Part 5

Dr. Hammond, Professor of Diseases of the Nervous System at Bellevue College, New York, has published some interesting statistics in reference to the relative weight of the brain, as compared with that of the body, in various classes of vertebrate animals, by which he shows that there is no definite relation between the intelligence of animals and the absolute or relative size of the brain. Thus, he says, "the canary bird and the Arctic sparrow have brains proportionately larger than those of any other known animals, including man, and yet no one will contend that these animals stand at the top of the scale of mental development. Man, who certainly stands at the head of the class of mammals, and of all other animals, so far as mind is concerned, rarely has a brain more than one-fiftieth the weight of the body, a proportion which is much greater in several other mammals, and is, as we have seen, exceeded by many of the smaller birds."

Clinical Lecture on Idiocy, p. 14.

L'Encéphale, March 1881, p. 82.

At a meeting of the Medico-Psychological Society of Paris, my friend M. Auguste Voisin exhibited plates of the brains of idiots who had only begun to speak at the age of from three to five years, in which the frontal and first parietal convolutions were rectilinear without secondary folds, resembling the fœtal condition of the convolutions at the sixth month of intra-uterine life.

The imagination of certain psychologists seems to have gone rampant upon this subject; one writer, M. Moreau, of Tours, maintained that genius was a nervous disease--"le génie est une névrose"; and in order that there may be no mistake about his meaning, he adds that "the constitution of many men of genius is in reality the same as that of idiots!" M. Moreau's doctrine may thus be summarised in his own words--"Les dispositions d'esprit qui font qu'un homme se distingue des autres hommes par l'originalité de ses pensées et de ses conceptions, par son excentricité on l'énergie de ses facultés affectives, par la transcendance de ses facultés intellectuelles, prennent leur source dans les mêmes conditions organiques que les divers troubles moraux, dont la folie et l'idiotie sont l'expression la plus complète."

Le Cerveau et la Pensée, par Paul Janet Membre de l'Institut. Paris, 1867, p. 58. This learned treatise contains an immense deal of information in reference to the mysterious connection between matter and mind, and I have found it of great service to me in my psychological researches.

"Nineteenth Century," March, 1880, p. 509.

MATTER AND MIND.

"Quare frustra sudaverit, qui cœlestia religionis arcana nostræ rationi adaptare conabitur." Bacon, "De Augmentis Scientiarum."

I have already stated that the study of idiocy was of great interest to the theologian, for I can imagine no more powerful weapon for combating the materialistic tendencies of the day than is furnished by a consideration of the natural history of the idiot. This is neither the time nor the place for me to enter into the question of the mysterious connection between matter and mind, a subject which I have developed at some length in my published works. In my various public appeals on behalf of the Asylum for Idiots, I have also usually taken the opportunity of pointing out how the experience afforded by the study of idiocy is utterly opposed to the extravagant dogmas of the materialistic school, and to the crude notions which pseudo-science has engendered; and I have also shown how the results of idiot training furnish a forcible demonstration of the dualistic theory of mind and matter, upon which science reposed till the times of Spinosa, Laplace, Haeckel, Huxley, and others.

The pseudo-philosophers of our time have bewildered the public mind by the wild flights of their imagination; thought, the so-called spiritual attributes of man, are merely a function of brain protoplasm; the brain, say they, secretes thought, just as the liver secretes bile, or as oxygen and sulphur produce sulphuric acid, and all the varied phenomena of nature are nothing more than the molecular changes of matter; the operations of the mind are but the products of the caudate cells of the brain, and volition and consciousness are mere physical manifestations. They see only the physio-chemical side of nature, they utterly ignore any spiritual attribute in man, they regard metaphysics as a relic of mediæval superstition, and they assert that all mental operations are bodily functions, and simply the result of some molecular or atomic change in the brain; indeed, the German philosophers go so far as to say that life itself is only a "special and most complicated act of mechanics;" that there is no real distinction between living and dead matter, and that vitality is a metaphysical ghost (ein metaphysisches Gespenst).

