CHAPTER I 



THE INDIVIDUAL CONCEIVED OF AS AN ESSENTIAL DYNAMO- 

 PSYCHISM AND AS REPRESENTATION 



I. THE SCIENTIFIC BASIS OF THIS CONCEPT. 1 



OUR physiological study of the individual, starting from 

 all known facts, has demonstrated the distinction between 

 his essential and real dynamo-psychism and its visible 

 representations. 



We have established by those facts, the illusory 

 nature of the appearances on which the general concept 

 of classical physiology is built the concept of the 

 living being as a simple cellular complex, organising 

 itself by means of specifically distinct tissues, and having 

 in itself the reason for its being, its origin, and its end, 

 the cause for its form, its mechanism, and its functions; 

 all these properties arising only by heredity from 

 generative cells. 



At the outset we have shown that it is not possible 

 to find the cause of specific form, nor the origin, the 

 essential cause, nor the purposes of its different modes 

 of activity, either in the organism itself or in the fact of 

 its cellular association. 



We have been obliged to admit that the corporeal 

 form is but a temporary illusion ; that organs and tissues 

 have no absolute specificity; that these organs and 

 tissues, even though proceeding from the single prim- 

 ordial substance of the ovum, can even in this life be 

 disintegrated into a unique primordial substance, which 



1 The whole of this and succeeding chapters are closely connected 

 with the physiological and psychological demonstrations of Book I. 

 They will not be understood apart from this connection. 



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