The collapse of scientific atheism / by J.M. Winn.

  • Winn, James M. (James Michell), 1808-1900.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The collapse of scientific atheism / by J.M. Winn. 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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    Las been doing its utmost to propagate the baneful doctrines of physiological psychology and positivism; but fortunately, owing to the dreary dulness of its articles, it is not likely to become popular. In the number for April 1879, there is a paper by Mr. Stavely Hall on the oft-told but ever-interesting story of Laura Bridgman, from which he flatters himself that he can gather facts in support of the views of his school. He has been unfortunate in his selection of this case. Blind, deaf, and dumb as she was from infancy, she learnt to communicate with the outer world by the means of the sense of touch alone, and it was observed that when dreaming, or thinking earnestly, her fingers moved like the lips of a person in deep thought. This shows the independent working of the human mind. In the course of his disquisition, Mr. Stavely Hall makes the following incomprehensible remarks :—“ Dreaming and waking notions are related as species and genera”; and he says of the sleep- ing state, “ Inner work has brought cells [of the brain] into un- stable equilibrium, and excitability very easily becomes excitation. Where the work of repair is not done, the slight stimuli of the sleeping state is not sufficient to rouse them ; where it is done, the almost spontaneous activity of rested cells easily raises their processes above the threshold of consciousness.” This is the sort of nonsense that is talked nowaday in the name of science and philosophy. The Edinburgh Review for January 1879, in an article on Mental Physiology, has endorsed some of the boldest and most extravagant views of the materialistic physiologists. The writer, in referring to the recent experiments of Hitzig, Fritsch, Ferrier, and others, of trying to determine by electricity the centres of motion in the brain, observes : “ There can be no doubt that in these experiments ideas were excited in the brains of the insensible animals by the physical agency of electrical currents. The brain-convolutions in reality consist of a number of distinct mind-centres, spread out in a kind of vault over the subordinate centres of nerve-action, which have the charge of consciousness, and are arranged layer above layer.’ What a boon this will be to a poor author, who has to cater weekly for the gratification of the public, to find that when his ideas are exhausted he can command a fresh supply by passing electric currents through his brain ! He goes so far as to say that the sensory ganglia take cognisance of sensuous impressions and also of mental states, thus endowing brain cells with the mental faculty of cognisance. He also says that the brain substance itself accomplishes the task of transmuting the impressions of sense into ideas. The term idea has always been regarded as synonymous with thought or conception : they are