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.

  • Robert Dunn
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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    highest phases of consciousness or mental development. The intuitions of the perceptive faculties, being often closely interwoven with feeling, and sometimes, espe- cially in regard to our social and moral relations in- tensely felt, while on the other hand, they furnish the pabulum of thought. And though feeling has no place in the constitution of absti'act ideas, or on the processes of logical reasoning, still we have both pleasurable and painful trains of thought and reflection. Phenomena of the Intellectual Consciousness. To perceive and to think are distinct mental acts ; for per- ception, as we have seen, speaks to us from without, but intellection from within, so that the mental processes are here reversed. And while, on the one hand, all our immediate or intuitive knowledge has its origin in per- ceptive experience; so, on the other hand, all our representative knowledge is the creation or product of the mind's own intellection and introspection, of imita- tion, imagination, ratiocination, and reflection; for these, with memory and volition, are the distinguishing phe- nomena of the intellectual consciousness. It is through them that man is raised so immeasurably high in the scale of being above the brute creation, and that the human mind attains to its culminating phase of develop- ment in the highest reason, and the freest will. Rising above sensation, and above perception, man soars to the region of representative knowledge, grasping through his intellectual faculties and reflecting powers abstract ideas, and necessary and universal truths, and finding articulate utterance and expression for them through the noble faculty of speech, in language. There are, as we have seen, instinctive intellectual in- tuitions, primitive beliefs, and primitive judgments; but, in the development of the intellectual consciousness, the imitative and imaginative faculties are the first to come into play, and to begin the work of abstraction. Man is from his cradle an imitative animal; and in the infancy of the race, in remote antiquity, he first sought to embody, through the imaginative faculty, his percep-
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