Classic Audiobook Collection - Brain and Personality, or the Physical Relations of the Brain to the Mind by William Hanna Thomson ~ Full Audiobook [science]

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

Brain and Personality, or the Physical Relations of the Brain to the Mind by William Hanna Thomson audiobook. Genre: science In Brain and Personality, or the Physical Relations of the Brain to the Mind, physician and thinker William Hanna Thomson explores one of the most enduring questions in human self-understanding: how the material brain relates to the immaterial experiences we call thought, character, will, and consciousness. Writing for curious readers as well as students of medicine and philosophy, Thomson surveys what anatomy and physiology can say about the nervous system, then presses onward into the harder territory of personality: why individuals differ, how habits and emotions take root, and what it means to speak of a self that can reflect and choose. Along the way, he weighs popular assumptions about heredity, mental effort, and the limits of scientific explanation, arguing for careful observation without reducing the whole of mind to mere mechanism. Part scientific primer and part philosophical inquiry, this book invites listeners into a disciplined conversation between laboratory facts and lived experience, aiming to clarify where physical causation ends, where interpretation begins, and how both perspectives can inform a humane view of mental life. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:38:00) Chapter 02 (00:55:01) Chapter 03 (01:07:32) Chapter 04 (01:25:01) Chapter 05 (01:59:58) Chapter 06 (02:29:32) Chapter 07 (02:53:40) Chapter 08 (03:16:55) Chapter 09 (03:43:18) Chapter 10 (04:09:03) Chapter 11 (04:35:14) Chapter 12 (04:58:49) Chapter 13 (05:24:21) Chapter 14 (05:49:46) Chapter 15 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brain and Personality, or the physical relations of the brain to the mind, by William Hannah Thompson. Chapter 1. Historical Introduction There is no more interesting subject in science than the physical conditions under which we become thinking beings. Though science is concerned with the knowledge which comes from investigation and experiment in the physical world, yet she cannot evade being questioned about the relations of matter to mind, because the bodily organ of the mind is a thing of physics. Hence, however discussion about mind may be waived, as pertaining to the province of metaphysics,

this cannot be done with that collection of matter, which is called the brain. In it, mind and matter come together, and therefore we cannot help asking how much the one, is dependent upon the other. As far as the mind is concerned, it must be admitted that no study of its own operations can give the least inkling on this question, any more than a study of the words of a telegram would reveal how a wire came to conduct them. The passage of thought in the one case, and of words in the other, are equally invisible. But the wire can be followed up until it connects with a mechanism,

which generates the words for the wire to transmit. Can any analogous result be expected from an examination of the physical mechanism through which the mind acts? The answer is that something of the kind seems to be assured by modern discoveries of definite relations between particular portions of brain matter and thought. That there are certain material seats of purely mental functions as the brain is now demonstrated beyond mistake by the fact that when these are physically disorganized, their special mental functions are forthwith abolished,

though all other places in the brain remain intact. It is significant, however, that these discoveries relate in the first instance to the working of the brain of man, in distinction from the brains of animals. Restricted to the brains of animals, which they could experiment with, physiologists would have been but little able to determine what special relations the brain held to thought. But with the brain of man it has proved to be wholly different, because, unlike animals,

man possesses a faculty which is directly related to thought, the great faculty of speech, and the specific anatomical seats of speech have been found, in the human brain as certainly as the ticker is found in its place in a telegraph office. It should be remarked, however, that it was reserved for physicians and not for psychologists to light upon these great discoveries by their observing what may be termed the effects of experiments with the human brain which disease makes for them. While it has been a distinct gain for psychologists to leave metaphysics,

and turn their attention to the general physiology of the nervous system, the criticism may be made that, apart from the human brain, the field of psychology is very limited, as far as the relation of mind to matter is concerned. A single very circumscribed injury to a place in the human brain may teach more on this subject than a survey of the whole domain of nervous physiology in animals. This is well illustrated by the fact that the identification of speech centers in the brain year-long led to the discovery, again by medical men, of the material seats of a whole series

of other faculties, both sensory and intellectual, so that taken together these findings give to the subject of the physical relations of the brain to the mind an entirely new aspect. These discoveries, however, have all been made within the lifetime of our own generation. On that account, they are scarcely known to the general public, and their important bearing on the old question of matter and mind is even less appreciated. Few persons are aware how slow the progress of knowledge has been of the actual physical relations of the mind to the body, and hence an historical review of that process.

progress would seem to be a fitting introduction to our present discussion. Thus, the word brain does not once occur in the Bible, for the good reason that during the centuries in which its different books were written, scarcely anyone in the world suspected that this most silent and secluded of organs had anything to do with thought or feeling. The earliest identification of the mind with a bodily organ we find among the Babylonians who located it in the liver. Their priests therefore elaborated a great system of omens based upon the appearances of this organ in the animals offered up for sacrifice. With the Hebrews, on the other hand, the heart was the chief seat of the soul, while the mind was located in the kidneys, and all tender emotions in the powels. Thus, one psalmist says that his reins, kidneys,

instruct him in the right seasons, and another that, the Lord trieth the heart and the kidneys. The prophet Jeremiah denounces the hypocrites of his day who had the Lord in their mouths, but not in their kidneys. In keeping with similar expressions in the Old Testament, St. Paul speaks of bowels of mercies.

A survival of these conceptions is found in our English phrase, two fellows of the same kidney. Nor for a long time were the ideas of the Greeks on this subject much nearer the mark. It is true that Plato assigns the supreme seat of the mind to the brain, but how purely speculative were his views is illustrated by the following quotation.

The creation of bones and flesh was in this wise. The foundation of these is the marrow which binds together body and soul, and the marrow is made out of such of the primary triangles as are adapted by their perfection to produce all the four elements. These God took and mingled them in due proportion, making as many kinds of marrow as there were to be hereafter kinds of souls. the receptacle of the divine soul he made round and called that portion of the marrow brain intending that the vessel containing this substance should be the head the bones were formed by sifting pure earth and wetting it with marrow it was then thrust alternately into fire and water and thus rendered insoluble by either as the bone was brittle and liable to mortify and destroy the marrow by the marrow by the bone was brittle and liable to mortify and destroy the marrow by the marrow by the

by too great rigidity, he contrived sinews and flesh, the first to give plasticity, the second to guard against heat and cold. Having this in view, the creator mingled earth with water, and mixed with them a ferment with acid and salt, so as to form pulpy flesh, etc. It is evident that Plato in this confounded the substance of the brain and of the spinal cord with the marrow of the bones, and thus got his conception of marrow as the foundation of the living body. But his younger contemporary, Aristotle, circa BC-335, who was the foremost physiologist of his day, and himself the son of a physician, scouted all this vital forago of Plato's, and as Plato evolved it all out of his own head, without troubling himself about facts,

He had little difficulty in doing so. Aristotle examined the brain for himself and came to the conclusion that its function had nothing to do with mind, but that it was a cool organ which properly refrigerated the blood for the heart. We may tempted to smile now at this conclusion, but Aristotle was no mere theorist, and he reasoned according to a sound scientific method from facts as he knew them. We must put ourselves in his place, with nothing to go by more than certain patent facts of life,

the explanation of which by other facts was then unknown to him. He found the brain an apparently insensible and inexorable organ, while the heart was extremely excitable. He therefore only followed his great predecessor Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who, recognizing how quickly consciousness is abolished by loss of blood, or deranged by blood poisons, or by the heated blood of fevers, inferred that the conscious mind resided in the blood, and hence that the heart, as the central organ of the circulation, was itself the chief seat of the soul.

Another cause of misunderstanding was that, as the arteries are found empty after death, owing to their contractile, walls expelling the blood from them, it was concluded that these vessels carried air or ethereal spirits from the heart to the rest of the body. We shall see that nothing so contributed to delay for centuries all progress as this mistake, by its suggesting the existence and all-pervading power of vital spirits. Supported by such great names as Hippocrates and Aristotle, these beliefs held sway for fully five centuries. Along with speculations how from the blood, the different organs of the body, such as the stomach, liver, spleen, intestines, etc., elaborated each its share of the various

appetites or emotions. Meanwhile, in this wilderness of Greek speculation, a voice had been crying in vain the true doctrine about the brain long before Plato or any of the rest. Alchmeon, the Pythagorean of Crotona, who lived about BC 500, a man who was both an anatomist and an experimental physiologist, taught that the brain was the sole seat of the mind and the source of feeling and of movement, and that at the brain arrived all sensation by means of the nerves. It is evident that he was led to do this by noting that severing the optic nerves leading from the eyes to the brain produced total blindness.

Unfortunately, he called the nerve's tendons, a term which, with its erroneous suggestions, continued to be applied to them for 2,000 years, until finally the great Descartes demonstrated the essential difference between tendons and nymphs. nerves. Even Shakespeare, when he spoke of nerves, meant sinews. But whether from Alcmeon's colonial origin, or because he was far in advance of his time, both Plato and Aristotle, who must have read his works, alluded to them contemptuously as somebody's views. Aristotle indeed taught that the spinal cord had nothing in common with the brain, and evidently paid little attention to its tendons or nerves.

In progress of time, a great school of anatomists and experimental physiologists arose in Alexandria, of whom Herophilus, circa BC300, and his contemporary erastistitus were the chief, who carefully dissected the brain and traced to it the nerves of the special senses, as Alchmean had done. They went so far as to divide the nerves into dose of sensation and of motion, though they were still hampered by Alchemian's term tendon, and apparently they could not wholly shake off the authority of Aristotle as to the functions of the brain.

They prepared the way, however, for Galen, circa AD 160, to whom we are chiefly indebted for the overthrow of Aristotle's doctrine about the brain, and the demonstration of its exclusive title as the seat of thought and feeling. To this great physician belongs the distinction of establishing this doctrine for all time. A contemporary of his, Ariteus of Capadocia, circa AD 170, advanced so far as to recognize correctly that the brain dominated the muscular movements of the body by nerves, which, originating in the brain, crossed their tracts below in the form of the letter X, so that injuries in one hemisphere of the brain paralyzed the muscles of the opposite side of the body,

while if they occurred in the spinal cord below the medulla, the resulting paralysis was on the same side with the injury. But even Arethaeus held that the seat of the soul was in the heart. After Galen, the progress of discovery of the true functions of the brain was extraordinarily slow. From the middle of the second century AD to the middle of the 19th century, or 1,700 years, the actual gains in this knowledge were relatively most insignificant, compared with the splendid advances in astronomy, geography, physical science, chemistry, and geology. It would seem as if to know thyself, scientifically, rather than metaphysically, instead of being the first, was destined to be among the latest of human achievements.

One great cause for this backwardness was the persistence way of teleology in all questions about life. Men were ever trying to explain the reasons of things by the imagined purposes of things, and to find the causes in. in the purposes. Thus we have seen that Plato's whole physiology originated in what he fancied the creator and the gods intended when they made this or that part of the living body. And all the long way down the centuries we meet with examples of reasoning on these subjects, not unlike that of the philosopher, who admired the benevolent wisdom of Providence in arranging that large rivers should flow past large towns. One of the greatest of these hindrances

was the conception of the brain as a secreting gland, which dates from Hippocrates and continues down to Carl Falkt, Cabanis and other writers in the earlier years of the 19th century, who maintained that the brain's secreted thought just as the liver secretes bile. Hippocrates that, brain resembles a gland, being white and soft-like glands. It discharges the same glandular offices as regards the head. It reads the head of its humidity and returns to the extremities the surplus

of its flux. With this postulate that it is a gland, one authority after another attempted to represent the brain's secretion as a kind of subtle fluid termed animal spirits. which permeated the body through the blood. Thus, the cart taught that the left ventricle of the heart separated these animal spirits, which had been generated in the brain, and distilled them out of the blood into a very living and very pure flame, and then distributed them through the arteries. These animal spirits, therefore, were readily made to account for everything,

normal and abnormal. Hence it was due to noxious vapors and humours that every variety of bodily disorder took its rise. To illustrate how effectually such conceptions served to block all progress in the science of life, we may quote one instance from a ponderous volume in my library with the date 1618 on physiology and anatomy by Hilkiah Crook, physician and professor on anatomy and carergery to his majesty James I.

Speaking of the origin and growth of hair, he says, The immediate matter of the hair is a sooty, thick and earthy vapor, which in the time of the third concoction, distillation, is elevated by the strength of the action of natural heat, and passeth through the pores of the skin, which heat excisieteth or dryeth this moisture of these sooty and thick vapours, for the vapour being thick in his passage leaveth some part of itself, to wit the grossest, in the very outlet, where it is impacted by a succeeding vapor arising where the former did,

is protruded and thrust forward, so that they are wrought together in one body. The straightness of the passages of the skin, where through the matter of the hairs, is avoided, formeth them into a small roundness, even as a wire receiveth that proportion whereof the whole is, where through it is drawn. One great office of the hairs of the head, therefore, crook perceived to be to lead off the vapors which otherwise would choke and make smoky the brain, though how hopelessly choked the brains of all bald heads, hence would be, he does not mention. Crook's illustrious contemporary Lord Bacon held that the blood did not distend the heart,

nor cause it to beat, but that was done by its contained spirits. Even Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood did not dislodge these pure non-entities from the brain, for we find as late as 1824, Dr. J. Mason Good in his study of medicine, mentioning the fact that the brain being a gland, the nervous power or energy issues from it as a fluid of a peculiar kind, and is so distributed by its nerves. It was the introduction of the microscope into the investigation of nervous tissues which first really exercised the animal.

spirits from the medical world. Their objective existence, in fact, had often been called in question before, but it was difficult to banish these airy creations altogether until some solid physical facts could be found which would dispose of them. Without the microscope, we could never have known what every living texture really is, nor after what fashion it is constructed. With the microscope, Ehrenberg, made in 1833 the first discovery of a nerve cell in a spinal ganglion and four years later

Porkinje demonstrated that the gray matter of the cerebrum and of the cerebellum is made up of nervous cells and their fibers this was followed in the next year by the publication of the great work of schleiden and schwan in which they proved that all vegetable and animal tissues are made up of cells and the products of cells. The intimate structure of all tissues and organs was thus revealed, and each was found to be perfectly characteristic of its kind, whether bony, tenderness, glandular, muscular, nervous, etc. Nervous tissue especially is very peculiar and unlike anything else in the body, and least of

all like glandular tissue. The brain, therefore, was thus shown to be no more a gland than a hand or a foot is, and that it never secretes anything. The brain instead is a special and distinct organ, connecting with nothing but nerves, acting and acted upon only through nerves or nervous masses, called ganglia, which are distributed through the body. It was not long before misconception of the brain as a separate mechanism,

in us, constructed after its own pattern, began to give rise to a new batch of theories. Gull, to whom brain anatomy owes a good deal, particularly in the tracing of the course of the brain fibers down through the medulla oblongata, regarding the brain as one organ, conceived that its convolutions served to mark it off into so many compartments, each with its distinctive mental functions which he proceeded to identify. He thus made out a list of 24 brain localities possessed with special intellectual or moral attributes, and which his pupil Spurzheim increased to 38. Now, as all individuals have their personal peculiarities of mind and of disposition,

these, in turn, could be explained by the development of their corresponding convolutions. Thus, a mathematician would leave a highly developed mathematical convolution, and a combative man would possess his brain seat of combativeness, etc. This so-called science of phrenology had great vogue for a time, owing to its further assumption that the outer contour of the head corresponded to the arrangements of the convolutions within, and thus afforded a ready physical basis for estimating. what manner of men or woman each person was. So popular became this supposed scientific standard of individuality that I once heard a prominent clergyman remark that before he addressed a young man about his soul, he wished he could be allowed to feel his bumps.

But, as in the case of animal spirits, so phrenology had to disappear before facts. It was shown that Gall and as well, and his followers did not study a sufficient number of brains, because, on the one hand, their mathematical convolutions were found as largely developed in the brains of porpoise dying in hospitals, as in the few mathematicians whose brains skull had investigated,

while the brains of some eminent men had no specially developed convolutions where they ought to have had them. On the other hand, while the inner table of the skull corresponds, in a general way with the sub-adjacent convolutions, it does not keep shape with any special convolution whatever, while as respects the outer table of the skull there may be no correspondence at all. Phrenology, therefore,

gradually became the exclusive property of popular lecturers who illustrated its doctrines with plates of variously labeled heads. The period between 1845 and 1860, was marked by notable advances, not only in general physiology, but also in the physiology of the brain and of the nervous system. The great principle of reflex action, that is, of the aferent and efferent elements in all nervous processes, was established, and many of the amazingly intricate paths of nerve fibers in the spinal cord and in the brain

were traced out. France at that time took the lead in all branches of the brain, medical science, and the names of Mahjondi, Longue, Florent, Gratiole, and others like them will always rank high in the annals of neurology. It is not easy at this day to appreciate what a paramount influence was exerted in the medical world by this school of Paris, whose lecture rooms were crowded by students from all countries. But partly as a reaction from the doctrines of phrenology, all separate localization of function in the brain was strongly denied, while the opposite and no less erroneous teaching was promulgated that the brain always acts as a whole.

The cerebral convolutions were regarded as the censorium commune, and, as one of them expressed it, any specific vibration initiated in each kind of sensory nerve thrills throughout the whole or a greater part of the mass of the brain. Thus, medical opinion seemed to settle down to the conclusion that our two brain hemispheres correspond to our two lungs, in the respect that every part discharges the same functions with the rest. But a great change was impending. On April 14, 1861, an eminent French hospital surgeon, Paul Broca, read a paper before the Societ d'Anthropology of Paris, in which he adduced evidences to prove, that there is a definite locality in the brain which is the sole seat of articulate speech, found in a limited area in the lower and posterior part of the convolution called the third frontal,

and which is now named Broca's convolution. This fact, of course, could only be demonstrated by injuries to that part in the human subject, and Broca showed, by citing a number of post-mortem examinations of persons dying after paralysis of the right side of the body, usually due to apoplexy, and who, with the onset of the paralysis, lost the power of utterance, that in all such cases damaged to that level, locality was demonstrable. As this statement seemed at first to be a reversion to the tenets of phrenology, it gave rise to so much heated discussion and denial

that it was not until about 1865 that it began to be generally admitted. What chiefly led to its final acceptance was the further discovery that the two other elements of human speech besides articulate utterance also have each their distinct and separate brain localities. One place being found for the words we receive through the ear, damage to which place causes word deafness, even though there be no deafness to other sounds than words. And secondly, one place for words received through the eye in reading,

damage to which causes the subject at once to become wholly illiterate, though he may see and recognize all other objects, of sight, except words, as well as ever. The demonstration of these anatomical bases of the Faculty of Speech soon led to careful experimental investigation of the brain in animals for other seats of distinct functions, constituting what is now termed cerebral localization and to a comparison of the results achieved with the effects of injury

or of disease in the brain of men. By 1870, through the labors of both experimental physiologists and practicing physicians, such as Hitzig, Ferrier, Monk, Lutyani, Charko, and others, it was shown that each of the special senses has its anatomical seat in the brain, and, in addition to that, in a centrally placed zone, are to be found the seats governing the voluntary movements of the muscles of the body, so that each muscle, or group of muscles, can be made to contract by excitation of the corresponding locality

in the cortex or surface of the brain. These discoveries were great enough of themselves, but they are relatively of secondary importance compared with those which followed and which will cause the name of Broca, as yet scarcely known by the general public, to rank in the history of science, along with the names of Copernicus and of Isaac Newton.

The anatomical seats of the senses and those of muscular movements are found equally in both hemispheres of the brain, and their functions, as such, are doubtless congenital. It was thus natural to infer, as the brain is a double organ, like our two eyes and our two ears, each hemisphere being the duplicate of the other, that both brains would equally participate in all brainwork. But a most unexpected fact, and one of far-reaching significance,

was soon demonstrated, namely that the anatomical seats of the Faculty of Speech are found only in one of the two hemispheres. Thus, if the Broca convolution, which is the seat of articulate speech, be damaged in a person after middle life, the loss is usually. irremediable, so that he can speak no longer, though the same convolution in the other hemisphere

be wholly intact. The same is true as regards word deafness or word blindness from injury of their respective places, for the corresponding localities in the other hemisphere, though not hurt at all, nevertheless are entirely word deaf and word blind, simply because they never had anything to do with speech. But here again another new element in the problem presented itself, which proved that the endowment of one hemisphere with the great gift of speech was not owing to any original or special fitness of that hemisphere for such a function, but solely because it was the hemisphere related to the most used hand in childhood.

In all right-handed persons, it is in the left brain that the speech centers are located, while in left-handed persons they are found exclusively in the right brain. Two conclusions inevitably follow upon these facts. First, that brain matter, as such, does not originate speech, for then both hemispheres would have their speech centers. And second, that either of the hemispheres is equal, good for speech, if something begins early enough in life to use it for that purpose. That something is the most commonly used hand by the human child at the time when it is learning

everything, for self-education always begins in our race with the stretching forth of the hand, as anyone may note in the first purposive actions of an infant. The hand which it then most used to learn by determined which of his own, its two brain hemispheres should know speech, and which hemisphere should remain wordless, and therefore thoughtless for life. This latter statement that thought, as such, is a function only of the hemisphere connected with the faculty of speech, was decisively demonstrated by the next revelation which followed upon Broca's fruitful discovery.

Without any help from metaphysics, and upon a much shrewd, basis than any metaphysical theories, it was simply found as a physical fact that our mental faculties, as such, are quite distinct from the elementary functions of sensation and of motion. These latter are congenital, but our ability to recognize and therefore to know what the particular objects or meanings be of what our senses report is not congenital, but as much acquired by us as our speech is acquired and not congenital. Because, connected with the original anatomical seats of sight and of hearing, were found certain physical anatomical areas of brain matter, injury of which abolished all power to recognize what the eye sees or the ear hears. In the visual area is a place which, if damaged, renders the person unable to recognize

members of his own family, though he see them, and in the auditory area are places, one of which, if hurt, causes the person to be no longer able to know his most familiar tunes when he hears them, while by injury in another spot, he loses all power of distinguishing sounds in general, so that he cannot tell the bark of a dog from the song of a bird, because they are alike only noises to him. And here again, these important brain areas in us, interpreting what sights or sounds mean, are found only in the left hemisphere of the right-handed and in the right hemisphere of the left-handed, in other words, in the hemisphere in which the seats of the faculty of speech are located. The decisive bearing of these pure matters of fact,

upon our whole discussion of the physical relations of the brain to the mind and to the personality is plain enough. As none of these wonderful mental faculties, including that of speech, were connected with brain matter at birth, but were created afterwards, it follows that they were created by the individual himself anatomically modifying his own brain. That brain matter did not itself organize these physical areas of mental function, is shown by their entire absence from the convolutions of the wordless hemisphere. As these physical relations of the brain to the mind are to be fully discussed in our succeeding chapters,

we could have preferred not to have alluded to them so far in advance, and we have done so now only for this reason. Many persons may imagine that such a theme must involve a discussion of what the mind is, and therefore enter upon the wide domain of metaphysics. We propose to avoid anything of the kind, as our subject deals primarily with the thing of physics, namely the brain. But the main facts about the structure and working of the brain are of such recent discovery that they scarcely yet have become generally known, at least in comparison with the latest discoveries in the physical sciences.

Regarded, however, simply as matters of knowledge, these new additions to our information about the one organ in us which is related to thought can be second to none in interest and importance. End of Section 1. Section 2 of Brain and Personality. This is a library box recording. All library box recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org.

Recording by Simone A Perego Brain and Personality Or the Physical Relations of the Brain to the Mind By William Hannah Thompson Chapter 2 Account of the Physical Basis of the Mind Two fundamentally opposite conception have existed about the relations of the brain to the mind

which may be illustrated by comparing the brain to either one of two different instruments or mechanisms for producing music, an Ehollian harp or a violin. Thus, if the brain may be regarded as an organ from which toots proceed, the questions then becomes, do thoughts arise in it as musical sounds flow from an Eholean harp or as they come from a violin? Both the Hegelian harp and the violin are constructed by threads of Kisholian harp. catgat stretched over apertures in a wooden box. The music of the Heholian harp comes from it when it is placed where currents of hair can flow through its threads, and its notes will then vary according to the direction, the

strength and the velocity of the currents. The hair which generated the music is a part of the whole outside atmosphere, and while each harp has its own peculiarities of sides, number of threads, position, etc., it spans. source as no peculiarity, but is one and the same in all. In like manner, some hold, currents of thought are excited in the brain by the incoming sensation transmitted from without by the vibrations of the various nerve fibers, which are specially adapted to receive impressions. And these vibrations, in turn, awaken those responses among the fibers and cells of the brain,

which constitute feelings and ideas. On this view, a man's brain may be regarded as a special reconstructed mechanism whose individual peculiarities in its working, as shown in his daily life, are all due to the arrangement of its material component parts. Some leaves give forth long, rich harmonious, not true. Others, from a unhappy disposition of their fibers, give forth little else than prolonged discord, and others a strange mixture of both.

But all these individual or so-called personal characteristics are matter of cerebral structure, as these is acted upon by the innumerable nerve stimuli proceeding from the outer world. More or less the fine conceptions of this kind about the relation of the brain to the mind are quite prevalent, particularly among those who empathize the influence of heredity in the genesis of individual or moral trait. The logical conclusion of this position is that the mind of the last analysis is the product of the composition and properties of brain matter,

and its operations of whatever sort are reactions among the brain elements to the play of external forces. The other and essentially different conception is that the brain, if likened to a musical instrument, resembles a violin in that, however good it be as a musical instrument, and however carefully it has to be constructed in all its part to become such an instrument, yet of itself it cannot give forth a musical note, much less take part in a complex symphony, without a musician to use it. Therefore, though no musicians can give us violin music without a violin, so no violin can be a musical without a music.

without a musician. It should be note that this theory requires mechanism and the complete integrity of the mechanism, quite as much as the other. In fact, the musical vibrations within the box depend so much for their qualities, upon the wood-house of which the violin is made, that extraordinary sounds have been paid for Stradivarius on that account alone. But thought mechanisms be such an essential element in both, the entrants of a wholly different in the case of the violin, namely the musician, makes it possible to harmonize the analogies to brain function drawn from these two instruments. In the one, we have only the effects of external forces acting upon material things, while in the other we likewise have material things, but the effects come from a source entirely distinct from, and whole independent of them.

We only need now to follow up each of these views of their energy, conclusions to recognize how far apart they are. The one regards the mind as bully of the brain, and hence the mind can have no existence apart from the brain. The other regards the brain as nothing more than the instrument of the mind, and no instrument can possibly be identical with the agency which uses it. As the brain itself gave no least sign of its activities, so much so that, as already mentioned, the word for ages did not suspect.

not suspect that it had any connection with thought or feeling. It was natural that the discussion should center first about the terms mind and body. As regards the mind, the processing themselves is of thought appear to offer in their genesis and sequence the only elements for examination. Metaphysician, therefore, have levered at the problem for centuries, but without coming to any agreement, one chief reason for their failure being that in their midst, of investigation, they have had no reline upon introspection. But the difficult with introspection is that it is like a man trying to lift himself by his own bootstraps. As our mental processes both begin and end within our service, they offer little which is objective for us to go by.

We need instead some external fulcrum to draw upon for satisfactory inferences. Such a fulcrum seems at last to be promised to us by modern discoveries connected with the brain itself in its relations and an organism to certain define mental functions. This was not possible so long as the brain was regarded as a single organ working as a unit, with the same relations in all its parts to consciousness and thought that the hair cells were ever located in the lungs, beer to respiration. Look at us, the physiologists with the brain before him was even worse of than the metaphysician. For nothing could be more undemonstrative to mere inspection than healthy brain matter. Physiologists, therefore, were obliged to investigate the brain, bit by bit, to find whether some parts of it were more connected with certain physical functions than others.

After the most excessive experiments were made on the brains of the brain, of living animals, certain important facts were demonstrated which have most directly bearing on the problem. Moreover, these experimental deductions have been further confirmed by observations of the effect of local brain damage caused in men by injuries of disease. By this means it is now proven that the grey matter of the brain surface is specially arranged to subserve certain specific physical functions only in certain local is in its substance.

It is not the whole brain which sees her ears, but only particular limited areas to which the consciousness of sight and of hearing respectively are confined. Likewise, the voluntary movements of each group of muscles in the body have been found to proceed from central well-defined starting points on the brain's surface, and these are so well demonstrated that the Sorgon often know by noting what muscles are implicated, just were to open the skull with his traffin so as to find the lesion or injury in the brain. On these grounds, the inference seemed probable that every special physical function is absurd by its own special seat in the material organ of the mind.

Hence, by these discoveries, we do seem to have come into possession of really objective facts where before everything was subjective. Because nothing could partake more of the nature of an objective, fact than the identification of an area of brain matter with a given brain function, by that function becoming invariable impaired according as its brain places damage. We propose, therefore, to discuss in the following page the bearing which it is now demonstrated the relations of brain structure to the mental operations have happened to the opposite views above state of the relations of the brain to the mind.

Fortunately for the general reader, the essential facts being up on our present discussion can be really demonstrately and easily understood. All are agreed that as far as the brain is concerned, the grey matter of the brain surface, technically called the cortex, is the ultimate seat of all processes connected with sensation and thought. This grey matter consists of a continuous layer whose average thickness is from 112 to 1.1 height of an inch. of a soft material of a very complex structure, in which are embedded immense numbers of little bodies, of various shapes and sizes, unfortunately cold cells, for they are not hollow. Between these cells ramifies a network of innumerable fine grey fibers.

