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Rational Living; Some Practical Inferences From Modern Psychology
Rational Living Some Practical Inferences From Modern Psychology Author:Henry Churchill King General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1907 Original Publisher: Macmillan Subjects: Conduct of life Mind and body Psychology Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get ... more »free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER V THE UNITY OF MIND AND BOOT -- THE PSYCHOLOGICAL EVIDENCE I. THE LAW OF DIFFUSION One of the clearest proofs of this intimate connection of the psychical with the physical -- not in the case of the brain only, but in the whole body -- is contained in what Bain has called the law of diffusion, and which James thus states: "Using sweeping terms, and ignoring exceptions, we might say that every possible feeling produces a movement, and that movement is a movement of the entire organism, and of each and all its parts. What happens patently when an explosion or a flash of lightning startles us, or when we are tickled, happens latently with every sensation we receive."1 These effects of feeling, even of the simplest kind, on the body, have been experimentally traced in the modification of the circulation of the blood, of respiration, of the activity of the sweatglands, and of the voluntary muscles, and less accurately in movements of the viscera. To take but a single instance, the effect on circulation: every least mental activity -- feeling or thought -- affects the circulation of the blood. This is particularly striking in the brain. 1 Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 37Z. Mosso's ingenious experiments here1 make the connection of thought and circulation of blood in the brain incontestable. He placed his subjects upon a table so carefully balanced that the slightest increase of weight at either extremity would turn the scale. He found that any active thinking by the subject, like the solving of a problem, would at once c...« less