Medicine and the mind : (la medecine de l'esprit) . bstract dissertation. The drawing, which I have borrowed from the excellentclinical lessons of Dr. Grasset, Professor in the Faculty ofMedicine at Montpellier, represents a brain and someof its modes of relation with the world. Let us suppose for a minute that we are dealing withthe unreading brain of M. Pierre Loti, for example, ata moment when the eyes of the poet are caught bysome striking foreign landscape. This is what willhappen. The nervous vibrations, which constitute visualsensation, start from the retina and go, rolling closelyin su
Medicine and the mind : (la medecine de l'esprit) . bstract dissertation. The drawing, which I have borrowed from the excellentclinical lessons of Dr. Grasset, Professor in the Faculty ofMedicine at Montpellier, represents a brain and someof its modes of relation with the world. Let us suppose for a minute that we are dealing withthe unreading brain of M. Pierre Loti, for example, ata moment when the eyes of the poet are caught bysome striking foreign landscape. This is what willhappen. The nervous vibrations, which constitute visualsensation, start from the retina and go, rolling closelyin succession, along the optic nerve to the ultimateoutcome of that nerve, viz. to point V, at that partof the brain in which the faculty of seeing is this zone is not plentifully furnished with notionsaccumulated by reading—notions which are trans-mitted by the same optic nerve and lodged in theneighbourhood of point V—the sensation will retain alljts freshness, all its first vivacity, and is abdut to desire Doctors and Litkrature 141. Figure i. A, cerebral centre for the hearing of words. V, centres for thesight of words. M, centre of articulate speech. E, centre forthe movements necessary to writing. 142 Medicine and the Mind impatiently to transforrrmtself into action, to come out ofthe brain again, as those things do come out of the brainof a poet, in the form of written language. And then, in proportion as the optic nerve shall bearthe knowledge of the landscape to point V, another visionwill arise of itself, will be kindled, so to speak, at thevicinity of point V, and this will be the evocation ofsymbols, the letters and words which serve us to expressthat which strikes our senses. It is under this form of signs that the nervous vibra-tion, always active and only seeking to escape, will goon from point V to point E of the brain, to the zone ofwriting; it will go there of preference, by habit, since it isnow a custom of M. Lotis brain to write his stirringimpr
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