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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    as strictly synonymous with this less ambiguous though egotistical monosyllable.* But does the word I, as commonly used, mean what Professor Ferrier states? It rather expresses the concrete Ego. Let Mind be substituted for the personal pronoun in speech, and it will be seen that the Ego, as thus used, implies the cog- nition, or consciousness, of Existence, and not mind simply; but Existence implies the synthesis of the sub- ject and the object—the union of the universal and the particular. The Ego is not, therefore, intelligence or mind, but a cognition of mind in synthesis with matter. Hence mind must be something more than the state of consciousness termed the Ego, which is simply a state of conscious existence, as unity. What that mind is, we will shortly endeavour to determine. In the meanwhile, we must adhere strictly to the facts of experience, and not vary even the millionth part. 82. Whenever Professor Ferrier uses the Ego strictly as significant of mind in the abstract, his views are admirably clear. Thus, as to what is Absolute Exist- ence—the thing of which the Ego is the consciousness— he remarks : Absolute Existence is the synthesis of the subject and object—the union of the universal and the particular—the concretion of the Ego [mind] and Non-Ego; in other words, the only true, and real, and independent Existences are minds [Egos], together-with- that-which-they-apprehend.f And again : It was formerly remarked (p. 163), that the equation, or coin- cidence, of the known and the existent is the ultimate conclusion which philosophy has to demonstrate. This demonstration has been supplied, and the conclusion reasoned out from the bottom. The universal and the * Institutes, p. 247. t Ibid. prop. x. p. 500.
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