Mind and Brain.

  • Laycock, Thomas, 1812-1876.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mind and Brain. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

    42/448 (page 2)
    To understand, therefore, the laws and modes of exist- ence of man as a rational being,—how he may be per- fected, and how his wants may be best determined and . fulfilled,—it is necessary to know, not only how the en- cephalon is constructed mechanically, and how it acts dynamically, but under what conditions it is constructed, and according to what laws it is operative. Or, in other words, the laws of development and organisation of the encephalon, as the necessary instrument and seat of man's energies and feelings, must be determined, if we would rightly understand its mechanism and modes of activity, under varying states of the consciousness, in various races, nations, societies, individuals. The vital processes and the correlative mental states of each moment are linked to a series of similar changes, of which they are logically the necessary results, extending far back into time. This long series of activities—vital and mental- continuing through a succession of individual men, from generation to generation, corresponds, in cerebral physio- logy and psychology, to that long succession of forms ot organisms which, commencing in the abysses of time, are the subject-matter of palaeontology; so that, just as the last individual of a species is but the latent expression or mani- festation of a long series of cycles of changes in the species, so the last thoughts, and feelings, and actions of an indivi- dual man are but the result of a series of changes dating far back in his own individual history, or having their roots in the modes of mental and vital activity of his ancestry. Now it is undeniably true, that throughout these cycles 'of vital changes there is an immanent inherent Energy ever operative, which is not a mere physical or material agent, and which can only be conceived as an S adapting force manifested in the phenomena of Te onseofuenfly, its laws and modes of operation can