Psychology : normal and morbid / by Charles A. Mercier.

  • Charles Arthur Mercier
Date:
[1901]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Psychology : normal and morbid / by Charles A. Mercier. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    wields the entire forces of the body over which it presides. It is to the governing body or individual that all representations are made, that all correspondence is directed, and it is by it that all acts done by the body corporate are devised and initiated. The function of the highest strata of the nervous system, which are the substrata of consciousness, are strictly analogous to those of the governing powers of such aggregates as have been instanced. These supreme regions of the regulating apparatus have a similar twofold function. They regulate the internal processes of the body in due proportion to one another; they preserve harmonious and co-operative relations between the actions of the several parts of the body; and in addition to this, they represent the whole body in all traffic between the body and agencies external to it. It is to the highest nerve regions that are conducted all impressions made upon the body from without. It is by the highest nerve regions that all acts done by the whole body are devised and initiated. It is by them that the whole forces of the body are wielded and directed. It is in them that the self is summar- ised. It is by them that the commerce between the self and the not- self is carried on. For practical purposes the highest nerve regions are the individual. The rest of the body is an apparatus to sustain them and to serve them. Consciousness, which is the accompaniment of the action of the highest nerve regions, exhibits two main and fundamental departments corresponding to the main and fundamental divisions of the functions of the highest nerve regions. Those activities which regulate the internal bodily processes have for their accompaniment the conscious- ness of self, or, as it is sometimes termed, subject consciousness. Those activities which regulate the commerce between the self and the world outside of self have for their accompaniment the con- sciousness of this external world and of its relations to the self, or, as it is sometimes called, object consciousness. The commerce between the individual and the world in which he lives consists manifestly of three prime factors: reception of motion, modification of motion, and emission of motion; and these three prime factors in the physical commerce between the body and the surrounding world correspond with three prime factors in the constitu- tion of mind—Sensation, Thought, and Will. Sensation arises during, and corresponds generally with, the reception of motion by the in- dividual. Thought arises during, and corresponds with, the combina-
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