CONSCIOUSNESS AND SENSATION. 103 
impressed condition of the brain-substance is of 
one invariable nature, while the objects which 
may occupy the consciousness, its acts of me- 
mory, of observation, of reason, of volition, and 
its conditions of emotion or desire are of end- 
less variety. The hemispheres, including the 
corpus striatum, may therefore not inappropriately 
be termed the organ of attention, the mode of 
whose action may be described thus :—the total 
amount of attention at any one moment is in 
proportion to the total amount of the impressed 
condition of the whole corpuscles of the hemi- 
spheres: but that attention may be occupied with 
numerous different mental actions going on at 
the same time; and with the specific nature of 
its occupation, whether memory, reason, emotion, 
appetite or volition, the brain can have nothing 
to do. 
This view stands in direct opposition to the 
views which find favour at present with at least 
many physicians of mental disease. Starting 
with the proposition that the diseases of the mind 
are the diseases of the brain, which has a certain 
amount of truth in it, they have unconsciously 
slid from that starting-point into phrenological 
assumptions and into a belief that brain-corpuscles 
are pigeon-holes of ideas ; and thus they predicate 
