STUDIES IN LIFE AND SENSE. 



ing effects, but it is left for the sensory masses of the brain to 

 excite consciousness and to further distribute the emotions through 

 the body. By way of fortifying his position, Dr. Carpenter gives 

 the following case quoted from Dr. Abercrombie's "Intellectual 

 Powers " : " In the Church of St. Peter at Cologne, the altarpiece 

 is a large and valuable picture by Rubens, representing the martyr- 

 dom of the Apostle. This picture having been carried away by 

 the French in 1805, to the great regret of the inhabitants, a painter 

 of that city undertook to make a copy of it from recollection ; and 

 succeeded in doing so in such a manner, that the most delicate tints 

 of the original are preserved with the most minute accuracy. The 

 original painting has now been restored, but the copy is preserved 

 along with it ; and even when they are rigidly compared, it is scarcely 

 possible to distinguish the one from the other." Dr. Abercrombie 

 also relates that Niebuhr, the celebrated Danish traveller, when old, 

 blind, and infirm, used to describe to his friends, with marvellous 

 exactitude, the scenes amidst which he had passed his early days, 

 remarking " that as he lay in bed, all visible objects shut out, the 

 pictures of what he had seen in the past continually floated before 

 his mind's eye, so that it was no wonder he could speak of them as 

 if he had seen them yesterday." Thus, urges Dr. Carpenter, these 

 instances, equally with Hamlet's declaration that he beholds his 

 father in his "mind's eye," are only to be explained as ideational 

 or internal representations of objects once seen. The " background 

 of consciousness " has projected them forwards, in other words, into 

 the waking life in the form of subjective sensations. 



The same "sensorial state" must have been produced in the case 

 of the painter and in that of Niebuhr as was produced by the ori- 

 ginal objects each had gazed upon "that state of the senstmum," 

 says Carpenter, " which was originally excited by impressions con- 

 veyed to it by the nerves of the external senses, being reproduced by 

 impressions brought down to it from the cerebrum (or big brain) 

 by the nerves of the internal senses." Lastly, it may be added that by 

 a third section of the physiological world the medulla oblongata, or in 

 other words the upper segment of the spinal cord, is to be regarded 

 as the seat of the feelings. The late Professor Laycock inclined 

 strongly towards this latter opinion. He held that the changes con- 

 nected with the receipt and transmission of impressions from the 

 outside world finally ended in the medulla, and there resulted in the 

 development of the higher feelings and sentiments ; whilst ordinary 

 and automatically adapted movements might take place entirely 

 unaccompanied by sensation or consciousness. The medulla in this 

 view is the seat "of all those corporeal actions cries and facial 

 movements^ by which states of consciousness are manifested," and 

 these movements " can be and are manifested automatically." Mr. 