At the International Psychological Congress held in Paris, in 1878, at which it was my privilege to be present, Professor Mierzejewski, of St. Petersburg, laid before the congress the result of his elaborate experiments on the brains of idiots, his communication being illustrated by casts of the brains of idiots, and also of certain animals, and the learned Russian professor's conclusions strongly militated against the theories of the philosophers of whom I have been speaking.

In order to understand the great value and import of Dr. Mierzejewski's investigations, I must remind you that the human brain is composed of two kinds of nerve structure, of an essentially different nature, grey matter and white matter. Examined microscopically, the grey matter is found to be composed of cells, while the white matter consists of fibres; their function also is different, the former being regarded as the generator of nerve force, while the latter simply serves as the medium by which this force is transmitted. As the manifestation of the intellectual powers is supposed to be in some way connected with the development of the grey matter of the cerebral convolutions, one would expect to find in idiots a deficiency of this element of brain tissue. Dr. Mierzejewski maintained that this is by no means the case, and he mentioned an instance of an idiot in whose brain the surface of grey matter was enormous. So it would seem that there is no fixed relation between the amount of grey matter of the brain and intellectual power, for richness of grey substance and abundance of nerve cells may be accompanied by idiocy.

Now, as these startling statements of the Russian professor were not made in a hole and corner, but were enunciated in the presence of leading psychologists from all parts of the world, I felt myself justified in telling the materialists that they must be faced, and either answered or admitted as correct; and as my comments upon these experiments were subsequently published in a leading London periodical and widely circulated, I am now justified in assuming that the inferences I then drew from these remarkable experiments cannot be controverted, and that the time has not yet arrived when the broad distinctions between mind and matter are to be obliterated, and man reduced to a mere automaton, a creature of a blind necessity.

Without unduly exaggerating the importance of Dr. Mierzejewski's experiments, it must be admitted that very great interest attaches to them at this juncture, when attention is so widely directed to the mysterious connection between matter and mind. Unhappily, instead of solving the question, the Russian professor's researches tend to shroud it in a still deeper mystery, and show that what has been termed the "slippery force of thought--the vis vivida animæ"--cannot be weighed in the balance; and they fully justify the eloquent language of a recent writer when he says, "Far more transcendent than all the glories of the universe is the mind of man. Mind is indeed an enigma, the solution of which is apparently beyond the reach of this very mind, itself the problem, the demonstrator, the demonstration, and the demonstrants."

Those who maintain that the brain is the organ of the mind, do not tell us what we are to understand by organ, brain, or mind; they seem to me to confound two things, the one with the other. In fact, they make no distinction between thought, mind, consciousness, and the instrument by which these attributes become externally manifested. It is true, we have no evidence to show that the mind can operate independently of the nervous system; on the contrary, all physiological data bearing upon the question of this mutual relation, go to prove that where there is no nervous system there are no mental manifestations. Moreover, as G.H. Lewes says, "It is the man, and not the brain, that thinks: it is the organism as a whole, and not one organ, that feels and acts."

Every faculty manifests itself by means of matter, but it is important not to confound the faculty with the corporeal organ upon which the external manifestation of such faculty depends. The word organ is the name given to a part of the human frame by which we have sensation, and by means of which we do a certain act or work; such are the organs of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. All these organs are passive, and require to be operated on ab extra, precisely in the same way as the musical organ, which is an instrument constructed by man, requires man's interference for the production of musical sounds.

When a musician sits down to a piano, the music cannot be said to be in the instrument, but in the soul of the performer. If the instrument be in good order, the inspiration of a Thalberg or of a Liszt will become apparent; break the cords or otherwise damage the instrument, and nothing but discordant strains are produced, the musical faculty of the performer, however, remaining unaffected. We are all familiar with Plato's celebrated dialogue on the Immortality of the Soul, where a disputant with Socrates inquires if the soul is not like the harmony of a lyre, more beautiful, more divine than the lyre itself, but yet is nothing without the lyre, vanishing when this instrument is broken.

