John Charles Bucknill

“ La maladie elle-même dure tant que la surdité n'est pas absolue."
Up to the date to which we have traced the progress of the disease, it appears to have been purely a physical malady, with no mental symptoms, unless some degree of loss of memory can be so called. Swift, indeed, complains bitterly of the impairment, as if memory were gone, and in his declining years of age and sickness it may have been a dull function compared with the brilliant faculty he once possessed. ”

“ Carpenter's theory of unconscious cerebration is a new, original, and most important light on the nature of mental activities. But if the power of looking at things anew, of considering arguments afresh, giving irrelevances the chance of being forgotten, and essentials the opportunity of being duly weighed, if this results in the better and clearer understanding of the subject of thought from the simple fact that the mere effort of thought is made under great advantage over the old, then the theory would seem to be unnecessary and superfluous. ”

“ Let those who think that there can be no morality and no religion, no foundation for human responsibility, and no basis for a moral code, without freedom of the will, read the great work of that grand old Puritan divine, Jonathan Edwards, entitled "A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of the Will which is supposed to be essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame." ”

“ Carpenter appears to adopt the metaphysical opinion that consciousness is the perception of the ego, and as such is one, simple and indivisible, but the physiological view of consciousness will be that it is highly complex, and compounded variously at every varying moment of perception, ideas, and emotions, some of which obtrude more or less upon the attention, some of which are more or less faint and unrecognized, but which nevertheless exist, and can be found, if the attention be directed to them. The consciousness always is, and must be, highly complex. ”

“ Without the opportunity of a verification, men are apt to accept marvelous statements as to mental facts with a degree of indulgent faith which they would never extend to any physical feats or phenomena. No one would accept the statement that a man had run a mile in two minutes, but that a man had performed a prodigious feat of cerebral exertion far surpassing, in comparison with the average powers of man, the excess of power which this would indicate, will gain ready credence, and find record in repetition without end. ”

“ A bird may think itself free to fly where it lists, yet, when dropped from a balloon, it falls like a stone. Any captive may think himself free until he get to the bounds, and the freest of us all is still a captive ”

“ Withdraw the effort, and the attention fixes upon the idea. The memory of the thing was in the brain, must have been there all the time, or it could never again have been remembered. Memory is a latent power, and always unconscious. Recollection is the mental activity which opens the cells of memory to the consciousness and recollection, therefore must always be conscious. That any portion of brain-work is done unconsciously in the act of recollection, is a theory to which we cannot subscribe without far stronger evidence than any which we have yet seen adduced. ”

“ Carpenter's work, namely, the development of the theory that, although the mental functions generally are automatic, the will is free. The theory, so far as we can ascertain, is not sustained by any facts fit to sustain an argument of such weight. The assumed fact that we are conscious of freedom and power to act in accordance with our moral judgment is revealed in face of the contradiction which it constantly receives, for the sense of restraint said to be felt by one is at least equivalent to the sense of liberty said to be felt by another. ”

“ I do not know that labyrinthine vertigo would necessarily incapacitate a man for the performance of marital duties, but it certainly might be a barrier to them more formidable than unprofessional critics are likely to suppose possible. Dr. Beddoes suggested that Swift was impotent from youthful dissipation, of which there is not a tittle of evidence. May not the great and grave disease of which I have adduced such copious evidence have been the real reason why Swift did not live with the woman whom it is certain that he loved with the most tender and persistent devotion?—Brain. ”

“ With all the tortures of the life-long disease from which he suffered and its obvious effect upon his temper in his later years, it is wonderful that Swift did retain his reason until, in the seventy-fourth year of his age, he was in all probability struck down by a new disease in the form of a localized left-side apoplexy or cerebral softening, which determined the symptoms of his insanity. ”

“ The theology of the most numerous, and, perhaps, the most earnest, sect of Protestant Christians is shown to be utterly adverse to the doctrine of free-will, and it would be equally untrue and uncharitable to deny that the lives of millions of persons guided by these opinions have proved from the Reformation to this hour that the opinion that neither will, thought, nor conduct is free, is consistent with a strict morality. ”

“ Carpenter has investigated here and elsewhere with great care—not, perhaps, so much in reference to the wild turmoil itself, as to the manner in which innocent chips and straws are whirled round on its surface, or engulfed in its depths. He has shown how much and how far persons of a certain constitution may, by automatic action of muscle, nerve, and brain, be the dupes of their own imperfect organization, and the puppets of stronger and more vulgar minds. ”

“ Probably the doctor had just then been vexed with some extraordinary display of female temper, but we think that if questioned he would have admitted that insane women as a class have scarcely worse tempers than other women, and that angry feelings do not constitute the modes of emotion which more frequently lead to the evolution of insanity. Grief and pride, and that compound of hope and fear we call anxiety, these are the modes of emotion which are the frequent groundwork of mental disease. ”

“ Carpenter's theory, which, as yet, we are unable to make our way over, under, or through; and, at present, our conclusion is, that unconscious cerebration is an hypothesis all in the air, and unsupported by any foundation of physiological fact.
Whether the activities of the cerebral convolutions are unattended with consciousness until they have been reflected upon the sensorium, is a question which perhaps physiological experiment, or even more likely pathological research, will answer before long. ”

