Chapters on man : with the outlines of a science of comparative psychology / by C. Staniland Wake.

  • Wake C. Staniland (Charles Staniland), 1835-1910.
Date:
1868
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Chapters on man : with the outlines of a science of comparative psychology / by C. Staniland Wake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    ments of the nervous system. Let us take the Amoeba, a creature of a jelly-like substance, showing no trace of a nervous structure, as an example of the lowest ani- mated forms, and we find no special sense organs, but merely a general sensibility necessary for the reception of impressions from external nature; and such creatures have none but purely ijistinctive action. If we advance a little higher in the scale of being, we see certain creatures, of which insects may be taken as represen- tatives, whose organs of special sense might be said to be limited to that of sight—the others they possess being only imperfectly developed,—and whose actions, although still instinctive, are accompanied by a percep- tion of external objects. Advancing still higher, we find animals, among whom may probably be classed the three lowest divisions of the Vertebrata, which, while possessing all other organs of special sense, have either no special organ of touch or one very inferior in its functional structure; and the mental activity of these animals shows itself chiefly in imitative action. The highest of all animated creatures are those which have not only a full development of the organs of sense, but an operation of them as perfect, with one exception, as that of the special sense organs of man, and this com- bined with external action often so closely resembling that of man himself as to lead us to ascribe both to the activity of the same mental principle—that of reason. Animal intelligence may, then, be further said to bear a direct ratio to the knowledge of external nature at- tainable,—the organs of sense being the media through which that knowledge is gained, and its range becoming