Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/521

508 H. MAUDSLEY : to Peru, from the fireside to the remotest star. As a matter of fact, if thought ever did make such a journey, it would take a longer time than light would to make the same journey. But it does nothing of the kind : it merely travels from one nerve-track in the brain to another lying perhaps so near it that a microscope is needed to show that they are different tracks ; and the speed, appreciable even for so microscopic a distance, differs in different persons according to each one's personal equation. The world with which alone consciousness has to do, is the world as it has been organised and registered in the brain by experience, and the journeys which it makes are no more than the microcosmic representatives of macrocosmic distances. Consider briefly the striking phenomena of loss of memory in what is called senile imbecility that is to say, in the extreme mental decay which sometimes takes place gradually in old age or befalls more suddenly after an attack of apo- plexy. A person so afflicted says the same thing or tells the same story of his past life as many times in as many minutes, while forgetting instantly all recent events and utterly obli- vious, on each occasion of retelling his story, of having told it before. The same nerve-tracts are in function on each occa- sion, but there is no conscious registration of its immediately previous function. It is impossible to say there is not memory seeing that the tale is remembered and told in the same words, but there is no memory of the former retellings. The more early and stably organised neurotic plexuses remain still capable of function, while the later organised plexuses answering to the events of later and present life have been rendered incapable of function by the failing nutrition and decay of brain ; the result being that there is no possibility of connecting the function of the former with any function of the latter, and therefore no memory of its repetition. The Eower of knowing them together, that is, consciousness liling, there is no possibility of reproducing it as memory. The religious fanatic of India who voluntarily subjects himself to occasions of protracted physical suffering, or in- flicts frightful injuries on himself, seems to be so transported by enthusiasm as to be insusceptible, or nearly so, to the torture which he might be expected to feel. Consciousness clearly has not full freedom of function, or else it would attend to the impressions of torture : it is under physical restraint, being fast bound to the strand or tract of exalted nervous function. There is a veritable psyclwlepsy or neuro- hpsyi}Q condition and effect of the psycholeptic strain being the induction of such a molecular state as to render conduction