Address to medical graduates of the University of Edinburgh : delivered on 1st August 1889 / by Alexander Crum Brown.

  • Brown, Alexander Crum, 1838-1922.
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address to medical graduates of the University of Edinburgh : delivered on 1st August 1889 / by Alexander Crum Brown. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    to the change which has come over your mode of thinking and acting. Ways of thought then untrodden have been converted by frequent use into intellectual highways—forms of thought and action then unfamiliar have become habitual. It is this mental and bodily road-making that is education. I say bodily as well as mental road-making, for just as the muscles of the blacksmith’s arms, and not only his muscles but the whole nervous apparatus connected with them, are strengthened and made more fit for their work by constant use, so no doubt a great material change takes place in the whole nervous system in the course of a complete education. The formation of habits, even habits of thought, is not a purely mental process; the material organ of thought is essentially involved, and this is of course still more distinctly seen to be the case with these habits, and they are the great majority, which are not simply habits of thought but involve elements of sensation, or of action, or of both. When we do a thing for the first time, we have a free and unbiased choice as to how we are to do it, but the second time our mental and bodily machinery has been so affected by the thing having been already done in one particular way that it is easier for us to repeat our action than to try another way, and after we have done it often the arrangements for doing it in the old familiar way have become so much a part of our organisation that it requires a great effort to make even slight changes in our method. Such habits have come to resemble very closely reflex actions, if indeed they are not in their nature of the very same kind.