CONSCIOUSNESS AS A VITAL FUNCTION 297 



may perhaps have traveled by very different sorts of 

 conveyances. 



It follows that we can attain satisfactory under- 

 standing of any natural phenomenon only by a syn- 

 thesis of its end-result, the processes in their entirety 

 by which this end was reached, and the structural 

 mechanisms which serve as the vehicles of these 

 processes. This is the scientific method. 



To conceive that conscious processes are truly 

 functions of the bodies with which they are always 

 associated is the simplest and indeed the only way in 

 which they can be articulated with the general sum 

 of scientific knowledge. And if our insight were not 

 clouded by mischievous metaphysical traditions we 

 should find that the problems concerning the relation 

 of mind and body offer no difficulties which are funda- 

 mentally different from those regarding the relation 

 of any organ and its function, of any object and its 

 properties. The body-mind problem, then, resolves 

 itself into an inquiry into the peculiarities of this re- 

 lationship, its mechanism and modus operandi. 



These are philosophic questions which the man of 

 science of today may very properly lay aside as out- 

 side the field of his interest. On the other hand, the 

 experience of several thousand ye,ars of rather fruitless 

 argumentation suggests that future progress is most 

 likely to come through the accumulation by scientific 

 inquiry of further experiential data, facts which per- 

 mit a reformiulation of the problem along new lines. 



