Essays on the Physiology of the Nervous System (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1856 edition. Excerpt: ...proximate to the true one, and 'acts accordingly. But if we should hence say, that he experiences the true sensation on the same ground that he experiences the false one, we should be guilty of saying, that the child nurses the breast because he sucks his thumb. In the recent work of Professor Bowen, of Harvard College, on Metaphysics and Ethics, at page 228 of the second edition, the author, after admitting that such motions as the beating of the heart, the movements of respiration, and the peristaltic actions of the intestines, are properly automatic, or mechanical, qualifies his admission in a note, as follows: "To avoid misconception, I may here mention, once for all, that I use the common phraseology that is founded on the mechanical theory of nature's operations, or the doctrine of secondary causes, but without admitting the truth of that theory. In the former part, I endeavored to prove that all action or change in the purely material creation, must be attributed to the immediate agency of the creator. Still, for the convenience of speech, to avoid circumvolution and incessant reference to this doctrine, I continue to use the language that is sanctioned by universal custom, though it is derived from what seems to me a wholly unphilosophical and mistaken view." With this ingenious author, whom it is a pleasure at all times to read, I agree in this use of language, so far as it is adopted in reference to inorganic substances. It is allowable here, on a somewhat similar principle as the license adopted by mathematicians in the popular mode of squaring the circle. When a polygon is inscribed or circumscribed about a circle, it differs so little from its area that the amount of that difference may safely be thrown away for...