ABSTRACT
The notion of our essential personality—that notio princeps around which all the phenomena of our mental activity revolve— arises, as we have already hinted, from the intimate contact between the sphere of psychical activity and the intellectual sphere. The elements of the vegetative and sensitive sensibility of the living organism* enter as primary factors into the genesis of the notion of our personality, and the effective participation of the elements of the sensorium completes and perfects it. When the currents of blood which carry life to the cells of the sensorium are suspended, another order of very significant phenomena is developed. The perceptive regions of the sensorium, struck, in a manner, with asphyxia, are all at once deprived of the property of feeling excitations from the surrounding medium; they remain torpid, inert, and the human personality ceases at the same time to be conscious of the things of the external world, of which it thus loses the knowledge.
