Page:Humanimmortality00jame.djvu/66

48 the frontal centres, the patient's consciousness of self is more deranged than is his perception of purely objective relations. Where the posterior associative regions suffer, it is rather the patient's system of objective ideas that undergoes disintegration (loc. cit. pp. 89-91). In rodents Flechsig thinks there is a complete absence of association-centres,—the sensory centres touch each other. In carnivora and the lower monkeys the latter centres still exceed the association-centres in volume. Only in the katarhinal apes do we begin to find anything like the human type (p. 84). In his little pamphlet, Die Grenzen geistiger Gesundheit und Krankheit, Leipzig, 1896, Flechsig ascribes the moral insensibility which is found in certain criminals to a diminution of internal pain-feeling due to degeneration of the 'Körperfühlsphäre,' that extensive anterior region first so named by Munk, in which he lays the seat of all the emotions and of the consciousness of self [Gehirn und Seele, pp. 62-68; die Grenzen, etc., pp. 31-39, 48].—I give these references to Flechsig for concreteness' sake, not because his views are irreversibly made out.

So widespread is this conclusion in positivistic circles, so abundantly is it expressed in