Note 509 — Chapter XXVI · [430] (continued 3)
Reading edition
This brain-scheme seems oddly enough to give a certain basis of reality to those hideously fabulous performances of the Herbartian Vorstellungen. Herbart says that when one idea is inhibited by another it fuses with that other and thereafter helps it to ascend into consciousness. Inhibition is thus the basis of association in both schemes, for the 'draining' of which the text speaks is tantamount to an inhibition of the activity of the cells which are drained, which inhibition makes the inhibited revive the inhibiter on later occasions.