Mental dynamics, or, Groundwork of a professional education : the Hunterian oration before the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 15th February, 1847 / by Joseph Henry Green.

  • Green, Joseph Henry, 1791-1863.
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mental dynamics, or, Groundwork of a professional education : the Hunterian oration before the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 15th February, 1847 / by Joseph Henry Green. 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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    it is by the influence of these in the same mind that the remaining faculties are properly and pe- culiarly human, namely the Understanding, which, in the intelligent animals, we see as a faculty of selecting and adapting means to immediate pur- poses, but which, elevated by Free-Will, Reason, and Imagination, in man becomes the faculty of Words or significant signs, of Language in its widest extent, visual or auditual,—a faculty by which we generalize the notices of the senses, and by referring the phenomena to pre-established classes we determine their reality, independent of the impressions or images in our own minds. Then the Sense, the percipient faculty, which, when united with Sensation, and determined by a specific organization, constitutes the Senses. In learning geometry, the pupil is rightly instructed that it is not to the diagram on the paper that the demonstrations apply, but to the mental percep- tion ; that the true mathematical circle is an object of the pure sense, and exists in and for the mind alone, the diagram being only a picture or imper- fect representative. Moreover, as there is no chasm in the mind, and every faculty, therefore, must have an inter-, mediate partaking of both ; so between the under- standing and the sense we find a most important faculty, and for which I know no more appropriate name than the Active or Schematic Fancy. It is that faculty by which we form the most general outline of our thoughts, the general scheme of our intended productions,—the mental scheme, for