282 PSYCHIATRY 



and enlivens speech. Professor Sanford, 1 discussing the influence 

 of physics on psychology, notes the fact that, as the result of man's 

 long primitive practice, his habits of thought are objective, and 

 the language he uses is saturated with physical connotations and 

 metaphors. It is not easy for even the best of us, he says, to keep 

 clear of this inveterate physical-mindedness and the subtle sug- 

 gestions of language; we help out our thinking by material figures 

 and feel a sort of dumb compulsion to make our psychological 

 theories accord with physical requirements. Ebbinghaus is quoted 

 as describing the older psychology as distinctly "mechanistic," 

 many analogies from familiar material processes being used in the 

 exposition of mental phenomena. In regard to essentials, Professor 

 Sanford thinks it may be said that psychology has outgrown this 

 method. But turning to our own field of the medical sciences, the 

 ruling tendency of our thought and language leads to the concep- 

 tions of "disease" and "process," for example, in terms implying 

 immediate causative agents. The familiar conceptions of a pro- 

 cess of anabolism and a contending process of katabolism in the 

 cell are treated as the analogues of the life-process and death-pro- 

 cess. The analogy is extended to include in this conception the 

 fact that in the whole compound organism the anabolic processes 

 overbalance the katabolic till middle life, when the two processes 

 are more nearly in equilibrium, and that thereafter katabolism 

 predominates more and more in the normal decline of old age. It 

 is held that in the broadest sense the process of senescence begins 

 with the beginning of life in a progressive diminution of the power 

 of growth; and with the progressive waning of the vital powers 

 the leading somatic changes accompanying old age are atrophic 

 and degenerative. The same conception concerning the anabolic 

 and katabolic processes is equally legitimate concerning the idea 

 that an inherent tendency to degeneration is transmissible; the 

 inherited constitutional weakness and diminution of vitality may 

 be interpreted as belonging to the series of changes which imply 

 a process of dying continuing through several generations. 



There appears through all these reasonings the prevailing method 

 of thinking in terms of "processes." The inquirer is moved to ask 

 whether the normal processes of anabolism and katabolism are 

 not both essential to the maintenance of a health-perfect cell and 

 both, therefore, parts of the normal life-process? We do not think 

 of the most healthily active cell as one most vigorously dying. If 

 we consider the physico-chemical changes in the cell inclusively 

 as a process of metabolism, it is consistent to think of the normal 

 building-up and breaking-down of complex compounds in growth, 

 vvork, and repair as harmonious, and not antagonistic, operations. 

 1 Sanford, E. C., Psychology and Physics, The Psych. Rev., vol. x, 1903. 



