352 



SCIENCE 



[Vol. LVI, No. 1448 



attitudes as well as bodily? Is it mere analogy 

 to lUven the warped attitude of the mind in a 

 psychoneurotic sufferer to the warped attitude 

 of the body constrained by an internal poten- 

 tial pain? Again, some mental events seem 

 spontaneous; in the nervous system some im- 

 pulses seem generated automaticallj' from 

 within. 



It may be said of all these similarities of 

 time-relation and the rest between the ways of 

 the nervous system and such simpler ways of 

 mind as I here venture on, that they exist be- 

 cause the operations of the mental part of the 

 nervous system communicate with the exterior 

 only through the non-mental part as gateway, 

 and that there the features of the nerve- 

 machinery are impressed on the mind's work- 

 ing. But that suggestion does not take into 

 account the fact that the higher and more com- 

 plex the mental process, the longer the time- 

 lag, the more incident the fatigue, the more 

 striking the memory character, and so on. 



All this similarity does but render more suc- 

 cinct the old enigma as to the nexus between 

 nerve impulse and mental event. In the proof 

 that the working of the animal mechanism con- 

 forms with the first law of thermodynamics is 

 it possible to say that psychical events are 

 evaluated in the balance sheet drawn up? On 

 the other hand, Mr. Barcroft and his fellow- 

 observers in their recent physiological explora- 

 tion of life on the Andes at 14,200 feet noted 

 that their arithmetic as well as their muscles 

 were at a disadvantage; the low oxygen pres- 

 sure mUitated against both. Indeed, we all 

 know that a few minutes without oxygen, or 

 few more with chloroform, and the psychical 

 and the nervous events will lapse together. The 

 nexus between the two sets of events is strict, 

 but for comprehension of its nature we still 

 require, it seems, comprehension of the un- 

 solved mystery of the "how" of life itself. A 

 shadowy bridge between them may lie perhaps 

 in the reflection that for the observer himself 

 the phj'sical phenomena he observes are in the 

 last resort psychical. 



The practical man has to accept nervous 

 function as a condition for mental function 

 without concerning himself about ignorance of 

 their connection. We know that with struc- 



tural derangement or destruction of certain 

 parts of the brain goes mental derangement or 

 defect, while derangement or destruction of 

 other parts of the nervous system is not so ac- 

 companied. Decade by decade the connection 

 between certain mental performances and cer- 

 tain cerebral regions becomes more definite. 

 Certain impairments of ideation as shown by 

 forms of incomprehension of language or of 

 familiar objects can help to diagnose for the 

 surgeon that part of the brain which is being 

 compressed by a tumor, and the tumor gone the 

 mental disabilities pass. Similarly those who, 

 like Professor Elliot Smith and Sir Arthur 

 Keith, recast the shajse of the cerebrum from 

 the cranial remains of prehistoric man, can out- 

 line for us something of his mentality from 

 examination of the relative development of the 

 several brain regions, using a true and scien- 

 tific phrenology. 



Could we look quite naively at the question 

 of a seat for the mind within the body we might 

 perhaps suppose it diffused there, not localized 

 in any one particular part at all. That it is 

 localized and that its localization is in the ner- 

 vous system — can we attach meaning to that 

 fact? The nervous system is that bodily sys- 

 tem the special office of which, from its earliest 

 appearance onVard throughout evoliitionary 

 history, has been more and more to weld to- 

 gether the bodv's component parts into one con- 

 solidated mechanism reacting as a unity to the 

 changeful world about it. More than any 

 other system it has constructed out of a collec- 

 tion of organs an individual of unified act and 

 experience. It represents the acme of accom- 

 plishment of the integration of the animal or- 

 ganism. That it is in this system that mind, 

 as we know it, has had its beginning, and with 

 the progressive development of the system has 

 developed step for step, is surely significant. 

 So it is that the portion in this system to which 

 mind transcendently attaches is exactly that 

 where are carried to their highest pitch the 

 nerve-actions which manage the individual' as 

 a whole, especially in his reactions to the ex- 

 ternal v/orld. There, in the brain, the inte- 

 grating nervous centers are themselves further 

 compounded, inter-connected, and re-combined 

 for unitary functions. The cortex of the fore- 



