has had interest for us, however, we do not forget, if we are normal, however much we should like to. The unpleasant fact stands out in retrospect, or is brought to mind by present association; we cannot escape it, as we can escape from objects. Ça y est; ça y reste. Coelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt.

So much for the normal individual. The abnormal has another way of dealing with past unpleasant experience, the fabled manner of the ostrich. If there is anything he is interested to "forget," he "forgets" it. He is really remembering to ignore it, like the wise chick. In his retrospects he develops a blind spot for this particular experience. (It is probable we all do it.) We call in the Second Law, which normally should have no jurisdiction in the world of ideal experience, to keep us unconscious of what is tending "towards consciousness" through the operation of the First Law, to inhibit a reaction which would otherwise occur. (The occurrence of an idea is a reaction.)

The most typical cases perhaps are those referring to sexual matters. These matters have a primary interest for all, while a prohibition attaches to them secondarily. The natural man is interested in sexual matters; the conventional man is interested to ignore what interests him as a natural man.

The simple repression is just a blind spot in an individual's ideal world, a negative hallucination. But there is another way than the ostrich's of dealing with unviable ideas. We may either be blind to what we would not see, or we may look at something else. The disputant, whose opponent's meaning is ambiguous in form, if not in fact, is at liberty to choose the meaning which best suits himself,-"tis a law in disputation."

Consider now the ease with which objects are "associated." Do we not often find it difficult to say how an idea "came into our head,” and discover, after much searching and perhaps retraversing, in fact or in imagination, our recent sense-experience, that a certain part of that sense-experience had suggested to us, not the idea of the particular sense-object presented, but the idea of an associated object? We had looked at A and thought of B, and A had never been explicitly in consciousness at all. And this too when we had no interest in ignoring A as far as we can see. Now let A be an idea in which the individual (1) is primarily interested (First Law), and which (2) he is interested to ignore, as an unpleasant idea (Second Law). The first condition determines the recurrence of the tendency A; the second inhibits A and thus allows the substitution of B. B becomes an obsessive idea. (Freudians will

note that this is "pure Freud," with the substitution of my First Law for libido and my Second for the censorship.)

An obsessive idea is a phenomenon quite analogous to the case of shell-shock. We can convert each into terms of the other, and say either that the abnormal bodily reactions of the shell-shock patient are physiological "obsessions," or that the obsessive idea is as physiological a reaction as those of shell-shock, only it is a reaction of the higher functions of the organism. The obsessive idea is at the same time a testimony to the superficial plausibility of the automaton theory of mind of the pure materialists, and its obvious condemnation. Physiology in its highest manifestations is still physiology. Normal thinking is not of the type of the recurrence of obsessive ideas.

Hence it is that the cure for both states is the same, the discovery to the patient of the occasion of his reactions. The individual thus becomes at unity with himself; there is a cessation of the aberrant physiological reactions determined by the improper operation of the Second Law.

The same aetiology would apply to certain hallucinations, organic sensations and motor tics. They are obsessions, tendencies not apparently appropriate to the situation. The repetitive nature of obsessions corresponds to the repetitive nature of normal tendencies, of the "normal obsessions," for instance, in regard to food and sex, in a word to the repetitive nature of life. We need hardly point out the omnium gatherum nature of the term "obsession."

IV.

So far I have dealt with what may be called psychological neuroses, i.e. with changes of standard of viable equilibrium as between psychological reaction and its conditions. I have not dealt, except to glance at it in connection with neurasthenia, with the relation of physiological reaction and its conditions. Is there such a thing as a physiological neurosis?

Whatever we may call it, there is certainly in physiological activity a type of abnormality exactly analogous to that which, in psychological activity, is called a neurosis. What is pure idiosyncrasy but a "functional" disorder of the organism as physiological activity? (We say "pure" because idiosyncrasies may be of psychological origin.) Most people can eat shell-fish or eggs without untoward consequences, but some people cannot. Their bodies react to these articles of diet in an abnormal way, find them unviable. Such reactions are physiological neuroses, alterations of the normal standard of viable equilibrium as between physiological activity and its conditions.

The relation between physiological activity and its conditions is not so complex, so various, as that between psychological activity and its conditions, but it is perhaps more baffling. For in the latter case we may consider first the relation of the psychological activity to its external conditions, and thus give a specious simplicity to the relation, which we complicate later by considering the internal conditions, the body. We can as it were distinguish a Soul to be the informing principle of the lifeactivity, a Conscious Subject which reacts to its environmental conditions, and which can be called hyper- or hypo-aesthetic. In the former case we cannot. We have a bio-chemical activity in which it is as hard to suppose a Soul as in a chemical reaction. It seems impossible (except for a monadologist) to separate, even in thought, physiological activity and its conditions.

But the appearance of a Soul or Mind or Conscious Subject is simply due to the operation of the tendency to viable equilibrium, the real informing principle of life-activity. And this tendency operates no less in physiological than in psychological activity. When it operates aberrantly, we have the physiological neuroses, which are not intelligible, any more than the psychological, as long as we keep within the circle of material conditions, in our attempts to understand them.

