A first book in organic evolutionShute, D. Kerfoot (Daniel Kerfoot)
Science
A first book in organic evolution
Shute, D. Kerfoot (Daniel Kerfoot)
Evolution
The study of the human brain in its anatomical, physiological and
psychological aspects has brought great thinkers, in all ages, into
the presence of phenomena that still baffle some of the most subtle
philosophers. Here we meet with such realities as self-consciousness,
perception, intellection and volition. Are these material entities of
such character that we may say they are exclusively products of the
activity of the brain, as the secretion of bile is the product of the
activity of the liver, as Cabanis taught? To us it seems clear that
such is not the case. One cannot take the specific gravity of love or
hate, of fear or joy, as one can that of bile; one cannot find a single
physical characteristic in any psychic phenomenon. The most physical of
all mental processes, viz., perception, has its psychological as well
as its physiological phases. The instreaming, through the senses, of
impressions from the external world, may be traced by the physiologist
along the different nerves of the body to the cortex cells of the brain.
All the phenomena that occur at and between these cortex cells and the
peripheral endings of the nerves may be formulated in terms of molecular
physics. But not so with that consciousness of these impressions which
we call perception. In the light of the present knowledge that we
possess, it seems to us that the only induction which the physiologist is
warranted in making is that, associated with molecular movements in the
brain is the phenomenon of perception. This leaves the field clear for
each thinker to speculate about the subject in such manner as seems to
him most rational. And the history of philosophy shows that many thinkers
have formulated theories upon the subject that range in character from
the materialism of Büchner to the idealism of Berkeley.
The view which teaches that psychic phenomena are correlated with
the physiological phenomena of the brain; that these phenomena have
undergone parallel[17] evolution, and “are as inseparable as are the
two sides of a sheet of paper” (Dr. Carus), appeals to us as the most
comprehensible one and at the same time the one most in consonance with
the known phenomena. We accept the view, then, that there is a mind
immanent in the brain.[18] The mind is conscious of its personality;
conscious of the external world through the innumerable perceptions
which reach it through the nervous system; conscious of its power to
build its percepts into concepts, and to reason about them; conscious
of its power of choice and of causing motion; and conscious of itself,
therefore, as a cause in producing effects; and, finally, it is conscious
of its power to adapt means to an end,—in short, it knows that it has the
power to design.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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