Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: An essay on physiological psychology / by Robert Dunn. 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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![perceptive faculty was in abeyance, but the will was in abeyance also, and memory she had none. She had no notion that she was at home, nor the least knowledge of anything about her. She did not even know her own mother, who attended upon her with the most unwearied attention and kindness. Wherever she was placed there she remained throughout the whole day, making not the slightest voluntary effort of any kind, manifesting no uneasiness for anything to eat or to drink, and taking no heed whatever of what was going on around her. In fine, while the perceptive faculty was benumbed and paralysed, ideation, memory, and volition were alike abolished. Perceptive Consciousness.— Sensory impressions, the intui- tions of the special senses, whether sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or feelings, internal or external, in order that they may reach the perceptive consciousness, and so become idealized and registered, require to be transmitted from their respective sensory ganglia to the great hemispherical ganglia, or cerebrum, for it is there that ideation is effected, and memory resides. But if, indeed, the per- ceptive faculty should become suspended,then all the enjoyments of the feast, all the fragrance of the flowers, and the whole of the associations which they embody, vanish as with a single and magic stroke/'* And, as in this young woman's case, the most nauseous medicines would be taken quite as readily as the most delicious viands. Such, too, is the fate of all our associations in connexion with the higher and more objective of the senses, with hearing, feeling, sight. For the whole world of tone,—the grandest harmony, the softest melody, the living voices of nature, —exist not when the percipient power is in abeyance; nor with- out its agency can our tactile sensibility impart to us any know- ledge of the bodily substances by which we are impressed, or identify the impressions with the forms of the external objects that produced them. And as for light—to what do the intuitions of light and colour amount without the perceptive faculty, and what the pictured image on the retina without the perceptive organ beyond it ? To the eye, without the perceptive faculty behind it, the universe would be all dark and dreary, not a tint or a hue there, not a smile on the face of nature, nor a shade of beauty on the summer's landscape.f And thus it is that perception is the portal to intellectual action; for while in sensa- tion, the conscious mind feels intuitively the physical impulse of the outward object as it affects the consciousness through the sensorium, in perception the nervous impression is carried a stage farther, and by virtue of the harmony which exists between the percipient mind and the external world or nature, the sensory impression is intuitively trans]ated into the form of intelligence, * Morcll's Psychology. t Ibid.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21050223_0025.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
