Ants and Some Other Insects: An Inquiry Into the Psychic Powers of These AnimalsForel, Auguste
Science
Ants and Some Other Insects: An Inquiry Into the Psychic Powers of These Animals
Forel, Auguste
Insects -- Biology; Psychology, Comparative
deviation of our ordinary train of memories, this is an unequivocal
indication that a step further on the remaining connection would be
completely severed, so that we should no longer have the right to
say that the brain-activities thus fading away nebulously from our
superconsciousness do not have consciousness in and for themselves. For
the sake of brevity and simplicity we will ascribe subconsciousness to
these so-called unconscious brain-processes.
If this assumption is correct--and all things point in this
direction--we are not further concerned with consciousness. It does
not at all exist as such, but only through the brain-activity of which
it is the inner reflex. With the disappearance of this activity,
consciousness disappears. When the one is complicated, the other, too,
is complicated. When the one is simple, the other is correspondingly
simple. If the brain-activity be dissociated, consciousness also
becomes dissociated. Consciousness is only an abstract concept,
which loses all its substance with the falling away of “conscious”
brain-activity. The brain-activity reflected in the mirror of
consciousness appears therein subjectively as a summary synthesis,
and the synthetical summation grows with the higher complications and
abstractions acquired through habit and practice, so that details
previously conscious (e. g., those involved in the act of reading)
later become subconscious, and the whole takes on the semblance of a
psychical unit.
Psychology, therefore, cannot restrict itself merely to a study of the
phenomena of our superconsciousness by means of introspection, for
the science would be impossible under such circumstances. Everybody
would have only his own subjective psychology, after the manner of
the old scholastic spiritualists, and would therefore be compelled to
doubt the very existence of the external world and his fellow-men.
Inference from analogy, scientific induction, the comparison of the
experiences of our five senses, prove to us the existence of the outer
world, our fellow-men and the psychology of the latter. They also
prove to us that there is such a thing as comparative psychology, a
psychology of animals. Finally our own psychology, without reference
to our brain-activity, is an incomprehensible patchwork full of
contradictions, a patchwork which above all things seems to contradict
the law of the conservation of energy.
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