The mental symptoms of brain disease : an aid to the surgical treatment of insanity, due to injury, haemorrhage, tumours, and other circumscribed lesions of the brain / by Bernard Hollander.

  • Hollander, Bernard, 1864-1934.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The mental symptoms of brain disease : an aid to the surgical treatment of insanity, due to injury, haemorrhage, tumours, and other circumscribed lesions of the brain / by Bernard Hollander. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    a knowledge of sensations. The different talents, for music, poetry, mathematics, etc., should all be simple modifications of one or more of the five senses. It would lead us to assume that men are born with equal original mental capacity; oppor- tunities and education determining the difference of subsequent development. If all our ideas are derived from the senses, what becomes of the general and purely intellectual ideas, whose significance is wholly independent of the material world? For example, “there is no effect without a cause.” Men with sight only could see, but would not perceive; men with hearing only would hear, but would not understand. Why should the sensory region be just the intellectual region ? The feelings and passions can be aroused just the same, and much quicker, as the result of the objective per- ception gained through the medium of the eye. Not only does the sensation of sight arouse emotion, but it differs according to the emotion we are already in. If all our ideas come from the senses, then the mind should be always proportionate to the greater or less delicacy of these same senses. Although the senses form the inlet for a great variety of ideas, yet it will often be found that the power of abstraction and combination of thought generally is greatest in those whose senses are not eminently developed. If the existence of Homer be doubted,