BOOKS.

DR. MAUDSLEY ON BODY AND MIND.* Dn. MAUDSLEY has written a very interesting little volume,

which we need hardly say that, in its physiological aspects, we should not presume to criticize in these columns, even if the present reviewer had any of the specific knowledge requisite for such criticism, which he has not. But Dr. Maudsley is not simply a distinguished physiologist. lie is also a rather dogmatic psychologist, and something not far removed from a satirist of what in his lofty scorn he terms metaphysical psychology,—which is, simply, we suppose, the careful study of the facts of conscious- ness by the light of self-observation. We may accept all Dr. Maudsley's physiological facts with the deference due to so accomplished a teacher, and yet criticize the high-sounding and often, we venture to say, not very scientific inferences—if in- ferences they be—with which he seeks to pour contempt on the conclusions of mental psychology.

" The physiological inquirer into mind may,' says Dr. Measles', in

his preface, " if he care to do so, justly protest against the easy confidence with which some metaphysical psychologists disdain physiological inquiry, and ignore its results, without ever having been at the pains to make themselves acquainted with what these results are, and with the steps by which they have been reached. Let theory be what it may, there can be no just question of the duty of observing faithfully all tho instances which mental phenomena offer for inductive inquiry, and of striving to realize the entirely new aspect which an exact study of the physiology of the nervous system gives to many problems of mental science. One reflection cannot fail to occur forcibly to those who have pursued this study, namely, that it would have been well could the physiological inquirer, after rising step by step from the investigation of life in its lowest forms to that of its highest and rocutt complex mani- festations, have entered upon his investigations of mind without being hampered by any philosophical theories concerning it. The very terms of metaphysical psychology have, instead of helping, oppressed and hindered him to an extent which it is impossible to measure ; they have been hobgoblins to frighten him from entering on his path of inquiry, phantoms to lead hint astray at every turn after he has entered upon it, deceivers lurking to betray him, under the guise of seeming friends tendering help. Let him take all the pains in the world, he cannot express adequately and exactly what he would, neither more nor less, for he must use words which have already meanings of a metaphysical kind attached to them, and which, when used, are therof ore, for him, more or less a misinterpretation.' "

We have no wish to excuse the " metaphysical psychologists" who "disdain physiological inquiry and ignore its results, without ever having been at the trouble to make themselves acquainted with what those results are," for we think them guilty of a fatal mistake; but we do not think that they are, in the present day, half so numerous as the physiological psychologists who disdain psychological in- quiry and ignore its results, without ever having been at the troubleto make themselves acquainted with what these results are,— nay, more, who positively come to the study of self-consciousness, if they do come to it at all, with a prepossession against all its assertions, and a semi-malevolent desire to brow-beat it, by such a cross-examination as the famous Mr. Chaffenbrass would have

dealt out to a hostile witness, into conveying the impression that all its supposed facts are maresnests. For our own parts, we think Dr. Maudsley, in spite of his accomplishments as a psychological

writer, inclines to the latter error, and that it is at the present day much the more prejudiced and the more violently dogmatic of the

two kinds of error. Why inductive philosophy should seem to feel so profound a disgust for the evidence of self-consciousness,— being, at all events, the only sort of direct evidence of which properly mental facts ever admit,—is to us a pure mystery, or is explicable only by way of reaction from the old school of psycho- logy, which was not willing,—much less eager,—to get the indirect light which physiology throws upon the science of mind.

Dr. Maudsley gives us a very interesting account of the now well-known phenomena of what is called reflex action,—that is, the connection between the effect of an external stimulus on the ganglia of the spinal cord, and the response to it in the way of a muscular contraction taking place without any conscious sensation or exertion of energy ; and he very justly argues that without well considering how much, which has often been attributed directly to mind, happens without any evidence of mind at all, we are not entitled to theorize on the higher phenomena. Dr. Maudsley does not attach at all too much weight to the statement that "actions bearing the semblance of design may be unconscious and auto- matic," to which he adds, ou the evidence of the well-known phe- nomena of habits painfully acquired, but so completely acquired at last that we can play a familiar tune or articulate a favourite

• Body and Mind: an Inquiry into their Connection and Muitsal Inflaence, specially in reference to Mental Disorders, being the GaiStOlaall tares for 1870, delivered &Icily the Royal College of Physicians, with Appendix. By shard Mandalay, M.D., Lond., Sc,, Sc. London : Macmillan and Co.

