Natural science is a branch of knowledge by general consent not primarily based on the a priori. It […] observes and endeavours by observation to fol… - Charles Scott Sherrington

In the training and in the exercise of medicine a remoteness abides between the field of neurology and that of mental health, psychiatry. It is sometimes blamed to prejudice on the part of the one side or the other. It is both more grave and less grave than that. It has a reasonable basis. It is rooted in the energy-mind problem. Physiology has not enough to offer about the brain in relation to the mind to lend the psychiatrist much help.

Today Nature looms larger than ever and includes more fully than ever ourselves. It is, if you will, a machine, but it is a partly mentalized machine, and in virtue of including ourselves it is a machine with human qualities of mind. It is a running stream of energy—mental and physical—and unlike man-made machines it is actuated by emotions, fears and hopes, dislikes and love. It bids fair to be master of this our planet—'it looks before and after'. To what or to whom does it owe this eminent and seemingly unique status? It answers unhesitatingly that it owes it to itself. But to the semi-divine assembly which looks on, that answer would be impertinent but for its saving ignorance. We may suppose that if they hear it the stars smile. Human thought is left wondering. What is it all for? Man is too small and too perishable to be the object of this whole. A counsel is 'let us endure and be quiet'—a counsel which is the easier to follow because it seems all that there is for us to do, at least at the present moment.

Mind, for anything perception can compass, goes therefore in our spatial world more ghostly than a ghost. Invisible, intangible, it is a thing not even of outline; it is not a 'thing'. It remains without sensual confirmation, and remains without it for ever. All that counts in life. Desire, zest, truth, love, knowledge, 'values', and, seeking metaphor to eke out expression, hell's depth and heaven's utmost height. Naked mind.