PSYCHIATRY IN THE FUNCTIONAL PSYCHOSES 281 



tion of two coincident processes appear in the principle of the psycho- 

 physical parallelism in the relation of mind and body. It being the 

 general fact that certain changes in those brain- and nerve-pro- 

 cesses with which consciousness is associated are always accom- 

 panied by changes in consciousness, and the converse being true 

 also, then certain other scientific principles are involved: (1) the 

 principle of equal continuity, with no breaks in either series of 

 changes, if one series is continuous the other must be continu- 

 ous also; (2) the principle of uniformity, when certain phenomena 

 in each series in brain-process and conscious state are essentially 

 associated, then the concomitance of those terms may be looked 

 for on all other occasions; (3) the principle must be a universal 

 one, whenever we find a series of phenomena in either of the 

 parallel trains of events the principle of parallelism has its appli- 

 cation. Structure and function must exist before there can be any 

 disease; the phenomena of life represent the supreme process in 

 animate nature; the phenomena of disease and degeneration ap- 

 pear as the results of discontinuous interferences with the life- 

 processes in which "normal function is acting under abnormal 

 conditions;" the assumption of a "disease-process," or of a "patho- 

 logical process" in the same sense, fails to meet the essential re- 

 quirements of a "process," it is certainly not comparable with 

 the life-process. If we must speak, for convenience, of "patholog- 

 ical process" and "degenerative process," the terms should be 

 used only in a very narrow sense of comparatively transient in- 

 terferences, or in the sense of referring to normal function acting 

 pathologically. 1 



To the inquiring mind the contradictory presentations of these 

 matters is confusing and creates difficulty. The subjects are, in 

 their nature, complex, and our knowledge is limited, but much 

 ambiguity is undoubtedly due to the lack of precision in the state- 

 ment of the terms of the problems. One of the most common ob- 

 stacles to clear thinking appears to arise out of the fact that for 

 every predicate implying action we have to think of an actor, or 

 causative agency, and our minds habitually conceive of some form 

 of personification of such an agent as possessing motor and motive 

 attributes. Thus we think of life and death, and artists picture 

 them, in human forms; we are prone to dualistic conceptions and 

 the mind delights in such paradoxical phrases as, there can be 

 no death without life; no disease without health; no evil with- 

 out good. The use of the active predicate abbreviates expression 



1 The writer's views of the inadequacy and misleading influence of the "dis- 

 ease-process" conception as a question in psychiatry was first presented to the 

 American Medico-Psychological Association at its meeting in Washington in 

 1902, in an unpublished paper on the principles of mental pathology and the 

 nature of mental symptoms. 



