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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    the scientific point of view which I propose, we see more general causes in operation, and learn that high aesthetic development and an all-pervading love of sensual plea- sures are coincident, and due to the same causes. It is therefore in a discovery of the laws of correlation of the moral and physical or vital forces, as they co-operate in the material organ of the mind, and their application to sociology, that a true mental science would win its highest triumphs; for a nation could thus be carried safely forward, by an applied philosophy of cerebral action, through successive phases of development, to the highest attainable pitch of physical, intellectual, and moral vigour, with the highest aesthetic perfection. There is one other object to be mentioned, to which a practical science of mind would be subservient, and that is the complete development of philosophy itself. Such a science must necessari]y investigate the laws of thought in correlation with the laws of life, or, in other words, develop the laws of Being. These would be the neces- sary laws of reason and existence. They would consti- tute the first principles of a science of human nature, comprising within it all the laws of thought and of lan- guage, as well as the laws of morals. Such a develop- ment would be the necessary consummation of all human science upon a knowledge of the Divine. These, then, are the great objects of a full and complete mental science, in relation with a philosphical physio- logy. It is co-extensive in its scope with created things. It investigates the action of the physical forces, that it may determine their relations to the forces of life and organisation ; it investigates the vital forces, that it may develop the relations of life and organisation to mind; and it investigates the phenomena of mind in their rela- tions to physical and vital forces as operative in the