16 
C. L. Herrick 
all outer experiences that the mass of non-localizable experiences 
has acquired the force of a negative localization — a state of not- 
outsidenesSj so to say, a subjectivity. The grouping of the not- j 
outside and the relatively constant as the empirical ego on its 
two sides of feeling and volition has received much study of late 
and it becomes apparent that the old theory of a simple central ■ 
sense of effort is far too sophisticated a concept. So long as it 
persisted, it was natural that a search for the “seat of the souh^ 
should be protracted even after the spatial element had been 
quite analytically treated by Kant and Lotze. We are driven 
by modern psychology to Lotze^s position that a thing is where it i 
acts and the being in the same place as another means that the 
two things have the power of interaction. It is plain that for a 
thing to be in a place apart from reacting upon the determinants 
of that place-in-which would be an impossible state to know of, if 
it existed, and an impossible thing to construe ontologically. 
Given the proper form of activity, and consciousness is given. 
It will make no difference whether this form is a neural equil- 
ibrium in the entire nervous system or restricted to the cortex. 
The cortex alone of the nervous structures appears to afford 
evidence of the arrangement securing the equilibration demanded, 
and for this reason it may take rank as an organ of consciousness 
par excellence. 
The brain is a prodigious mechanism for bringing diverse 
stimuli together in one continuum in the cortex. So far from a 
device for projecting stimuli upon one point, as imagined by 
Des Cartes and most speculative philosophers, the stimuli suffer 
a sort of dispersion in their path toward the field of consciousness. 
I discover that this mechanism is in a terrific state of activity. 
Currents of blood and lymph supplying highly complicated cur- 
rents of energy are passing through the mechanism continually 
and doubtless the energy actually operating in the brain, if 
convertible into gross forms of work, would lift many tons liter- 
ally miles high daily, for we deal here with what the physicist 
would call intramolecular types of forces as well as molecular 
and molar types of forces. Now all this vast activity reveals 
itself to us in scarcely any commensurate return. Just as the 
spectator looking at the solar system would see little evidence of 
the energy expressed ■ in the equilibrated system of planets, 
every molecule of which is brimful of activity in balanced con- 
