Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/503

No. 5.] the cessation of consciousness altogether, so far as objective tests can determine.

So far our inquiry has developed only negative results, showing the limits beyond which consciousness is not manifested. This is far from being what we require for a positive explanation of psychic phenomena. In his Grundlinien einer allgemeinen Psychologie, Hertzen, of Lausanne, has endeavored to present the positive condition of consciousness. He says: “Consciousness is connected exclusively with the disintegrating phase of central nervous action.” He offers the following laws of relation: (1) “The intensity of consciousness is in direct ratio to the intensity of functional disintegration.” (2) “The intensity of consciousness is in inverse ratio to the ease and quickness of the central translation of stimulus into action.” This last corresponds to the diminishing sensibility in the growth of habit, or the law of increasing automatism. What we do easily and quickly we soon do unconsciously. Thus, we learn to walk, to read, to spell, to write with a minimum of consciousness. A transaction that is difficult and new gives us much thought, perhaps worry, a feeling of resistance among our ideas corresponding to the disintegration of cerebral tissue noted by the physician in the copious waste products eliminated from the body. But precisely what this metabolism is by which the disintegration of cerebral tissue becomes the condition of consciousness Hertzen is far from disclosing. He identifies psychic activity with motion, — the molecular motion produced by the decomposition of nerve-cells. He says: “We may liken the brain to a hall provided with a multitude of gas-lights, but illuminated by only a relatively constant number of burning jets, which, however, are not always the same; on the contrary, they change every instant: as some are extinguished, others are lighted; all are never lighted together; from time to time all are dark” (p. 98). Just as light is a mode of motion, this writer maintains, so also is consciousness. We may not be able to