98 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



factor in acting identical with these bodily prerequisites 

 of acting, or with their distribution : the brain is a sort 

 of warehouse, a place of storing, and some day indeed we 

 may understand its physiology. But the acting factor 

 is not identical with the warehouse : it uses it, just as it 

 uses the brain as a system of connexions. 1 The brain, 

 as a specifically organised body, possesses nothing but the 

 faculty of storing all the impressions that have occurred to 

 it in any way just as they are given, and, by doing so, it 

 is able to become differently stimulated the second time 

 by the same stimulus : the " having been stimulated ' : by 

 it alters the type of its future effects. Borrowing a very 

 convenient name from a book of Semon's, 2 we may say 

 that the brain possesses the faculty of storing " engrammata." 

 But it only can store engrammata in the sense of given 

 combinations of given elements, and therefore nothing but 

 the psychical phenomena of simple recognition and of 

 association by contiguity is immediately related to cerebral 

 processes : it is absolutely inconceivable how the brain 

 qua bodily brain could accomplish the new and free and 

 " logical " rearrangement of the elements of the engrammata, 

 following the lines of individuality. 3 The storing of en- 



1 It cannot be our task here to develop a theory of insanity, and so we 

 may content ourselves with saying that in all "mental " diseases it is not the 

 "mind" which is ill but the brain: on account of abnormalities in the 

 brain the mind receives what might be called an " abnormal reality." 



The theory of hypnotism is also beyond the province of this book. Of 

 course all hypnotising agents, though "psychical" in themselves, must 

 affect the brain somehow. The same holds for the phenomenon of so-called 

 "double consciousness." What is generally called " subconsciousness " in 

 psychology a very bad term indeed would be a psychoid of inferior order, 

 according to our terminology. 



2 Die Mneme, Leipzig, 2nd ed., 1908. 



3 Von Uexkuell's "schemata" promoting " iconoreception " and "rnoto- 

 reception " can be nothing except engrammata in the sense denned. Of 



