Body and mind : a history and a defense of animism / by William McDougall.
- William McDougall
- Date:
- 1920
Licence: In copyright
Credit: Body and mind : a history and a defense of animism / by William McDougall. Source: Wellcome Collection.
394/420 page 370
![37C undergoing no development in the course of the individua.1 s life. Rather, the soul is a system of capacities which are fully present as latent potentialities from the beginning of the individual’s life ; and these potentialities are realized or brought into play only in proportion as the brain-mechanisms became developed and specialized. The mental differences exhibited by any person at different stages of his life would thus be wholly due to the developmental and degenerative changes of his brain-structure. And it would follow also that the mental differences between one person and another may be, and presumably are, wholly conditioned by differences of brain-structure. It would follow also that just as we should have to conceive the soul of any human being as an unchanging system of potentialities at all stages of the individual life, mental development being purely development of the bodily mechanisms by which the psychical potentialities are brought more fully into play, so we might conceive the mental differences between man and animals of all levels as wholly due to differences of kind and degree of bodily organization ; the souls of all animals, from the lowliest upward to man, would have the same potentialities, and these potentialities would be actual¬ ized in proportion to the degree of evolution of the bodily organization. Mental evolution would thus be regarded as con¬ sisting wholly in progressive evolution of bodily organization ; a view which is implied also in the “transmission theory” of James and Bergson.* 1 by analogy to the brain. And yet it is only as incorporated in the brain that such a schematism can represent anything causal. This is, to my mind, the con¬ clusive reason for saying that the order of presentation of the mind's materials is due to cerebral physiology alone. . . . The effects of interested attention and volition remain. These activities seem to hold fast to certain elements, and by emphasizing them and dwelling on them, to make their associates the only ones which are evolved. This is the point at which an anti-mechanical psychology must, if anywhere, make its stand in dealing with association. Everything else is pretty certainly due to cerebral laws ” (“ Principles,” i. p. 594). And again he wrote: “The soul presents nothing herself; creates nothing; is at the mercy of the material forces for all possibilities ; but amongst these possibilities she selects, and by reinforcing one and checking others, she figures not as an ' epiphenomenon,’ but as something from which the play gets moral support” (op. cit., ii. p. 584). That this view is not consistent with James’s transmission theory and later utterances seems to me clear.' 1 Lotze expressed himself as follows on this view of the essential similarity of all souls : “ What causes determine the various levels of development reached by the various races of animated beings ? Now here it was a possible opinion that all souls are homogeneous in nature, and that the combined influence of all externa] conditions, as well those whose seat is the organization of the body](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b29815782_0394.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