To save space this layer of grey matter is everywhere folded upon itself, as one would crample up an handkerchief in his hand, so that the surface of the brain present a number of forros or crises between the folds. The chief foros, however, are quite defined in their location, so that the main folds are called lobs and the smaller ones convolutions, and these in turn serve to map out the different regions of the brain surface, which are then named according. Under the net and within the gray layer, and constituting the greater part of the brain mass,

is the white matter. which consist of bundles of grey fibres contained within sheets of apparently an insulating material and white in colour. Some grey fibres, however, have no coating. The function of the nerve fibre is wholly that of a conductor's too and from the grey matter. On that account the white matter is not like the grey matter of the surface, the primary seat of any mental power. Thought in many instances these fibres form important links between the various cortes, areas which seems to promote associated action between them.

Here, therefore, in the grey matter of the surface of the brain, we have a material substance which is the defined seat of the conscious mind. For, as just stated, if one particular area of this grey layer be destroyed, sight is totally lost, though the height itself in whole its parts, with the nervous tract leading their throm to the brain, whole intact. If another particular cortical hair is similarly injured, hearing is abolished, to the hear with all its apparatus be unjured. The consciousness of sight of our hearing, therefore, is neither in the high nor hear respect to live, but in these special

localities on the brain surface. To use the phrase of an old anatomist, the grey matter is the animal. Regarded thus, this form of matter is the most interesting. and important substance in the world. For it is the only matter which we know of that is directly associated with mind. There can be no question also that upon the integrity of this great matter

depends the integrity of all mental processes. For this can be proportionally perverted by anything which interferes with the physical conditions of the grey tissue, called by agents which derange it's working. Thus, medical injuries of the brain

in men often have been followed by peculiar mental disorders, sometimes including change in disposition or in moral character. The most striking illustration of this kind, however, and which can be produced at will, are furnished by the action of the brain poisons. In fact, a curiously interesting treatise might be written with the title of the metaphysics of a drugstore. Thus, Hopiumpurly stimulates those mental processes which are related to their imagination, so that the opium taker becomes intensely interesting is in our trains of suggest his ideas. He is therefore silent and solitary and thus contracts with the alcohol taker,

who has his feelings and emotions so stimulated by that poison that he would fail to share them with other person, and becomes both familiar and tortive. One of the most singular in its effects on the mind is Ashik's or Indian hemp. When fully handled its influence, the ashy smoker can be made to entertain a most vivid sense of the objective reality of any suggestion which is made to its fancy. I once knew a party of Arabs who, while all drunk together with his rug, came to an opening in an over-herchurched street in an oriental town, toward which the moonlight stream upon the pavement. The leader of the party took the moonlight for a pool of water,

and forth which drew up his trousers to wait carefully through head, and was followed and behold the rest of them, doing the same thing. Hence, by merely introducing certain defined substance into the bloodstream, as it rapidly courses to the brain from its four-grid arteriors, we can produce well-defined mental processes characteristics of the operation of these agents, or, in other words, sensation. feelings and ideas specifically generated by these wholly material things. In time, also, the persistent use of these agents seems to alter the personality itself.

Thus, a confirmed drunkard finally becomes more unlike this former self than an average European, differed from an average Asiatic. At first sight, such facts as these seem to indicate that the brain and mind are one. Change the state of the brain, and the finger is changed according. It is not surprising, therefore, that previous to the progress of discovery within the last 25 years, it appears as if nothing could be postulated about mental phenomena apart from the material condition of the mind's organ. The Holian art theory that sensation and toads are the products of vibration through especially arranged mechanism seems to correspond most naturally with the facts.

But unfortunately, for this conclusion, all the facts adducting in its support can be a adduce just as conclusive in support of the opposite theory of the brain being, but the instrument of the tinker, as the violin is the instrument of the musicians who plays upon it. The most skilful violinist would draw for nothing but crazy sounds from his instrument if its chords were smeared with gris instead of with rosing, and every mental disorder from the near to coma can be paralleled by corresponding musical rearrangements. due to put any structural condition in the violin itself, and not at all in the performer.

It then would be from no fault of ease, but solely from conditions in its instrument that every sound which he can get out of it is faulted. Indeed, the rightful direction of thought may often appear to be striving to regulate the brain of a drunkard, just as a musician would deal with a disordered instrument, and still most likely do we see some of the sound, something hacking to tease in certain state of insanity. We are thus left by this consideration just where we were before. And inso, we must go further than deeper than physical changes in brain matter can take us to arrive at satisfactory conception of the true relations of the brain

to the mind. End of section two. Section 3, A Brain and Personality. This is a Libravox recording. are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Larry Wilson. Brain and personality or physical relations of the brain to the mind by William Hannah Thompson. Brainweight and mental faculty. What we have arrived at so far is that the grave matter is the physical basis of the mind. No one now disputes this. the eye does not see any more than an opera-glass sees. It is one place only in the gray cortex which actually sees. And as with the consciousness of sight, so doubtless the seat of every other special form of mind consciousness is somewhere in this mysterious layer. But how far does this

take us? Not very far, because if we hence should infer that consciousness in all its forms of sensation, feeling, perception, thought, etc., dependent wholly on the existence of so much gray matter, we should soon encounter a series of material, i.e. physical facts, and conditions which if they did not actually contradict such inferences, would at least seriously modify them. To begin with, the simplest as well as the most physical facts. In all animals, there is a close correspondence between the degree of development of any organ and its functional power or activity. A powerful arm implies a big arm, or at least not another, undersized one. Is a powerful brain, likewise, a big brain, or at least not an undersized brain?

In other words, does the actual size of brain in man bear any direct relation to mental capacity? This question may be answered in the affirmative, only, however, with so many qualifications that it then becomes by itself of little account in our discussion. Thus the brains of most idiots and of half-witted persons are usually smaller and way less than the average of normal brains, while many men distinguish for their mental powers have had large and heavy brains. But the exceptions are very numerous both ways. Thus assuming the average weight of normal European brains, among men, to be 49.5 ounces, we have the following list of the brain weights of distinguished men given by Professor John Marshall.

Abercrombie, 64.7. Lord Campbell, 56.7. Webster, 55.5. Chalmers, 54.8. Day morning, 54. Well, 51.5. Grote, 52. Tiedman, 47.4. Hansamon, 45.4. Helmholtz, 45. Dahlinger, 37.7. But just such variations are found a people in general, not at all distinguished. Even among poppers, in a large series of observations cited by Professor Marshall, 13 brains among 900 were found to weigh above 60 ounces. The heaviest, perfectly healthy brain was that of a mechanic which weighed just above 70 ounces. In the Journal of the Biometrical Society, June 195, Professor Carl Pearson, FRS, and Dr. Raymond Pearl give the results of an analysis of 2,100 adult male and 1,34 adult female brain weights,

belonging to five races, Swedish, Bavarian, Heshen, Bohemian, and English. With the conclusion that, quote, there is no evidence that brain weight is sensibly correlated with intellectual ability. Of the five races investigated by the biometricians, the English have the smallest mean brain weight. the mean of the adult Englishman is 27 grams less than the Bavarian mean, 57 grams less than the Hessian mean, 65 grams less than the Swedish mean,

and 120 grams less than the Bohemian mean, unquote. On the other hand, brain bulk as such varies according to racial peculiarities with little or no reference to mental faculty. Thus the ancient Peruvians, who founded the empire of the Incas, must be regarded as an intellectual people, but they were remarkable both for the small size of their skulls and for brains which were on an average no larger than those of many idiots. One of the latest discussions on this subject by Professor David Hanseman, who made a most careful examination of the brain of the most remarkable man in modern times for pure intellectual

powers, Herman von Hamelts. Professor Hanseman was much disappointed to find the Helmholtz's brain weighed barely 45 ounces. But the brain of Dr. Dollinger, the eminent historian, weighed only 37.7 ounces. He concludes his elaborate paper on this subject with the remark that all investigators agree that the weight of the brain bears no relation to the mental capacity of man. Likewise, the external measure of a head is of no account whatever. No man's intellect can be judged by the size of his hat. Johannes Muller's had the large circumference of 614 millimeters, Richard Wagner's 600 millimeters,

but Napoleon's was only 564 and Darwin's 563 millimeters. Therefore, if any conclusions can be drawn from these considerations, it would seem as if brain organization was more important than mere size. Hence it follows that neither of our two opposing theories is helped by these anatom. comical facts. A gifted violinist would greatly prefer to play upon a violin of standard make, however expensive it was, than appear before a critical audience with the cheap product of a village artificer. No one can doubt that an originally well-organized brain is a good thing to have, but that does not affect the real point at issue, which is whether the best organized brain,

or for that matter any other brain, can be made to think without a thinker. We have, therefore, again, to go further into the subject, than the mere size of the brain and man will carry us. But our very next step brings us to an anatomical fact of primary importance, which seems to make our previous discussion about the bulk of brain matter quite superfluous. To some, indeed, this anatomical fact appears to dispose of the Aeolian harp theory altogether, as far as physical basis for it is concerned. So sweeping in reality are the conclusions which follow upon the single material factor in the problem that it is well to pause and take our bearings on all sides to be sure of the full import of its significance. The question all along has been this.

As all are agreed that the gray matter is the material seat of thought, etc., is it also the source of thought? The dictum of Borese St. Vincent, Cabanus, Carl Vote, and others, was that the brain secretes thought just as the liver secretes bile. As a statement, this is intelligible enough, and all writers who advocate what we have represented as the Aeolian harp theory of the relation of the brain to the mind will be found on examination to hold essentially the same opinion, however they may differ in their statement of details. Thought, feeling, volition, etc. are on the last analysis, according to any such view the products of the material organization of the gray matter as it responds to its appropriate specific stimuli. Now it is evident that such a premise involves one inevitable conclusion,

namely that the more gray matter you have, the better thought, etc. you will have. If this be granted, it becomes then a question of quantitative gray matter, and if in accordance with modern conceptions, thought be conceived of as a form of energy stored up by the gray matter, then the amount of this energy liberated will be appropriate to the quantity of the specific substance which stores it up. But even on this hypothesis, mere quantity of the mind generating material is not enough. Another factor has to be taken fully into account, namely how it is organized, because it is only by its special organization that one portion of this gray matter is endowed with the faculty of sight, and another in a different place does not see,

but here, and so on for each special sense. But for the present, we may let this inconvenient factor pass, and revert to the original proposition, that however complex the organizing be, it is the gray matter which is organized, and hence the more there be of this cerebral stuff, the more correspondingly will its various mental products be. But the anatomical fact, which wholly disposes of this theory, as that we, like most people, and particularly these reasoners, are quite inaccurate when we use the word brain. There is no such thing as a brain in a human being. He always has two brains, and never one brain, just as he has two eyes and two ears. And these two brains are just as perfectly matched and duplicates of each other in all their parts as his two eyes and

his two ears are. Therefore, if the quantity of gray matter is the fact for us to found our superstructure upon, one half of this matter being in the right brain and the other half in the left brain, it follows that if one of the two brains be rendered useless by any chance, either half the mind or half of the mental capacity will be gone. Is that so? Instead of being so, it has been abundantly demonstrated that one of the two brains can do all the thinking necessary for the purposes of life. No addition of mental power, nor of mental endowment, is secured by our having two brains, any more than the faculty of sight is increased in us by our having two eyes. This, however, is only in accordance, as we shall see, with the general

law of all pair organs in the body, whose existence in pairs is for quite other reasons than for increase in function. It is difficult, therefore, to see why our paired brains should constitute an exception to this law, and that they do not do so, in fact, we shall show by anatomical evidence of the most convincing kind. We may observe here in passing that this pairing of the mind's organ is a very perplexing problem to some reasoners. As one authority remarks, quote, we are completely in the dark as to the reason why we possess two hemispheres. This difficulty arises mainly from certain assumptions about the relations of thought to matter, while the constant use of the term brain unconsciously leads to the conception of a single organ as the source of

thought, just as the liver is the only source of bio. It is in fact an illustration of the dominance of this conception that this identical comparison of the brain to the liver occurs so often among writers of this school. But though we may correctly speak of the eye and the ear in the singular, So long as we are talking of the function itself, of sight or of hearing, such language is no longer correct when we speak of them in the plural, for we then are only referring to them as instruments of sight or of hearing. For instruments and nothing but instruments, these pair organs certainly are. Though without the eye there would be no sight, and without the ear, no hearing. Yet the eye is no more the seat or source of sight than is a telescope or microscope. Whether, therefore,

our two perfectly symmetrical brains are likewise not the sources, but rather the instruments of thought. We will now proceed to examine. Into section three. Section 4 of Brain and Personality. This is a Libre Vox recording. All Libre Vox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibreVox.org. Recording by Julie Berks.

Brain and Personality Or the Physical Relations of the Brain to the Mind by William Hannah Thompson Section 4 Significance of the Brain being a Double or Pair Organ Our brains consist of two perfectly matched organs technically called the right and left hemispheres As regards their gray matter,

they correspond furrow for furrow, lobe for lobe for and convolution for convolution Now, with the partial exception of the hands and feet, the salient fact about other pair organs in the body is this, that either one of the pair can do the whole business of both, if necessary. It is not one of the two eyes which sees red while the other sees green, nor if a man knows the two languages does one ear hear only English and the other only German. What one eye sees, the other sees, so that if a man should lose one eye, with the remaining eye he might become either an astronomer or a microscopist. Some persons have been known to live for many years with only one lung to breathe with. I once was called in consultation to see a strong working man who had lived for 13 years

wholly unaware that he had only one kidney, the other having been destroyed by a stone becoming impacted in the tube leading from it when he had an attack of kidney colic. It was a similar mishap in the tube of the remaining kidney, which first showed what his defect was. It is evident, therefore, that the chief reasons why we have pair organs is, first, for convenience, due to the body itself being generally two-sided, right and left. And secondly, to ensure against emergencies, just as a man, will provide himself with two keys for the same lock lest he lose one. As regards our brains, however, there is one exception to this rule about pair organs

and a division of labor between the two hemispheres and respect of the control of those muscular movements which are of a voluntary character. The centers of these governing the right half of the body occupying a tract in the gray cortex of the left brain, while those of the left half of the body are correspondingly located in the right hemisphere. The most probable explanation of this arrangement is that it ensures a more perfect balance between the two sides of the body and its muscular movements. Thus, the two eyes need to move in almost perfect harmony, and on that account, there are special crossings of nerve fibers from side to side to secure this unity of action. but with respect to thought itself, the above-mentioned law about pair organs holds perfectly.

It has been repeatedly shown by post-mortem examinations that persons have lived for years with only one hemisphere in working order, the other having been virtually destroyed by disease. But with the exception of parts and one half of their bodies being paralyzed for voluntary movements, such as those of the arms and legs, They have thought and acted and transacted business as well with one half of the gray matter, with which they started life, i.e. with only one hemisphere, as others are able to use one eye for all purposes after losing its mate. Of many such instances, we need cite only that of a man,

who for several years was under the observation of an expert neurologist, who published a history of his case with a full description of the condition of the conditions found in his brain after death. Footnote. Dr. Pierce Bailey, American Journal of the Medical Sciences, March 1889. The patient had always been strong and well and was 47 years of age, when he awoke one morning with his whole left side numb and paralyzed. He remained thus paralyzed for 10 years till he died, but meantime his speech was perfectly normal,

his reading good and his memory unaffected. He gave no sign of mental weakness, but was always intelligent, patient, cheerful, and particularly good in attention. He read the papers constantly and liked to talk politics. He bore his disability bravely and was neither depressed, emotional, irritable, nor apathetic. At the autopsy, a large cyst full of fluid occupied the anterior part of the right hemisphere, with the whole tissue disorganized and without any remains of gray matter, while the posterior half of the hemisphere was everywhere atrophied. Microscopical examination of the tissues showed the same destruction of the nerve elements. Dr. Bailey concludes with saying, putting all together the man during life,

manifested nothing to indicate that the power of operations of his mind had been affected, and yet after death the whole of one hemisphere was found to be greatly lessened in size and impoverished in cellular constituents, and the frontal lobes which some regard as the seat of the highest cerebral functions were almost totally annihilated on one side. On the other hand, there is one anatomical fact which might give color to the supposition that our two brains are constructed to operate virtually as one organ. At the bottom of the cleft separating the two hemispheres, there is a large bridge named the Corpus Colossum, four inches in length and which is made up of bundles of white fibers which pass from one brain to the other. It has been supposed that the function of this commissure, as it is called, is to make the various brain centers and the two hemispheres work together,

as some of its fibers have been traced from certain areas of the cortex, down to this bridge and across it to corresponding areas in the opposite brain. This surmised was apparently strengthened by the frequent absence or only partial development of this commissure in the brains of idiots or of feeble-minded subjects. But the progress of research has not confirmed the theory that the two hemispheres are functionally united by this connecting bridge, for in cases of mentally defective subjects,

where the corpus colossum was found wanting, other organic abnormalities were also invariably found, which had to be taken into account as well. Meantime, numerous reports have been published of post-mortem examinations performed by distinguished neurologists on persons who during life showed no signs of mental defect, and yet in whom there was no corpus callosum between the two hemispheres. In each of these subjects also, there was no other abnormality present in the brain. Most of these cases were only accidentally discovered in the bodies of persons dying from ordinary diseases

because nothing in their antecedent history suggested the existence of their anatomical peculiarity. Thus, Eichler reports the case of a man 43 years of age, a laborer who during life had showed no mental peculiarities but was a diligent, capable workman, a good husband, and in every respect sober, quiet, and well-behaved, and could read and write, but in whom the corpus colossum was entirely absent. The eminent neurologist, Professor Erb, and reporting two similar cases, remarks that, when the brain is otherwise well-developed,

with absence of the corpus colism, there may be no disturbance of motility, coordination, general or special sensibility, reflexes, speech, or intelligence. Considering the rarity of autopsies in which careful examinations of the brain are made, such cases may be quite common in the general population, without anything in life betraying their existence. Undoubtedly, this connection between the two brains may be of use in providing against some accidents to either of the cerebral pairs, But these instances of its absence only serve to prove that for performing the ordinary functions of mental life, the two hemispheres are wholly independent of each other.

Indeed, one investigator of this subject remarks that the problem of the use of the corpus colossum is still unsolved, as its absence appears to be so little missed. Footnote. This subject of absence of the corpus colossum is fully treated in an article by the well-nosed. known brain anatomist Professor Alex Bruce in Brain, 1889, pages 171 through 179. The inference from these facts is perfectly obvious. If one half of the total gray matter of our brains is distributed in one hemisphere and the other half in the second hemisphere, it is not for the purpose of doubling or even increasing our mental capacity. We might lose one half of our gray matter provided the losses only on one side, and the other side remains whole,

without losing a single idea thereby. In other words, we might reason, argue, calculate, love or hate, like or dislike, or in short, be altogether ourselves mentally, with only one half of our gray matter left to us. We therefore, as persons, do not depend for our personality upon the number of ounces of gray matter, which our cranial cavity contains, but rather on the fact whether the gray matter of one of our hemispheres be in good condition or not. If it is, then the gray matter of the other hemisphere is not needed by us for the purpose of thinking. Our gray matter as such is halved, but we ourselves are not only halved into two half selves by this bilateral distribution, but we remain the same mental unit as ever, but we remain the same mental

unit as ever, if only we can keep intact, that one of the two hemispheres which, as we will see later, is the sole seat of thought. These undoubted facts, therefore, lead to just as undoubted a conclusion, namely that everything involved in our conscious personality, while related to gray matter, is only related to, but not originated by gray matter. For if it were originated by gray matter, then both hemispheres would be equally necessary to our complete personality. If a stream of water comes from two equal sources, the drying up of one stream will leave only half the quantity of water running, and just so must the stream of thought fall off one half when one hemisphere is injured if it originates in the two perfectly equal hemispheres. Or to put it

Conversely, if gray matter originates thought, then both our hemispheres must share equally in producing thought, for one has just as much gray matter as the other, and with just the same arrangement and organization of it. It is these demonstrated truths which, as we have remarked before, prove so embarrassing to those who hold the view that the brain makes the mind. As one hemisphere is quite enough for all mental requirements, they cannot be. but regard on their principles, the other hemisphere is quite superfluous. So it would be if their principles were valid. If thought is actually a secretion or product of the brain, as bile is a secretion of the liver,

then the case with the brain is the same as if we had two fully developed livers, which, however, could not be made to produce more bile than one alone does. If our brains are never anything more than the instruments of a thinker, the thinker might very well have two such instruments and use either one as he chooses. I have been informed by watchmakers that they grow so accustomed to use only one of their eyes at their work, that in time they become unable to use the other eye for it. We shall see further on that the human thinker likewise becomes so accustomed to use only one of his brain pair for, for thought that it is doubtful if he ever uses its fellow to formulate a single idea, with which one of the pair he will choose to do his thinking for life depends upon a sort of

accident, almost of the nature of a whim during the days of childhood. So far we have been gradually approaching the central subject of all our discussion, namely the relation of the brain to thought. Herefore we have referred to certain ascertained local of brain functions in special places in the brain cortex, but none of these functions yet mentioned are necessarily identical with thinking or thought. A sensation like that of sight is not thought, however much of thought, after its reception, it may give rise to. Likewise, a muscular movement in response to excitation of the corresponding area in the cortex is not itself an act of thought, however it may follow upon thought.

Now, what is thinking? We are precluded from asking metaphysics to answer this question because our subject deals only with the relations of a thing of physics, i.e. brain substance to mind. We are called upon instead to answer the question, are there definite localities in the brain substance which have as close relations to acts of pure thinking as we have found to be the case in connection with acts of seeing or of hearing.

Unlike the metaphysician, who would begin with defining what thought and its elements are, we can only cite concrete examples of thinking done by or through an active human brain. A judge when he takes the brief submitted to him and sits down to write out his opinion is thinking. An orator making ready his oration to sway an assembly is that, thinking. An author at work on a book is thinking. A philosopher pondering a subject in philosophy is thinking, and so on. Now, is its mental faculty of thinking so dependent upon the material arrangement of brain gray matter and special localities thereof that just as physical injury in the cortical site area may cause total blindness? So a similar injury in these special areas,

all other brain areas remaining intact, would make it impossible for the judge to write an opinion, the orator to compose his speech, or the author to go on with his book. It is even so, and the demonstration of how and why it is, so furnishes more data for the correct estimation of the true relation of the brain to the mind than any of the facts which we have heretofore been considering. It has been discovered that certain well-defined areas of the brain cortex minister as directly to human thinking as others do to special sensations or to movements, and when once we appreciate their significance,

we must admit that no greater discoveries than these have been achieved in science. We cannot ask to be led higher than to the very seats where thought becomes articulate, and we may well pause when we find ourselves unmistakable. there, to ask what it all means. We have been seeking for the material whereabouts of mind, if such there be, and hence the question whether we can come into the physical neighborhood of some great and purely mental faculty cannot but involve the solution of our whole problem. It was indeed a great step to discover just where a sensory stimulus traveling from the outside world along a nerve fiber ends,

not only in a physical stopping place, but in a conscious perception. We are, however, far more than conscious selves only. We are thinking selves, and nothing could be more important than to investigate the physical basis of one transcendent human endowment which is so associated with thought itself that no true thinking is possible in man without its exercise. End of Section 4. of Brain and Personality.

This is a Libre Vox recording. All Libre Vox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibreVox.org. Recording by Julie Burks. Brain and Personality or the Physical Relations of the Brain to the Mind by William Hannah Thompson.

Section 5. The Faculty of Speech Before entering upon the consideration of the Faculty of Speech and it's bearing upon the subject of our discussion. It is fitting to note the fact that no investigation of the human body itself affords the least explanation why man is man. There is nothing in his physical frame which truly separates him from other animals because every member and organ of his body has its counterpart or analog in the bodies of other animals.

Man shares with other mammalia the same kind of lungs to breathe with, His blood circulates through the same kind of heart and arteries and veins. He digests and assimilates his food by the same kind of apparatus, with all its varieties of parts and accessories, his secreting glands, his muscles, his bones, and, in short, every other bodily thing in him is like unto theirs. Also, not only the anatomy, but the physiology, that is, the working of every physical element in man,

is so strictly in keeping with that of other mammals that much the greater part of our knowledge of human physiology is derived from investigations into the physiology of other animals. We even deduce from experiments on them how either medicines or poisons may affect ourselves. But there is one organ of his body which immediately suggests itself as necessarily a great exception to all this. The mind of man, what must its organ be? How could the human brain be other than a most exceptional brain in the whole animal series? This inference seemed so certain that the most diligent search was long continued for the physical counterpart in man's brain to his marvelous intellect. Nothing, therefore, could have been more disappointing than to discover that the brain of the chimpanzee, as far as

structure goes, presents us with not only every lobe, but with every convolution of the human brain. The chief facts, indeed, respecting the functions of the different areas of our own brain cortex so far determined by physiologists, have been deduced from experiments on the brains of anthropoid apes. All attempts to demonstrate a new or superadded or special collection or arrangement of gray matter in man's brain, which no other animal possesses, have failed. Ever since Huxley showed against Owen that the human brain has not even one peculiarity not found in a baboon's brain, no one expects that the scalpel will reveal a single physical explanation as to why the mind of a baboon and the mind of a physiologist who dissect him are so infinitely apart. If the similarity of brain

formation and mechanism carried out in all details, be according to that which is needed, there would be no reason why baboons could not become philosophers or mathematicians. Man's body, therefore, including his brain, leaves man himself wholly unexplained. Professor Huxley puts the subject thus. As to the convolutions, the brains of the apes exhibit every stage of progress from the almost smooth brain of the marmoset to the orang and chimpanzee, which fall but little below man. And it is most remarkable that as soon as all the principal sulci, fissures, appear, the pattern according to which they are arranged is identical with that of the corresponding sulci of man.

So far as cerebral structure goes, therefore, it is clear that man differs less from the chimpanzees and orang, than these do even from the monkeys, and that the difference between the brain of the chimpanzee and of man is almost insignificant when compared with that between the chimpanzee brain and that of a lemur. But there is one physiological standard by which man can be truly measured, which applies to him alone, and which rounds his whole marvelous being, his faculty of speech. The immeasurable distance between man and every other animal on earth,

is fully accounted for by the existence, the nature, and the significance of man's words. By the sayings of Francis Bacon, we find ourselves in the presence of an intellect which grasps the principles of all knowledge. In the words of Shakespeare, while not every experience of human life is vividly embodied. We are awed by the sublimity and the solemnity of the thoughts of him who expressed himself in the words of the 90th Psalm. So the more we ponder it, the more impassable grows the gulf between the minds of those who could speak thus and the minds of dumb animals. They cannot be the same beings and kind, however similar their bodily relationships be, because the more we recognize what the presence of the logos in man implies,

the planer becomes the reason why he stands alone in this world. Professor Highman, Huxley remarks on this subject. After passion and prejudice have died away, the same result will attend the teachings of the naturalist, respecting that great Alps and Andes of the living world, man. Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes, for he alone possesses the marvelous endowment of intelligible and rational speech. Thus he stands as a on a mountain top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his lower nature, by reflecting here and there a ray from the infinite source of truth. Footnote, Man's Place in Nature,

pages 119, 132. And footnote. Regarded as a physiological study, the faculty of speech consists not in uttering words, but in the power of word-making. The primary truth about a word, is that it only comes from mind. Apart from mind, it has no existence. Every word was originally made by a personality which first designed and invented it. If there be no personality, there can be no making of a word. Hence, no word ever came or can come into existence spontaneously. No human being was ever born with a word. A word, therefore, is an artificial human product, the outgrowth of a need, just as a knife was first made by someone who wanted to cut. Being purely human creations, words, like all man's works, sooner or later, grow old and die.

Some of the finest languages ever spoken are now dead. Therefore, it is not words as such which concern the physiologist, but the capacity for making them, for this is the faculty of speech itself. This faculty has all the characters of a fundamental physiological fact, because it is absolutely generic. No speechless race of man has yet been found, however low we go in the scale of human intelligence, or however isolated the race, and every speech of savage tribe consists, like every other speech, not of so many sounds, but of verbs, nouns, and partitives, that is, with all of the distinctly mental elements of true language. Not the least impressive fact about this exclusively human faculty is its limitless power of creation.

The remarkable excellence of the languages of many savage races is a testimony to the innate power of this human endowment. Thus, the Turks were originally a barbarous horde of high Asia. Their language was wholly formed while they were so. It is one of the finest, if not the finest, sounding languages in the world. It has been the least modified by foreign influences or admixture of any language in Europe. It has never had any literature of its own worth mentioning, but this is what Max Mueller says of it. We have before us in the Turkish language of perfectly transparent structure and a grammar, the inner workings of which we can study as of watching the building of cells in a beehive.

