THE EDUCATION OF THE HEMISPHERES.
Nerve-currents run in through sense-organs, and whilst provoking reflex acts in the lower centres, they arouse ideas in the hemispheres, which either permit the reflexes in question, check them, or substitute others for them. All ideas being in the last resort reminiscences, the question to answer is: How can processes become organized in the hemispheres which correspond to reminiscences in the mind?[1]
Nothing is easier than to conceive a possible way in which this might be done, provided four assumptions be granted. These assumptions (which after all are inevitable in any event) are:
1) The same cerebral process which, when aroused from without by a sense-organ, gives the perception of an object, will give an idea of the same object when aroused by other cerebral processes from within.
2) If processes 1, 2, 3, 4 have once been aroused together or in immediate succession, any subsequent arousal of any one of them (whether from without or within) will tend to arouse the others in the original order. [This is the so-called law of association.]
3) Every sensorial excitement propagated to a lower centre tends to spread upwards and arouse an idea.
4) Every idea tends ultimately either to produce a movement or to check one which otherwise would be produced.
Suppose now (these assumptions being granted) that we have a baby before us who sees a candle-flame for the first
- ↑ I hope that the reader will take no umbrage at my so mixing the physical and mental, and talking of reflex acts and hemispheres and reminiscences in the same breath, as if they were homogeneous quantities and factors of one causal chain. I have done so deliberately; for although I admit that from the radically physical point of view it is easy to conceive of the chain of events amongst the cells and fibres as complete in itself, and that whilst so conceiving it one need make no mention of 'ideas,' I yet suspect that point of view of being an unreal abstraction. Reflexes in centres may take place even where accompanying feelings or ideas guide them. In another chapter I shall try to show reasons for not abandoning this common-sense position; meanwhile language lends itself so much more easily to the mixed way of describing, that I will continue to employ the latter. The more radical-minded reader can always read 'ideational process' for 'idea.'
