Self-control and how to secure it = (L'éducation de soi-même) / by Paul Dubois ; Authorized translation by Harry Hutcheson Boyd.

  • Paul Charles Dubois
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Self-control and how to secure it = (L'éducation de soi-même) / by Paul Dubois ; Authorized translation by Harry Hutcheson Boyd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    Believers, who attribute creation to an all- powerful personal God, seem to me a little overweening in limiting that power. They profess that this God could only construct the human marvel by associating two heteroge- neous elements, the soul and the body. They therefore refuse Him another power, that of producing what we call thought from the op- erations of organs constructed for the pur- pose; I should have more confidence in His omnipotence. They also allow themselves a criticism which appears to me out of place towards Providence, by disdaining the body, in considering it inferior, in giving complete supremacy to that abstraction we call the soul. The biologist looks at things in another way. For him, man is one, he is a material organism. The cells of which he is composed have their especial roles; some contract, others secrete. The nerves transmit the vi- brations, still unknown in its essence, called the nervous wave. The brain is the organ of thought. It receives numerous excitations from without, and within the latter they are transformed into mental pictures, without our [326]