The relationship of the emotions and the body must have existed as long as there have been well-developed brains. When a wild animal finds itself down wind from a man and gets the dreaded scent, it is the emotion of fear which starts its muscles in a wild rush away. A large part of our modern conception of progress, however, is the making of new names, and psychosomatic has appeared in the last half century (psyche, the mind; and soma, the body). It is generally thought of as the influence of the mind on the body, but it is also the effect of the body on the mind.
The problem of which comes first is at times as baffling as that of the hen and the egg. The theory of William James was that the sense organs of the body are stimulated by an object and the resulting feeling of bodily sensations is the emotion. But Dr. Walter Cannon reports that he and others practically separated the cortex of the brain from the body and the animals still exhibited normal emotions. I do not see that we have to worry as to which is the cart and which the horse.
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GENERAL HEALTH
