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tion unimpaired; the other destroys the power of motion, but does not affect sensation. That the central organ of the nervous system, the brain, must in some way or other coöperate in all sensation, and in all muscular motion except that which is actually automatic and mechanical, is also certain; for if the nervous continuity between any part of the body and the brain is interrupted, either by the division of the nerve, or by pressure on any intermediate portion, unfitting it to perform its functions, sensation and voluntary motion in that part cease to exist. That the memory or thought of a sensation formerly experienced has also for its necessary condition a state of the brain, and of the same nerves which transmit the sensation itself, does not admit of the same direct proof by experiment; but is, at least, a highly probable hypothesis. When we consider that in dreams, hallucinations, and some highly excited states of the nervous system, the idea or remembrance of a sensation is actually mistaken for the sensation itself; and also that the idea, when vividly excited, not unfrequently produces the same effects on the whole bodily frame which the sensation would produce, it is hardly possible, in the face of all this resemblance, to suppose any fundamentally different machinery for their production, or any real difference in their physical conditions, except one of degree. The instrumentality of the brain in thought is a more mysterious subject ; the evidence is less direct, and its inter

science. Belonging essentially to the association school, he has not only, with great clearness and copiousness, illustrated, popularized, and enforced by fresh arguments all which that school had already done towards the explanation of the phenomena of mind, but he has added so largely to it, that those who have the highest appreciation and the warmest admiration of his predecessors, are likely to be the most struck with the great advance which this treatise constitutes over what those predecessors had done, and the improved position in which it places their psychological theory. Mr. Bain possesses, indeed, an union of qualifications peculiarly fitting him for what, in the language of Dr. Brown, may be called the physical investigation of mind. With analytic powers comparable to those of his most distinguished predecessors, he combines a range of appropriate knowledge still wider than theirs; having made a more accurate study than perhaps any previous psychologist of the whole round of the physical sciences, on which the mental depend both for their methods, and for the necessary material substratum of their theories; while those sciences, also, are themselves in a far higher state of advancement than in any former age. This is especially true of the science most nearly allied, both in subject and method, with psychological in vestigations, the science of Physiology; which Hartley, Brown, and Mill had unquestionably studied, and knew perhaps as well as it was known by any one at the time when they studied it, but in a super-pretation has given rise to some of the ficial manner compared with Mr. Bain; the science having in the mean while assumed almost a new aspect, from the important discoveries which have been made in all its branches, and especially in the functions of the nervous system, since even the latest of those authors wrote.

Mr. Bain commences his work with a full and luminous exposition of what is known of the structure and functions of the nervous system. What may be called the outward action of the nervous system is two-fold sensation and muscular motion; and one of the great physiological discoveries of the present age is, that these two functions are performed by means of two distinct sets of nerves, in close juxtaposition, one of which, if separately severed or paralyzed, puts an end to sensation in the part of the body which it supplies, but leaves the power of mo

keenest controversies of our era, controversies yet far from being conclusively decided. But the general connection is attested by many indisputable pathological facts, such as the effect of cerebral inflammation in producing delirium; the relation between idiocy and cerebral malformation or disease; and is confirmed by the entire range of comparative anatomy, which shows the intellectual faculties of the various species of animals bearing, if not an exact ratio, yet a very unequivocal relation, to the development in proportional size, and complexity of structure, of the cerebral hemispheres.

However imperfect our knowledge may still be in regard to this part of the func tions of the nervous system, it is certain that all our sensations depend upon the transmission of some sort of nervous influence inward, from-the senses to the brain,

and that our voluntary motions take place | Activity can not possibly be generated by the transmission of some sort of nerv- from passive elements; a primitive active ous influence outward, from the brain to element must be found somewhere; and the muscular system; these two nervous Hartley found it in the stimulative power operations being, as already observed, the of sensation over the muscles. All our functions of two distinct systems of nerves, muscular motions, according to him, were called respectively the nerves of sensation originally automatic, and excited by the and those of motion. It is now necessary stimulus of sensations; as, no doubt, many to notice another physiological truth, of them were and are. After a muscular brought to light only within the present contraction has been sufficiently often exgeneration, namely, the different functions cited by a sensation, then, in Hartley's of the two kinds of matter of which the opinion, the idea or remembrance of the nervous system is compounded. The sensation acquires a similar power of exnerves consist partly of gray vesicular or citing that same muscular contraction. cell-like matter, partly of white fibrous Here is the first germ of volition-a musmatter. Physiologists are now of opinion cular action excited by an idea. After that the function of the gray matter is that this, every combination of associated ideas of originating power, while the white fib- into which that idea or remembrance enrous matter is simply a conductor which ters, and which, therefore, can not be conveys the influence to and from the recalled without recalling it, obtains the brain, and between one part of the brain power of recalling also the muscular moand another. With this physiological dis- tion which has come under its control. covery is connected the first capital im- This is Hartley's notion of the point of provement which Mr. Bain has made in junction between our intellectual states the Association Psychology as left by his and our muscular actions, which is the predecessors; the nature of which we foundation of the theory of Volition. It now proceed to indicate. involves two assumptions, both of which are merely hypothetical. One is, that all muscular action is originally excited by sensations; which has never been proved, and which there is much evidence to contradict. The other is, that between the primitive automatic character of a muscu

