Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/527

 514 H. MAUDSLEY : life ; and if we could imagine this compound nervous system to be taken at an early and plastic stage, so as to be capable of unity of education to the full extent of the capacities of ant-life and bee-life ; is it not a possible, if not probable, conception that consciousness would occur during its develop- ment ? The question might, indeed, be fairly raised, whether a consciousness of some sort did not attend the forming of these creatures, which, now that they are fixedly formed, has disappeared ; that which was once diffused through the animal kingdom, when developing, being now concentrated and specialised in the complex brain of man, who has by his predominance superseded other lines of development and condemned them to a sterile immobility. It is a vain specula- tion certainly ; but none the less it is the imagination of a course of events like that which actually takes place now in the human kind when a great genius appears and, gathering up in himself the scattered and sometimes latent lines of human thought and feeling, perceives their relations, com- bines them into unity of growth, and brings to conscious delivery the silent pulses of the age. NOTE. Since this paper was placed in the Editor's hands I have, by his favour, seen Prof. Herzen's exposition of his theory of the conditions of consciousness as set forth in Les Conditions physiques de la Conscience (1886, noticed in MIND No. 45, p. 145). Although he therein criticises vigorously the doctrines with respect to consciousness which I have advocated all rny life, his main purpose is to set forth and elucidate what he believes to be the physical law of consciousness. Starting from the accepted opinion that there are two phases of every nervous act first, a decomposition of nervous elements and liberation of energy ; secondly, an immediately following reintegration or reconstitution of their substance and storing up of energy he maintains that consciousness never accompanies the integration, but is confined exclusively to the disintegration, of the nerve-substance. That seems to be to say, in other words, that consciousness accompanies the function, but does not accompany the subsequent nutritive repair of waste which is no part of the function, although no doubt the condition of future function. One is tempted to ask, in relation to this proposition, whether any one has ever said or thought differently. Meanwhile, no account is taken by Prof. Herzen of the question whether it is the nerve-element itself that undergoes disintegration during function, or whether it is only the material supplied to it from the blood that is consumed in the libera- tion of energy. His second proposition is that tJie intensity of consciousness is in direct ratio to the intensity of the functional disintegration ; and his third, that the intensity of consciousness is in inverse ratio to the facility and rapidity with which each nervous element transmits its disintegration to other nervous elements and enters upon the process of reintegration. These three propositions together constitute what he calls the physical law of consciousness. Considering the meaning of the two last propositions, I fail to see why Prof. Herzen should find so much fault as he does with what was no doubt a somewhat crude suggestion of mine made many years