Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/477

 as to the “origin of consciousness” by “thought,” this solution depends upon endosystematic changes; when the physiologist, on the other hand, institutes practical experiments in reference to this problem, it is by means of ectosystematic changes that the vital-difference is annulled.

From his detailed analysis Avenarius gets as the most important of the endosystematic (i.e., occurring within system C) adjustments—

(1) Temporary superseding of an unfamiliar kind of change by a familiar, upon which depends the reduction of the Unknown to the Known;

(2) Gradual habituation to a kind of change, which in its original unfamiliarity signified a vital-difference; upon this depends the gradual growth into another and originally strange apprehension; the Unknown becomes a Known.

(3) Temporary substitution of one kind of change for another, giving rise to permanent tendency to the mode of change substituted. Upon this depends the origin of statements which are fixed and unalterable, the so-called True, the Certain, the Eternal, etc., while at the same time that which to begin with had been true becomes untrue and uncertain.

We began by pointing out (what is here again clear) that the processes of change in the nervous central organ are analysed by Avenarius not for their own sake only, but because he aims more especially at establishing the relation between all human thought and action and those processes. This I will show by examples for the three groups of adjustments named above:—

(1) When an individual explains the origin of the sea as “perspiration of the earth-body,” or the likeness of a child to his deceased father as “inheritance of the soul,” we have within these E-values a reduction of the Unknown to the Known, and for the process of change in system C a superseding of an unfamiliar kind of change by a familiar. The following is another instance of this: Sir J. Lubbock tells us of the Minatarris that they were greatly astonished when they saw an American gentleman absorbed in the New York Commercial Advertiser. As they had never heard of reading and now saw a newspaper for the first time, they considered as to what it might be. Thus the newspaper started a vital-difference in them, to annul which their C-systems passed to a series of changes. The vital-series thus formed was brief; it came to an end in one of the savages in the E-value that the newspaper was a medicinal cloth for sore eyes. Here