DE. HILL, FROM REFLEX ACTION TO VOLITION. 53 



whose minds are failing, owing to atrophy of the brain, can fail 

 to have noticed the regularity with which given conditions pro- 

 duce given results. Actions which in a robust person would be 

 judged as strictly voluntary, can be induced over and over again 

 by placing the person in the same circumstances which have 

 been observed to evoke them. 



Dr. Jones, from his large experience at Earlswood Asylum, 

 criticised my account of location in the cortex of the brain. I 

 think he misunderstood me in the bearing that my remarks may 

 have on phrenology ; what I meant was that the faculties, as 

 phrenologists classify them, are not to be localised as tabulated 

 by them. As to the location of faculties in a much larger sense, 

 about that I have nothing to say. I had merely pointed out that 

 the study of the cortex of the brain drives us further and further 

 back, and the more we know the more simple do we find its 

 arrangement to be. 



Flourens thought, twenty years ago, that the brain acted as a 

 whole ; but we know now that if you stimulate or exert one part of 

 the brain you get a movement of the arm, another part governs the 

 leg, and another part movement of the eye-balls ; the whole has 

 been mapped out into areas which are connected with the muscles 

 and certain sense organs controlling their actions. 



The instances that Dr. Jones gave of certain persons lacking 

 common judgment and excelling in other things, recalling the form 

 of the Great Eastern, for instance, and so on, do not need any 

 special explanation, for it would be an absurdity to regard judg- 

 ment as a "faculty" capable of localization in the brain. It is 

 most probable on the other hand that the power of recalling the 

 image of things which have been seen depends upon the relative 

 development of certain portions of the brain. 



I have been asked a certain number of questions, to answer 

 which would require a much greater knowledge of Plato and 

 Aristotle than I possess. I must therefore restrict myself to the 

 anatomical and physiological sides of the question before us — I 

 was asked, I think, whether the cells in the brain were capable of 

 discharging " ideal impulses," I believe that was the expression. 

 Now the curious thing about the study of the anatomy of the 

 cortex is that the more we go into it, the more we are inclined to 

 give up the notion that the cells have anything to do with the 

 mental processes, except in so far as they serve for the connection 



