WHAT WE DO WITH OUR BRAINS 15 



organs of overt behavior — viscera, muscles, larynx, 

 etc. — bulk larger in the writings of some of these new 

 psychologists than does the cerebral cortex, and we 

 are back to about the same fundamental physiological 

 point of view as that of King Solomon already 

 quoted. 



But are we scientifically justified in treating the 

 conscious side of human life as a by-product, an 

 epiphenomenon, or a parallel phenomenon that can 

 be ignored in either a critical or a common-sense view 

 of living? It is true that so far most philosophers and 

 introspective psychologists have signally failed to 

 knit their accounts of the conscious processes into the 

 general scheme of life as the biologist must view it. 

 This is probably due to preconceptions of some sort 

 or other which are incompatible with a unified 

 scientific treatment of the problem. 



Let us start anew with a different set of pre- 

 conceptions, with a working hypothesis which is 

 mechanistic throughout and therefore presumably 

 acceptable to those who follow rigorously the scientific 

 method. In the past, consciousness has usually been 

 treated as a thing apart, not causally related with 

 bodily processes. This promptly leads off into 

 mysticism where science cannot follow, for the 

 scientific method of today postulates a single order 

 of nature, a unitary cosmos, not a dualistic or 

 pluralistic universe. 



But consciousness is not mystical unless we choose 



