152 Human Personality. 



impelled by the common want to take up the function of 

 estimating these conveyed impulses, whether faint or in- 

 tense and imperative, of estimating and responding to 

 them. Thus somewhere along the incipient nerve line a 

 nerve ganglion would be developed from cells which, under 

 other circumstances of the colony's needs, might have be- 

 come locomotive cells or gland cells. For it is the many 

 common wants of the cell union which have forced the 

 assumption of different functions upon different tracts of 

 cells. 



There seems to be nothing very wonderful in the process 

 by which the virgin sensibility of the unicell has been 

 raised to the condition of intellect. We observe,- first, a 

 condition in which a cell is compelled to feel the feeling 

 of another cell. The medium or agency of transmitting 

 feeling in this case is probably an actual current of ions ; 

 an "ether," let us say, for the sake of a familiar word. 

 Excited to action by this received sensation, the inter- 

 mediate cell transmits the sensation to another contiguous 

 cell ; this latter in turn transmits it to a third, and so on. 

 But sensation thus conveyed onward, from cell to cell, 

 requires referendum somewhere. Moreover, different 

 lines of cells thus acting as incipient nerves would cross 

 each other, as such lines multiplied, and cause distraction 

 and confusion. 



A new necessity arose, the necessity that certain cells 

 along an embryo nerve line, or at the crossings of such lines, 



