Read "The Analysis of Mind" by Bertrand Russell online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
In this lecture we shall be concerned with a very general characteristic which broadly, though not absolutely, distinguishes the behaviour of living organisms from that of dead matter. The characteristic in question is this:
The response of an organism to a given stimulus is very often dependent upon the past history of the organism, and not merely upon the stimulus and the HITHERTO DISCOVERABLE present state of the organism.