The Beginning Of Reason
We found feeling by far the strongest factor in producing action in
babyhood and childhood. Our instinctive doing, we learned, is the result
of a race impulse. Will acts chiefly at emotion's bidding. But very
early the baby's experience operates as a partial check to feeling's
exclusive sway. It keeps him from touching the fire, no matter how its
brightness attracts. It may be merely the sense memory of hurt when
finge
will probably prevent him from ever again touching it. Or it may be the
brain-cell's retention of the painful feeling of slapped hands when the
fingers reaching out to the flame had not yet quite touched. These
punishment experiences are only effective in many children after more or
less repetition has set up an automatic prohibition from brain to motor
nerves; but right here intellect begins to assert itself in the form of
sense memory. The baby does not reason about the matter. His nerve-cells
simply remember pain, and that particular brightness and glow, and
finger touch--or that reaching out to the glow--and slapped hands, as
occurring together. In the same way he early connects pleasure with the
taste of certain forbidden things. He does not know they are sweet. He
only knows "I want." Even here his desire to taste may be checked in
action by a vivid memory of what happened when he tasted that other
time, and was spanked or put in his little room all alone with only milk
and bread to eat for a long time.
Later on the child may think, from cause to effect, thus: "Sweet, good,
want, taste, spank, hurt (or no dinner, all by self, lonely), spank hurt
more than sweets good. Not taste." But long before he can work this out,
consciously, two distinct memories, one of pleasure and one of pain, are
aroused by the sight of the sweet. And what he will do with it depends
upon which memory is stronger. In other words, his action is governed
altogether by his feeling, though memory, which is an intellectual
factor, supplies the material for feeling.
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Accuracy Of Perception
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How to Study.--You learn sooner or later from experience that the quickest and best way to learn anything new is to give it your undivided attention at the moment; to perceive one thing at a time and to perceive it as something that is definite, or ... Consciousness
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Sleep seldom, if ever, is a condition of utter unconsciousness. We so frequently have at least a vague recollection, when we wake, of dreaming--whether or not we remember the dream material--that we are inclined to accept sleep as always a state of ... Consciousness Is Complex
The one fact we want at this stage of our inquiry is simply this: that consciousness, awaking at birth, very soon becomes complex. However single and simple in content immediate consciousness may be, it is so intimately linked with all preceding exp... Development Of Reason And Will
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Our points of view are very frequently merely hereditary or acquired prejudices, hence altogether emotional rather than rational. We only with great difficulty see things through another man's eyes. It necessitates comprehending his background fully... Habit Is A Conserver Of Effort
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So the good nurse will not consider her work done when she has diverted mental processes into channels of co-operation. When the patient, who is capable of reasoning, knows the why of his treatment, and realizes that he can only keep well as he hims... The Beginning Of Reason
We found feeling by far the strongest factor in producing action in babyhood and childhood. Our instinctive doing, we learned, is the result of a race impulse. Will acts chiefly at emotion's bidding. But very early the baby's experience operates as ... The Central And Peripheral Nervous Systems In Action
I am passing the open door of a bake-shop, and a pervading odor fills the air. I think "hot rolls," because my organ of smell--the nose--has received a stimulus which it transmits along my olfactory nerves to the brain; and there the odor is given a... The Cerebrum Or Forebrain
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If the patient's mind is temporarily clouded through infection or suffering, he may be reacting to a delusion, an obsession, a fixed idea of disability, a terrifying fear. Sometimes he persistently refuses food, and gives no reason for it. The unthi... The Mind A Prey To False Associations
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Mind, we found, is born in the form of consciousness when the outside world impresses itself upon the brain-cells by way of the senses. This consciousness, observation and experiment prove, is first a feeling one, later a feeling-thinking-willing ... The Normal Mind
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The student of life and of the sciences which deal with the origin and development of the human race, and with the relations of man to man and nation to nation--such sciences as biology and anthropology, sociology and ethics and history--comes to ... The Nurse Of The Future
The nurse of the future will not be merely a handmaiden to care for the sick body by deftly carrying out the doctor's orders. She will do this almost automatically as a matter of course, and skilfully; but it will be the merest beginning of her miss... The Obsessed Patient
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