We will now return to the question asked at the beginning of the last chapter—‘ Which material events are directly associated with consciousness?’—but starting this time from the somewhat surer ground of inner experience. We first tried to show, on general grounds, that the idea that this association is a unique prerogative of the functions of the brain is not very probable; and we then had to admit that attempts at extending the association to other events unfortunately lose themselves in vague, fantastic speculations. We now propose to make an observation of an opposite kind, but equally capable of shattering this idea. It runs as follows:

Not all brain-processes are accompanied by consciousness. There are nerve-processes which, while exactly resembling the ‘conscious’ processes of the brain both in their whole centripetal-centrifugal pattern and in their biological significance as reaction-regulators, nevertheless are not associated with consciousness. They include not only the regulatory reflex processes in the ganglia of the spinal cord and that part of the nervous system which they control, but also a considerable number of reflex events which involve the brain itself but do not enter into consciousness.

So here we have various specimens of very similar nerve-processes taking place within our soma, some of which are accompanied by consciousness and some not; moreover—and this is something extremely valuable for our analysis—they include intermediate forms at every level.