Cerebral psychology : read at a meeting of the Psychological Society of Great Britain / by Charles Bray.
- Charles Bray
- Date:
- [1877?]
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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![not reflection on consciousness, which is another thing. In its lowest form it exists as a sort of nebulous mist or protoplasm, out of which all higher kinds of thought and feeling are evolved. Where it begins it is difficult to say; whether plants have feeling has not yet, I think, been quite satisfactorily determined. From the monera, the first form of sensitive individual life, we pass by successive evolutions through amoeboids, worms, polyzoa, and asci- dians, till we arrive at the vertebrata and mollusca, with the first of which we have only to do, as there only we can distinctly trace the nervous system through all its wonder- ful variety. The increase of sensibility or power of feeling always increases in proportion to the enlargement and complexity of the nervous system as we trace it through fishes, reptiles, birds, and quadrupeds. From the point of the animal scale where the brain becomes distinctly visible up to man the nervous substance is the same; and as the range of its function extends part after part is added to it, thus increasing both in size and complexity. The evidence of this afforded by comparative anatomy is irresistible. The Edinburgh Review, even in its 94th number, a long while now ago, recognised this; it says : “ In the nervous system we are enabled to associate every faculty which gives superiority with some addition to its mass, even to the smallest indication of sensation and will, to the highest degree of sensibility, judgment, and expression. The brain is observed to be progressively improved in its structure; and with reference to the spinal marrow and nerves, augmented in volume more and more, until we reach the human brain, each addition being marked by some addition to or amplification of the power of the animal, until in man we behold it possessing some parts of which animals are destitute, and wanting none which they possess.” Ascending thus the scale of sensi- [210]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22443940_0006.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
