The insanity of genius and the general inequality of human faculty, physiologically considered / by J.F. Nisbet.

Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The insanity of genius and the general inequality of human faculty, physiologically considered / by J.F. Nisbet. 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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    impressions—few memories, that is to say. Dolt and block- head are the words commonly applied to these unfortunates who are governed almost wholly by the sensory impressions of the moment. The possessor of a well-endowed visual centre in conjunction with a poor auditory one, will remem- ber things he has seen better than things he has heard. He will have a good memory for faces, and a bad one for re- lated facts. He will have a clear perception of surrounding objects, with their colours and their relations to each other, but he will be a poor hand at remembering a tune. He may be a painter, he will never be a musician. In the musician the auditory centre is necessarily the most susceptible, since it is here that his memories are the most cohesive and the most easily revived. In intellectual or artistic pursuits of every kind, the power of concentrating one's thoughts is of great importance. Upon what does this power depend ? As sensory impressions tend to call up appropriate movements, so induced move- ments call up the sensory impressions commonly associated with them. So much is clear. By throwing himself into the physical attitudes of joy or sorrow, the actor contrives to bring his sentiments into a corresponding state. In view of this, Ferrier offers the ingenious suggestion that a person whose motor centres are highly developed may, by the agency of these, be enabled to control his ideas, just as one may call up a state of grief, more or less pronounced, by assuming the physical expression appropriate to it. He concludes that, as the motor centres are not merely the basis of sensori-motor cohesions and acquisitions, but also the basis of the powers of concentration and control of ideation, a relatively high development of the motor centres, as com- pared with the sensory centres, will be found in those animals and individuals capable of the highest intellectual achievements. There is no necessary contradiction here to the theory, above adopted, of the will. The highly developed motor centres spoken of by Ferrier are but the means where- by a communicated impulse from the outer world is carried into effect. Will still remains essentially a matter of cerebral organisation, which the individual is powerless to alter.