Motor Automatism, on the other hand, is a non-reflex movement of a voluntary muscle, executed in the waking state but not controlled by the ordinary waking consciousness.
The Chateau of the duc de Luynes, the translator of the Meditations, was the home of a Cartesian club, that discussed the questions of automatism and of the composition of the sun from filings and parings, and rivalled Port Royal in its vivisections.
The world, as he thought, on its physical side, always was a living body; and on its psychical side God always was its conscious spirit; and, so far from life arising from the lifeless, and consciousness from unconsciousness, the life and consciousness of the whole world are the origin of the lifeless and the unconscious in parts of it, by a kind of secondary automatism, while we ourselves are developed from our own mother-earth by differentiation.
Sensory Automatism is the term given by students of psychical research to a centrally initiated hallucination.
An interesting form of speech automatism is known as Glossolalia; in the typical case of Helene Smith, Th.
