ANIMAL AUTOMATISM. 219 



"behind a readiness to be moved in the same way, in 

 that part. Anything which resuscitates the motion 

 gives rise to the appropriate feeling. This is the 

 physical mechanism of memory. 



Descartes imagined that the pineal body (a curious 

 appendage to the upper side of the brain, the function / 

 of which, if it have any, is wholly unknown) was the x 

 instrument through which the soul received impressions ( 

 from, and communicated them to, the brain. And he 

 thus endeavours to explain what happens when one tries 

 to recollect something : 



" Thus when the soul wills to remember anything, this volition, 

 causing the [pineal] gland to incline itself in different directions, 

 drives the [animal] spirits towards different regions of the brain, 

 until they reach that part in which are the traces, which the object 

 which it desires to remember has left. These traces are produced 

 thus: those pores of the brain through which the [animal] spirits 

 have previously been driven, by reason of the presence of the ob- 

 ject, have thereby acquired a tendency to be opened by the animal 

 spirits which return towards them, more easily than other pores, so 

 that the animal spirits, impinging on these pores, enter them more 

 readily than others. By this means they excite a particular move- 

 ment in the pineal gland, which represents the object to the soul, 

 and causes it to know what it is which it desired to recollect." * 



That memory is dependent upon some condition of 

 the brain is a fact established by many considerations 

 among the most important of which are the remarkable 

 phenomena of aphasia. And that the condition of the 

 brain on which memory depends, is largely determined 

 by the repeated occurrence of that condition of its mo- 



* "Les Passions de 1'Ame," xlii. 



