FUNCTIONS OF THE BBAIN. 29 



in reality a host of distinct powers. We must first have 

 images of concrete things and ideas of abstract qualities 

 and relations ; we must next have the memory of words 

 and then the capacity so to associate each idea or image 

 with a particular word that, when the word is heard, the 

 idea shall forthwith enter our mind. We must conversely, 

 as soon as the idea arises in our mind, associate with it a 

 mental image of the word, and by means of this image we 

 must innervate our articulatory apparatus so as to repro- 

 duce the word as physical sound. To read or to write a 

 language other elements still must be introduced. But it 

 is plain that the faculty of spoken language alone is so 

 complicated as to call into play almost all the elementary 

 powers which the mind possesses, memory, imagination, 

 association, judgment, and volition. A portion of the brain 

 competent to be the adequate seat of such a faculty would 

 needs be an entire brain in miniature, — just as the faculty 

 itself is really a specification of the entire man, a sort of 

 homunculus. 



Yet just such homunculi are for the most part the 

 phrenological organs. As Lange says : 



" We have a parliament of little men together, each one of whom, 

 as happens also in a real parliament, possesses but a single idea 

 which he ceaselessly strives to make prevail " — benevolence, firmness, 

 hope, and the rest. "Instead of one soul, phrenology gives us forty, 

 €ach alone as enigmatic as the full aggregate psychic life can be. In- 

 stead of dividing the latter into effective elements, she divides it into 

 personal beings of peculiar character. . . . ' Herr Pastor, sure there 

 be a horse inside,' called out the peasants to X after their spiritual 

 shepherd had spent hours in explaining to them the construction of the 

 locomotive. With a hoi'se inside truly everything becomes clear, even 

 though it be a queer enough sort of horse — the horse itself calls for no 

 explanation! Phrenology takes a start to get beyond the point of view 

 of the ghost-like soul entity, but she ends by populating the whole skull 

 with ghosts of the same order." * 



Modern Science conceives of the matter in a very difi'er- 

 ent way. Brain and mind alike consist of simple elements, 

 sensory and motor. "All nervous centres," says Dr. Hugh- 

 lings Jackson,t " from the lowest to the very highest (the 



*Geschichte des Materialismus, 2d ed., ii. p. 345. 

 f "West Riding Asylum Reports, 1876, p. 267. 



