II. 



THE BRAIN AND ITS PHYSIOLOGY. 



[From an article in the British and Foreign Medical Review, October, 1846.] 



IT may be desirable to recapitulate briefly the positions on which 

 we have now dwelt. 



1. That the sensory ganglia supply all the conditions requisite 

 for the reception of sensations in the higher animals as in the 

 lower ; and that there is a class of actions excitable through them 

 by the direct influence of sensations ; to these we give the name 

 of consensual. 



2. That the sensations which excite these actions, also excite 

 the feelings of pleasure and pain, which have their seat in the 

 same ganglia. These feelings may receive different designations, 

 according to the nature of the objects towards which they are dis 

 played. Thus, attachment and dislike, affection and rage, joy and 

 sorrow, and many other simple and elementary feelings, are but 

 modifications or phases of pleasure and pain, which receive their 

 different designations according to the character of the objects 

 which excite them, the ideas which they arouse, and the mode in 

 which they are manifested. 



3. That sensations, the simple feelings connected with them, 

 and the consensual movements to which they prompt, make up 

 the sum-total of those operations to which the term instinctive is 

 properly applicable ; that these take place through the instru 

 mentality of the sensory ganglia, and that none of those higher 

 operations which involve the formation of ideas, reasoning pro 

 cesses, and volitional determinations, can take place without a 

 cerebrum. 



