120 THE EIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE. 



I. Cellular 'presentation. — At the lowest stages we 

 find presentation to be a general physiological 

 property of psychoplasm ; even in the simplest 

 unicellular protist sensations may leave a permanent 

 trace in the psychoplasm, and these may be repro- 

 duced by memory. In more than four thousand 

 kinds of radiolaria, which I have described, every 

 single species is distinguished by a special, hereditary 

 skeletal structure. The construction of this specific, 

 and often highly elaborate, skeleton by a cell of the 

 simplest description (generally globular) is only intelli- 

 gible when we attribute the faculty of presentation, 

 and, indeed, of a special reproduction of the plastic 

 " feeling of distance," to the constructive protoplasm 

 — as I have pointed out in my Psychology of the 

 Radiolaria} 



II. Histionic presentation. — In the coenobia or cell- 

 colonies of the social protists, and still better in the 

 tissues [in the Greek, technical term, hista ; hence 

 the name histionic] of plants and lower, nerveless 

 animals (sponges, polyps, etc.), we find the second 

 stage of unconscious presentation, which consists of 

 the common psychic activity of a number of closely 

 connected cells. If a single stimulus may, instead of 

 simply spending itself in the reflex movement of an 

 organ (the leaf of a plant, for instance, or the arm of a 

 polyp), leave a permanent impression, which can be 

 spontaneously reproduced later on, we are bound to 

 assume, in explaining the phenomenon, a histionic 

 presentation, dependent on the psychoplasm of the 

 associated tissue-cells. 



III. Unconscious presentation in the ganglionic cells. 



1 E. Haeckel, " General Natural History of the Radiolaria "; 1887. 



