i86 JoiTRNAi, OF Comparative Neurology. 



in this fluid may issue in phantasy while there is a separate 

 spiritual activity to correspond to each form of motion of the 

 vital spirits. Emotions, for example, are the result of cur- 

 rents from the heart. 



In a sense the soul is, as Wundt says, superfluous in this 

 theory, and Descartes evidently is lead to postulate its exis- 

 tence to account for the unity of consciousness. He accounts 

 it an unnecessary luxury for lower animals which accordingly 

 are automata, with only the illusiory appearance of conscious- 

 ness. It was a step easily taken by the French metaphysi- 

 cians, a few years later, to apply the same principle to man 

 and eliminate the psychical element entirely. 



Under the influence of the German metaphysicians of the 

 school of Wolff, for whom classification and analysis passed 

 for explanation, there followed a revival of a tendency which 

 had been frequently exhibited before to assign to various 

 organs the mental processes separated by their analysis. 



That the brain is associated with thought was recognized 

 very early, and this view prevailed among the Greek physi- 

 cians in spite of the fact that Aristotle described the brain as 

 the most bloodless and inert organ of the body, designed 

 to regulate the temperature of the latter, much as the 

 condensing vapors of the sky mitigate summer heat and 

 drought. Pythagoras, Hippocrates, and Plato clearly recog- 

 nized the head as the seat of the intellect and will. 



In the days of Ptolemy Soter, some attempt was made to 

 localize functions; Erasistratus believed that the sensory 

 nerves spring from the meninges, while the motor are de- 

 rived from the substance of the brain itself, and Herophilus 

 is said to have anticipated Descartes in teaching that the 

 vital forces reside in the ventricles. The followers of Galen 

 subscribed to the same view. 



The Arabian physicians extended the doctrine of localiza- 

 tion. Albertus Magnus assigned judgment to the frontal, 

 imagination to the parietal, and memory to the occipital por- 

 tions of the brain. The notion of animal spirits within the 



