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.

    451/470 (page 411)
    inv. IX.] BIOLOGY. 41 t relation with corresponding affinitive impressions (2lj2), when the primordial cell is placed under similar condi- tions, the same, or rather similar affinitive impressions are received, and the parental series of vital energies and changes are reproduced in the offspring. In this way the two processes of synesis and parent-like evolution constitute the memory of the species or the variety. So also when encephalic or mnemonic synesis has been com- pleted, whether in connection with volitions or thoughts, as a manifestation of the retentive or conservative faculty; if affinitive impressions similar to those under which the synesis was completed be subsequently brought into rela- tion with the brain-tissue thus modified, there is analo- gous reproduction of the correlative vital changes, and evolution and differentiation of new encephalic changes in orderly succession, as reminiscences or not, coinciding with new trains and associations of ideas. Accordingly, as the new mnemonic synesis is perfected under the act of energy termed attention, or not (28), the synetic changes become the bases of latent states of consciousness (p. 174), or of unconscious cerebral action (61, G3, 65), with an intui- tion, but not necessarily a perception of past time. These reminiscences may be of syneses widely distant in time, or different in regard to consciousness. The reminis- cences of syneses elTected during sleep (hypnotic synesis), if reproduced to the consciousness out of relation to the affinitive impressions with which they originated, give origin to a large class of insane delusions and mysterious feelings. Or they may be reminiscences of atavistic syneses ; for just as ancestral qualities of body and mind descend to offspring in successive generations, or are derived from ancestors through at least several genera- tions, if not backwards ad infinitum, so may these mne- monic syneses descend. In this way are evolved a class