The absurdity of any mind-body relation : delivered on 19 May 1932 at University College London / by Charles S. Myers.

  • Myers, Charles S. (Charles Samuel), 1873-1946
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The absurdity of any mind-body relation : delivered on 19 May 1932 at University College London / by Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the material stimulus presented to the living organism, but also on the effects of that stimulus in relation to the present and past activities of the living organism. We may freely admit that apart from our own activity we can conceive nothing as to the nature of that stimulus. But we are surely not justified in affirming that were it not for our mental activity that stimulus would cease to exist. Such idealism is unwarrantable. All that we can say is that without mind we cannot interpret the activities of matter. Our common sense, however, forbids us to deny the continual existence of material activity, independent of our own mental activity. Its esse is not percipi^ but agere. Each of us is bound to posit activities other than his own. And the very conception of such activities is impossible without positing time and space. True, our concep¬ tion of all activity is compelled to be ‘ psycho-morphic ’; so is that of time and space, and likewise that of pur¬ pose and direction—when they lie (or when we suppose these to lie) beyond our personal experience of them. We are forced to think in terms of our individual human, mental experience. We can only proceed by abstractions from our total experience. And just as the physiologists and the physicists have concerned themselves with pure mechanisms by ruling out all purpose and direction, so further by ruling out mechanisms recent mathematicians have reduced the universe to abstract symbols and equations relative to a space-time continuum. But neither physical mechanisms nor mathematical equations present a complete picture of the history and the conduct of the living and lifeless world. They are powerless to account for its past evolution or to