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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    there are no Human actions which cannot be accounted for by unconditional sequence, such an assumption cannot be admitted as an adequate disproof of the testimony borne by Human Consciousness to the opposite effect. It* is im- possible for me to think, says Mr. Sidgwick, (Op. cit. p. 51), in the moment of deliberate volition,- that my volition is completely determined by my formed cha- racter and the motives acting upon it. The opposite conviction is so strong as to be absolutely unshaken by the evidence brought against it. I cannot believe it to be illusory. * * * No amount of experience of the sway of motives even tends to make me distrust my intuitive consciousness, that in resolving after deliberation I exer- cise free choice as to which of the motives acting on me shall prevail. Nothing short of absolute proof that this consciousness is erroneous, could overcome the force with which it announces itself as certain; and I cannot perceive that such proof has been given. It is alleged, indeed, that the belief entertained by all men—except Philosophers—in their own freedom of choice (within certain limits) between different modes of action, is an illusion of ignorant common sense, which, like the vulgar belief that the sun moves round the earth, is utterly dispelled by the light of Science. But the two beliefs rest upon an entirely different basis. The latter, like other erroneous beliefs which arise in the exercise of our senses, is an inference from the facts of Consciousness, which a more enlarged experience (such as that afforded by almost every railway-journey) shows to be untenable: the