Principles of mental physiology : with their applications to the training and discipline of the mind and the study of its morbid conditions / by William B. Carpenter.

  • Carpenter, William Benjamin, 1813-1885.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Principles of mental physiology : with their applications to the training and discipline of the mind and the study of its morbid conditions / by William B. Carpenter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    Man's action which is exempted from the Law of Physical Causation. The corrective to this view, however, appears to me to be furnished by the intelligent study of that large class of the phenomena of Human Nature, which lies patent to every trained observer in the ordinary course of events. For the more carefully he studies these phenomena, the more clearly is he led to see that, as has been pithily said by Emerson, Thoughts rule the World; and that, though the spheres of moral and jjhysical Causation impinge (as it were) upon one another, they are in themselves essentially distinct. The influence of a great Idea conceived by a thinker in his closet, in dominating the action of an entire Nation, is utterly disproportioned to any conceivable play of molecular forces that can be excited by the Physical agency of the thinker in putting his idea into speech or writing. The Moral power of the a thoughts that breathe, and words that burn in the utterances of the Poet, cannot be correlated, like the mechanical Energy exerted by his muscles in the writing of his verse, with the quantity of food he may have consumed in their production. And the new direction that may be given to the whole course of two lives, by the faintest expression of Emotion in a tone, a look, or a touch, cannot be brought to any common measure, either with those Muscular contractions, or with those molecular changes in Nervous matter, which are the Physical causes of its manifestation. But to this it may be replied that, even when we look at Human action from its Mental side, without any regard to