Brain as an organ of mind

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Appleton, 1880 - 708 pages
 

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Page 540 - follows upon the command of our Will. Of this we are every moment conscious. But the means by which this is effected ; the energy by which the Will performs so extraordinary an operation ; of this we are so far from being immediately conscious, that it must ever escape our diligent inquiry.
Page 231 - variations of instincts : that is of variations produced by the same unknown causes which produce slight deviations of bodily structure For peculiar habits confined to the workers or sterile females, however long they might be followed, could not possibly affect the males and fertile females which alone leave descendants.
Page 230 - Under domestication instincts have been acquired, and natural instincts have been lost, partly by habit, and partly by man selecting and accumulating during successive generations peculiar mental habits and actions, which at first appeared from •what we must in our ignorance call an accident. In some cases compulsory habit alone
Page 230 - periods of life, or at different seasons of the year, or when placed under different circumstances, &c. ; in which case either the one or the other instinct might be preserved by natural selection. And such instances of diversity of instinct in the same species can be shown to occur in nature.
Page 153 - second place we have every reason for believing that there is, in company with all our mental processes, an unbroken material succession. From the ingress of a sensation to the outgoing responses in action, the mental succession is not for an instant dissevered from a physical succession
Page 543 - of Deliberation, and, concerning this process, Hobbes says : —" The whole sum of desires, aversions, hopes and fears, continued till the thing be either done or thought impossible, is what we call Deliberation." " Appetite, therefore, and aversion are simply
Page 197 - There cannot be co-ordination of many stimuli without some ganglion through which they are all brought into relation, this ganglion must be subject to the influence of each—must undergo many changes. And the quick succession of changes in a ganglion, implying as it does perpetual experiences of differences and likenesses, constitutes the raw material of Consciousness.
Page 153 - It would be incompatible with everything we know of cerebral action, to suppose that the physical chain ends abruptly in a physical void, occupied by an immaterial substance ; which immaterial substance, after working alone, imparts its results to the other edge of the physical break, and determines the active response—two shores of the material with an intervening ocean of the immaterial.
Page 412 - The concept thus formed by an abstraction of the resembling from the non-resembling qualities of objects, would again fall back into the confusion and infinitude from which it has been called out, were it not rendered permanent for consciousness, by being fixed and ratified in a verbal sign.
Page 540 - a Power to begin or forbear, continue or end several Actions of our Minds and Motions of our Bodies, barely by a Thought or preference of the Mind.

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