Alexander Bain

“ Of this, however, there can be no reasonable doubt—namely, that a large amount of pleasure supposes a corresponding large expenditure of blood and nerve-tissue, to the stinting, perhaps, of the active energies and the intellectual processes. It is a matter of practical moment to ascertain what pleasures cost least, for there are thrifty and unthrifty modes of spending our brain and heart's blood. Experience probably justifies us in saying that the narcotic stimulants are, in general, a more extravagant expenditure than the stimulation of food, society, and fine art. ”

“ Great activity and great sensibility are extreme phases, each using a large amount of power, and therefore scarcely to be coupled in the same system. The active, energetic man, loving activity for its own sake, moving in every direction, wants the delicate circumspection of another man who does not love activity for its own sake, but is energetic only at the spur of his special ends.
And once more. Great intellect as a whole is not readily united with a large emotional nature. ”

“ The fact is that, all this time we are speaking of nerves and wires, we are not speaking of mind, properly so called, at all; we are putting forward physical facts that go along with it, but these physical facts are not the mental fact, and they even preclude us from thinking of the mental fact. We are in this fix: mental states and bodily states are utterly contrasted; they cannot be compared, they have nothing in common except the most general of all attributes, degree, and order in time; when engaged with one we must be oblivious of all that distinguishes the other. ”

“ There is, in fact, no rupture of nervous continuity. The only tenable supposition is, that mental and physical proceed together, as individual twins. When, therefore, we speak of a mental cause, a mental agency, we have always a two-sided cause; the effect produced is not the effect of mind alone, but of mind in company with body. That mind should have operated on the body, is as much as to say that a two-sided phenomenon, one side being bodily, can influence the body; it is, after all, body acting upon body. ”

“ I deal not with mind directly, but with its material side, with whose activity, measured exactly as we measure the other physical forces, true mental activity has a definite correspondence.
Let us suppose, then, a human being with average physical constitution, in respect of nutritive vigor, and fairly supplied with food and with air, or oxygen. The result of the oxidation of the food is a definite total of force, which may be variously distributed. The demand made by the brain, to sustain the purely mental functions, may be below average, or above average ”

“ When a shock of fear paralyzes digestion, it is not the emotion of fear, in the abstract, or as a pure mental existence, that does the harm; it is the emotion in company with a peculiarly excited condition of the brain and nervous system; and it is this condition of the brain that deranges the stomach. ”

“ In the employment of external agents, as warmth and food, all will admit that the sensation rises exactly as the stimulant rises, until a certain point is reached, when the agency changes its character; too great heat destroying the tissues, and too much food impeding digestion. There is, although we may not have the power to fix it, a sensational equivalent of heat, of food, of exercise, of sound, of light ”

“ Just as we assign limits to mind as a whole, by a reference to the grant of physical expenditure, in oxidation, etc., for the department, so we must assign limits to the different phases or modes of mental work—thought, feeling, and so on—according to the share allotted to each; so that, while the mind as a whole may be stinted by the demands of the non-mental functions, each separate manifestation is bounded by the requirements of the others. ”

“ It is a very serious drawback in any department of knowledge, where there are relations of quantity, to be unable to reduce them to numerical precision. This is the case with mind in a great degree, although not with it alone; many physical qualities are in the same state of unprecise measurement. We cannot reduce to numbers the statement of a man's constitutional vigor, so as to say how much he has lost by fatigue, by disease, by age, or how much he has gained by a certain healthy regimen. ”

“ The physical facts underlying the mental fact are a wide-spread agitation of the cerebral currents, a tumultuous conflict, a consumption of energy.
It is this compliance with numerous and opposing conditions that obtains the most scanty justice in our appreciation of character. The unknown amount of painful suppression that a cautious thinker, a careful writer, or an artist of fine taste, has gone through, represents a great physico-mental expenditure. The regard to evidence is a heavy drag on the wings of speculative daring. ”

“ There is an alliance with matter, with the object, or extended world; but the thing allied, the mind proper, has itself no extension, and cannot be joined in local union. Now, we have no form of language, no familiar analogy, suited to this unique conjunction; in comparison with all ordinary unions, it is a paradox or a contradiction. We understand union in the sense of local connection; here is a union where local connection is irrelevant, unsuitable, contradictory, for we cannot think of mind without putting ourselves out of the world of place. ”

“ The work of acquisition is necessarily a process of great nervous expenditure. Unintentional imitation costs least, because there is no forcing of reluctant attention. But a course of extensive and various acquisitions cannot be maintained without a large supply of blood to cement all the multifarious connections of the nerve-fibres, constituting the physical side of acquisition. An abated support of other mental functions, as well as of the purely physical functions, must accompany a life devoted to mental improvement, whether arts, languages, sciences, moral restraints, or other culture. ”

“ Let there be a great demand for mental work. The oxidation must now be disproportionately expended in the brain; less is given to the muscles, the stomach, the lungs, the skin, and secreting organs generally. There is a reduction of the possible muscular work, and of the ability to subsist on coarser food, and to endure hardship. Experience confirms this inference; the common observation of mankind has recognized the fact—although in a vague, unsteady form—that the head-worker is not equally fitted to be a hand-worker. ”

