The principles of psychology Author:William James Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. ON SOME GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. The elementary properties of nerve-tissue on which the brain-functions depend are far from being sa... more »tisfactorily made out. The scheme that suggests itself in the first instance to the mind, because it is so obvious, is certainly false: I mean the notion that each cell stands for an idea or part of an idea, and that the ideas are associated or 'bound into bundles' (to use a phrase of Locke's) by the fibres. If we make a symbolic diagram on a blackboard, of the laws of association between ideas, we are inevitably led to draw circles, or closed figures of some kind, and to connect them by lines. When we hear that the nerve-centres contain cells which send off fibres, we say that Nature has realized our diagram for us, and that the mechanical substratum of thought is plain. In some way, it is true, oui diagram must be realized in the brain; but surely in no such visible and palpable way as we at first suppose. An enormous number of the cellular bodies in the hemispheres are fibreless. Where fibres are sent off they soon divide into untraceable ramifications ; and nowhere do we see a simple coarse anatomical connection, like a line on the blackboard, between two cells. Too much anatomy has been found to order for theoretic purposes, even by the anatomists ; and the popular-science notions of cells and fibres are almost wholly wide of the truth. Let us therefore relegate the subject of the intimate workings of the brain tothe physiology of the future, save in respect to a few points of which a word must now be said. And first of I shall myself In later places indulge In much of this schematization. The reader will understand once for all that it is symbolic; and that the use of it is hardly more than to show what a deep co...« less