amenability to the will, an intermediate condition is passed through, of excitability by the idea of the sensation by which the motion was at first excited; that the intervention of this idea is necessary in all cases of voluntary power; and that the recalling of it is the indispensable machinery of voluntary action. This is a mere hypothesis, which consciousness does not vouch for, and which no evidence has been brought to substantiate.

Those who have studied the writings of the Association Psychologists, must often have been unfavorably impressed by the almost total absence, in their analytical expositions, of the recognition of any active element, or spontaneity, in the mind itself. Sensation, and the memory of sen-lar contraction and its ultimate state of sation, are passive phenomena; the mind, in them, does not act, but is acted upon; it is a mere recipient of impressions; and though adhesion by association may enable one of these passive impressions to recall another, yet when recalled, it is but passive still. A theory of association which stops here, seems adequate to account for our dreams, our reveries, our casual thoughts, and states of mere contemplation, but for no other part of our nature. The mind, however, is active as well as passive; and the apparent insufficiency of the theory to account for the mind's activity, is probably the circumstance which has oftenest operated to alienate from the Association Psychology any of those who had really studied it. Coleridge, who was one of these, and in the early part of his life a decided Hartleian, has left on record, in his Biographia Literaria, that such was the fact in his own case. Yet, no Hartleian could overlook the necessity, incumbent on any theory of the mind, of accounting for our voluntary powers.

Mr. Bain has made a great advance on this theory. Those who are acquainted with the French metaphysical writers of this century, or even with the first paper of M. Cousin's Fragments Philosophiques, will remember the important modification made by M. Laromiguière in Condillac's psychological system. M. Laromiguière had noted in Condillae the same defect which has been pointed out in the Association philosophers; and as Condillac had placed the passive phenomenon, Sensation, at the center of his system, M. Laromiguière corrected him by putting instead

"Dr. Reid has no hesitation in classing the

voluntary command of an organ—that is, the
of will-among instincts. The power of lifting a
sequence of feeling and action implied in all acts
morsel of food to the mouth is, according to
him, an instinctive or preëstablished conjunc-
tion of the wish and the deed; that is to say,
the emotional state of hunger, coupled with the
sight of a piece of bread, is associated through
the several movements of the hand, arm, and
a primitive link of the mental constitution with
mouth concerned in the act of eating. This
assertion of Dr. Reid's may be simply met by
appealing to the facts. It is not true that hu-
man beings possess at birth any voluntary com-
mand of their limbs whatsoever. A babe of
two months old can not use its hands in
obedience to its desires. The infant can grasp
nothing, hold nothing, can scarcely fix its eyes
assert that the movements of a ballet-dancer are
on anything. Dr. Reid might just as easily
instinctive, or that we are born with an already
established link of causation in our minds
between the wish to paint a landscape and the
movements of a painter's arm.
perfect command of our voluntary movements
less perfect command of these movements that
implied in every art be an acquisition, so is the
life.....
grows upon a child during the first years of

