Essays in scientific synthesis / by Eugenio Rignano.

  • Eugenio Rignano
Date:
[1918]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Essays in scientific synthesis / by Eugenio Rignano. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    state, whose respective activations constitute the differ¬ ent forms of irritability of the living substance, repre¬ sent in their active state so many specific modes of being of one and the same elementary phenomenon, characteristic of the living substance. On the other hand, apart even from all the innumerable examples which go to show that the physiological effects of our recollections are identical with those of real sensations, Wundt’s experiment alone—in which the very intense mnemic evocation of a given colour, while we look fixedly at any white surface or figure, causes the appearance of the complementary colour— and all the other analogous experiments which this later suggested, are enough to show what Maudsley had all along maintained, that the remembrance of a sensation is nothing but the reproduction or reactiva¬ tion of the very identical “ specific ” current which constituted the original sensation. It follows that the specific accumulation, for example, of a certain sensorial psychical centre, on which there¬ fore exclusively depends its “ specific irritability,” is really due to nothing but the accumulation made in the past in this psychic centre of the same specific nervous current which it can now give as a current of discharge, and which at that time on the contrary acted as a current of charge. If this conclusion is, as we may say, self-imposed with respect to real psycho-mnemic phenomena, in which the fact of the nervous energy produced by the discharge of the respective centre appears in the first rank, while the physico-chemical phenomena accom¬ panying this discharge pass to the second rank, then—
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