Examination of Dr. Carpenter's claim of priority as to the discovery of the law of unconscious cerebral action.

  • Laycock, Thomas, 1812-1876.
Date:
[cbetween 1800 and 1899?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Examination of Dr. Carpenter's claim of priority as to the discovery of the law of unconscious cerebral action. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    3/20
    APPENDIX. Examination of Dr VarpenUih Claim of Priority as to tlie Discover]! of the, Laic of Unconscious Cerebral Action. In the fifth edition of his Principles of Human Physiology (1855), Dr Carpenter expounds the doctrine taught in this work of unconscious vital action of the brain, as the organ of thought. Ho shows that much of our highest mental activity is to be I'egarded as the expression of the automatic action of the cere- brum ; and that it may act upon impressions transmitted to it, and may elaborate results such as we might have attained by the purposive direction of our minds to the subject, ^vithout any comciousness on our parts (p. 607). Looking, he adds, at all those automatic operations by which results are evolved without any intentional direction of the mind to them, in the liglit of ' reflex' actions of the cerebrum, there is no more diffi- culty in comprehending that such reflex actions may proceed without our knowledge, so as to evolve intellectual products when their results are transmitted to the sensorium and are thus im- pressed on our consciousness, than there is in understanding that impressions may excite muscular movements through the reflex j)ower of the spinal cord, without the necessary intervention of Sensation. He (Dr Carpenter) iihows how his doctrine can be made to explain the etiology of the remarkable mental states induced by mesmeric, electro-biological, and similar processes, and how it elucidates the nature of delirium, somnambulism, insanity, and the like. He has designated this class of opera- tions by the term unconscious cerebration (p. 609); and for all these views he sets up a formal claim of priority in the pre- face to this fifth edition of his Human Physiology. This general law of cerebral action is, if true, of such funda- mental importance to mental science, that, if the claim thus set up be at all-credible, Dr Laycock has done Dr Carpenter great