THE BASIS FOR SWEDENBORG’S STATEMENTS CONCERNING THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN.
If we take a general view of Swedenborg’s investigations, the outlines of which have been sketched above, a number of questions are suggested: Whence did Swedenborg secure the material for all these far-sighted statements, whence the evidence for all these discoveries? Did Swedenborg himself carry out the special investigations which must have formed the basis of his beautiful results?[52] Or was the evidence ready at hand in the literature of those days?
The answering of these questions is naturally of a certain importance in the valuation of the opinions expressed. And as several of Swedenborg’s statements concern questions which are still among the ›unsolved›, I have taken up some of these questions for examination. In this I have restricted my investigation to a confined province, and chosen one which in our own times is of great actual interest, namely, the function of the brain, and especially that of the cerebral cortex. As we have already seen, Swedenborg connected in the closest manner the soul’s activity with the cortex of the cerebrum, indeed, he localizes in detail special departments of that activity to determinate regions of the cortex; and the object of my investigation is, therefore, to endeavour to find out upon what foundations Swedenborg erected this doctrine of the centres of the psychic functions in the cortex of the cerebrum.
ON THE CENTRES OF THE VEGETATIVE FUNCTIONS.
With regard to the function of the brain, Swedenborg, in the first place, made the distinction that the cerebrum regulates the psychic, and the cerebellum the vegetative functions.
Many different opinions prevailed in Swedenborg’s time concerning this question. Some investigators considered that the vegetative as well as the psychical functions stood under the direct control of the cerebrum; others that the centres of vegetative life were separated from those of psychic life and had not, like these, their place in the cerebrum. And Swedenborg adopted the latter opinion, primarily for the following reasons:
1) Experiments on animals had brought to light the fact that respiration and the action of the heart continued for a time even after the hemispheres of the cerebrum (in dogs) had been separated from their connection with the cerebellum and medulla oblongata, indeed, even if the hemispheres of the cerebrum (in dogs) had been extirpated.[53] He was also led to the same conclusion by