piece of poetry, with scarcely a single act of self-consciousness or attention throughout, that " acts consciously designed at first may, by repetition, become unconscious and automatic, the faculties of them being organized in the constitution of the nerve-centres, and they being then performed as reflex effects of an external stimulus." On the indirect teaching of such facts it is hardly possible to dwell too carefully. But Dr. Maudaley does not dwell on them carefully at all. On the contrary, he seems to us to interpret them with ostentatious rashness. What do these two facts suggest as their explanation ? There may, of course, be a good many explanations. The second fact may, for instance, by passibility, be the explanation of the first. The fact that educated' " sensory and motor nuclei " may continue to do their work automatically, without making any draft upon the acts of attention through which they first learned it, might, in connection with the law of inherited qualities, explain a good many of the ready-made nervous mechanisms with which the body is furnished. It is conceivable that the contraction of the leg of the decapitated frog in answer to any irritation applied to the foot, may represent the experience of some far-off period, when the ancestral frog learnt by sensation and volition (then perhaps con- nected with the ganglia of its spinal cord) its lesson of self-preser- vation. Or it may be that these " purposive" but unconscious and involuntary actions may be explained by some such principle as Mr. Darwin's,—by the slow elimination of all individual frogs in times long past whose muscles did not contract and draw away the foot when the stimulus was applied. Or again, it may be supposed that the " purposive " organization is explicable just as the purposive mechanism of a watch is explicable, by ascribing the purpose to a creative mind external to the organization, — a mind which chose its own instruments to work out its own ends. • All these theories are conceivable explana- tions of the phenomena, so far as they go, though some of the explanations may probably be a mere pushing-back of the problem to be explained. But when Dr. Maudsley assumes, without even discussing the question, that the only proper key to the explanation of the conscious and voluntary acts is to be found in the unconscious and involuntary acts, he raises a smile at his own bitter denunciations of those who are guilty of the converse assumption. The highest functions of the nervous system, he tells us, are "those to which the hemispherical ganglia minister. These are the functions of intelligence, of emotion, and of will ; they are the strictly mental functions. The question at once arises whether we have to do in these supreme centres with pre- dominately different properties and different laws of evolution from those which belong to the lower nerve-centres. We have to do with different functions certainly ; but are the organic proper- ties, which take place in them, essentially different from, or are they identical with, those of the lower nerve-centres? They appear to be essentially the same : there is a reception of impres- sions, and there is a reaction to impressions, and there is an organic registration of the effects both of the impressions and of the reaction to them." And he adds, with delightful dogma- tism, "the impressions that are made there" [i.e., in the higher nervous centres], "are the physical conditions of ideas; the feeling of the ideas is emotion, for I hold emotion to mean the special sensibility of the vesicular neurine to ideas ; the registration of them is memory; and the reaction to them is volition. Attention is the maintenance of the tension of an idea or group of ideas— the keeping it before the mind" [Dr. Maudsley will not allow, as far as we understand, any " metaphysical entity behind the so- called instincts " of any emotion, so what " the mind" is in his view, we do not at all know], "and reflection is the successive transference of energy from one to another of a series of ideas."

Less instructive definitions we never read, and we wish Dr. Maudsley would tell us where he gets them. Not, of course, froL self-consciousness, which knows nothing of " the vesicular neurine," and is, apparently in his esteem, the source of little but psycholo- gical error ; hardly from microscopic observation, which may have disclosed the " vesicular neurine " but not " groups of ideas " held " before the mind " ; whence, then, do they come? However, it is obvious that the principle of Dr. Maudsley's system is to ex- plain all the higher phenomena as developments of the lower. And he illustrates this principle more at length by the following dissertation on memory :—

" Take, for example, the so-called faculty of memory, of which meta- physicians have made so much as affording us the knowledge of personal identity. From the way in which they usually treat of it, one would suppose that memory was peculiar to mind, and far beyond the reach of physical explanation. Bat a little reflection will prove that it is nothing of the kind. The acquired functions of the spinal cord, and of the sensory ganglia, obviously imply the existence of memory, which is indispensable to their formation and exercise. How else could these centres be educated? The impressions made upon them, and the answering movements, both leave their traces behind them, which are capable of being revived on the occasions of similar impressions. A ganglionic centre, whether of mind, sensation, or movement, which was without memory, would be an idiotic centre, incapable of being taught its functions. In every nerve-oell there is memory, and not only so, but there is memory in every organic element of the body. The virus of small-pox or of syphilis makes its mark on the constitution for the rest of life. We may forget it, but it will not forget us, though, like the memory of an old man, it may fade and become faint with advancing age. The manner in which the scar of a out in a child's finger is per- petuated, and grows as the body grows, evinces, as Mr. Paget has pointed out, that the organic element of the part remembers the change which it has suffered. Memory is the organic registration of the effects of impressions, the organization of experience, and to recollect is to revive this experience—to call the organized residua into functional activity. "The fact that memory is accompanied by consciousness in the supreme centres does not alter the fundamental nature of the organics processes that are the condition of it. The more sure and perfect, indeed, memory becomes, the more unconscious it becomes ; and when an idea or mental state has been completely organized, it is revived without consciousness, and takes its part automatically in our mental operations, just as a habitual movement does in our bodily activity. We perceive in oper- ation hero the same law of organization of conscious acquisitions as unconscious power, which we observed in the functions of the lower nerve- centres. A child, while learning to speak or read, has to remember the meaning of each word, must tediously exercise its memory ; but which of us finds it necessary to remember the meanings of the common words which we are daily using, as we must do those of a foreign language with which we are not very familiar ? We do remember them, of course, but it is by an unconscious memory. In like manner, a pupil, learning to play the pianoforte, is obliged to call to mind each note : but the skilful player goes through no such process of conscious remembrance ; his ideas, like his movements, are automatic, and both so rapid as to sur- pass the rapidity of succession of conscious ideas and movements. To my mind, there are incontrovertible reasons to conclude that the organic conditions of memory are the same in the supreme centres of thought as they are in the lower centres of sensation and of reflex action. "

