A science of mind is a goal which has engrossed thousands of generations of Man.
Armies, dynasties and whole civilizations have perished for the lack of it. Rome went to dust
for the want of it. China swims in blood for the need of it; and down in the arsenal is an atom
bomb, its hopeful nose full-armed in ignorance of it.
No quest has been more relentlessly pursued or has been more violent. No primitive
tribe, no matter how ignorant, has failed to recognize the problem as a problem, nor has it
failed to bring forth at least an attempted formulation. Today one finds the aborigine of
Australia substituting for a science of mind a “magic healing crystal.” The Shaman of British
Guiana makes shift for actual mental laws with his monotonous song and consecrated cigar.
The throbbing drum of the Goldi medicine man serves in the stead of an adequate technique to
alleviate the lack of serenity in patients.
The enlightened and golden age of Greece yet had but superstition in its principal
sanatoria for mental ills, the Aesculapian temple. The most the Roman could do for peace of
mind for the sick was to appeal to the penates, the household divinities, or sacrifice to Febris,
goddess of fevers. And an English king, centuries after, could have been found in the hands of
exorcists who sought to cure his deliriums by driving the demons from him.
From the most ancient times to the present, in the crudest primitive tribe or the most
magnificently ornamented civilization, Man has found himself in a state of awed helplessness
when confronted by the phenomena of strange illnesses or aberrations. His desperation, in his
efforts to treat the individual, has been but slightly altered during his entire history, and until
this twentieth century passed mid-term, the percentages of his alleviations, in terms of
individual mental derangements, compared evenly with the successes of the shamans
confronted with the same problems. According to a modern writer, the single adv...
