Mechanism, life and personality
 |
This book consists of four lectures which were delivered in the Physiological Laboratory of Guy's Hospital, during May of this year, as a London University course for senior students. They are reproduced in the form of their delivery, after careful revision, in which I have been much aided by the criticisms and suggestions of my friend Professor J. T. Wilson, F.RS. Philosophical readers who may have chanced to see an essay by my brother and myself on ' The Relations of Philosophy to Science ' in Essays in Philosophical Criticism^ published in 1883, will recognise in these lectures a development of the ideas put forward in that essay.
In a presidential address which I delivered in 1908 before the Physiological Section of the British Association, and in other scattered papers, the same line of argument in relation to the aims of biology and its position among the sciences was followed out in certain directions.
The lectures now published represent an attempt at a more comprehensive treatment of the subject. The time is now more than ripe for bringing the great biological movement of the nineteenth century into definite relation with the mainstream of human thought, and these lectures form a contribution towards the fulfilment of this task.
Contents:
The mechanistic theory of life.--Criticism of the mechanistic theory.--Biology and the physical sciences.--Personality
Download Mechanism, life and personality - 2.4 MB