The conception of nervous and mental energy (III) / by C.S. Myers.

  • Charles Samuel Myers
Date:
[1923?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The conception of nervous and mental energy (III) / by C.S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    common fund of ‘intellective’ energy (for such it is at the highest levels, although we recognize it, to use Dr Head’s significant term, as ‘ vigilance5 at the lowest, ‘physiological’ levels) which may be employed in the various intellectual abilities with which different minds are differently endowed, is a problem still awaiting solution. To-day, however, the swing of the pendulum tends to ascribe all mental activity to ‘feeling,’ and to suppose that all percepts, ideas and volitions, all forms of cognition and conation, derive their motor effects from the energy which they obtain from related affects. According to some, indeed, this energy is ultimately to be derived from a single affect, —the sexual emotion. But the past neglect of instinctive and emotional feelings should not cause us to overlook the activity involved in per¬ ceiving or thinking, or to regard percepts or thoughts (e.g. ends) as merely inert ‘mental matter’ whose ‘movement’ (nay, whose very ‘existence’ in consciousness) is dependent solely on the force of pro¬ pulsion or repression derived from feeling. Cognitive and affective experiences are not thus to be isolated in their beginnings. Moreover, as regards volition, self-activity is not identifiable with instinctive and emotional activity: the activity of the ‘individual’ organism is not the mere sum or resultant of the activity of its abstract parts. The last point to which I would invite attention is the relation be¬ tween mental and nervous energy. Energy in general we recognise only by the work of which it is capable; we actually measure it only by the work which it performs; and this work involves a transformation of energy from a higher to a lower level. We know nothing of what, e.g. electrical energy really is: we describe it in lower terms, e.g. of inertia, mass, weight and structure, with which, indeed, according to most recent theory, all energy is endowed. At the same time, however, we do not identify the various forms of energy with each other. Should we, then, because peripheral nervous energy reveals itself as electrical energy, necessarily follow Dr Adrian in identifying peripheral nervous with electrical energy? The latter may surely be a ‘degradation’ of the former. Still more cogent, to my mind, becomes the acceptance of a special nervous energy when we come to deal with the central nervous system. In our present ignorance I see nothing in such acceptance necessarily incompatible with the doctrine of the conservation of energy. I feel convinced that the problems of inhibition, control, direction and purpose which we have to face on the psychological side cannot honestly be evaded on the physiological side—in other words, that the outstanding problems of mind and life must ultimately be solved in similar terms.
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