“ When physical nourishment, or physical stimulant, acting through the blood, quiets the mental irritation, and restores a cheerful tone, it is not a bodily fact causing a mental fact by a direct line of causation: the nourishment and the stimulus determine the circulation of blood to the brain, give a new direction to the nerve-currents, and the mental condition corresponding to this particular mode of cerebral action henceforth manifests itself. The line of mental sequence is thus, not mind causing body, and body causing mind, but mind-body giving birth to mind-body ”

“ Improve the quality and increase the quantity of the food; increase the supply of oxygen by healthy residence; let the habitual muscular exertion be such as to strengthen and not impair the functions; abate as much as possible all excesses and irregularities, bodily and mental; add the enormous economy of an educated disposal of the forces; and you will develop a higher being, a greater aggregate of power. You will then have more to spare for all kinds of expenditure—for the physico-mental, as well as for the strictly physical. ”

“ What is required for this application of the principle is, to ascertain the comparative cost, in the physical point of view, of the different functions of the mind.
The great divisions of the mind are—feeling, will, and thought; feeling, seen in our pleasures and pains; will, in our labors to attain the one and avoid the other; thought, in our sensations, ideas, recollections, reasonings, imaginings, and so on. Now, the forces of the mind, with their physical supports, may be evenly or unevenly distributed over the three functions. ”

“ It may be possible, at some future stage of scientific inquiry, to compute the comparative amount of oxidation in the brain during severe mental labor. Even now, from obvious facts, we must pronounce it to be a very considerable fraction of the entire work done in the system. The privation of the other interests during mental exertion is so apparent, so extensive, that if the exertion should happen to be long continued, a liberal atonement has to be made in order to stave off general insolvency. Mental excess counts as largely as muscular excess in the diversion of power ”

“ In high mental excitement, digestion is stopped; muscular vigor is abated except in the one form of giving vent to the feelings, thoughts, and purposes; the general nutrition languishes; and, if the state were long continued or oft repeated, the physical powers, strictly so called, would rapidly deteriorate. We know, on the other extreme, that sleep is accompanied by reduced circulation in the brain; there is in fact a reduced circulation generally; while of that reduced amount more goes to the nutritive functions than to the cerebral. ”

“ All the phases of life and mind are inseparably interwoven with the body (which inseparability is Aristotle's definition of the soul) except the last, the active nous, or intellect, which is detached from corporeal matter, self-subsisting, the essence of Deity, and an immortal substance, although the immortality is not personal to the individual. ”

“ The greater the number of interests that a political schemer can throw overboard, the easier his work of construction. The absence of restraints—of severe conditions—in fine art, allows a flush and ebullience, an opulence of production, that is often called the highest genius. The Shakespearean profusion of images would have been reduced to one-half, if not less, by the self-imposed restraints of Pope, Gray, or Tennyson. So, reckless assertion is fuel to eloquence. A man of ordinary fairness of mind would be no match for the wit and epigram of Swift. ”

“ It is the thinking or intellectual part of us that involves the heaviest item of expenditure in the physico-mental department. Any thing like a great or general cultivation of the powers of thought, or any occupation that severely and continuously brings them into play, will induce such a preponderance of cerebral activity, in oxidation and in nerve-currents, as to disturb the balance of life, and to require special arrangements for redeeming that disturbance. ”

“ When we say that one man is more courageous, more loving, more irascible than another, we apply a scale of degree, existing in our own mind, but so vague that we may apply it differently at different times, while we can hardly communicate it to others exactly as it stands to ourselves. ”

“ When our voluntary endeavors are successful, a distinct throb of pleasure is the result, which counts among our valuable enjoyments: when they fail, a painful and depressing state ensues. The more complicated operations of the will, as in adjusting many opposite interests, bring in the element of conflict, which is always painful and wasting. ”

“ We know also that there are means of increasing the circulation in one organ, and drawing it off from another, chiefly by calling the one into greater exercise, as when we exert the muscles or convey food to the stomach; and that, when mental processes are more than usually intensified, the blood is proportionally drawn to the brain; the oxidizing process is there in excess, with corresponding defect and detriment in other organs. ”

“ It is thus that we measure men's fortunes and felicity by the numerical amount of certain agents, as money, and by the absence or low degree of certain other agents, the causes of pain and the depressors of vitality. And, although the estimate is somewhat rough, this is not owing to the indefiniteness of the sensational equivalent, but to the complications of the human system, and chiefly to the narrowness of the line that everywhere divides the wholesome from the unwholesome degrees of all stimulants. ”

“ He extended the domain of the independent immaterial principle from the highest intellectual soul of Aristotle to all the three souls recognized by him—the vegetable or plant soul (without consciousness) , the animal soul (with consciousness) , and the intellect throughout. The two lower souls—the vegetable and the animal—need the coöperation of the body in this life; the intellect works without any bodily organ, except that it makes use of the perceptions of the senses. ”

“ We deal with a compound or two-sided phenomenon—mental on one side, physical on the other; there is a definite correspondence in degree, although a difference of nature, between the two sides; and the physical side is itself in full correlation with the recognized physical forces of the world. ”