CONSCIOUSNESS AND SENSATION. 



103 



impressed condition of the brain-substance is of 

 one invariable nature, while the objects which 

 may occupy the consciousness, its acts of me- 

 mory, of observation, of reason, of volition, and 

 its conditions of emotion or desire are of end- 

 less variety. The hemispheres, including the 

 corpus striatum, may therefore not inappropriately 

 be termed the organ of attention, the mode of 

 whose action may be described thus : the total 

 amount of attention at any one moment is in 

 proportion to the total amount of the impressed 

 condition of the whole corpuscles of the hemi- 

 spheres : but that attention may be occupied with 

 numerous different mental actions going on at 

 the same time ; and with the specific nature of 

 its occupation, whether memory, reason, emotion, 

 appetite or volition, the brain can have nothing 

 to do. 



This view stands in direct opposition to the 

 views which find favour at present with at least 

 many physicians of mental disease. Starting 

 with the proposition that the diseases of the mind 

 are the diseases of the brain, which has a certain 

 amount of truth in it, they have unconsciously 

 slid from that starting-point into phrenological 

 assumptions and into a belief that brain-corpuscles 

 are pigeon-holes of ideas ; and thus they predicate 



