Sensation and the unity of structure of sensiferous organs / Professor Huxley.

  • Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1825-1895.
Date:
[1879]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sensation and the unity of structure of sensiferous organs / Professor Huxley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Moiml institution of threat Uritain. WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, Friday, March 7, 1879. Sir W. Frederick Pollock, Bart. M.A. Vice-President, in the Chair. Professor Huxley, LL.D. F.R.S. Sensation and the Unity of Structure of Sensiferous Organs* ****** We are indebted to Descartes, who happened to be a physiologist as well as a philosopher, for the first distinct enunciation of the essential elements of the true theory of sensation. In later times, it is not to the works of the philosophers, if Hartley and James Mill are excepted, but to those of the physiologists, that we must turn for an adequate account of the sensory process. Haller’s luminous, though summary, account of sensation in his admirable ‘ Primes Lineee,’ the first edition of which was printed in 1747, offers a striking contrast to the prolixity and confusion of thought which pervade Reid’s ‘ Inquiry,’ of seventeen years later date.f Even Sir William Hamilton, learned historian and acute critic as he was, not only failed to appre- hend the philosophical bearing of long-established physiological truths; but, when he affirmed that there is no reason to deny that the mind feels at the finger points, and nono to assert that the brain is the sole organ of thought, he showed that he had not apprehended the significance of the revolution oommenced, two hundred years before his time, by Descartes, and effectively followed up by Haller, Hartley, and Bonnet in the middle of the last century. In truth, the theory of sensation, except in one point, is, at the present moment, very much where Hartley, led by a hint of Sir Isaac Newton’s, left it, when, a hundred and twenty years since, the ‘ Ob- servations on Man: his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations,’ was * The whole discourse is given in the ‘ Nineteenth Century ’ for April, 1879. t In justice to Reid, however, it should be stated that the chapters on Sensa- tion in the ‘Essays on the Intellectual Powers’ (1785) exhibit a great improve- ment. He is, in fact, in advance of his commentator, as the note to Essay II. chap. ii. p. 218, of Hamilton’s edition shows. B