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"If so coarse a thing as a telephone-plate can be made to thrill for years and never reduplicate its inward condition, how much more must this be the case with the infinitely delicate brain?"

— James, William (1842-1910)

Author

James, William (1842-1910)

Work Title

On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology

Date

January, 1884

Metaphor

"If so coarse a thing as a telephone-plate can be made to thrill for years and never reduplicate its inward condition, how much more must this be the case with the infinitely delicate brain?"

Metaphor in Context

If we are ever to be entitled to make psychological inferences from brain-processes, we should make them here in favour of the view I defend. The whole drift of recent brain-inquiry sets towards the notion that the brain always acts as a whole, and that no part of it can be discharging without altering the tensions of all the other parts. The best symbol for it seems to be an electric conductor, the amount of whose charge at any one point is a function of the total charge elsewhere. Some tracts are always waning in tension, some waxing, whilst others actively discharge. The states of tension, however, have as positive an influence as the discharges in determining the total condition, and consequently in deciding what the psychosis shall be to which the complex neurosis corresponds. All we know of sub-maximal nerve-irritations, and of the summation of apparently ineffective stimuli, tends to show that no changes in the brain are really physiologically ineffective, and that presumably none are bare of psychological result. But as the distribution of brain-tension shifts from one relative state of equilibrium to another, like the aurora borealis or the gyrations of a kaleidoscope, now rapid and now slow, is it likely that the brain's faithful psychic concomitant is heavier-footed than itself, that its rate of change is coarser-grained, that it cannot match each one of the organ's irradiations by a shifting inward iridescence of its own? But if it can do this, its inward iridescences must be infinite, for the brain-redistributions are in infinite variety. If so coarse a thing as a telephone-plate can be made to thrill for years and never reduplicate its inward condition, how much more must this be the case with the infinitely delicate brain?
(pp. 11-2)