An eminent Orientalist remarked that we might imagine the Turkish to be the result of the result of the deliberations of some famous society of learned men, but no such society could have devised what the mind of man produced left to itself in the steeps of tardary and guided only by its innate laws or by an intuitive power as wonderful as any within the realm of nature. Footnote. Science of Language, first series, page 309. And footnote. Mr. Crisp, and a paper read at the anthropological section of the British Association of Science, August 1905, said, the Bantu languages of Africa will express any idea, however esoteric, and will do it with extraordinary position and often with great felicity. A foreigner who has acquired one of them will often leave his own language to use a Bantu word,

because it conveys his thought more aptly and tertially. Bantu proverbs and metaphors, are often most incisive, emphasizing with much power and delicacy, what it is intended to say. There are masters in the art of destructive criticism, and their native shrewdness, observation, and wit render them dangerous disputants. Footnote. Nature. November 16, 1905, page 66. And footnote. In the infancy of philology, some theorists describe the beginning of words to finessexenical. imitations of natural sounds, but this bow-wow theory, as it has been called, soon died after the recognition of the infinite human capacity for making languages. As natural sounds are the same the world over, if this view were correct, some similarity in sound should be found in

all languages among the words so derived, which is by no means the case. Even in baby talk, where most we would expect to find them. The words vary in sound between the different races as much as do the words of adults. Thus the word bow-wow, meaning a dog, is found only in English. Indeed, one might as well trace a navigable river to a bottle of water,

as to suppose that the inexhaustible stream of human speech has any other source than the limitless spirit of man, for, owing to that fact, human speech is far richer than any one language possibly can be. There is much truth in the saying that a man doubles himself when he learns a new language. Whoever enters upon the study of one of the great languages of the East, such as the Arabic, soon notes not only how unlike any European tongue it is,

but that it teems with words and constructions and meanings, which have no equivalence in any Western speech. The necessary conclusion, therefore, which the philologists must come to from all these facts, is that the source of all words is the conscious mind or human personality itself. It is not, as some reasoners loosely state, that language makes man, but it is man who makes language. The mind comes first, and is altogether the beginning and cause of the word. We need to emphasize this primary truth, lest it escape us when we find that all words have their material anatomical seats in the brain, upon which we can put our index finger.

Otherwise, we might infer that these material localities, these speech areas of gray matter, do themselves originate the words which are located there, which will find instead that the material seats of words and the brain matter no more make those words than the shells of a library make the books arranged on them. The ultimate fact is rather, as revealed by the physiological study of the faculty of speech, that words are the instruments which the thinker invents or makes for himself for the purpose of defining his thought. Their relations to thought are just as definitely instrumental

as the violinist fingers are instrumental to the expression of his thoughts and feelings with the violin. The violinist thinks first in time before a finger moves, and the thinker thinks first in time before a word rises to his lips. By degrees, however, the mind becomes so habituated to think only by using its word instruments that an adult life thought without words becomes almost, if not quite, impossible. Because in all thinking as such, the man talks to himself in words, whether he will later talk to others or whether he be thinking alone. If anyone doubt this,

let him try to represent a true thought to his consciousness without its accompanying words. It should be clearly recognized that this applies only to thought and not to feelings. Thoughts need words to become true thoughts, but feelings do not need words to become true feelings. In fact, we often vainly try to express our feelings in words and find words fail us. We must again disclaim here any excursion into the field of metaphysics, for as we Proceed with our discussion, we will meet with illustrations of what will happen to an adult's power of pure thinking upon actual material damage to his brain word apparatus. When such damage is complete, though manifestations of feeling may remain, all recognizable signs of thought are gone. Having considered the relations of words to thoughts, we now come to a crucial point in all our discussion, namely the relations of words to the brain.

We can scarcely overstate the importance of certain modern discoveries on this subject, because they revealed the first recognizable link between the immaterial and the material, between mind and matter, yet demonstrated in science. That link never would have been guessed by metaphysicians, for it was only physicians who could have discovered such facts by their noting the effects of small and strictly localized brain injuries. The simplest way to illustrate this statement is to narrate some experience of physicians which teach these lessons of such extreme interest.

I was once hurriedly sent for by an old patient of mine. I found her much disturbed by a strange experience which she immediately detailed in the well-chosen words of an educated woman. What is the reason, doctor, she said, that everything in a book or newspaper is illegible to me. Last evening I sent an advertisement to the herald for a waitress, and when the girls came this morning, I could not read their references. I then took up the herald and found that I could not read a word in it. At first I supposed my eyesight had failed, but I could see everything around the room as well as ever, and so also with my crochet work. I then opened the Bible that could not read a word. What is the matter with me? I at once recognized that she had been struck with word blindness, and this affection is technically termed. And from that day to her death, two years later, she never saw a word.

In a moment of time, she had become as illiterate as an Australian savage, and she remained so. Having calmed her excitement as best I could, I was able to note that she had absolutely no other disorder of speech and none of vision. She heard every word that came to her ears, and she could speak as fluently as ever, but no word could reach her consciousness through her eyes. All that which as yet had happened to her was that a little artery which supplies blood to a small area in the visual region of her brain had become plugged

with the result of totally disorganizing the gray matter where eye words are registered. The words, the blood thereof, which is the life thereof, find their best illustration in that most living of things, the brain gray matter, for it immediately dies if deprived of its supply of blood. Another example of the total loss of the power of recognizing words occurred in a hospital patient, but in him it was not words that came through the eye, but words that came through

the ear, which he could not recognize, so that he had what is termed word deafness. He was a naturally intelligent young man under 30, a clerk in a mercantile establishment, and was supposed to have become insane, because, though he talked incessantly, he talked only gibberish, and moreover he did not seem to understand what was said to him. It was soon found, however, that he could read and write as well as ever, so that to all questions that were put to him in writing, he wrote correct answers. The reason why he talked so incoherently was because he could not hear his own words, and for the same reason all words addressed to his ears reached his consciousness only as sounds, but were otherwise as unintelligible to him as the words of a language which he had never

heard. It was also words only that he could not hear, for he heard and recognized all other sounds, including the tick of a watch and the notes of a canary bird. Such cases of word deafness are due to the same kind of damage to a small locality in the auditory area of the brain as that which causes word blindness in the visual area. A third form of loss is still more common. A man retires to bed in good health, but is found in the morning utterly unable to speak a word. It is soon ascertained that he has no word deafness, for he evidently understands everything that has spoken to him,

and that he has no word blindness because he can read. but he may not be able to utter a word, still less, a sentence. In his distress, he may make signs that he would like to write, but even if he can hold a pen well and begin to write, it is usually found that he cannot find the words to express himself by writing any more than he can by speaking. Thus it is that processes of disease enable us to analyze our brain mechanism of speech with all the precision of well-divized experiments.

By this means we learn, as otherwise we would not, that speech is of two kinds. The first kind consists of words which come to us, and these are words which arrive through the ear, and then go to a particular locality in what is called the first temporal convolution, which is in the cortical area of hearing, where they are received as words. And the second consists of words which come to us through the eye in reading, and which go to an entirely different place from me. the ear words, for they are received as words in a special locality called the angular gyrus in the cortical visual area. It is to be remembered that there is no resemblance whatever

between the sound of the word man, for example, and the written word man, for sound and sight are two wholly separate things, and hence sound words and sight words have each their different brain registries. Modern invention has doubtless added a third word registry. connected with the sense of touch, by which the blind are unable to read, but a special locality has not yet been identified. The second kind of speech consists of words which go from us, or which we ourselves utter. This division of the faculty of speech is wholly different from the first, because in that we are passive and receive the words, while in this we are active and ourselves give forth the words. We do this either by word of mouth or by word of hand in writing,

and to thus express ourselves an entirely distinct mechanism is required, because it involves muscular movements. It is therefore called motor speech and proceeds from an altogether different place in the brain cortex, in a region from which muscular movements are initiated, particularly in those regions which govern the movements of the tongue and other muscles of articulation, and which are also in proximity to the motor areas governing the hands. Here, in a small patch of gray matter, not larger than a hazelnat, located in a part of a convolution called Roka's convolution, from the French surgeon who first identified its connection with speech,

is stored every word that can be spoken. Footnote. Rosenstein, quoted, by Sir William Gowers, Diseases of the Nervous System, Volume 2, page 115, Second Edition, 1901. And footnote, let this remarkable piece of matter be separately destroyed, as it often is by a gush of blood from a ruptured artery, and the consciousness is utterly unable to find a word with which to express itself. It still may have its power to receive all words from others through the ear or eye, but not a word can it communicate in return.

The point of an umbrella once neatly destroyed this last or uttering center in a man who was brought to Bellevue Hospital wholly unable to speak a word, though he could hear words by his ear and read with his eye as well as ever. The story told by his friends was that in a drunken row a man poked the tip of an umbrella into his eye, but instead of seriously injuring that organ, it passed over the eyeball into his brain, just where the uttering speech center lies resting on only a thin plate in the bony roof of the orbit. From the situation of the small hole made in the roof of the orbit, this pointed stick could have gone nowhere else, and from his subsequent symptoms, it evidently caused no

hemorrhage or other damage, except just and broke his convolution. While I was describing his case to a large class in my clinic, he saw a student with an umbrella in his hand and pointing to it, he burst into tears. Meanwhile, he had a wholly uninjured brocus convulsion in his other hemisphere, but though he wept at his inability, he could not make it talk for reasons which we will subsequently explain. These different derangements of speech, due to organic changes in the word mechanism, are technically called. called aphasias, and divided into the sensory forms when eye or ear words are deranged, or motor aphasia, when Broca's convolution is damaged.

Now, as we have remarked before, the gray matter of no one of these three seeds of words originates or makes any words. They are simply registered there for use, as they would be on a printed page or on a wax leaf of a phonograph, and how that is done we will learn further on. We have already likened those speech areas to the shelves of a library, with words arranged thereon like so many volumes, and that something very similar to this is actually the case, is demonstrated by facts such as these. When a man sets about to learn a language new to him, he has to add another brain shelf for that purpose, because the old shelf has too many books on it to allow any room for a row of entirely new words. Professor Henshelwood of the University of Glasgow publishes the case of a highly educated man

who was brought to him for an attack of ordinary word blindness. Footnote, Lancet, February 8th, 1902, also his book, Letter, Word, and Mind Blindness, London, 2001. And Footnote. He could read his native English in print only with the greatest difficulty and words in writing scarcely at all. As Dr. Henshalwood was told that the patient had learned Greek, Latin, and French,

he first tested him with Greek, when the patient was surprised and delighted to find that he could reek Greek perfectly, as he did paragraphs in Homer, the usudides, and xenophon. Then, testing his Latin, he could read it far better than he could English, but not as perfectly as Greek, while in French he made more mistakes than in Latin, but still read it a great deal better than he could his native English. The only explanation, of course, of this case, is that the injury to his brain matter nearly ruined the English shelf,

then damaged to a less extent the French, and still less the Latin shelf, while the Greek shelf escaped entirely. The same arrangement holds true also in the auditory word mechanism. Dr. Hensher Wood reports the case of a Frenchman, who made his living in Glasgow as a teacher of French for a number of years during which he learned English. After returning to his native country, he had a stroke of epilepsy from which he became word deaf in French, while his English shelf remained intact so that his wife could speak to him, but only in English. But while such instances indicate that these shelves are arranged one above the

other. Other facts show that the books may be so jammed sideways, so to speak, that not one of them can be got out, in which case the event proves that on each shelf the verbs are placed first, the pronouns next, then the prepositions and adverbs next, and the nouns last. A man was brought to my clinic who could not speak a word. My diagnosis was that he probably had a tumor-like swelling in the speech area, which might be absorbed by giving him iodine of potassium. I had him removed then so that he could not hear what I was to say, while I told the class that if he recovered, he would very likely get his verbs first and his nouns last. When he returned two weeks afterward, on my showing him a knife, he said, you cut, a pencil, you write, etc. Three weeks later,

he had all his prepositions that he could name no noun for several weeks after that. The reasons for all this are that verbs are our innermost and therefore first learned words, because we know that we see, we hear, etc., before we know what it is we see or hear, while nouns represent things outside of us to which we lastly give names. The nouns which we learn after all the others, and therefore forget the soonest, are the name of persons, so that elderly people very commonly complain how they cannot recall persons' names. These cerebral library shelves may also be partially, instead of completely, damaged by accidents to the brain, with results not unlike those which often disturb the equanimity of a student

when the house-cleaning season arrives, and women invade his study for a general dusting of his books. For days afterwards, he picks up the wrong book because it has been put back where it does not belong. So after some brain shock, a person may be able to speak, but the wrong word often vexatiously comes to his lips, just as if his broken shelves had become badly jumbled. To this condition, the term paraphasia is given. There may be shelves in these cerebral libraries, however, for other things than words. Professor Edgren of Stockholm has published the records of a number of patients who had lost the power of reading music that they could still read words, that is, they became music note blind instead of word blind. And Dr. Henshal Woods patient

mentioned above, who could read Greek but not English, the reverse took place, for he could still read music as well as ever, though he could not read a sentence in English. interesting, however, of these separate registries is that for figures, as the damage to the speech apparatus often involves more than one registry, the following record of a case in my own experience is of interest, because it proves that if only one of the three speech mechanisms remain uninjured, the personality can use that one sufficiently well for all practical purposes. A gentleman who doing a long, active business career had accumulated a fortune, had an attack of epilepsy which, while causing no muscular paralysis, made him both word-blind and wholly unable

to utter a word. He remained in this condition for seven years, but what brought him to my office, in company with his lawyer and only son, was that my opinion was sought as to his competence to make a will. His lawyer produced one in which the patient devised a certain amount of property, consisting of pieces of real estate and of other items, each very definitely mentioned to his married daughter, which was, in the testator's opinion, a very fair division of his property between his two children. His manufacturing business, however, he devised exclusively to his son. learning that his son-in-law was dissatisfied with this arrangement and might induce his wife to contest her father's will after his death by a claim to a share in the profits of the factory, on the ground that in his condition he was incapable of making a will. He came to me as an expert to give my written opinion on the subject. It was naturally felt by his son and his lawyer that a very plausible case might be made out to the jury by the other side. that a man who could not himself read a word of his will, nor utter a sound by which he could express

what he wanted, might easily be imposed upon by the persons interested to do so. In my examination of him, it was found that though he could not read, and likewise could not write, as his utterance speech mechanism was wholly ruined, yet he could both read and write figures as well as ever, in fact that he was unusually adept in all arithmetical calculations meantime nothing could persuade him to retire from business and so for seven years he continued to buy and sell as he had always done for he wrote the sums for all transactions and pointing to the figures with his pencil the bargain had to be forthwith concluded an illustration he produced a memorandum book of his in which were entered numerous such accounts particularly directing my attention by his finger to one of them in which he had bought a third interest in a business enterprise, and in which he had entered all payments correctly on that basis, the sums varying according to the year's profits. As questions relating to the testamentary capacity of ephagics have come up in many courts of both Europe and America,

quite a literature has grown up on this subject, and I proceeded to test this particular. case, according to its accepted rules. I took the well and looked it carefully over before him, and then read it aloud, item by item, to each of which he nodded assent, until I decidedly misread one stipulation as in favor of the son, when it was actually in favor of the daughter. The old gentleman was furious at my supposed mistake, and was quick to correct any other inaccuracies in my reading, however minor in importance they were. I therefore could give a decided opinion that he was entirely competent to devise a will, and I was glad to learn afterwards that this precautionary measure on his part prevented any trouble in settling the estate

when he died some months afterwards. The place for registering figures is doubtless somewhere in the visual area of the cortex. But in his history, he, his case so removed from the I-word registry that it escaped damage as completely as his ear-word mechanism had done. Meanwhile, this patient had repeatedly tried to learn to speak and to read again after the sudden onset of his calamity, but though he endeavored with characteristic perseverance to get back some of the lost parts of his speech, yet he failed altogether. Mentally he was just the same, and his personality with all its peculiarities remained the same. But those particular chords of the instrument were irretrievably broken. Why he, just like the man whose

uttering center was destroyed by the umbrella tip, could not substitute another set of precisely similar cords which he had in his brain, and which also were perfectly intact. We will explain in the next chapter because that explanation covers the whole subject of how we talk at all. End of Section 5. Section 6 of Brain and Personality. This is a Libre Vox recording. All Libre Vox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibreVox.org. Recording by Julie Burks. Brain and personality or the physical relations of the brain to the mind by William Hannah Thompson. Section 6. The Faculty of Speech continued. It should be noted, first of all, that no part of the human brain has any original, that is, native connection with the gift of speech.

The material seat or region of the brain of this great faculty comes always as an acquired change in the brain, for no one ever was born with it. Hence, at birth, speech has no place or locality whatever in either hemisphere. We may even go so far as to say that if the distinguishing fact about man is that he is a speaking animal, this is not owing to the structure of his brain. For not only has the chimpanzee just the same convolutions which man has for speech, but like the chimpanzee, man has the same convolutions in pairs, that is, in both hemispheres. And yet, man uses only one of these pairs for speech, while the same set of convolutions in his other hemisphere is no more used for speech than either pair is used for that purpose by the chimpanzee. If, therefore, the word faculty

was an original endowment of those word areas in man, on account of their particular construction, those areas being just alike in each hemisphere, then both hemispheres would be used for speech. Instead of this being the case, the entire word mechanism in all its parts, is found in only one of the two hemispheres, while the other hemisphere remains wordless for life. With the great majority of persons, the speech centers are located exclusively in the left hemisphere. It is a part of the left superior temporal convolution. which hears words. It is a part of the left angular gyrus which sees words, and it is the left brokous convolution which utters words. And all such persons, the corresponding places in the right

hemisphere are not speech areas at all. It would be natural to infer from all this that the left brain is organized differently from the right brain as far as the supreme endowment is concerned. but it is not so, for the good reason that in some persons the speech centers are in the right brain alone, and it is their left brains which are the wordless ones. Moreover, such persons are not a wit inferior to the others in everything which language demands. Therefore, again, it is not brain structure, nor organization, nor locality, nor brain cells or fibers, nor any similar thing which is the first cause of word-making. That first cause is something wholly different, namely an agency, or rather agent, which visits these brain localities, and finding them originally entirely unfamiliar with a single word of any kind, proceeds by a long and incestant repetition process of teaching, to fashion those particles of gray matter to do what he proposes, here to receive words, and there to utter words, how he manages to do.

this is revealed by his original reason for choosing the left brain in most persons, but in others not the left but the right brain. The facts which led to the discovery of the first steps and the formation of the word mechanism in man were that it was noted that when sudden paralysis occurs on one side of the body, if it be the right side which is paralyzed, the side which is governed by the left brain, motor, or uttering speech is also very commonly affected. The reason for this is that Broca's convolution, which contains the center for motor speech,

as we have already explained, is situated in that part of the cortex, which is called the motor area, because from that area precede those excitations of muscular movements, which are of a voluntary kind. A powerful spurt of blood from a ruptured cerebral artery may so tear the brain tissue as to involve these motor centers or the fibers leading from them,

and in doing so frequently involves Broca's convolution among the rest. Post-mortem examinations fully confirmed this statement. Meanwhile, as the right hemisphere is then found to be quite unaffected, including the right Broca's convolution, it is plain that the loss of speech is due exclusively to the injury to the left hemisphere. On the other hand, while loss of speech ordinarily accompanies right-sided but not left-sided paralysis, some cases have been reported in which it accompanied left-sided and not right-sided paralysis. In time, more of these cases were published, along with the significant post-mortem findings

of damage to the right instead of the left, Broca's convolution. In other instances, in patients who, with left-sided paralysis, and loss of motor speech had also showed word blindness during life. Not only the right brocus convolution, but the region of the right angular gyrus was likewise found damaged. As the corresponding places in the left hemisphere were intact, it followed that in these persons, the speech centers were in the right brain and not in the left.

It was not long before this seemingly curious anomaly found its explanation, which is that right-sided paralysis with loss of speech occurs in right-handed people, and left-sided paralysis with loss of speech occurs in persons who have been left-handed in life. In other words, the faculty of speech is located in the hemisphere which governs the hand which is most used. Hand and speech, therefore, are physiologically connected. This remarkable fact brings us back to the origin to the very beginning of the very beginning of, this wonderful faculty of expression in man. It began by one personality longing to communicate with others, and the first thing which he did then, as every human being still does, when endeavoring to

communicate with those whose vocal speech he does not know was to make gestures with his hands. Gesture language, therefore, was the first language, and few persons are aware how much gesture language still continues in living use. This is particularly, noticeable among all peoples who have no written language, but even among the most civilized. Whole races are characterized by the number and variety of their gestures while speaking, quite as much as their vocabulary. A non-gesculating Frenchman is as uncommon as a tacitone Frenchman. One has to learn two languages among the Arabs, for nothing can exceed the expressiveness and piquancy of those gestures by which they often more than

double the meaning of their words. The important place which gesture language holds among primitive peoples is well illustrated by the following anecdote. Dr. Walter Roth, in the preface to his ethnological studies of the northwestern Queensland-Australia Aborigines, says, I was out on horseback with some blacks when one of the boys riding by my side suddenly asked me to halt, as a mate of his in front was after some emus, consisting of a hen-bird and her young progeny. As there had been apparently to me no communication whatsoever

between the boy in front and the one close to me, separated as they were by a distance of quite 150 yards, I naturally concluded that my informant was uttering a falsehood and told him so in pretty plain terms, with the result

that after certain mutual recriminations he explained on his hands how he had received his information, the statement to be shortly afterwards confirmed by the arrival of the lad himself with the dead bird and some of the young in question. I afterwards found that there is an actual well-defined sign language which extends through the entire northwestern districts of Queensland. Among our staid Anglo-Saxons, a preacher like Whitfield moved his audience more by what they saw him do with the muscles of his face and of his hands than by the state Anglo-Saxons, the words he uttered, for those words we have in his printed sermons, and we wonder at the effect they had on his hearers. His voice certainly cannot account for the whole difference.

As inspection of the frontispiece plate shows in what close proximity to the area governing the movements of the hand and the motor region of the brain are, the centers which preside over the movements of the muscles of the face, of the lips, and of the tongue. A common and associated action of these parts, therefore, would be much more natural than between the muscles of the face, for example, and those of the leg. We can then see how readily facial expression lending itself to gesture and attempts at communication would seek the cooperation of lips and tongue for vocal sounds, soon to become words because of the human mind back of the sounds. This last element of mind, as we will note later, is indispensable, because otherwise the sounds would have remained forever only like those of an anthropoid ape. But as the right hand is the oftenest used for every purpose,

so it is of the two hands the oftenest used for gesture, which means, of course, for language. As soon as other parts were sought for to cooperate with gesture and language, the appeal would necessarily be to the neighboring's centers in the left brain, and not by crossing the Corpus Colossum bridge to the corresponding centers in the other hemisphere. It would not be long, therefore, before the habit became settled to use only parts in the left brain for this specialized work, until finally the habit became fixed for life. Why some people are left-handed, we do not know. The discussion on the origin

of right-handedness and left-handedness comes down to us from ancient times. and is ever renewed. Scarcely a month passes without it being all threshed out again in our medical journals, but the primary connection of the hand with the fashioning of the word mechanism in the human brain is conclusively settled by the location of that mechanism in the right hemisphere and left-handed persons. Whence, therefore, the impulses mostly proceed for using the particular hand in question settles both to what cerebral places, word, are to go, and from what places they are to come. So far, we have been led by anatomical facts. Thus, Broca's convolution is no more a theory than a finger is, for it is a definite material thing.

But what makes Broca's convolution talk? Evidently not simply because it is Broca's convolution, because there is another broca's convolution within the same cranium, which does not talk. This question, which really concerns the origin of human speech, is not best answered by studying speech in children and noting how they begin. Many reasoners go astray here because with preconceived views about the automatic origin of words, which children are supposed to learn by imitation, they wholly ignore the anatomical brain changes which are necessary to make speech and what it is which causes them. If they are studied, it will then appear that these anatomical changes cannot possibly be of automatic origin, but rather must be the effects and results of purpose. The best age, therefore, for starting this investigation is when the subject begins to learn to read. The ability to read constitutes an important department of language, and no human race has yet been found, which cannot be taught to read if the attempt be made early enough.

in life. Thus, Bishop Hale of Perth, Western Australia, in his Aborigines of Australia, mentions that a shepherd, Adams, has taken to wife a native woman who had been brought up at some settler station and was partially educated. Adams could not read, and the black wife taught the white husband to read. It is no longer doubtful that every race of man can be educated to know anything, from reading and writing to mathematics, philosophy, and political economy. In other words, man is always and everywhere man, and infinitely distant in mind from every ape. Some early anthropologists were mistaken enough to say that certain races of men were too low in the scale to be able to count above five the number of their fingers, and they cited some tribes among the Australian savages as

examples. We need only quote the following as to the actual facts. Mr. James Dawson and his Australian Aborigines published in Melbourne in 1881 records the following remarkable evidence. The inspection of the Aboriginal school and Rahamayuk in Gippsland during the past 11 years gets a percentage of results higher than the other state, white schools, in Victoria, and while no doubt this excellence is largely due to the regularity with which the children attend school and to the skill and zeal of the gentlemen who teach them, it fairly shows that Aboriginal children are at least equal to others in power of learning those branches of education which are taught in the state schools of Victoria. On several occasions of examination by a government inspector, the percentage of the Ryamayak School was

a result unparalleled by any other school in the colony. Footnote. See article the position of the Australian Aborigines and the scale of human intelligence by the Honorable J. Mildred Creed in the 19th century magazine, January 1905. End, footnote. Now, no one can imagine that learning to read can be automatic. It requires instead the most persevering attention and application for many months. Over and over again, the pictures of the separate letters have to be identified so as to be distinguished from one another, and then their combination into words successfully mastered till the word symbol and its meaning are simultaneously recognized. This process of brain shaping has to be done piece by piece, or layer by layer, so that some

persons become word-blind without being letter-blind, but a less spontaneous cerebral act than this can scarcely be conceived. If it is not wholly the doing of what we call will, then what is it? But the most pregnant fact about this process of learning to read is that by the constant repetition of the will-directed effort to see the letter and word pictures, an actual modification of gray matter results, and a limited portion of the way-directed. the visual area, so that it can do what no other gray matter anywhere can do, see, and recognize words. Here, surely, we come upon a most impressive fact, namely that by constant repetition of a given stimulus, we can affect a permanent anatomical change in our brain stuff, which will

add a specific and remarkable cerebral function to that place, which it never had before, and which, therefore, it could not have had either originally or spontaneously. This material change must be there, though no microscope will ever detect it, or identify the English reading from the French reading cells, and one who can read both languages. But yet there it must be, or a blood clot or an umbrella tip could not destroy it. But this material change was not affected easily. Rather, it came only by laborious and laborious and laborious. long-continued work spent on that collection of gray matter, and work by something which must

be wholly extraneous to the gray matter itself. It is absurd to suppose that any other areas of the cortex which cannot of themselves recognize a letter or word are the teachers of the cells in the angular gyrish which do the reading. It is the conscious personality alone which does this work, and no better proof of this is needed to show. know that such must be the process than when. In later years, a student learns to read Greek, Latin, and French, as did Dr. Henshelwood's patient above-sighted. When that man separately studied those three languages, in addition to his childhood's speech, his consciousness and his will certainly cooperated in prolonged exercise until wholly distinct portions of his gray matter

were fashioned, one for Greek, another for Latin, and another for French words, each so divided from each other and from the earlier English stratum, that they were respectively differently affected by the damage which involved this word area. We must hear pause in our discussion, because we have come to a great principle which goes to the foundation of everything nervous, from the nervous system of Apollo up to the brain of a philosopher. That principle is this, that a stimulus to nervous matter affects a change in that matter by calling forth a reaction in it. This change may be exceedingly slight after the first stimulus, but each repetition of the stimulus increases the change, with its following specific reaction until by constant repetition a permanent alteration in the nervous matter stimulated occurs,

which produces a fixed habitual way of working in it. In other words, the nervous matter acquires a special way of working that is a function by habit. We will find this principle constantly illustrated and operative in many ways as we proceed. But what concerns us now is that already, from the facts which we have been reviewing, we arrive at one of the most important of all conclusions,

namely that the gray layer of our brains is actually plastic and capable of being fashioned. It need not be left with only the slender equipment of functions, which nature gives it at birth. Instead, it can be fashioned artificially, that is, by education, so that it may acquire very many new functions or capacities, which never come by birth nor by inheritance, but which can be stamped upon it as some, many physical alterations and its proplasmic substance. All this is demonstrated beyond cavil, by the textural brain changes which the acquired and not congenital function of speech

depends upon. This well-demonstrated truth is a far-reaching significance, because it gives an entirely new aspect to the fomentous subject of education. Most persons conceive of education vaguely as only mental, a training of the mind as such, with small thought that involves physical changes in the brain itself, ere it can become real and permanent. But we have seen that different forms of education, as perfect examples of education as can be named, are ultimately dependent upon the sound condition of certain portions of the gray matter which have been educated for each work. Thus to read music requires a great deal of education, and an apoplectic clot may instantly deprive a person of a laboriously gained power to read music, or such an

accident may spoil every other kind of reading, and yet leave the music-reading place unharmed. What a burden of school-day's arithmetic was everyone remembers, but in those same days, figures were deeply engraved in some part of the angular gyrus, so that, as in the case mentioned on page 99, when all other reading cells were ruined, they remained as clear as ever for their owner's use. Or again, they may be spoiled while the reading of music notes remains. So writing, which heretofore has been regarded as a form of brokous convolution work, because usually when this convolution is damaged, speech by mouth and speech by hand are both abolished,

very probably has a center of its own, since cases are reported where the individual could not speak but could write. Some investigators claim to have identified the writing center and a part of the motor area above Broca's convolution. Footnote. Professor C.K. Mills, American Journal of the Medical Sciences, September 1904. End footnote. From all this, it follows that the brain must be modified by every process of true special education. A skilled violinist can play upon his instrument as easily as another

can read a book. But how did he acquire such an accomplishment? Without doubt, by actually fashioning a special violin center in his brain as reading cells are fashioned, by the same laborious iteration of exercise of those particular brain cells until they had to become violin music cells. And so with every handicraft, instances which prove this have been reported of mechanics, who, after an apollactic attack, have had their right hand suddenly but permanently lose its cunning, while but little else or nothing seemed to be lost. Meantime, one fact about the plasticity of the matter of the human brain cortex, in other words, its educatability, is that its plasticity diminishes progressively with age.