“ Carpenter's wide acquaintance with men and books, and the use he has made of it in his abundant illustrations of mental phenomena, is that these phenomena are in their very nature so transitory and fluent that they afford most unsatisfactory data for scientific conclusions. Physical facts can be repeated and verified. Even facts of rare occurrence and beyond the control of man do repeat themselves, and can be waited for. ”

“ In the mean while we are exceedingly incredulous, and retain our faith in the old opinion that consciousness resides in the cerebral convolutions, and that we are conscious of all mental changes which take place therein.
It is somewhat remarkable that, notwithstanding the large part which consciousness, or want of consciousness, plays in Dr. Carpenter's system, he has nowhere attempted to show wherein it consists or of what it is composed. Certainly it is in great part composed of the perception of sensations coming from without, and, so far, may well be located in the sensorium commune. ”

“ It may be taken as one of the commonest mental experiences of most men, that a fact, and especially a name, which they endeavor to remember, which escapes from the determinate effort of recollection, often suddenly jumps, as it were, into the recollection without effort, after they have been thinking of other matters. Dr. Carpenter explains this by the theory that the part of the brain engaged in storing up and reproducing past impressions is not the same part of the brain which is engaged in the consciousness of those impressions, or in the consciousness of their reproduction ”

“ Even in Swift's latest biography, or rather that fragment of one which so strongly makes us feel that touch of the vanished hand of the most appreciative critic of men of letters, the late John Forster's charming volume, the author speaks of Swift's giddiness and deafness, not as symptoms of one disorder, but as "two life-long enemies," and it is a curious enough fact that Swift himself attributed the origin of these two enemies to different causes, operating at different periods. ”

“ As a feather falls not to the earth without drawing the earth to itself, so in psychics, the most feeble and transient sensation, unnoticed and not forgotten, because never really placed in the memory, is still a factor of the mind through all its subsequent existence, and in the history of all mind forever. ”

“ The second class of facts adduced to prove that mental work can be performed by the brain without consciousness, are almost as common among men who are in the habit of employing their minds in intricate and difficult subjects. A man thinks on some matter which needs to be considered from various points of mental view, which appears to have bearings on many other subjects which seem to need elucidation from many quarters ”

“ Disagreeing, as we do, with its main purpose, we cannot avoid the expectation and the hope that it will provoke rivalry, and yet it richly deserves, and will no doubt occupy, a place in medical literature, the vacancy of which has been much felt, as a text-book on Mental Physiology.—Journal of Mental Science. ”

“ Free-will it is which is the foundation of morals, which renders man responsible for his actions, which gives him the power of forming his own character, which rules and dominates, or at least ought to rule and dominate, all the emotional and intellectual functions of the brain which science shows to be the result of animal chemistry. ”

“ But it may also be remarked that if Swift had been "a contemporary patient," although we might not have effected a radical cure of his disease, we should at least have understood enough of its origin and nature to have saved him from tormenting himself by a life-long abstinence from fruit, of which he was passionately fond, under the belief that it had caused and continued to excite his disease by inducing that "coldness of stomach to which he attributed his vertigo and its accompanying sickness." ”

“ We could have wished that the peculiarities of extra-automatic people could have been investigated by themselves, and in a strictly scientific manner, and without according the undeserved honor of inquiry to those who travesty the wholesome laws of Nature, convert a fit into a heavenly trance, an hysterical girl into a prophetess, an automatic movement into a communication with the spirits of the dead. ”

“ Irresistible, undeniable facts demonstrate that man is not a den wherein two enemies are chained together; but one being—that soul and body are one—one and indivisible. We had better face this great fact. 'Tis no good to blink it. Our knowledge of physiology has come to a point where the old idea of man's constitution must be thrown aside. ”

“ No doubt there are many brain-changes of which we are not conscious, but mental change, without consciousness, is, according to this very high authority, a contradiction in terms. But all the facts adduced by Dr. Carpenter to prove unconscious cerebration are distinctly mental changes such as, according to Mill, it is a contradiction in terms to designate as unconscious. ”

“ But evidence has yet to be sought that the consciousness of ideas, whether they be intellectual or emotional, has its seat elsewhere than in that part of the brain where these ideas are formed, namely, in the cortical layer of the cerebral convolutions. ”

“ We never saw a lunatic biologized, and we have seen a hundred experimented upon by professors of the art. In as many school-girls probably a large proportion would be found susceptible, especially if they had been ill supplied with good food and fresh air, and had imbibed an undue amount of sensational poetry and fiction. One lady Dr. Carpenter has himself biologized into so deep a sleep that she could not be awakened by any ordinary means, even by being roughly shaken. ”

“ We have no authentic account of the first outbreak of insanity, and Sir Walter's statement that, after his understanding failed, "his first state was that of violent and furious lunacy," would seem to have been applicable only to that later period when he suffered indescribable torture from some unknown local disease, producing exophthalmos of the left eye. It is clear there was emotional depression amounting to melancholia, and "much water in the brain," which was probably sub-arachnoid effusion, is sufficient evidence of dementia. ”