RATS AND MEN 361 



very real factors in human behavior. They are under 

 personal control and social control, like all other vital 

 processes. And this control is of a different order from 

 that seen in an ant hill or a rat hole. The mechanist 

 regards all vital functions as causally related with 

 simpler inorganic processes; but they are not identical 

 with these latter, for in living substance the physico- 

 chemical processes are combined in patterns not 

 found elsewhere (p. 287). Similarly, certain functions 

 of the cerebral cortex are in causal relationship with 

 simpler physiological processes; but these latter are 

 here organized in distinctive patterns, one of whose 

 characteristics is the presence of an awareness while 

 these events are in process. And when this awareness 

 attains the level of human self-consciousness with 

 capacity for symbolic thinking and the idealization 

 and socialization of experience, in the present state of 

 our knowledge it is futile to try to formulate these 

 recondite cortical processes in terms of any known 

 patterns of elementary mechanism. We know these 

 processes as personal experience, and we can observe 

 their effects as objective behavior, but what they are 

 remains obscure. 



Despite these limitations, one does not feel justi- 

 fied either to ignore the introspectively known experi- 

 ence which he undoubtedly has or to set it aside as for- 

 ever inaccessible by the scientific method. As a nat- 

 uralist, 1 decline to sell out my most precious birth- 

 right — namely, the right to live biologically a whole 



