Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/265

Rh allow that there are consciousnesses of a lowly and sluggish nature in connection with the lowly and sluggish life of the plants. This, it will be remembered, was a point defended on other grounds by the great psychologist Fechner, and which has since been upheld by not a few, among whom we may mention a man of as high position as Paulsen.

But this point we must pass over with this mere mention, for we have problems of greater interest to consider.

The final test of any theory lies in the explanation it gives of the mysterious; and it is a very cogent argument in favor of the broad view of the nature of consciousness thus taken that in connection with these conceptions we have a completely satisfactory -answer to the old time puzzle as to the moment of the beginning of the individual soul life.

Perhaps it may be well at this juncture to recall two points made above.

1. That a fully developed human consciousness is a complex system of minor psychic systems—a system of minor, less developed consciousnesses; and that consciousness under the broader conception just reached corresponds with the activities in a fully developed physical system which is a system of minor less developed physical systems, of which the nervous system is of preeminent importance indeed, but not alone of significance.

2. That if any one of these minor physical systems is cut off from the whole physical system a minor consciousness may be held to correspond with the activities in this cut off minor system.

In the human species, to which in this connection we may confine our attention, the unfructified germ cell is a living protoplasmic particle which is cast off from the body of the female; and, under such a view as we have above been led to hold, so long as it is a living particle, it has corresponding with its exceedingly lowly activities, an exceedingly lowly form of psychic existence.

While it was part of the body of the female it had its little part in forming the totality of those systemic physical activities to which corresponded the female's consciousness.

If the germ cell happens to be fructified, and attaches itself to the internal tissues of the body of the female, notwithstanding that this attachment is only of such nature that our biologists call it parasitic; nevertheless, under the view here taken the cell again becomes part of the whole bodily system of the mother, and its activities again play their lowly part in the production of the systemic action of the whole body, which has its correspondent in the whole of the consciousness of the adult female.