Cerebral psychology : read at a meeting of the Psychological Society of Great Britain / by Charles Bray.

  • Charles Bray
Date:
[1877?]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Cerebral psychology : read at a meeting of the Psychological Society of Great Britain / by Charles Bray. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    our parents. All our powers, both of thought and feeling, thus act as instincts or intuitions; and when in a previous paper I said “ Instinct was memory once removed,” I meant it was impressions made upon the brain in a previous gene- ration, not in childhood, or in our own lifetime. Man is thus a bundle of instincts, transmitted through every animal form of life that has previously existed. As I have said elsewhere, “Memory is the result of impressions on the brain; these impressions are deepened by repetition till both speech and action become involuntary in a recognised and definite order, along the path so often travelled. In old age, when our animal vigour is exhausted, and less force passes through the brain, and the brain itself becomes less susceptible of impression, the old impressions resume their sway, and we return to our old habits of feeling and thinking, and our early memories.”* But I need not dilate upon the subject of present Memory, as you have already had an excellent paper on the subject by one of your Vice- Presidents, Dr. Geo. Harris. He tells us that, according to Locke, pleasure and pain contribute most to fix ideas in the memory; and that Mr. Smee observes that, “ as a general rule, the power of memory is proportionate to the intensity of the impression.” This is only saying with Helvetius, “that there is no memory without attention, and no atten- tion without interest;” and with Serjt. Cox, in “What am I?” “that each faculty has its own memory, and that memory is usually proportionate to the capacity of the faculty; ” and let me add that the capacity of each faculty is proportionate to the size of its cerebral organ. It may be thought, from all I have said, that I am a Materialist; on the contrary, I cannot even understand * A Manual of Anthropology, or Science of Man, based on Modern Research, p. 65. [216]
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