Principles of mental physiology : with their applications to the training and discipline of the mind, and the study of its morbid conditions / by William B. Carpenter.

  • Carpenter, William Benjamin, 1813-1885.
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Principles of mental physiology : with their applications to the training and discipline of the mind, and the study of its morbid conditions / by William B. Carpenter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    prism, and found that it answered perfectly well; and it lias been on this plan that all the '* binoculars hitherto in ordinary use in this country have been since constructed. 438. The more thoroughly, then, we examine into what may be termed the Mechanism of Thought, the more clear does it become that not only an automatic^ but an unconscious action enters largely into all its processes. As 0. Wendell Holmes has well re- marked :— a. Our definite ideas are stepping-stones; how we get from one to the other, we do not know : something carries us ; ive [i. e. our conscious selves] do not take the step. A creating and informing spirit, which is tvith us, and not of us, is recognised every where in real and in storied life. It is the Zeus that kindled the rage of Achilles; it is the Muse of Homer ; it is the Daimon of Socrates ; it is the inspira- tion of the Seer; it is the mocking spirit that whispers to Margaret as she kneels at the altar ; and the hobgoblin that cried *' Sell him, sell him! in the ear of John Bunyan; it shaped the forms that filled the soul of Michael Angelo, when he saw the figure of the great lawgiver in the yet unhewn marble, and the dome of the world's yet unbuilt Basilica against the black horizon ; it comes to the least of us as a voice that will be heard ; it tells us what we must believe ; it frames our sentences; it lends a sudden gleam of sense or eloquence to the dullest of us all; we wonder at ourselves, or rather not at ourselves, but at this divine visitor, who chooses our brain as his dwelling-place, and invests our naked thought with the purple of the kings of speech or song.—(Op. cit. p. 59.) 439. But it is not intellectual work alone, that is done in this manner; for it seems equally clear that emotional states, or rather states which constitute Emotions when we become conscious of them, may be developed by the same process ; so that our feelings towards persons and objects may undergo most important changes, without our being in the least degree aware, until we have our attention directed to our own mental state, of the alteration which lias taken place in them.—A characteristic example of this kind of action, is afforded by an occurrence extremely common in real life, and con-