< An Experimental research (continued from page 11-292) >
whose existence is u matter of inference, and which from the point of view of organisation is postulated under the term function through which ends and means are accommodated.
How a serious or even a trivial complaint may be arrested by a subjective cause or influence is really as grout a mystery as the supposed action at a distance itself. A chain of physical events with its psychical parallel does unquestionably load up to the completion of the desired act, but us every act of thought must be so indefinitely complex in its material aspect, from the psychical side, we must be given, and be content to receive, but a very small portion of the entire sum of changes.
The eye unarmed by instrumental aid, supplies us with an admirable overage knowledge of the surface nature of things such as fruit, animals, and green fields; the transformation of the eyes by the wand of a fairy into microscopes or telescopes would be an intolerable nuisance, since we have not been prepared by a long process of education to accept nature in terms of the minute brought near to the standard of the ordinary.
We are, certainly, already prepared to receive and embody in the language of the several senses, all objects whatever that exist in nature, but it is through the moulding process of an education physical and mental, which transforms our very selves, that the relations of the now become adopted into the domain of natural knowledge.
Transferring the analogy to the internal world, the largo or massive groups of integrated sensations and feelings which alone are given in consciousness, when dissected through change in the mental instruments, present us with unfamiliar elements, which not unfrequently appear in the guise of the grotesque.
That it is to our advantage, as thinking Egos at the administrative centres of our organisations, to be free from the conscious supervision of details, mechanical in their expression though psychical and mental in their form and their potentiality, cannot lie denied; but to argue from the fact of such freedom to the utter negation of any power on the part of the Ego to open out into a realised subjective or quasi-subjective experience of all the latent possibilities of the living body, is weak, and cuts at the very foundation of the principle of Evolution, which, whatever we may believe of it as an exhaustive theory of mundane affairs, certainly, as a formula, embraces the content of that experience, the subject matter of which is given through the external senses.
The whole body conscious of itself in its units is no absurd conception though smacking of chaos and rebellion: true, the constitutional form of government which the healthy body affects makes consciousness specially the privilege of the representative of power,— President Ego or King Ego, I know not which— and whose real rank the stupid philosophy of many would reduce to a mere titular dignity with the tinsel of consciousness as a gilding for his robes.
But I am so far a socialist and democrat in physiology as to demand a vote for the individual units of the body, each vote the voice of that which works and which is therefore entitled to be heard, to have feeling, in fact, and so to play its part, though a silent one, in the general assembly. Granting, however, a subjective side to all living matter, I cannot deny that the spirit of law and order in nature keeps the units in their places, so that during health they never attempt to assert individuality by the manifestation of that which alone could result from a proclamation of their freedom, namely, disorder, tending to destructive change.
I must cut this digression short by expressing it as my settled conviction that in the case above referred to, motion was transmitted from my nerves, blood or tissues, which was taken up by the corresponding part of my patient’s body it may be by some selective absorption.
The principle of materialism does not oblige me to trace any relationship between my superintending Ego and the effect produced on my patient, any more than it obliges me to account for the minute motions of my own organism in terms of conscious sensibility. It simply allows the possibility of such a transfer without question, leaving to me the task of establishing by evidence the fact of such transfer.
The second case I shall offer, as requiring the intervention of some purely physical machinery between the operator and the patient, is that of a soldier suffering from fever of a simple type, who presented himself at the hospital of which I was in medical charge some years ago. The history of the case showed that he was at the time I first saw him in the hot stage of ague. I ordered him to sit down in my private room and I at once commenced to make downward passes, beginning at the head and ending below the epigastrium. The <... continues on page 11-294 >