This study of human behavior seeks to restore a concept of man as autonomous, and move away from the behaviorist concept of man as automaton. Powers does not intend to deny science. Indeed, the book opens with a deliberately and specifically mechanistic picture of how the central nervous system behaves. Only after the mechanistic model is thoroughly understood will the reader see that it leads beyond ordinary mechanism and that it is capable of describing the interface between what we can represent as mechanism and what we cannot yet represent at all, but only experience.