96 FUNCTIONAL INERTIA 



the term :< protoplasm " was coined by Purkinje, 

 and twelve years before the cell-theory was enun- 

 ciated by Schwann. 



Further, Faraday was not a biologist, and even 

 if he had been, scientific views took much longer to 

 travel from the Continent to London in 1818 than 

 they do to-day. My point of view is, of course, 

 biologically a very much wider one than Faraday's, 

 for, (i) there is more than an analogy between 

 physical and psychical inertia, and, (2) that, since 

 inertia is bound up with the molecules of living 

 matter it underlies all metabolism and therefore 

 all functions both those with and those without a 

 conscious correlate. To Faraday it was a mere 

 analogy ; matter had inertia, and the mind ex- 

 hibited something which was best called inertia 

 too, but he did not say, because he was not in a 

 position to say, that the mind has inertia because 

 cerebral protoplasm has inertia, and cerebral pro- 

 toplasm has inertia in common with the lowliest 

 fraction of living matter. If protoplasm possesses 

 inertia of function, then it is not merely a matter of 

 an ingen'ous analogy, but it follows causally that, 

 since psychic phenomena have their physical basis 

 in protoplasm, psychic phenomena must exhibit 

 inertia. The well-marked tendency to do what has 

 been done before, to continue doing what you have 

 just been doing, to yield to habit, to the familiar, is 

 nothing else than the expression of the functional 

 mertia of psychic activity. Every day we have ex- 

 amples of it ; some one is reading from the news- 



