ABSTRACT
Any study of mind is faced at the outset with the problem of defining and distinguishing its subject-matter. What is the mind? What processes are properly to be called mental processes in contradistinction with physiological and physical processes? Common experience tempts us to look to consciousness as the characteristic by which to distinguish the mental, but not all the activities generally held to be mental are conscious, and even if they were, there are then the further questions, how consciousness is related to those physiological processes on which it seems to be dependent and to that overt behaviour of which it seems often to be the condition. These are difficult and perhaps even insoluble problems, though some philosophers have considered them not to be genuine questions at all but only pseudo-problems arising from misleading linguistic associations, the factual basis of which either is not problematic at all or gives rise to questions of quite a different kind. Before committing ourselves on that issue it would be well to take some account of the facts and to consider whether or not they do give rise to genuine questions about psychophysical relationships.
