ngle cell, and, nevertheless, this cell is as
fully furnished with all the most important attributes of the soul,
with sensation and volition, as any one of the higher animals with a
nervous system. The same obtains of the Hydra and the related hydroid
polyps, in which the neuro-muscular cells, or other distributed cells
of the outer germ-layer, fulfil the soul-functions. But as these
cells, besides this, exercise motor and other functions as well, we
cannot as yet designate them as nerve-cells, at any rate there can be
no idea of a special nervous-system. The characteristic soul-organs of
the higher animals, which we include under the conception of a
nervous-system, in fact originated by the division of labour of the
cells out of those neutral cell-groups in their lower-typed ancestors.

In the great Soul-question Du Bois-Reymond, like Virchow, still keeps
his position on the standpoint of neural-psychology, according to
which no personal soul-life is conceivable without a nervous system.
We look upon this standpoint as left far behind, and set up in
opposition to it Cellular-psychology, the doctrine that every animal
cell has a soul; that is to say, that its protoplasm is endowed with
sensation and motion. In the one-celled Infusoria, which are so highly
sensitive and have such an energetic will, this conception will be
clear without any farther explanation. But we cannot refuse to allow
that plant-cells as well as animal-cells have psychic functions, since
we know that the phenomena of irritability, and of "automatic motion,"
are the universal attributes of all protoplasm. No doubt the specific
mechanism, the cause of motion, in the irritable Mimosa and other
"sensitive" plants, is quite different from the muscular motions of
animals; but these, like those, are only specifically different forms
of development of the "cell-soul," and both proceed from the
"mechanical energy of the protoplasm." The sensibility of the
irritable protoplasm is the same in the vegetable-cell of the Mimosa
as in the animal-cell of the Hydra. How far Du Bois-Reymond is from
discerning this, and how deeply he is still entangled in
neuro-psychological views is shown most clearly in the astonishing
sentence which he has thought good to append to his above-quoted,
erroneous assertion. "And what could we reply to the naturalist if,
before he could agree to the assumption of a World-soul he required
that we should show him--bedded in neuroglia and