This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VIII THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY In the preceding chapter we have seen that the evolution of a nervous system is guided by a great principle, which on the last analysis may be regarded as a specific nervous reaction to environment. By means of the undeviating inflow along the afferent channels ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VIII THE BRAIN AND PERSONALITY In the preceding chapter we have seen that the evolution of a nervous system is guided by a great principle, which on the last analysis may be regarded as a specific nervous reaction to environment. By means of the undeviating inflow along the afferent channels of stimuli from the outer world or environment, the receptive nerve elements are affected till they in turn excite an outflow along the efferent channel; and when the same afferent stimulus is repeated often enough, the consequent efferent effect becomes so uniform as to constitute a special mode of nervous action, or, in other words, a nervous function. It is thus that this afferent agency coming from without continuously proceeds, fashioning one system of nervous centers after another, until at last it begins to look as if out of the human brain itself, it constructs what is virtually a pure thinking machine like all its previous mechanisms, and whose operations, though more complex, yet illustrate the same automatic principles which govern the functions of the medulla oblongata. This inference seems legitimate, because in so many of its activities the human brain appears fully to exemplify just the same order of reactions which we have met before at lower levels. Why is this not enough? It is in no sense enough, simply because the brain of man and the mind of man do not correspond. Nowhere is there such a discrepancy. There is a gap here which no facts of animal evolution even begin to account for. Man's brain in physical and anatomical respects corresponds quite closely to that of the chimpanzee, and hence, according to all precedents, his mind should show but little advance in degree, and none in hind, over the mind of this ape. We...
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