NOTE ON THE RELATION BETWEEN MIND AND 



BODY. 



By Prof. Thomas M. Forsyth^ M.A., D.Phil. 



At the Pretoria meeting of the Association in 191 5 an inter- 

 esting paper was read in Section D on " The Relation of Body 

 and Mind." The paper was written by the Right Rev. Dr. 

 Chandler, Bishop of Bloenifontein,* and was originally delivered 

 as the Presidential Address to the Orange Free State Branch of 

 the Association. During the discussion that followed this ad- 

 dress, I made some remarks on the subject which I have always 

 wanted to elaborate a little. 



The Bishop's conclusion was that, instead of a complete dual- 

 ism of body and mind, or a complete unification of them without 

 due distinction, whether in terms of materialism or of mentalism, 

 we must substitute the conception that mind and body are related 

 to each other as the whole and the parts, or as life and mechanism, 

 and that each is moulded or modified through its union with the 

 other. It is with a view to the furtiier elucidation of this concep- 

 tion, especially the aspect of it that is expressed in terms of the 

 distinction between life and mechanism, that the following brief 

 note has been written. 



The conception of interaction or mutual influence 1)etween 

 mind and body, so long as these are regarded as utterly disparate 

 realities, is, when thought out, seen to be a meaningless assertion. 

 Yet recent psycholog>^ tends to return to interactionism in some 

 form as the only possible solution of the problem. 



Materialism — the theory that material processes condition 

 consciousness but are not themselves modified or influenced by 

 anything else than material process, and that consciousness is only 

 a spectator of events and not an actor in them — fails to explain 

 adequately the place of interest, selection, purpose, endeavour in 

 the individual life. Mentalism or psychism — the theory that mat- 

 ter is only an appearance to mind — fails to explain sufficiently the 

 difference between mind and matter, and how matter limits the 

 manifestation of mind and the action of mind upon mind. 

 Lastly, psychophysical parallelism — the theory that mind and Ijody 

 are aspects, subjective and objective, or inner and outer, of the 

 same reality — leaves the two aspects, the inward feeling and 

 striving and the outward mechanical process, side by side with 

 each other without uniting them in terms of actual experience. 

 Each of these theories is doubtless part of the truth, and with 

 sufficient supplementation would yield the whole truth. But 



already we seem able, by utilizing results and conceptions that 

 are prominent in a good deal of present-day psychology and phil- 

 osophy, to get a mode of statement that combines in some mea- 

 sure the truth of all of them, and at the same time gives inter- 

 actionism a real meaning. 



*Rept. S-A. Ass. for Adv. of Sc. : Pretoria ( 1915), 280. 

 A 



