118 WARFARE IN THE HUMAN BODY 



text-books show. In things " psychological " there are 

 few physiologists who have not welcomed Pavlov's " condi- 

 tioned reflexes." By their considered use mysterious and 

 misleading words, with a hundred different meanings, may 

 be avoided. " Consciousness " itself, that Pandora's box of 

 scientific, no less than metaphysical, disaster, at last gives 

 way, and discloses itself as reflex adaptational machinery. 

 It is time that the word inhibition should yield to the 

 same key, for positive reflexes, however conditioned and 

 complex, which should be capable of resolution into 

 physical reactions, obviously rule living action of all 

 kinds. Certainly in physiology we have not yet reached 

 ultimate postulates or axioms, and no hypothesis should 

 include definite contradictions, especially when we have 

 to say " whatever it essentially may be." 



In looking for explanation the human " mind " searches 

 for rest : the brain seeks automatically for the shorter paths 

 of cerebral activity that we call generalizations. There is 

 something profoundly satisfying in such processes, and they 

 can certainly be ranged under the laws of energetics. The 

 brain has less work to do, and a complex series of opening 

 and closing synapses is freed from continual irritation. 

 The flood of " thought," or energy, has found a short direct 

 channel, while all other possible paths are cut out. They 

 are, in fact, "inhibited"; synapses close; energy does 

 not act that way. Such a view by no means implies an 

 acceptance of M'Dougall's " drainage " theory of inhibition, 

 although something can be said for it. All it means is that 

 there is substituted action. It is probably so in every case 

 of inhibition. On a previous page I sought for some homely 

 illustrations and analogies for cardiac vagal action. These 

 can also be found for the phenomena in which lessened 

 action takes place in other muscles than those of the heart. 



