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
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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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    imv. ill.] ONTOLOGY. IQT actions of lower animals are closely similar to the opera- tion of the highest intelligence; so that if man be in- stinctive as to many of his actions, animals are in- telligent as to many of theirs. The logical conclusion from those facts would necessarily be, that there is a fundamental identity of mental nature between men and other conscious beings; but this has been repudiated, as we have seen, and instinct has been usually attributed, when manifested in lower organisms as Thought or Intelligence, to the direct operation of the Almighty, or to something Divine. Thus Eeid: When a bee makes its comb geometrically, the geometry is not in the bee, but in that great Geometrician who made the bee, and made all things in number, weight, and mea- sure.* 73. Nevertheless, although speculative philosophy re- pudiates this community of nature, and limits the term instinctive to those actions which are performed blindly and ignorantly, or at least independently of knowledge and volition, the philosophy of common sense teaches otherwise. It clearly shows that all our mental opera- tions are, in fact, instinctive in their nature. Keid maintained, in especial, the instinctive character of our beliefs, cognitions, judgments; it is a fundamental prin- ciple in his philosophy, pervading the whole of it, and is thus defended by Sir William Hamilton : An instinct is an agent which performs blindly and ignorantly a work of intelligence and knowledge. The terms instinc- tive belief—judgment—cognition—are therefore expres- sions not ill adapted to characterise a belief, judgment, cognition, which, as the result of no anterior conscious- ness, is, like the products of animal instinct, the intelli-
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