Page:Life in Motion.djvu/218

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LIFE IN MOTION

out pegs, puts one part into connection with another? Or is there some kind of shunting-place, a sort of Clapham Junction, to which lines from all parts converge, and from which currents are sent here and there, according to the necessities that arise? Or is there at work something like the card of a Jacquard loom, by which all the threads are collected and arranged and transmitted, so that each takes its place in the complicated pattern of the woven web? All these analogies fail in giving a notion of the intricate phenomena that occur, and it must not be supposed that the nervous system works in the least like any one of the mechanisms I have alluded to. Still such arranging of the impulses does take place,—some think in the spinal cord itself, others in the cerebellum, others in the cerebrum, others in the nervous system as a whole,—and the result is exquisitely harmonised movement.

All these phenomena are undoubtedly connected with molecular movement. Such movements occur even in the brain itself, and there is little doubt they are also associated with all mental phenomena. It does not