DEVELOPMENTAL AND MOTIVATIONAL CONCEPTS IN PIAGET'S SENSORIMOTOR THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE

Abstract

Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he heing an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Theresa as an hysteric, Sail lt Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate.... Carlyle's org, -tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh [po 14]. A more fully developed example of the same kind ofreasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers, of <.Titicizing the religious emotions by showing a connection between them and the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence. The macerations of saints, and the devotion of missionaries, are only instances of the parental instinct of selfsacrifice gone astray. For the hysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is but an imaginary substitute for a more earthly subject of affection [po 11£.].