This is much more evident with certain brain functions than with others, but is particularly the case with the acquisition of language. Children under 10 years of age acquire languages by the ear very easily. That is, the gray matter of their word centers is very plastic. and can soon be fashioned for that purpose. But what is gained easily is lost easily. For if a child at that age be removed to another country, where he no longer hears the language which he has learned,

he generally forgets it totally in less than two years. On the other hand, many cases are reported of children becoming aphasic, just as adults do by the onset of right-sided paralysis. With the destruction of the left Broca's convolution, and yet they gradually learn to talk again in much the same fashion in which they acquired speech at first. That they do this by educating the centers in the right brain is proved by parallel cases of the supervision afterwards of total aphasia, when left-sided paralysis was added to their former right-sided paralysis,

i.e. by a second injury involving the right centers. facts of this kind have led some writers to draw the erroneous conclusion that both hemispheres are concerned in speech, so that if the word centers of one side are injured, those of the other hemisphere can come to the patient's help. The chief argument for their position is the transitory character of loss of speech in certain persons affected with aphasia. In a few weeks, they recover their ability to read or speak, as the case may be, and it is therefore argued that they do so by help from the centers in the unaffected hemisphere. But it does not seem to occur to these reasoners that, if so, then every case of ephasia from injury in one hemisphere should soon be recovered from

by the aid of the other hemisphere. But the facts are that a great majority of cases in adults, if the ephasia does not approve within a few months, certainly within a year, it never improves. My shrewd patient, who retained his arithmetic, so well, took many a lesson for six years, with all the assiduity of an industrious schoolboy, and yet he never got back a word in his left angular gyrus, nor in his left broke his convolution, nor, of course, in the right word centers. The most probable explanation of temporary aphasia and recovery or improvement from it is,

that the sudden injury causes a shock, and thus paralysis. of the word centers, but not complete disorganization of them, so that in time they regain their function, rather than that, the structures in the other hemisphere, which had not for years been taught a word of English any more than of Chinese, should in a few weeks be able to read or speak. The older the patient is, the more hopeless the case, simply because the unaffected word areas in the other hemisphere have passed the time of life when the gravely matter is plastic enough to be fashioned for any new complex function. A healthy man after forty scarcely ever learns a new language well.

After fifty, such instances are of the rarest, and at seventy, the best that can be expected is the mastery of a very few foreign phrases and badly pronounced at that. We need not dwell further on this subject, for it is simply in keeping with the facts connected with any other mental acquirement, which comes only by education. A physician needs many years to get his education, and who would expect him at 50 or 60 to become a civil engineer? Our study of the cerebral relations of the Faculty of Speech serves one purpose, at least, namely that of revealing the great fact that man can be educated and does educate himself by modifying his brain for that purpose. It is,

this fact which makes man what he is, man. But for the purpose of our discussion, it is so important to be able to recognize clearly how our brain matter can be made to acquire wholly new functions and according to what fundamental principles of nervous physiology it does so, that we must, for the present, diverge from the subject of education to that of the great laws governing all nervous development. Above everything else, modern science is indebted to the recognition of the principle of evolution as the chief guide to the understanding of the deeper problems of life. By this is meant that all life development and certainly all nervous development has been orderly, which in turn means that from the beginning, however low to the end, however high,

certain fundamental laws continuously operate. We therefore can best unravel the most complex forms by studying the commencement in the slightest forms. Well assured that if we never drop the line of continuity, it will be our clue through the most intricate passages of our search. We will then find that as we approach the subject of the brain of man, in its relation to thought by another route entirely than that which we have been following, namely by the route which leads from below upwards, we will arrive all the more certainly at the conclusions to which we have been so far attending,

with all the added confirmation given by the convergence of independent lines of research. We proceed, therefore, in the next chapter to the consideration of the great laws which preside over the evolution of a nervous system. End of Section 6. Section 7. of brain and personality. This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public

domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. Brain and personality, or the physical relations of the brain to the mind, by William Anna Thompson, evolution of a nervous system. Certain fundamental principles are always found underlined the essential phenomenon of life, which first recognizable in the most primitive, prove afterwards to be just as operative in the most developed forms. The greatest growth, for example, in either the vegetable or animal kingdoms, a towering oak or an immense will, have to begin like every other living thing, as veritable microbes in a single microscopic cell. The inner structure of that cell itself, has certain

invariable elements, which are equally present in the first vegetable and in the first animal cell. Thus, every species of plant or animal contains in its first cell a fixed, specific, and always even number of bodies called chromosomes, because they can take a dye, and this number regularly recurs in all the subsequent cells of the future body, though they be millions. Thus, in the cells of the mouse, the salamanda, the trout and the lily, the chromosomes always number 24. In the ox, the guinea pig, in man and in the onion, the chromosomes always number 16. In the shark, the number is 36, in the grass upper, 12, and so on. It is from such facts and others like them that the eminent naturalist, vonnegeli, was led

to say that all life is one. But nowhere is the saddest way of fundamental principles so illustrated as in the development of a never system. From the first beginnings of the never system in a polyp up to the mavellous brain of man, certain primary laws are always operative, without their ever been afterwards repealed or superseded. If, therefore, we had to understand the complex, We must first study the simplest organization, while assured that what is illustrated by it will continue recognizable in every further development, however great or manifold. In studying the development of a never system from a physiological point of view, the first principle discernible as governing that development is what in any other connection we would term discipline, and we cannot do better than to note out the conception suggested by that word are applicable to our subject.

One of the definitions given in Webster of the word discipline is subjection to role, submission to other and control by severe systematic training. The central idea conveyed by this definition is that discipline in no way represses activity, but directed by means of regulated restraint. Without activity, there could be no discipline for there would be nothing then to discipline.

The word, therefore, implies some kind of her energy made to subserve some purpose which it would not effect unless it be put under control. But in its usual and most correct sense, discipline is not a word which can be applied to an inanimate force. It is an exclusively never-system word. You cannot properly say that you would discipline your watch if it goes too fast.

though you can't say that you will regulate it. Nor can you properly say that you have disciplined the energy of steam when you have made it to observe your purpose by putting it under control in an engine. It must always be something nervous that is disciplined, so that even in the bodies of the highest animals, nothing but that which is nervous can be either disciplined or trained. This may seem a singular statement to some,

as they think of the highly trained muscles of the legs of a dancer or the fingers of a pianist. But it is not the muscles in these cases, but the mental nerves of the muscles, which have been so wonderfully disciplined. For neither of these instances of supposed muscle training can be compared for complexity and difficulty with the training of the muscular organ, the tongue, for the movements necessary for articulate speech. An animated orator has to make a greater number of rapidly succeeding and yet perfectly adjusted contractions and relaxation of his muscles of articulation than any famous performer on a musical instrument.

But how shall we explain the authenticated case of a man who could speak English, French, and German, and who suddenly became unable from an attack of right epiplegia or paralysis on the right side of his body? To make his tongue work out a word in any one of the three languages, what was the matter with its tongue? Nothing as a muscle or mussela again. In fact, it could not work as well as ever in assisting mastication and swallowing. Why, therefore, could it not talk? Solely because its nervous direction for the movement in speaking was lost,

while its nervous direction for the movement of mastication was retained. But if its pair of hypoglossal nerves were also cut, just as the accident which has cut its epiplegia had severed the connection with the eye-brain centers, then the tongue would have failed equally to assist in mastication and in the clotition. It is a mistake, therefore, to say that muscles, as such, can be taught to do anything. Nothing can be taught except that which is nervous. This principle is full-reaching, because among other things, it introduces us to a second element of fundamental importance and which is characteristic of the nervous system alone, namely that of graduation of rank in work or function.

Every tissue of the body except the nervous tissue as but one dead level of function. No one bone, a bone, cell, has any higher rank than any bone a bone cell, any more than one brick in a building is of a higher, button grade than another brick, simply because it is put above or below. And so muscles are little else than duplicate of each other in function, because wherever they are, they will be found to do but one thing, namely contract and relax and nothing more. There is therefore no such thing in the muscles as one set governing another set by virtue of poor innate superiority, as the rider is superior to his horse. The horse might claim against his rider, the greater importance, because he does all the going,

and so it might, if he were like his rider, and not a broken-in horse. But just this difference meets us in the case of the grey motor cells of the spinal cord and the grey motor cells of the surface of the brain. The grey motor cells of the cord do all the going of the body, for even the so-called cranial motel nerves really belong to its system. Not a muscle of the body is directly under the control of those aristocratic motocels in the topmost layer of the brain. The cord might say to the brain, If you wish to move end of foot, you have to ask me to do it for you.

Very well then, do it is the brain's answer. But don't you move end of foot till I tell you, for since I have been evoluted up here, you have lost your senseless independence and must obey me. You were the original nervous system, to be sure, just as there were horses before they were meant to ride them. But since I have come, I am above and you are below, and as it is, it took me long patient training and a great deal of trouble to break you into my service so that you would act according to my others.

Rank, however, always implies an ultimate below, from which everything starts as a common foundation for all subsequent gradations and so we will begin now with the simplest illustration of what a nerve system is reduced to its most primitive form as it is in the lowest animals which show a trace of nerve system it is proved to consist of three parts one a nerve filament which receives and transmit a stimulus to two a nerve center of soft gray cells and fibers which receive this stimulus and which center reacts to the stimulus, never on the nerve which brought it, but on three, a nerve filament which proceeds from the center.

Hence, these two filaments are accordingly named the first aiferant because it transmits to, and the second, efferent, because it transmits from the center some nervous vibration. One of the commonest examples of efferent excitation is when muscles contract in response to the aferent excitations, is when muscles contract in response to the effluent excitation of their mortal nerves. A fair illustration of this mechanism can be found in ourselves in the act of winking. You can abolish the power to wink in one of three ways. You may do it first by cutting the branch of the fifth cranial nerve, which transmits sensation to the nerve center for winking at the top of the spinal cord.

This center then does not know that any winking out to be done, done because it depends for all news of that kind on the sensory fifth nerve and that has been cut. Or you may abolish winking by cutting the proper bench of the seventh pair of cranial nerves. Then no matter how the fifth nerve tells the center that it how to wink hard, the center answers, I cannot do it because the seventh nerve, which is the efferance of mortal nerve that works the muscle of the eyelid, is cut. Or, lastly, with both the fifth and seventh nerves intact, no winking will occur because the nerve center itself has been deaded by some narcotic poison. From that simple beginning of a real nervous system, one can proceed step by step, with

animals still utterly brainless, but which have developed and complicated nevors system, and yet in them no other mode of working than byiferent, centric, and efferent, and iferent element can be discovered. What one finds in the small organized nervous systems is a greater number of these centers, each width is aphorant and efferent nerves, but with one important addition, namely that the separate nerves centers in them are connected by short nerve fibers, which are for the purpose of enabling the centers to work together. Something as the jars of a lading battery are connected by short chains. A still further development shows a regular chain of search nerve centers,

forming a distinctly ascending series, whose functions never change or abolish the original aphyrant and efferent mode of working, but instead show a more and more perfect amony of action between the several parts. By this amony of action new results in movement or in the direction of movement are secured, which would be impracticable where the separate centers to work. walk independently. After a certain number of nerve centers have become associated, according to the skill of the animal's development, we find that the mutual cooperation of the centers begin to be plainly more frequent in certain

directions than in others. That is, that it seems easier for the centers to act together to execute some movements than to execute other movements. When we examine why this is so, it proves to be because of the more frequent repetition of certain aphorant stimuli than of the other aphorant stimuli. Repeat one efferent excitation a hundred times and another only once, and the movement consequent on the first are clearly much more readily caused than those following on the unusual excitation. Therefore, we have come now to the second and most important principle of all, in the organization of a nervous system, and which we have alluded to in the previous

chapter, namely habits. The whole never system indeed in any animal, man included, is first organized by habits. However complex, for example, be the movement executed by muscles in harder to produce a given effect, e.g. the movement of the eyeballs, some muscles contracting strongly, others most gently, others again relaxing just enough to allow their opponents to contract just so much and no more. All these perfectly associated movements are nevertheless explicable only as the slowly acquired habit of the centers which supply those muscles with their motor nerves. Hence the important question, how did the centers come to acquire this habit? The answer is, from a thousand thousand times repeated aiferent impressions along the optic, a sense of sight's nerve,

is habituating the efferent or motor nerves of the eye muscles to act. together. Physiologists, therefore, when they speak of nerve centers being organized to perform such and such functions, mean not that the nerve centers have been created, so from the beginning, but their habits are so organized them. But the important principle to bear in mind here is that it is the affluent segment of the nervous system, or that which is acted upon by stimuli from the outside world, which is the ultimate source of this great fashioner of the nervous system, habit, and not the nerve center itself, nor the aetherent segment. This principle while night overshadows all others in its bearing upon the question of the origin and development of the nervous mechanism. We will gain no insights into the deeper problems of nervous organization if we relax our hold on the continuous presence and operation of aphorant excitation,

all the way from the swaying arms of a hydra-fault, up to the successive trains of thoughts in a human brain. We thus speak of it now, because further on, we will have to refer repeatedly to the place of the aphorant in discussing some subjects. Second to none in importance about our own mental operations. Yet, however, we start with the fact that it is the aphorant only which connects with the environment. Upon the efferance, the nerve centre will only depend, not only for the primary, resource of its activity, but for the organization of that activity so that it can ever become uniform. The reaction of a nerve center to an efferent stimulus has been likened to an

explosion of energy set free by the lighted fuse of the efferent. But that explosion would be an explosion and nothing more, but for that one great fact about the efferent nerve itself, namely that it always causes the explosion to be in one direction only. Over and over again, it does exactly the same thing as at first, and thus trains the nerve center to react only in one fashion. All this is due to the great law that an aferent nerve never varies in what it does. As Professor Sherrington expresses it, the efferent nerve, extending from the receptive surface to the central nervous again,

forms the sole avenue which impulses generated at its receptive points can use. It constitutes a private path exclusive to the impulses generated at its own receptive points and other receptive points than its own cannot receive it. The nerve centers therefore become accustomed to react in the same way to aferent stimuli because these stimuli are never mixed or confused with others. address section of physiology, Brith Associates Science, 1904.

It is quite otherwise with either a single efferent nerve or with any organized nervous path for efferent impulses, for any single one of this may be used in response to a great variety of efferent stimuli. Thus, the act of coughing is executed by a whole group of motor nerves acting together in a regular way.

But this same effluent path for coughing may be used by a number of very different efferent stimuli, starting from the nose, fernex, larynx, bronchy, plura, stomach, brain, or other organs, so that not uncommonly it requires some search to find what the particular cost of the cough is. It may be a pain in a child's ear, or a warm in the intestine. An aferent stimulus on the other end never breaks its rule of you. its rule of using none but its own path of excitation, and hence it is the source of sources of this great factor, habits, in never's evolution. Another peculiarity of efferent excitation to which we shall have to allude again in the

very highest connection, namely in the succession of ideas in human thinking, is that an efferent stimulus, though always itself single, once it excites an efferent, act in the nerve center may have that exaltation spread from center to center as it were like so many successive effluent explosions. Thus, a sneeze is always due to the excitation of a minute tweak in the sensory or efferent nerve of the nostril, which then transmits it to an efferent center in the medulla or blangetta at the top of the spinal cord. This efferent center then sends this excitation to 55 pairs of

of effluent centers to cause them to call their 110 muscles into one combined and war-regulated sneeze performance. A number of writers or nervous disorders seem to regard an attack of epilepsy as due to a spontaneous discharge of nervous energy in some cortical brain centers. The motel area being especially involved when the attack is accompanied by convulsions. As no other examples of spontaneous efferent actions can be cited, but on the contrary, such always follow upon a preceding aferent stimulus. I would ascribe the true beginning of an epileptic paroxym, whatever its form, to an abnormal efferent excitation.

This view of the nature of the serious nervous disease as an important bearing upon its treatment, as I explained in an article on the pathology and treatment of epilepsy in the NYMED Journal, November 8 and 15, 1902. All that we have said, therefore finds a complete illustration in the structure and functions of the spinal cord in all vertebrates. The spinal cord, which is the original nervous system in every vertebrate, as it is the first to appear in its embryonic development, consists of a great number of nerve centers, one above the other, or receiving their aiferent and giving of their aiferent nerves on each side, and has constantly joined together by tract of communicating fibers, until finally the old muscular system of the body is found to be under its exclusive control. As remarked before, no primary law of function in the

nervous system is ever superseded by any later development. And so, however great to be the additions afterwards of brain centers or functions, yet the spinal nerve centers retain all their original prerogatives quite as much in men as in any of the rest of the animal world. If, as remarked above, you wish to show the cunning of your right hand in any work of skill or the fluency of your speech with your tongue, your designing and talking brain has to ask the spinal nerve centers for the muscles of skill or the fluency of your speech with your tongue. for the muscles of the hand and for those of the tongue to direct those muscles to do the work for it. Meanwhile, this wonderfully organizing power of everent habit walks out results in creating special functions or mode of working in the spinal cord, which actually startled us with their close resemblance to what we are accustomed to regard as manifestations of design or purpose.

Thus, if a vigorous frog, maternily decapitated, with a sharp knife and its headless body be put on a plate, it will forthwith jump up and assume on the plate a perfectly natural, if not somewhat impertinent attitude. If now a small drop of acidic acid is applied on the frog's side, as soon as it begins to irritate the skin, the headless frog gravely and deliberately raises his end leg and brings up his foot to scratch of the acid. If more acid be applied, it brings down the harm to upscratch the same spot. And if the irritation continues, it begins to lose balance by trying to bring up the other

leg also, until at last, as if the itching had become intolerable, it makes a most natural die for the floor. An amusing illustration of this kind once occurred to me in my college days while fishing in a western stream with a classmates. My companion's luck had been poor, when at a deep, promising pull, he became greatly excited by a powerful bite, with a pull which bent his pull near double, only to find out, alas, that it was drawing up a great mud turtle, which had swallowed the hook beyond mistake. In vain my friend tried to persuade the turtle when he landed him to put his head out from

under his shell till he could get the hook free. Finally, as he had no harder hook, my friend hung the turtle over a branch and sawed his head half with his jack knife. Down at last dropped the turtle's headless body, went to our astonishment, it straightway walked some two yards right into the water and dove off into the deep pole, just as if the creature kept an extra head under its shell to put on in an emergency. End of Section 7, Recording by Thoria. Section 8 of Brain and Personality. This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Brain and Personality or the Physical Relations of the Brain to the Mind by William Anna Thompson. Evolution of a Nevers system Part 2 In animals below the vertebrates, the nevers system encompassed a fewer series of centers, and all acting alike to their efferent stimuli. They proceed with such uniform and rigid habits of action that, like other examples of unmitigated consistency, it occasionally leads to inconvenient results.

While surgeoning in Syria, I was told that the old country round Mount Lebanon was dismayed one year by the news that a vast army of marching locust was coming from the eastern desert. The governor of the district uttered a regiment of soldiers to aid the people to construct a great rampant of eath bushes to be set on fire as the locust came up to it, hoping thus to save the gardens of Beiraut. These locust always up straight ahead, deviating neither to the right not left, and on coming to a house went up with stone walls, over it and down it, as if it were a level place, and in such inconceivable, numbers that an American resident described the noise of the great oast passing over the roof as like to that of a tremendous a storm. At every green leave on the way each took a bite and then went on for the next one to take his bite until in an incredibly short time not a green thing could be seen. When they reached the prepared heaps of if and these were set on fire,

the locusts matched on without passing until in a brief time they put the bonfires completely out. As the sea was not far off, everybody hoped that they would take to serve bathing, and so they did. Just as certain injurious political crowds among us can always be dependent upon to match up to the polls and vote the straight ticket. When the Wormgard reached the waves, like all good true locusts, in they opt, followed by all the rest, till the billow seemed to roll only grass uppers, not did the scene and until the last, and until the last, last of the rear guard, faithful to the great law of aphyrant, centric and aiferent, had skipped over the heaps of his dead comrades to make his last jump into the blue waters of

the Mediterranean. In structure, the spinal cord as it centers located within, and like all ganglolic matter, they are of a gray color. There is a special arrangement, however, of its cells are cutting as they subserved an aferent or efferent function, the aferent cells, of a more or less rounded shape, being grouped more toward the posterior segment of the cord where the aiferate nerves enter, and the nerves with efferent functions, usually larger and of a stellite shape, being grouped toward the anterior segments where the motor nerves emerge. At the top of the spinal cord, as it enters the skull, it developed the final supreme center

of the entire system, the medulla oblongata, that fit and most responsible, that fits and most the responsible ruler of the whole world and beautifully regulated spinal mechanism, that center in which a small injury would threaten life more than its wood in the brain, as it may cause instant death, for the medulla holds the reins of the pulse and of the breath in its ends, while at the same time it acts as the intermediary between the various regions of the brain above and those of the spinal cord beneath. But the chief feature about this remarkable nervous apparatus, the spinal cord, is that however intricate its adjustments be, so that by it the most complicated and combined movements

are executed. Enough as we have seen to wear all the aspect of design of purposive muscular act, yet from first to last its operations are purely automatic. This is because its workings are all organized by the steady, unvarying operation of different stimulus. Without that, there would be no centric change and without centric change there would be no efferent impulse. Originally, nothing could be more a facet that efferent stimuli and thus at first the centric change would be correspondingly so. But when the same efferent stimulus records over and over again,

the centric change becomes fixed by this repetition and the efferent impulse follows suit, till a special mode of working or, in other words, a special nerve function is established. A watch or a clock, therefore, could not be a more automatic mechanism than is a spinal nerve center. The desirability of distinctly recognizing the part taken by Aferrin Abbott in the organization of nervous function leads me at the rinks of being tedious to cite another illustration of the kind. The nervous mechanism of the act of breathing is a primary example of such a way. organization. The aphorin stimulants in the form of the sensation of the want of air, coming up by the

aphorant vagus nerve, leads to the successive efference muscular movement of inspiration and then of expiration, with all the regularity of the swing of a pendulum. Now let the habit of checking the return swing of the pendulum during expiration be contracted, especially in childhood. The habit forming age by prolonged coughing as in whooping or in measles, and there is danger of this bad habit in breathing lasting for years or for life in the form of the wretched disease, asthma. It should be noted that the act of coughing always occurs in expiration, thus interrupting the regular rhythm of expiration quickly following inspiration. In asthma, the air enters easily in inspiration, but is checked in expiration so that this

latter, instead of being equal to inspiration, as an health, may in asthma be five times as long. Once the normal habit of breathing become deranged, the respiratory center may be at the mercy of a great variety of efferine stimuli which are never perceived in health. Thus, one form of asthma is called cat asthma because the main entrance of a cat into the room would start the patient wheezing, though wholly ignoring that the animal is near. The son of a medical accordion is called. acquaintance of mine knew immediately by his breathing that some buck with was in the house, though it was in his own room on the top floor, and it was found that he could as surreptitiously brought the forbidden article into the kitchen I was mixing it with water to make cakes for herself.

I have had more than one patient who could sleep while in New York, but who would be sure to be awakened by an attack of asthma if they spent nights in Brooklyn across the East River? Other esmatics have their attacks induced by the most trivial derangement of digestion, and but few of them can safely eat a healthy meal at night. Such whimsicalities of this complaint might be multiplied indefinitely, only to illustrate that there is always risk in interfering with old normal nervous habit. The constant coughing of chronic bronchitis will frequently induce its form of asthma in adults, which, however, generally subsides if the bruncitis be cured.

But it is in the medulla that we meet with special illustrations of a third great law of never's development. To return for a moment to our first principle of discipline, that principle, whether applied in armies or anything else, implies some source or sources of authoritative restraint, generally irregular hierarchy of commandes, one ranking the other. Nowhere in any instance is this great principle of discipline so impressively demonstrated as in the harmony, so to call them, of active centers in the nervous systems of the higher animals. A constantly recurring words in books on never's physiology is inhibition as descriptive of the workings of certain nerves or nerve centers. One example will illustrate what this word refers to. By stimulating with an electric current, one nerve which comes down from the medulla to the heart, you make the latter bit more powerfully and rapidly.

By stimulating another nerve which also descends from the medulla to the heart, that again at once begin to beat more slowly, stimulate that nerve still further and the heart beats very slowly, still more again and it comes to a full stop. Now cut that same nerve and the heart bound off to the most rapid tumultose beaten. As an eminent physiologist characterizes it, this nerve brittles the heart. For when it is server, the heart behaves like a horse who throws it righter and straightaway takes the racing. For the nerve is in the inhibitory or governing nerve of the heart, that nerve which makes the heart a strong heart by governing it.

If he suddenly tell a man a dreadful piece of news and his pulse scarcely quickens or quivers, is he a weak man or is he a weak heart? Another man sees a street boy preparing to snowballing and at once its pulse runs up to 120. What is the difference between these two men? The difference lies in the cardiac branches of their vagueness. Now, as we investigate the functions of this great law of inhibition in the nervous system, we find that as AIA centers are developed in this series, their influence is shown not only in new powers or functions super added to the older ones, but that it constantly inhibit, or in other words, control the action of the lower centers.

Thus, in the frog, a mass of centers called the optic lobes are developed just above the medulla. Now, as long as the slopes are connected with the spinal cord, you may stimulate the aphirine spinal nerves of the frog, and but little or no reflex movement will result. Cuts, however, the connecting tracks, and thus free the cord from the control of this higher sense, control of these higher centers, and the slightest ticking of the skin will then make the fur kick actively. After we pass the medulla oblongata, we find ourselves proceeding along large tract of nerve fibers,

which soon presents us with a series of considerable swellings along their course, and which are found to be altogether now or differently constructed masses of grey matter, or ganglars as they are called. This new ganglars proved to be chiefly pertainable. chiefly pertentous development of the effluent system, causing in fact the afferent segments to take the lead in nervous life, for they are no less than the centers of the special senses of sight, smell and urine, durer are small according to the needs of the animal for each sense, respectively. Now, when we use the term special senses, we mean a form of sensation. But what is sensation itself?

Nobody knows. All definitions of sensibilities. amount to saying that sensation is sensation, for to call it an act of the consciousness is when translated into Aglosaxon, to announce that the thing which feels feels. This something called consciousness makes its first appearance in vertebrate after the old mechanism of the spinal cord and medulla has been completed, and the lower vertebrates seem to need but little else for their world than this special sense ganglia. which are proportionately developed in them according to their life avid. However, even in them, two other swellings appear, which are relatively wonderfully small in many of these animals, considering their great imports,

as they are no less than the beginnings of the cerebral emispheres, or what we call the brain in ourselves. The accompanying figure tell the story of their evolution. Figure 1, the brain of a lamprey. In figure 1, we have the sensory gangling and the brain of a lamprey. A small fish often mistaken for an eel from its form. Those rounded masses O1 represent his olfactory lobes, for his habit require him to be good at smelling. Then the two large swellings below are his optic lobes, while those two insignificant spheres between marked C is cerebral lobes or brain, or all that he has to cogitate with. with.

Figure 2. Brain of a carp. Figure 2 shows the sensory and intellectual apparatus of a carp. It does not smell at all, so he has no olfactory lobes, but his optic lobes are large compared with his brain or mental equipment. Figure 3 represents the apparatus of that old friend of the physiologist, the poor frog in which his mechanism for thinking. Though larger than that of fishes, it's cursely larger than his upshot.

larger than its optic lobes. Figure 3. Brain of a frog. M. In each of these figures represent the medulla. In some fishes, such as the carp, when the ganglia which correspond to the cerebral hemispheres are experimentally removed, they do not seem to mind it at all, for even then there is little, if anything, to distinguish them from perfectly normal animals. They maintain their natural attitude and use their tails and fins in swimming with the same vigor and precision as before. They not only see, but are able to find their food. If worms are thrown into the water where they are swimming, they immediately pounce upon them.

If a piece of string similar in size to a worm is thrown in, they are able to detect the difference and they drop it after having seized it. They even, to some extent, distinguish colors. But when some red and some white wafers are thrown into the water, the fish almost invariably select the red in preference to the whites. It is much the same with the frog. If care be taken to keep the frogs alive after the removal of their cerebral lobes until they have quite recovered from the injury, brainless frogs will behave just like full-brain frogs

under like circumstances. They will crawl under stones or bury themselves in the earth at the beginning of the of winter and after the period of abomination is over, they will calm out and diligently catch the flies which are buzzing around in the vessels in which they are kept. Figure 4. Brain of a Pigeon. But figure 4, which shows the brain of a pigeon, illustrates how much higher in the scale birds are than fishes and amphibia. The original Basil Gagia, which we have been considering are beginning now to be completely

overshadowed by the cerebral loves. and ends after their removal, birds show much greater alterations in their behavior. Memory and volition seem annihilated, and the birds do not seek their food. But if the optic globes are uninjured, the bird will work around the room, avoiding obstacles. It will fly from one place and alight securely on another, always preferring a perch to the floor. And if placed on a swinging cord, it balances itself perfectly with the two-and-throw movement. If placed in a special attitude, it roughes its feathers and shows fights, thus illustrating that pugnacity and sedate brains, or, as physiologists express it, belongs to a lower level. In the ascent from birds to mammals, the development of the cerebral ganglars or lobes grows from mere bulbous swallows into great masses which cover more and more the sensory ganglure, until in the monkeys are only buried under their mass.

