The disorders of speech.

  • Wyllie, John, 1914-
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The disorders of speech. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    gence, which takes cognizance of, fixes, and groups together these impressions, so as to form Ideas from them, is not a faculty that is specially localized in the anterior part, or in the middle or in the posterior part, of the brain-substance, but is one that belongs to the cortex as a whole. It would appear to be more especially connected with the more superficial layers of the cortex; but the evidence in favour even of that supposition is not entirely conclusive. It is by this pervading faculty, the Intelli- gence, that the images are revived and taken cognizance of, while they yet remain in situ. It is now generally believed that if one of the cortical centres for sense-impressions were extirpated from both hemispheres, the store of memories amassed at that centre would be utterly obliter- ated from the mind. On this subject Dr Ferrier says:— The destruction of the visual centre, therefore, not only makes the individual blind presentatively, but blind representatively or ideally, and all cognitions into which visual characters enter in part or whole, become mangled or imperfect, or are utterly rooted out of consciousness.1 Granting, then, that our primary and most simple cognitions of things are merely the results of this revival and blending of sense images, and that the group of images constitutes in fact the Idea in our minds which represents the Thing, let us now look at the relation of this idea of an object to its name. In the first place, it should be noted that the simple idea of a concrete object may be perfectly distinct in the mind, even when we have, for the time, utterly forgotten the object's name. Although we are not liable to forget the names of common and familiar objects, we have, most of us, had experience of forgetting, for a few minutes, the proper name of some familiar acquaintance. We know that, in these circumstances, the mental image of his personality loses nothing, in distinctness and completeness, from the loss of the name. It is so with regard to everything of which the mind can form a clear and distinct image or memory: we can think of it clearly, even when the word expressive of it is for the moment forgotten. I believe that if we had no words to express such actions as walking, running, or flying; or such colours as red, 1 Op. cil, p. 429.