296 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNISTthis "capacity for conception," which Weitling defined as essen
tially a matter of chemistry, there could be no world, no reality,
no body, no truth, and no God. By referring to the analogy of
making daguerreotypes, a process with which he seems to have
been familiar, he discussed the transformation of impressions into
memory. Thereupon he expounded a theory of "organic electro
magnetic force" which activated the body. He maintained that
the senses constitute the electric part of this force or power and
that these electric impulses are conducted to the brain by means
of the nervous system. It was his contention that the electric im
pulses that reached the brain both attracted and repelled, depend
ing on "earlier impressions and acquired characteristics." Memory
he defined as the "organically stimulated picture gallery of our
perceptions."
By his theories of electromagnetic currents, Weitling explained
such phenomena as sleep, exhaustion, dreams ("thinking without
will" while the senses are closed by sleep to outside stimuli), and
"magnetic sleep," under which he included somnambulism, faint
ing, and death. Emotion and feeling thus were reduced to a simple
matter of stimuli and nerve tension. As a result Weitling was
forced to conclude that there really is no free will, though man
thinks there is, and that everything is a matter of stimuli, impres
sions, and reactions, a type of psychology not too different from
the theories of some modern behaviorists.
It is when one reaches the pages and pages of classifications of
concepts, which follow these fairly plausible introductory dis
cussions of the processes of perception, that one encounters a
completely impractical and incomprehensible system. The classi
fications cover such subjects as natural causes and results; inor
ganic and organic substances; the artificial, utilitarian and ideal;
earth forms, minerals, plants, forms, sounds, theory and practice;
the arts and the sciences; fantasies and facts; and scores of others.
It is useless to try to give many examples of the new language, for
it was far more artificial than any it was expected to supersede.
The following sentences may serve as illustrations of the fantastic