Modern materialism and emergent evolution / by William McDougall.

  • McDougall, William, 1871-1938
Date:
1929
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Modern materialism and emergent evolution / by William McDougall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    informed view of the possibilities, there seems to be close correlation between, on the one hand, experiences of the various sense-qualities and of various bodily movements and, on the other hand, certain parts of the brain structure. But all attempts to carry the correlation farther have broken down. Prof. Bergson 1 has carefully examined a mass of the empirical evidence and shown clearly this lack of detailed correlation. And since his review was made further evidence of the same kind has accumu¬ lated.2 In general, it may be said, the evidence supports the view that in some sense the brain functions as a whole ; and that, when one part is destroyed, other parts can in a surprising manner take over as it were the impaired functions ; or, at least, the impaired functions are restored and become correlated with parts of the brain other than those with which they were originally or normally correlated. These facts are even more opposed to the view that function depends altogether on material structure than are the instances of 1 In his Matter and Memory. 2 I will refer here only to the conclusions recently announced by Dr. J. K. Lashley. They are the more weighty since Lashley seems to have a strong mechanistic bias and would be shocked to know of the application of his conclusions which I am here making. His observations were made by training rats to run mazes before and after ablation of small or large portions of the cerebral hemispheres. The significant result from the point of view of our present problem was that, though ablation of parts of the brain produced in various degrees impairment of this form of intelligent action, there was no correlation found between the memory displayed and any particular parts of the brain, and even ablations of almost the whole of the two cerebral hemi¬ spheres did not wholly abolish either the power of learning or the retention of that which had been learnt.