64 Unconscious Memory 



its highest point, so as to take a freer view of the surround- 

 ing territory. 



It will soon appear that I should fail in this purpose if 

 my remarks were to confine themselves solely to physiology. 

 I hope to show how far psychological investigations also 

 afford not only permissible, but indispensable, aid to 

 physiological inquiries. 



Consciousness is an accompaniment of that animal and 

 human organisation and of that material mechanism 

 which it is the province of physiology to explore ; and as 

 long as the atoms of the brain follow their due course 

 according to certain definite laws, there arises an inner 

 life which springs from sensation and idea, from feeling 

 and will. 



We feel this in our own cases ; it strikes us in our con- 

 verse with other people ; we can see it plainly in the more 

 highly organised animals ; even the lowest forms of life 

 bear traces of it ; and who can draw a line in the kingdom 

 of organic life, and say that it is here the soul ceases ? 



With what eyes, then, is physiology to regard this two- 

 fold life of the organised world ? Shall she close them 

 entirely to one whole side of it, that she may fix them 

 more intently on the other? 



So long as the physiologist is content to be a physicist, and 

 nothing more — using the word " physicist " in its widest 

 signification — his position in regard to the organic world 

 is one of extreme but legitimate one-sidedness. As the 

 crystal to the mineralogist or the vibrating string to the 

 acoustician, so from this point of view both man and the 

 lower animals are to the physiologist neither more nor 

 less than the matter of which they consist. That animals 

 feel desire and repugnance, that the material mechanism 

 of the human frame is in close connection with emotions 

 of pleasure or pain, and with the active idea-life of con- 

 sciousness — this cannot, in the eyes of the physicist, make 

 the animal or human body into anything more than what 

 it actually is. To him it is a combination of matter, 



