Body and mind : an inquiry into their connection and mutual influence, specially in reference to mental disorders : being the Gulstonian lectures for 1870, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians : with appendix / by Henry Maudsley.
- Maudsley Henry, 1835-1918.
- Date:
- 1870
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Body and mind : an inquiry into their connection and mutual influence, specially in reference to mental disorders : being the Gulstonian lectures for 1870, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians : with appendix / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![X.] EDUCATJON OF NER VE-CENTRES. Unlike the bee and the ant, man must slowly learn the use of his senses and their respondent movements. This he does by virtue of the fundamental property of nerve-centres, whereby they react in a definite way to suitable impressions, organically register their experience, and so acquire by education their special faculties. Thus it is that many of the daily actions of our life, which directly follow impressions on the senses, take place in answer to sensations that are not perceived—become, so to speak, instinctive; some of them being not a whit less automatic than the instinctive acts of the bee, or the acts of the pigeon deprived of its hemispheres. When we move about in a room with the objects in which we are quite familiar, we direct our steps so as to avoid them, without being conscious what they are, or what we are doing; we see them, as we easily discover if we try to move about in the same way with our eyes shut, but we stincts wliich they manifest can have been acquired originally, except by virtue of some such power. But the power in them now is evi- dently of a rudimentary kind, and must remain so while they have not those higher nerve-centres in which the sensations are combined into ideas, and perceptions of the relations of things are acquired. Granting, however, that the bee or ant has these traces of adaptive action, it must be allowed that they are truly rudiments of functions, which in the supreme nerve-centres we designate as reason and volition. Such a confession might be a trouble to a metaphysical physiologist, who would thereupon find it necessary to place a meta- physical entity behind the so-called instincts of the bee, but can be no trouble to the inductive physiologist; he simply recognizes an illustration of a physiological diffusion of properties, and of the physical conditions of primitive volition, and traces in the evolution of mind and its organs, as in the evolution of other functions and their organs, a progressive specialization and increasing complexity.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21694540_0035.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
