Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/518

THE PHYSICAL CONDITIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 505 any case be brought into use. If a person does not escape from a horrible pain instantly by means of the fit sensory reflex movements, these purposive movements are disor- ganised and practically paralysed, and he immediately begins to make the most energetic voluntary movements of escape. Should they fail, all his movements become disorganised quoad purposiveness in fact, disorderly, convulsive, and eventually paralysed ; not otherwise than as a great panic of fright paralyses them instantly in some persons. Thus much then concerning the probable conditions of consciousness. The conclusion is that consciousness is not part of any actual energy in nature, but the accompaniment of certain coincident or rapidly alternating energies of matter in a complex state of nervous organisation, disappearing when these energies are organised into such perfect con- solidate coaction as to act as one, reappearing again when the co-organised plexuses or formed neurotic patterns are disintegrated. The natural order of ascending mental development from simple and concrete, through general, to still more general ideas, and from these upwards to the most abstract ideas, is the progressive co-organisation of two systems to act as one, and the further co-organisation of these integrated systems in ever ascending scale, until the ideal unity of a supreme head or will is reached in which all have abstract representation in the one and the one acts through all. Were this thorough, complete, perfect, there would be no consciousness ; consciousness attends upon its incompletenesses and its disintegrations. IV. The various and many times strange states of abnormal consciousness which accompany certain induced and morbid states of the nervous system go to show how baseless the metaphysical theory of consciousness is. It is only because such instances, recorded long ago over and over again, have been persistently ignored by those who have been the pro- fessed cultivators of so-called mental philosophy, being overlooked entirely by them or rejected as morbid facts which did not properly come within its scope, that their imposing fabrics of philosophy have been able to endure for a day. 1 As a matter of observation, consciousness is evidently capable of all sorts of disintegrations, mutilations, divisions ; 1 They have been described and discussed by Combe, Mayo, Wigan, and by writers on mental disorders, as instances of twofold personality ', of double consciousness, &c. 33