The brain in relation to the mind / by Joseph Swan.

  • Joseph Swan
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The brain in relation to the mind / by Joseph Swan. 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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    eye or ear, their meanings are acquired by pointing to any familiar objects they represent. When words and their meanings have been thus learnt, one can be chosen and adopted for another without pointing to any familiar object; and when such information has accumulated, one or more words can be made to represent ideas. When ideas have been multiplied, the process of thinking can be commenced on a larger scale, by which one idea is compared with another, and the result is either stored up in the mind, or written, or spoken. Every day furnishes fresh information : this is compared with the preceding results of thinking, and the stock of knowledge becomes enlarged or corrected. A great portion of it may remain fixed in the brain, but the result or meaning is preserved in the mind. The act of thinking may therefore be considered as a comparison of the ideas, and a judgment or determination for rejecting some of them, and retaining and combining the rest. The forms of the letters and words being fixed in the brain and mind, they can by memory be conveyed from thence to the tongue without any fresh impulse from the organs of sense, but by the same means of the voluntary tract. Afterwards ideas may also be restored and conveyed by the same process, and then all the information that has
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