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Nobody should want to rid his mind of science, but why should science want to rid us of our minds? In the name of science, however, clever men have given their minds to that very enterprise, although no doubt with the explanation that they were only ridding us of what we had falsely thought to be our minds. Thus in the eighteenth century La Mettrie presented the thesis that man was a machine. In the nineteenth, Huxley tried to show that we were conscious automata. In the twentieth, Mr. Hogben,1 among others, professes to deduce from Pavlov's2 experimental results that consciousness is a superstition, being only a misdescription of conditioned reflexes. I propose, then, to examine the modish form of this persistent doctrine.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1934
References
page 421 note 1 In The Nature of Living Matter, hereafter cited as L.
page 421 note 2 See Conditioned Reflexes, Eng. trans., hereafter cited as C.
page 424 note 1 The most recent English expositor of Descartes (MrKeeling, S. V. in his Descartes, p. 259 n.Google Scholar) states that the term reflex “appears to have been coined by Willis (1699), and not until 1784 was the general theory of reflexes at all fully elaborated (viz. by Prochaska), but in what consists the difference between voluntary action and unconscious reflex was first stated definitely by Marshall Hall in 1833.” Mr. Keeling also notes (op. cit., p. 260 n.) “how strikingly far” Descartes in his Passions, art. 50, anticipated the language of “conditioning.”