MONISM 



rational science of healing, are grounded now on the 

 safe methods of physics and chemistry and a thorough 

 knowledge of the human organism. Disease is no long- 

 er regarded as a special entity that comes on the body 

 like an evil spirit or mysterious organism, but is con- 

 ceived as a baneful disturbance of its normal activity. 

 Pathology is only a branch of physiology ; it studies the 

 changes that take place in the tissues and cells under 

 abnormal and dangerous conditions. When the causes 

 of these changes are poisons or foreign organisms (such 

 as bacteria or amcebas), the art of healing has to re- 

 move them and restore the normal equilibrium of the 

 functions. 



The science of mental disease is a special branch of 

 medicine; it has the same relation to it as psychology 

 has to physiology. However, as pathological psychology 

 it deserves special consideration, not only on account of 

 its extreme practical importance, but also because of its 

 theoretical interest. The misleading dualist idea of 

 body and soul that has perverted our notions of mental 

 life from the. oldest times has led people to regard men- 

 tal disorders as special phenomena, at one time directly 

 as evil spirits that enter from without into the human 

 body, at another time as mysterious dynamic occur- 

 rences affecting the mystic being of the soul (indepen- 

 dently of the body) . These dualistic and still wide-spread 

 and mischievous errors have caused the most fatal mis- 

 takes in the treatment of mental disease ; they have had 

 the most unfortunate effect on juristic and social and 

 other aspects of practical life. But the ground has been 

 cut from under these irrational and superstitious ideas 

 by modern psychiatry, which regards all mental disease 

 as a disorder of the brain, and traces it to changes in 

 the cortex that lie at the root of all psychoses (delusions, 

 lunacy, etc.). As we call this central organ of mind the 

 phronema, we may say: Psychiatry is the pathology 



463 