In men, these original senses at the base of the skull are relatively so insignificant that we are accustomed to leave them out of consideration and to speak of his cerebral emmisfriz as his brain. As regards, the function of the brain and your relations, the first conclusion we come to is that an unmistakable promotion, so as to speak, as occurred in the mammalian brain of the great functions of sensation, consciousness and the power of directing movement. from the basal ganglia of fishes, amphibia and birds up to the great cerebral ganglia above. Remove this from a mammal, and it is therefore from acting as if it still at the same degree of consciousness or power of movements left, which does lower in the scale possess. This does not prove that the cerebral ganglia have entirely superseded the original basal ganglia. For facts of disease at the base of the brain in man show that even in him, this original nerve centre still owed much of their old relations.

The case instead is like the history of a prosperous firm, which began business in a very small way and in humble quarters, and then when it had branched out to an undreamed of extent from its lowly start, the highly trained heads of the company and found to have moved up to large and the comedier's apartment on the upper floors, why the original routine work is yet done, as of old, in the stories below. simple, routine work is quite enough now for the basal gangler. Why consciousness is needed to go up higher, we are the far wider operations of mind have to be carried on.

Nevertheless, it is the same old firm, for we will find that its principles and modes of doing business by the heads of the establishment have not changed, though they are now handling millions where they used only to deal with a few dollars. We may not unnaturally think that in ourselves, the forese the foremanly think that in ourselves, the foreman our range of our memories, imaginations, feelings, and ideas must have a very different genesis and be according to very different laws from the simple unconscious functions of the first example of a nervous system which we have described. But a little attention to the source and sequence of our ideas, even when taking the widest sweep, will show a quite unmistakable correspondence to the old original methods of never's work. Thus, even with that unique mental faculty of

speech, which we have been considering at length, we are met at the outset with our old familiar terms, aphorant and efferent, as plainly as in any function of the spinal cord. Our speech consists of words which come to us through the aphorant channels of the year and of the eye, and of the words which go from us by the etherent's broker convolution. Moreover, in the other of time, the aphorants preceded and created the efferent, for the child first earth the words addressed to its ear, and then slowly taught broker's convolution to respond, slowly, for it evidently understands words sometime before it can learn to stummer them on its tongue. But likewise, many of the longest and most intricate workings of our minding act of thinking

can often be traced to a single effluent excitation, which was the origin of the old process. One familiar illustration would suffice. While you are in your reclamation, shining cheer, parrubs with your eyes shut, some friends casually plays on the piano in the adjoining room, an old well-known tune, which you were fond of in your father's house years gone by. A throng of memories of long ago, of faces not seen for years, of some that will never be seen here again, pictures of places and sins with their events and experiences, all crowd upon you two, you're started by tears welling up in your eyes. You spring up at finding yourself so deeply moved by what?

By that single effluent impression coming through the auditory nerve? In fact, any analysis of our ordinary mental processes made by retracing step-by-step our one idea has been suggested by a previous idea, and that in turn by another, we usually bring us at last to some one efferent excitation coming to us from our outside world. That is just the old way in which the effluent works, as we showed. On page 148, how in the spinal mechanism it executes a sneeze. We need not to be metaphysicians to make this discovery, that our thinking so often begins first with some sensation, then experienced.

Nor does it take long to find that many of a trains of thought, as they are well-termed, as somehow habitual to us, as if we are falling into the way of thinking does. In other words, our whole friend, habits, whom we have seen to be such a multi-form organizer of spinal ganga and spinal functions, seem to have organized our brains also. It has thousands of private effluent wires which to reach our consciousness from every part of our bodies, each one of which can stir a sensation and that an idea, until it seems difficult to deny that our thoughts about the product of this great efferrant creator of nervous-up. Some may differ from these considerations that we have come to the end, that is, that we need not go further in explaining the how of our thinking selves.

Many, indeed, have thought so, and have meant that women and women are mentally the result of our environment that sees of our outside world creating us by different exactations. The never system of a polyp is centrally a pure mechanism. a most mechanical affair. But the principles of its mechanism continue just the same through every step in the long series of evolution. Till at last, we find those virtually mechanical principles accounting for man. But in our next chapter, we will find ourselves face to face with an entirely new version of Neversmatter. One-to-one brain protoplasm is as clay to the potter. End of Section 8.

Recording by Victoria Section 9 of Brain and Personality This is the Libby Box recording. All Libby Box recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriBox.org. Recording by Maria Abranica. Brain and personality

or the physical relations of the brain to the mind. By William Hannah Thompson. Section 9 In the preceding chapter, we have seen that the evolution of a nervous system is guided by the great principle, which on the last analysis may be regarded as a specific nervous reaction to environment. By means of the undeviating inflow along the afferent channels of stimuli from the outer world or environment, the receptive nerve elements are affected till they in turn excite an outflow along the efferent channels. And when the same afferent stimulus is repeated often enough, the consequent effect becomes so uniform as to constitute a spatial mode of nervous action, or in the other words, a nervous function.

It is thus that this afferent agency coming from without continuously proceeds, passioning one system of the nervous centers after another, until at last it begins to look as if out of the human brain itself. It constructs toward its virtually a pure-thinking machine like all its previous mechanism and whose operations, though more complex, yet illustrate the same automatic principles which govern the functions of the medulla of longata. This inference seems legitimate, because in so many of its activities, the human brain affairs fully exemplify, just the same order of reactions which we have met before at lower levels. Why is this not enough? It is in no sense enough, simply because the brain of man and the mind of man do not correspond. Nowhere is there such a discrepancy.

There is a gap here which no facts of animal evolution even begin to account for. Man's brain in physical and anatomical respects corresponds to quote. closely to that of the chimpanzee, and hence, according to all precedents, his mind should show but little advance in degree, and none in kind over the mind of this ape. We cannot allow at this point any confusion in reasoning to obscure this fundamental fact. On the one side is Homo, properly placed in sociology among the primates, because in his body, as in his brain, he clearly belonged to that class of animals. But it is thus as to his mind.

Those to Pendous works and bridge across the Firth or Fort and the Simplen Tunnel through the Alps existed down to the smallest detail in their engineer's mind, before they existed on Earth. Hence, we are in the presence here of a being endowed with the supreme attributes of a creator, or one who solely buy his own designing gives origin to things, which otherwise would not. not be. Such an endowment makes man wholly unnatural, because by this time we know nature well and her limitations in all her works. Where in nature, is there anything so weird as he who found the infinite ether and straightway made it the invisible bearer of his words across oceans? What else can his mind not do when he orders electricity to change its tones of thunder to the small tickings of a telegraph or by telephone carry his personal voice hundreds of miles away. Now, our contention is not that such human doings are marvelous,

but that they are actually supernatural because nature has nothing which even remotely approximates to them. But there are other aspects without number of these mental activities which are equally supernatural, as he displays them in language, science, philosophy, religion, poetry, art, statesmanship, law, finance, and the rest. In any one of which spears, he has no fellow. But so accustomed have we become to this great fact that we woolly lose its profound significance, which shows that man is an animal, only physically, and the more complete our knowledge of living nature is the planar becomes this conclusion.

Physically, the gap between the brain of men and the brain of an anthropoid ape is too insignificant to count. But their difference as beings corresponds to the distance of the earth from the nearest fixed star. Therefore, the brain of man does not account for men. What does? We are bound by our premises to seek for an answer to this question, only by searching the brain itself. To note whether in it there are evidences of the premonies. presence of something whose agency affords the sole explanation why the human brain differs so in its capacities from any other animal brain.

Having started with the brain, with the brain, we must continue. Let the investigation takes us where it may. The brain is a physical and material thing, and we have already adduced proofs based entirely on material facts. Brain facts as they may be called, which show that brain matter as such as itself no properties of mind, and becomes related to mental processes only in certain localities

by becoming their artificially and not originally nor congenitally endowed with such functions. It is not with his whole brain that a man knows things or devices, but he does so in limited areas of one hemisphere there are, which he himself has educated for the purpose. The question then follows, How came this particular brain places to be thus chosen, and not others precisely, like them in original organization?

That this great creative choice proceeds from no source in the brain itself is demonstrated by the following considerations. Thus, as we have already shown, the speech centers in the brain are as much the creations of the individual himself to store the words in them for clothing his thoughts, without as if he made a wardrobe in which to store garments for clothing his body. The speech centers no more generate the words in the one case than the wardrobe manufacturers, the articles which it contains. Hence, men supply themselves with as different languages as they invent different costumes, though no one ever started in life with either of these equipments.

In fact, he might inherit clothes, but never. Our words-for-word centers in the brain must always be personally made because no brain of itself made a word. As we stated in Chapter 6, this is true beyond mistake by the human faculty of learning to read, which rules out the error of some tourists who confining themselves to observe how little children first learn speech through the ear, as grad the faculty to automatic imitation. but a reading center in the angular gyrus has nothing to do with the ear, and moreover it can be made only at the age when purposive for long intention takes the place of echo-like imitation.

But we are now about to enumerate a most important series of facts which, like those previously mentioned, came to light by medical experience and which go even farther than the discovery of the speech centers in demonstrating how the brain is physically related to thought. We begin as before with an actual occurrence this time in surgery. Sir William McEwen, the eminent professor of surgery of the University of Glasgow, gives the particulars of the case of a mechanic who received a severe injury to his head.

Immediately, after the accident, he was in a peculiar mental condition. Physically, he could see, but what he saw. conveyed no impression to his mind. Thus an object presented itself before him, which he could not make out. But when this object emitted sounds of the human voice, he at once recognized it to be a man who was one of his fellow workers. He was equally unable to recognize his wife and children. By eyesight, he could not tell how many fingers he held up

when he placed his own hand before his face, till he became cognizant of the number by the sense of touch. These symptoms gave the key to the hidden lesion in his brain and therefore were to trefine his skull. An operation it was found that a portion of the inner table of the skull had been detached from the outer and had become embedded in the gray matter of that locality. The bone was removed from the brain

and re-implanted in proper position, upon which he recovered and returned to his work. It is evident from this that that fragment of bone interfered with an important mental function located in just that brain's path which it penetrated, because so soon as it was removed from that place, the mental function returned. What was that mental function? It was not sight. For the man saw his wife and friends as well as before, but he did not know what he

Hence, seeing and knowing what is seen are not the same thing, because each of these mental processes has its separate material sit in the brain. But as knowing appears to be so much higher as an intellectual performance than the simple sensation of sight, writers have inaccurately termed this special form of abolition of intelligence mind blindness. To distinguish it from word blindness, which follows upon damage to the word. center in the angular gyrus, but word blindness, which renders a person wholly illiterate because he no longer recognizes printed or written words when he sees them, though he knew them perfectly before. It's as much an example of mind blindness as was this patient's mind blindness, the only difference

between the two being in the things which were seen. In word blindness, words are seen but not known. in this so-called mind blindness. Objects are seen but not known. In both, therefore, the blindness is the same in nature, namely mental blindness. As this inability to recognize, visual objects has been frequently observed after localized damage to the brain from disease. The locality itself where things perceived by sight are then known has become as well identified as is the word center in the angular gyrus. with the same important deductions about the way by which this mental function comes to be localized, as in the case of the I-word center.

That is to say, we learn to know how we know what it is we see by first discovering where this act of knowing is done, and secondly, by establishing the fact that no other place in the whole brain save this knows anything by sight, and also why this is so. In explanation, we shall first state that the primary center of sight in the occipital lobe is in the neighborhood of a wedge-shaped convolution called the Cuneus, see Frontispiece. This convolution, of course, is found equally in both hemispers, and that it is directly related to sight is proved by the fact that it is only when the region of this convolution is destroyed in both hemispers that total blindness is spread. produced. That function of sight in the cuneus is doubtless congenital, but the child when born does not know what it sees. That particular power is afterwards acquired, not by the cuneus, but by an adjacent area of brain cells. In front of the cuneus, which we ourselves for the

forfeus of convenience, we'll hereafter call the precunius. How this locality comes to acquire this important mind function of knowing what visual objects are. We will discuss after those equally interesting and still more varied packs connected with the recognition of sounds. Thus, in the temporal lobe is found the original center of hearing. Just as the conneous in the occipital lobe is the original center of sight, where a whole group of centers becomes developed afterwards around the regional auditory center, each one of which has learned what different kinds of sound mean. One of the greatest of this is that for music, and a divine faculty it is, because more than

anything else, it is the speech of the soul as it awakens to a communion with a great harmonies of the non-material universe. A true musician must have a richly furnished shrine for the goddess of music in his temporal lobe, and that he has is proved. by some persons, who, after having been very fun of music and able to tell at once whether they were listening to a composition by Mendelsohn or one by Wagner, suddenly experienced the sad misfortune technically termed amusia. No longer can they recognize any tune. However familiar, and in vain they try a violin or piano to bring back to them their departed joy. They know no music thereafter. The reason being that material damage has happened to the center in the temporal lobe,

which has been separately educated for music, just as another place in the same lobe has been separately educated for words. We have already described what is meant by words deafness, as well as how it costs. But besides, the center for words and the center for music, the auditory area of the temporal lobe has a place where the meaning of sounds in general is recognized, as the visual area just mentioned, has its place for recognizing objects of sight. Let this auditory area be separately damaged, and the unfortunate then cannot tell the sound of a locomotive whistle from that of a church bell. All sounds, including the voices of his friends, are alike indistinguishable noises to him. To this condition, the turn mind-deafness has been given, signifying sound

meaning deafness. Therefore, while the ability to know is a great attribute of the human mind, yet these facts prove that there are actual physical bases in the brain on whose integrity as such this faculty can alone be exercised. An artist may be lost in admiration while gazing at the assistant Madonna. An apoplectic clock may make him the next day, though still able to see that great picture, no longer able to distinguish it from a wallpaper. A trained musician may be entrance at one time listening to a symphony of Beethoven, but in a few hours, though still able to hear it, he may be wholly unable to recognize it as music. In both cases, a highly developed mental capacity is lost immediately after a local brain injury. How are we to explain the sudden abolition of superior mental endowments by such physical changes?

The explanation is as conclusive as it is important, namely that these knowing areas are found in the same brain hemisphere that contains the speech centers and in that hemisphere only, so that the inference is certain that they are all created by the same agency. Thus Professor Mike Evans, patient was a right-handed man, and the splinter was driven into a convolution of his lap brain, that is, into the speaking and not into the wordless hemisphere. Now, he had just the same collection of cells in the corresponding region in front of the right Cuneus, and moreover, they were not injured at all the accident, Nevertheless, they could not help him recognize his wife and children anymore.

Then those cells could read Latin. It is evident, therefore, that those right hemisphere cells, though they could see, because they belonged to the visual area, yet did not know what they saw, any more than an infant knows what it sees when it first comes into the world. Though existing in an adult man, they had never been taught the meaning of visual objects, any more than his right temporal lobe cells had ever been taught to hear a word or his right angular gyrus to read a word. Likewise, it has been found that the injuries technically termed lesions, which produced the various forms of mind deafness above described.

Occure only in the left hemispheres of the right-handed persons or in the right hemispheres of left-handed persons. In other words, they show how these mental functions strictly follow the hand. most used in childhood, just as the speech centers do. Hence, we learn to know just we learn to think. We think in words, and for that purpose, we register our word memories in their laboriously prepared brain places. So also we register the memories of what we see and of what we hear in their prepared places, the preparation in both instances having originally been began by the most active hand in response to personal intent. Investigations into infant psychology show that the first training of the site object center

occurs only a little earlier than the time when the cells in the temporal lobe are being trained to hear the first words for the infant begins its lessons of sight interpretation by stretching for its little hand to find out what is which it is looking at. So far, back in our lives, however, did this process begin that we have forgotten all about it? But the saying, a burned child dreads the fire, refers to the inscription made by the child on its precarious that a flame is not like some other attractively shining thing, and that it had better not to try again to say his whole of it.

According to the psychological laws, which we have already mentioned, memories of all kinds are doubtless, registered in our brain cells by the regional stimulus of each. and when an agency like conscious purpose systematically repeats the same stimulus to the same cells. They become arranged there in a library of records, as we have shown is in the case in the speech centers. There is really nothing incomprehensible in this.

For something quite analogous to it, all is accomplished in that remarkable mechanism. The phonograph in which layer after layer of its delicate receptive wax sleeves may be found cold. with all kinds of sentences, or entire songs with their tunes. While by a device similar to Broca's convolution, there come back again through its brazen trot, the words tunes, tones, and all else spoken into the machine.

An instructed Muslim Sheikh from Arabia might regard this an unholy invention of Satan, which of itself produces all that it utters, whereas neither it, no Satan but a human person, the source of every one of its uncanny performances. From these considerations, there can be no doubt that the exercise of every separate mental faculty is conditioned by acquired cerebral changes, similar to those by which is interpreted all information coming by the eye and the ear. The brain thus comes to have places where memories are stored for the understanding of its facial sensation. But it also follows

on anatomical grounds that the human being when he thinks, perceives, knows, remembers, conceives, reasons, purposes, and speaks as these powers physically located in only one of the two hemispheres of his brain. As long as the educated hemisphere is in sound condition, it matters little. So far as the mind is concerned, what happens to the uneducated hemisphere? As the man mentioned in Chapter 4, page 63, who had lost one of his hemispheres by disease. Happily for him, had his speaking hemisphere left intact. And therefore, he remained himself in all mental and moral characteristics.

Hence, his story and others, like his in medical literature, prove that human brain mother does not become human in its powers, until that something within takes its hand to fashion it. But for that purpose, one hemisphere of the brain matter is quite enough, just as one violin is quite enough for its player, while to the untaught hemisphere is left only what it had at birth, without a word or an idea or a single acquired accomplishment. But what is this one just something which we have been following from convolution to convolution of the human brain under the guidance? not of metaphysicians, but of physicians and surgeons. We have seen that this something is not natural, but supernatural,

both in its powers and its creations by means of those powers, hence it could have not come by any modification or advance upon a chimpanze's brain, because in the human brain itself, this something is only in one of its hemispheres, according as it has been put there, not by the hemisphere, but by the human being himself, which he does generally in the left, but sometimes in the right one, with equal completeness in either case. This something can be no other than that greatest of reality is here, the self or the human personality. To us, this is the most direct certainty which we know of, because all other phenomena are contingent upon the relative to personal consciousness.

Those reasoners who attempt to explain personality away by saying that it is only the condition of our makeup at the time being. Evidently, imagine that we are ourselves according to the state of the atoms or ions of our brains. But this theory is at once disposed of by the demonstration that our mentality is wholly unilateral in our brains, and is made so by nothing in the brain itself, either before birth or at birth. This statement which implies that one of the two human brain hemispheres is normally unintelligent and thoughtless. It's unacceptable to some reasoners because it compels the admission that the thinker and his brain are two separate things, the brain like the hand, being only the instrument of the thinker. Therefore, they search for indications that the silent hemisphere sometimes

does come to the help of its highly endowed partner when the latter is disabled in its speaking power by disease. The inference being that it does so by its inherent capacity for speech, but no unmistakable cases of the kind have yet been published. And, as we have remarked before in Chapter 6, those which seem to be so can easily be otherwise explained. Thus in childhood both hemispers are equally teachable, and speech lost by damage to, one can be made up by the education of the speech convolutions in the other. But the age when new languages may be learned varies in different individuals, so that is not impossible for it to be done in the 50s. If, therefore, an adult is found to have recovered from amphacia after a time.

This does not prove that he had to speech centers all the while for speech is never an original endowment nor a spontaneous power, but must always be the result of the spatial training of brain cells. That this marvelous training is practically limited to only one hemisphere is shown by the positive and not the hypothetical evidence in hundreds of cases of individuals. Many of them men distinguished for mental gifts who after a stroke causing either sensory or motor aphasia never regain their lost powers. However, long they live afterwards with an unindued hemisphere in their heads. Nor is the problem changed or lesson

by referring to the speaking and knowing hemisphere as somehow. The driving hemisphere for the question then is what makes it drive, so wondrously to the utmost ranges of human talk, while its fellow is left unable to know a life companion by sight or to distinguish strains of music from mere noises. End of Section 9. recording by Maria Abrenica

Section 10 of Brain and Personality This is a Libri Box recording All Libri Box recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer Please visit LibriBox.org Recording by Maria Abrenica World Adjibooks podcast Brain and Personality

Or the Physical Relations of the Brain to the Mind By William Hannah Thompson Section 10 Brain and Personality Part 2 Meanwhile, before the advent of this personal agency, which deals so remarkably with portions of human brain matter, as to impart to them transcendent properties which they did not have before, nor ever could have spontaneously.

The only organizer of nervous tissue, which we have met was the affront-bringing stimuli from the environment or outside world. But the more we studied the processes which result in this, mind-linked changes in man, with the same attention which has been bestowed upon the operations of the affront, the planar it becomes that their formative stimuli come not from without but from within, and are essentially unlike the workings of the affront. Nothing savoring of purpose or design enters into the play of the affront, as it flows into the nerve centers with its sensations, any more than the currents of air, causing the threads of an

Eoleon harp to vibrate any musical meaning comparable to the airs overburdy. Instead of that, the centers organized by the affront for work performed that work with no design, then does a watch purposely go when its wound up. Automatism, pure and simple, is inseparable from the affront in every one of its relations. Moreover, this afferent mechanism is congenital, entering the world ready-made without needing mind to work it. But to speak of a personality which thinks purposes and wills as automatic is a self-contradiction in terms. We need not appeal to metaphysics for our argument, because we now meet with another strong line of evidence that the personality can dispense with the most important means of afferent stimuli which nature furnishes.

And yet, make good their loss because the personality is independent and self-determining, and hence can triumph over the most serious deprivations possible of its afferent mechanism or communication with the world in which it lives. This has been shown in some members of our race who have suffered from certain great misfortunes in early life, which, however, constitute in a way most instructive physiological experiments. To appreciate the force of these demonstrations, we must first take into account how much in each case was loss of life's equipment for mental development. Thus, it requires some effort to estimate

how much education and human mind receives from the single afferent channel of the eye. To do this at all adequately, we must go back to the first news which the child gets from the outer world by sight. A series of impressions, first of color, then of form, then of distance, and lastly of definite objects, are made upon the end. brain visual area until by repetition a vast star of picture memories are there laid off for life as so many objects lessons. How much, therefore, is the mind of a young child deprived of? If it becomes blind before this great afferent teacher could give it a single lesson.

But for the education and direction of thought and feeling, the human being, different from the lower animals, gains more by the affront channel of the ear than by that of the eye. The only exception to this love seems to be in the case of birds. Mr. Sclator sealed up the ears of newly hatched chicks, and not one of them could be induced to come to the mother hen, who was excitedly clacking to them. The chicks were then placed where they could not see her, and their ears were unstopped,

when as quickly as they heard, her day ran round to where she was and were soon under her wings. But for the human infant, the loss of hearing is a terrible calamity. Besides, being at first, it's only appeal to others. It is itself a relief to the child to cry. Hence, when it cannot hear its own cry, it becomes the more disturbed by its feelings, because loving looks and touch only in perfectly makeup or kindly voice,

tones and words. We must not forget that to a human ear, however young, words soon have some meaning, more than parents may then suppose. Until a few months afterwards, they are surprised that they're surprised that their children know so much. If words once again begin to reach through the ear,

the mind springs forward to its limitless inheritance of thought, and especially of feelings. It is the ear, not the eye, which moves the heart. We see with indifference of fish in its dying writings, but we cannot listen to cries of pain without emotion. The seeing of the eye supplies the intellect with more ideas than two sounds, not words. which come through the ear.

But the intellect-informing eye makes more mistakes than all the affront channels put together in the information which it rings. Its news has always to be revised and corrected by the other senses before it can be accepted. Thus, it reports that a man is only a foot high when he is in a mile off, but the ears is always accurate. I have recognized a friend's voice when it came over 400 miles on a telephone wire as plainly as if he had been in the next room. Close the ear, therefore, of a child and it remains more a mere animal than when any other

avenue with the outer world is close, because it is dumb. If we should liken our apparatus from mind training to a boat which is to take us over the sea of life, the great affluent mechanisms of the eye and of the ear might then be regarded as corresponding to the hall and to the frame respectively. Can the personality, therefore, survive the complete wreck of both, and go on with nothing, but the kill to cling to for the rest of the voyage? The answers would certainly be no. If the personality depended, not only for its development, but also for its own origin

upon its afferent mechanisms. If, on the other hand, the affront has nothing to do with the personality except to inform it, the loss of the affront will have no other. effect on the personality than that of leaving it in ignorance. The personality would then be simply like one condemned to solitary confinement. That being so, if only some messages could reach him by any route, however unusual or roundabout, the personality would be found as complete and individual as ever. The conclusiveness of this demonstration needs a trained psychologist to appreciate it fully

because he will knows how much its spatial sense contributes to the mental equipment of a human being, and therefore how much is lost when not one, but two, of the chiefest life instructors of the mind are simultaneously lost. It is this which makes the autobiography of the celebrated Helen Keller of such intense interest, regarded purely from a psychological point of view, so important and decisive in their bearing upon the subject. of our discussion are the facts illustrated by her story, that we feel justified in dwelling upon them at some length. It is not on account of her becoming such an accomplished woman with so many eminent men and women among her personal friends and correspondence that we do so. But because

a psychologist, she is such an instructive case, physicians get into the way of looking at patients as so many cases of this or that disease. And so, Helen Keller fixes the attention of a psychologist not from sympathy, for he has nothing to do with sympathy, but because she is a first-class scientific demonstration. Nothing, therefore, which we will call from her published autobiography, is for the sake of anecdote, but for what it implies about brain matter. I do not mean, of course, that physicians have their capacity for sympathy lessened by their pursuits. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was professor of the anatomy at the Harvard Medical School and a trained psychologist as well. Helen Keller thus writes, Life, Page 135. I remember all the first time I saw Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

He had invited Miss Sullivan and me to call on him one Sunday afternoon. It was early in the spring just after I had learned to speak. We were shown at once to his library where we found he seated in a big armchair by an open fire, which glowed and crackled on the heart, thinking he said of other days. And listening to the murmur of the river Charles, I suggested. Yes, he replied, the Charles has many dear associations for me. There was an order of print and letter in the room which told me that it was full of books, and I stretched out my hands instinctively to find them.

My fingers lightened upon a beautiful volume of Tenison's poems, and when Miss Sullivan told me what it was, I began to recite. Break, break, break, or die-called greystones, O.C. But I stopped suddenly. I felt tears on my hand. I had made my beloved poet, Whip and I was greatly disturbed. When 19 months old, Helen Keller had an attack, presumably of cerebral spinal meningitis,

which left her totally and permanently. and deaf, and hence dumb also, till her seventh year, therefore, she was wholly dependent upon her senses of smell, taste, and touch for all her information. Hence, also, she could communicate her wants or feelings to others only by bodily actions, which she had learned to associate in her mind with states of pleasure or of pain. On this account, she was perpetually subject to feats of great excitement or anger, due to her inner feelings having such imperfect outlets for expression, while she was equally deprived of direction from others. The best of us, though equipped with every means of communication by speech, tone, gesture,

and glance with like return of the same from our fellows, are yet up to be impatient at the slowness of others in understanding us. We can imagine, therefore, what it was to this child, to have scarcely anyway to explain her ones except by throwing things or herself on the ground. If the afferent is the origin of mental endowments, her father's pet dog and cat with full possession of sight and hearing, not to mention voice, were in better condition for development that she was. On March 6, 1887, Helen's teacher, Miss Sullivan arrived, and her first indivore was to begin teaching the child language by tracing on the palm of her hand the letter spelling the words, dull and cake.

Repetitions of these words tracing continued until Helen could make them for herself. And by March 31, she could trace on her hand 18 nouns and three verbs, without knowing, however, what they meant. On April 5, hardly a month from the beginning of her education,

the awakening came. Ms. Sullivan had her hold a mag in her hand at a pump and as a cold water filled the mug and ran on her hand. The teacher traced and knew the letters W-A-T-E-R on the palm of her free hand. Miss Sullivan's writes, She dropped the mug and stood as one transfix. A new light came into her face.

She spelled water several times. The great step was gained when this blind, deaf and dumb. girl suddenly understood that the symbol trace in her palm meant water. She had got a word. From that moment, her personality was set free, like a prisoner allowed to leave a dark dungeon to go wherever he list. For now, for the first time, she knew that everything had a name, which she could learn on her palm.

The next morning, Helen got up like a radiant fairy. She has lifted from object to object, asking the name of everything, kissing her teacher for the first time in her gladness. It is touching to read that she tried to teach her dog by tracing the word water on its pouse. From this beginning, her progress was rapid. In two years and a half, she was studying arithmetic, geography, zoology, and botany, and reading general literature. Meantime, she was asking questions about everything, and for its physiognomy. intellectual interest in showing how a shot in mind, so to speak, like hers, will work when once

in a possession of the Logos Faculty, we make this extract. Page 370. Early in May 1890, fourth year of her training, she wrote on her tablet the following list of questions. I wish to write about things I do not understand. Who made the earth and the seas and everything? What makes the sun hot? Where was I before I came to mother?

