Medical psychology : comprising a brief exposition of the leading phenomena of the mental states, and of the nervous apparatus through which they are manifested with a view to the better understanding and elucidation of the mental phenomena or symptoms of disease / by Robert Dunn.

  • Dunn, Robert, 1799-1877.
Date:
1863
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical psychology : comprising a brief exposition of the leading phenomena of the mental states, and of the nervous apparatus through which they are manifested with a view to the better understanding and elucidation of the mental phenomena or symptoms of disease / by Robert Dunn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    duct or of crime. In the expressive language of Lord Bacon, the light of Nature not only shines upon the human mind through the medium of the rational faculty, but by an internal instinct, according to the law of conscience, which is a sparkle of the purity of man's first estate. Equally and alike intuitive are his reli- gious emotional feelings of awe, wonder, veneration, and reverence, early developed, and awakened by objects of sublimity, grandeur, vastness, and mystery. Moreover, closely associated in the perceptive con- soiousness, with the propensities and affections, and with the moral and religious intuitions and feelings, are the emotional states. Like them, these are all of a composite nature, involving in their manifestation per- ceptive or ideational activities, as well as sensorial feel- ings. There are, indeed, certain elementary emotional sensibilities, readily roused into activity, through all the organs of sense, and which, in the absence of the idea- tional element, may be said to bear the same relation to the true emotions which the instincts do to the propen- sities and sentiments, as, for instance, joy and fear, etc.; for such is laughter, the expression of joyous emotion^ when a mere consensuous act, provoked by titillation on the sui-face of the body; and such, too, are the trembling fear and shuddering dread from the lightning's vivid flash, quickly followed by the crash or peal of the loud thunder. But still ideation is the connecting link inter- mediatmg between the extremes of mental action, emo- tion and voUtion—between our inherent elementary emotional sensibilities and impulses on the one hand and the operations of thought and voUtional power on the other; sometimes, indeed, in subordination to the one and sometimes the other. For Laughter, holding both her sides, when an emotional act, is excited by ludicrous ideas in the mind. Now, as sensation is the link in the chain of being be tweenthe conscious and unconscious processes, the vital and the mental forces, so is perception intermediate be tween sensation and intellection-the lowest and the B