Psychology

Descriptions of the mind or soul begin with Plato and Aristotle. Locke may be called the father of psychology of modern times. The Germans tried to add exactness to psychology by an experimental method. Lotze in 1852, Fechner in 1860 and Wundt in 1863 all did much to bring this experimental point of view to a practical working basis. A great many facts have been discovered by laboratory methods and such investigations are still being pursued.

In 1861 Broca discovered that the brains of persons suffering one kind of aphasia showed a lesion in a certain spot.

About 1870 Hitzig showed that special movements could be excited in a dog by electrification of various parts of the brain. By this method and by comparing the injuries in the brains of persons suffering from nervous disorders, Ferrier and Munk, six or seven years later, established local centers for the senses of sight, hearing, touch, and smell. All, of this introduced an entirely new conception of the relation of brain and mind. Briefly put, the facts are these: destroy a center in the brain and you destroy the corresponding sense or motion; destroy the path between two centers and the relation between corresponding ideas is destroyed; thus a patient may see his coat and not know what it is for. Moreover, not only does a lesion destroy the power of sight, for example, but takes away the memory of things seen. The question of localization is one of the most interesting in psychology, and has already made possible surgical operations on the brain for diseases which previous ages did not connect with the brain at all.