NERVOUS INTEGRATIONS IN MAN 26 1 



it does so essentially by a pure reflex, a geotropic reflex. 

 The erect posture is the normal basis both in ourselves 

 and in the dog for much of all the active reaction to the 

 w^orld that hfe and its behavior demand. Its observance 

 and maintenance are therefore of eminent and fundamental 

 importance to the organism. Maintaining the erect attitude 

 is indeed nothing less than keeping right side up to the 

 world in v^hich it hves. What is the relation of the highest 

 centers, the mental organ proper, to this great basic act of 

 animal hfe of keeping itself right side up? As already stated 

 the animal without its mental organ still stands and walks, 

 runs and even jumps, and further can, if its erect attitude be 

 disturbed, regain it. It is therefore less true to say that the 

 animal under direction of its mind keeps itself right side 

 up than to say that the animal body by automatic mechanism 

 is kept right side up. From the animal's point of view, as a 

 sentient being, for itself to be right side up to the world is, of 

 course, for the world to be right side up to it. In other words, 

 the body's automatism ensures that the mind looking, so to 

 speak, out from the body, finds the world right side up. 

 This relation is maintained by physiological reflex processes 

 seemingly as non-mental as is the digestive secretion of 

 the bile. Hence, this right-side-upness being settled without 

 mind, and indeed prior to mind, and naive mind being, 

 whatever else it is, utilitarian, the situation has not invited 

 and not had consideration from naive mind. Mind has not 

 troubled because it has not needed, so to say, to think about 

 a relation already established and given it from the outset. 

 This enables us therefore to trace how, in the make-up of 

 mind, right-side-upness of the world comes as an innate 

 unargued dictum, an immediate intuition, largely eluding 

 mental analysis because there is wanting direct sense 

 experience of its origin and of its elemental processes, 

 although confusion in mental space results when its elements 

 conflict. William James, with characteristic picturesqueness, 

 wrote that "our prehistoric ancestors discovered the com- 

 mon-sense concepts," among them as he says "one-space." 

 With that latter we may set "world right-side-upness;" 

 but we must date its discovery further back than to our 

 prehistoric ancestors. It is an immediate intuition and must 