of it, the active phenomenon, Attention, | been excited by the spontaneous energies as the fundamental fact by which to ex- of our organization. Mr. Bain's reason plain the active half of the mental phenom- for preferring the latter theory, is merely ena. Mr. Bain's theory (the germ of that the evidence is in its favor; that no which is in a passage cited by him from other is consistent with observation of the eminent physiologist, Müller) stands children and young animals. We will in nearly the same relation to Hartley's as exhibit a part of the exposition in his own Laromiguière's to that of Condillac. He words: has widened his basis by the admission of a second primitive element. He holds that the brain does not act solely in obedience to impulses, but is also a selfacting instrument; that the nervous influence which, being conveyed through the motory nerves, excites the muscles into action, is generated automatically in the brain itself, not, of course, lawlessly and without a cause, but under the organic stimulus of nutrition; and manifests itself in the general rush of bodily activity, which all healthy animals exhibit after food and repose, and in the random motions which we see constantly made without apparent end or purpose by infants. This doctrine, of which the accumulated proofs will be found in Mr. Bain's first volume, (pages 73 to 80) supplies him with a simple explanation of the origin of voluntary power. Among the numerous motions given forth indiscriminately by the spontaneous energy of the nervous center, some are accidentally hit on, which are found to be followed by a pleasure, or by the relief of a pain. In this case, the child is able, to a certain extent, to prolong that particular motion, or to abate it; and this, in our author's opinion, is the sole original power which we possess over our bodily motions, and the ultimate basis of voluntary action. The pleasure which the motion produces, or the pain which it relieves, determines the detention or relinquishment of that particular muscular movement. Why there is this natural tendency to detain or to get rid of a muscular contraction which influences our sensations, as well as why that tendency is towards pleasure and from pain, instead of being the reverse, can not be explained. The author's reason for considering this to be our only original power over our bodily movements, is not that the supposition affords any help in clearing up the mystery, or possesses any superiority of antecedent probability; for it is just as likely à priori, that we should be able, by a wish, to select and originate a bodily movement, as that we should merely be able to prolong one which has already

If the more

There

"But the acquisition must needs repose upon some fundamental property of our nature that may properly be styled an instinct. It is this initial germ or rudiment that I am now anxious to fasten upon and make apparent. certainly does exist in the depths of our constiings, especially the painful class, impel to action tution a property, whereby certain of our feelof some kind or other. This, which I have termed the volitional property of feeling, is not an acquired property. From the earliest infancy a pain has a tendency to excite the active organs, as well as the emotional expression, although as yet there is no channel prepared whereby the members. The child whose foot is pricked by stimulus may flow towards the appropriate a needle in its dress is undoubtedly impelled by an active stimulus, but as no primitive link exists between an irritation in the foot and the movement of the hand towards the part affected, the stimulus is wasted on vain efforts, and there is nothing to be done but to drown the pain by erty of almost every feeling of pain to stimulate the outburst of pure emotion. It is the propsome action for the extinction or abatement of that pain; it is likewise the property of many emotions of pleasure to stimulate an action for

the continuance and increase of the pleasure; | movement out of dormancy; this is the state of but the primitive impulse does not in either case determine which action. . . . . .

matters in the maturity of volition. The infant of twelve months, under the stimulus of cold, can hitch nearer the side of the nurse, although no spontaneous movements to that effect happen at the moment; past reflection has established a connection that did not exist at the beginning, whereby the feeling and action have become linked together as cause and effect.”—The Senses and the Intellect, pp. 292 6.

"If at the moment of some acute pain, there should accidentally occur a spontaneous movement, and if that movement sensibly alleviates the pain, then it is that the volitional impulse belonging to the feeling will show itself. The movement accidentally begun through some other influence, will be sustained through this influence of the painful emotion. In the original situation of things, the acute feeling is In confirmation and illustration of these unable of itself to bring on the precise move-ingenious remarks, we quote from another ment that would modify the suffering; there is part of the same volume the following no primordial link between a state of suffering and a train of alleviating movements. But should the proper movement be once actually begun, and cause a felt diminution of the acute agony, the spur that belongs to states of pain

would suffice to sustain this movement...

The emotion can not invite, or suggest, or waken up the appropriate action; nevertheless, the appropriate action once there, and sensibly telling upon the irritation, is thereupon kept going by the active influence, the volitional spur of the irritated consciousness. In short, if the state of pain can not awaken a dormant action, a present feeling can at least maintain a present action. This, so far as I can make out, is the original position of things in the matter of volition. It may be that the start and the movements resulting from an acute smart, may relieve the smart, but that would not be a volition. In volition there are actions quite distinct from the manifested movements due to the emotion itself; these other actions rise at first independently and spontaneously, and are clutched in the embrace of the feeling when the two are found to suit one another in the alleviation of pain or the effusion of pleasure.

66

notes of observation made upon the earliest movements of two lambs seen during the first hour of their birth, and at subsequent stages of their develop

ment:"

