THE PRINCIPAL ACTS 397 



" It is thus," said Cabanis, " that operations of imagination and 

 memory are performed. The motions of the objects recalled and 

 represented are, it is true, usually provided by impressions received 

 in the various organs : but the act which recalls their image, which 

 presents them to the brain in their correct form, which puts that organ 

 in a condition to form numberless new combinations, often depends 

 entirely on causes situated within the sensitive organ." (Histoire 

 des Sensations, p. 168.) 



This appears to me quite true ; it is all the result of the power of 

 the inner feeling of the individual, for this feeling can be aroused by 

 a simple idea which gives rise to that moral need called desire ; and 

 we know that desire includes and leads to the performance both of 

 those actions which set up muscular movement, and of those which 

 give rise to our thoughts, judgments, reasonings, philosophical 

 analyses, and to the operations of our imagination. 



Desire creates the will to act in one or other of these two ways : 

 now this desire, together with the will which it evokes, arouses our inner 

 feeling, so that it dispatches nervous fluid either into some part of the 

 muscular system, or of the organ which produces acts of intelligence. 



If Cabanis, whose work on the Rapports du Physique et du Moral 

 is an inexhaustible mine of observations and interesting discussion, 

 had recognised the power of the inner feehng ; if he had guessed 

 the mechanism of sensations, and not mistaken physical sensibility 

 for the cause of intellectual operations ; if he had recognised that 

 sensations do not necessarily yield ideas, but mere perceptions, which 

 is a very different thing ; if, lastly, he had distinguished what is 

 due to irritability from what is the product of sensations ; how great 

 would have been the light which his interesting work might have 

 shed ! As it is, this work presents the best means for advancing that 

 sphere of human knowledge now in question, on account of the 

 multitude of facts and observations which it comprises. But I am 

 convinced that these facts can only be made useful by fixing our ideas 

 on the essential distinctions drawn in the course of the present 

 work. 



By paying attention to what I have said in the present section, we 

 shall probably reach the conviction : 



1. That the seat of memory is the organ of intelligence itself, and that 

 the operations of memory are simply acts which recall to consciousness 

 ideas already acquired ; 



2. That the outlines or images of these ideas are necessarily already 

 graven in some part of the organ of understanding ; 



3. That the inner feeling, when stirred by any cause, drives the avail- 

 able nervous fluid over such of the impressed outlines as may be selected 



