How to Read Human Nature: Its Inner States and Outer Forms — John Shaqi
How to Read Human Nature: Its Inner States and Outer FormsAtkinson, William Walker
Science
How to Read Human Nature: Its Inner States and Outer Forms
Atkinson, William Walker
Character; Personality; Phrenology; Physiognomy
Marsh says: "Every human movement, every organic act, every volition,
passion, or emotion, every intellectual process, is accompanied with
atomic disturbance." Picton says: "The soul never does one single action
by itself apart from some excitement of bodily tissue." Emerson says:
"The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river its
channel in the soil; the animal its bones in the stratum; the fern and
leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its
sculpture in the sand or stone.... The ground is all memoranda and
signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to the
intelligent. In nature this self-registration is incessant." Morell
says: "The mind depends for the manifestation of all its activities upon
a material organism." Bain says: "The organ of the mind is not the brain
by itself; it is the brain, nerve, muscles, organs of sense, viscera....
It is uncertain how far even thought, reminiscence, or the emotions of
the past and absent could be sustained without the more distant
communication between the brain and the rest of the body." And, thus, as
we consider the subject carefully we see that psychology is as much
concerned with the physical manifestations of the mental impulses and
states as with the metaphysical aspect of those states--as much with the
Outer Form as with the Inner State--for it is practically impossible to
permanently separate them.
As an illustration of the physical accompaniment or Outer Form, of the
psychical feeling or Inner State, the following quotation from Darwin's
"Origin of the Emotions," will well serve the purpose:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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