Maudsley's “Physiology of Mind”

Abstract

MAN very long ago, probably about the time he became man, reflected that he felt and thought ; since then no one has ever had the least doubt, as to whether a given object of thought was a fact of mind or of body ; and every attempt to resolve the one into the other has been but the vain enterprise of a misguided intelligence. The physical and mental stand over against each other—the fundamental duality of being which no effort of thought has been able to transcend. How, after reflecting that they felt, our far-off ancestors came to refer their feelings and reflections to a soul or spiritual entity, which they supposed to inhabit and animate the body, to cause and direct its movements, can never be more than a subject of speculation. But that such was the universal belief of mankind, that such is still the creed of all save a few, and that all language has been evolved under this conception, scarcely requires to be stated. For ages the curious speculated around the fascinating mystery of the union of soul and body—and yet the mystery remained. A slow change of view, however, was taking place. From the belief that the life and movement, the health and disease of the body, were in some way directly dependent on a conscious, thinking soul, we have passed gradually, very gradually, to the view held by that body of thinkers who claim to be the scientific psychologists of the present day, which is, that mind, feeling, and thought, in a word, consciousness, is dependent on bodily organisation. Dr. Maudsley presents the volume before us as a treatise or “disquisition, by the light of existing knowledge, concerning the nervous structures and functions which are the probable physical foundations, or the objective aspects of, those natural phenomena which appear in consciousness as feelings and thoughts, and are known only in that way.”

The Physiology of Mind.

Being the First Part of a Third Edition, Revised, Enlarged, and in great part Re-written, of “The Physiology and Pathology of Mind.” By Henry Maudsley (London: Macmillan and Co., 1876.)