Principles of Mental Physiology
With their Applications to the Training and Discipline of the Mind, and the Study of its Morbid Conditions

Carpenter demonstrates the arguments for and against the psychological models of automatism and free will.

William Benjamin Carpenter (Author)

9781108005289, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 July 2009

764 pages
21.6 x 14 x 3.9 cm, 0.87 kg

William Carpenter (1813–85) was trained as a doctor; he was apprenticed to an eye surgeon, and later attended University College London and the University of Edinburgh, obtaining his M. D. in 1839. Rather than practising medicine, he became a teacher, specialising in neurology, and it was his work as a zoologist on marine invertebrates that brought him wide scientific recognition. His Principles of Mental Physiology, published in 1874, developed the ideas he had first expounded in the 1850s, and expounds the arguments for and against the two models of psychology then current – automatism, which assumed that the mind operates under the control of the physiology of the body for all human activity, and free will, 'an independent power, controlling and directing that activity.' Drawing on animal as well as human examples, his arguments, especially on the acquisition of mental traits in the individual, are much influenced by Darwin.

Preface
Book I. General Physiology: 1. Of the general relations between mind and body
2. Of the nervous system and its functions
3. Of attention
4. Of sensation
5. Of perception and instinct
6. Of ideation and ideo-motor action
7. Of the emotions
8. Of habit
9. Of the will
Book II. Special Physiology: 10. Of memory
11. Of common sense
12. Of imagination
13. Of unconscious cerebration
14. Of reverie and abstraction–electro-biology
15. Of sleep, dreaming and somnambulism
16. Of mesmerism and spiritualism
17. Of intoxication and delirium
18. Of insanity
19. Influence of mental states on the organic functions
20. Of mind and will in nature
Appendix.

Subject Areas: Evolution [PSAJ]