The Origin and Nature of Emotions [48]
have enunciated. What is the whole social welfare movement but a recognition on the part of municipalities, educational boards, and religious organizations of the fact that the future welfare of the race depends upon the administration to the young of forceful uplifting environmental stimuli?
There are now, as there were in Darwin's day, many who feel that man is degraded from his high estate by the conception that he is not a reasoning, willing being, the result of a special creation. But one may wonder indeed what conception of the origin of man can be more wonderful or more inspiring than the belief that he has been slowly evolved through the ages, and that all creatures have had a part in his development; that each form of life has contributed and is contributing still to his present welfare and to his future advancement.
Recapitulation
Psychology,--the science of the human soul and its relations,-- under the mechanistic theory of life, must receive a new definition. It becomes a science of man's activities as determined by the environmental stimuli of his phylogeny and of his ontogeny.
On this basis we postulate that throughout the history of the race nothing has been lost, but that every experience of the race and of the individual has been retained for the guidance of the individual and of the race; that for the accomplishment of this end there has been evolved through the ages a nerve mechanism of such infinite delicacy and precision that in some unknown manner it can register permanently within itself every impression received in the phylogenetic and ontogenetic experience of the individual; that each of these nerve mechanisms or brain patterns has its own connection with the external world, and that each is attuned to receive impressions of but one kind, as in the apparatus of wireless telegraphy each instrument can receive and interpret waves of a certain rate of intensity only; that thought, will, ego, personality, perception, imagination, reason, emotion, choice, memory, are to be interpreted in terms of these brain patterns; that these so-called phenomena of human life depend upon the stimuli which can secure the final common path, this in turn having been determined by the frequency and the strength of the environmental stimuli of the past and of the present.
Finally, as for life's origin and life's ultimate end, we are content to say that they are unknown, perhaps unknowable. We know only that living matter, like lifeless matter, has its own place in the cosmic processes; that the gigantic forces which operated to produce a world upon which life could exist, as a logical sequence, when the time was ripe, evolved life; and finally that these cosmic forces are still active, though none can tell what worlds and what races may be the result of their coming activities.
A MECHANISTIC THEORY OF DISEASE[*]
[*] Oration in Surgery. Delivered at the 147th Annual Meeting of the Medical Society of New Jersey, at Spring Lake, N. J., June 11, 1913.
In this address the paragraphs which were taken from the preceding paper, "A Mechanistic View of Psychology," have been omitted, those portions only being republished in which the premises have been applied in a discussion of certain medical problems rather than of psychological problems.
The human body is an elaborate mechanism equipped first for such conflict with environment as will tend to the preservation of the individual, and second for the propagation of the species, both of these functions, when most efficiently carried out, tending to the upbuilding and perfection of the race. From the date of Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, to the present day, the human body has been constantly compared to a machine, but the time for analogy and comparison is past. I postulate that the body is itself a mechanism responding in every part to the adequate stimuli given it from without by the environment of the present and from within by the environment of the past, the memory of which is stored in the central battery of the
There are now, as there were in Darwin's day, many who feel that man is degraded from his high estate by the conception that he is not a reasoning, willing being, the result of a special creation. But one may wonder indeed what conception of the origin of man can be more wonderful or more inspiring than the belief that he has been slowly evolved through the ages, and that all creatures have had a part in his development; that each form of life has contributed and is contributing still to his present welfare and to his future advancement.
Recapitulation
Psychology,--the science of the human soul and its relations,-- under the mechanistic theory of life, must receive a new definition. It becomes a science of man's activities as determined by the environmental stimuli of his phylogeny and of his ontogeny.
On this basis we postulate that throughout the history of the race nothing has been lost, but that every experience of the race and of the individual has been retained for the guidance of the individual and of the race; that for the accomplishment of this end there has been evolved through the ages a nerve mechanism of such infinite delicacy and precision that in some unknown manner it can register permanently within itself every impression received in the phylogenetic and ontogenetic experience of the individual; that each of these nerve mechanisms or brain patterns has its own connection with the external world, and that each is attuned to receive impressions of but one kind, as in the apparatus of wireless telegraphy each instrument can receive and interpret waves of a certain rate of intensity only; that thought, will, ego, personality, perception, imagination, reason, emotion, choice, memory, are to be interpreted in terms of these brain patterns; that these so-called phenomena of human life depend upon the stimuli which can secure the final common path, this in turn having been determined by the frequency and the strength of the environmental stimuli of the past and of the present.
Finally, as for life's origin and life's ultimate end, we are content to say that they are unknown, perhaps unknowable. We know only that living matter, like lifeless matter, has its own place in the cosmic processes; that the gigantic forces which operated to produce a world upon which life could exist, as a logical sequence, when the time was ripe, evolved life; and finally that these cosmic forces are still active, though none can tell what worlds and what races may be the result of their coming activities.
A MECHANISTIC THEORY OF DISEASE[*]
[*] Oration in Surgery. Delivered at the 147th Annual Meeting of the Medical Society of New Jersey, at Spring Lake, N. J., June 11, 1913.
In this address the paragraphs which were taken from the preceding paper, "A Mechanistic View of Psychology," have been omitted, those portions only being republished in which the premises have been applied in a discussion of certain medical problems rather than of psychological problems.
The human body is an elaborate mechanism equipped first for such conflict with environment as will tend to the preservation of the individual, and second for the propagation of the species, both of these functions, when most efficiently carried out, tending to the upbuilding and perfection of the race. From the date of Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, to the present day, the human body has been constantly compared to a machine, but the time for analogy and comparison is past. I postulate that the body is itself a mechanism responding in every part to the adequate stimuli given it from without by the environment of the present and from within by the environment of the past, the memory of which is stored in the central battery of the