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By Sir W. Russell Brain. Springfield, Illinois: Charles C Thomas, 1951. 90 pp.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF MEDICINE TO OUR IDEA OF THE MIND. (The Rede Lecture for 1952). By Sir W. Russell Brain. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1952. 30 pp.
This brief volume and the briefer lecture discuss various facets of one group of problems. The book consists of seven chapters: The Neurological Approach to the Problem of Perception; Speech and Thought; The Cerebral Basis of Consciousness; The Intervention of the Nervous System; 'The Two Worlds'; Symbols and Patterns; The Status of Mind—A Conversation Between Reader and Author. The lecture seems to be an effort to make up for certain oversights in the earlier volume; yet together they leave every problem not only unsolved but unclearly stated. The author begins by attributing to philosophers a tendency to deny the existence of a mind-body problem, a position that could easily be controverted. Then he asserts his own conviction that the mind is 'autonomous' of the laws of matter 'in its own sphere'. The last line of the book states that man 'while looking on the world with the cold eye of scientific vision still needs to be sustained and carried forward by the vital forces of older modes of knowledge'. Thus it becomes a piece of special pleading for mysticism, cast in pseudoscientific terms.