Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/24

12 WILLIAM JAMES. the total charge elsewhere. Some tracts are always waning in tension, some waxing, whilst others actively discharge. The states of tension, however, have as positive an influence as the discharges in determining the total condition, and consequently in deciding what the psychosis shall be to which the complex neurosis corresponds. All we know of sub- maximal nerve-irritations, and of the summation of ap- parently ineffective stimuli, tends to show that no changes in the brain are really physiologically ineffective, and that presumably none are bare of psychological result. But as the distribution of brain-tension shifts from one relative state of equilibrium to another, like the aurora borealis or the gyrations of a kaleidoscope, now rapid and now slow, is it likely that the brain's faithful psychic concomitant is heavier-footed than itself, that its rate of change is coarser-grained, that it cannot match each one of the organ's irradiations by a shifting inward iridescence of its own? But if it can do this, its inward iridescences must be infinite, for the brain-redistributions are in infinite variety. If so coarse a thing as a telephone-plate can be made to thrill for years and never reduplicate its inward condition, how much more must this be the case with the infinitely delicate brain ? As, in the senses, an impression feels very differently according to what has preceded it ; as one colour succeeding another is modified by the contrast, silence sounds delicious aftei^noise, and a note, when the scale is sung up, sounds unlike itself when the scale is sung down ; as the presence of certain lines in a figure changes the apparent form of the other lines, and as in music the whole aesthetic effect comes from the manner in which one set of sounds alters our feeling of another ; so, in thought, we must admit that those portions of the brain that have just been maximally excited retain a kind of soreness which is a condition of our present consciousness, a co-determinant of how and what we now shall feel. I am sure that this concrete and total manner of regarding the mind's changes is the only true manner, difficult as it may be to carry it out in detail. Associationism and Her- bartianism are only schematisms which, the moment they are literally taken, become mythologies, and had much better be dropped than retained. 1 1 In an article on the "Association of Ideas" published in the Popular Science Monthly of New York for March, 1880, I have myself tried to re- interpret the various varieties of association as due to quantitative alterations in what is always an integral action of the brain.