Indeed, in extreme cases, where experiments on the brain have been
tried on lower animals, it is found that it can be entirely removed
without destroying life, or affecting many of the actions which require
perception and volition. Thus, when the brain has been entirely removed
from a pigeon, it smoothes its feathers with its bill when they have been
ruffled, and places its head under its wing when it sleeps; and a frog
under the same conditions, if held by one foot endeavours to draw it
away, and if unsuccessful, places the other foot against an obstacle in
order to get more purchase in the effort to liberate itself.
So much for the organ of mind; the other factor, that of outward
stimulus, is still more obvious. If thought cannot exist without grey
nerve-tissue, neither can it without impressions to stimulate that
tissue. A perfect brain, if cut off from all communication with the
external universe, could no more think and have perceptions, than
impressions from without could generate them without the appropriate
nerve-tissue. Once generated, the mind can store them up by memory,
control them by reason, and gradually evolve from them ever higher and
higher ideas and trains of reasoning, both in the individual and the
species:—in the individual passing from infancy to manhood, partly by
heredity from ancestors, and partly by education—using the word in the
large sense of influences of all sorts from the surrounding environment;
in the species, by a similar but much slower development from savagery to
civilisation.
Thus the whole fabric of arithmetic, algebra, and the higher calculi
are built up from the primitive perception of number. The earliest
palæolithic savage must have been conscious of a difference between
encountering one or two cave-bears or mammoths; and some existing races
of savages have hardly got beyond this primitive perception. Some
Australian tribes, it is said, have not got beyond three numerals, one,
two, and a great number. But by degrees the perceptions of number have
become more extensive and accurate, and the number of fingers on each
hand has been used as a standard of comparison. Thus ten, or two-hand,
the number of fingers on the two hands has gradually become the basis
of arithmetical numeration, and from this up to Sir W. Hamilton’s
‘Quaternions’ the progression is regular and intelligible. But Newton
could never have invented the differential calculus and solved the
problem of the heavens, if thousands of centuries before some primitive
human mind had not received the perception that two apples or two bears
were different from one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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