Psychology · William James
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN.
Marique, and Exner and Paneth have shown that by cutting _round_ a 'motor' centre and so separating it from the influence of the rest of the cortex, the same disorders are produced as by cutting it out, so that it is really just what I called it, only the funnel through which the stream of innervation, starting from elsewhere, escapes; _consciousness accompanying the stream, and being mainly of things seen if the stream is strongest occipitally, of things heard if it is strongest temporally, of things felt, etc., if the stream occupies most intensely the 'motor zone.'_ It seems to me that some broad and vague formulation like this is as much as we can safely venture on in the present state of science--so much at least is not likely to be overturned. But it is obvious how little this tells us of the detail of what goes on in the brain when a certain thought is before the mind. The general forms of relation perceived between things, as their identities, likenesses, or contrasts; the forms of the consciousness itself, as effortless or perplexed, attentive or inattentive, pleasant or disagreeable; the phenomena of interest and selection, etc., etc., are all lumped together as effects correlated with the currents that connect one centre with another. Nothing can be more vague than such a formula. Moreover certain portions of the brain, as the lower frontal lobes, escape formulational together. Their destruction gives rise to no local trouble of either motion or sensibility in dogs, and in monkeys neither stimulation nor excision of these lobes produces any symptoms whatever. One monkey of Horsley and Schaefer's was as tame, and did certain tricks as well, after as before the operation.
It is in short obvious that our knowledge of our mental states infinitely exceeds our knowledge of their concomitant cerebral conditions. Without introspective analysis of the mental elements of speech, the doctrine of Aphasia, for instance, which is the most brilliant jewel in Physiology, would have been utterly impossible. Our assumption, therefore (p. 5), that mind-states are absolutely dependent on brain-conditions, must still be understood as a mere postulate. We may have a general faith that it must be true, but any exact insight as to _how_ it is true lags wofully behind. Before taking up the study of conscious states properly so called, I will in a separate chapter speak of two or three aspects of brain-function which have a general importance and which coöperate in the production of all our mental states.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.