1878.] 
Feeling and Energy. 
393 
can, to repel the allegation, I must now deal with the next 
objection likely to be urged against the hypothesis of alter- 
nation. 
It is objected that, even admitting the similarity between 
feeling and energy to be sufficient to satisfy a theory of 
alternation, there is yet wanted a locus in time wherein the 
supposed alternation may transpire. The £< physical pro- 
cesses concerned in nervous addion,” say the objectors, ££ are 
complete in themselves without the intervention of mental 
states. The dynamical activity of an excited nerve is 
believed to be perfectly unbroken from first to last. No in- 
terval of time, however brief, is regarded as possible during 
which the dynamical state is suspended. Now it appears 
to me there are innumerable intervals during the addion of a 
nerve when the dynamical state, stridtly so-called, must be 
suspended, though this may to physicists sound new, strange, 
and absurd. 
Nervous action has been described as molecular vibration, 
or the to-and-fro movement of the minute constituents of 
the axis-cylinder or nerve-proper. The rapidity of transit 
of a nervous impulse is claimed to have been measured, and 
a very humble speed it is. But even if it were as swift as 
the swiftest known force, it would still be a period of time. 
And just as the time-period of the motion of the first mole- 
cule of the nerve is distinddly separated from the time-period 
of the last molecule’s motion by the times of motion of each 
of the intervening molecules, so there is a period during 
which each molecule is in the attitude of receiving energy 
from its preceding neighbour distinct from the period during 
which it is in the add of imparting its energy to the suc- 
ceeding molecule. Receiving and imparting are not simul- 
taneous in occurrence, else time would be blotted out, the 
last molecule would move simultaneously with the first. 
The very fadd that time is an element at all involves the 
admission that the whole time of vibration is divisible into 
the individual times of the vibrating elements, and the times 
of each of these into times of receiving and giving energy. 
And since the imparting stage is the only one of the two 
conditions of a vibrating molecule which can be striddly 
called dynamical, addive, energising, it follows that the dy- 
namical periods of the entire nerve are interrupted by periods 
that cannot be striddly called dynamical, since they are 
periods of passivity ; periods of being affedded, aroused, 
avakened; periods during which a condition exists which 
exadtly corresponds with the condition we call feeling, or the 
mental state. These periods furnish, then, the desired locus 
