l6 BRAIN MECHANISMS AND LEARNING 



designed to represent the demands of the external world, but it also wishes 

 to be a loyal servant to the id, and to draw the id's hbido onto itself. In its 

 attempt to mediate between the id and reality, it is often forced to clothe 

 the unconscious commands of the id with its own preconscious rationaliza- 

 tions, to gloss over the conflicts between the id and reality. 



'On the other hand, its every movement is watched by the severe 

 superego, which holds up certain norms of behaviour without regard to 

 any difficulties coming from the id and the external world; and if these 

 norms are not acted up to, it punishes the ego with feelings of tension 

 which manifest themselves as a sense of inferiority or guilt. In this way, 

 goaded on by the id, hemmed in by the superego, and rebuffed by 

 reality, the ego struggles to cope with its task of reducing the forces and 

 influences which work in it and upon it to some kind of harmony. When 

 the ego is forced to acknowledge its weakness, it breaks out into anxiety; 

 reality anxiety in the face of the external world, normal anxiety in the 

 face of the superego, and neurotic anxiety in the face of the strength of 

 the passions of the id. 



'It can easily be imagined that certain practices of mystics may succeed 

 in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind 

 so that, for example, the perceptual system becomes able to grasp relations 

 in the deeper layers of the ego and in the id which would otherwise be 

 inaccessible to it. Whether such a procedure can put one in possession of 

 ultimate truths, from which all good will flow, may be safely doubted. 

 All the same, we must admit that the therapeutic efforts of psychoanalysis 

 have chosen much the same method of approach; for their object is to 

 strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, to 

 widen its field of vision, and so to extend its organization that it can take 

 over new portions of the id. Where id was, there shall ego be. It is re- 

 clamation work, like the draining of the Zuyder Zee.' 



Spciiar and Darwin. From what has been presented it seems clear that, to 

 their contemporaries, Spencer's ideas of the evolution of the brain and 

 its functions were fully as influential as Darwin's, if not more so. This may 

 be attributable in part to the fact that Spencer applied evolutionary prin- 

 ciples to an understanding of the brain earlier than Darwin and, indeed, 

 before the lattcr's ideas were published at all. Additionally, appeal doubt- 

 less attached to the broad sweep of Spencer's interests and to his efforts to 

 account for the whole range of neural function, from instincts to the most 

 complex features of the mind, in keeping with his propensity for global 

 syntheses. 



Darwin, by contrast, stuck closer to the observational data then 



