Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/172

158 cause of change in the motion of the matter of the organism. If these positions are well based, it follows that our mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of the changes which take place automatically in the organism, and that, to take an extreme illustration the feeling (?) we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but a symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of the act. We are conscious automata." (The italics in the above quotation are the present writer's.) This passage, published in 1874, will remain unique as an attempt to "get on" in our examination of man without consciousness. Consciousness is a collateral product of brain change. Whatever may be meant by "collateral," it can not be so one-sided an affair as to save the break in physical continuity previously described. If consciousness be at all the product of brain changes, it appears, and must appear, as a stranger to these changes, destitute of a single one of their features. Further, and with sincere deference, I would say that the reasoning in the passage before us seems to me peculiar. Consciousness is produced by brain-changes; nay more, these are the sole cause of consciousness, and yet there is no ground to believe that consciousness in its turn ever occasions brain changes or muscular movements. Volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but a token that such an act is taking place. This would be termed in logic a contradiction, both in form and matter.

When we are told that consciousness is completely without the power of modifying the working of our body, we do, indeed, feel that consciousness might as well give up and cease to be; at the same time we know that consciousness, in the shape of volition, is adjusting, directing, and in manifold other ways modifying our organism from day to day. My reason for bringing up this disposition of consciousness was not so much to show its deficiency (which has been well done by Dr. Carpenter and others), as to insist upon the fact that consciousness is not susceptible of scientific treatment by any physical or physiological method. I wished also to show that no half-way recognition of consciousness would meet the demands of investigation. Perhaps the chiefest benefit to come from the physiological psychology of our day will be in this, that it will make unmistakably clear its own inadequacy for a treatment of consciousness as such. I trust I may not be misunderstood in this remark. I yield to no one in the belief that an inestimable advantage has been conferred on psychology by physiology. It is now possible to study the sensations, both general and special, with a thoroughness unknown a few years since. The intimacy of connection between brain-changes and what we term soul-states has been once and for all established and proclaimed. Much may be accomplished toward a localization of functions in the hemispheres; the time may even come when people at large shall know that most of their stupidity, peevishness, and sin, results from unhealthful brain-activity. The relation between digestion, ventilation, sleep, and morals, may