itself, in a manner of speaking, into the center of the stream.  Or if you will, the rest of the stream has to arrange itself around it as the center.  A similar mechanism for the tonus of the other members of the vegetative system, and how they determine consciousness and behaviour is understandable.  It has been shown that when the bladder tone and the intestinal tone are of a definitely measurable size, one has the desire to empty them.  The same applies to the sex glands.  The pressure within a viscus is dependent upon the ratio between the amount of contraction of the involuntary muscle in its walls, the external pressure, and the quantity of its distending contents, the internal pressure.  The resultant quotient, the internal pressure divided by the external pressure, measures the intravisceral pressure.  The primitive wish-feelings are the direct expressions of the various intravisceral pressures, or tones.  The primitive soul is an awareness of the fused primitive wish-feelings of themselves as a whole, and of the struggle between them for recognition, isolation, and, as we say, satisfaction.  This satisfaction consists in a degradation of the highest intravisceral pressure to a point at which some other intravisceral pressure becomes higher and therefore predominant.

PHYSICS OF THE WISH

Mind, consciousness, may then be portrayed as an ocean comprised of mobile current layers, complexes built up around the awareness of different intravisceral pressures.  A shifting hierarchy of such pressures form the points of focusing of consciousness that result in conduct.  Behaviour may be defined as the resultant of the organism’s pressure against the environment’s counter pressure until there is a sufficient reduction of the specifically exciting intravisceral pressure.  Just as water flows to its own level, so will conduct flow to reduce intravisceral pressure to its own level.  A physics of the soul comes into prospect, in which a mathematical analysis will state the process quantitatively in terms of some common unit of pressure.

Not only conduct, but also character, because it is past conduct repeated, associated, and fixed, will be so statable.  For intravisceral tonus or pressure is not simply or only an acute or passing affair.  There is for it a persistent or average figure, the so-called normal for it, below which or above which the acute situation will bring it. Character is a matter then of standards in the vegetative system.  Character, indeed, is an alloy of the different standard intravisceral pressures of the organism, a fusion created by the resistance or counter pressure of the obstacles in the environment.  Character, in short, is the grand intravisceral barometer of a personality.