animal telephone system. It could create no energy--it could merely
redirect the currents actually flowing.

Practically this might do, but speculatively it was most disturbing. For if
the 'loose relation' had to be admitted in one instance, it was admitted in
principle; and one could not get rid of the suspicion that it would turn up
elsewhere, and that the banishment of it from every other field represented
a convenient pragmatic postulate rather than a solid metaphysical truth.
Moreover, the correlation of the unitary soul with the unitary gland might
do justice to a mechanistical philosophy, but it did not do justice to the
soul's own consciousness of itself. The soul's consciousness is the 'idea'
or 'representation' of the life of the whole body, certainly not of the
life of the pineal gland nor, as the unreflective nowadays would say, of
the brain. I am not conscious in, or of, my brain except when I have a
headache; consciousness is in my eyes and finger-tips and so on. It is
physically true, no doubt, that consciousness in and of my finger-tips is
not possible without the functioning of my brain; but that is a poor reason
for locating the consciousness in the brain. The filament of the electric
bulb will not be incandescent apart from the functioning of the dynamo; but
that is a poor reason for saying that the incandescence is in the dynamo.

Certainly the area of representation in our mind is not simply equivalent
to the area of our body. But in so far as the confines of mental
representation part company with the confines of the body, it is not that
they may contract and fall back upon the pineal gland, but that they may
expand and advance over the surrounding world. The mind does not represent
its own body merely, it represents the world in so far as the world affects
that body or is physically reproduced in it. The mind has no observable
natural relation to the pineal gland. It has only two natural relations: to
its body as a whole and to its effective environment. What Descartes had