ra and the sponges, are distributed
among the cells of the two germ-layers, and in all the higher animals
among the different tissues, organs, and apparatus of a highly developed
and constructed organism. The psychic functions of sensation and
voluntary motion, which are here distributed to such very various organs
and tissues, are in the infusoria fulfilled by the neutral plasson
material of the cell, by the protoplasma, and possibly also by the
nucleus (compare my treatise "The Morphology of the Infusoria." Jena,
Zeitschriften, 1873, vol. vii. p. 516). And just as we must attribute to
these primary animal forms an independent "soul," just as we must
plainly be convinced that the single independent cell has a "psyche," we
must as decidedly attribute a soul to every other cell; for the most
important active constituent of the cell, the protoplasm, everywhere
exhibits the same psychic properties of sensibility or irritability, and
motive power or will. The only difference is this, that in the organism
of the higher animals and plants the numerous collected cells, to a
great extent, give up their individual independence, and are subject,
like good citizens, to the soul-polity which represents the unity of the
will and sensations in the cell community. We here also must distinguish
clearly between the central soul of the whole many-celled organism or
the personal psyche (the person-soul), and the particular individual
soul or elementary soul of the individual cells constituting that
organism (the cell-soul). Their relations are strikingly illustrated in
the instructive group of Siphonophora, as I have briefly shown in my
article on "The Cell-soul and Soul-cells" (Deutsche Rundschau, July
1878). Beyond a doubt the whole stock or polity of Siphonophora has a
very definite united will and a united sensibility, and yet each of the
individual persons of which this stock (or Cormus) is composed has its
own personal will and its own particular sensations. Each of these
persons indeed was originally a separate Medusa, and the individual
Siphonophora stock originated, by association and division of labour,
out of these united Medusa communities.

When I developed this theory of the cell-soul and designated it in my
Munich address as the "surest foundation of empirical psychology," I
believed I was drawing an inference quite to Virchow's mind, from his
own views of mechanical and cellular-physiology; and for that reason I
took the s