10 PSTCIIOLOOT. 



a like ingenuity. Such a frog, after rising from the bottom 

 and finding his farther upward progress checked by the 

 ghiss bell which has been inverted over him, will not per- 

 sist in butting his nose against the obstacle until dead of 

 suffocation, but will often re-descend and emerge from under 

 its rim as if, not a definite mechanical propulsion upwards, 

 but rather a conscious desire to reach the air by hook or 

 crook were the main-spring of his activity. Goltz con- 

 cluded from this that the hemispheres are not the sole seat 

 of intellect in frogs. He made the same inference from 

 observing that a brainless frog will turn over from his back 

 to his belly when one of his legs is sewed up, although the 

 movements required are then very difterent from those 

 excited under normal circumstances by the same annoying 

 position. They seem determined, consequently, not merely 

 by the antecedent irritant, but by the final end, — though the 

 irritant of course is what makes the end desired. 



Another brilliant German author, Liebmann,* argues 

 against the brain's mechanism accounting for mental action, 

 by very similar considerations. A machine as such, he 

 says, will bring forth right results when it is in good order, 

 and wrong results if out of repair. But both kinds of result 

 flow with equally fatal necessity from their conditions. We 

 cannot suppose the clock-work whose structure fatally 

 determines it to a certain rate of speed, noticing that this 

 speed is too slow or too fast and vainly trying to correct it. 

 Its conscience, if it have any, should be as good as that of 

 the best chronometer, for both alike obey equally well the 

 same eternal mechanical laws — laws from behind. But if 

 the hrain be out of order and the man says " Twice four are 

 two," instead of " Twice four are eight," or else " I must go 

 to the coal to buy the wharf," instead of " I must go to the 

 wharf to buy the coal," instantly there arises a conscious- 

 ness of error. The wrong performance, though it obey the 

 same mechanical law as the right, is nevertheless con- 

 demned, — condemned as contradicting the inner law — the 

 law from in front, the purpose or ideal for which the braio 

 should act, w'h ether it do so or not. 



* Zur Analysis der Wirklicbkeit, p. 489. 



