242 THE PROBLEM OF BODY AND MIND 



brain serves simply to translate a small part of what goes 

 on in mind, then personality is not permanently tethered 

 to protoplasm. 



The animist need not occupy the extreme position that 

 the body is but an instrument on which the mind plays. 

 Wiser and truer is the view that through the body the mind 

 is educated, disciplined, and enriched. As Aliotta puts it, 

 " The body is not something with which the mind can dis- 

 pense, it is not the forbidding prison which the Platonists 

 depicted in such gloomy colours, it is no torture-chamber in 

 which mind is doomed to expiate some mysterious crime, 

 but rather the fertile soil in which alone the plant of spirit- 

 uality can develop and blossom." 



Among the advantages of animism we recognise (1) its 

 emphasis on the supremacy and efficiency of what we call 

 mind or spirit; (2) that it nevertheless faces the fundamen- 

 tal and all-pervading fact of body; (3) that its idea of inter- 

 action or reciprocal influence, though perhaps inconceivable, 

 is a good working hypothesis, fitting many familiar facts; 

 and (4) that it is congruent with that attractive and opti- 

 mistic view of the world which assures us of the conserva- 

 tion of values. A spirited and scholarly defence of Animism 

 has been furnished by Dr. W. MacDougall in his book on 

 Body and Mind. 



Difficulties in the Way of Animism. All the statements 

 that have been proposed of the body and mind puzzle have 

 their particular difficulties, and they are not awanting in 

 the case of animism. 



(a) The whole trend of science is to emphasise the influ- 

 ence of the bodily life on the thought-life, and although we 

 are told that this only means that the soul cannot realise 

 itself except in co-operating with its partner the body, we 





