no * THE PSYCHIC LIFE 



At the beginning of his essay upon the Psychic Life of Micro- 

 Organisms (Revtie Philosophique], M. Binet expresses himself as 

 follows: " In the lower beings that represent the simplest forms of 

 life, we find manifestations of an intelligence which greatly trans- 

 cends the phenomena of cellular irritability. Thus even on the 

 very lowest rounds of the ladder of life, psychic manifestations are 

 very much more complex than is usually believed, and the concep- 

 tion of cellular psychology which some very recent authors have 

 formed, seems to me a very crude analysis of the most delicate of 

 phenomena." 



As I have upheld in my Essai de Psychologic Generate, and in some 

 measure however little developed this admitedly old idea, that 

 cellular irritability is the beginning of psychical activity, I request 

 the permission to speak in defence of an opinion so roughly han- 

 dled by M. Binet. 



Now, it appears to me that M. Binet has allowed himself to 

 become involved in illusion respecting the word cellule. A cell, in 

 the eyes of the embryologist and the morphologist, has a well-de- 

 fined meaning. But M. Binet does not seem to have comprehended 

 the fact, that for the physiologist and the psychologist, the essen- 

 tial condition of cellular unity is homogeneity. It is possible that 

 the infusoria, the strange story of whose life M. Binet relates to 

 us, are single-celled organisms. I am in no wise qualified to decide 

 as to this; but whether a single cell, or a group of cells, it matters 

 little, in my opinion, provided the single cell is differentiated to 

 the same degree that it would be if composed of several cells not 

 homogeneous. 



I appeal to M. Binet himself and to the cuts of his essay. When 

 he shows us an Euglena with eyes, esophagus, mouth, contractile 

 vesicle, contractile reservoir (fig. 6); when he carefully describes 

 the shape of the flagellum, the nettle-like tentacles, the tongue- 

 shaped organs, the ocular spots, the trichocysts, and the peristome; 

 when he assumes special nervous centres endowed with various at-' 

 tributes (p. 22): he cannot induce us to admit that the psychology 

 of these complicated organisms is the same as the psychology of 

 the simple cell. I repeat, it is quite immaterial to me that people 

 affirm by the authority of embryology that this or that is a single 

 cell. If that cellule have ocular organs, a nervous system, a mouth, 

 an aesophagus, and a heart, I shall, despite any and every hypoth- 

 esis of the embryologists, refuse to regard it as being physiologi- 

 cally a homogeneous cell, as is, for example, a muscular fibre. 



