The possibility of ideas such as these is to be found in what I might call the mechanizing of biological values. Thinking is represented, along with heat, as a molecular vibration; the psychic act, under the figure of an impress, of an “Engramm,”[20] thus of work accomplished; and therewith we get the possibility of that rolling back of the _I_-process from the individual to his begetters, and from these in turn to their begetters, and so on backwards _ad infinitum_--in short, the possibility of remaining upon the lines of the purely material, which partakes of the nature of a reaction precisely as much as the lines upon which the physicist works in the cosmogony peculiar to energetics. Just as there, from the outset, the real energies are left out of consideration and only their reactions dealt with, looked upon as work done; so in the treatment of the problem of heredity by science the whole process of life is looked upon simply as work done, in biological guise, a mode of apprehending it to which scientific thought itself, as represented by the teleological school, is entirely opposed.[21] With the mechanistic representation of things is necessarily involved the question as to the seat of consciousness. Modern physiology vaunts itself not a little upon having got beyond the follies of the centuries that are past, when this seat was sought for in all sorts of hidden nooks. But sooth to say, its own position nowise differs; the change is only in the means of defence employed. Now, as formerly, endeavour is made to localize consciousness in certain regions; there is a search for the “seat” of consciousness. Whether as a pure hypothesis I transfer this seat to the pineal gland, or whether, from the results of experiments upon animals, I seek by a process of exclusion, as it were, to find it in the cerebral cortex--all this makes no essential difference. The mistake, the Hebraism, lies in seeking for a “seat” of consciousness at all. To such an idea only a few exceptionally clear minds oppose a front of resistance. As an example, I cite in a footnote a passage from E. Mach’s _Analyse der Empfindungen_.[22]