[505] This figure and the following ones are purely schematic, and must not be supposed to involve any theory about protoplasmatic and axis-cylinder processes. The latter, according to Golgi and others, emerge from the base of the cell, and each cell has but one. They alone form a nervous network. The reader will of course also understand that none of the hypothetical constructions which I make from now to the end of the chapter are proposed as definite accounts of what happens. All I aim at is to make it clear in some more or less symbolic fashion that the formation of new paths, the learning of habits, etc., is in some mechanical way conceivable. Compare what was said in Vol. I. p. 81, note.
[506] The Nervous System and the Mind (1888), pp. 75-6.
[507] Compare Vol. I. pp. 137, 142.
[508] That is, the direction towards the motor cells.
[509] This brain-scheme seems oddly enough to give a certain basis of reality to those hideously fabulous performances of the Herbartian Vorstellungen. Herbart says that when one idea is inhibited by another it fuses with that other and thereafter helps it to ascend into consciousness. Inhibition is thus the basis of association in both schemes, for the 'draining' of which the text speaks is tantamount to an inhibition of the activity of the cells which are drained, which inhibition makes the inhibited revive the inhibiter on later occasions.
[510] See the luminous passage in Münsterberg: Die Willenshandlung, pp. 144-5.
[511] L. Lange's and Münsterberg's experiments with 'shortened' or 'muscular' reaction-time (see Vol. I. p. 432) show how potent a fact dynamically this anticipatory preparation of a whole set of possible drainage-channels is.
[512] Even as the proofs of these pages are passing through my hands, I receive Heft 2 of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie u. Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, in which the irrepressible young Münsterberg publishes experiments to show that there is no association between successive ideas, apart from intervening movements. As my explanations have assumed that an earlier excited sensory cell drains a later one, his experiments and inferences would, if sound, upset all my hypotheses. I therefore can (at this late moment) only refer the reader to Herr M.'s article, hoping to review the subject again myself in another place.