But SWEDENBORG does not stop even here. The elements of the cerebral cortex, he continues, are still not the ultimate determinants. They are only, so to speak, the inner sense-organs[42] and sub-determining media.[43] They are themselves subordinated under the understanding and the will, and their principle, the soul.[44] The soul, the principle of life, it is the soul, which, through those cortical elements, perceives the external world: it is the soul which feels, sees, hears, smells, tastes, it is the soul which recollects, thinks, performs, and wills; it is the soul which speaks and acts.[45] What then is the soul, and where does she reside? The seat of the soul must surely lie in the cerebral cortex; at least its activity comes into play there, and still more definitely, in the ›Cerebellula› of the cortex. (See above and also ›The Brain›, No. 7). But what is she? What is the soul? Here SWEDENBORG makes one attempt after the other to draw away the obscuring veil. Sometimes he thinks of the soul as only dwelling and working in the ›Cerebellula› and their ›fluidum spirituosum›; but in this way he does not come to a solution of the principal question, which is only removed farther away.[46] Sometimes he thinks the soul to be identical with the ›fluidum spirituosum›; but how can this, however subtile fluid, be immortal? Here he is again repulsed.[47] He discusses the supposition that, although the ›fluidum spirituosum› in itself is not immortal, it yet becomes so upon the death of the body, and so forth.[48] And at last he bursts out with: ›it amounts to the same thing if we see in this fluid the soul itself, or only its faculty of imagination and judgment, for the one cannot be thought of without the other.›[49] SWEDENBORG himself, however, was not satisfied with the result, but acknowledges that he had been too hasty, when, after having in reality thoroughly considered only the blood and brain, he entered immediately upon the search for the soul. He therefore says in the preface to the next work: ›I am now determined to allow myself no respite, until I have run through the whole field to the very goal—until I have traversed the universal animal kingdom to the soul (usque ad animam). Thus I hope, that by bending my course inward continually, I shall open all the doors that lead to her, and at length contemplate the soul herself: by the divine permission.› It is grand to see the indomitable energy and zeal for investigation in this man of 53 years! He was now obliged to extend considerably the field of his investigations—thereby to come to still more thorough insight into the conditions of the soul’s life, and afterwards, as he says, ›in his analytical way to be able to work himself up from the lower to the higher›, to find the way from phenomena and facts to causes and the final principles of the organism’s intricate mechanism.