[f. AUTOMAT-ON + -ISM; cf. Gr. αὐτοματισμός that which happens of itself, and F. automatisme.]
1. The quality of being automatic, or of acting mechanically only; involuntary action. Hence, the doctrine attributing this quality to animals.
1838. Blackw. Mag., XLIII. 605. The Cartesian doctrine of the automatism of the whole animal kingdom.
1857. T. Webb, Intell. Locke, viii. 154. Whatever is done from blind Impulse is Automatism rather than Action.
1879. Mallock, Life worth Living 171. The unity or dualism of existence, the independence or automatism of the life and will of man.
2. Mechanical, unthinking routine.
1882. in Med. Temp. Jrnl., No. 52. 154. Nowhere, perhaps, is medical automatism seen … more commonly than in our Lunatic Asylums.
3. The faculty of independently originating action or motion. (From the original sense of automaton.)
1876. Foster, Phys., I. iii. (1879), 111. Automatism, i.e. the power of initiating disturbances or vital impulses, independent of any immediate disturbing event or stimulus from without, is one of the fundamental properties of protoplasm.
1882. Romanes, in Nature, XXV. 335. The hypothesis of conscious automatism is nothing more than an emphatic restatement of the truth, that the relation between body and mind is a relation which has so far proved inconceivable.
