f his terminology is involved it is the fault really of psychology, since he perforce had to use the concepts which psychology had developed. I have tried in this paper merely to raise the question whether the psychopathologist can not reshape to some extent his formulation of problems (without doing injustice to the patient) so as to avail himself of biological and behavioristic concepts.

peech is just as objective as tennis-playing or any other muscular act and should be looked upon in just as objective a way. The difficulty has been that instead of looking at speech as at other muscular acts, we have looked upon it as a revealer of "thought" -- the sacred inner secret of the "mind."

Now if I had started with a dog whose instinctive reaction systems were (possibly) perverted in the beginning (heredity) and I had superposed in addition the above bizarre group of habit reactions, he would seem a pitiful object indeed when trying to cope with his environment.

The physician surely finds here serious conflict with reality and a woeful lack of normal compensations. But since there are no organic pathological disturbances, the physician diagnoses the case as neurasthenia with compulsion neurosis -- the disease is mental.

Is it not simpler, then, to look upon all such manifestations as special forms of conditioned reflexes? As long as they do not disturb the subject's ordinary reactions to the objects around him, we do not class the patient as being "mentally" disturbed (as in the psychopathological disturbances we see in daily life); the moment, however, that an arm is incapacitated or the glandular and muscular elements of the sex organs become involved we must take notice of such grave disturbances and try to see what can be done.

Nor will the objection hold that conditioned reflexes arise only in the laboratory. Dr. Lashley has shown that numerous such conditioned reflexes exist in the functioning of the parotid gland in man, and that these reflexes arise in the regular course of daily activity. So pronounced are they that a subject can not very well experiment upon himself.

in the manifest content of dreams one finds new words, misplacement of words, condensation of words, etc.; and in the association test the failure of words and an increased reaction time between stimulus word and response.

The final test of all words, however, is the question whether they can stand adequately (be substituted) for acts. We often see an instructor despair of telling a student in words how to conduct an experiment. He then resorts to acts and goes through the experiment for the student. Our words thus stand as a kind of shorthand sketch of our repertoire of acts and motor attitudes.

What James is particularly emphasizing here is that the human organism is instinctively capable of developing along many different lines, but that due to the stress of civilization some of these instinctive capabilities must be thwarted.

This general correspondence between language and bodily habits is shown clearly in the football field, where we see the player making a complex series of movements and later hear him stating in words what systems of plays he employed; and in the case where we hear a man tell us what acts he is going to perform on a horizontal bar and later see him executing these acts.

the patient can not phrase in terms of words the habit twists which have become a part of his biological equipment)

Some of the instinctive tendencies born with us are poor heritages; some of the habits we early develop [p. 591] are equally poor possessions. But whether they are "good" or "bad" they must give way as we put on the habits required of adults.

In addition to these impulses which are instinctive and therefore hereditary, there are many habit impulses which are equally strong and which for similar reasons must be given up. The systems of habits we form, i.e., the acts we learn to perform, at four years of age will not serve us when we are twelve, and those formed at the age of twelve will not serve us when we become adults.

he more sure I am that there is a simpler and a more common-sense way (and at the same time a more scientific way) of describing the essential factors in their theory.

As a sequel to this meeting I began to attempt to formulate my own ideas as to the terminology I should use in describing a mental disease. I think that at the outset I should admit that I know a good deal more about terminology than I know about diseases of any kind

Being the only psychologist present, I did not like to admit that I did not understand the physician's use of the term "mental."

At the end of his discourse two or three eminent physicians stated their satisfaction that the speaker had been willing to come out clearly and say that the disease was "mental." In other words, they expressed their approval of the fact that the speaker did not, in functional nervous cases, deem it necessary to find lesions in the central nervous system or even a toxic condition of the nervous system before admitting that the patient had a disease.