THE UNITY OF THE NEURISTS CONSCIOUSNESS. 323 



most various individual motory apparatuses are connected 

 with the most various individual motory ganglion-cells. 

 Sensations are certainly collected in definite ganglion- 

 cells, still among them too we do not find any single cell 

 which can in any way be designated the centre of all 

 sensation, but we again meet with a great number of 

 very minute centres. 



All the operations which have their source in the 

 nervous system, and there certainly are a very great 

 number of them, do not allow us to recognise a unity 

 anywhere else than in our own consciousness ; an ana- 

 tomical or physiological unity has at least as yet been 

 nowhere demonstrable. If we really were to set 

 down the nervous system with its numerous separate 

 centres as the central point of all organic actions, even 

 then the thing actually sought for, a real unity, would 

 not have been obtained. If a clear idea is formed of 

 the difficulties which stand in the way of such a unity, 

 it can scarcely be doubted, but that we are continually 

 led astray by the spiritual phenomena displayed in our 

 own persons, in the interpretation of organic processes. 

 Feeling ourselves to be something simple and indivisible, 

 we always start with the presumption that everything 

 else must be regulated by this indivisible principle. 

 But if we trace the development of any given plant 

 from its first germ up to the highest point in its evolu- 

 tion, we meet with a series of processes altogether 

 analogous, without our being able to entertain the suppo- 

 sition for a moment, that such a unity exists in it, as we 

 are led by our consciousness to suppose exists in us. 

 Nobody has been able to detect a nervous system in plants ; 

 in no case has it been discovered that the whole of the 

 fully developed plant was governed from a single point. 

 All the vegetable physiology of the present day is based 

 upon the investigation , of the activity of cells, and if 



