A NEW PHASE OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 313 



is objected, What has the power to establish such adaptation, except 

 an intelligent being ? We shall reply, that all those phenomena which 

 are usually simultaneous in the organism have the power of suggest- 

 ing each other, that is to say, of acting reciprocally as causes. They 

 do in the end compose a circle, which vibrates throughout, whichever 

 one of its links it may be that receives the impulse. Every gesture, 

 every external movement of the body, is naturally followed by its per- 

 ception, and consequently by its idea ; by dint of being contempora- 

 neous with the organic facts which determine the production of motion, 

 the idea forms in connection with them habits of adaptation, the result 

 of which is to give it the property of exciting them. Thus, the move- 

 ment was at first involuntary, and theretofore it was the movement 

 which stirred its idea in the intellect, through the intermediate means 

 of perception ; afterward the movement became voluntary, and it may 

 be was caused, in its turn, by the cerebral phenomenon of its idea, 

 which had had time to contract habits of coexistence, and of sugges- 

 tion with the intermediate modifications of the nerves and the muscles. 

 Such habits may even show themselves, so far as they are hereditarily 

 reproduced and continued, as if they were innate with the individual. 



It is the same with regard to those reflex movements which Hart- 

 mann also refers to an unconscious will and intelligence. He defines 

 a reflex movement as " that which takes place when the excitement of 

 a nerve of motion is transmitted to a nervous centre, which transmits 

 it on to another nerve of motion, that produces in the last place a 

 muscular contraction." This definition is evidently too broad, and 

 would equally embrace all those movements that result from cerebral 

 action ; for the brain is also a nervous centre, which only transforms 

 movements that come from outside of it, so as to transmit them to 

 motor nerves. Physiologists usually confine the description of " re- 

 flex " to those movements as to which the series of facts intermediate 

 between the external excitement received and the final act does not 

 pass through the me, or the thinking brain. 1 Now, among these move- 

 ments, certain distinctions must be established. In a great number of 

 them the most prejudiced mind could not discover any sign of finality, 

 and therefore as to those there cannot even be any question of apply- 

 ing an hypothesis of an intelligence, whether conscious or unconscious ; 

 when, for instance, some one tickles me, and I laugh, I cannot recog- 

 nize any thing between these two facts of laughing and of tickling, 

 beyond an accidental and mechanical coincidence. Other reflex move- 

 ments are very easily explained upon the hypothesis of natural selec- 

 tion ; such, for instance, is the action of the spinal marrow on the 



1 In the strictest meaning of the term, a reflex phenomenon is a movement called 

 forth in one part of the body by an excitement proceeding from that part, and acting 

 intermediately through a new centre, oti r than the brain, properly called, and conse- 

 quently without the intervention of the will. (Vclpian, Lectures onihe General and Com- 

 parative Pliyx'wloc/ii of the Nervous System.) 



