Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/251

FBIEDKICH JODL, Lehrbuch der Psychologic. 237 realisation of Huxley's dream of a mechanical equivalent for con- sciousness, just as we now have a mechanical equivalent for heat. But however this may be, it seems premature, and it is certainly useless, to attempt to bind psychological science to a particular theory of the relation of soul and body. No better proof of this could be found than that which Prof. Jodl himself furnishes. I do not refer to the frequency with which his language contradicts, literally taken, his hypothesis ; that he explains as accommo- dation to popular and recognised modes of speech. Nor do I refer especially to his positive and eloquent insistence, as over against an "exaggerated naturalism " that the conscious will is " not merely a product in the world, but a factor," " a force among other forces," influencing reality and not to be eliminated from human evolution language which can hardly be interpreted as accommodation merely, and which it is quite impossible to recon- cile with the criticism of similar views on the part of Prof. James (p. 62) or with the terms of the doctrine here under discussion. I refer to the fact that Prof. Jodl nowhere makes any special use of the hypothesis either for the purposes of his psychological analysis or for the establishment of anything like a psychologi- cal law. Even he avails himself, on occasion, of the convenient hypothesis of the " psychical disposition," though carefully ex- plaining, what is really nonsense, that the disposition " really " exists only as a physiological disposition in the structure of the nervous substance. In the end, therefore, his insistence that even the highest achievements of our conscious intelligence are not merely correlated with, but are when viewed objectively, nothing but mechanical processes of release and redistribution of nervous energy in the brain (p. 119), may either be of profound speculative significance or may merely express a pious scientific conviction ; it certainly does not serve to make the course of psychical events any the more intelligible. The fundamental relation of consciousness is taken to be the opposition and mediation of subject and object. This is analysed into three moments, representing respectively the action from without inwards, the reaction from within outwards and an inner mediation between the two. These moments appear in the mutu- ally implicated forms' and modes of the primary psychical reaction as sensation, feeling and conation. This division is then crossed by another, having regard to the different stages of mental develop- ment. The basis of the latter is the fact that along with the flow or undulation in which the contents of consciousness arise only to disappear, there is a summation of their effects : retained in some manner as dispositions, they reappear in new forms and in their mu- tual influence on one another and on the primary processes give rise to the manifold modes of the developing conscious life. The division from this point of view is into primary, secondary and tertiary phe- nomena, corresponding somewhat to the more familiar division, presentative, representative and reflective, but not referring, as