Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/234

214 214 PSYCHOLOGY. Let us turn now to consider the BELATIONS OF CONSCIOtrSNESS TO SPACE. This is the problem known in the history of philoso- phy as the question of the seat of the soul. It has given rise to much literature, but we must ourselves treat it very briefly. Everything depends on what we conceive the soul to be, an extended or an inextended entity. If the former, it may occupy a seat. If the latter, it may not ; though it has been thought that even then it might still have a posi- tion. Much hair-splitting has arisen about the possibility of an inextended thing nevertheless being present through- out a certain amount of extension. We must distinguish the kinds of presence. In some manner our consciousness is * present ' to everything with which it is in relation. I am cognitively present to Orion whenever I perceive that con- stellation, but I am not dynamically present there, I work no effects. To my brain, however, I am dynamically present, inasmuch as my thoughts and feelings seem to react upon the processes thereof. If, then, by the seat of the mind is meant nothing more than the locality with which it stands in immediate dynamic relations, we are certain to be right in saying that its seat is somewhere in the cortex of the brain. Descartes, as is well known, thought that the inextended soul was immediately present to the pineal gland. Others, as Lotze in his earlier days, and W. Volk- mann, think its position must be at some point of the struc- tureless matrix of the anatomical brain-elements, at which point they suppose that all nerve-currents may cross and combine. The scholastic doctrine is that the soul is to- tally present, both in the whole and in each and every part of the body. This mode of presence is said to be due to the soul's inextended nature and to its simplicity. Two ex- tended entities could only correspond in space with one another, part to part, — but not so does the soul, which has no parts, correspond with the body. Sir Wm. Hamilton and Professor Bo wen defend something like this view. I. H. Fichte, Ulrici, and, among American philosophers, Mr. J. E. Walter,* maintain the soul to be a space-filling prin-
 * Perception of Space and Matter, 1879, part ii. chap. 3