Meyer, Data of Modern Neurology. 293 



The neurologist finds as material for his studies the living 

 being, be it an animal or a person. This living object offers 

 three series of phenomena: (i) The morphological series, in- 

 cluding all the facts of visible and tangible anatomy and histol- 

 ogy ; (2) the physiological series, furnishing the material for 

 the specification of energies which become evident in the pro- 

 cess of vital manifestation. These are the two objective series, 

 A certain number of the physiological processes may moreover 

 involve a third series of phenomena, subjective in character, 

 but none the less objective in many manifestations, namely (3) 

 the psychical series. An adequate digestion and correlation of 

 all these three series of facts by the mental activity itself con- 

 stitutes our neurological science. We have just seen how the 

 older physiological school grouped its data and how it differs 

 from the one represented by the modern anatomical-physio- 

 logical school which the writer would favor. We take for the 

 time being an objective point of view, leaving out the psychical 

 because we lack sufficient experimental means now to closely 

 outline the ' psychical ' part of the nervous system. (For this 

 latter problem, to use a probably justifiable simile from our 

 plan of the brain, we should have been able to produce in a 

 living being a state of pure automatism where all the actions, 

 even complicated ones, could be elicited but without conscious- 

 ness ; and we should then be able to examine the brain for the 

 cells which have been ' paralyzed ' for this purpose in an iso- 

 lated manner. This seems almost inconceivable with our pres- 

 ent methods and means, and it will therefore be a Utopian task 

 to search in this way for the purely psychical 'Anteile,' or 

 superstructures of the nervous system. It is easy to see from 

 this simile that there are extreme difficulties in the way of 

 demonstrating which neurone-complexes are absolutely essential 

 for psychic happenings, and also, that it would be premature to 

 speak of the * psychic ' neurones simply because we suspect 

 that they are involved in conscious activity. To call the neu- 

 rones of the pyramidal tract (the motor efferent cerebral neu- 

 rones) ' voluntary ' motor tracts, may not be far from the truth, 

 but their action is not necessarily conscious (hysteria, epileptic 



