The phrenological brain-doctrine divided the brain into 'organs,' each of which stood for the man in a certain partial attitude. The organ of 'Philoprogenitiveness,' with its concomitant consciousness, is an entire man so far as he loves children, that of 'Reverence' is an entire man worshipping, etc. The spiritualistic psychology, in turn, divided the Mind into 'faculties,' which were also entire mental men in certain limited attitudes. But 'faculties' are not mental elements any more than 'organs' are brain-elements. Analysis breaks both into more elementary constituents.
Brain and mind alike consist of simple elements, sensory and motor. "All nervous centres," says Dr. Hughlings Jackson, "from the lowest to the very highest (the substrata of consciousness), are made up of nothing else than nervous arrangements, representing impressions and movements.... I do not see of what other materials the brain can be made." Meynert represents the matter similarly when he calls the cortex of the hemispheres the surface of projection for every muscle and every sensitive point of the body. The muscles and the sensitive points are represented each by a cortical point, and the Brain is little more than the sum of all these cortical points, to which, on the mental side, as many sensations and ideas correspond. The sensations and ideas of sensation and of motion are, in turn, the elements out of which the Mind is built according to the analytic school of psychology. The relations between objects are explained by 'associations' between the ideas; and the emotional and instinctive tendencies, by associations between ideas and movements. The same diagram can symbolize both the inner and the outer world; dots or circles standing indifferently for cells or ideas, and lines joining them, for fibres or associations. The associationist doctrine of 'ideas' may be doubted to be a literal expression of the truth, but it probably will always retain a didactic usefulness. At all events, it is interesting to see how well physiological analysis plays into its hands. To proceed to details.
Fig. 41.—Left hemisphere of monkey's brain. Outer surface.
The Motor Region.—The one thing which is perfectly well established is this, that the 'central' convolutions, on either side of the fissure of Rolando, and (at least in the monkey) the calloso-marginal convolution (which is continuous with them on the mesial surface where one hemisphere is applied against the other), form the region by which all the motor incitations which leave the cortex pass out, on their way to those executive centres in the region of the pons, medulla, and spinal cord from which the muscular contractions are discharged in the last resort. The existence of this so-called 'motor zone' is established by anatomical as well as vivisectional and pathological evidence.
The accompanying figures (Figs. [41] and [42]), from Schaefer and Horsley, show the topographical arrangement of the monkey's motor zone more clearly than any description.
Fig. 42.—Left hemisphere of monkey's brain. Mesial surface.