258 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



or another minor psychic system within consciousness; some being 

 now cut off, some being now added on, to go to make unanalyzable 

 differences from time to time in what we call our personalities. 



If we accept this conclusion, we are led to take one further step 

 which has importance in connection with the consideration of the next 

 division of this article. 



"We commonly assume that so special a significance is to be given 

 to action within the nervous system in man's organism that it alone 

 can be considered of moment in the relations of correspondence with 

 consciousness. Our modern biologists, however, are coming to see 

 that all protoplasmic substance has powers of interaction — of ' conduc- 

 tion ' — similar to those observed in nervous tissue ; and that masses 

 of protoplasm may form systems of active life without the existence 

 of anything like nervous systems; nervous matter, indeed, appears to 

 be but a specially differentiated kind of protoplasm which serves as a 

 peculiarly quick and sensitive ' conductor ' from part to part of the 

 organism.* 



It seems possible therefore to hold that while the form of con- 

 sciousness with which we are familiar is practically correspondent only 

 with transfers of energy within the vastly complex human nervous 

 system ; nevertheless it may be true that any transfer of energy in pro- 

 toplasmic matter may have a coincident psychic effect; and that con- 

 sciousnesses of a certain grade may exist in living bodies which are 

 systematized and yet without nervous systems. 



If such a view be possible, then we must hold that human con- 

 sciousness is in all probability complicated by the existence of' psychic 

 correspondents of transfers of energy in other protoplasmic masses 

 than those which we designate as the nervous system; although it 

 must of course be granted that the very superior ' conductivity ' of the 

 nervous masses makes the part of human consciousness which, under 

 such a view, corresponds with activity of the nervous system vastly 

 more important in the whole of man's consciousness than all the rest 

 of the psychic effects corresponding with transfers of energy in proto- 

 plasmic masses other than the nervous tissues. 



One more point of a good deal of importance must be noted in 

 this connection. 



If we once agree that all transfers of energy in protoplasmic sub- 

 stance have their psychic correspondences, then of course we must 



* Confer Loeb, ' Physiology of the Brain,' p. 60 and elsewhere. Professor 

 Loeb scouts the very idea that this, or any other fact, points to the con- 

 clusions which we here suggest; but I judge that this is because 'consciousness' 

 for him means something much narrower than it does for us here. 



