PSYCHOLOGY Ixxxv 



deserves great credit ; for throughout the history of philo- 

 sophy, almost up to modern times, the will has been accorded 

 an altogether undue prominence and significance. He placed 

 it approximately in its correct rank : he pointed out that 

 the extraordinary instincts of various insects has nothing 

 whatever to do with will or any conscious effort : he rightly 

 aflSrmed that conscious will has infinitely less to do with 

 initiating even human activities than it is supposed to 

 have. He denied the so-called free-will altogether, saying 

 that any volition flowed as necessarily from antecedent 

 conditions as the quotient in an arithmetical sum. In 

 all this he has been thoroughly justified by modern 

 knowledge. 



Lamarck regarded the cerebral hemispheres, which he 

 called the hypocephalon, as the special intellectual organ, 

 and to a great extent cut off from the remainder of the 

 brain. He held that " ideas " were the material of every 

 kind of intellectual operation : and with that restless craving 

 for the manufacture of semi-material entities to explain away 

 difficulties, he affirmed that an idea was a tracing or engraving 

 actually impressed physically upon the soft substance of the 

 hemispheres. He recognised that the white matter of the 

 hemispheres is composed of nerve-fibres, which he imagined 

 to be hollow tubes containing the nervous fluid. He believed 

 that each fibre terminated in a minute cavity in the cortex, 

 too small to be visible. Now, when some impression is made 

 on our external senses, say the sight of a fish, the nervous 

 fluid contained in the optic nerve becomes agitated, as I 

 have already mentioned in describing Lamarck's views of 

 sensation. Now, Lamarck continues, if attention is turned to 

 the cause of tlie sensation, the sensation does not immediately 

 pass away, but, by a second reaction, subsequent to that 

 constituting the sensation, it reaches the brain, and there 

 becomes pigeon-holed as an idea. The agitation in the 

 original afferent nerve, in this case the optic nerve, passes 

 up to the cerebral cortex, and there (if I understand Lamarck 

 aright) engraves on the walls of the cavity at the end of the 



