Mind and body : a discourse on the physiology of the phrenical action of the cerebrum / by Robert Jamieson.

  • Jamieson, Robert
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mind and body : a discourse on the physiology of the phrenical action of the cerebrum / by Robert Jamieson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    seem that the manifestation of mind in the human body, and indeed phrenic action under every circumstance of life, is dependent on the intervention of the grey nervous cell between spiritual influence and perceptible matter. To affect thought, matter must act through this channel, and to influence matter, mind must start forward from the same intermedium. In phrenic action, these cells wax and decay, and are renewed, by an unseen stimulus acting on a living organism, whose vital capacity of so responding has been thought to be associated, in a more special degree, with the phosphoric element of nervous tissue, than with any other of its chemical constituents. In Sensibility, which is the base of all phrenic mani¬ festation, and the root whereby the blossom of mind is nourished from the soil, the grey nervous tissue, which, in the form of a cell nucleus, terminates every sensitive nerve, is impressed by the contact of an external object. This impression is conveyed through a susceptible track of white nervous matter, called a nerve, to a mass of grey neurine-— a mass of nervous cells—called a ganglion, where the in¬ ward moving impression loses its character, and is reflected outwards as a reacting force. This force is conveyed from the ganglion also by a nerve, which, however, does not end in grey neurine, but in muscular fibre. The muscle, thus quickened, indicates the establishment of sensibility by contracting, and thus more or less directly reacting on the external matter, whose impression was the beginning of this chain of vital action.