Are We Automata?

If, now, leaving the empirical combination of objects, we ask how the mind proceeds rationally to connect them we find selection again to be omnipotent. In an article on "Brute and Human Intellect " in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, July 1878, p. 236 I have tried to show that all Reasoning depends on the ability of the mind to break up the totality of the phenomenon reasoned about into partial factors or elements, and to pick out from among these the particular one which, in our given theoretical or practical emergency, may lead to the proper conclusion. Another predicament will need another conclusion, and require another element to be picked out. The man of genius is he who will always stick-in his bill, as it were, at the right point, and bring it out with the right element -- "reason" if the emergency be theoretical, "means" if it be practical-transfixed upon it? Association by similarity I have shown to be an important help to this breaking-up of represented things into their elements. But this association is only the minimum of that same selection of which picking out the right reason is a maximum. I here confine myself to this brief statement, but it may suffice to show that Reasoning is but another form of that selective activity which appears to be the true sphere of mental spontaneity.