1. The logic of natural sciences.

Theoretical conclusions of Eccles (and of most other brain researchers) are supported by a logic that all natural sciences inherited from classic mechanics. “From earlier theories we have taken over the idea of corpuscles, together with the scientific vocabulary based on it” – pointed out the Nobel-prize winner Schrödinger, adding: “This concept is not correct. It constantly prompts our thinking to seek explanations that obviously make no sense at all. Its thought structure contains elements that do not exist in real corpuscles.” Of all natural sciences, it was physics that first deviated from this logic, when, following its series of crises around the turn of the century, it presented the concept that “everything – absolutely everyting – is corpuscle and field at the same time. All matter has its continuous structure, represented by a field, as well as its discrete structure, represented by a corpuscle.”^x

Returning to our problem, here the “explanations that obviously make no sense at all”, search for which is prompted by the corpuscle-oriented logic of our thinking, are related to the question: How does the state of a spatially delimited individual body influences the states of other bodies that are detached from the former – a neuron other nerve cells, a module of neurons other modules, a precise part of the nervous system its other parts, or the integer nervous system other bodily organs? Now, the answer made out by a “corpuscular logic” is that spatially defined bodies only interact to the extent that they enter into spatial contact along their circumferences.

It was this very logic that has always been applied, in particular, for understanding meaning although for such a logic this latter has always remained enigmatic. Since the controversy between Platon and Antisthenis it has been hard to settle whether meaning is located within the spatially delimited bodies of individual things, or it exists as an idea detached from every one at them. It is still more hard to say whether, while an individual organism gets into contact with an external individual object, meaning will or will not be transferred into the organism from the thing (where, as it has just been pointed out, one was unable to say whether meaning was inherent).

Finally, it is the least possible at all to decide whether meaning has a mental impact only when it finds its way into an individual organism. “Corpuscular logic” tries to cope with meaning by transforming it into familiarity: as if meaning would have been transferred from the thing into the organism and by now fixed in one of its parts that is, in principle, identifiable as responsable for the memory of this organism. On the other hand, one may not a priori discard the possibility that meaning may have a mental impact even when detached from all individual organisms being located in a supraindividual system of language, culture etc. (just the same way as it “in itself” is perhaps detached from all individual things).

If “corpuscular logic” does take into consideration this latter possibility, nevertheless it imposes its own terms upon the facts. First of all, it represents language as a store of particular corpuscules (i. e. a priori given labels), that would carry meanings (also supposed to be given a priori) the way real things would be expected by the “corpuscular logic” to do. Again, such a logic may only conceive the way meaning carried by a linguistic label becomes a psychic factor if that linguistic label, being contacted by an individual, turns from external into internal factor: finds, through some coding process, a corpuscular vehicle located in a theoretically well identifiable locus in the individual body. According such a logic, without getting into an, at least, indirect connection with the individual body the fact that language includes meanings would be psychologically just as irrelevant as is that other fact of things being given in this individual body's environmentbefore setting up their contact.