I know that plants grow from seeds which are in the ground, but I am sure people do not grow that way. I never saw a child plant. Little birds and chickens come out of eggs. I have seen them. All blind persons who have no memory of eyesight constantly speak of seeing, meaning thereby correctly enough mental sight.

Example, perceiving. What was the egg before? before it was an egg. Why does not the earth fall? It is so large and heavy. Tell me something that Father Nature's das. There was no stopping her now. She must know the origin of things.

What human being does not ask this question? Does this universal human trait come from any function of the automatic affront or from the free personality? When her teacher in reply, page 371, told her that men came to believe that all forces were manifestations of one power, and to that power they gave the name God. She soon asked, Where is God? Did you ever see God?

I told her that God was everywhere, and that she must not think of him as a person, but as the life, the mind, the soul of everything. This fantastic talk did not suit Helen. She interrupted me. Everything does not have life. The rocks have not life, and they cannot think. In March 1890, three years after she began with her first word,

she commenced to take lessons in articulate speech. On account of their complete illustration of physiological fact, we will quote a few passages in which it relates her experience in learning how to make Broca's convolution to this work, live page 60. I shall never forget the surprise and delight I felt when I uttered my first sentence. It is warm. True, they were broken and stammering syllables, but they were human speech.

My soul conscious of new strength came out of bandage. No deaf child who was earnestly tried to speak the words which he has never heard. To come out of the prison of silence can forget the thrill of surprise which came over him when he uttered his first word. Only such an one can appreciate the eagerness which I talked to my toys, or the delight I felt when at my cold Mildred, her little sister, ran to me or my dogs obeyed my voice, but it must not be supposed that I could really talk in this short time. I needed Miss Sullivan's assistance constantly in my efforts to articulate each sound clearly

and to combine all sounds in a thousand ways. Even now, she calls my attention every. every day to mispronounce words. All teachers of the deaf know what this means, and only they can all appreciate the peculiar difficulties with which I had to contend. In reading my teacher's lips, I was wholly dependent on my fingers. I had to use the sense of touch in catching the vibrations of the throat, the movements of the mouth, and the expression of the pace, and often this sense was at fault. In such cases, I was forced to repeat the words or sentences,

sometimes for hours until I felt the proper ring in my own voice. My work was practice, practice, practice. Discouragement and weariness cast me down frequently. But the next moment, the thought that I should soon be at home and show my loved ones

what I had accomplished spurred me on. My little sister will understand me now. Was thought stronger than all obstacles. I used to repeat ecstatically, I am not dumb now. Words are the mind's wings, as she wrote to Dr. Holmes. Helen's story of her life begins with a child in her seventh year, with each of the avenues of incoming and of outgoing speech close to her.

After two-man's language begins with one word lodged in her consciousness by a most circuitous brain path, The book ends with a young woman, a graduate with honors of Radcliffe College, verse in the sciences taught there, along with extensive reading in Latin, Greek, French, German, and English classics, passionately pound of poetry and of history, a writer of the purest English style, and a thinker of no mean order, as is sufficiently illustrated by a remark of hers. Page 2.95 Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind.

It requires the same effort of a brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle. But as we have already remarked, the physiological interest of her story is quite apart from the interest of her biography, great as that is. To a physiologist, it is an example of a living brain, with the cells of the great visual area entirely and forever atropied or wasted away, because that is what happens to those textural cerebral elements in cases of her kind. No word for reading could ever be registered in her angular gyrus nor in any neighboring visual cells, and just the same extinction of hearing cells was present in her temporal lobes, so that not one was left her to catch the sound of a word

any more than that of any other sound. Broca's convolution for uttering speech, therefore could not have a single telephone wire coming from, from it from either of these two great affrin centers. After a while, Broca's convolution began to be rang up by thousands of reiterated messages coming from a wholly unusual quarter in the brain, namely the center of the sense of touch, practice, practice, practice by the hour at a time. The work of an indomitable personal will finally make that convolution submit to this perpetual

stimulation from the tactile area, till it began. becomes ready to do what Helen purposes, whether to speak, to read aloud or to write. Now it happens that the sense of touch is the most diffused of all the senses at the surface of the body, so that it is not localized in one organ, like the eye or the ear. On that account, it is the least spatialized of any of the senses, so much so that it's an anatomical seat in the brain center. it's even yet not fully demonstrated. But itself, therefore,

this sense could not afford the mind-much definite information, but personality with a purpose can specialize anything nervous. The United States Treasury paid a high salary to a man on account of the one fact that while he could count gold pieces by the hundred thousand with great rapidity,

he would instantly toss out either a defective or a progulent coin because for such detection his touch was infallible. In normal individuals, Prokast convolution is a constant communication with the afferent speech centers, those of the ear and eye,

respectively by numerous nerve fibers passing between them with just that function. This is proved by the occurrence of many instances of world deafness or world blindness during life, in which after death, the injury was found not in the gray matter of the convolutions,

but in the track of the white fibers leading from them. It is difficult on that account to decide in some patients with amphasia whether the damage has occurred in the gray cortex or in the subjacent conducting white matter, for the effects would be much the same in either case. Normally, however, there can be but very few if any nerve fibers connecting broca's convolution with the area of the sense of touch. How are we supposed, therefore, that in Helen Keller's case, the affluent speech which learned through the sense of touch, made such abundant connections with the speech-athering center that she could talk to others in all the way's characteristic of the function of Broca's center in ordinary persons. We have to mention now in explanation certain facts about nerve fibers which we have not alluded

to before. A nerve fiber is really a prolongation or part of the nerve. cell from which it originates and is itself as much gray matter as the cell to which it belongs. Now one of the most important facts about these fibrials of gray matter is that they can grow and that they grow in the direction of the stimulus which courses through them. Thus, if a nerve be cut so that the two severed ends remain at some distance from each other. In a few weeks it is found that new nerve fibers sprout out of the stump end nearest disorder of its origin until the gap is bridged. This property is taken advantage of in-surgery to restore

the sensibility and mobility of a part when that has been lost of severance of its nerves. Hence, while it is true that such regeneration does not occur apparently in the conducting fibers of the brain itself, yet there is no improbability in the surmise that repeated currents of stimuli will in-time project as it were. new tracks of fibers from one cerebral convolution to another, for that would be only in keeping with facts already ascertained of the development of great and important tracks of nervous fibers as a child grows. Thus, in the human infant at birth, a great pyramidal tract as it is called which connects the motor area of the cerebral cortex with a spinal cord and by which all voluntary

movements are executed. It is far less developed than it will. be four years later. As a child by practice learns to use its hands and fit, new nerves fibers by the taus and grow from the motor center of the cortex to go down and make connections with the motor centers of the spinal cord. Such, moreover, must be the case in the organizing of the speech centers in the speaking hemisphere of the brain. If either the reading angular convolution on the one hand or the word-hearing temporal convolution on the other had no fibers developed for connecting them with their corresponding speech, uttering convolution, as well as with each other, the person might read or hear words, but could not speak at all.

A fact clearly demonstrated by false mortem findings in which the brain injury has been limited to the conducting fibers of Broca's convolution only. The speech centers themselves being intact, but this capacity for sending forth new fibers to make connections diminishes rapid, with age. Hence, when an apoplectic clot ruins the speech centers after 60 years of age, the loss of speech is almost invariably permanent because the corresponding speech convolutions in the other hemisphere not only are unable separately to learn their words, but the power to generate new connecting fibers between the convolutions, which is equally necessary for perfect speech is no longer available.

End of Chapter 10 Recording by Maria Abrenica World Audiblex podcast Section 11 of Brain and Personality This is a liverbox recording All Libra box recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer Please visit liverybox.org

Recording by Maria Abrenica World Audio Books podcast Brain and Personality or the physical relations of the brain to the mind by William Hannah Thompson Section 11 The Brain and Personality Part 3 Throughout the preceding discussion,

some persons may find it difficult to accept the demonstration of the personal will as an active agent in fashioning brain matter because it implies that a purely spiritual agency such as they imagine the will to be can cause definite material effects. This need not be wondered at, because there is no one word about which the faults of metaphysics have gathered so thickly as about this word will. We advise them to let metaphysics alone and turn their attention to the actual facts which we have

been considering. A brain center used for speaking is certainly an actual material fact, or else it could not be destroyed by a pointed stick. How this material thing was made, we have shown to have been by a specific nerve stimulus repeatedly acting on the collection of the brain cells till it was fashioned accordingly. There is nothing exceptional about this, or so are numerous other nerve centers fashioned by their specific nerve stimuli. The array of light is a specific stimulus to the nerve cells of the retina, from which this stimulus is propagated by the optic nerves to the cells of the visual area in the

posterior lobe of the brain. Now, the effects of the effect of the brain, the effects of the system of the brain, the effect of overstimulation of nerve soles have been experimentally observed in animals by exposing one eye to strong light, while the other was left dark and then contrasting the appearance of the cells which had been overworked with those of

the other retina, which were kept at rest. The first effect of such stimulation is to cause the nerve cell to swell by absorption of the nutritive limb in which it is bath, but as it becomes fatigue by the continuous stimulation, the cell shrink. Its nucleus becomes displaced, and at last the whole cell becomes disorganized into dead stuff.

The chemical results of this degeneration have been studied and reported to be a change from the normal protoplasm of the cell with its phosphorated fat into colin and a non-posperated neutral fat. But this is just what happens to the nerve fibers and nerve cells in a small spat in the brain motor region, which orders the right thumb and forefinger to hold a pan. If the will does not let up on disorder enough to let those motor nerves of the bookkeeper have arrest from its stimulation, we have a case of rital spousy with the same degeneration of motor nerve matter, and as a result, total atrophy of both the nerves and the muscles which they supply. Here, therefore, the will has ended its activity with precious nerve matter turned into poor neutral fat, said fat being no more a thing of metaphysics than a tallow can. candle is. It is over-stimulation in both cases, but the stimulus of light comes from the outside and that of the will from the inside. But does the latter fact make the will less of a reality than light is, when it actually causes the same kind of physical and chemical changes?

Another important conclusion is led up to by these facts, namely that we can make our own brains so far as special mental functions or aptitudes are concerned, if only we have will strong enough to take the trouble. We practice, practice, practice, as in Ms. Keller's case, the will stimulus will not only organize brain centers to perform new functions, but will project new connecting, or as they are technically called association fibers, which will make nerve centers work together as they could not without being thus associated. Its such self-created brain center requires great labor to make it, because nothing but the prolonged exertion of the personal will can fashion anything of the kind.

He cannot do it by proxy any more than he can make a new German shelf in his brain speech centers by proxy. He must do it all himself, though he may have to spend three years in Berlin for the purpose. A person therefore acquires new brain capacities by acquiring new anatomical basis for them in the form both of brain cells, which he has trained and of actively working brain fibers, which he has himself virtually created. But nothing could show better than these facts the complete antithesis between personality and automatism. One might as well insist that because an automobile carriage goes along smoothly and mechanically that the driver who makes the driver who makes the, vehicle, turn any number of street corners must also be an automation, as to say that a person who educates his brain is himself, the automatic product of the brain which he educates.

This series of facts which we have been reviewing demonstrates how the different places in one hemisphere come to subserve their mental functions by a process of education carried on throughout one and the same teacher, for the process itself never varies. Moreover, it explain that these highly educated areas in the cortex are not self-taught, because they would not exist only in one hemisphere when the capacity for such education was certainly originally equal in both. But what is that teacher, and whence does he come? It is not easy to suppose that any part of the brain itself can act as such a general teacher, because no cortical area ever interchanges its capacities with any other. If the ear grows dull of human,

the eye cannot help it hear better, nor can the Q-news, while indispensable for the education of the world seeing angular gyrus, which is a part of a visual area, furnish a damaged music center in the temporal lobe with a single note. But so persistent has been the hand for some cerebral place which created the personality deck, since the rest of the cortex has been shown to subserve merely sensory and motor functions. It has been suggested. It has been suggested. suggested that the limited portion called the prefrontal lobe C. Pronti's piece is the spatial mindset in the brain. As this region differs from the rest of the frontal lobe in having no relation to motor and equally none to sensory functions so that it shows no signs of anything in particular when experimented upon.

It has been surmised that it is related in its function to pure thinking or to the mind itself. It is also claimed that it is more developed in the human than in any other brain. The chief reliance for the support of this theory, however, has rested upon reports of the effects in man of accidents or of tumors or such like damage to this locality upon the mental functions. It is alleged that those who have suffered from lesions of this sort often changed in disposition with a special enfeebormant of the power of attention. and of thought concentration, along with consequent apathy or mental dullness amounting sometimes to dementia. But just such mental symptoms often accompany damage to other parts than this of the brain,

and all are equally susceptible of interpretation on the supposition of consequent derangements of the cerebral circulation. But to demonstrate that injury to the prefrontal region directly causes these mental symptoms, they should uniformly accompany such physical changes. This is so far from being the case as to lead Professor Schaefer to remark. So much has been made of certain clinical cases in which an extensive lesion of the frontal lobes was followed by diminution of the intellectual faculties and by a change for the words in the general disposition of the individual,

that it is important to assert what the clinical evidence on this point really amounts to. Wealth has collected 59 cases of lichens confined to the frontal region in man. Of this 47 or about 80% showed no changes in intellectual capacity or character, and only 12 of the total number or 20% had such changes recorded against them. It is clear, therefore, that the doctrine of spatial localization of the intellectual faculties in this portion of the frontal lobes rest on no sufficient basis. On page 63, I give the particulars of the man who had one hemisphere, and particularly its frontal part, destroyed by disease, without affecting his mind at all.

Fortunately, for him, as we have remarked, it was his wordless and not his word in doled hemisphere, which was involved. Likewise, a great difference is found in the accompanying mental derogments of frontal lesions, whether they occur in the wordless hemisphere when often there are no mental, symptoms at all, or in the educated half. For the purposes of our argument, we might readily admit that the frontal convolutions can be taught important mental functions, just as areas in the occipital and in the temporal convolutions are thus taught. But until it can be shown that the frontal convolutions think at all, whether they have been taught or not, that is, that the frontal lobes of both hemispheres work the thinker. All these speculations about them are very,

It is not improbable that the prefrontal convolutions of the educated hemisphere do play an important part in mental operations, but that does not show that they are a weightless instruments than the angular gyrus is in its reading function, or brokass convolution in its function. Of the four strings of a violin, string A is track offered than string G to make music. But string A does not make the other strings play, much less is it itself. the musician. From some examples in my own experience, I would infer that one of the functions of the prefrontal convolutions in the speech hemisphere is the recognition of personal identity. A gentleman once consulted me in my office about some nervous symptoms. For reasons unnecessary to

detail here, I began to suspect that he might be suffering from the effects of a brain tumor. But the most careful examination failed to show that any one of his special senses on being separately tested, was affected in the list, nor could I find any motor derangements. His speech was well articulated, and he expressed himself clearly. Suddenly he said, where am I? Am I here or somewhere else? Am I in the body or out of it? These remarks confirmed me in my suspicions that the probable seat of the lesion was in the left frontal lobe.

Some months afterwards, my surmise was proved correct at the autopsy. when a tumor was found in that very place. We may remark here that the facts about the marvelous processes of education of the speech and dodd hemisphere naturally suggests the question. Whether the elaboration of so many interpreting or association areas with their consequent maze of association fibers would not in time increase the actual amount of gray, matter its fibers in those localities,

the spatial work has been spent upon them by the individual. This may be difficult to demonstrate by our present in perfect methods of physical inspection of nervous matter. Though functionally, the difference is wide enough between a purely sensory and a purely motor nerve, so far we are unable to see which is which, and we have to irritate or to cut them to find out. So no inspections of the gray matter of the speech centers tells us any more of their very special powers than the inspection of any other locality in a given cortical area reveals what it does or how it does it. About the only physical sign of the kind yet demonstrated is the presence in the molar area of the cortex of relatively large and stalates-shaped cells which resemble in this particular respects that cells at the origin of the motor nerves of the spinal cord.

But all analogy with other living textures would lead us to infer that the more apart was exercised, and more it would grow in its spatial components, and hence that the cortical layers of a man, sharing fully in all the mental activities of modern civilized life, would be more developed, even quantitatively, than the thoughtless brains of a papuan savage. The only way in which such increased brain growth could occur in the cranial cavity

would be by increased folding of the gray cortex, with multiplication of its associating fibers. A few investigations of the kind have, have been made of the brains of men, distinguished for varied mental acquisitions during life. And when compared with the brains of savages or of men of low or abnormal intellectual grade, they seem to show, though with some exceptions, that in the speech centers specially, the brains of highly cultivated men present much greater complexity in the convolutions with greater depth of the fissures. But though further investigations may demonstrate fairly constant

post-mortem evidences in the form of increased cortical convolutions of a long life of exceptional mental activity. This would not prove at all that their subjects became eminent because they were born with such convoluted brains. While it is doubtless, through the all individuals or our race are not born with equally good brains, yet the fact remains that the spatial mental capacities for which certain men have become eminent were all acquired and were not So, hence the utmost which can be considered is that the greater aptitude for acquiring may be congenital, but nothing more. Because, however, apt a man may be in learning languages or in mastering mathematics. He did not know a word, nor could he count two, when he was born.

And if it had been possible to examine his brain when he was four years old, there would not have been found a single one of the complicated brain folds, which we had when he was 60, because he made all this latter himself by persistent exercise. In other words, a great personality may possibly make a great brain, but no brain can make a great personality. To sum up, our subject deals primarily with material facts. Hence, it is in no sense a speculative subject because anatomical details are neither speculative nor theoretical, and we have been concerned with the anatomical seats of mental facts. faculties. We began with the physical anatomy of the faculty of speech, which demonstrates that

the reception, the understanding, and the expression of words depend as absolutely upon a spatial brain mechanism as the movements of the hands of a watch depend upon the spring inside. But much more than that, the particular anatomical seats of human intelligence are just as palpably demonstrable as the seats of human language. This so-called mind, areas of brain matter are found group around the congenital sense areas, and it is by them that the human being knows what to think about the information which his senses bring. Cut out any one of those areas and fortuit its kind of intelligence is gone. The most materialistic chury of the relation of thought to brain substance could not ask for more solid facts to support its contention. if only it could be demonstrated that these brain localities with their matchless endowments

were as native to the brain as its sensory centers are. But no human being ever brought with him a single one of these wondrous places in his brain, nor ever inherited them. Yet their existence must somehow to be accounted for. No question about physical life equals this question for surpassing significance. Not being native, that is. Congenital, it follows that these seats of mental faculty must all be artificially acquired. It is equally plain that the process by which they are acquired must be the same for them all.

However, different their factions be, because as an anatomical fact, they are all found in only one of the two hemispheres. This feature, therefore, puts an entirely new aspect on the whole matter. No longer can we suppose that the pair of symmetrical brain hemispheres in our skull, holds just the same relations to the functions of thought that the two eyes do to the function of sight or the two ears to that of hearing because if in a young person one eye be covered the other eye does not have to wait for months before it can learn to see as it fellow did nor if one ear be stopped for experiment in a person after 50 does its companion ear then frug to be totally deaf

hence while both members of the eye and ear organs are at all times just alike in their work. It is surely significant that with the two brain hemispheres, it is entirely different. So different indeed, that no contrast could be greater than that existing between them in their capacity for mental work. It may be asked by some if one hemisphere is not used for thought, then of what use is it? The answer is that it is of every use as far as motion and feeling are concerned. Paralysis and numbness or loss of sensation, of the left side of the body are serious misfortunes to a right-handed man. Though he still can talk and think as well as ever,

physicians frequently meet with striking illustrations of this one-sided habitat of the mind. A man who was one of the strongest thinkers and one of the greatest masters of English style that I have ever known. Had his mind totally wrecked one morning by an apoplectic love, but though he lived four months afterwards with his right brain hand. atmosphere, apparently as sound as ever. Yet he could not recognize the dearly loved members of his family, either by sight or by their voices. His intelligence was simply suddenly annihilated by the injury in his left hemisphere. The fact that his right hemisphere remained unendured availed nothing because this exceptional musician had never played with that right violin. And now that it was 70 years old, it was no longer musical. Therefore, it is a power not of the brain because it is the masterful personal will, which makes the brain human. By a human brain, we mean one which has been slowly fashioned into an instrument by which the personality can recognize and know all things physical,

from the composition of a pebble to the elements of a fixed star. It is the will alone which can make material seats for mind, and when made, they are the most personal things in a man's body. In fact, they are the only examples of the kind in his physical frame, because though he cannot make one hair of his head, white or black, he can and thus make speech centers inside of his head, to say nothing of other centers of most varied faculty. So long, his brain matter has not become set, as potters would express it. By the lapse of years, he deals with his cortical gray matter by the purposive exercise of memorizing habit, as the potter deals with wetter. clay. And wondrously, does he fashion it, until it no more resembles the same gray matter on the other side of his head in mental capacities than unfashioned clay resembles a Portland vase. How could this clay itself make this purless vase? As the educated hemisphere is the brain of man,

while its fellow remains only that of the animal homo. Whence comes the incalculable difference between the two, considering that it is not brain which makes man, but man who makes one of his brain hemispheres human in mental faculties, we might even say that if a human personality would enter a young chimpanze's brain where it would find all the required cerebral convolutions, that ape could then grow into a true inventor or philosopher. Note on ambidextry. Since the first edition of this book was published, I have received many letters, three from university professors of psychology, asking whether, in view of the fact that the centers of speech and for other purely mental functions are located only in the brain

hemisphere related to the most used hand in early life, the teaching of ambidextry to children would not be a great advantage. Some of my correspondents seem to think that ambidextry learned early enough would lead both hemispir to produce thought and thus, include the sum of mentality by the added activities of brain matter ordinarily unused. But this conception is negative by the psychological fact discussed in Chapter 4, which shows that pair organs are not so for the purpose of doubling or even of increasing faculty. We hear no more with two ears than we hear with one. Hence, no gain in mental capacity would accrue from both hemispheres being equally educated.

The advantage, however, would be a real one if with both hemispheres educated, one of them should become incapacitated by injury in later life. For then, its fellow would take its place without delay. But, unfortunately, it is very doubtful if the simultaneous education of both hemispheres is possible. The anatomical seats of mental functions not being congenital, like those connected with the functions of the eyes and ears. Their mode of genesis is totally different. as they are fashioned solely by the individual while growing in years.

They remain personal to the end and hands can be neither hereditary nor transmissible. But this process of fashioning is so slow and laborious that apparently it is never attempted with both hemispheres, simply because the teaching of one answers all purposes. By a habit unconsciously began in the hemisphere connected with a hand most easily used by the child, The habit continues for life unless the individual is forced by destructive injury to the first educated hemisphere to take up the training of its an injured fellow. Instances of this kind are mentioned in Chapter 6, page 124. But nothing short of such necessity will induce a person to cross over to the sound but hitherto unused hemisphere to begin teaching it, because such an undertaking would be literally teaching everything from A, B, C.

up. We may remark here in passing that the fact of its ever occurring at all shows that this migration to the other side is another evidence of the independent existence of the personality. In such a case, to return to our original illustration, the two hemispheres were like two violins lying together in the same cranial backs, and it was not until the musician found the one which he had been exclusively using irretrippably broken that hidden turned to the same. to the other one and after some trouble made it fit to play with. But he alone accounts for the second violin become musical at all, since it never vibrated with a single note until he took it in hand. Left-handed children are often compelled to become ambidextrous by obliging them to learn

by practice to use the right hand as freely as the left. But, however, advantages this may be in some respects. It is doubtful if such training extends to anything more than the movements of the hand muscles themselves. The one hemispair which was first led to talk and to think will keep on doing so irrespective of ambidextry, because the hand did not create a speech center, but only served to start its first beginnings as such until it became a habit, which experience shows cannot be changed. I have been asked by a professor of psychology whether obliging a left-handed child to use the right hand may not delay its learning to speak by confusing the normal process of development in its right hemisphere of speech centers. I am strongly inclined to believe

that this may happen from a case in my own experience of the only left-handed child in a family of four sons and three daughters. Her left hand was tied in early childhood till she used the right hand well, but whereas the other children learned to speak early. One sister remarkably well at only 15 months of age. She was fully six years old before she could talk plainly, though in all other mental respects, she was in no way behind any of the rest of the family. End of Section 11. Recording by Maria Brenica, World Audio Books Podcasts. Section 12 of Brain and Personality. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer,

please visit Libravox.org, read by Maria James. Brain and Personality or the Physical Relations of the Brain to the Mind by William Hannah Thompson. Practical Applications Part 1 We have definitely concluded that the facts both of brain anatomy and of brain physiology indicate that this organ of the personality is never other than its instrument, while the personality itself is as different and as separate from it as the violinist is separate from and not the product of his violin. As already demonstrated, one of the properties of the personal human will is that of being a specific brain stimulus, more potent than all the afferent stimuli together in producing changes in brain matter,

by which the brain acquires and by it alone entirely new powers or functions not possible, in any other animal brain. This great truth would suffice of itself to prove that the will is a new thing. For the only other fashioner of nerve tissue is the afferent, and we have shown that in their fashioning processes, the afferent and the will are generically distinct, and have no relationship to each other. Indeed, as a final contrast, we may say that the afferent can do nothing new any more than a watch can. Whatever a watch does is the result of pre-arrangement in its mechanism. Likewise, a nervous center is so slowly organized by the mechanically acting afferent, evidently requiring the cooperation of heredity for many generations, that it will do

only one thing during life and no other. But a will act, ordinarily called a voluntary act, is not often just the same thing when repeated. The variety of Voluntary acts is practically unlimited on account of a profound principle underlying will by virtue of its own nature, namely perfect freedom. Having recognized what a portentist change comes over the whole situation by the entrance of this highest attribute of personality, nothing could exceed the importance of showing what, according to physiology, is the rightful place and rank of the will in a human being. This question of rank is an actual and not a theoretical one in the consideration of any subject in nervous physiology. As we have remarked before, it is only in a nervous system that the element of rank has any place. But there it is all important, because no principle is more fundamental than that of control of the working of all the lower nerve centers

by the centers which are higher than they are in the scale and in the time of their development. Therefore, what is and always should be the governing power in our living selves is a proper subject of physiology as well as of philosophy. Approaching this subject, therefore, from the side of physiology, we must begin by referring to what is said on page 157 to 159 about inhibition. It is well for the ordinary reader to appreciate the importance which is attached to inhibition, as its technical term is by physiologists in their interpretation of nervous functions. Without inhibition, no organization of a nervous system would be possible,

and therefore we may explain again that by this term is meant that the operations of nervous centers, instead of being allowed to go on independently, are constantly controlled, restrained, checked, or altogether suspended from moment to moment, according to time needs by the direct intervention, that is, inhibition, of other nerve centers, or even sometimes by nerves specially endowed with this restraining power. We there cited in illustration how the medulla oblongata sends a bundle of nerve fibers to the heart, called the heart accelerators, which make it beat faster, while it also supplies an important strand of nerves which bridle the heart and make it

beat slowly and deliberately. But the reader may consult a modern textbook of physiology to find another striking illustration of nervous regulation of the heart, under the title The Depressor Nerve. Ever since Ludwig and Sion first discovered the function of this small nerve in 1866, physiologists have been greatly interested in its unique properties, one being, as demonstrated by its first discoverers, that it can quickly lower the pressure of the blood in the arteries all over the body from 30 to 50%. To understand this, it should be stated that in the medulla oblongata, there is the center governing the entire and most extensive system of special nerves which ramify on the coats of the arteries, and whose business it is

to regulate the caliber of the arteries so that their diameter becomes large or small, according to whether the part which the arteries supply needs more or less blood. Thus, the stomach needs nine times more blood when actively digesting its contents than when it is empty, and the vasomotor nerves, as they are called, of its arteries, dilate the arteries to bring more blood, or contract them to shut it off, as the need may be. The function of these nerves, therefore, is of prime importance, for without their constricting action, the vessels of the abdominal organs alone might relax enough to contain most of the blood of the body, as sometimes happens with quickly fatal results. But on the other hand, during violent muscular exercise or under excitement,

the blood may be driven to the heart so fast that its cavities become dangerously distended. Then it is that the depressor nerve instantly comes to the rescue. Ignoring its automatic nature, we may figuratively represent it addressing the medulla thus. Make haste, emergency, heart overfilling and distending so with blood that a valve may give way. Tell your vaso-construly. constrictor center instantly to order all its nerves to relax their grip on the arteries, the body over, to the degree which I direct, order the accelerator center to suspend operations and the vagus center to give an extra turn to its brakes. The medulla obeys, and the overful heart immediately relieves itself by a general widening of its arterial channels. Thus we find

this single afferent nerve capable of inhibiting the action of the whole vast mechanism of the artery constrictors, so that when this nerve has been experimentally stimulated by an electric current, the tongue swells from its arteries being dilated, and likewise, the kidneys are flushed red with blood. Also, unlike other nerves, it cannot be fatigued or exhausted by prolonged stimulation, so that in every respect it is like a sleepless, tireless sentinel posted at the great gate of the heart's outflow. These are only illustrations of the nervous mechanism before there added to it a single one of the great brain ganglia with their high and complex functions. If in the array of the spinal centers we find at every turn special disciplinary arrangements

in the shape of specific appointments, so to speak, of nerve centers with their special nerves to act as checks or controls over the whole system, we will find still plainer illustrations of the function of inhibition or control in the great army of cerebral centers. whole tracts of nerve fibers descend from the brain, coursing along the nervous strands of the cord, till each fiber ends at, but not in, a spinal nerve cell. Forthwith, that nerve fiber rules the spinal nerve cell absolutely, by directing how it is to act and do this or that,

according to the commands coming from above. The spinal motor cells move all bones of the body by the muscles attached to them, as we have said, but every such movement is subject to the behest of the brain fiber. But just as there are fibers passing from the brain above to the cord below, so all cerebral collections of gray matter have fibers coursing between them. These, as we have stated before, are called association fibers as they pass from lobe to lobe, from lobeial to lobeal and from convolution to convolution. That these extremely numerous connections between the

cortical centers with each other are for the purpose of bringing the different functions of each into communication and relation with the others is not doubted by anyone. According to all precedent in the nervous system, it follows that this anatomical fact indicates that the great law of inhibition must be the necessary law governing the mental operations of the brain itself. Each thinking center, acting by itself, without being controlled by other centers, would inevitably act foolishly. This is the reason of the absurdity of dreams. In dreams, some nerve centers happen to awaken. by themselves, and thus start ideas without any control or correction from other nerve centers which are still asleep, and which, if they were also awake, would tell them, that is not true. Stop till I think with you.

