Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/620

602 derivation from its original canis, and the habitual change of c before a into ch in the passage of words into French from Latin. By this time, I think the reader (with his usual acuteness) will begin to perceive into what a hopeless network of cross connections and crooked combinations we have managed to get ourselves in our search after the definitely localizable.

How, then, does the mechanism of the brain really act? I believe the true answer to this question is the one most fully given by M. Ribot and never yet completely accepted by English psychologists. It acts, for the most part, as a whole; or at least, even the simplest idea or mental act of any sort is a complex of processes involving the most enormously varied brain-elements. Instead of dog being located somewhere in one particular cell of the brain, dog is an idea, audible, visible, legible, pronounceable, requiring for different modes of its perception or production the co-operation of an enormous number of separate cells, fibers, and ganglia.

Let us take an illustration from a kindred case. How clumsy and awkward a supposition it would be if we were to imagine there was a muscle of dancing, and a muscle of walking, and a muscle of rowing, and a muscle of cricketing, and a muscle for the special practice of the noble art of lawn-tennis! Dancing is not a single act; it is a complex series of co-ordinated movements, implying for its proper performance the action of almost all the muscles of the body in different proportions, and in relatively fixed amounts and manners. Even a waltz is complicated enough; but when we come to a quadrille or a set of lancers, everybody can see at once that the figure consists of so many steps forward and so many back; of a bow here, and a twirl there; of hands now extended both together, and now held out one at a time in rapid succession; and so forth, throughout all the long and complicated series. A quadrille, in short, is not a name for one act, for a single movement of a single muscle, but for many acts of the whole organism, all arranged in a fixed sequence.

It is just the same with the simplest act of mental perception. Orange, for example, is not the name of a single impression; it is the name of a vast complex of impressions, all or most of which are present to consciousness in the actuality whenever we see an orange, and a great many of which are present in the idea whenever we remember or think of an orange. It is the name of a rather soft, yellow fruit, round in shape, with a thick rind, white inside, and possessing a characteristic taste and odor; a fruit divisible into several angular, juicy segments, with cells inside, and with pips of a recognized size and shape—and so forth, ad infinitum. In the act of perceiving an orange we exercise a number of separate nerves of sight, smell, taste, and feeling, and their connected organs in the brain as well. In the act of thinking about or remembering an orange we exercise more faintly a considerable number of these nerves and central organs, though