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Almost every nerve-centre has above it a higher centre whose function it is directly to repress or subdue the activity of the lower centre. A familiar instance of this is seen in the action of the heart: there are certain nerve-centres which when excited lessen the rate of the heart's beat, and are even able to stop it altogether.
This is the result of memory of the lower nerve-centres. At first, the child reads only by a distinct conscious effort of memory, recalling painfully each word. After a time the words become so impressed upon the lower nerve-centres that we may read on when our attention is directed to some other thing.
Can you even imagine what Schubert's "Linden-Tree" might be when perfectly sung? Is it an hallucination, then, that possesses me some subtle disturbance of the nerve-centres sapping the sources of will-power, enfeebling even the physical energies? I do not know. Sometimes I am ashamedly conscious that I do not greatly care.
There was one shabby little exchange thirty years ago; but now there are fifty-two exchanges, as the nerve-centres of a vast fifty-million-dollar system. Incredible as it may seem to foreigners, it is literally true that in a single building in New York, the Hudson Terminal, there are more telephones than in Odessa or Madrid, more than in the two kingdoms of Greece and Bulgaria combined.
I am too unskilful a butcher to imitate the Wasp and myself to resort to paralysis; moreover, the caustic liquid injected into the nerve-centres, ammonia in particular, would leave traces of smell or flavour which might put off my boarders. I am therefore compelled to deprive my insects of the power of movement by killing them outright.
Certain phenomena of remembrance seen frequently in exhausting diseases, and especially in old age, show the permanence of impressions made upon the higher nerve-centres, and are also very similar in their nature to this so-called double consciousness.
No comparison is permissible between the methodical squeezes of the Ammophila benumbing the cephalic nerve-centres and the brutal manipulations of the Philanthus emptying the crop of her Bee. The huntress of Grey Worms induces a temporary torpor of the mandibles; the ravisher of Bees makes them eject their honey. No one gifted with the least perspicacity will confound the two operations.
It is only when the life becomes more complicated and various, so that reflex action can no longer determine all its movements and the higher nerve-centres begin to be evolved, that the dawning of consciousness is reached. But with the growth of the higher centres the capacities of action become so various and indeterminate that definite direction is not given to them until after birth.
The Ammophila, we imagine, must learn, one by one, like the entomologist, the positions of the nerve-centres of the caterpillar must acquire at least the practical knowledge of these positions by trying the effects of its sting.
In our New England the great Andover discussion and the heretical missionary question have benumbed all sensibility on this subject as entirely, as completely, as the new local anaesthetic, cocaine, deadens the sensibility of the part to which it is applied, so that the eye may have its mote or beam plucked out without feeling it, as the novels of Zola and Maupassant have hardened the delicate nerve-centres of the women who have fed their imaginations on the food they have furnished.
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