If bigoted psychologists lose much that is instructive, as they do, by depreciating the lessons of physiology, bigoted physiologists like Dr. Maudsley certainly lose more by depreciating the lessons of self-consciousness. It is hard to conceive a greater confusion of ideas than that which pervades this passage. Dr. Maudsley begins by asserting that memory belongs to every ganglionic centre, whether accompanied by consciousness or not, and says that would be "an idiotic centre, incapable of being taught its functions," which was without memory. Well, in that sense every material substance which bears the impressions of former action upon it, and is fitted by these impressions for uses for which it would be otherwise unfit in the future, has memory. The ploughed earth which bears the traces of the plough, and is fitted by the furrows it has received to take the seed into its bosom, remembers the plough. The land subjected to a rotation of crops, and so prepared for corn, remembers the turnips by which it was so prepared ; the leather remembers the tan-yard ; the railway remembers the train ; the linen remembers the flax. Still more, the flower which has been caused to grow double by the applica- tion of rich soil, remembers the manure which has transformed it ; the beech tree remembers the letters still visible on its surface ; and clearly the carefully-bred race-horse, or the young setter which sets at a bird for the first time in its life, remembers its parent- age in the reproduction of the ancestral qualities. All this is strictly as correct as to talk—as Mr. Paget probablydid in metaphor, but as Dr. Maudsley does seriously,—of the child's finger remem- bering the cut which has left a scar. The truth is, Dr. Maudsley seems wholly unable to distinguish between a memory and a record, —between the conscious act, and the sign by the help of which the conscious act is performed. No doubt a great deal which is commonly talked of as memory is not memory at all ;—you might as well call the inertia of a fly-wheel an act of memory, as the force of a habit which once grew out of memory, but has lost all trace of its origin, an act of memory ;—for it is merely an organic habit by the aid of which we recover a lost im- pression. When Dr. Maudsley says, " the more sure and perfect, indeed, memory becomes, the more unconscious it becomes," he really says what is a contradiction in terms, and might just as well say, the more memory you have, the less you remember. If I can say a piece of verse with- out thinking of its meaning, it certainly is no act of memory in

relation to the meaning. The words when they come into my mouth may suggest the meaning, if I attend to them ; but in that case it is not that I remember the meaning, but the words, and

by help of the words, recover the meaning. Many people learn so completely by rote, that if you call their attention to the mean- ing, they are so bewildered by the new mental action, that they forget the words, and have to take another run at the words in the old oblivious way, in order to recover the proper order of verbal succession. You might as well call a knot in your pocket-handker-

chief before it reminds you of what you have to do, a memory, as a scar on the finger or any other record of the past which is not con- sciously interpreted. And when Dr. Maudsley says we remember the meaning of familiar words by " unconscious memory," we are still more utterly puzzled. What on earth is unconscious memory ? Apparently Dr. Maudsley means by it, very quick memory,—so quick that you hardly dwell longer on the separate words than the whirling spark does at each individual point in the circle which appears to the eye continuous flame. But unconscious memory, and memory which requires an infinitesimal point of time to complete it, are as different as two things can be. If I have forgotten the meaning of the word, it is no memory at all. If I have not, I am conscious

what it means, and the memory is conscious. Unconscious memory' is a collocation of words without a meaning.

But this is the sort of bigoted philosophizing which runs through Dr. Maudsley's very interesting and able lectures. While he is expounding physiological fact, he is lucid and impressive. When he goes beyond, it is with such a fanatic determination to explain the higher phenomena by the lower, that he simply amazes and bewilders us. When treating of the physical causes of insanity his lectures are full of instruction. When treating of psychology proper, we seem to see a very able man so full of prejudice, that he prefers to confound the most clearly distinct phenomena rather than admit the characteristic differenti ve of the world of mind.