The facts of delirium are also best explained as a result of the suspension through paralysis of their inhibitory nerves of the control of higher centers over lower ones, which then run riot with their unchecked fancies or ideas. That this is true is proven by the fact that just such disorders can be imitated by administering agents like opium and alcohol, which, we know by experiments on animals, have the same property of paralyzing nerve inhibition, whether in the brain or in the spinal cord. A well-balanced brain, therefore, is one which, when some one center starts an idea, waits till the answer comes from all the other nerve centers which have communicating fibers with that center, as to what they also think about it. One other fact also should be mentioned here.

As quick as thought is a proverbial phrase which a physiologist would not care to use, for he has ingeniously devised means by which to measure the rate of transmission of a nerve impulse, both up a sensory nerve and down a motor one, with the result that it averages about 180 feet a second in the first, and 160 in the second instance. Now some have imagined that nerve currents are somehow allied to electrical currents, but while the nerve current vibration travels not more than 200 feet, an electrical current during the same time traverses a copper wire at the rate of 180,000 miles a second.

Between the two, therefore, there is a greater disparity than between the fastest of express trains and the slowest crawl of a snail. More than that, when an afferent stimulus reaches a nerve center, a marked delay occurs before an afferent response emerges from that centre. As Sir Michael Foster expresses it, the advent of an afferent impression by the afferent nerve is a busy time for the centre, during which many processes, of which we have very little exact knowledge, are being carried on in it.

It takes some time to deliberate what it will do. The shortest period of a reflex act has also been measured in a few simple reflex arcs, only to show that the delay at the center exceeds in time both afferent inflow and efferent outflow. Hence, when several nerve centers have to adjust themselves to know what they are all to do about some afferent excitation, one center, sometimes inhibiting the other during the process, the final outcome may seem to be a very deliberate affair. Without knowing it, therefore, a man may have good physiology in his exclamation, if only I had stopped to think.

But to return to the subject of the physiological rank of the will, as we have explained before, the higher centers do not suppress or abolish the functions of the lower centers, but restrain, regulate, and direct them instead. They, in fact, establish their prerogative to govern by governing, and when needful, they soon prove their title by doing so. We have already demonstrated the mighty work of the will in dealing with brain matter as the potter does with clay, and that it is the will alone that has that power.

But on that same account, we are now to show that in thus making an instrument for the mind to use, the will is higher than the mind, and hence that its rightful prerogative is to govern and to direct the mind, just as it is the prerogative of the mind to govern and direct the body. No teaching of physiology is more important than this, and its truth is emphasized by the great facts of human life which themselves both illustrate and confirm it. Thus the rule is universal that the higher and rank is responsible for the behavior of the lower. Hence it is that with the rule, the advent of the human will, there enters a principle into the living world which is entirely

new, because nothing like it is recognizable anywhere else. This principle pertains, and is applicable, to man alone, and not to any other creature on earth. So transcendent in its bearings and applications is this principle, that we may well pause to note what it implies about the real nature of the human will, because, owing solely to what his will is, on man alone rests the weight of personal responsibility. Therefore man himself cannot possibly be a living machine, however much his mind may answer to that description, for no machine can be responsible for anything,

because a machine can only do what it is constructed for. Nor can a mere animal be held responsible for anything, for even though it be high enough in the scale to have a mind, and some animals certainly do have minds, yet they are virtually so fully the creatures of the mechanical afferent that they have no true power of choice. But man can always do or not do as he chooses, or in other words, wills. Therefore, this very different thing, his will, makes him different from every other earthly living thing. Therefore, something is expected and taken for granted about him, which is not expected of any other being.

In fact, man reigns here below only because he is responsible, and it is his will alone which makes him responsible. Human responsibility, on account of man's possession of a virtually all-controlling will, if he chooses to exercise it, is such an unwelcome doctrine to many reasoners that every effort has been made to disprove the freedom of the will. We, however, cannot follow this contention when it travels off into the far fields of metaphysics, just enough to enable us to bring the disputant back to our province of physiology. Thus, it is contended that the human will is not free because it is itself the product of motives. As Spinoza expressed it, men are free as to their acts, but not free as to the motives which determine these acts. A motiveless will is no will at all, because a will can only act as it has

a motive or motives, and therefore it cannot exist apart from motives. Hence, as it is the motives which make the will, man's will is not free, simply because it has to submit to the strongest motive. The fatal flaw in this reasoning is that it confounds a thing with the conditions of a thing. One might as well deny the power of steam because it cannot do anything without first being confined within the sides of a boiler, as to deny the power of the will, because, you know, its operations are always conditioned by motives. A steam engine may be a perfect engine, but it may work very feebly if it has not enough steam. So a man may have and may appreciate to the utmost all the motives for a given line of conduct but may weep, not because of lack

of motives, but from lack of willpower to act upon those motives. In our concluding chapter, we will allude to a great physiological reason for this too frequent lament. But, After all, the practical experience of human life is the best test of the truth of any theories, and especially of metaphysical theories. Men have never doubted the fact of human responsibility, nor the reason why every man is responsible. One illustration of this truth will suffice. Go into any court of law on earth,

whether in America, in Europe, in Turkey, or in China, and see there the criminal and the judge. Can the criminal, in effect, say anywhere or in any language? Oh, judge, you should not punish me, a poor machine, whose efferent acts are the necessary result of my afferent impulses. Think in my case how old, how hereditary, and how natural the afferent impulse was. I was starving, and in order to eat, I stole. The reply of any judge, the world over to such a plea, would have to be the same, for there is one human fact upon which all human law is based. It assumes that there is a central power in every man, which must be stronger than impulse, whether single or multiform, and that men must be punished if it is not thus stronger. The judge, therefore, answers to such pleading, you are a man, and so have the power of choice. However strong and however numerous or sudden the impulses of passion or the cravings of nature may be, you still have within you the ability

to choose not to yield to those impulses, and on that account alone I am here to judge you. If you did not have that power, I could have no jurisdiction over you. If you were a mere animal, a noble lion, or a cunning ape, or anything like them, you would not be brought here before me, whatever you did. But because you are a man, and as a man have the power of choice, you now find yourself in court, because when you were hungry, you did not act like a man, but like a hungry animal, and you shall be punished because you did act like an animal. This illustration is enough to prove at once that the power of choice, or, in other words,

the will in man cannot possibly be mechanical or the product of afferent impulse, because it is plainly above impulse, or else it would not be expected always to rule impulse. Therefore it must be free from the tyranny of the afferent, for if it were not thus free, there would be no responsibility, and if there be no responsibility, then there can be no human law whatever. To admit that this principle can ever have an exception in law, whereby impulse could ever lawfully become stronger than the will, would be forthwith the abrogation of all law. Law's very existence depends upon the responsibility of men, because they have a will which ought always to be the master and not the slave, still less the product, of afferent impulse. Such being the presumption of all human law about the rank of the will as regards conduct, what do the facts of human life in general testify as to the

relative station of the mind and the will. Chief among the faculties of the human mind are memory, imagination, speech, knowledge, conception, and judgment. This last leading to the mind's highest attribute, reason. No wonder that these splendid endowments should lead many to think that there can be nothing higher in us than the mind. But in the order of development, physiology emphatically states, and the whole world proves it to be true, that the mind is not only the subordinate,

but well-nigh invariably the merest servant in man of the will, and by it often as despotically ruled as the mind in turn often despotically rules the body. One proof of the secondary place held by the mind, the significance of which is often not sufficiently appreciated, is the fact that the mind is easily detached from the personality, while such is never the case with the will. The mind is so detachable that it can be made to work like any other machine as its owner sees fit. A prominent body of professional men among us live by letting out the entire equipment of their mental faculties for hire.

After a lawyer has accepted a retainer, he commands his mind forthwith to busy itself with all its resources of reasoning and of persuasion for the party who pays him. His emotions, from the extremes of pathos to those of indignation, may be pressed into the service as well. But no man can let out his will for hire, and he lies when he pretends to. The will refuses to be displaced from the personality by anything on earth, or sometimes in heaven. But this subject wears a grave aspect when it is recognized that, owing to its original prerogative, the will always holds a retainer on its reason in practical life. The reason may sometimes timidly propose to its master a series of arguments which it knows will not be welcome, only to be ordered to come back again with a more acceptable line of

reasons. It is this fact which explains why opinions, either political or religious, can and do, have well-defined geographical rather than mental boundaries. The Strait of Calais is like a rivulet compared to the historical separation between the English and French views. While as to the Strait of Gibraltar, Morocco is much farther away from all Europe in every belief in principle than Japan. But one special historical illustration of this truth we had in America. Before the year 1861, a boundary called after two surveyors, Mason's and Dixon's, line, divided the United States, not only geographically, but politically, intellectually, and morally. Notwithstanding all the sophistries about other issues, there lay, as Lincoln said, in his

immortal second inaugural, as the chief cause of all the fierce antagonism between the two geographical sections of the country, a difference of opinion about the institution of African slavery. Was it because the reasoning faculties differed so between these two sections of the same English-born race? On one side of the line, most men and women reasoned, and so supposed that they believed, that slavery was the sum of all evil. On the other side, most men and women reasoned, till they supposed that they believed, that slavery was a good, if not a divine institution. nor was the dispute settled by reasoning. End of Section 12.

Section 13 of Brain and Personality. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. Recording by Maria James, Brain and Personality, or the Physical Relations of the Brain to the Mind, by William Hanna Thompson. Practical Applications Part 2 Some would-be reformers or philiposition. philanthropists appear to rely upon increase of knowledge or of information in the world as the

cure for the world's evils. If men's minds were but enlightened, then everything would go well. The physiologist can only point out that such people, owing to their unfamiliarity with the constitution of this court, are addressing the wrong official. Reason undoubtedly does hold a high position at this court, which no one can justly disparage, but at best it is only an advisor of its sovereign. In the future, as this master improves in motives, this official will doubtless be promoted with an increase of authority. But as the world is still constituted, the influence of reason with the power which actually rules is at all times uncertain, because the effect depends on how the ruler is otherwise disposed. Should the reason venture

to be importunate, it meets with the summary answer of the Roman Caesar. Sik volos, seek yubio, stert pro rataione voluntas. So I will, so I command, for a reason, let the wish stand. Therefore gain the ear of the will first, and everything naturally, because physiologically, follows. The world is to improve, not by an increase of knowing people, desirable as that is, but by an increase among its inhabitants of people with benevolent wills. One phase of this subject deserves notice. Though the mind is so detachable from the real self, men nevertheless are constantly liable to confound it with the self. No mistake is greater and yet so common.

Thus, when on occasion this retained lawyer of the will is directed to reason and to talk volubly on all righteousness, men are deceived into believing that those who can talk so well must themselves be good. Both Seneca and Lord Bacon were among the meanest men of their times. The Romans' moral maxims are admired to this day, but he was the man who scandalized even the hardened cynics of Nero's Rome by rising in the Senate to eulogize Nero for ripping open the body of his mother to see the womb that bore him. Indeed, some men may be observed, who, for the creditable showing, virtuous declamation makes, proceed to display their own gifts of eloquence about goodness,

much as they would lead out a horse to show his fine points. Another important aspect of the relation of the will to the mind is that, just as with the creation of speech centers, the will likewise so alters the brain that in time the brain thinks only according to certain habitual ways. Some strong but elderly men of my acquaintance, whose reasoning powers no one could pronounce weak, seem no more able to change their opinions than they could learn readily, Turkish or Chinese. As a rule, it is only in the third or fourth decennials of life that men's minds show any capacity to be converted on any important matter of opinion. The cause for this is not from any

enfeeblement of judgment attendant on the advent of middle age. Instead, the judgment as a faculty should then be much stronger than in youth, as indeed generally proves to be if left free to act. But as the years pass, the judgment is less and less free to act. Those will elements, likes and dislikes in proportion to their intensity and duration, have steadily been fashioning the mind's physical instrument to work out only opinions to match, until to have to have have new opinions, they need to have literally new brains. The utmost that reason at any time can do is to persuade its master by adducing other motives, but an adult man who can be convinced against his will is well-nigh a physiological impossibility. Why this is so we now see clearly. It must not

be supposed that men ever really hold opinions, which to them appear unreasonable, their wills take good care that their reasoning servant should always supply them with all the reasons which they want, and very well does this servant furnish its master with most cogent arguments to show the great reasonableness of his views, especially if his master's interests, that is, wishes, are strongly enlisted. Men's interests come to them from such sources as their parentage, birthplace, party, or sect, and the influences of these factors in life sway their reasoning as naturally, and as irresistibly as the wind carries with it the dust of a road. This subservience of reason to the will is simply physiological,

and therefore so unconscious that it is, in no sense, hypocritical or insincere, however some may wonder at the intellectual feats in reasoning of those who have differed from them, not in mental faculty, but in their native environment. No one should wonder at or resent any reasoning as such, for this suburbation. subordinate in man has to do as he is bidden by his master. In short, the world has yet to learn, once for all, that men are not to be justified nor condemned by such superficial things about them as their opinions. Set the will right first, and men's opinions will follow suit, as soon as they have opportunities for knowing better, but with the will remaining perverted,

not the opportunities for knowing of an eternity will avail. One of the best promises for the future of our race is the fact that men are always touched and the longest affected by the spectacle among their fellows of an individual life of consistent goodness, itself due to a will attribute. Influence is an exclusively human word, and in this world of changes by death, it is to be measured not alone by its extent, but by its duration. judged thus the influence of a simple-minded but loving mother may be perpetuated long after the eloquence of a score of famous orators has died away died away as only mind-produced words can utterly die away into empty space passing from the general to the individual no subject should so commend itself to the serious attention of all educators and instructors as those physiological facts which explain how the mind acts and how the will acts every teacher and parent ought to learn all that they can about this subject the thinking brain when left to itself is the seat of the play of the afferent responding mechanically to a thousand thousand aphorant excitations pouring in upon it in number as countless as the birds of the air which come down from the north south east and west on a field in ganeseret to catch away the seed of the sower we are not responsible for the thoughts which enter our minds. No man ever was. What we are responsible for is the thoughts which we allow to stay there, because we have a kingly power within us which can command this mechanically thinking brain

to do its thinking according to its behest, just as the brain in turn can command the spinal core to stop acting reflexly to its afferent excitations, and to act only in according to the brain's behest. The will, by its lawful, physiological, inhibitory power can say to the thinking brain, these thoughts are good thoughts and valuable, therefore keep them, those other thoughts are purposeless and hence unprofitable, therefore dismiss them at once, and a well-disciplined mind will obey. With what result? Here we come to the highest illustration of that great principle in nervous development, discipline, for it is the will as the ranking official of all in man, who should now step forward

to take the command. We cannot overestimate the priceless value of such direction when completely effective for the life of the individual in this world. A mind always broken in to the sway of the will, and therefore thinking according to reflex suggestion, constitutes a purposive life. A man who habitually thinks according to purpose will then speak according to purpose, and who will care to measure strength with such a man. Such a man or woman is the very embodiment of living power. But the important practical truth to apply here is that no power so grows in us by exercise, or so weakens and atrophies by disuse as the will. Teach a child's self-restraint, and you are directly developing thereby his willpower. Soon he will himself learn the next

lesson in will development, and win Carlisle's great equipment for life, the ability to take trouble. But physiology now adds that the will then alters the brain by creating new places for the mind to work with. It is the will which creates the man. When the age of three score is reached, men can give the best opinions about life, because most of its illusions have vanished, and well can they then comment on many a fellow traveler's course, though they may not care to refer to their own. Not a few of those whom they have known started out, apparently well equipped, so far as mental gifts and opportunities of education and of social position could enable them to go far and ascend high. But one by one they lagged and suffered themselves to be outstripped by others, whom perhaps few suspected at the start would reach the first rank before them,

because they appeared so much inferior in mental powers to the men whom ultimately they wholly distanced. Will direction explains it all. What is the finest mental machine in this life without willpower? In a former age, men worshipped the body. Homer's heroes, with a partial exception of Ulysses, were worshipped for their bodily strength and beauty. The same is still true everywhere among the savage tribes. But we are living in an age in which mental gifts are estimated above all else. The great poet, the great artist, the great writer, the great orator, are our Goliaths, while there is no end to the twaddle about genius. But the finest mental machine, without will, is little else than a machine worked by the afferent. But we are not here

to be afferent. It is a responsibility for any being in the universe. to have what man has, the will, that majestic endowment constitutes the high privilege granted to each man apparently to test how much the man will make of himself. It is clothed with powers which will enable him to obtain the greatest of all possessions, self-possession. Self-possession implies the capacity for self-restraint, self-compulsion, and self-direction, and he who has these, if he live long enough, can have any other possession that he wants. The steady discipline of the will saves the mind also by obliging it not only to lessen the number of its thoughts, but to improve their quality.

It is a weak, often a diseased mind, which thinks hurriedly. Let a man be enfeebled by a fever or by any other cause of exhaustion, and he has hard work to keep his mental machine from turning out thoughts which run to the end of the earth. A rapid flow of ideas, indeed, is the sign often of impending ruin, as in the approach of maniacal insanity, and rarely does that dreadful calamity occur, except after long antecedent, vicious mental habits, in which the mind has been allowed to roam with progressively less and less inhibition by the will. To a less but ever harmful degree, men are everywhere exposed to the depredations of

that great thief of life, desultoriness. For desultoriness of thought leads to desultoriness of purpose, of plan, and of action, because each of these are soon displaced by some other thought or purpose, till the man wakes up at last to find his life wasted by his ever-roving, afferently working mind. Mental waste from too little will direction is the greatest waste of the world. Will direction calls for effort, but without it, the mind can easily saunter among attractive scenes of its own creation. This is one reason why our world is infested with so many dreamers, because it is so interesting to imagine an ideal society, an ideal state, or an ideal church, with personally owned air castles included.

All these are examples of mental processes which, when indulged in till they become mental habits, may end in true mental diseases. During the usually gradual onset of that fatal form of insanity, which ends in general paralysis, the mind of the patient is characteristically occupied with exalted daydreams. I have thus recognized paupers in almshouses as affected with parisus, not only by the physical signs in their eye pupils, etc. But by eliciting from them confidential statements of what millionaires they were and of what great things they were going to do. It is therefore one of the healthiest symptoms in a man to find him always able to face facts.

This the mind will never do without the command of the will. Because facing facts has to be a deliberate, often a disagreeable process, requiring much thought, and no mental machine can think long on any subject unless it has learned to think by will. Deep thought is but another term for prolonged thought. Without at first proposing anything of the sort, the physiologist now begins to find himself appearing in public in the conventional garb of an old sage. From the time of the prince who, centuries before Moses was born, wrote a book which has been found in an Egyptian tomb, in which he counsels his grandson how he could profit, as he himself had, by studying the books of the ancients, through a long line of Hebrew, Sanskrit, Persian, Chinese, Greek, and Roman worthies. Mankind has been abundantly lectured about wisdom.

Some people find these sages rather tiresome because their talk is so monotonously alike, while its substance nearly everyone has known before. Therefore, the physiologist had better not venture to add himself to the number unless he can show cause by having something new to say. All that he can claim is that his calling has made clear certain facts and principles entering into the question which his predecessors might have suspected, but without being as well informed about the grounds for them as he now is, thus as to wisdom.

For practical purposes, it might be defined as a correct appreciation of the relative importance of things and acting accordingly. The physiologist divides this definition into two very distinct halves, according to his recognition of the wide difference between the mind and the will. The first half, the appreciation of the relative importance of things, is done exclusively by the mind, and it does it so well and easily that anyone can try his hand at it. Everybody is wise by fits. The greatest fool of one's acquaintance has his sage moments, and, moreover, can deliver correct judgments about what others ought to do. But when it comes to acting accordingly, that falls to the

will alone, and to keep on steadily doing what the mind recognizes as the wise thing, such a store of willpower is needed that but few are found who have it. The ancient sages long bewailed this failure of the will to do the behest of the wise mind, but though they clearly recognized the fact, they did not know the physiological reason for it, which we are yet to allude to in our final chapter. As we have stated in chapter one, none of them knew what a nervous system was, nor what the brain was for. They did not know, therefore, any of the following facts which have so much bearing upon every speculation about man. First, that the conscious personality has a material organ to think with, which exists in two, symmetrical halves. It is only one half of this organ, however, which can be used for speech,

or for recognizing or knowing anything which is either seen or heard or touched, in the sense of the touch which is educated. All acquired human endowments, therefore, are acquired by a modification of the material comprising the speaking half of the brain. This speaking half of the brain did not originally have a single one of these great functions, not a single place in it for them any more than its fellow hemisphere has to the end of life. They are all stamped, as it were, each in its respective place in the speaking hemisphere by a single creative agency. Had any one of the old wise men or philosophers been told this, how eagerly would he have asked who or what that creative agency was?

We can well imagine that when told it was alone the purposive human will which first endowed that hemisphere with the great faculty of speech, and then with all the rest of these great powers, he would have exclaimed, if so, the will is the greatest fact in man. The physiologist has something new to say even on the oldest subjects of the moralist, who, like himself, for example, can speak with such emphasis on the great subject of habit. Long ago, sages said that our habits make us, but they said so after their observation of external life. The physiologist, using the same words, means that our habits make our brains inside of us, so that we think, talk, and act accordingly, and always accordingly, until the will steps in and takes the fashioning of the human brain in hand.

But has the will here entirely displaced habit? Alas, no. The will is very partial in its work on the brain, as it began by discarding one of the two brains altogether, so by analogous neglect it also leaves every man with a great part of his mental apparatus only a purposeless, mechanically thinking thing, which is the mere creature of its habits. Then comes to the man an excellent teacher, experience, only, as Carlisle says of him, a teacher good and true, but he demands such dreaded. wages. From experience, the man learns in time that many of his mental habits are very injurious and hamper him like so many fetters. What can he do about it? It is the physiologist who can now tell him. Do not expect much from a New Year's Day's resolutions. Your will can make a new man of you, but only after its fashion when making anything new in the brain, by reiterating the same resolution stimulus every single day after New Year's for the whole year at least,

just as you learn by it a new language. Brain cells and brain fibers cannot learn better ways from preachers, only your own untiring will can do anything with them. One other thing the will can do, which is of welcome import. To the young, as has been said, nature does nothing but give, from the old she does nothing but take away. if men did not become used to the progressive losses of old age by sheer compulsion the so-called natural term of life would be for little else than sorrow with old age everything physical about us becomes progressively less usable and enjoyable as if it were decaying by disease but the will says to age you must spare whatever brain there be where i remain in force do what you like with bone muscle or anything else about your victim and you may likewise waste the brains of ordinary people till they become more childish than children,

but the brain where I work shall always remain young." This is all due to the remarkable physiological power of what is called interest, to resist either bodily exhaustion or decay. If a man expended the same amount of muscular exertion sawing wood, which he does, climbing rocks or wading streams after trout, he would faint dead away. dead away. But interest is the soul of the will, and the undying ambition of many statesmen has kept his brain as strong after three score and ten as it ever was before. The mind of Gladstone, when he was over 80, was not like his body at that age, but remained still the same mind in all

its powers which it was at 60. This was not simply because Gladstone had an exceptional mind, for, if that were all, his mind would have been relatively older at 80 and after than it was at 60, which it never was, but continued to the end more than 20 years younger than the rest of his frame. The importance of demonstrating this principle will excuse our delaying a moment in accounting for those interesting physiological objects, old misers. A miser is sustained throughout life by a special development of that incapacity for satisfaction which is one of the characteristics of that creature, man. Even man's body shares in this insatiability,

for whereas the ass is contented with the same diet at his master's crib all his days, it would take more knowledge than most people have to state correctly where each article on a working man's table comes from, because every region and every climate of the globe generally contributes something to that dinner. But a power working on that will element, which prevents man from knowing what is enough, calls the miser to a lifelong mortification of the flesh, to an indifference to the scorn of his fellows at his conduct or at his raiment, and to the claims not only of his kindred, but even of his own body,

for rich misers have been known to so hate their own lives for the sake of their master as to die of starvation, and all because that master's voice ever sounds in the miser's ear, to him that hath shall be given, and he shall have more abundantly. In other words, the miser's will is unceasingly stimulated by one of the most living and powerful of human motives, the desire to have. Wall Street is no place for dotards or simpletons, and that money market has known more than one octogenarian, who was as well able to acquire from others when he was past 80 as he was half a century before. There is a bodily window through which the light streams as long as the brain is yet young, as is exemplified in a rich miser of my acquaintance.

While the rest of him betrays that he is close upon ninety, the quick, searching glance of his eye reveals that every faculty of his mind is yet fully at the disposal of his will. On the other hand, let a man retire from business in his prime to lead thereafter a motiveless life, An age will change his brain as fast as it changes the color of his hair. No lesson for advancing years does physiology emphasize more strongly than that a man should never lose that great motive power of the will interest. End of Section 13 of Brain and Personality. This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org, recording by Hawaii in December 2020. Brain and Personality, or the Physical Relations of the Brain to the Mind, by William Hannah Thompson. The Significance of Sleep, Part 1 No consideration of the physical relations of the brain to the mind would be complete without including the separation of the one from the other. which occurs in sleep. Regarded simply as a phenomenon,

sleep has been well-termed the great mystery of life. We should not allow the term mystery, however, to become, as is done by some persons, a signal for a cessation of all further discussion. From its own nature

a true mystery, instead of ending discussion, calls for more of it, because a mystery is always something about which we know a good deal, or else it would be no mystery. If we know nothing about the subject, it is not a mystery to us,

whatever else it may be. Thus I have heard a fourth dimension of space spoken of, but as I know nothing of such a dimension and have not found anyone who does, it can be no mystery to me. What constitutes a mystery is the unknown which is certainly connected with the known. A mystery, therefore,

is unfinished knowledge rather than complete ignorance. Whether we can know the rest or not makes no difference. It then would remain only an unsolved mystery, but in no sense the less a mystery when we are convinced from what we know about it that there is more still to know. The history of science is a record of many a long-standing mystery finally solved.

Meantime, the process which the process which science follows in dealing with mysteries is always the same. First, begin by finding out all you know on the subject. Do this as thoroughly as possible. Then be sure that you do not pass to the consideration of the unknown, except along lines definitely connected with that which is certainly known. In all essentials, this process corresponds to that of the astronomer who is trying to find out his distance from a heavenly body. He cannot leave this earth, and therefore he begins with geometry, and with infinite patience measures his baseline. Not until he is sure of that does he begin as carefully to measure the angles of the lines which leave this earth from either end of his

baseline on their way to the object in the sky. Therefore we begin our investigation of the mystery of sleep by selecting for our baseline its most fundamental fact, as it appears in a question often put by a child. Where do we go to when we go to sleep? This is a very natural question for a child, because it easily recognizes that we are gone then. Its understanding has already grasped the central fact about sleep. Absence. That being so, we must now take our time in considering this first fact, our baseline for subsequent proceedings. In the first place, something must be present in order that the other thing be absent from it, and the present here is the living body, not only complete in all its parts, but also in its

living attributes and functions. Not one of its component cells is changed or gone. The blood circulates the same, the secretions flow the same. The secretions flowed a same, the lungs go on exchanging carbonic acid for oxygen, and all the processes of nutrition are as active as ever. But the completeness of that which is present only accentuates the disappearance of that which is absent. Whatever other questions may be raised, the primary and certain truth is that in natural sleep, the conscious personality in us takes its departure from the body without leaving a trace behind. It may return gradually and partially as in dreams,

but that is then not sleep. In true, healthy, sound sleep, the body is as devoid as a bronze or stone statue of either consciousness or mind. That it is still a warm living body does not alter the case, because while a living body can be awakened and a statue cannot,

awakening is the opposite of sleep, and hence throws no light whatever on what sleep itself is. The marvel of sleep is lost upon us owing to the unfortunate peculiarity that our ability to wonder is soon abolished by mere repetition. Because the recurrence of sleep is as certain and regular as sunset itself, it does not occur to us to wonder at it or to ask what it all means. Really to appreciate what a strange thing sleep is in a race of intelligent beings, we may have recourse to our imagination and picture another world whose inhabitants are mentally just like ourselves, but whose ordinary conscious life is continuous, and sleep therefore wholly unknown to them. Now, should a single one of their fellows happen to fall asleep in our fashion,

he would certainly fill them all with amazement, if not with terror. To their minds, an individual who could virtually go out of existence for some hours and then return just as if nothing had happened, would be about as uncanny and alarming an object as the apparition of an unmistakable ghost would be to us. But the greatest perturbation of all which this sleeper would occasion would be among their philosophers, because he would constitute a phenomenon

which contradicted their whole science of the real. With less difficulty than our own philosophers, who always feel uneasy when sleep is mentioned, their philosophers had long demonstrated that the one certainty of certainties among them was their own conscious selves, that ego which is always there. As with us, every other existence

is only relative to this first certainty, which is based upon personal consciousness. But this new sleeper among them would be a specimen of a being who can be alternately vividly conscious at one time and utterly non-conscious at another, and whose ego, therefore, could both be and not be by turns.

