The claims of psychology to a place in the circle of the sciences / sessional address of the President, Mr. Serjeant Cox.

  • Edward William Cox
Date:
[1878]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The claims of psychology to a place in the circle of the sciences / sessional address of the President, Mr. Serjeant Cox. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    you cannot resolve into certainties ? Be content with Physiology^ which will teach you all about form and function. Be satisfied with our happy conclusion, that Mind is a secretion from brain and Soul a myth—a fancy—the invention of Priestcraft, the paradise of fools.” Such are the objections raised to the recognition of Psychology as a Science and from the stand point of Materialism they are very powerful. Psychology, on the other hand, asserts emphatically that Mind is something more than a brain secretion, and that evidence can be adduced of the existence of Soul—(meaning by this term—the Con- scious Self—the I—the You) as a definite and distinct entity, the bodily structure being only the mechanism by means of which the communication is maintained between itself and the material world in which it dwells; ^e molecu^r structure, perhaps, being nothing more than an incrustation of the non-molecular Self, crystalised, as it were,^bout it in healthy life, dropping slowly from it in disease and parting wholly from it in death. This is a conjecture—and only as such is it advanced. Little more than conjecture is possible in the present imperfect con- dition of our knowledge. We want more facts before we can dare to dogmatise. It is the proper province of Psychology to make search for those facts. The Scientists affirm that. Mind and Soul being myths, there can be no facts, and, therefore, that search after them is time wasted and folly. At this starting point of our Science we join issue with the Materialists. M^e affirm, with absolute confidence, that there are facts and phenomena, innumerable and indisputable, that point directly to the existence of Mind and Soul, as the only probable solution of them—phenomena wholly inexplicable by and entirely inconsistent with any theory of Materialism —phenomena which almost compel to the conclusion that Intelligence is not molecular nor a condition of molecules— that Consciousness is not merely a function of matter—but ~^44]