26 FSYCUOLOGY. 



fcliroiifTli the mind. Tlie effect on tlie cliild's conduct wlieu 

 the cjindh^ li;inie is next presented is easy to imagine. Of 

 course the sight of it arouses the grasping reflex ; but it 

 arouses simultaneously the idea thereof, together with that 

 of the consequent pain, and of the final retraction of the 

 band ; and if these cerebral processes prevail in strength 

 over the immediate sensation in the centres beloAv, the hist 

 idea will be the cue by which the final action is discharged. 

 The grasping will be arrested in mid-career, the hand 

 drawn back, and the child's fingers saved. 



In all this we assume that the hemispheres do not 

 natively couple any particular sense-impression with any 

 special motor discharge. They only register, and preserve 

 traces of, such couplings as are already organized in the 

 reflex centres below. But this brings it inevitably about 

 that, w^hen a chain of experiences has been already regis- 

 tered and the first link is impressed once again from without, 

 the last link will often be awakened in idea long before it 

 can exist in fad. And if this last link were previously 

 coupled with a motion, that motion may now come from the 

 mere ideal suggestion without waiting for the actual impres- 

 sion to arise. Thus an animal with hemispheres acts in an- 

 ticipation of future things ; or, to use our previous formula, he 

 acts from considerations of distant good and ill. If w^e give 

 the name of partners to the original couplings of impressions 

 with motions in a reflex way, then we may say that the func- 

 tion of the hemispheres is simply to luring about exchanges 

 among the partners. Movement r/i", which natively is sensa- 

 tion s"'s partner, becomes through the hemispheres the 

 partner of sensation s' , s"" or s^ . It is like the great com- 

 mutating switch-board at a central telephone station. No 

 new elementary process is involved ; no impression nor any 

 motion peculiar to the hemispheres ; but any number of 

 combinations impossible to the lower machinery taken 

 alone, and an endless consequent increase in the possibilities 

 of behavior on the creature's part. 



All this, as a mere scheme,* is so clear and so concordant 



* I shall call it hereafter for shortness ' the Meynert scheme;' for the 

 child-and-flame example, as well as the whole general notion that the hemi- 

 spheres are a supernumerary surface for the projection and association o^ 



