Insanity : its dependence on physical disease ... / by John P. Gray.

  • Gray, John P. (John Purdue), 1825-1886.
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insanity : its dependence on physical disease ... / by John P. Gray. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    outward manifestations. We conclude with the same certainty that the brain in some manner digests the impressions; that it produces organically the secretion of thought. This, then, fully resolves the difficulty raised by those who, re- garding sensation as a passive faculty, do not understand how the acts of judging, reasoning, imagining, should be nothing else but perceiving. This difficulty vanishes, when we recognize, in all these different operations, only the action of the brain upon the impressions which are transmitted to it. But if, moreover, we observe that the movement, of which every action of the organs presupposes the existence, is in the animal economy only a modification,—a transformation,—of sensa- tion, we shall see that we are excused from making any changes in the doctrine of the modern analysts, and that all the physiological or moral phenomena are always brought back, in the last result, to the faculty of sensation. [Cabanis, Rarpports du Physique et du Moral de V homme^ vol. i, p., 124.] Recently Dr, W. A. Hammond, of New York, in a work on Slee])^ and its Derangements^^'' Las reasserted tkis old theory, and expresses liis views of mind in tlie following language : Writers who contend for the doctrine of constant mental activ- ity, regard the brain as the organ or tool of the mind; a structure which the mind makes use of in order to manifest itself Such a theory is certain to lead them into difficulties, and is contrary to all the teaching of physiology. The full discussion of this question would be out of place here; I will, therefore, only state that this work is written from the stand-point of regarding the mind as nothing more than the result of cerebral action. Just as a good liver secretes good bile, a good candle gives good light, and good coal a good fire, so does a good brain give a good mind. When the brain is quiescent there is no mind. It will tlius be seen tliat the introduction of material- istic theories, even into the domain of psychology, is nothing new. Neither is Cabanis the only French writer who has pushed Locke's theory of sensation to its ultimate results of materialism and atheism But it would be a thing much to be deprecated, that the gen-