Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/516

THE PHYSICAL CONDITIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 503 meaning of them. In order to be conscious of their meaning, if that is our aim, it is necessary to proceed more slowly with the repetition and to bring each word into distinct con- sciousness by realising the relations or associations of the idea which it denotes that is to say, by stirring related activities which, then known together with it, make conscious- ness. Now it is obvious that the intervention of a process of this sort must interfere with and hinder the mechanical succession of the word-repetition ; for it is to stir other activities where they are not needed and where they are therefore obtrusive and obstructive. Additional proof of this is seen in the fact that a few lines of a language not understood, if engraven well in the memory in childhood, can be repeated, once they are brought back to mind, at any period of life, and with as much ease and accuracy as the words of a known language which had been similarly com- mitted to memory ; also in the extraordinary revival and utterance of forgotten lines of poetry sometimes displayed in mania and other abnormal brain-states. The foregoing considerations go to prove that in the con- tinuity and energy which exist throughout nature conscious- ness has no part ; that it is not an energy itself, but only an accompaniment of the actual energy. The whole business of mental function, as work, might go on without it just as the machinery of a clock might work without a pointer to indicate the hours. It is a necessary concomitant apparently of the process of manufacture of the mental organisation, not an energy at work in the manufacture. The misfortune is that ordinary language assumes it to be a kind of supreme energy, and so habitually vitiates thought about it. When any one accidentally touches a red-hot poker with his hand and instantly withdraws the burnt part, certainly before he has time to think and will the quick movement of with- drawal, we have been accustomed to say that the painful feeling causes him to do it that the act is sensori-motor. Inasmuch as the pain is a consciousness, or what we im- properly call an affection of consciousness, that is equivalent to saying that consciousness determines motion, is itself an energy ; which is what we have decided it is not. The movement is really the work of physical structuralisation in response to a specially disorganising affection of it a physical reaction of a special structure to a physical impres- sion made upon it ; the original aptitudes to certain com- binations and successions of movements having been organised into definite nervous machinery by education and practice. A baby might not do it, although it would feel