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What are the mental effects of deafness? How do the deafened react psychologically to their handicap? What does deafness do to the mind?
To answer these questions is the assigned task of this study.2 It necessitates first of all a consideration of what is meant by the words mind and mental.
The function of mind is one of adaptation of the individual to the world, to life, and concerns the correlation of all human activities as synthesized in an individual. The new psychology is, properly, the study of the technique of this adaptation and this correlation. This modern conception of the human mind is among the conspicuous scientific advances of the century. Herbert Spencer defined life as the continuous adjustment of inner to outer relations; and this adjustment is made by the organism in myriad ways—some motor, some emotional, some structural; some conscious, some unconscious; some happily, some unhappily. But the whole process of fitting in to the cosmos is our present cenception of the function of mind. Conduct is but the end result of certain stimuli to which