I hereby conclude my presentation of the grounds upon which SWEDENBORG appears to have founded his doctrine of the cerebral cortex as the seat of the soul’s activity.
I. It has here been my endeavour to show, that his _first_ general statement that the centres of the psychical functions are to be found in the cortex was a conclusion, which he derived from three premises, secured in different ways:
The _1st_ premise was a conclusion drawn from the clinical observations, post mortem discoveries and results obtained from experiments on animals, which he had collected from literature;
The _2nd_ premise was a summing up of the comparatively recent discoveries in microscopic cerebral anatomy, and
The _3rd_ was an hypothesis, concerning the continuous connection between the cortical elements and the fibres of the cerebral medulla, by which an easy communication was established between those elements and the distributions of the nerves in the various parts of the body. In his conclusions from these premises SWEDENBORG had some guidance in preceding authors, who placed at least the sensory function in a certain connection with the cortical substance.
II. His second statements, his essential _doctrine of localization_, showed in many points a great agreement with that presented by VIEUSSENS, but also contained important differences, which partly rested upon the conclusion to which SWEDENBORG had previously come, concerning the importance of the cortex for the psychic life, partly depended upon the new point of view concerning the correspondence of the cerebral regions to those of the body, to which he had arrived in his work supported by clinical results. The _detailed_ doctrine of localizations seems to have been constructed with the assistance of VIEUSSENS’ detailed statements concerning the connection of the nerves with the various regions of the cerebral medulla.
III. His third statement, his—so to speak, ›_Cerebellular theory_›, that the ›Cerebellula› were the units of which the brain was in reality composed, and that the function of the cortex was essentially the summing up of the activity of the ›Cerebellula›, and that the ›Cerebellula› were connected with one another into various kinds of groups, corresponding to the various kinds of perceptions and to the different movements of the body, etc., this was grounded in part upon the discoveries of Malpighi and others and their detailed descriptions of the structure and situation of the cortical elements and their connection with each other, in part upon SWEDENBORG’s clinical experiences and his own previously drawn conclusions, which be further followed up.