BIOPSYCHOLOGICAL 655 



There is no scientific test for mind; we can only argue that the 

 description of the animal's behaviour in a particular case is not good 

 sense if we leave "mind" out. The attempt to treat animals apsychi- 

 cally does not work either in theory or in practice. We do not make 

 the most or the best of our horse or our dog on an apsychic theory, 

 and we certainly do not understand it in all its behaviour. To 

 suppose that mind does not count in man is an obvious absurdity, 

 though it must be admitted that we have in the past under-appre- 

 ciated such factors as hormones and the Unconscious. And if it be 

 maintained that man is the only organism in whose behaviour 

 mind counts, then we are making him, if we are evolutionists, a 

 very quaint mental Melchisedek. 



It is difficult to take very seriously the extreme view of man 

 as a machine, I'homme machine, a machine with an intermittent 

 safety-valve whistle, called mind, which is all sound, signifying 

 nothing; and the extreme behaviourist view lands us in this absur- 

 dity. No doubt reflexes, tropisms, habituations, and enregistrations 

 in the body count for much; it is part of Nature's tactics to autom- 

 atise. This automatisation is justified by its everyday ready-made 

 efficiency, and also because in many cases it leaves the higher 

 faculties more free for initiative. No doubt the ductless or endocrinal 

 glands, such as thyroid, suprarenal, and pituitary, count for much; 

 but it is a gross exaggeration to speak of them as determining the 

 personality. No doubt the mind sometimes suffers from being 

 immersed in an unsound body, yet how many invalids have proved 

 that mind may be victorious over a sea of troubles ! Is man going to 

 surrender his birthright of making his psychic MiND-body transcend 

 his organic BoDY-mind? 



We are told by a physiological authority that man is an "adaptive 

 mechanism", which has among its functions "the fabrication of 

 thought", including, of course, the mechanistic theory. But a 

 machine cannot have a theory that it is a machine. 



In connection with the autonomy of mind we wish to say a little 

 in regard to the repercussion of evolving mind on evolving body. 

 We know something of the mind's influence on the body in the 

 individual life-history, not only in everyday reactions, as when 

 emotion thrills the whole body through the endocrinal or hormonic 

 system, but in subtle cases, as when "her temple face is chiselled 

 from within". But let us think of this also in regard to evolution. 

 The individual mind — an aspect of the reality we call life — reacts 

 continually on the individual body, and makes it possible for the 

 organism to play more effectively the structural peculiarities in its 

 hand of hereditary cards. This is one of the ways in which mind 

 works as a vera causa, not only in individual development, but in 

 racial evolution. 



