Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/510

 THE PHYSICAL CONDITIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 497 Passing from these speculative reflections, what we have to realise here is that pain-consciousness is a consciousness sui generis, entirely different from any of the different forms of sen- sational consciousness, and that although we apply the general term consciousness to all of them, there is no common abstract consciousness ; that in talking of them we are talking of entirely different things. Our true business is not to search out the con- ditions of consciousness, but the conditions of each particular consciousness the conditions, that is, of pain and, in due course, of every other special feeling or so-called affection of consciousness. Could we explain exactly under what condi- tions pain-consciousness occurs, the explanation would not be an explanation of the conditions under which tactile consciousness or visual consciousness occurs ; for they are not, like it, of a destructive or disorganising, but rather of a conservative and organising character. It is necessary also to apprehend clearly in this connexion that there is acquired functional organisation of nervous plexuses as well as fixed inborn structural organisation of them that is to say, organisation of existing structures to act together to subserve particular functions ; and that it is such organisation we mean when we speak of the organisation of a particular neurotic pattern in the supreme centres of the brain. There are multitudinous nervous plexuses constituting the complex structure of the brain, and they are capable of forming manifold neurotic patterns in mental organisation. These patterns may be ever so temporary and transient, or they may become fixed and lasting when they are habitually repeated. The theory is that consciousness attends the functional organisation of a particular neurotic pattern ; that it lapses when such a functional plexus has been definitely formed by habit ; and that it is necessarily aroused again when that pattern is broken up or disorganised by the irruption into it of other activities. This last operation, corresponding probably to the disorganisation of the nervous unit of sensation which is the condition of pain, is notably difficult and disagreeable in proportion to the strength of the habit and may be positively painful. Relativity is implied necessarily in every fact of conscious- ness is the very essence of it. Whether we speak of self and not-self, of inner and outer, of up and down, and the like, we take this relativity for granted, implicitly or ex- plicitly. Nobody could ever be conscious that he was an Ego had he not a correlative consciousness of a Non-ego. Now the external world, as individual experience, means