Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/264

258 or another minor psychic system within consciousness; some being now cut off, some being now added on, to go to make unanalyzable differences from time to time in what we call our personalities.

If we accept this conclusion, we are led to take one further step which has importance in connection with the consideration of the next division of this article.

"We commonly assume that so special a significance is to be given to action within the nervous system in man's organism that it alone can be considered of moment in the relations of correspondence with consciousness. Our modern biologists, however, are coming to see that all protoplasmic substance has powers of interaction—of 'conduction'—similar to those observed in nervous tissue; and that masses of protoplasm may form systems of active life without the existence of anything like nervous systems; nervous matter, indeed, appears to be but a specially differentiated kind of protoplasm which serves as a peculiarly quick and sensitive 'conductor' from part to part of the organism.

It seems possible therefore to hold that while the form of consciousness with which we are familiar is practically correspondent only with transfers of energy within the vastly complex human nervous system; nevertheless it may be true that any transfer of energy in protoplasmic matter may have a coincident psychic effect; and that consciousnesses of a certain grade may exist in living bodies which are systematized and yet without nervous systems.

If such a view be possible, then we must hold that human consciousness is in all probability complicated by the existence of' psychic correspondents of transfers of energy in other protoplasmic masses than those which we designate as the nervous system; although it must of course be granted that the very superior 'conductivity' of the nervous masses makes the part of human consciousness which, under such a view, corresponds with activity of the nervous system vastly more important in the whole of man's consciousness than all the rest of the psychic effects corresponding with transfers of energy in protoplasmic masses other than the nervous tissues.

One more point of a good deal of importance must be noted in this connection.

If we once agree that all transfers of energy in protoplasmic substance have their psychic correspondences, then of course we must