284 NATURE AND MAN. 



THE LIMITS OF HUMAN AUTOMATISM. 



[Preface to the fourth edition of the &quot; Principles of Mental Physiology,&quot; 

 1876.] 



SINCE the first issue of the following treatise, the question of 

 &quot; Human Automatism &quot; has largely engaged the attention of that 

 increasing portion of the public mind which interests itself in 

 scientific inquiry. The address of the eminent physicist who 

 occupied the presidential chair at the Belfast meeting of the British 

 Association, embodied a philosophical creed of which it seems a 

 necessary corollary, that all mental as well as bodily activity, being 

 the outcome of the &quot;potentialities&quot; of matter, is subject to physical 

 conditions alone. The distinguished biologist who brilliantly ex 

 pounded at the same meeting the Cartesian doctrine that &quot; Animals 

 are Automata,&quot; explicitly maintained (in direct opposition to 

 Descartes himself) that Man is only a more complicated and 

 variously endowed automaton : his bodily actions being determined 

 solely by physical causes ; the succession of his mental states 

 depending entirely upon the molecular activities of his cerebrum ; 

 and the movements he is accustomed to regard as expressing his 

 feelings, or as executing his intentions, having their real origin in 

 brain-changes, of which those feelings and intentions are the mere 

 concomitant &quot; symbols in consciousness.&quot; * Professor Huxley s 

 pronundamento was soon followed by that of an able mathematician, 

 who brought to that profoundly difficult problem of &quot; body and 

 mind &quot; which has exercised the greatest intellects from Aristotle 

 to J. S. Mill, the training of a skilled athlete, who knocks down 

 * Fortnightly Review, November, 1874, p. $77. 



