Natural law, as automatic mind or unconscious intelligence : read at a meeting of the Psychological Society of Great Britain / by Charles Bray.

  • Bray, Charles, 1811-1884.
Date:
[1877]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Natural law, as automatic mind or unconscious intelligence : read at a meeting of the Psychological Society of Great Britain / by Charles Bray. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    14/16 (page 14)
    Order of Nature, from conscious to unconscious actiou, so that we have now all the effect of intelligence acting uncon- sciously ; and this unconscious intelligence is moi’e intelli- gent in the growth of plants and animals than the conscious intelligence anywhere known to us. It may be said that we have no more right to assume that all force is mental than that it is physical, particularly as it is from the physical power that the mental seems to arise. But how does it so arise ? It is only from every atom from the first acting from conscious intelligence that this result is attained. It is mind throughout that produces what we call mind, physical force being automatic mind; for, as we have seen, “ unless among your primordial elements you scatter the germs of Mind as well as the inferior elements, the evolution can never be wrought out: ” (Lotze’s Microcosmos.) The intelligence of man is the highest conscious intelligence with which we are familiar, but he could not make his own body ; where each part now acts unconsciously towards the ultimate objects of his being—the production of the largest amount of pleasure- able sensibility. This body has probably taken millions of years to make, part being added to part on the principle of evolution, but each part originally existing separately and acting consciously. If we now consciously attended only to the action of the heart, there would be little else that the mind could do. But all that is done for us, leaving the mind free for higher purposes, consciousness only returning when something is going wrong in the machinery, and interference is necessary. And so it may be in nature ; in the progress from the monad to the man evolution and natural selection are yet unable to account for all that has taken place, and no doubt the “ missing links ” are supplied by the action of conscious power and intelligence. Of the nature of this intelligence, and of its mode of action, we can know little or nothing, we can only judge faintly by analogy. “[204]