Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/97

77 FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN 77 to be tabulce rasce at first, as the Meynert scheme would have them ; and so far from their being educated by the lower centres exclusively, they educate themselves.* We have already noticed the absence of reactions from fear and hunger in the ordinary brainless frog. Schrader gives a striking account of the instinctless condition of his brainless pigeons, active as they were in the way of loco- motion and voice. " The hemisphereless animal moves in a world of bodies which . . . are all of equal value for him. . . . He is, to use Goltz's apt expression, impersonal. . . . Every object is for him only a space-occupying mass, he turns out of liis path for an ordinary pigeon no otherwise than for a stone. He may try to climb over both. All authors agree that they never found any difference, whether it was an in- animate body, a cat, a dog, or a bird of prey which came in their pigeon's way. The creature knows neither friends nor enemies, in the thickest company it lives like a hermit. The languishing cooing of the male awakens no more im- pression than the rattling of the peas, or the call-whistle which in the days before the injury used to make the birds hasten to be fed. Quite as little as the earlier observers have I seen hemisphereless she-birds answer the courting of the male. A hemisphereless male will coo all day long and show distinct signs of sexual excitement, but his activ- ity is without any object, it is entirely indifferent to him whether the she-bird be there or not. If one is placed near him, he leaves her unnoticed. . . . As the male pays no at- tention to the female, so she pays none to her young. The brood may follow the mother ceaselessly calling for food, but they might as well ask it from a stone. . . . The hemi- scheme in toto, saying that whilst we have in our personal experience plenty of examples of acts which were at first voluntary becoming second- arily automatic and reflex, we have no conscious record of a single origi- nally reflex act growing voluntary. — As far as conscious record is concerned, we could not possibly have it even if the Meynert scheme were wholly true, for the education of the hemispheres which that scheme postulates must in the nature of things antedate recollection. But it seems to me that Milnsterberg's rejection of the scheme may possibly be correct as regards reflexes from the lower centres. Everywhere in this department of psy- chogenesis we are made to feel how ignorant we really are.
 * Munsterberg (Die Willenshandlung, 1888, p. 134) challenges Meyucrt's