292 BRAINS OF RATS AND MEN 



sanity can be brought into line with general pathol- 

 ogy. Dr. Ford Robertson (1920) remarks that it has 

 been laid down by psychologists that there is no evi- 

 dence to support the position that mind is a function 

 of the nerve fibers and nerve cells. He says: 



On the contrary, it seems to me that there is no definite 

 evidence of its being anything else; indeed, the view that mind is 

 an expression of the functional activity of the brain, or, more 

 strictly, of the association centers, instead of being absurd, is 

 supported by a mass of anatomical, physiological, and patho- 

 logical evidence that the psychologists are either unaware of or 

 are incapable of interpreting correctly. 



The mental processes and their organs, like the 

 muscular and conducting processes, have grown up in 

 individual and racial development gradually and 

 naturally. They do not arise from nothing, nor are 

 they injected into the sequence of natural events from 

 an external non-physical or metaphysical realm. 



The natural causal sequence in thinking is un- 

 broken. The causes of my present mental processes 

 are to be sought in previous natural processes, some 

 strictly physiological, some also perhaps introspec- 

 tively experienced. The results of the mental process 

 again may be other mental processes, as when I 

 "make up my mind" to clear farm land of forest; 

 some physiological, as when I am swinging the ax; 

 some the ensuing alterations of the face of external 

 nature. The mental act is as necessary a Hnk in this 

 causal sequence as are the physiological processes of 



