Search -
The Psychic Life of Micro-Organisms: A Study in Experimental Psychology (Classic Reprint)
The Psychic Life of MicroOrganisms A Study in Experimental Psychology - Classic Reprint Author:Alfred Binet Excerpt from The Psychic Life of Micro-Organisms: A Study in Experimental Psychology — I have endeavored, in the following essay upon Micro-organisms, to show that psychological phenomena begin among the very lowest classes of beings: they are met with in every form of life from the simplest cellule to the most complicated organism. It is they th... more »at are essential phenomena of life, inherent in all protoplasm.
We admit, accordingly, the existence of a vitalism, that is to say, of an aggregate of properties which properly pertain to living matter and which are never found in inanimate substances. Among these properties of life we classify psychological phenomena.
Vitalism, it is unnecessary to say, has nothing in common with the doctrine upheld by the School of Montpellier. The principle here involved has nothing to do with properties and forces that are superadded to living matter; it concerns the properties that are inherent in it - the properties that characterize life.
The modern opponents of vitalism seek to confute the theory by attempting to explain all phenomena of life from physcio-chemical forces. They maintain that according as physiology advances the tendency is to relegate all phenomena nominally physiological into the domain of physics and chemistry; and that it would be only a question of time, if as yet they had not succeeded in demonstrating that every vital process is founded upon mechanical phenomena.
In a recent treatise upon "Vitalism and Mechanism," M. Bunge, professor of physiology at Basel, has shown that the history of physiology disproves these hypotheses.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.« less