280 PSYCHIATRY 



"tendencies are in the opposite direction, but they seem to be coin- 

 cident results of the same vital condition." 



In the many well-known conditions of constitutional weakness 

 and instability it is easy to understand the nutritional failure to 

 develop normal growth and efficiency of function, or to maintain 

 them, and the consequent recession of the developmental pro- 

 cesses, even to the cessation of life. The doctrine of dissolution 

 as characterizing the many conditions of such recessions is clearly 

 consistent. When biological conceptions are invoked, it is also 

 easy to comprehend the general principles of development whereby, 

 through physiological reactions of the organism, there are adapt- 

 ations and modifications of characters due to changes of environ- 

 ment and favorable to life and health ; it is intelligible that through 

 use higher types of characters may be produced, or through dis- 

 use recessions to more primitive types, under the causative influ- 

 ences of the environment, and all this may be within the physio- 

 logical limits of the organism as expressions of the processes of 

 life. In the domain of biology it is, no doubt, helpful for descrip- 

 tive purposes to conceive of the developmental forces as acting 

 in an inverse direction, producing the effects of reversals and re- 

 gressions. But when this latter conception is applied to patho- 

 logical conditions, it is in harmony with our prevailing modes of 

 thought in medicine that there is conceived to be an attack, as 

 of some harmful agency, upon the living organism; a pathological 

 process of degeneration is supposed to ensue which is a regressive 

 process of decay, and this implies its active going backward against 

 the normal tendency of the nutritional energy to maintain life 

 and growth. As a further explaining principle the conditions of 

 acquired or inherited defect are conceived, and a process of de- 

 generation of which "heredity" is the motive force; thus the de- 

 velopmental forces turn against themselves, and, working in the 

 inverse direction, produce decay. It is the all-pervading disposi- 

 tion to seek an immediate cause for every effect, and it is easy to 

 describe agencies and processes. When the stamp of "degeneracy" 

 is fixed upon a fated organism we commonly think of its possessor 

 as a "degenerate" descending to inevitable doom. 



Is it not evident that there is a misleading ambiguity in the pre- 

 vailing usage of the conception of "processes"? It is necessary 

 to the notion of a process that there is a passing over of one set 

 of phenomena into another, and this constitutes a change. 1 A 

 "process" is constituted of a series of such changes when one stage 

 or aspect of the process necessarily succeeds upon another. The 

 action of a causative force or stimulus is essential to the change, 

 as in the biological processes. The requirements of the concep- 

 1 Baldwin, J. M., Development and Evolution, 1902. 



