xxii Journal of Comparative Neurology. 



CQuld hardly fail to greatly alter the reaction. In spite of these sources 

 of error it is not our desire to intimate that, on the whole, the activities 

 of the decorticated dog are not fairly indicative of the functions of the 

 infracortical centres. Strong irritation of the skin caused the animal 

 to growl and bite, he could be awaked from natural sleep by loud 

 noises, the taste of food awakened the impulse to feed, etc. But when 

 an author seriously claims that these facts prove that "we have un- 

 doubted manifestations of the presence of every variety of sensation, 

 tactile, muscular sense, sense of pain, vision, hearing, taste, and finally 

 the visceral sensations of hunger and of thirst,"' he betrays a lack of 

 psychological discrimination and begs the real question. Here, as so 

 generally, the content of sense is put for sensation and then the conclu- 

 sion is reached that sensation is produced in the infracortical centres. 

 Now it would be just as legitimate to decide that because certain pro- 

 cesses of a nervous character and essential to vision are carried on in 

 the eye therefore the eye is the seat of visual sensation. There is no 

 manner of doubt that all the preliminaries to vision including a large 

 number of coordinating reflexes are all provided for in the infracortical 

 centres. It is ecpially certain that there is a provision for reflexes of a 

 higher order — such as grow out of the relations of different senses 

 inter se. All that is reported in the case of the decorticated dog may 

 well belong in the categories of infraconscious coordination. It must 

 be remembered that the consciousness of a sensation is probably never 

 attained until there has been a kinesodic response to it and it is not un- 

 Ukely that it is the reflected current rather than the direct one which 

 enters consciousness. It is in this way that the storage of vestiges in 

 the cortex may be explained in such cases where the original stimulus 

 never reached consciousness. It is absolutely necessary that the line 

 between physiology and psychology should coincide with that which 

 separates the conscious from the unconscious or that the distinction be 

 abandoned. If sensation is selected as the unit of psychology it is ab- 

 surd to speak of unconscious sensation. The fact that the dog in the 

 present instance acts as though conscious of a stimulus is no proof of 

 such consciousness and all admit that there is a complete absence of all 

 evidence of reproduced sensation or of reflection. It is true that very 

 complicated sets of cyclical reflexes are produced but something very 

 similar might under proper conditions be reproduced upon a corpse. 

 The fact that the cortical connections are not completed until a very 

 late period of the ontogeny, which is adduced in support of the idea 



'W. II. Thompson, fonrn. Nenious and Mental Disease, June, 1895. 



