Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T11:21:58.506Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Thirty-Second Maudsley Lecture: Sensory Experience and Brain Structure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2018

Wilfred Le Gros Clark*
Affiliation:
The University of Oxford

Extract

It was in my early youth that I first read Bergson's Creative Evolution. At that time, as I recollect, it particularly captured my interest and attention because it seemed to embody certain essential principles which I had not found to be expressed quite so forcibly elsewhere. It is true that the validity of many of Bergson's speculations and ideas have since been seriously controverted and so find little or no support today, but his philosophy also propounds certain conceptions which are perhaps worthy of renewed attention. I refer more especially to Bergson's contrast of those two aspects of conscious experience which he terms intellect and intuition. Intellect, he argues, is the product of a gradual evolutionary process which enables the individual with increasing efficiency to select and abstract just those several features of surrounding objects which are directly relevant to the problem of evolutionary survival. In so far as it selects and abstracts, the intellect by itself can provide only a partial view of external reality. “To conquer matter,” Bergson says, “consciousness has had to exhaust the best part of its power”—it has had to “adapt itself to the habits of matter and concentrate all its attention on them, in fact, determine itself more especially as intellect.” But there remains “around our conceptual and logical thought a vague nebulosity, made of the very substance out of which has been formed the luminous nucleus which we call the intellect”. Therein reside certain powers that are complementary to the understanding—powers of intuitive recognition. Intellect is essentially based on a sort of derived symbolism gradually elaborated in the course of evolution, which serves its immediate purpose as a convenient, useful, and indeed essential device for gaining control over the material world; on the other hand intuition, according to Bergson, is capable of giving scintillating flashes of insight “into the very inwardness of life”.

Type
Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1958 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barer, R., “Refractometry and interferometry of living cells”, J. Opt. Soc., Amer., 1957, 47, 545.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brodal, A., “The reticular formation of the brain stem”, Henderson Trust Lectures No. 18, 1957. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.Google Scholar
Galambos, R., “Neural mechanisms of audition”, Physiol. Rev., 1954, 34, 49.Google Scholar
Granit, R., Sensory Mechanisms of the Retina, 1947. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kuhn, R. A., “Organization of tactile dermatomes in cat and monkey”, J. Neurophys., 1953, 16, 169.Google Scholar
Le Gros Clark, W. E., “The laminar pattern of the lateral geniculate nucleus considered in relation to colour vision”, Documenta Opthalmologica, 1949, 3, 57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miner, N. M., “Cutaneous localization following 180 degree rotation of skin grafts”, Anat. Rec., 1951, 109, 326.Google Scholar
Mountcastle, V. B., “Modality and topographic properties of single neurons of cat's somatic sensory cortex”, J. Neurophys., 1957, 20, 408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Powell, T. P. S., and Cowan, W. M., “A study of thalamo-striate relations in the monkey”, Brain, 1956, 79, 364.Google Scholar
Sinclair, D. C., Weddell, G., and Zander, E., “The relationship of cutaneous sensibility to neurohistology in the human pinna”, J. Anat., 1952, 86, 402.Google Scholar
Sperry, R. W., “Visuomotor coordination in the newt (Triturus viridescens) after regeneration of the optic nerve”, J. Comp. Neur., 1943, 79, 33.Google Scholar
Idem , “Regulative factors in the orderly growth of neural circuits”, Growth, Symposium, 1951, 10, 63.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.