4 PSYCHOLOOT. 



a copy, somewhat mutilated and altered, of the order of 

 phenomena. But the slightest reflection shows that phe- 

 nomena have absolutely no power to influence our ideas 

 until they have first impressed our senses and our brain. 

 The bare existence of a past fact is no ground for our re- 

 membering it. Unless we have seen it, or somehow under- 

 gone it, we shall never know of its having been. The expe- 

 riences of the body are thus one of the conditions of the 

 faculty of memory being what it is. And a very small 

 amount of reflection on facts shows that one part of the 

 body, namely, the brain, is the part whose experiences are 

 directly concerned. If the nervous communication be cut 

 oif between the brain and other parts, the experiences of 

 those other parts are non-existent for the mind. The eye 

 is blind, the ear deaf, the hand insensible and motionless. 

 And conversely, if the brain be injured, consciousness is 

 abolished or altered, even although every other organ in 

 the hodj be ready to play its normal part. A blow on the 

 head, a sudden subtraction of blood, the pressure of an 

 apoplectic hemorrhage, may have the first effect; whilst a 

 very few ounces of alcohol or grains of opium or hasheesh, 

 or a whiff of chloroform or nitrous oxide gas, are sure to 

 have the second. The delirium of fever, the altered self 

 of insanity, are all due to foreign matters circulating 

 through the brain, or to pathological changes in that 

 organ's substance. The fact that the brain is the one 

 immediate bodily condition of the mental operations is 

 indeed so universally admitted nowadays that I need 

 spend no more time in illustrating it, but will simply 

 postulate it and pass on. The whole remainder of the 

 book will be more or less of a proof that the postulate was 

 correct. 



Bodily experiences, therefore, and more particularly 

 brain-experiences, must take a place amongst those con- 

 ditions of the mentallife of which Psychology need take 

 account. The spiritualist and the associationist must both 

 he ' cerebrolists,' to the extent at least of admitting that 

 certain peculiarities in the way of working of their own 

 favorite principles are explicable only by the fact that the 

 brain laws are a codeterminant of the result. 



