130 THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE. 



are all derived from the two elementary functions 

 of the psyche, sensation and motion, and from their 

 combination in reflex action and presentation. To 

 the province of sensation, in a wide sense, we must 

 attribute the feeling of like and dislike which deter- 

 mines the emotion ; while the corresponding desire 

 and aversion (love and hatred), the effort to attain 

 what is liked and avoid what is disliked, belong to 

 the category of movement. "Attraction '' and " repul- 

 sion " seem to be the sources of witt, that momentous 

 element of the soul which determines the character 

 of the individual. The passions, which play so 

 important a part in the psychic life of man, are but 

 intensifications of emotion. Komanes has recently 

 shown that these also are common to man and the 

 brute. Even at the lowest stage of organic life we 

 find in all the protista those elementary feelings of 

 like and dislike, revealing themselves in what are 

 called their tropisms, in the striving after light or 

 darkness, heat or cold, and in their different relations 

 to positive and negative electricity. On the other 

 hand, we find at the highest stage of psychic life, in 

 civilised man, those finer shades of emotion, of delight 

 and disgust, of love and hatred, which are the main- 

 springs of civilisation and the inexhaustible sources 

 of poetry. Yet a connecting chain of all conceivable 

 gradations unites the most primitive elements of 

 feeling in the psychoplasm of the unicellular protist 

 with the highest forms of passion that rule in the 

 ganglionic cells of the cortex of the human brain. 

 That the latter are absolutely amenable to physical 

 laws was proved long ago by the great Spinoza in his 

 famous Statics of Emotion. 



The notion of will has as many different meanings 