Let me further illustrate this point by an allusion to the electric telegraph, by means of which ideas and words are transmitted from mind to mind with a rapidity to which ordinary language cannot attain. Now, the electrical battery may be not inaptly compared to the brain, and the telegraph wires to the nerves which emanate from it. If the battery be out of order, or the telegraph wires be broken, this lightning language, by which mind speaks to mind, becomes impossible. In the same way, idiocy may be considered as a disease of the instrument rather than of the performer; the idiot's brain is damaged and has become an unfit instrument for the outward manifestation of the powers of the mind, but the lowest idiot possesses the germs of intellectual activity and moral responsibility; and within his malconstructed organism, there lies concealed in its fragile, fleshly casket, a precious jewel of immortality--an imperishable essence that is destined to live on for ever and for aye, through countless æons of time, when the dicta of these dreamers of whom I have been speaking, to use the language of one of them, "shall have melted away like streaks of morning cloud into the infinite azure of the past."

I repeat it, we must take care not to confound the organ with the person who possesses this organ: the eye is not that which sees, it is only the organ by which we see; the ear is not that which hears, it is only the organ by which we hear. Precisely in the same way and in the same sense, the brain is the organ of mind, the organ by which our mental faculties become externally manifested. That it cannot be otherwise is shewn by the results of memory. The brain is of a perishable nature, its atoms are constantly changing; the body is continually throwing off old particles and appropriating new ones, every breath that is drawn, and every exertion that is made, cause some minute change in the bodily frame-work, so that it is never entirely the same; there is no person, therefore, who has the same brain that he had 20 years ago; and the vivid impressions of the past are utterly inexplicable on the supposition that mental activity is a mere function of any perishable organ like the brain, but they necessitate the conclusion that mind and body, spirit and matter, are two entirely heterogeneous substances, and that mind--the concrete Ego--is independent of the material organ by which its external manifestation is alone possible.

However tempting it might be, I feel I must not trespass any further by dwelling on the mysterious connection between matter and mind, a subject the complete comprehension of which is beyond the limits of our finite capacities. As Goethe philosophically remarks, "We are eternally in contact with problems. Man is an obscure being, he knows little of the world, and of himself least of all."

It would seem that the great Roman orator, nearly 2,000 years ago, with prescient eye, foresaw the attempts that would hereafter be made to pry into the hidden mysteries of Nature, when he said:--

"Latent ista omnia, Luculle, crassis occultata et circumfusa tenebris, ut nulla acies humani ingenii tanta sit, quæ penetrare in cœlum, terra intrare possit."

These lines of Cicero would seem to be peculiarly applicable to certain modern philosophers, who, in their attempts to bridge over the gulf--the impassable gulf--which separates matter from mind, persistently ignore the fact that there are certain things which, from their very nature, are beyond the pale of precise knowledge, and which cannot be determined by physical investigation--which, in fact, lie outside the sphere of man's intellect. I believe the question I am discussing is one of these, and that, although we may grope with the taper of science into the dark caverns whence seem to issue the springs of humanity, we shall probably fail to understand the mysterious connection between matter and mind, a theme essentially beyond the grasp of human intelligence, and which cannot be fathomed by the puny plummet of human thought or touch.

The study of the idiot is calculated to elucidate this overwhelmingly important subject, and I believe the Idiot Asylum is destined to become the arena and battlefield on which this great question will have to be fought out.

FOOTNOTES:

"Darwinism Tested by Language," Rivington, 1877; "Aphasia or Loss of Speech, and the Localisation of the Faculty of Language," 2nd edition, Churchills, 1890. The reader is referred to these treatises, and especially to his work on Darwinism, for a fuller exposition of the author's views, here only incidentally sketched; and also for a more complete knowledge of the scientific facts and different authorities quoted in support of the position here taken in reference to the connection between Matter and Mind.

"Das Leben ist nur ein besonderer, und zwar der complicirteste Act der Mechanik; ein Theil der Gesammtmaterie tritt von Zeit zu Zeit aus dem gewöhnlichen Gange ihrer Bewegungen heraus in besondre organisch-chemische Verbindungen, und nachdem er eine Zeit lang darin verharrt hat, kehrt er weider zu den allgemeinen Bewegungsverhältnissen zurück."--