358 The Outline of Science 



12 

 Mind and Body 



Before we leave the subject of this article a further word 

 should be said. 



The comparison of the body to an engine is very useful, but 

 it is more than a little apt to lead us astray. For the body is living, 

 and in higher animals, at least, there is a "mind" that counts. No 

 one has succeeded in making clear the relation between mind and 

 body, if there be a relation, but what we are sure of is that there 

 are two aspects, two sides to the shield, the mental and the bodily. 

 Just as a dome has its inner concave and its outer convex curve, 

 inseparable from one another, two aspects of the same thing, so 

 the living creature is a feeling, remembering, willing, and some- 

 times thinking being, just as really and truly as it is a feeding, 

 moving, storing, and energy-transforming system. On the one 

 side there is "mind," probably present even when it is not ap- 

 parent to the observer; on the other side there is the routine of 

 chemical processes which we call metabolism. Sometimes the 

 living creature is more of a body-mind, sometimes more of a mind- 

 body. We cannot solve the riddle: the mental or subjective and 

 the bodily or objective activity are bound together in one. What 

 we are quite sure of is that the ideal for the organism is a healthy 

 body at the service of a healthy mind. Let us take an illustration 

 of the influence of mind on body. 



Emotions and Digestion 



The famous physiologist of Petrograd, Professor Ivan Pet- 

 rovitch Pavlov, was the first to demonstrate the influence of the 

 emotions on the health of the system. Everyone knows that a 

 good circulation and a good digestion make for cheerfulness, but 

 the converse is also true. "A merry heart is the life of the flesh." 

 The researches of Pavlov, Cannon, Carlson, and Crile have made 

 it quite clear that pleasant emotions favour the secretion of the 



