Abstract

Nobody should want to rid his mind of science, but why should science want to rid us of our minds? In the name of science, however, clever men have given their minds to that very enterprise, although no doubt with the explanation that they were only ridding us of what we had falsely thought to be our minds. Thus in the eighteenth century La Mettrie presented the thesis that man was a machine. In the nineteenth, Huxley tried to show that we were conscious automata. In the twentieth, Mr. Hogben,1 among others, professes to deduce from Pavlov's2 experimental results that consciousness is a superstition, being only a misdescription of conditioned reflexes. I propose, then, to examine the modish form of this persistent doctrine.