What? Have the association neurones some choice as to the synapses they shall make? Is it left to them to say which, of a multitude of differently charged axones, their dendrites shall shake hands with? Does not mechanics govern the connection which the association neurone effects with a million waiting dendrites already linked with a million different effectors? Is our soldier in the middle row permitted to suit himself as to what listening-post he shall get in touch with, and is he then allowed to do as he likes with the information? What was lately a mere relay instrument seems suddenly to have been endowed with strange powers. If ever an arrangement was devised to look like the physical embodiment of consciousness and free will, this certainly is it. No wonder Dr. Watson would prefer to have us regard these brain areas as vague “silent” ones, wherein no function can be “localized.” A behaviorist who should lose his unconsciousness would be more frightened than was Peter Schlemihil when he lost his shadow to the devil. The mere suggestion that the association neurone might be the Achilles’ heel of insensibility must have shocked many a conditioned reflex back into infantilism. Dr. Watson remained and remains calm and aloof in the midst of his “silent areas.” But others bestirred themselves with considerable zeal if not discretion. The problem was to find some purely blind and mechanistic agent capable of regulating the resistance of the synapse. For that is the best way to think of it--as a resistance. A neural impulse will go farther in a given time along a simple nerve than it will along a route interrupted by neurones with little gulfs between them. Not only that, but when it comes out it is found to be measurably weaker than when it went in. Almost immediately it picks up again, and goes on, full speed ahead, as if somebody had stepped on the gas. How this little miracle is accomplished, nobody knows; nor whence comes the added force. Doubtless, however, it comes from the body in some perfectly natural and ascertainable way. Certainly it has nothing to do with the will.