BRIEF NOTICE OF THE CORPOREAL PART OF THE PROCESS, IN SENSATION.
The mental phenomena, of the class which is at present under our consideration, being those, which arise, in consequence of certain previous affections of our organs of sense, it is necessary, that we should take some notice of the corporeal part of the process; though it must always be remembered, that it is the last part of the process, the mental affection only, which truly belongs to our science,—and that, if this, in all its varieties, had been the result of any other species of affections of organs constituted in any other manner,—as long as there was the regular correspondence of certain mental affections with certain organic affections,—the philosophy of mind would have continued precisely the same as now. Our systems of anatomy, and of the physiology of our mere bodily frame, would indeed have been different,—but not that more intimate physiology, which relates to the functions of the animating spirit, whose presence is life, and without which our bodily frame, in all its beautiful adaptation of parts to parts, is a machine, as inert and powerless, as the separate atoms that compose it.
The great essential organ of all sensation is the brain, with its appendages, particularly the nerves that issue from it to certain organs, which are more strictly termed the organs of sense; as it is there the immediate objects, or external causes of sensation, the particles of light, for example, in vision, or of odour in smell, arrive, and come, as it were, into contact with the sensorial substance. Each organ, as you well know, has objects peculiar to itself, which it would be superfluous to enumerate; and since the blind are still sensible of sound, the deaf of colour, and both of smell, and taste, and touch, there must evidently be some difference, either in the sensorial substance itself which is diffused over the different organs, or in the mode of its diffusion and exposure in the different organs, from which this striking diversity of their relative sensibilities proceeds. The nervous matter however, considered separately from the coats in which it is enveloped, is of the same half-fibrous, but soft and pulpy texture, as the substance of the brain itself, and is in perfect continuity with that substance, forming, therefore, with it, what may be considered as one mass, as much as the whole brain itself may be considered as one mass; which has, indeed, for its chief seat the great cavity of the head; the
“Superas hominis sedes, arcemque cerebri;
Namque illic posuit solium, et sua templa sacravit,
Mens animi;—”[68]
but which extends, by innumerable ramifications, over the whole surface, and through the internal parts of the body. The mind, in that central brain in which it is supposed to reside, communicating with all these extreme branches, has been compared, by a very obvious, but a very beautiful similitude, to the parent Ocean, receiving from innumerable distances the waters of its filial streams:
“Ac uti longinquis descendunt montibus amnes,
Velivolus Tamisis, flaventisque Indus arenæ,
Euphratesque, Tagusque, et opimo flumine Ganges,