Considerations on Flechsig's "Gehirn und Seele."

  • Jacobi, Mary Putnam, 1842-1906.
Date:
[1897?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Considerations on Flechsig's "Gehirn und Seele.". Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

    20/32 (page 16)
    ciation centres. The attribute of a soul-making function to the centres in question rests primarily on an argument of exclusion. The mind, says Flechsig in substance, is a product of the brain. Such and such parts of the brain do not produce mind, but only sensory impressions or motor impulses. But as mind is clearly produced, it must originate in the action of the parts of the cortex which remain after subtracting the sensory areas. Therefore, these must be psychic centres. They are called also asso- ciating centres, because the genesis of mind is explained precisely on Condillac's hypothesis, by the simple addition, association, or blending together of two sensations. Any one sensation is not mind, declares Flechsig, although he had previously interpreted all his observations on the medullization of nerve tracts, as proving that mind was constructed from a sensation. Two sensations are not mind; but if two different sensory impressions meet in the region of the brain which is intercalated between the two sensory centres where such impressions are generated, then something new is formed by their associa- tion, and this something is an idea, a thought, a mental tendency, there is a piece of mind. In each psychic centre we can deduce the mental faculties which are there developed, by observing what sensory centres border on each side of it. The insula lies between the auditory and the motor speech centre: it is therefore the psychic centre for the faculty of speech. The parieto- occipital lobe is intercalated between the visual centre and the touch-motor centre, the somaesthetic area of Barker, constituted by the Rolandic convolutions. Hence the posterior psychic centre is the seat of faculties which may be considered as composed of the sense of touch and the sense of sight—faculties which tend towards scientific observation or aesthetic talent, as the case may be. Fol- lowing this line of thought, we should expect to find the frontal lobes, intercalated between the somaesthetic centre and the olfactory sphere, to be the seat of faculties which