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Updated: May 14, 2025
As Sherrington has stated, "Environment drives the brain, the brain drives the various organs of the body," and here we believe we find the key to a mechanistic interpretation of all body processes. On this basis we may see that the activities of life depend upon the ability of the parts of the body mechanism to respond adequately to adequate stimulation.
The score is full of the revolutions of wheels, of delicate clockwork movements, of screws and turbines. Beneath the music one hears always the regular, insistent, maniacal breathing of a concertina. And what in it is not purely mechanistic nevertheless completes the picture of the world as it appears to one who has seen the man-machine in all its comedy.
This is the mechanistic explanation of mind, consciousness, etc., but it is the only one, or kind of one, that lends itself to scientific interpretation. Life, spirit, consciousness, may be a mode of motion as distinct from all other modes of motion, such as heat, light, electricity, as these are distinct from each other.
The mechanistic explanations, we said, hold good for the systems that our thought artificially detaches from the whole. But of the whole itself and of the systems which, within this whole, seem to take after it, we cannot admit a priori that they are mechanically explicable, for then time would be useless, and even unreal.
In this address the paragraphs which were taken from the preceding paper, "A Mechanistic View of Psychology," have been omitted, those portions only being republished in which the premises have been applied in a discussion of certain medical problems rather than of psychological problems.
CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT. By Joseph Jastrow. Pp. 596 Plus xviii. D. Appleton & Co., 1915. $2.50 net. BACKWARD CHILDREN. By Arthur Holmes. Pp. 247. Bobbs, Merrill. $1.00 net. A MECHANISTIC VIEW OF WAR AND PEACE. By George W. Crile. Pp. 105 Plus xii. The MacMillan Co. $1.25. Copyright 1916, by Richard G. Badger. All Rights Reserved.
"Ordered," a purely mechanistic and materialistically realised cosmos cannot be. "Ordered" conditions are determined by what we agree to call "Laws"; and these, as all must admit, entail a Lawgiver. The alternative is Blind Chance; and the author, after considering the question, agrees, as again most reasonable persons will agree, that Blind Chance is no explanation of things as they are.
The mechanistic interpretation of natural phenomena developed during the last century he accepts at its full value, and would extend experimentally as far as it will go, for he finds it not invalid but inadequate. To minds of this temperament it is no wonder that Bergson's Creative Evolution came with the force of an inspiration.
Associated with them is Reinke’s “Theory of Dominants.” Driesch started from their ranks, and is a most interesting example of consistent development from a recognition of the impossibilities of the mechanistic position to an individually thought-out vitalistic theory. Hertwig, too, takes a very definite position of his own in regard to these matters.
On the one hand, it posits a strictly mechanistic epigenesis, and on the other hand, it incorporates the notion of "specificall vertues drawne by the bloud in its iterated courses, by its circular motion, through all the severall partes of the parents body." Digby rejects an internal agent, entelechy, or the Aristotelian formal and efficient causes.
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