The importance of the sensory attribute of order / by H.J. Watt.

  • Watt, Henry J. (Henry Jackson), 1879-1925.
Date:
[between 1910 and 1919?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The importance of the sensory attribute of order / by H.J. Watt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    the world in its order. Mind is in so far a mere extension of the order of the physical universe, a part of it in that respect. The currents of the world penetrate it and run through it without loss of their detail of differences. It is true we can never feel the warmth of the world’s being, its inner light and essence, the springs of its spontaneity. But we can feel and know almost its every part and movement and the principles of its changes. And if we fail not to grant it the life and spirit that we feel in ourselves, it cannot be such a wilderness of stocks and stones as many despondently believe who miss in it the rich qualities that we find in sense. With this in view we can begin to understand how it is that the brain thinks the world, as it were. The brain is a vast structure, but it is at least clearly a whole of parts. The senses enter by different portals and are housed in different regions of it. Each of them is in the first place an intimate system with its own range of simple complications. It is a patent fact that these systems come into close correlation with one another. It is not necessary to think of this, as has perhaps been the prevailing tendency, as an association of images ; it is just as likely to be the sort of correlation above ascribed to sensory space, before it is an association of images. Beyond these general indications it has as yet been impossible to carry the interpretation of brain in terms of mind. But if cognition is prevailingly ordinal in character and is an outgrowth of the complications of the ordinal attribute of sense, there can be no difficulty in carrying on the idea of progressive correlation of brain “ centres ” upwards or inwards to the hypostatisation of ’ a cerebral substitute for thought itself. It is true we do not know the location of this in the brain, nor are we perhaps likely to learn much about it soon. But it may well be accepted as a general notion for the inter- pretation of the brain as the organ of mind. The points of the brain at which occur the combinative groupings of group- ings that finally reach to the elements of sense will be the cerebral correlatives of the thoughts whose mental function is a similar grouping of groupings of sense-data. In the brain substrate of the qualities of sense we have probably the highest possible development of the (chemical ?) specialisations of neural matter, especially in vision, smell and taste, and hearing. In the other senses there is more homogeneity, though they doubtless differ somewhat from one another. The neural correlate of ordinal differences and their integrative complications and finally of thoughts may well be a still more primitive and generalised process. We can hardly tell. But at least it should be no longer difficult to think of the brain as the organ of the cognitive mind.