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.

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    could be traced to a combination of the sense of touch and the sense of smell. Rut here the synthesis breaks down, and Flechsig, who localizes in the frontal convolutions the sentiment of personality, the sense of the ego, is much put to it to explain what share the olfactory sphere should hear in the genesis of this part of the mind. Unable to do so, Flechsig at this point abandons the strict application of his own theory, and deduces the sentiment of the ego, not from a combination between two sensory centres, but exclusively from the adjacency of one—namely the somses- thetic sphere in the central convolutions. The sentiment of the ego and of personality is said to arise as a natural sequence from the impressions of touch, which put the individual into connection with the outside world; and the impulses to movement, which give him control over it. The foregoing exposition sounds wonderfully clear, and convincingly ingenious, until we attempt to analyze exactly what it means, and then the apparent clearness becomes veiled by the densest obscurity. The theory in- volves the following postulates: 1st. That sensations are not psychic phenomena. Flechsig defines psychic phenomena as vital phenomena distinguished from all others because accompanied by con- sciousness. Now, a sensation, to be such, must be accom- panied by consciousness, often of peculiar vividness. Con- sciousness is not essential to organic susceptibility or to afferent neural impulses, but an unconscious sensation is a contradiction in terms. The first postulate, therefore, is false. 2d. That a mental act proper always implies generali- zation from two or more sensations, or from the memory residues of sensations. This statement raises the cardinal problems in philosophy, which are far beyond the province of this paper to discuss. It may be, however, admitted that for a certain class of mental acts the proposition is ap- proximately correct. 3d. It is quite otherwise with the third postulate of