95 



producing the thought consciousness that accompanies sense 

 consciousness." Emotions, he says, are produced in like 

 manner. 1 



But these external objects which play upon the medulla- 

 oblongata, the cerebrum, the cerebellum, and even the me- 

 dulla-oblongata itself, all belong, for Spencer, to an existence 

 "beyond consciousness". As external they act as the causal 

 substrata of sense consciousness and thought consciousness. 

 It is claimed, for example, as already indicated, that the cause 

 of a particular conscious experience is to be looked for in a 

 certain nerve disturbance external to consciousness. This 

 leads one to conclude, however, that if it were possible for him 

 to witness this nerve disturbance, the conditions laid down 

 by Spencer would not be fulfilled, for such observed nerve 

 stimulation would not then be an unknown substratum to 

 consciousness at all, but a known experience, which would 

 again require an unknown substratum, and so on ad infinitum. 

 That the cause of a conscious experience must always remain 

 in the unknown, has already been maintained by Spencer in 

 the statement that "we can never learn the nature of that 

 which is manifested to us". Causality would then seem to be, 

 on such an hypothesis, some 'mysterious' relation standing 

 between consciousness and something not consciousness. But 

 here, again, a relation between the known and the unknown 

 can itself be only verbally posited, not known. To apply this 

 causal relation, therefore, as the Associationists continually do, 

 to the connection between data predicated beyond conscious- 

 ness, and the data within consciousness, is quite unwarranted 

 in terms of fact; and is admissable, if at all, only on grounds of 

 speculative theory a theory, however, which stands or falls 

 according to its scientific evidence, or lack of it, and its in- 

 herent logical or illogical relations. 



6. METHOD. 



It will now be apparent wherein lies the source of the 

 difficulties which have been seen to attend the physiological 

 theories of association which have been under examination. 

 This source lies in the purely speculative method which the 

 above writers have followed. A better method, however, of 

 approaching the question, would have been, before attempting 

 to discover how brain processes produce consciousness, to 

 examine the distinction which is made between these processes 

 and consciousness, to see if such distinction is itself a valid 

 one, from the standpoint on which it is adopted. 



^ee pp. 43-45. 



