18 DEVELOPMENT OF TEACHING ABOUT NERVO-MENTAL FUNCTIONS

The famous physiologist was the Swiss scientist Albrecht Haller (1708–1777). His work Fundamentals of Physiology (1757) is evaluated as the dividing line between modern physiology and everything that happened before. From under the determinative influence of the soul, A. Galler deduced not only purely nervous phenomena, but also an essential part of the psychic. Such phenomena directly take part in the complex motor skills of walking, blinking, etc.

A. Galler called the psychic elements of these complex dynamics "dark perceptions." Despite the provisions proving a compromise with theology, the physiological system of A. Haller was the main link in the formation of materialistic views on neuropsychic phenomena. Explaining these phenomena by the nature of the body itself, and not by factors foreign to it, it supplemented the Cartesian model with new elements. The experiment revealed the characteristic properties of the organism, just as valid as other attributes of matter. Hallerov's "living machine" was, in contrast to the Cartesian, the carrier of forces and qualities that machines do not have. In this way, the natural-science prerequisites for a significant shift in the maturation of psychological thought — the transition to the understanding of the psyche as a property of formed matter — were formed. Not mechanics, but biology was made the core of the deterministic consideration of consciousness. This determined the formation on the new foundations of judgments about the reflex. If in R. Descartes and D. Hartley this concept was created on the principles of physics, then in the Czech physiologist J. Procházka (1749–1820) who continued the line of A. Haller, it acquired a biological basis. The reflex, according to Y. Prochaska, is generated not by an arbitrary external stimulus, but only by that which turns into feeling. Feeling, whether it turns into a function of consciousness or not, has one common meaning and is called the “compass of life.” Developing these lines, Prochazka, not only feeling, but also more complex types of mental activity, depends on the task of adapting organisms to the circumstances of life.

In his work Physiology, or the Doctrine of Man, J. Prochazka argued that the opinion on the reflex should explain the functioning of the nervous system as a whole.

The idea of ​​the inseparable connection of the organism with the external environment was first derived from the principles of a mechanistic world outlook.

R. Descartes took as a basis the principle of conservation of momentum, and J. Prochazka thought of the general dependence of an organism on nature. But as the beginning of this connection and dependence on it is not the law of conservation of momentum, but the law of self-preservation of the living body, which is carried out only under the circumstances of the implementation of selective reactions to environmental influences.