"The faculties which survive," says Flourens, "after the ablation of the cerebral lobes are those on which depend the functions of nutrition (that is to say, digestion, circulation, respiration), of movement, locomotion, and even of sensation."1

Here we must notice that the sensation of a functional mechanism absolutely escapes our observation. Flourens maintains that this faculty survives - it would be more correct to say that it persists. In reality it exists, in a feeble degree, in the whole isolated part of the brain. Flourens presupposes, on the other hand, that the faculties of perception and of memory are lost: this should be understood as meaning the central perception and memory, for we must accord a special memory and volition to the inferior association, isolated from its center.

When a decapitated frog acts, when its leg responds by reactionary movements towards the excited part, it is not the principal will which acts, but the ganglionary will. If, then, a movement may produce itself after the ablation of the cerebral lobes, it is true that perception does not exist for the frog, though the act is felt somewhere, and willed, because the leg directs itself towards the excited place: but the cause of the movement is a divisional entity, a kind of inferior animalcule. It is a ganglionary memory, which recognizes an acquired sensation, to which this local soul responds automatically. If the chicken from which the cerebral mass has been taken is incapable of looking for its food, a grain put into its beak is nevertheless capable of provoking deglutition. There remains, then, a local memory and perception, even a will: only they are no longer the memory, perception, and will of the chicken, but those of a sort of monster, which has descended to the lowest stage of the vital scale, where the bulb which subsists has become a sort of organic head. If there is deglutition, there is a re-awakening of many acquired memories; and since all three have perceived something, sensibility is not dead, but it appreciates at its true value the sensation presented.

1 Flourens, De la vie et de l'intelligence, 1858, p. 66.

Will cannot be said to be absent from such an action, since deglutition is a movement which has to be willed before it can be executed. Therefore it must not be said that sensation has been separated from volition, but simply that the ways of communication between the cerebral soul and the small organic souls have been cut.

Each organic apparatus has its own life and its personal sensations. Thus the visual apparatus may be affected by objects and still know nothing about the intellectual images provoked in us by that vision, since these pass outside of it. The experiments of Flourens have demonstrated that if one takes out the superior brain of an animal, leaving to it, however, all the organs of the senses, the eye would conserve its visual power, the iris would be mobile and could follow the displacements of the light, and the retina would conserve its sensitiveness. However, we could not say that there is a vision of the image, because the visual representation exists only in the inner consciousness of the animal. If, on the contrary, we take away the tubercule on which the ocular mechanism depends, without touching the cerebral lobe, the eye will no longer have movement or sensibility. It appears, then, that the organ, a stranger to the psychic representations, possesses active and sensitive faculties, as well as perceptions known only to itself: and it is no longer possible to sustain the identity of consciousness and functions, in view of these experiments which show an animal, without a brain, whose functions continue while consciousness no longer exists. Physiology is full of mysteries which it seems possible to clarify if we accord a portion of soul to each division of physiological unity. But we must not forget the invisible physiology, the unknown element, revealed in former experiments and constituting the sensitive element which interpenetrates all the organic machine.

Matter in mind are thus related by an intermediary state recently discovered.

The current of induction goes from mind to matter in passing through this intermediary. This process, it is not difficult to admit, though our education has not prepared us for it. But now that certainty exists concerning an exterior action, effected without the aid of organs, it seems impossible to avoid the necessary deduction of the existence of an intermediary organ.

All our physiology gives us the proof of movement without contact. A cell is without contact with another cell, but nevertheless expansions and retractions are transmitted from one to the other and executed punctually under the sole direction of the will. Thus each cell is in telepathic relation with its neighbor: hence it is necessary that they should share alike sensibility and activity. In short, every organic division possesses a soul, or if we prefer, a part of a soul. This has been sufficiently established by the polyanimism of Durand de Gros, Every ganglion, every mechanism, every organ, seems to have a sensitive soul, endowed with will.

The soul is not extinguished except in the lowest of the organic scale, at the dead point of inert matter, if it so be that inertia may exist in any part of nature. Our organs are but the material expression of a form of life realized by our invisible soul.

Dr. Durand de Gros felt the necessity of something more than has been taught concerning simply physiological inductions, and was the first, I believe, to have the courage to put his ideas into circulation.

He understood that there are no unconscious acts, and did not hesitate to conclude that the acts generated by different points of the spinal column have souls as motive powers. He recognized, moreover, as an indispensable hypothesis, that there is a something associated with our physical nature. He felt the necessity for introducing into our machine an occult agent of sensation: he affirmed that cerebral matter is a stranger to telepathic perception and proclaimed it without reticence.