Idee einer neuen Hirnanatomie (1811) : Originaltext und Übersetzung / Charles Bell ; mit Einleitung herausgegeben von Erich Ebstein.

  • Charles Bell
Date:
1911
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Idee einer neuen Hirnanatomie (1811) : Originaltext und Übersetzung / Charles Bell ; mit Einleitung herausgegeben von Erich Ebstein. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    If light, pressure, galvanism, or electricity produce vision, we must conclude that the idea in the mind is the result of an action excited in the eye or in the hrain, not of any thing received, though caused by an impression from without. The operations of the mind are confined not by the limited nature of things created, but by the limited number of our organs of sense. By induction we know that things exist which yet are not brought under the operation of the senses. When we have never known the operation of one of the organs of the five senses, we can never know the ideas pertaining to that sense; and what would be the effect on our minds, even constituted as they now are, with a superadded organ of sense, no man can distinctly imagine. As we are parts of the creation, so God has bound us to the material world by this law of our nature, that it shall require excitement from without, and an operation [13] produced by the action of things external to rouse our faculties: But that once brought into activity, the organs can be put in exercise by the mind, and be made to minister to the me- mory and imagination, and all the faculties of the soul. i I shall hereafter shew, that the operations of the mind y are seated in the great mass of the cerebrum, while the parts of the brain to which the nerves of sense tend, strictly form ; the seat of the sensation, being the internal organs of sense. ' These organs are operated upon in two directions. They re- ceive the impression from without, as from the eye and ear: and as their action influences the operations of the brain pro- ducing perception, so are they brought into action and suffer changes similar to that which they experience from external pressure by the operation of the will; or, as I am now treat- ing of the subject anatomically by the operation of the great j mass of the brain upon them. [14] In all regulated actions of the muscles we must acknow- ; ledge that they are influenced through the same nerves, by the same operation of the sensorium. Now the operations of the body are as nice and curious, and as perfectly regulated , before Reason has sway, as they are at any time after, when ; the muscular frame might be supposed to be under the guidance .