On the basis of these and some other anatomical and physiological data, in conjunction with a number of clinical and experimental observations, SWEDENBORG, as we have before seen, came to the conclusion that it is in the _cortex_ that the soul’s activity comes into being; but at the same time he concluded that, strictly speaking, the cortical elements were the real work-shops. For he reasoned in the following manner: When the sensory impressions enter the brain, they certainly proceed no further than to the _›Sphaerulae› of the cortex, since these constitute the beginnings of the nerve and medullary fibres_: were they to go further, for instance to the small arteries which surround the cortical elements, or to the membranes of the brain, then they would overstep the boundary, as he says, and leave the actual centre and go out to the more peripheral parts.[85]
SWEDENBORG consequently here followed the same line of thought as his predecessors. DESCARTES supposed that the nerves originated from the wall of the central ventricle of the brain and therefore located the images of sensory impressions, etc., there. VIEUSSENS and others thought that the nerves originate from the centrum ovale, and thus he placed the psychic activity there. And SWEDENBORG now proceeded in a similar manner when he attributed the psycho-sensory operations to the ›Cerebellula›. And what other parts of the cortex were better fitted to perform the demanding and ever-shifting psychical labour than the ›Cerebellula›, to which the life-giving powers of the blood were so plentifully admitted, and in which, according to the testimony of many, the highly subtile nervous fluid was created, whose office it was to communicate the rapid and shifting utterances of the soul’s life!
SWEDENBORG’s predecessors had thought that the distinctions between the sensory impressions depended partly upon what kind of nerve was affected, and VIEUSSENS had located the images of perception and memory in the nerve-tubes in the centrum ovale, which had the finest caliber. What, then, was more natural than that SWEDENBORG should now locate these images in the ›Cerebellula› of the cortex? For what substance of the cortex was better fitted, a more suitable medium to comprehend and distinguish the innumerable shades of the impressions than these myriads of ›Cerebellula›—of different sizes, forms and consistency, etc., which were connected each with its own special nerve-fibril and so well distinguished from their neighbors! And at the same time they were connected with the other ›Cerebellula› into groups of different kinds, by which the psychical elaboration of the impressions was made possible.