Consider a gob of protoplasm, say an amœba or a slime-mould. It does
not differ in any radical way from the contents of a nerve-cell,
though its functions may be less specialised. There is no doubt that
this slime-mould, or this amœba, or at any rate some similar mass of
protoplasm feels. That is to say, it feels when it is in its excited
condition. But note how it behaves. When the whole is quiescent and
rigid, a place upon it is irritated. Just at this point, an active motion
is set up, and this gradually spreads to other parts. In this action, no
unity nor relation to a nucleus, or other unitary organ can be discerned.
It is a mere amorphous continuum of protoplasm, with feeling passing
from one part to another. Nor is there anything like a wave-motion. The
activity does not advance to new parts, just as fast as it leaves old
parts. Rather, in the beginning, it dies out at a slower rate than that
at which it spreads. And while the process is going on, by exciting the
mass at another point, a second quite independent state of excitation
will be set up. In some places, neither excitation will exist, in others
each separately, in still other places, both effects will be added
together. Whatever there is in the whole phenomenon to make us think
there is feeling in such a mass of protoplasm,—_feeling_, but plainly no
_personality_,—goes logically to show that that feeling has a subjective,
or substantial, spatial extension, as the excited state has. This is, no
doubt, a difficult idea to seize, for the reason that it is a subjective,
not an objective, extension. It is not that we have a feeling of bigness;
though Professor James, perhaps rightly, teaches that we have. It is that
the feeling, as a subject of inhesion, is big. Moreover, our own feelings
are focused in attention to such a degree that we are not aware that
ideas are not brought to an absolute unity; just as nobody not instructed
by special experiment has any idea how very, very little of the field of
vision is distinct. Still, we all know how the attention wanders about
among our feelings; and this fact shows that those feelings that are not
co-ordinated in attention have a reciprocal externality, although they
are present at the same time. But we must not tax introspection to make a
phenomenon manifest which essentially involves externality.
Since space is continuous, it follows that there must be an immediate
community of feeling between parts of mind infinitesimally near together.
Without this, I believe it would have been impossible for minds external
to one another, ever to become coördinated, and equally impossible for
any coördination to be established in the action of the nerve-matter of
one brain.