Habit and intelligence: a series of essays on the laws of life and mind / by Joseph John Murphy.

  • Joseph John Murphy
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Habit and intelligence: a series of essays on the laws of life and mind / by Joseph John Murphy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    47/632 (page 3)
    INTKO.] INTRODUCTION. habit. Tliis is by far the most important of all questions now under scientific discussion, and perhaps the most important that science can ever have to consider. From the point of view adopted in this work, this question divides itself into two: the one, concerning the unconscious intelligence that organizes the body; the other, concerning the conscious intelligence of mind. Origin of Species.—The inquiry concerning the nature of the organizing intelligence involves an examination of that ques- tion of the origin of species wloich, since the pubhcation of Darwin’s great work on the subject, has probably attracted more interest than any other scientific question. I agree with Darwin in the belief that all species have been derived by descent vdth modification, probably from one,* certainly from a few, original germs; and I further agree with him in attach- ing great importance to “natural selection among spontaneous variations ” as part of the agency by which the modifications have been efiected. But I altogether differ from him, in that I believe the wondrous facts of organic adaptation cannot have been produced by natural selection, or by any unintelligent agency whatever. Mental Intelligence.—As on the subject of organizing intelli- gence I have come to a conclusion which is fundamentally opposed to that of Darwin, so on that of mental or conscious intelligence I have come to a conclusion which is funda- mentally opposed to that of the dominant psychological school in this country:—the school which was founded by Hartley, and to which Mill, Bain, and Herbert Spencer belong. The characteristic point of their theory is, that they endeavour to account for the whole mental nature by the single principle of the association of ideas, or, as 1 call it, of mental habit. 1 15 2