Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/485

 AMERICAN REFORMATORY SYSTEM 471

ive vista where truth and fairness dwell. Habitual careful attention with accompanying expectancy and appropriate exertion and resultant clarified vision constitute a habitus not consistent with criminal tendencies.

BALANCE^ SKILL^ AND TONE

At present, owing to absence of exact knowledge of the modes of the mutual dependence of mind and body, it is not possible to wield, with perfect balance, the contingent means and motives, nor accurately adjust the operation of the scheduled elements of the joint composition — the total mechanism. But the fact of interdependence is so well established and so much of the method has been learned from experiment that the principles of mental physiology or physiological psychology should be applied in the reformatory procedure. It is uniformly conceded that the nervous system, concentered in the brain, is the organ or instrument of the mind ; that the mind is a real being which can be acted upon by the brain and which can act in the body through the brain. For the sake of the authority and simplicity of state- ment of this elementary biological truth I quote from Professor Ladd as follows :

The mind behaves as it does because of the constitution and behavior of the molecules of the brain; and the brains behave as they do behave because of the nature and activities of the mind. Each acts in view of the

other. The action of each accounts for the other The physical

process consists in the action of the appropriate modes of physical energy upon the nervous and end-apparatus of sense, .... brought to bear through mechanical contrivances carrying impulses to the mind. And psychical energies are transmuted into physiological processes — a nerve commotion within the nervous system thence propagated along the tracks and diffusing over the various areas of the nervous system.

This brief statement of the dual human constitution, the condition of whose changeable and changing elements at any time so determines conduct, points to the possibility and so to the duty of effecting salutary alterations in the personality of prisoners by means of skilfully directed exercises of mind and body in harmonious mutual conjunction. If there exists a spiritual reality, neither brain nor mind, which manifests itself