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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    ancient speculations have been developed. The following hymn from the Vedas gives an idea of the speculative powers of the ancient Hindoo philosophers as to the origin and nature of G-od, and of His working in creation :— '; Then there was no entity nor non-entity; No world, nor sky, nor aught above it; Nothing anywhere. . . . Death was not, Nor then was Immortality, Nor distinction of the day or night; But That [i.e., God] breathed without afflation. Who knows, and shall declare, whence and why This creation took place ? The gods are subsequent to the production of this world ; Who then can know whence it proceeded, Or whence this varied world uprose ? He who in the highest heaven is ruler knows, indeed, But not another can possess this knowledge.* 198. The doctrine of the personality of the Deity has a double foundation on the experience and the intuitions of mankind. Every man feels, amidst all the multifari- ous processes of his corporeal frame, that he is one, or a person, knowing the past and present, and anticipating the future—desiring, feeling, suffering. He is all this in virtue of the laws of his existence, and eminently in virtue of the great law of adaptation to ends. Now, it is not conceivable that man should be thus personal and conscious, and his Creator (whose existence, by the terms of the argument, is admitted) should be impersonal and unconscious. It would be as easy to conceive that the cause is not equal to the effect; that the less is greater than the whole; that the contained is larger than the container. Further, all men, at all advanced in thought, * Hymn from the Vedas, Colebrook's Essays, pp. 17, 18. See also this Hymn discussed in Professor Muller's History of Sanskrit Literature, pp. 559-64.
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