Volume 1

Mind and brain, or, The correlations of consciousness and organisation : systematically investigated and applied to philosophy, mental science and practice / by Thomas Laycock.

Thomas Laycock

Date:: 1869

Credit: Mind and brain, or, The correlations of consciousness and organisation : systematically investigated and applied to philosophy, mental science and practice / by Thomas Laycock. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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$respect, and to this extent our organs are not external to ourselves.* 54. Philosophy thus joins with the common sense of mankind in affirming that the man is not mind alone nor matter alone. Hence we find that those philosophers who oppose the doctrine of unconscious, i. e. latent, states of mental existence, equally with those who advocate it, advance proofs or objections founded on the premiss that the soul in action is not separate from the hody—that is, is a dualism in unity. Thus Locke, who opposed the doc- trine, draws his arguments entirely from his experience of his corporeal states, just as Sir William Hamilton, who supported it, attempts to establish it by experi- mental research on himself during a particular corporeal state. And Locke's argument is therefore perfectly well founded. We know, certainly, he says, by experi- ence, that we sometimes think, and thence draw this in- fallible consequence, that there is something in us that has a power to think ; but whether that substance per- petually thinks or no, we can be no further assured than [the same] experience informs us. The state of exist- ence usually selected as the battle-ground is that of sleep. So Locke says: Wake a man out of a sound sleep, and ask him what he was at that moment thinking on. If he himself be conscious of nothing he then thought on, he must be a notable diviner of thoughts that can assure him that he was thinking : may he not, with more reason, assure him that he was not asleep ? f Cudworth in like manner appeals to experience, in opposition to the Cartesians : Those philosophers themselves, who make the essence of the soul to consist in cogitation; and • Reid's Works—Supp. Dissertations, note D*, p. 880, foot-note, t Essay on the Human Understanding, book ii. chap. 1, \\ 9, 10-14, sqq.$