524i THE EVOLUTION OF MIND 



than of the purely physiological modus operandi involved 

 in the attainment of the control." 



^' My mind to me a kingdom is," and to many men the 

 inner life of contemplation, imagination, sesthetic emotion, 

 hard thinking, and the like, is the real life. In everyday 

 human life we see evidence of the efficiency of mind when a 

 man copes with novel difficulties, when he anticipates a 

 rarely occurring risk, when of set purpose he correlates his 

 acts and those of others towards a distant end, when affec- 

 tive states (such as joy) exert a demonstrable influence on 

 the functions of the body. We should not spend time in 

 making such obvious remarks, were it not for the activity 

 of the hard-headed mechanists, who write, for instance, thus : 

 " So until the opposite can be proved we must accept the 

 proposition that also human intelligence comprises no psy- 

 chical factor, and that it has arisen phylogenetically through 

 continual transformation and refinement of physico-chemical 

 nerve-processes." 



It is interesting to notice the growing tendency to recognise 

 both physiological and psychological factors in the chain of 

 causation of mental and nervous disorders. Thus Dr. 

 Bernard Hart writes (1918, p. 16) : " We have, indeed, 

 reached the paradoxical conclusion that, while in many 

 ^ mental ' disorders mental factors play only a minor part 

 amongst the causes which have produced them, in ^ nervous ^ 

 disorders these mental factors are of fundamental signifi- 

 cance. . . . The conviction that in the so-called nervous 

 disorders the predominant part is played by mental causes 

 has been steadily growing during the forty years which have 

 elapsed since the work of Charcot, and has been greatly 

 strengthened by the experience given to us by the war." 



