Laycock and Winslow on the Brain: A Review

Extract

Dr. Laycock's volumes present a formidable aspect. The correlations of consciousness and organisation is a sufficiently puzzling title. Open either volume where we will, we meet in the head lines such expressions as “mental dynamics,” “cerebral differentiation,” “teleotic homologies,” “correlations of the will,” “unifying functions of the brain,” and other hard words enough to make the hair on the head of him who is to read by compulsion, stand on end. Nevertheless the book is a readable book. Dr. Laycock, beyond doubt, has a metaphysical turn. He deals with the most abstruse topics with the easy air of a man whose life and conversation have been spent in speculation. We say this without prematurely pledging ourselves to the belief that he is even only for the most part sound in his opinions; for such is the nature of metaphysics, that a man may be a prodigious genius in that line, and yet it may be the fortune of the age in which he lives, never to discover that his works rest on some wholly baseless principle.