His Principles of Mental Physiology, published in 1874, developed the ideas he had first expounded in the 1850s, and expounds the arguments for and against the two models of psychology then current - automatism, which assumed that the mind ...

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In William Carpenter's view, not only is mental activity the direct result of the physiological activity of the nervous system, the course of neural activity can in its turn be influenced by the occurrence of mental events.