Makers of man, a study of human initiative / [Charles Joseph Whitby].

  • Whitby, Charles J. (Charles Joseph)
Date:
[1910]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Makers of man, a study of human initiative / [Charles Joseph Whitby]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    reactions of these anucleated protozoa as Sensations, and limit their consciousness to these. But sensation is not the raw material of consciousness in general; it is rather an abstraction from the unity of human perception. One might as well talk of the protist as having ideas ! It has the unitary potentiality of every form of soul-life, ]ust as it has the unitary potentiality of every specific bodily function. The unity of primitive mind comprehends the germ of both will and idea , that is the mam lesson we learn from the contemplation of our monocellular forebear. The next thing to be noted is the ectodermic origin of the nervous system, a point of which the psychological import has hitherto been strangely ignored. Solipsists and rationalists are prone to lay undue stress on the insulation of the human cere- brum, its apparent dependency on the peripheral nerves for knowledge of the “ external world.” They must surely be aware that, phylogenetically, the entire nervous system, in- cluding the brain, is an external organ, the analogue of the epi- thelium of a gastraead (so far as that functions as a sense-organ), the analogue of the peripheral portion of the protoplasm of an anucleated infusorian. Haeckel has pointed out the importance of the conception of “ unconscious memory ” from a develop- mental point of view. May we not regard the external reference of perception as an objective interpretation of one such un- conscious memory—that, namely, of direct intuition, on the part of protozoic and metazoic ancestors, of a contiguous external medium ? Before we take leave of our protozoon, there is one other element of its inferred psychology, to the speculative significance of which I must call attention. The continuity and homogeneity of its structure—I refer, of course, to the anucleated protist— inevitably suggest a like simplicity of psychic function. The consciousness or quasi-consciousness of the cell must be a totality, what happens in one part will be intuited, and reacted to, locally or generally, not by that part only, but by the cell as a whole. That is to say, the cell as a whole will have an intuition of local stimulus, and the cell as a whole will determine the local or general reaction. The generalisation of a given