222 Journal of Comparative Neurology. 



opens with the thesis that all nervous action is sentient, that 

 there are feelings evoked in the reflex processes of the brainless 

 frog but they are not fell ! The spinal ganglia even of the de- 

 capitated frog may very well be supposed to be possessed of 

 feeling, "but it remains a local irritation ; it is not reported to 

 the psychical headquarters of the frog and thus we say the frog 

 has ceased to feel it." Again every irritation which thrills 

 through our nervous system takes place in response to a stimu- 

 lous of some kind and must be supposed to be a feeling." 



None of these in its isolated form ever attains conscious- 

 ness. Consciousness is, in fact, the coordination of feelings or 

 a product of such coordination. 



We have then our fundamental definition. Feeling is not 

 a presentation in consciousness nor is it a nervous stimulus, it is 

 a purely nervous activity, a neurosis, the state of excitement in 

 which a nervous element finds itself after irritation. Perhaps, 

 however, other passages and the tendency of modern monism 

 will permit a slight refinement upon this which seems derivable 

 from the text of Dr. Carus' article, and we may say feeling is 

 the sentient or psychic aspect of the neurosis. It would seem 

 that in separating feeling from consciousness it is considered 

 necessary to predicate consciousness in the elementary parts of 

 a vital organism so that each cell not only has its own types of 

 responses to stimuli but consiousness to correspond. What 

 else is meant by the psychosis corresponding the isolated neu- 

 rosis we fail to discover. 



Having thus identified feeling with what to the physiologist 

 is elementary nervous action or certain forms of such action and 

 recognizing the inherent impossibility of affirming or denying 

 the existence of elementary consciousness, we are prepared to 

 follow the author to his next step. Consciousness is a product 

 of coordinated feelings. Of course every one is prepared to 

 admit the large amount of unconscious cerebration and to agree 

 that only a little from the enormous mass of brain activity 

 reaches consciousness at all. The author's use of intelligence 

 is also peculiar and must be recognized before one ventures a 

 criticism. Intelligence, for him, is simply the sum of stored 