To return now to our own earth and to our body of philosophers, we may first allude to the theme which has long chiefly occupied their attention, namely ontology or the science of being. In their discussions on the nature of being, two great terms are continually employed, namely subject, to denote that which thinks, and object, or that which is thought about. The subject also feels and perceives, while the object is not. that which is the occasion of feeling and of perceiving by the subject.

The longest debate has been on the relations of these two elements of our being to each other. One school of philosophers maintain that they are absolutely distinct, the subject being the central ego and the object being essentially the external non-ego. The other school maintains that the two are really identical, object being but a of subject. Meantime, the appeal on both sides is exclusively to facts of consciousness. The first school relies upon the immediate perception by the subject that the object, for example, a stone, is no part of it, never was and never can be. The other school, beginning with the illustrations of sound and of pain as things which have no objective but only subjective,

existence then goes on to demonstrate that everything exists only as a state of consciousness. Apart from a conscious mind, nothing has any real existence in or of itself. This was Bishop Berkeley's celebrated doctrine. It may be remarked here that Democritus of Abdera, circa 430 BC, was the doctrinal ancestor of Berkeley. His teaching contains the germ of all subsequent speculations of the kind, enunciated in his famous saying, Man lives plunged in a world of illusion and of deceptive forms which the vulgar take for reality. To tell the truth, we do not know anything. The late Professor Clifford maintained a theory about mind and its relations to matter,

which, to use his own words, is not merely a sense. speculation, but is a result to which all the greater minds which have studied this question in the right way, namely in Clifford's way, have gradually been approximating for a long time. This theory is that mental phenomena and physical phenomena, although apparently diverse, are really identical. This view, though not in all its aspects the same, yet approximates to the doctrine of Hegel, that there can be no existence possible of matter or of motion, except as standing in relation to mind. All we can say to this is that by the time a man who, while looking at that interesting

body, the moon, comes through philosophizing to believe that it is a special phase of himself, because being an object it exists only in his consciousness, he must then be intellect. drunk. It is related of a certain German thinker that his cogitations led him into such a sea of doubts that he began to doubt his own existence. At last his feet touched the bottom on one unquestionable fact, that is, that he could not doubt that he doubted. But unfortunately for this reassurance, it also would go when he lay his head upon his pillow

at night, for in his sleep he would not know that he have ever doubted. Doubting is a fact of consciousness. But so is every other fact which myth of physicians go by. They all consist of mental processes in the waking state. But in sleep, all mental processes, with everything pertaining to them, apparently sees, and so completely that all contrasts and distinctions belonging to conscious life equally disappear. A philosopher and a simpleton, a wise man and a fool, and likewise an innocent child and a murderer, a saint and a criminal, are all alike when they are all fast asleep.

Sleep, therefore, is a something which abolishes both the subject and the object of the metaphysician before his very eyes, and along with them every other thing that he has talked to. about, whether principles of thought or principles of ethics. This undoubted accompaniment of sleep, then, raises the question whether our baseline itself be correct or not. Thus sleep testify to the absence of the conscious personality from the body, or rather to what is really quite different from absence, namely to extinction of the personality. Instead of the child's question, where do we? we go when we go to sleep. The other question, also sometimes asked by a child, may be nearer

the mark. Where does the fire go when it goes out? We may then liken our conscious life to the light of a candle which is periodically extinguished to prevent the candle, which is the analog of the body, from being burned up too fast. Every time this candle is lit, it gives off its light at the expense of the body, so that in time the candle itself is used up, and after a few fitful flashes in its socket, it ends in final darkness. Starting, therefore, with extinction as our base, we will follow our lines of inference therefrom to note whether they will converge to some definite conclusion. At one end of our baseline we have the fact, which is doubtless true, that sleep is due

to a physical bodily necessity or condition. Moreover, we have more than one example of purely physical conditions, including the chief element in sleep, namely unconsciousness, such as an apoplexy, or from a blow on the head, or from brain poisoning, as by chloroform, and though these states differ in many particulars from natural sleep, yet they suffice to show that the link between consciousness and the brain is a physical one,

or else physical agents would not sever it. The inference, therefore, seems probable that as physical conditions of the brain extinguish consciousness, so physical conditions there created. But unfortunately, this line of inference, based upon extinction, cannot be made to pass in the neighborhood of demonstrated facts. To begin with, it is not the whole body, but only a part of the body, namely the nervous system, which is connected with the conscious personality, and not the whole nervous system, but only the brain, and in turn not the whole brain, but only the one of the two hemispheres in which speech is located, which, when awake, either subjectively thinks or recognizes objects. We have gone all over the subject before and need not waste any more words upon it.

The brain itself neither makes a word nor forms an idea. All words and all knowledge are put in the brain and arranged there for use, like so many books on their brain shelves by the brain's librarian. Where he goes to, when he locks this library up and leaves for the night, we do not know, but one thing is certain, that not one of its books made itself or put itself where it properly is. But the inferences drawn at the other end of this baseline are worse yet for going all astray. Extinction is extinction. Therefore, after the shortest nap, our whole conscious selves have to be made all anew. The comparison to a relit candle is altogether too

simple to fit the case, for our being is infinitely more than a flame. The surest realities of being cannot actively exist, then be annihilated, and then come into active existence again, like passing flashes of light. How much of our conscious life consists in memories and the use of memories? Every word we hear, read, or utter exists as memorized symbols in the self. of our speech centers, and it took a long time to put them there. A night's sleep certainly does not, and cannot, obliterate them, nor wipe out anything else the brain has acquired.

We have gained in our years settled convictions, strong motives, and living sentiments, all too deeply seated to come by day and go by night, or ever approach extinction while we live. It is these abiding elements in our conscious being which make us true persons. To admit that all of them can be and not be between waking and sleeping would be the end of all reality. If we are certain of anything, it is that we are. The old saying,

Cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, is not to be disproved by brief lapses into our own. unthinking sleep. But this theory runs counter also to one of the most striking facts about personality, namely continuity. Change is the great word descriptive of this strange life of ours. As old age approaches, memory can bring back picture after picture of our former selves, in early childhood, in youth and in each year thereafter, with changes upon changes in everything, except in one thing. Through them all, whether taking place in us or about us,

we were never anybody else. It was I who was a child, and it is the same I who is now. That I has never been other than what it is, and certainly never yet extinct. Here the extinction theory of sleep leads us to absurdity as its conclusion, or, in other words, to a mental nowhere.

Let us, therefore, in our quest, now turn and ask what physiology has to say on the subject. That is eminently proper, because in all matters connected with bodily life, it is the province of physiology to occupy itself with the question, what for? All other details about structure or place are considered by the physiology,

as simply contributing to solving this question. What is the purpose achieved? Sleep is a great factor in human life, about one third of its allotted duration being spent in sleep. But what is sleep for? Many persons may think that they can answer this question offhand without any help from the physiologist. After a hard day's work,

Farmer and mechanic know that their fatigued muscles need rest. Another who has been working his brain for hours finds that his thoughts are growing dull and sleepy. With another, an exciting day ends in a sense of weariness in all his nerves, those of the eye and of the ear especially. Therefore, it is plain that muscles cannot be worked forever, nor a brain nor nerves be exercised unceasingly, and hence that is what the rest of sleep is for.

But such an answer is nonetheless a mistake, because part of it is true. In fact, the demonstration of what a particular mistake in this answer is will take us a long way toward recognizing what in truth is the real significance of sleep. First, as to the muscles. Sleep is needed by muscles not because they are, muscles doing work. Muscular work as such does not tire muscles, though they have to work uninterruptedly not for hours only, but for years. Muscular work consists in pulling at something and then relaxing so as to pull again. For this purpose, all muscles which are attached to

bones are composed of lines of muscle cells which contract in the direction of their attachments and by shortening the muscle produced a pull. All such muscles under the microscope have just the same appearance, are constructed alike and always perform just the same kind of work. Now the diaphragm is a great muscle and is both constructed and does its work just as any muscle in arm or leg does its work. Indeed, it has to perform more muscular work than any muscle in the muscle in the limbs ever does or could do. But it would be disastrous if ever it got so tired by its work that it called for rest. It is the same in the powerful array of the other chest and abdominal muscles which carry on our respiration, for the combined muscular work spent in breathing

has been estimated as equal to raising 500 pounds an inch with each deep inspiration. So, great is the work performed by these muscles that most of our power-making food is consumed in their unceasing exercise, in all which, fortunately, none of them ever need sleep. It has been erroneously supposed that these muscles get all the rest in breathing which they need, because they rhythmically rest between inspiration and expiration. But let anyone try to move his arms up and down sawing wood 24 times a minute, which is the pace of ordinary breathing, while standing, and he will find that his pauses between in that rhythmical process did not amount to any rest at all. The conclusion from these physiological facts is important, namely that it is

something else beside their work, and essentially different from it, which tires and exhausts muscles to the degrees sometimes of destroying them. Still more significant are the facts about nerve cells and the expenditure of their energy, which is equivalent in its way to the expenditure of power by muscles in their work. In contrast with the action of muscles, which is visible and uniform, the action of nerve cells and of their prolongations in nerve fibers is both invisible and extraordinarily multiform. We can judge what their action is only by cutting the nerve fiber or excising the cell,

or by stimulating these with various irritants. But the result of such experiments conveys the impression of power, or of the transfer of energy in nervous tissue much more than any manifestations of the kind in muscular tissue. Take a powerful muscle and simply sever its motor nerve, and the muscle hangs flaccid and paralyzed. All that strong work in the muscle was elicited by a current of energy coming down that nerve. So the whole powerful mechanism of the muscles of respiration would instantly and forever cease to work if a small nail were driven into the respiratory center in the medulla oblongata. but the medulla has to regulate the beating heart as well

and it sends its nerves to follow every secondary artery down to the smallest to regulate them all with a grip which they must ever obey. These are examples of only a part of the work which the power centers in the medulla are constantly performing without cessation throughout life. A moment's sleep by them would mean the sleep of death. Hence neither nerve cells nor nerve fibers, as such, need rest in their work,

and as with muscles, it must be something other than their work which can fatigue them. End of Section 14. Section 15 of Brain and Personality This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. Recording by Hawaii in January 2021. Brain and Personality, or the physical relations of the brain to the mind,

by William Hannah Thompson. The Significance of Sleep, Part 2. No one can fail, therefore, to be deeply impressed by the revelation of what the significance of sleep is, when it clearly appears that it is only the play upon it of the consciousness, and especially the highest function of consciousness, the will that fatigues or exhausts with weariness any part of the living body. The muscles of the thumb and forefinger are small indeed, either in size or in power compared with the diaphragm,

but, as we have mentioned, often both the nerves of these muscles and the muscles themselves are wholly ruined in rites palsy by two continuous work done by them at the command of the will. As soon as the will orders the muscles of the arms and legs to work under its direction, that work becomes labor. Year long they cry for rest and must have it, or fatal exhaustion will follow.

Therefore, it is not natural work, whether nervous or muscular, but only conscious work which wears. In proportion to the continuousness, with which the conscious will enters into anybodyly action is the resultant fatigue. What does this remarkable fact mean? Because instead of missing the presence of this law of being in the operations of the brain itself, when thoughts are passing through it, we then meet with some of its most striking illustrations. Allow the brain to think as it pleases, and it is much pleased to do so.

It enjoys all the afferent impressions of the senses and thinks fast and easily. It roves from thought to thought and from fancy to fancy, as lightly as the butterfly passes from flower to flower. Mental butterflying, in fact, is a good descriptive term of the thinking of many men and women. But the moment the will calls the mind from its pasturing, and putting its bridle on says, Now go my way and think exclusively as I direct you, the sense of effort is immediate and fatigue begins.

Many persons indeed not only cannot think long by will, that is, think efferently, but they cannot even think long afferently by will, as, for example, in the passive mental exercise of listening. If they listen at all, they must have a constant variety of sensation. This constitutes one of the signs of mental degeneracy of our day, namely the craving for that low, afferent form of mentality, which is ministered to by what is properly termed the sensational.

Owing to its direct relations to life, physiologists have labored long in their researchers into the genesis of fatigue. The Leipzig school especially has almost subordinated other themes of physiology to this investigation by the most exhaustive experiments with numerous ingenious devices to ascertain and to measure how muscles are acted upon by stimuli and how they are exhausted by them. But it should be noted that the only stimuli with which they can experiment are themselves unnatural and foreign to this living tissue itself. A prick of a pin, a pinch with a forcips, an irritating acid,

or their most commonly used agent, an electrical current, are none of them the natural stimuli of either nerve or muscle. In fact, cartilage is a better conductor of an electrical current than is a nerve. But the inference is that these stimuli can exhaust a muscle, because they are unnatural to it. Natural stimuli are like those which descend from the medulla to the diaphragm muscle

and which never exhaust it. Nor do any other stimuli from the medulla cause fatigue because they all have the character of being spontaneous or what is termed automatic. But a wheel stimulus called a voluntary stimulus

is necessarily not automatic and hence distinctly different from automatic stimulus. Here, therefore, is the secret of the inevitable fatigue which so-called voluntary activity sooner or later occasions. The inference therefore seems certain that the consciousness, and particularly its most vivid form, the active will, is essentially foreign both to the muscular and to the nervous system of the body. including the brain itself. If the conscious will were not foreign but were natural,

its exercise would not cause fatigue. Hence it must be something super added to the body as an extra burden for the body to carry. Such being the case, the conclusion follows that the necessity for sleep arises from the fact that the consciousness bears the relation to the body of the rider to his horse. While the rider directs the horse in all his ways, he is neither the horse nor a constant part of the horse, but so different from him that it is his added weight which wears the animal out, and makes it necessary for this rider to dismount at stated intervals and leave the horse wholly alone.

The horse can get along perfectly well without this rider, and then not know what fatigue means. But the separate load of the consciousness is so far from being light that no other provision is possible than its complete withdrawal from brain and body until they are both sufficiently rested. All animals, therefore, require sleep in proportion to their possession of consciousness, but more than all, man, because in him consciousness attains to its highest activity in the purposive will. To prevent misconception, it should be repeated that it is primarily consciousness, with or without the will, which causes the fatigue which necessitates sleep. Sleep is common to infants and animals, including hibernating animals, quite irrespective of the will, because all forms of consciousness cause fatigue in proportion to their intensity. When particularly vivid and prolonged, the result and weariness may be too great for perfect sleep to follow. Thus, dogs after an exciting day's hunting often have their sleep disturbed by their dreams of the chase. All this is because consciousness is itself a specific stimulus to nerve matter, just as light and sound are.

In the case of these afferent stimuli, however, they are sort of. and nature can be easily identified. Not so consciousness, even in its simplest form of a common sensation. On page 162 in the chapter on the evolution of a nervous system, we remark, What is sensation? Nobody knows. All definitions of sensation amount to saying that sensation is sensation,

for to call it an action. For to call it an act of the consciousness is, when translated into Anglo-Saxon, to announce that the thing which feels feels. But when, instead of passively receiving a sensation, the consciousness is actively excited by a designing will, the resulting exhaustion is much greater, and that constitutes our whole contention. What a powerful specific stimulus to a nerve center the will may be, to the degree of causing destructive, physical and chemical changes in it, we have already shown on page 222. But what becomes of the personality itself when it thus withdraws?

We have seen that it must still exist in its entirety during sleep, as well as before sleep. One difficulty, of course, is inherent in the problem, namely that the personality itself is always invisible. A living brain when exposed, though it then be conscious, shows no more evidence of the mind which is there than thus any other bodily thing. The nearest we ever come to seeing this indweller is when it makes the eye flash. All that we can see is that our consciousness in its relation to the mind seems somewhat like a window which is but rare, opened wide. Whole trains of thoughts may go on within us, with the light of this window

scarcely falling upon them, except at the final conclusions. Unconscious cerebration is what physiologists call this kind of thinking. But does this kind of thinking go on while the window of consciousness is wholly closed during sleep? There are some facts of experience which seem to point that way. People often go to bed in a state of much perplexity or indecision about certain matters, and then rise in the morning, much as if they had taken some friend's advice while they were asleep, which puts things in an entirely new light. Others say that they want to sleep over a question before they will decide it. There is nothing like sleep for promoting judiciousness. On the other hand, some anecdotes are told which appear to show that occasionally the personality does steal

behind the closed window of consciousness in sleep, and then having the mental machine all to itself makes it work even more effectively than in the waking estate. Such occurrences, however, are too few to establish any general principle. Two such instances I can personally vouch for. While at college I was told by a fellow student that his roommate, called Childs, set up with him late one night working at a difficult problem in mathematics. Failing to solve it, Charles rubbed his slate clean, put out the light, and retired to bed in much vexation. Long after midnight his chum was awakened by a light when he saw Child's in his nightdress busy with his slate. He then called to Charles to desist from such untimely work, but not receiving any answer turned over to sleep.

The next morning, while both were dressing, Charles complained that his night's rest had not refreshed him. I am not surprised, replied his friend, when you got up about three o'clock and went at that problem again. Charles answered that he had done nothing of the kind. When glancing at the table, he was astonished to find his slate covered with the problem all correctly worked out. The other instance was that of a British consul in Syria, who afterwards rose high in the diplomatic service.

He had been a diligent student of Arabic to fit himself for the duties of his position, when one night he tried to compose a letter to a Lebanon-Emir. Arabic etiquette requires that such letters should testify to the accomplishments of the right, in the selection of a multitude of conventional compliments corresponding to the rank of the person addressed. When, besides these, the matter in hand had to be dealt with very diplomatically, the consul did little that evening but tear up one letter after another which he had written, as unsatisfactory, till finally he stopped in despair and went to bed, blessing all Arabic composition in general.

The next morning he found on his desk a fresh letter, which he must have penned as it was in his handwriting, and so well-worded that he forthwith dispatched it. But to revert to the subject of fatigue. Because the thing is, as it is, we seize either to inquire or to reason about it. But why cannot we carry on all the activities of our conscious life as we do those of our bodily life without fatigue. Why do all voluntary acts, whether muscle, nerve or a brain be used in them, lead to such exhaustion that sleep becomes necessary? Regarded by itself, human fatigue supplies one of the strongest foundation facts for a philosophy of pessimism. It is all very well

to speak of the dignity of labor, but labor is a curse. No rhetorical halo cast about it in modern democratic communities, when manual labor is spoken of, can really hide its intrinsic odiousness. The other great truth, that idleness is for man a worse curse, does not alter the fact that labor remains the heavy, weary burden of human life. Muscle work is the commonest and the simplest. and hence can be done also by the ox. Therefore it is cheap, its pay is low,

and the man who can do no other work is always poor. But for man this animal work is so hateful that nothing but stern compulsion keeps him at it, as with the great majority of our race, simply to get enough to eat. But brain work is harder yet, because the will is then so much more engaged. The only compensation is that it commands higher wages, because it costs more to produce it, and hence is more costly.

But so difficult is this work that no form of labour is more often shirked. Really active brain workers are few, owing to the steadiness of purpose which such labor requires. The self-reproaches which life retrospects so commonly bring come from the recognition that the best course was so often not followed because another was at the time easier. But human excellence, be it mental or moral, is never made easy of attainment for us.

We may have every such excellence if we will only pay for it with its equivalent in grievous toil. Therefore it is to this curse of labour that so much of human failure and sorrow can be ascribed. While the sun shines, mankind carries it

pathetic burden of work till night comes with its sleep, which allows it for a space to forget all its woes. But has this temporary oblivion any other physiological purpose than to permit the burden to be lifted again? Once more we repeat that it is no answer to say that fatigue is the simple result of the expenditure of our bodily forces, a chemical result of the chemical processes which would consume the candle of life, if kept too continuously burning, for we have seen that this is not true. Heart and lungs with their working muscles and energizing nerves burn up more in their work than any other bodily things do, but fatigue never interferes with, nor follows upon their

active chemical processes. Hence, sleep may be termed nature's great anesthetic for the pain of labor, and regarded it as a great blessing, just as chloroform is a blessing for what otherwise would be unendurable. But while we speak of sleep as our sweet restorer, we must not forget that the living body itself never needs this restorer till something different from it begins to stir the brain with its activities. We have dealt with this subject of fatigue because of its physiological import, for nothing could witness more plainly to the separate and external nature of the consciousness and of the

purposive will, than this virtual protest of the physical frame against them both, but particularly against the will. It need not be wondered at, therefore, that to many thoughtful minds, both in ancient and modern times, sleep has appeared as one of the strongest of evidences that the soul is not of the body, distinct from it. Both body and soul can exist apart from each other. In the sleeping state the body is seen left entirely to itself. Compared with the waking state, the difference is marvelous. Is that succeeding amazing difference which comes at the instant of waking, a thing of physical or chemical origin? Could the body create the man in that moment? Common sense,

which is the safe and balanced sum of all sense, answers that such a supposition is nonsense. Magnetism and iron are associated for mighty working in a dynamo, but only while the electrical current is coursing through the iron. Then, in a twinkling, the iron is only iron. Does the iron itself make the magnetism every time the connection recurs? Sleep and awakening have always made, mankind doubt the fact of human extinction by death. In the remotest past, when the race was

represented by the primitive cave dwellers, they buried, with their dead, weapons for the chase, food and food utensils, and even for the children their little toys. A minority of men may now attempt to ascribe this conviction, which is found everywhere and in all times, merely to human aspiration. It is true that the human heart has much to say and to ask when loved ones lie dead, but it is the sure fact of sleep which makes hope so reasonable by giving the lie to every doctrine of extinction. We have already tried to picture a world whose inhabitants, though otherwise like ourselves, had never seen anyone's sleep, and what a number of questions such a sight would occasion among them.

But the sight of one dead would be to them unspeakably awful, because, unlike us, they had never been prepared beforehand by any example of a real going away, followed by a real coming back. Yet for us, the only serious difference as regards personality between sleep and death, is that after death, there is no real. return. In both states, the absence of the personality is complete, but does the failure to

return make the same absence then mean extinction when it never did so in sleep? No one really believes it, though one may say he does. What is generic cannot be got out of us by logic, or by anything else, and a belief in a hereafter is as generic of mankind as the faculty of speech itself. The men who nearly 60 centuries ago built those tremendous tombs, the pyramids, cared more about the other worlds than this.

To judge him by what he accomplished in every direction, unaided by foreign teaching or by inheritance from the past, the old Egyptian of the Fourth Dynasty was no fool. Some would say that his solicitude about the future life

was because his priest frightened him, but then the question immediately arises, how came the priest to have such power to scare him? As an historical fact, disbelief in the unseen world does not prevail among nations until they begin to rot. In Greece it was not in the age of Marathon or of Aristides that such infidels abounded,

but in the wretched times when only rhetoricians and sophists flourished. When Rome was all unethysts, iron, the Roman was a devout man, but in the slavish days of a Tiberius and a domitian, he became an epicurean. The brain does not work well with the blood reaching it after coursing through gangrenous tissues. The lack of any returning traveler to tell of the world beyond caused primitive and ancient peoples to picture it each for themselves. But as the imagination can do nothing but reprimed,

produce earthly scenes, so the Egyptian had another Egypt, the Greek, Elysian fields, and the American-Indian happy hunting grounds. On the other hand, with the dark grave as its portal, an association of gloom often remained inseparable from thoughts of the abode of the dead. Homer depicts the wise Ulysses descending there, and finding it a cheerless place, where even the greatest departed heroes live only as weak, mournful spectres, so that Achilles tells his old friend, I would rather be one of Earth's ploughmen working for another poor, impoverished man,

than to rule all the shades of the dead. But the light which modern science has shed upon the facts of life can suggest, too, when duly pondered, quite different trains of thought, or, if you please, of mental pictures of another life, life than this awaiting us. The mental and moral equipment of man seems efficient for any future life, however limitless its conditions.

Locality, which held such an exclusive place in ancient conceptions, can be wholly subordinated now to questions about states of being. We can now conceive of a body no longer made of the most temporary forms of that matter, which is itself passing away, but fashioned to be a dynamic body, a body of power which need not shrink, as here, from the heavy burden of the will. There should be no night there,

for sleep will not be needed, when purpose does not weary, nor its exercise fatigue. Then as to the mind, we know that at present the word enough is only understood, but not experienced by man, and the opportunities for knowledge in a universe would not be too many for his desires.

But above all, rises a conception of a perfection of being, when the will so responds to the highest motives alone, that there could be no conflict with lower motives forever. Often we fail to appreciate all which death implies when it comes at the end of a long, wasting disease, marked by progressive enfeeblement of the bodily powers and by clouding of the mind. At such times it may simply appear as a physical process, like a candle slowly burning itself out. But it is quite otherwise when a man, it may be an exceptional man as regards mind,

altogether leaves us in an instant. How are we then stunned at being thus confronted with the whole mystery of our being? There is nothing so impressive as this, a living embodiment of personal mental power before us one moment and in another gone from us forever. However it may have been with us before, the here and the hereafter

cannot now be divided in our minds, for the one follows too quickly upon the other to let us believe that there is no link between them. One event of this kind, which happened on a public occasion in New York, will not be forgotten to the end of his days by anyone who witnessed it. Our whole great country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was then agitated by the discussion of the great human question, what is money? A coin may be one of the smallest things that man makes, but however small, it testifies to ideas of vassment. utterly beyond the comprehension of any other animal than man, because in that material thing are represented the existence of law,

fixed institutions, and society, as it adjusts the relations of individuals to one another. So entirely ideal, however, is money that on a piece of paper which may be burned with a match may be printed what would make it more valuable than any other one thing on earth. on earth. But whatever money is outward form, it must always represent its equivalent in human labour. Nothing but that gives its value to money. Coin or paper produced without that costly antecedent cannot be money, however much men may insist that it is. But because money itself

has no existence outside of agreement between men, so good faith in that agreement is its sole basis. So sure is this law that every social tie in a great country may be endangered by a loss of faith in what purports to be its money. It requires, therefore, great mental grasp to perceive clearly through all the incalculably complex relations of civilized life, what a momentous meaning attaches to the word credit. With credit gone, everything goes, because men no longer know how to deal with each other. A country's minister of finance, therefore, should be above all others, one who can quickly see what imperils its public credit and just how it does so. On January 29, 1891, the New York Board of Trade and of Transportation held its annual dinner. Representing, as it did, the greatest

business interests of the land, and with the whole country stirred by the financial question, it invited the then secretary of the Treasury of the United States to address it on that occasion. Everyone was eagerly waiting for what he would then say, because he was a statesman long and widely known as a man of not only great ability, but of the highest personal character. After holding many public positions in his own Western State of Minnesota, he was elected to the National House of Representatives, where for ten years he held the responsible position of chairman of the financial committee of the House,

that of ways and means. In that position he actively contended for, and finally won, an object which had strongly enlisted his Christian sympathies, by a bill directed against the great abuses by government agents in their dealing with the Indian tribes. He then served for ten years in the United States, Senate, once losing his seat in that buddy because he would not sacrifice his convictions on the money question, as did others among his party's leaders in his state. He then served twice as a cabinet officer, as secretary of the Treasury. Nor were his hearers now disappointed with what he had to say.

After a masterly review of the whole subject of what money is and always must be to make it money, he characteristically brushed aside all other issues to insist on the moral aspects of good faith as the one vital principle underlying everything financial. The words which he then spoke were printed day after day on the front pages of many of the most prominent newspapers in the country and served to determine thousands of men how to vote when the time came. These words were, As poison in the blood permeates arteries, veins, nerves, brain and heart, and speedily brings paralysis or death,

so does a debased or fluctuating currency permeate all the arteries of trade, paralyze all kinds of business, and bring disaster to all classes of people. It is as impossible for commerce to flourish with such an instrument as it is for the human body to go strong and vigorous with a deadly poison lurking in the blood. As he uttered these last words, in the blood, his tongue faltered, he sank to the floor, and in a moment of time he was gone. What was it that happened to William Wyndham, the man who had always been a leader wherever he was, an influential legislator, an active philanthropist, and an eminent statesman, whose great services to his country at a most critical time will never be forgotten.

Human philosophy and human science hardly know what to say in reply. A higher voice than either of their answers, he fell asleep, for after sleep cometh awakening. End of Section 15. of brain and personality, or the physical relations of the brain to the mind, by William Hannah Thompson.