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70
SCIENCE
automatism, that is to say, to arrest the ceaseless flow of action to cbtain a pause for deliberation. Hence, the brain is needed only by such beings as happen to possess some degree of control over the motor springs of their actions-desires.
As is well known, there are many highly intellectual men and women who are simply unable to exercise their discrimination in certain circumstances, especially when faced with some over-powering temptation. They invariably then do things of which they repent in their calmer moments. It seems to me that there is a clear conflict here between the faculty of judgment and emotion, the latter overruling the former for the time being. It would be difficult to conceive how this could happen if discrimination were a function of the brain and the brain were actually functioning at the time when it was overruled by emotion and continued to forge the ego thereafter. Everything becomes lucid, on the other hand, by the simple acknowledgment of a pre-existing ego that brings with it all its pre-natal tendencies evolved out elsewhere in earlier surroundings, such tendencies constituting the demand in response to which its future organism is to be made. The brain would then be an instrument of discrimination made to meet the demand of an individual already advanced in self-control, and its functioning would depend both on its own conditions and on the emotional states of the ego. The inability of the newly-born infant to define his own being clearly to himself or to any one else, in an intel
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