A knowledge of man, as an animal, ought to lie as a foundation on which all systems of morality, and all laws relating to the moral conduct of individuals, be founded.
In 1833, Dr. Charles Knowlton was imprisoned in the East Cambridge jail at hard labor for an entire season, as punishment for publishing The Fruits of Philosophy, America’s first medical birth control manual. On March 31st, the day he was released, Knowlton gave two public lectures and his friend Abner Kneeland (editor of the Boston Investigator) published them as a booklet.
Knowlton spent no time discussing his incarceration but instead launched into describing the process of thought as a completely material interaction between sensation, perception, and the organic operations of the brain. Knowlton said that thought and consciousness were the result of habitual organic processes he called “sensorial tendencies.” These ideas (especially as they appeared in his book Elements of Modern Materialism) have been compared to the psychological theories of behaviorism — it’s also interesting how the idea of mental habits appears in David Hume’s philosophy, which Knowlton did not refer to (he mentioned Locke), although he was clearly very familiar with Scottish medical literature.
Those who profess to believe that there is something in a man’s head for the word will to signify, would probably treat, in connection with volition, of a little theological thing called free agency. This is the argument. The inference is that man, philosophically speaking, is no more a free agent than a time-piece. No attempt, to my knowledge, has ever been made to refute this argument. The course pursued by those who wish not to have the doctrine of necessity prevail, is to blow at it, and attempt to make people believe that, according to this view, it is absurd to punish a man for crime. Whether they believe what they say, I know not; but if they do, they are indeed stupid. Punishment is not, and ought not to be vindictive; it is designed to operate as a cause to prevent further crime; and this it is calculated to do, though man, philosophically speaking, is no more a free agent than a time-piece. Though man and a time-piece agree in one respect, that of not being free agents, still they differ very essentially in others. One is a piece of mechanical machinery, the other an organic machine.
Yet the Scottish professors, as Reid and Stewart, have so blundered, as to take the simple fact that we think, as good and sufficient evidence, nay, positive proof, that man has a soul or mind, which is ‘not liable to be impaired by disease or mutilation of any of our organs.’ But since I know a man’s ability to think is impaired by disease of the brain…I am much inclined to think that if his brain should be crushed, he could not think quite so well for it.
My hearers, is it not strange that a class of men should have so long presumed to tell us how we are made, what sort of things we are, and what will become of us when we are dead, when they have never made man their study. A knowledge of man, as an animal, ought to lie as a foundation on which all systems of morality, and all laws relating to the moral conduct of individuals, be founded.