PROFESSOR AT KONIGSBERG 67 



and I have got all I want for the moment if they are alive 

 to it. Du Bois is in Paris these holidays to give his own 

 things at the Academic, and writes that he will bring mine 

 forward also. He is very clever at that job, and I have no 

 doubt that he will present the German scientists in quite an 

 imposing light to the Frenchmen. Konigsberg is a splendid 

 place to work in, because it does not tempt one to do much 

 else, and yet there is plenty of intellectual life about it. The 

 apparatus which I used in my work was made quite well for 

 me here/ 



In a few days, however, Helmholtz received a letter of 

 affectionate criticism from his father, intimating that with all 

 deference to his son's authority, he found difficulty in under- 

 standing the result of his investigations : 



I As regards your work, the results at first appeared to me 

 surprising, since I regard the idea and its bodily expression 

 not as successive, but as simultaneous, a single living act, that 

 only becomes bodily and mental on reflection : and I could as 

 little reconcile myself to your view, as I could admit that 

 a star that had disappeared in Abraham's time should still be 

 visible/ 



Helmholtz was far from wishing that his father should accept 

 his results upon the scientific appreciation of others, contrary 

 to his own convictions, and lost no time in sending him the 

 following lucid explanation of the meaning of his work : 



I 1 am adding a note intended so far as may be to remove 

 your doubts about the rate of propagation in nerve. You must 

 remember that the interaction of mental and bodily processes 

 is initiated in the brain, and that consciousness, intellectual 

 activity, has nothing to do with the transmission of the message 

 from the skin, from the retina, or from the ear, to the brain. 

 In relation to intelligence this transmission within the body 

 is as external as the propagation of sound from the place at 

 which it takes origin, to the ear. Just as in this case it is 

 the elasticity of the air that conveys the concussion of the 

 resonant body to the nervous apparatus of the ear, so it is 

 here the motions of the minute material particles of the nervous 

 substance which are propagated from the end of the nerve 

 to its origin in the brain, where they are first recognized as 

 a message to consciousness. That the velocity of this trans- 



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