The physical basis of mind / [George Henry Lewes].

  • George Henry Lewes
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The physical basis of mind / [George Henry Lewes]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    One distinction of Lewes, which gives to his message so deep a significance at the present stage of philo- sophic development, is the combination of a large and scholarly grasp of philosophic problems with the trained faculty of a scientific specialist. As a biologist, he was not only well read in the extensive literature of his time, but carried out for himself careful lines of research. One may say that the Problems bring together the two main directions of his activity, that represented by the Biographical History of Philosophy, and that illustrated in the Physiology of Common Life. The aim of the Problems is the old aim of philosophy, a fuller and deeper knowledge of man at once on his spiritual and on his material side. This fuller knowledge the author desires to attain, partly by improving on current psychological conceptions, as in the valuable addendum that human faculties, reason, conscience, have their sociological as well as their biological factors, and partly by improving on cur- rent notions of the organism and its activities. To see Nature in her actual complexity, to take into account all the conditions which go to constitute a living, sentient, intellectual being, this is throughout his dominant aim. Lewes’s habit of mind, his respect for concrete reality, led him to unify to the utmost the bodily and the mental conditions in the living man. Mind, under its simplest aspect, sensation or sentience, seems here to be no extraneous appendage to nervous processes, but a part of neurility itself; conversely,
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