The Mind of Mechanical Man*

No better example could be found of man's characteristic desire for knowledge beyond, and far beyond, the limits of the authentic scientific discoveries of his own day than his wish to understand in complete detail the relationship between brain and mind-the one so finite, the other so amorphous and elusive. It is a subject which at present awakes a renewed interest, because we are invaded by the physicists and mathematicians-an invasion by no means unwelcome, bringing as it does new suggestions for analogy and comparison. We feel perhaps that we are being pushed, gently not roughly pushed, to accept the great likeness between the actions of electronic machines and those of the nervous system. At the same time we may misunderstand this invitation, and go beyond it to too ready an affirmation that there is identity. We should be wise to examine the nature of this concept and to see how far the electro-physicists share with us a common road. Medicine is placed by these suggestions in a familiar predicament. I refer to the dangers of our being unintentionally misled by pure science. Medical history furnishes many examples, such as the planetary and chemical theories of disease that were the outcome of the Scientific Renaissance. We are the same people as our ancestors and prone to their mistakes. We should reflect that if we go too far and too fast no one will deride us more unashamedly than the scientists who have tempted us. Discussion of mind-brain relations is, I know well, premature, but I suspect that it always will be premature, taking heart from a quotation that I shall make from Hughlings Jackson-not one of his best-known passages -because it may have been thought to be a sad lapse on his part. I believe it myself to be both true and useful, and so I repeat it.