THE NERVOUS SYSTEM AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 161 



condition of the sensitive nerve-fibers. This is produced by the out- 

 ward irritation, but is a purely physical and inward nervous process, 

 having no other resemblance to its cause than that it is motion, and 

 having no resemblance to the sensation which is conditioned upon it. 

 4. The transfer of this condition of the nerve-fiber to the central parts 

 of the nervous system, especially to the brain. These are the mechani- 

 cal antecedents for sensation. They are susceptible of physical treat- 

 ment. They may, and often do, operate without any sensation arising ; 

 more than this, they may operate so as to produce a reflex activity, 

 causing violent motions, still without the faintest appearance of sensa- 

 tion. It is plain, then, that to know anything about sensation we must 

 pass from physiology to personal experience. It seems a just charge 

 against the materialism of physiology, both general and medical, that 

 it takes no account of the element in a sensation-process. 



How shall we escape saying that the last step in this process is the 

 sensation itself, which the soul calls forth from itself in consequence of 

 the antecedents described ? The sensation is no picture of the outer 

 thing, the retinal image works, in all probability, chemically upon the 

 retina, but that image does not and can not get itself transferred to 

 the cerebral hemispheres. The sensation is an answer to the excitation 

 in the brain-mass, arising from that image, an answer in such peculiar 

 language that it must be called language of the soul not as thereby 

 explaining it in the sense of resolving its mystery, yet as thereby ex- 

 plaining it in the only way in which explanation is anywhere possible, 

 viz., by resolving the combined activities into their elements. 



It is a necessary part of this discussion to note that one of these 

 elements is personality, i. e., a consciousness of the sensation as mine. 

 It seems unfortunate that, in dealing with this experience of personal- 

 ity, the strength and weakness of the development theory are not 

 rightly estimated. The strength of the theory lies in those rudiment- 

 ary sensations connected with infant life, and with the organic pro- 

 cesses where it seems but just to say that only feeling is present, i. e., 

 no true consciousness, no knowledge of the sensation as mine. The 

 weakness of the theory, and it is a fatal one, lies in the failure to 

 recognize the distinction between a matured idea of self which comes 

 only with years, and a consciousness that the sensation is mine, how- 

 ever rudimentary this sensation may be. The most primitive distinc- 

 tions in consciousness, those of pleasure and pain, can not be expe- 

 rienced without being known. When this is realized, the inadequacy 

 of the attempt to dispense with personality, or to derive it from any- 

 thing more elementary than itself, must appear ; the two factors in 

 every phenomenon, viz., that which manifests itself, and that to which 

 it manifests itself, are at once disclosed. 



Memory, which, though lying in the so-called fog-land of conscious- 

 ness, is yet a reality, has been brought forward as decisive against the 

 application of evolution to the origin of knowledge. Memory is a pre- 



VOL. XXVII. 11 



