nd other one-celled organisms; for, in
these individual, isolated, living cells we find the same
manifestations of soul-life--feelings, and ideas (mental images),
will and motion, as is in the higher animals compounded of many cells"
(p. 13). Virchow now rises up in the strongest protest against this
theory of a cellular sensibility, which I regard as the inevitable
consequence of his early views of cellular physiology; it is to him
"mere trifling with words." He combats with equal decisiveness "the
scientific necessity of extending the province of psychical processes
beyond the circle of those bodies in and by which we actually see them
exhibited." He further says, "If I explain attraction and repulsion as
psychical phenomena, I simply throw the psyche out of the window; the
psyche ceases to be a psyche." Finally he says, "I assert without any
hesitation that for us the sum total of psychical phenomena is
connected with certain animals only, and not with the collective mass
of all organic beings; nay, not even with all animals in general. We
have no ground as yet for speaking of the lowest animals as possessing
psychical properties; we find such properties only in the higher
grades, and with perfect certainty only in the very highest."
When I first read this and other astounding statements in Virchow's
paper, I involuntarily asked myself, "Can this be the same Virchow
from whom, twenty-five years ago, I learnt in Wuerzburg that the
soul-functions of man and animals depend on mechanical processes in
the soul-organs; that these organs are, like all other organs,
composed of cells, and that the functional activity of an organ is
nothing more than the sum of the activity of all the cells which
compose it? Is this the same Virchow whose most vital doctrine it was
that all the physical and psychical processes of the human organism
were to be referred to the mechanics of cell life; who supported the
view of the unity of all the phenomena of life with the same emphasis
with which we are now obliged to defend it against his attacks?"
In fact, and beyond a doubt, we have here a new proof of Virchow's
complete change in all fundamental scientific principles. For the
cellular psychology which I advance is only a necessary consequence of
the cellular physiology promulgated by Virchow. His present opposition
to the former is either a renunciation of the latter or an untenable
and inconsequent position. To explain this astonishing
|