If a physiological process proceed abnormally because of some demonstrable abnormality in its conditions, this constitutes an organic derangement, about which no one has any difficulty whatever. But it is also possible for physiological process to proceed abnormally when all the conditions before and after birth are normal (not appear to be normal, but are normal, a thing we can suppose for the argument's sake) except the internal physiological conditions of the fertilized ovum itself. The individual manifestation of life is degenerate. This is one condition of the occurrence of functional physiological derangement, of physiological neurosis. The organism's physiological standard of viable equilibrium is altered from the normal. Development in such cases proceeds aberrantly, resulting in all the anatomical malformations and disproportions called stigmata of degeneracy. Such mal-development is physiological neurosis. To refer the abnormalities to one another, as when cretinism is referred to thyroid insufficiency, or neurasthenia to loss of muscular tone, shows the medical man as poor a natural philosopher as the people who proposed to live by taking in each other's washing showed themselves poor economists. All the abnormalities present are the effect of the degenerate condition. Families, human and other, can die out; a race can be sick; and the neuroses, physiological and psychological, are symptoms of this racial sickness.

This is by way of apology for my inability to exhibit the physiological neuroses as deviations from various particular standards of viable equilibrium, as I could do with the psychological neuroses. The physiological neuroses are simply departures from the type. For any fertilized ovum the attainment of physiological viable equilibrium is the attainment of the normal maturity of its type; it is a repetition of its parents. And for the mature organism, physiological viable equilibrium is normal working.

It may be said that I myself have not got outside the circle of material conditions, since I refer the physiological neuroses to physiological abnormality in the germ-cell. The objection would show a misunderstanding of my position (and incidentally a poor opinion of my intelligence, but to this I am accustomed). I have no ambition to explain material phenomena as the effects of immaterial causes. I can meet the objection equally well on the ground of normal living processes, developmental or otherwise, for in these also the notion of viable equilibrium (or some such notion) is essential to our understanding of them. Given a fertilized ovum and a suitable environment, something else is still required, or why should one ovum become a fig-tree and another a thistle? A definite tendency towards a goal is required, a tendency, I say, towards viable equilibrium, determined by the past history of the life in question. (Action tends to be repeated in similar circumstances.) It is in recognizing this tendency, this "law" of life, that I get outside the circle of present material conditions. But the living-process is unthinkable without its material conditions, just as is physical activity. I have no wish to divorce life-activity in any of its manifestations from its material conditions. A "law of Nature" is the way things happen. Apart from the happenings, it is nothing.

So with the phenomenon of acclimatization, which is acquired "degeneracy" or change of standard of viable equilibrium. I have no wish at all to deny that, in the case of the organisms A, B and C aforementioned, a super-physiologist would be able to find physiological conditions in B and C different from those of A and from those of one another. What I deny is that such physiological abnormality is the cause of the degeneracy.

The same applies, of course, to the psychological neuroses. The superphysiologist would be able to detect the physiological conditions of hysteria.

V.

The manifestations of psychological tendency (= the "self") occur only in respect of physiological change, not in respect of the changes and situations of the external physical world. The individual is not in direct contact with the world. His body is interpolated. Of any given change we cannot know whether it is in the world or in ourselves. “The world is grey." "No; you are growing old." Hence the illusion of the laudator temporis acti.

This fact gives rise to ambiguity as to the "site" of the disturbance in certain functional disorders. For they may arise either in the relation, psychological reaction-physiological conditions, or in the relation, physiological reaction-conditions.

Take, for instance, hypochondriasis. In the former case it is properly described, in subjective terms, as "the arrest of attention on the bodily sensations" (H. Rayner). But it is also possible that the individual's bodily changes are actually of such abnormal intensity that, occurring in any of us, even the most normal (psychologically), they would compel our attention to them. The visceral neurasthenic has a right to be hypochondriac.

Take the individual whose physiological processes find eggs unviable. How many of these unfortunates have been bullied by well-meaning people who have regarded the affair as psychological, as a case for having "the nonsense knocked out of them"? And again, this may be the right diagnosis sometimes. (I say nothing as to the treatment.)

So with neurasthenia, as I pointed out in discussing it. The physiological machine may be working so badly that any of us would quickly tire of driving it. We are all neurasthenics by bedtime. Or the machine may be well enough, originally at least, but the driver too easily tired.

Organs and systems have their neuroses also, their hyper-aesthesia to such bodily changes as those occasioned by emotional conditions. When a wife can tell "how business is" by the history of her husband's heart or stomach, the physician labels these organs "neurotic."

In the relation of the individual to his external environment, no ambiguity as to the "locality" of the neurosis can arise. The observer simply notes the intensity of the physical change or of the emotional situation and judges whether or not it is sufficient to occasion a reaction in a normal person. And his measure is himself. The phlegmatic thinks a great many people hysterical.