Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/273

 PHYSIOLOGY AND PATHOLOGY. 241

that all bodily movements, even those which are purely vegetative and organic, proceed from the will, by no means implies that they are voluntary. For that would mean that they were occasioned by motives; but motives are representations, and their seat is the brain: only those parts of our body which communicate with the brain by means of the nerves, can be put in movement by the brain, consequently by motives, and this movement alone is what is called voluntary. The movement of the inner economy of the organism, on the contrary, is directed, as in plant- life, by stimuli; only as, on the one hand, the complex nature of the animal organism necessitated an outer sensorium for the apprehension of the outer world and the will's reaction to that outer world, so, on the other hand, did it necessitate a cerebrum abdominale [network of nerves in the stomach], the sympathetic nervous system, in order to direct the will's reaction likewise to inner stimuli. We may compare the former to a Foreign Office, the latter to a Home Ministry; but the will remains the omnipresent Autocrat.

The progress made in Physiology since von Haller has placed beyond doubt the fact that not only those actions which are consciously performed (functiones animales), but even vital processes that take place quite unconsciously (functiones vitales et naturales), are directed throughout by the nervous system. Likewise that their only difference, as far as our consciousness of them is concerned, consists in the former being directed by nerves proceeding from the brain, the latter by nerves that do not directly communicate with that chief centre of the nervous system, which is mainly directed towards the outside, but with subordinate, minor centres, with the nerve-knots, the ganglia and their net-work, which preside as it were like governors over the various provinces of the nervous system, directing those internal processes that follow upon internal stimuli, just as the brain directs the external