214 PSTCHOLOOY. 



Let us turu uow to consider the 



RELATIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS TO SPACE, 



This is the problem known in the history of philoso- 

 phy as the question of the seat of the soul. It has given 

 rise to much literature, but we must ourselves treat it very 

 briefly. Everything depends on what we conceive the soul 

 to be, an extended or an inextended entity. If the former, 

 it may occupy a seat. If the latter, it may not ; though it 

 has been thought that even then it might still have a posi- 

 tion. Much hair-splitting has arisen about the possibility 

 of an inextended thing nevertheless being present through- 

 out a certain amount of extension. We must distinguish 

 the kinds of presence. In some manner our consciousness 

 is ' present ' to everything with which it is in relation. I am 

 cognitively present to Orion whenever I perceive that con- 

 stellation, but I am not dynamically present there, I work 

 no effects. To my brain, however, I am dynamically present, 

 inasmuch as my thoughts and feelings seem to react upon 

 the processes thereof. If, then, by the seat of the mind is 

 meant nothing more than the locality with which it stands 

 in immediate dynamic relations, we are certain to be 

 right in saying that its seat is somewhere in the cortex of 

 the brain. Descartes, as is well known, thought that the 

 inextended soul was immediately present to the pineal 

 gland. Others, as Lotze in his earlier days, and W. Volk- 

 mann, think its ^30sition must be at some point of the struc- 

 tureless matrix of the anatomical brain-elements, at which 

 point they suppose that all nerve-currents may cross and 

 combine. The scholastic doctrine is that the soul is to- 

 tally present, both in the whole and in each and every part 

 of the body. This mode of presence is said to be due to 

 the soul's inextended nature and to its simplicity. Two ex- 

 tended entities could only correspond in space with one 

 another, part to part, — but not so does the soul, which has 

 no parts, correspond with the body. Sir Wm. Hamilton 

 and Professor Bowen defend something like this view. I. 

 H. Fichte, Ulrici, and, among American philosophers, Mr 

 J. E. Walter,* maintain the soul to be a space-filling prin- 



* Perception of Space and Matter, 1879, part ii. chap. 3 



