Ants and Some Other Insects: An Inquiry Into the Psychic Powers of These AnimalsForel, Auguste
Science
Ants and Some Other Insects: An Inquiry Into the Psychic Powers of These Animals
Forel, Auguste
Insects -- Biology; Psychology, Comparative
Bethe, Uexkull, and others would require us to hold fast to the
physiological method, because it alone is exact and restricts itself to
what can be weighed and measured. This, too, is an error which has been
refuted from time immemorial. Only pure mathematics is exact, because
in its operations it makes use solely of equations of abstract numbers.
The concrete natural sciences can never be exact and are as unable
to subsist without the inductive method of inference from analogy as
a tree without its roots. Bethe and Uexkull do not seem to know that
knowledge is merely relative. They demand absolute exactitude and
cannot understand that such a thing is impossible. Besides, physiology
has no reason to pride itself upon the peculiar exactitude of its
methods and results.
Although we know that our whole psychology appears as the activity of
our cerebrum in connection with the activities of more subordinate
nerve-centers, the senses and the muscles, nevertheless for didactic
purposes it may be divided into the psychology of cognition, of
feeling and volition. Relatively speaking, this subdivision has
an anatomico-physiological basis. Cognition depends, in the first
instance, on the elaboration of sense-impressions by the brain; the
will represents the psycho- or cerebrofugal resultants of cognition
and the feelings together with their final transmission to the
muscles. The feelings represent general conditions of excitation of a
central nature united with elements of cognition and with cerebrofugal
impulses, which are relatively differentiated and refined by the
former, but have profound hereditary and phylogenetic origins and are
relatively independent. There is a continual interaction of these three
groups of brain-activities upon one another. Sense-impressions arouse
the attention; this necessitates movements; the latter produce new
sense-impressions and call for an active selection among themselves.
Both occasion feelings of pleasure and pain and these again call
forth movements of defense, flight, or desire, and bring about fresh
sense-impressions, etc. Anatomically, at least, the sensory pathways
to the brain and their cortical centers are sharply separated from the
centers belonging to the volitional pathways to the muscles. Further
on in the cerebrum, however, all three regions merge together in many
neurons of the cortex.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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