HIGHER FUNCTIONS: ANATOMICAL BASIS 105 



one-sided development. Again, there are otliers whose 

 intellectual mind is particularly well developed, but whose 

 conceptions of conduct and of conscience are distinctly 

 below the average. Disease may apparently affect these 

 two qualities separately, and I imagine that advances in 

 knowledge are likely to be made only by attacking the 

 problem along these lines. 



The views of Charles Mercier have been vividly ex- 

 pressed to the medical profession, but apparently they 

 have been but little comprehended. " Alienists still 

 deny that insanity is disorder of conduct, though they 

 witness such disorder in every case of insanity that comes 

 before them; they still declare that disorder of mind is 

 insanity, in the face of many mental disorders in which 

 not a trace of insanity can be found " (Mercier). Most 

 physicians are familiar with the patient whose abnormal 

 conduct demands his confinement within the walls of an 

 asylum, but whose intellect would be envied by many 

 whose conduct fits them to live without those walls. 

 Equally familiar is the patient whose intellectual estima- 

 tion of the abnormalities of conduct displayed by his 

 fellow-inmates is perfectly sound, but whose own conduct 

 is possibly even more abnormal than that which he 

 criticizes adversely in others. On the other hand, the 

 conduct of an individual in w^hom damage of an associa- 

 tion area prevents his intellectual mind from finding the 

 least meaning in the spoken words of his fenoA\-men may 

 be perfect. 



Should reason and intelligence be the outcome of the 

 perfection of cortical representations of the several senses 

 and the development of ample association areas, and 

 should the formation of higher ideals of conduct ])e a 

 concomitant phenomenon dependent upon the develop- 

 ment of a prefrontal association area, then the rise of 

 these things may be followed (by the ordinary methods 

 of the anatomist and physiologist) in the elaborating 

 cerebral hemispheres of the arboreal stock, which cul- 

 minates in Man. 



