Some years ago, in a Hughlings Jackson lecture, I ventured to give some personal views upon the nature of the relationship of mind to brain. I said nothing original, yet something rather different from what we are accustomed to hear in those popular symposia on the brain-mind relationship, or upon brain mechanisms and consciousness, of which we have had a number of examples in recent years. The views I expressed had the sanction of philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas, and, in a measure, of such physiological geniuses as Hughlings Jackson and Sherrington, but there is little interest in them at the present time in a scientific world still intensely preoccupied with the concepts of cybernetics and biophysics: preoccupied in the sense that some scientists find they cannot easily entertain any concepts which transcend these fragmentary ideas.

How we approach this problem depends largely upon our concept of nature and of natural science. Therefore, I define natural science as being ‘the study of nature as perceived: a study wherein nature is disclosed as a complex of entities whose mutual relations can be thought of and discussed without reference to sense awareness or thought about it’. This is to say that we can be perfectly good natural scientists without bothering our heads about the nature of perceiving, or the theory of knowledge—epistemology, as it is called. This is a complex definition, which I have taken from a great mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead. Its full import will appear later, but in the meantime I wish to point out that nature, that is, the world as perceived, does not comprehend all that the human mind can entertain.

Ease of communications brings all men together: but the contiguity of bodies does not necessarily entail the crossfertilization of minds, and the mere fact that we can now move round the world at incredible speed does not mean that we are any better equipped to appreciate the ideas and cultures of other lands. Indeed it can be argued that the enormous development of the tourist traffic in Europe has done more to emphasize national peculiarities than to promote international good will: mere physical contact between nations does not necessarily lead to better understanding.

That there is need for better understanding, however, few would deny; and it is only since the last war that Europeans have come to realize it. For it is quite certain that the last war put an end to European supremacy for ever; and Europeans, so long the master race, will now have to learn the hard way how to get on on equal terms with peoples they had previously dominated. Moreover, their recent attainment of freedom has given the Asiatics a new self-confidence and a new faith in their ancient civilizations.

Christianity benefited greatly from the imperialist expansion of nominally Christian powers, and Christian missions have made most progress where European political power has been strongest. With the retreat of Europe from imperialism all that has changed, and the newly liberated peoples of Asia see Christianity not so much as a rival religion to be judged according to its own merits as the religion of their late masters who so often seemed to behave in a singularly un-Christian way.

Research scientists and manufacturing chemists lighten many of the burdens of existence, yet sometimes, as when they produce the means for individuals to make love and nothing more, they shift them from body to soul. Only a pill; all the same the weight may prove unsupportable when, leaving behind the world which has been given to us, we launch into another of our own making. The first is a harsh school, exacting recognition of our subordinate place in the scheme of things and acknowledgment of the established rules. Still there are compensations: we can know where we are and where to lay the blame, we can pit ourselves against resistance, we may be broken but at least we have belonged, and to something that was not us. Whereas if we rebel against our limits and adventure according to our merely personal wants, we lose all pattern, for each person as such is an original; we grasp for one shadow after another projected from ourselves, yet, being what we are, we keep our guilt-sense, no longer, however, with an object to prevent it turning morbid. It is as though we have strained to become pure persons and have ceased to be human beings, as though we have set ourselves the goal of absolute freedom and, having reached it, found ourselves empty.

I

Strip ideas and you simplify the opposition between the anarchism which stirs at the root of personality and the subjection to law which is the consequence of having been born into human nature as a specific kind of thing.