230 THE PROBLEM OF BODY AND MIND 



^' The mind is somehow a mid-term receiving messages from 

 the object in the external world and issuing messages to the 

 organs concerned in behaving appropriately to that object. 

 Whenever the mind is thus effective in guidance we have 

 what we called ahc-ipYOcess. The distinguishing feature in 

 such guidance is a context of meaning within a sphere of 

 interest." Using the term mind in this sense, we have to 

 consider its relation to the processes that go on in the cortex 

 of the brain, and, anticipating our subsequent discussion, 

 we may say that there are two main views. " According 

 to the first there are two radically distinct and wholly dis- 

 parate orders of being — the mental order and the physical 

 order," which interact. ^' According to the second there 

 is only one order within which there are distinguishable 

 types of relatedness and of process, e.g., physical, physio- 

 logical, and psychical. Any given term may be coincidentally 

 related to other terms in these severally distinguishable ways. 

 This is the a&c-interpretation already suggested." On the 

 second view the c process is always correlated with ah 

 processes ; on the first view the c process is independent of 

 any physiological correlate. 



§ 2. What Must Be Recognised from the Biological Side. 



It is possible, as we have seen, to apply to a living body 

 many of the methods of chemistry and physics, and to give 

 chemical and physical descriptions of isolated observed 

 processes. The more that is done, the more will the distinc- 

 tively vital stand out in relief. If it can be shown that the 

 balsam's jerking out of its seeds admits of complete mechani- 

 cal description in terms of tensions, elasticity, and the like 

 the more obvious will be the distinctively vital factor in 

 the sundew's fly-catching successes. But no adequate chem- 



