59 



With regard to the heredity of the sentiments and passions, 

 Ribot says : " Man is situated in the midst of the universe, 

 which acts upon him only by its properties. Colours, odours, 

 savours, forms, resistances, movements, become modes of 

 our organism, producing therein a shock to the nerves. 

 Then all these peripheric impressions pass to the brain, pro- 

 bably into the optic thalami, and being thence transmitted 

 to the cortical substance of the brain, they are transformed, 

 we know not how, into facts of consciousness ; the physio- 

 logical phenomenon becomes psychological, constituting 

 that state of the mind which we denominate cognition. 

 But this is not all. The nerve-vibrations produced by 

 material objects, not only make us acquainted with some- 

 thing outside of us, but they also produce within us a 

 certain agreeable or disagreeable state, which we call feeling." 

 If there were no such reverberation of pleasure or pain 

 within us, then our experiences of the external world would 

 be, as Bichat says, " only a frigid series of intellectual 

 phenomena. . . ." If we add that pleasure and pain may be 

 excited in us either by some state of our organs dependent 

 on the vital processes, or by recollections suggested by 

 memory, we have enumerated every mode of cognition 

 which can produce phenomena of sensation. 



Philosophical physiologists, such as Bain, Miiller, and 

 Maudsley, agree in regarding Spinoza as the author of the 

 grandest contribution to the philosophical study of the 

 ultimate reason of sensible phenomena ; and, in his admir- 

 able Ethics^ the latter author contends that the ultimate 

 explanation of all sensible phenomena is found in the fact 

 of desire "desire meaning appetite with self-consciousness," 

 and appetite being " the very essence of man, in so far as 

 it is directed to acts which tend towards his conservation." 



