232 Heredity. 



The brain is the seat and the condition of clear consciousness; but 

 every secondary nerve-centre and every ganglion is conscious after 

 its own fashion. This view, which is also based on physiology, 

 holds that, inasmuch as sensibility is a histological, not a morpho- 

 logical property, wherever there is a nerve-substance there must 

 also be a more or less vague consciousness, and that the general 

 consciousness of the creature is composed of these infinitesimal 

 quantities, which are lost in it even while they constitute it. 



We need not decide between these two hypotheses, nor are we 

 competent to do so. We would merely show that, as far as they 

 touch upon our subject, they both lead to the same conclusion. 



We have already said that the antithesis of the physical and the 

 moral, considered in the phenomenal order, resolves itself into the 

 contrast of the conscious with the unconscious, and we now see 

 that, as we bring both groups together, the one encroaches on the 

 other, so that it is impossible to say where the conscious ends and 

 where the unconscious begins. For the present, we only observe 

 that it would be premature to draw a conclusion before we have 

 studied the purely psychological that is, the conscious pheno- 

 menon. This we now proceed to do. 



in. 



We therefore now pass from phenomena of a mixed nature half- 

 physiological and half-psychological to those which properly 

 constitute intellectual life. But we must not forget that here we 

 are concerned only with phenomena ; we know not what the mind 

 is in itself, nor need we discuss that question here. We have 

 merely to inquire whether psychological life may not in the last 

 analysis be brought down to a few irreducible elements, given, or 

 at least suggested, by experience, and whether there is any relation 

 between the primordial facts of mental life and the primordial 

 facts of physical life. Leaving, therefore, all questions as to the 

 substance of the mind, which concern metaphysics, and all details 

 as to its faculties and phenomena, which concern descriptive 

 psychology, let us see to what ultimate form we may reduce the 

 fact of conscience, or thought, considered as a phenomenon. 



It may be said generally, that to think is to unify and to 

 diversify; to reduce phenomenal plurality to the unity of the 



