Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/157

Rh world or from internal disorders, arouse the partly formed motor centers and create in them an abnormal activity. Motor strains, bone displacements, muscular irregularities and undue local sensitiveness are thus caused, which force disjustive trains of thought into consciousness with each renewed activity. All such thinking must be suppressed before adjustment is effected.

Motor domination begins about the fourth year and ends ten years later. It is the means by which adjustment is secured. Sensory trains of thought are adjustive only when they help men to foresee the elements of future adjustment. Their usefulness comes after the motor adjustments are formed. Any reversal of this order produces a disjustment which is intensified if motor strains have been produced by the premature activity. These disjustments are due to the abnormalities of the child's environment and to wrong notions of education. Parents not only fail to guard their children against sensory storms, but they introduce artificial trains of thought under the mistaken notion that vivid concepts and well-organized memories are an aid in a child's development.

Environmental maladjustments thus have three leading causes: defective nutrition, poisons formed within the system, and premature motor activity. The first two are prenatal, the third is due to the later development of the motor than of the sensory powers. In their genetic manifestations these maladjustments show themselves as retardations, accelerations and motor strains. Their pathological effects become sex morbidness, senility and motor morbidness. As mental phenomena, they become egotism, dogmatism and mysticism.

Symbolism is an intense form of mysticism and beyond it are visions, hallucinations, subconsciousness and finally double personality. The essence of them all is the same. Some of the motor powers do not readily come under the control of the will. The amount of this disruption of personality varies, but its presence is always a manifestation of motor disorder.

The important facts to be recognized are the difference between senility and morbidness and the two distinct sources of morbidness, the one in sex disorders and the other in motor strains. Senility is a sensory condition making mental associations difficult or impossible to alter. The causes of morbidness lie not in the brain but in the body. It is thus a pathological, not a mental disorder. Morbid parts are easily excited to action and act apart from, or in opposition to, the dominant personality as expressed in the will.

To simplify this argument still more I shall divide mental reactions into three groups, visual, motor and senile. Visual reactions involve no movement of thought beyond itself. Motor reactions create thought movements which end in activity. Senile reactions create a sequence with no elements not found in antecedent mental concept. Colored