VII. Principles of Psychosomatic Physiology

The question at once arises: in what way do the following enter and inhabit the organism: on the one hand, sense-perception proper, in which neural function merely terminates, and on the other the faculty of motion, which is the effusion of will? Unbiased observation discloses that neither the one nor the other of these belongs to the organism in the same sense that neural function, rhythmic occurrence and metabolic process belong to it. What goes on in the senses does not belong immediately to the organism at all. The external world reaches out into the senses, as though they were bays or inlets leading into the organism’s own existence. Compassing the processes that take place in the senses, the psyche does not participate in inner organic events; it participates in the extension of outer events into the organism.[^2] In the same way, when physical motion is brought about, what we have to do with is not something that is actually situated within the organism, but an outward working of the organism into the physical equilibrium (or other dynamic relation) between the organism itself and its environment. Within the organism it is only a metabolic process that can be assigned to willing; but the event that is liberated through this process is at the same time an actual happening within the equilibrium, or the dynamics, of the external world. Exerting volition, the life of the psyche overreaches the domain of the organism and combines its action with a happening in the outer world.