The Physical Basis of Mind. With Illustrations. Being the Second Series of Problems of Life and Mind
London: Trubner and Company, 1877.
First edition. xiv, [2], 493 pp. Bound in publisher's brown cloth with gilt stamping, spine label, black coated endpapers. Very Good+ with small tear at head, a little wear along title label, hinges cracked but holding. Contents bright. An ambitious book of amateur physiology, biology, psychology, and philosophy by the lover of novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), published the year before he died. His complex views on neurology, sophisticated and cutting-edge for their time, informed her fiction. He was insistent on a holistic view of the nervous system and disparaged the common 19th century trope of the individual neuron as telegraph, in a kind of Victorian parallel of the contemporary Orch OR hypothesis versus the computational theory of the mind debate. Scarce in the original cloth.
Price: $600.00