72 
TRANSACTIONS OF THE TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
ture whence the organs of speech receive their innervation is definitely 
located in the lower frontal convolution of the left side. Injuries af¬ 
fecting this special organ give invariably rise to what is called aphasia, 
which means speechlessness. 
As Erxner remarks, many different efficiencies conspire to enable us 
to use language, and the brain-centers where these are located have to be 
all intact for the purposes of speech. To give a proper answer to a 
question, for example: 
First. The words have to be heard. 
Second. They have to be understood. 
Third. The process set going in the receiving organism by the words 
has to elaborate there a proper result. 
Fourth. The residt has to he expressed in words. 
Fifth. Appropriate innervation has to set the articulating muscles in 
motion. 
Sixth. The innervation must reach the muscles of articulation in 
proper order and intensity. 
All these divers organic efficiencies, located in definite nerve-centers, 
have to be set harmoniously going in order to give a proper answer to 
the simplest question. 
Now, as we are not even in the least conscious of having any brain- 
centers, much less of their definite location, how can our consciousness 
possibly perform on an organ whose keys and stops are utterly unknown 
to it? It must, evidently, be some agency vastly more potent than con¬ 
scious awareness which extracts from that marvelously intricate central 
organ of ours, in harmonious sequence, whole strains of speech and all 
manner of purposive movements. 
A hypnotized person, carrying out consciously-unremembered sugges¬ 
tions; a somnambulist, writing an elaborate essay unbeknown to his 
waking self; a dreamer, constituted, beyond his own volitional determin¬ 
ation, actor and spectator in thrilling dramas; in all these faithful imita¬ 
tions of what is believed to be otherwise consciously effected, there sure¬ 
ly must he some agency at work of an entirely different order, something 
performing of itself, automatically, what we in our waking state are 
wont to attribute to the doings of our consciousness. 
Nevertheless, who can in truth believe that pleasure and pain, hope 
and fear, love and hate; that ideal purposes firmly set, and unflinching 
faithfulness to their execution in actual life; who can believe that all 
this impassioned consciousness is of no slightest avail, that it is utterly 
powerless to influence the irreversibly fated drift of human existence? 
Notwithstanding, the question remains still unsolved, how mental 
states can possibly influence bodily actions. Ever since the mechanical 
interpretation of physical nature gained sway, leading necessarily to the 
