Consciousness / by Henry Rutgers Marshall.

  • Henry Rutgers Marshall
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Consciousness / by Henry Rutgers Marshall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    rest of the nervous system, but as a special part which has developed within the small confines of the skull, and which, in being thus crowded into a compact space, has become much folded up, this crowding involving a much closer relation between the parts there located than is observed in the rest of the nervous system. We thus find a mass of important parts of the system concentrated in the brain, the activities in which correspond with very marked changes in our mental life ; and many thinkers have thus come to look upon the brain as the “ organ of mind ” ; and to consider the activities of the rest of the nervous system as either of relatively small importance, or as of no importance whatever, in relation to our mental life. If the nervous system had been so arranged that this crowding within the skull had not occurred, it is highly improbable that we would have ever been tempted to look upon the activities of any part of the nervous system as without importance in relation to the correspondence between neural activities and changes in consciousness which we are here considering. Sec. 4. The acute investigations of the neurologist during the last century have enormously increased our knowledge of the nature of this nervous system, and have brought out clearly one fact of great importance to the psychologist. They have taught us that the nervous system is not a simple system, but is really a system of minor systems of hypothetical nervous elements. Within the nervous system, taken as a whole, we find minor systems of the first order ; one (a) which has to do with environmental stimulation ; another (7) which has to do with the organism’s reaction upon its environment ; and another very broad system (/3) which has to do with the coordination of minor nervous systems (a) and (7). And within these minor nervous systems of the first order we find nervous systems of lower orders, one within another in indefinite number. Each minor nervous system of one of the lower orders is
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