Page:Smithsonian Report (1898).djvu/556

468 books and from most academic chairs is taught as "psychology" is not a true empirical science of the mind, not the physiology of the mental organs, but rather a fantastic metaphysics, compounded of one-sided introspective observation of self and of uncritical comparisons, of mis- understood data and incomplete experiments, of speculative errors and religious dogmas. Most of the so-called psychologists know nothing at all of the brain and organs of special sense, that wonderful and incomparably complex apparatus which solely and alone is the organ of the mental faculties in man and in animals. Most psychologists possess today no knowledge of the significant problems of modern experimental physiology and psychiatry, or they purposely ignore them; indeed, they know nothing at all of the actual localization of the separate mental faculties or their concurrence in the normal workings of the single portions of the brain.

The surprising disclosures which the minute anatomy and ontogeny of the human brain, assisted by experimental physiology and pathology, have made during the last four years are among the most important discoveries of the nineteenth century. Indeed, these have not hitherto been widely known, which is explained on the one hand by the great difficulty of the subject which deals with the extremely complicated structure of our brain, and on the other hand by the passive stiff-necked resistance of the dominant school of psychology. The localization of the higher mental faculties upon the cortex of the brain was effected ten years ago by the suggestive researches of Goltz, Munk, Wernicke, Edinger, and others. But recently (1894) Paul Flechsig has succeeded in marking out the single parts of this region in a definite manner; he has pointed out that in the gray cortical zone of the brain mantle there are four clearly defined regions for the central sense organs, or four "sensory spheres"—the sphere for general bodily sensibility, in the parietal lobe; the sphere for smell, in the frontal lobe; that for vision, in the occipital lobe, and that for hearing, in the temporal lobe. Between these four "seats of sensation" lie the four great seats of thought or "association centers"—the real organs of intellectual life. They are the highest apparatus of the mental faculty, on which thought and consciousness depend. In front the frontal brain, or "frontal association center;" behind and above the parietal brain or "parietal association center;" "behind and below the principal brain, or "great occipitotemporal association center" (the most important of all), and finally, deep underneath, in the interior, is placed the insula brain, or "island of Reil," the "insular association center." These four seats of thought, distinguished by peculiar and highly complicated nerve structure from the intermediate seats of sensation, are the real "organs of thought," the only true apparatus of our mental life. * * *

The next question now is, What has paleontology to say regarding these important results of comparative anatomy and their application to the system of the primates and to phylogeny? For it is the petri-