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It is the application of attention, the connecting of the object without with the point of the mental stream, which is the two-fold cause of the detailed knowledge of a thing as well as of the closing of the door against all other senses than the one which may be actually functioning.
THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
The amount of consciousness which watches over the actions of life where intellect is not shedding its illuminative lustre, consists in the sparks given out, from time to time, at the sensory-motor point, in consequence of friction with the incoming stimulus, or of resistance to action. But the glow produced by reflection is the intellectual gleam with which reason carries on the adjustment of the soul's inner relations with the outer.
The control of the mind is exercised through the brain which is interposed between it and the nervous system. The centripetal impulses coming from the periphery pass through the brain, just as the motor impulses originating with the will find their way to the desired channel of activity through it. This is because the brain is superimposed, as a loop, over both the sensory and motor systems, through which the ego comes into touch with the physical world. Bergson thus describes the function of the brain :
"In our opinion the brain is no more than a kind of central telephonic exchange; its office is to allow communication, or to delay it. It adds nothing to what it receives; but, as all the organs of perception send to it their ultimate prolongations, and as all the motor mechanisms of the spinal cord and of the medulla oblongata have in it their accredited representatives, it really constitutes a centre, where the peripheral excitation gets into re. lation with this or that motor mechanism, chosen and no longer prescribed."-Matter and Memory, pp. 19-20.
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