PSYCHIATRY IN THE FUNCTIONAL PSYCHOSES 279 



logically, an evolutional reversal commencing in the structures 

 latest developed. 



In the extensive literature concerning the life-processes and their 

 failure in disease and senility other diverging views may be cited, 

 but the purpose here is only to indicate certain ideas and reasonings 

 that bear upon the pathological conceptions with which psychiatry 

 has had to labor. With respect to physiological old age ending in 

 natural death the contending view is that the decline of life manifests 

 the summation of the effects of external injuries, the damage of wear 

 and waste, and is not something different and apart from disease. It 

 is to be noted in the doctrine of necrobiosis that the idea of a "disease- 

 entity," with its course and process parallel and antagonistic to the 

 life-process, is avoided by conceiving life or the life-principle as the 

 sole producer of two series of developmental processes, one of which 

 leads to its end-result in the existence of normal being; this life- 

 process is also conceived as turning against itself in another process 

 of producing a series of decrements that reaches to the end-result of 

 non-existence. One result must exclude the other, and we admit that 

 death is the common goal ; the life of every living thing ends in death 

 and there is only one end-result, death is developed out of life. 

 But by shifting the position to the larger view the attempt is to set 

 up a dual conception of two processes, equal, parallel, antagonistic, 

 yet conjoined. The truth is that the whole of life comprehends all 

 living nature; the individual parts that bloom, fructify, and perish, 

 and the fragments chipped and sloughed off from the great embodi- 

 ment of life in matter, are always dying or dead, but the one chief 

 process of life goes on, and we say that life is developed out of death. 

 The minor casualties of injury and disease represent the chance 

 encounters of living substance in its struggle for existence with the 

 discontinuous opposing forces of the world of living and material 

 things. Living substance dies, but life is immortal. We may describe, 

 in such figures of speech, the dual developmental processes with their 

 contrasting end-results. 



The paradox of the " processes" appears also in the application 

 of the doctrine of abiotrophy which, of itself, helps to make clearer 

 the terms of the problem by the conception of a failure of nutri- 

 tional energy with a consequent limitation of the durability of 

 the organism and of the length of life. In applying this doctrine 

 to certain pathological changes it is said that the overgrowth of 

 interstitial neuroglial tissue, when the nerve elements decay, is 

 in consequence of the fact that the two elements have "a com- 

 mon but inverse vitality;" when the nutritional energy fails to 

 maintain the growth of both, the more highly specialized tissue 

 ceases to live, while the less specialized tends to overgrow with 

 the tendency of the former to decay. It is explained that these 



