The Physical Basis of Mind / Being the Second Series of Problems of Life and Mind.

Chapter 49: PROBLEM III. ANIMAL AUTOMATISM.

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The text investigates the biological foundations of mental phenomena, arguing that psychology must root itself in organismal and social conditions. It presents four essays on the nature of life, the nervous mechanism, animal automatism, and reflex action, combining physiological description with philosophical critique. The author emphasizes a biological rather than metaphysical or purely mechanical viewpoint, warns against speculative assumptions such as imaginary anatomy and the unexamined primacy of the nerve-cell, and proposes extending competition principles to tissues and organs. The work seeks to reconcile mechanical explanations of movement with biological complexity and to show how physical processes relate to mental aspects without reducing one wholly to the other.

PROBLEM III.
ANIMAL AUTOMATISM.

“L’organisme le plus complexe est un vaste mécanisme qui résulte de l’assemblage de mécanismes secondaires.”—Claude Bernard.

“Les corps vivants sont machines à l’infini.”—Leibnitz.

“Noi lamentiamo con Majendie che nel linguaggio fisiologico siensi intruse le preopinioni psicologiche col trascico inevitabile del vocaboli, ai quali codeste preopinioni si trovano legate. Probabilmente questa fu una delle principali cagioni degli errori e degli equivoci anatomofisiologici, da cui non poterono svincolarsi, a loro insaputa, i cultori sperimentali della scienza, perchè nell’ interpretare i fenomeni osservati erano obbligati ad usare il linguaggio di una false moneta in corso.”—Lussana e Lemoigne, Fisiologia dei Centri Nervosi, 1871, I. 16.