As soon therefore as we have got so far as to distinguish _will_ [_Wille_] from _free-will_ [_Willkühr_], and to consider the latter as a particular kind or particular phenomenon of the former, we shall find no difficulty in recognising the will, even in unconscious processes. Thus the assertion, that all bodily movements, even those which are purely vegetative and organic, proceed from _the will_, by no means implies that they are voluntary. For that would mean that they were occasioned by motives; but motives are representations, and their seat is the brain: only those parts of our body which communicate with the brain by means of the nerves, can be put in movement by the brain, consequently by motives, and this movement alone is what is called voluntary. The movement of the inner economy of the organism, on the contrary, is directed, as in plant-life, by _stimuli_; only as, on the one hand, the complex nature of the animal organism necessitated an outer sensorium for the apprehension of the outer world and the will's reaction on that outer world, so, on the other hand, did it necessitate a _cerebrum abdominale_, the sympathetic nervous system, in order to direct the will's reaction upon inner stimuli likewise. We may compare the former to a Home Ministry, the latter to a Foreign Office; but the will remains the omnipresent Autocrat. The progress made in Physiology since Haller has placed beyond doubt, that not only those actions which are consciously performed (_functiones animales_), but even vital processes that take place quite unconsciously (_functiones vitales et naturales_), are directed throughout by the _nervous system_. Likewise that their only difference, as far as our consciousness of them is concerned, consists in the former being directed by nerves proceeding from the brain, the latter by nerves that do not directly communicate with that chief centre of the nervous system--mainly directed towards the outside--but with subordinate, minor centres, with the nerve-knots, the ganglia and their net-work, which preside as it were like vice-gerents over the various departments of the nervous system, directing those internal processes that follow upon internal stimuli, just as the brain directs the external actions that follow upon external motives, and thus receiving impressions from inside upon which they react correspondingly, just as the brain receives representations on the strength of which it forms resolutions; only each of these minor centres is confined to a narrower sphere of action. Upon this rests the _vita propria_ of each system, in referring to which Van Helmont said that each organ has, as it were, its own _ego_. It accounts also for life continuing in parts which have been cut off the bodies of insects, reptiles, and other inferior animals, whose brain has no marked preponderance over the ganglia of single parts; and it likewise explains how many reptiles are able to live for weeks, nay even months,