body itself.

This is the meaning of all those psycho-physical experiments that have
been carried on with so much ingenuity and persistence (usually associated
with attempts to explain vital phenomena in terms of mechanism). First,
they attempt to interpret the expressions of will, feeling and need, the
spontaneous activities and movements of the lowest forms of
life--protists--as "pure reflexes," as processes which take place in
obedience to stimuli, and thus are ultimately due to chemical and physical
influences and causes without the intervention of a psychical motive; and,
secondly, when this has been apparently or really achieved, the theory of
irritability and reflex mechanism is pushed from below upwards, until even
the most intricate and complex movements and operations of our own body,
which we have wrongly distinguished as acts or behaviour from mere
processes of stimulation, are finally recognised as reflexes and
liberations due to stimuli. Some stimulus or other, from light or sound or
something else, is, according to this theory, conducted to the nervous
centre, the ganglion, the spinal cord, the cerebellum or the cerebrum.
Here it produces an effect, not of a psychical nature, but some minute
chemical, or physical,--or purely mechanical change, which goes through
many permutations within the nervous centre itself, unites there with the
stored energies, and then, thus altered, returns by the efferent nerve
paths to effect a muscle-contraction in some organ, a stretching of the
hand, or a movement of the whole body. The physical process is accompanied
by a peculiar inward mirroring, which is the psychical penumbra or shadow
of the whole business. Thus what is in reality a purely mechanical and
reflex sequence appears like a psychical experience, like choice and will
and psychical causality. We may be compared to Spinoza's stone; it was
thrown, and it thought it was flying.

The reasons for interpreting things in this way lie in the principles of
investigation. It is only in this way, we are told, that nature can be
reduced to natural terms, that is, to chemistry, physics, and mechanics.
Only in this way is it possible to gain a true insight into and
understanding of things, and to bring them under mathematical formulae.
Thus only, too, can "the miraculous" be eliminated. For if we are obliged
to admit that the will has a real influence on the corporeal, for instance
upon our brain, and nerves, and arm-muscl