Mental mechanisms / by William A. White.

  • White, William A. (William Alanson), 1870-1937.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mental mechanisms / by William A. White. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    17/168 (page 5)
    Such possibilities of reaction as described are plainly seen to be the result of experience, of the continuous coming into contact with all sorts of external conditions which have to be reacted to, extending over all of the years of life. The child when born into the world has no mind, no conscious- ness. It has, however, a central nervous system and special sense organs. From the moment of its birth it begins to receive sensa- tions from the outer world and to react to them. Some faint conception of the tremendous mass of material that is poured into the central nervous system through the medium of the special sense organs can be gathered from the statement of Titchener^ that it is possible to distinguish 44,435 sensation qualities and the additional fact of the wide distribution of some of the special sense organs, especially those located in the skin, so that there are literally thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of points of stimulation. In no other way can the stuff out of which mind is made find its way to the brain except by the sensorium. Whatever man may become must in the last analysis depend upon this material and so no conception of mind can fail to take it into account. A person at any particular moment is the end result of all the proc- esses that have been at work since his conception and in the same way a given state of mind can only be conceived to be what it is because of all that has gone before—it is the end product. In order that results may be attained, in order that the reactions of the individual should gradually develop from the meaningless, ill-directed, diffuse motions of the infant to the well-directed and efficient activities of the adult something more is necessary than the mere receipt of all this mass of sensory material. The mass of sensations that are hourly, even momentarily, being conditioned by the constant stream of neural changes from the periphery and which are the raw materials of mind, the matter 'Edward Bradford Titchener: An Outline of Psychology. The Mac- millan Co., New York, 1899.