"One of the lambs, on being dropped, was taken hold of by the shepherd and laid on the ground so as to rest on its four knees. For a very short time, perhaps not much above a minute, it kept still in this attitude; a certain force was doubtless exerted to enable it to retain its position; but the first decided exertion of the creature's own energy was shown in standing up on its legs, which it did after the pause of little more than a minute. The power thus put forth I can only describe as a spontaneous burst of the locomotive energy, under this conditionnamely, that as all the four limbs were actuated at the same instant, the innate power must have been guided into this quadruple channel in consequence of that nervous organization that constitutes the four limbs one related group. The animal now stood on its legs, the feet being considerably apart, so as to widen the base of An example will perhaps place this specula- support. The energy that raised it up continued tion in a clearer light. An infant lying in bed flowing in order to maintain the standing poshas the painful sensation of chillness. This ture, and the animal doubtless had the confeeling produces the usual emotional display-sciousness of such a flow of energy as its earliest namely, movements, and perhaps cries and tears. Besides these emotional elements there is a latent spur of volition, but with nothing to ay hold of as yet, owing to the disconnected condition of the mental arrangements at our birth. The child's spontaneity, however, may be awake, and the pained condition will act so as to irritate the spontaneous centers, and make their central stimulus flow more copiously. In the course of a variety of spontaneous movements of arms, legs, and body, there occurs an action that brings the child in contact with the nurse lying beside it; instantly warmth is felt, and this alleviation of the painful feeling becomes immediately the stimulus to sustain the movement going on at that moment. That movement, when discovered, is kept up in preference to the others occurring in the course of the random spontaneity. . . .

"By a process of cohesion or acquisition, coming under the law of association, the movement and the feeling become so linked together, that the feeling can at after times waken the

mental experience. This standing posture was continued for a minute or two in perfect stillness. Next followed the beginnings of locomotive movement. At first a limb was raised and set down again, then came a second movement that widened the animal's base without altering its position. When a more complex movement of its limbs came on, the effect seemed to be to go sideways; another complex movement led for wards; but at the outset there appeared to be nothing to decide one direction rather than another, for the earliest movements were a jumble of side, forward, and backward. Still, the alternation of limb that any consecutive advance required, seemed within the power of the creature during the first ten minutes of life. Sensation as yet could be of very little avail, and it was evident that action took the start in the animal's history. The eyes were wide open, and light must needs have entered to stimulate the brain. The contact with the solid earth, and the feelings of weight and movement, were the earliest feelings. In this state of uncertain wandering, with

little change of place, the lamb was seized hold the fact, and stimulating exertion and pursuit to of and carried up to the side of the mother. recover it. Six or seven hours after birth the This made no difference till its nose was brought animal had made notable progress, and locomointo contact with the woolly skin of the dam, tion was easy, the forward movement being preferwhich originated a new sensation. Then came red but not predominant. The sensations of sight a conjunction manifestly of the volitional kind. began to have a meaning. In less than twentyThere was clearly a tendency to sustain this four hours the animal could, at the sight of the contact, to keep the nose rubbing upon the side mother ahead, move in the forward direction at and belly of the ewe. Finding a certain move- once to come up to her, showing that a particument to have this effect, that movement was sus-lar visible image had now been associated with tained; exemplifying what I consider the primi-a definite movement; the absence of any such tive or fundamental part of volition. Losing association being most manifest in the early the contact, there was yet no power to recover movements of life. It could proceed at once to it by a direct action, for the indications of sight the teat and suck, guided only by its desire and at this stage had no meaning. The animal's the sight of the object. It was now in the full spontaneous irregular movements were continu- exercise of the locomotive faculty; and very ed; for a time they were quite fruitless, until soon we could see it moving with the nose a chance contact came about again, and this con- along the ground in contact with the grass, tact could evidently sustain the posture or the preliminary of seizing the blades in the movement that was causing it. The whole of mouth. the first hour was spent in these various move- "The observations proved distinctly three ments about the mother, there being in that several points-namely, first, the existence of short time an evident increase of facility in spontaneous action as the earliest fact in the the various acts of locomotion, and in command- creature's history; second, the absence of any ing the head in such a way as to keep up the definite bent prior to experienced sensation; agreeable touch. A second hour was spent and third, the power of a sensation actually exmuch in the same manner, and in the course perienced to keep up the coïnciding movement of the third hour the animal, which had been of the time, thereby constituting a voluntary entirely left to itself, came upon the teat, and act in the initial form. What was also very got this into its mouth. The spontaneous work-remarkable, was the rate of acquisition, or the ings of the mouth now yielded a new sensation, whereby they were animated and sustained, and unexpectedly the creature found itself in the possession of a new pleasure-the satisfaction first of mouthing the object; next, by and by, the pleasure of drawing milk The intensity of this last feeling would doubtless give an intense spur to the coëxisting movements, and keep them energetically at work. A new and grand impression was thus produced, remaining after

rapidity with which all the associations between sensations and actions became fixed. A power that the creature did not at all possess naturally, got itself matured as an acquisition in a few hours; before the end of a week the lamb was capable of almost any thing belonging to its sphere of existence; and at the lapse of a fortnight, no difference could be seen between it and the aged members of the flock.”—(Pp. 404—6.) (TO BE CONCLUDED IN NEXT NUMBER.)

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