THE STUDY OF NEUROLOGY 237 



right to consider it as representing a condition which anatomy need 

 not take into account. Mental action is, in every sense, a real force, 

 standing on the same plane with the other forces which we regard 

 as more familiar, and as such it is capable of influencing the nutrition 

 of the body. It is only by evasions and subterfuges that we can deny 

 the reciprocal relationship between bodily processes and mental 

 states. Both of them are manifestations of energy, and there must be 

 some denominator common to them both. Between death from a 

 bullet that traverses the brain and death from an emotional shock, 

 the difference is one solely of detail. When any disorder such as we 

 should be inclined to call functional is hostile to the fundamental 

 interests of the organism, it leads at once to manifest disorders of the 

 nutrition. Not only is this true of depressive emotions, but even of 

 excessive intellectual preoccupations, as when Dante said, "My great 

 work has made me lean." This datum of common observation is 

 receiving, more and more, the solid indorsement of scientific thought. 

 Thus, Ostwald * dwells upon the fact that mental operations of a 

 pleasurable sort directly favor nutrition and the normal flow of chem- 

 ical energy, while those of a painful sort interfere with nutrition and 

 hinder the flow of chemical energy. 



At both these latter points the barrier between the functional and 

 the organic is broken down. As a matter of fact, this barrier does not 

 by right exist, and we should not be tempted to use the terms "func- 

 tional" and "organic" as applied to disease at all were it not for two 

 reasons, the first being the convenience of the custom, the second 

 that there are many conditions which we recognize as being on the 

 whole hostile to most of the interest of the organism and which we 

 therefore feel justified in classifying as disease, yet where the dis- 

 order is not adapted for anatomical expression. If we adopted, as we 

 should, the conception defended by the clear-minded philosopher and 

 scientist (Ostwald), that the organism is a fabric built up, not of 

 atoms, but of energies, we should never draw these unscientific 

 distinctions between "function" and "structure," or "symptoma- 

 tology" and "anatomical expression," as standing for fundamentally 

 different and contradictory conceptions, or as affording the one a 

 truer and the other a less true method of approaching the study of 

 disease, but we should admit that the data gathered under these 

 different headings stand upon the same plane as regards their admis- 

 sibility as evidence. The data furnished by the study of symptoms, 

 which in the case of the so-called functional disorders constitute all 

 the evidence at our command, are data of a physiologic sort, and 

 throw light rather on the reactions of the organisms than on the 

 direct effects of the primary lesion. For this reason they are not sus- 

 ceptible to discovery by anatomic means. 



1 Philosophic der Natur. 



