes to jump over a stone which he sees, all he need do is to excite from the hemispheres the jumping-centre in the thalami or wherever it may be, and the latter will provide for the details of the execution. It is like a general ordering a colonel to make a certain movement, but not telling him how it shall be done.2

The same muscle, then, repeatedly represented at different heights; and at each it enters into a different combination with other muscles to co-operate in some special form of concerted movement. At each height the movement is discharged by some particular form of sensorial stimulus. Thus in the cord, the skin alone occasions movements; in the upper part of the optic lobes, the eyes are added; in the thalami, the semi-circular canals would seem to play a part; whilst the stimuli which discharge the hemispheres would seem not so much to be elementary sorts of sensation, as groups of sensations forming determinate objects or things. Prey is not pursued nor are enemies shunned by ordinary hemisphereless frogs. Those reactions upon complex circumstances which we call instinctive rather than reflex, are already in this animal dependent on the brain’s highest lobes, and still more is this the case with animals higher in the zoological scale.

The results are just the same if, instead of a frog, we take a pigeon, and cut out his hemispheres as they are ordinarily cut out for a lecture-room demonstration. There is not a movement natural to him which this brainless bird cannot perform if expressly excited thereto; only the inner promptings seem deficient, and when left to himself he spends most of his time crouched on the ground with his head sunk between his shoulders as if asleep.

General Notion of Hemispheres.

All these facts lead us, when we think about them, to some such explanatory conception as this: The lower centres act from present sensational stimuli alone; the hemispheres act from perceptions and considerations, the sensations which they may receive, serving only as suggesters of these. But what are perceptions but sensations grouped together? and what are considerations but expectations, in the fancy, of sensations which will be felt one way or another according as action takes this course or that? If I step aside on seeing a rattlesnake, from considering how dangerous an animal he is, the mental materials which constitute my prudential reflection are images more or less vivid of the movement of his head, of a sudden pain in my leg, of a state of terror, a swelling of the limb, a chill, delirium, unconsciousness, etc., etc., and the ruin of my hopes. But all these images are constructed out of my past experiences. They are reproductions of what I have felt or witnessed. They are, in short, remote sensations; and the difference between the hemisphereless animal and the whole one may be concisely expressed by saying that the one obeys absent, the other only present, objects.

The hemispheres would then seem to be the seat of memory. Vestiges of past experience must in some way be stored up in them, and must, when aroused by present stimuli, first appear as representations of distant goods and evils; and then must discharge into the appropriate motor channels for warding off the evil and securing the benefits of the good. If we liken the nervous currents to electric currents, we can compare the nervous system, C, below the hemispheres to a direct circuit from sense-organ to muscle along the line S . . . C . . . M of Fig. 2 (p. 21). The hemisphere, H, adds the long circuit or loop-line through which the current may pass when for any reason the direct line is not used.

Thus, a tired wayfarer on a hot day throws himself on the damp earth beneath a maple-tree. The sensations of delicious rest and coolness pouring themselves through the direct line would naturally discharge into the muscles of complete extension: he would abandon himself to the dangerous repose. But the loop-line being open, part of the current is drafted along it, and awakens rheumatic or catarral reminiscences, which prevail over the instigations of sense, and make the man arise and pursue his way to where he may enjoy his rest more safely. Presently we shall examine the manner in which the hemispheric loop-line may be supposed to serve as a reservoir for such reminiscences as these. Meanwhile I will ask the reader to notice some corollaries of its being such a reservoir.

First, no animal without it can deliberate, pause, postpone, nicely weigh one motive against another, or compare. Prudence, in a word, is for such a creature an impossible virtue. Accordingly we see that nature removes those functions in the exercise of which prudence is a virtue from the lower centres and hands them over to the cerebrum. Wherever a creature has to deal with complex features of the environment, prudence is a virtue. The higher animals have so to deal; and the more complex the features, the higher we call the animals. The fewer of his acts, then, can such an animal perform without the help of the organs in question. In the frog many acts devolve wholly on the lower centres; in the bird fewer; in the rodent fewer still; in the dog very few indeed; and in apes and men hardly any at all.

The advantages of this are obvious. Take the prehension of food as an example and suppose it to be a reflex performance of the lower centres. The animal will be condemned fatally and irresistibly to snap at it whenever presented, no matter what the circumstances may be; he can no more disobey this prompting than water can refuse to boil when a fire is kindled under the pot. His life will again and again pay the forfeit of his gluttony.

Exposure to retaliation, to other enemies, to traps, to poisons, to the dangers of repletion, must be regular parts of his existence. His lack of all thought by which to weigh the danger against the attractiveness of the bait, and of all volition to remain hungry a little while longer, is the direct measure of his lowness in the mental scale. And those fishes which, like our cunners and sculpins, are no sooner thrown back from the hook into the water, than they automatically seize the hook again, would soon expiate the degradation of their intelligence by the extinction of their type, did not their exaggerated fecundity atone for their imprudence. Appetite and the acts it prompts have consequently become in all higher vertebrates functions of the cerebrum. They disappear when the physiologist’s knife has left the subordinate centres alone in place. The brainless pigeon will starve though left on a corn-heap.

Take again the sexual function. In birds this devolves exclusively upon the hemispheres. When these are shorn away the pigeon pays no attention to the billings and cooings of its mate. And Goltz found that a bitch in heat would excite no emotion in male dogs who had suffered large loss of cerebral tissue. Those who have read Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man’ know what immense importance in the amelioration of the breed in birds this author ascribes to the mere fact of sexual selection. The sexual act is not performed until every condition of circumstance and sentiment is fulfilled, until time, place, and partner all are fit. But in frogs and toads this passion devolves on the lower centres. They show consequently a machine-like obedience to the present incitement of sense, and an almost total exclusion of the power of choice. Copulation occurs per fas aut nefas, occasionally between males, often with dead females, in puddles exposed on the highway, and the male may be cut in two without letting go his hold. Every spring an immense sacrifice of batrachian life takes place from these causes alone.