Remarks on the Brunonian system ... / [James Jackson].

  • James Jackson
Date:
1809
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on the Brunonian system ... / [James Jackson]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    from this principle any thing except what our actual knowledge of the individual properties of living beings will authorise. To prevent incon- venience, this imaginary principle will be referred to in these observations; and sometimes under the name given to it by Dr. Brown. ‘This name is excitability. Ir it were certain that there is such a principle, although its nature be not well understood, it might be lawful to give to it any arbitrary appel- lation for the convenience of referring to it. But such a principle should not receive a name which implies any peculiar character, unless that cha- racter certainly belongs and is appropriate to it. Brown employs the term excitability as synoni- mous with the principle of life. In the fifteenth ‘paragraph of his Elements of Medicine, taken in connection with some others which precede, we ascertain the extent of signification in which the term is employed. The exciting powers, he says, act on the excitability, and ‘“‘ the effects common to all the exciting powers are sense, motion, men- tal exertion, and passion.”’ It would seem, then, that under this name of excitability he includes those various properties on which depend sense; motion, &c. These properties are known by the names of irritability, mobility, sensibility, per- ception, memory, judgment, volition, mmagina- tion, and passion. He thus makes the most of the term, which its original signification will permit. But, thus ex-
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