The Brain as an Organ of Mind

Front Cover
Appleton, 1887 - 708 pages

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 233 - Under changed conditions of life, it is at least possible that slight modifications of instinct might be profitable to a species; and if it can be shown that instincts do vary ever so little, then I can see no difficulty in natural selection preserving and continually accumulating variations of instinct to any extent that may be profitable. It is thus, as I believe, that all the most complex and wonderful instincts have originated.
Page 152 - It would be incompatible with everything we know of the 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 157 - ... by the action of the legs, and the same will take place in the separate parts if the body be divided into several distinct portions. After these actions have come to an end, they may be excited again by irritating any part of the nervous centres, or the cut extremity of the nervous cord. The body is moved forward by the regular and successive action of the legs...
Page 173 - ... one, is the result. Ideas, also, which have been so often conjoined, that whenever one exists in the mind, the others immediately exist along with it, seem to run into one another, to coalesce, as it were, and out of many to form one idea; which idea, however in reality complex, appears to be no less simple than any one of those of which it is compounded.
Page 546 - The motion of our body 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 for ever escape our most diligent enquiry.
Page 325 - When asked how he could possibly learn so soon whether a particular monkey would turn out a good actor, he answered that it all depended on their power of attention. If, when he was talking and explaining anything to a monkey, its attention was easily distracted, as by a fly on the wall or other trifling object, the case was hopeless.
Page 422 - Between the extremes of human intelligence — say a Tasmanian and a Shakespeare — there are infinitesimal gradations, enabling us to follow the development of the one into the other without the introduction of any essentially new factor. But between animal and human intelligence there is a gap which can only be bridged over by an addition from without.
Page 248 - Zoology (the stoparola of Ray) builds every year in the vines that grow on the walls of my house. A pair of these little birds had one year inadvertently placed their nest on a naked bough, perhaps in a shady time, not being aware of the inconvenience that followed. But...
Page 248 - But a hot sunny season coming on before the brood was half fledged, the reflection of the wall became insupportable, and must inevitably have destroyed the tender young, had not affection suggested an expedient, and prompted the parent birds to hover over the nest all the hotter hours, while, with wings expanded, and mouths gaping for breath, they screened off the heat from their suffering offspring.
Page 167 - ... in these modifications, a quality, a phenomenon of mind, absolutely new, has been superadded, which was never involved in, and could therefore never have been evolved out of, the mere faculty of knowledge. The faculty of knowledge is certainly the first in order, inasmuch as it is the conditio sine qua non of the others...

Bibliographic information