Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/472

 stability or for change. We simply affirm the fact that system C, when subjected to the stimuli which crowd upon it, does not immediately perish, but maintains itself for a definite time, not absolutely but with diminutions of its maintenance; and after having affirmed that, we can only state the conditions of the maintenance.

The stimuli from the environment, the R-values, are primarily to be regarded as threats, as disturbing influences, as occasions capable of breaking down the maintenance of system C, and thus we find two values: (1) that of a disturbance of the vital maintenance, and (2) that of a re-approach to the (ideal) maintenance-maximum.

The greatest conceivable vital maintenance-value must not be identified with anything like the greatest conceivable pleasure, or the greatest development of power. Its significance is not psychological, but only logical, and as a constant value is unattainable in life. Psychologically it may be compared with the Nirvana of Buddhism, which is explained as the absolute cessation of the bodily and mental activity which is conjoined with personal existence, as the absolute rest which the Oriental takes to be the highest pleasure. In the purely logical significance, in which alone empiriocriticism uses the value “vital maintenance-maximum,” it signifies only an ideal point, about which the life of the organism moves in constant oscillations, like the indifference-point between pleasure and pain, which also has only a logico-mathematical significance.

Now, vital disturbance is one of those changes in the state of the nervous central organ which we have noticed above, and by which the E-values are directly conditioned. But this change may be more accurately described; it has a special character. If I break a stick, that is changing it; but the stick never becomes whole again. It is different with the nervous central organ. When changes take place in it there are generally present also the conditions which annul the change. Vital disturbance is for the most part gradually annulled; then the system C approximates again to its maximum-maintenance. Thus the change which we have here differs from that in the stick inasmuch as it consists in an oscillation between two phases, in deviation from a preliminary value and in approximating to it again. Thus we have to do with a process of change which is itself compounded from various changes.

All R-values, the totality of all physiological stimuli, condition the deviations from the vital maximum of maintenance. But what are the conditions of the annihilation of