104 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



sensations; dogs (but not pigeons) ate and drank spontaneously, 

 frogs caught flies, pigeons flew with an absolutely right 

 calculation of distance. The " memory ' of these animals, 

 it is true, for the greater part related to experience gained 

 before the operation, but to a certain extent they also were 

 able to acquire new experience even in their defective state. 

 In other words, on the basis of a general " prospective 

 potency" the lower parts of the brain acquired a definite 

 " prospective value," which otherwise they would not have 

 acquired. 1 It therefore cannot be denied that acting in 

 some measure is possible even without the main part of the 

 brain, though the degree of this acting is of a much lower 

 kind. 



The term " Antwortsreaktion," which we have already 

 made use of elsewhere, was invented by Goltz to describe 

 what he had discovered in his frog deprived of the hemi- 

 spheres. He himself speaks of the impossibility of imagining 

 a machine as the basis of the phenomena, and then tries to 

 introduce a psychological terminology. It is strange that he 

 did not notice that it was vitalism, the autonomy of vital 

 processes, that had been proved by his discoveries. But 

 Goltz does not stand alone here : many authors agree that 

 the so-called " soul ' : plays a positive and causal role in act- 

 ing, without noticing that a natural factor which is neither 

 chemical nor physical is thus introduced into the argument. 



That real acting may go on in animals deprived of the 

 hemispheres, is of great importance, of course, for the theory 



1 Therefore, as Lewandowsky also well observes, operative experiments are 

 not able to teach us the "normal" performances of the parts left by them. 

 But they demonstrate what I call the "prospective potency," and that is 

 more valuable. All experiments about electric irritability of parts of the 

 brain, of course, relate to their "prospective value" only. Compare our 

 hypothetical remarks on the newly born in the text. 



