ings of the mind. The truly novel in the
content of the idea is the recognition of the fact that the wish is
charged. Now it could never be charged in a vacuum. That means that
a wish could never be born in the brain alone. For the brain has no
power to charge itself with energy--it can only store and transmit. If
a wish is potential energy that must be transformed into kinetic, it
must have a source. That source is the vegetative system. Without the
vegetative system, the great complex of viscera in the abdomen and
chest, blood and its vessels, endocrines, muscles and nerves, the
brain would remain but an intricate cold storage plant of memories,
associations of past experiences. It would need no change and initiate
no effort. But when the wish enters upon the scene, it is as if a dead
storage battery has been refreshed with new current. Enriched with
billions of electrons there is a stir and a movement, dynamic mind.
But the dynamo is the more ancient possession of the animal, the
vegetative apparatus. In short, what must always be remembered is that
a wish is never cerebral, but always sub-cerebral, visceral, in its
origins.

The sub-cerebral makes the cerebral. Activities in the nervous system
below the brain and especially the vegetative system, force upon it
its function of the active verb. It has to be, to do, and to suffer,
and then to manipulate the environment to satiate the insatiable
viscera, insatiable because the local chemistry is continually raising
the tension of one or the other of them. A physics of human behaviour
becomes possible with the aid of these concepts of endocrine
regulation of intravisceral pressure, and intervisceral equilibrium,
an intramuscular pressure and an intermuscular equilibrium, with the
brain as the shifting fulcrum of the system.

The sensation of hunger, as we have seen, serves as good an exemplar
as any of this mechanism of the wish. Hunger is preceded and
accompanied by contractions of the stomach of increasing intensity.
Those contractions must be brought about by a substance acting upon
the nerve endings in the wall of the stomach. As it closes down upon
itself, waves pass up and down. With each wave, the pressure within it
rises. The exact amount of the pressure may be accurately measured
by means of a small balloon swallowed and then inflated. When the
pressure rises above a certain figure, the sensation of hunger breaks
into the consciousness of the individual. We in