he surrounding bodies. The
first of these movements are the reflex movements, then are developed
those combinations of movements which we called perceptive or suspensive
actions in keeping with perceptions. Later came the social acts, the
elementary intellectual acts which gave birth to language, the primitive
voluntary acts, the immediate beliefs, then the reflected acts, the
rational acts, experimental, etc. As I said formerly, there is, in each
function, quite a superior part which consists in its adaptation to the
particular circumstance existing at the present moment. The function of
alimentation, for instance, has to exercise itself at this moment when I
am to take aliments on this table in the midst of new people, that is to
say, among whom I have not yet found myself in this circumstance,
wearing a special dress and submitting my body and my mind to very
particular social rites. In reality it is nevertheless the function of
alimentation, but it must be noted that the act of dining, when wearing
a dress suit and talking to a neighbor, is not quite the same
physiological phenomenon as the simple secretion of the pancreas.
Certain patients lose only the superior part of this function of
alimentation which consists in eating in society, in eating in new and
complex circumstances, in eating while being conscious of what one is
doing, and in submitting to rules. Although the physiologist does not
imagine that these functions are connected with the exercise of sexual
functions in humanity, there is a pathology of the betrothal and of the
wedding-tour.

It is just on this superior part of the functions, on their adaptation
to present circumstances, that the disorders of conduct
(self-government) which occupy us to-day bear. If one is willing to
understand by the word "evolution" the fact that a living being is
continually transforming himself to adapt himself to new circumstances,
neuroses and psychoses are disorders or halts in the evolution of
functions, in the development of their highest and latest part.[16]

This halt in evolution can be connected with different physiological
causes, hereditary weaknesses of origin, infections, intoxications,
disorders of internal secretions, disorders of the sympathetic system.
These diverse etiologies will most likely be of use later to distinguish
between forms of these diseases; but to-day the common character of
neuroses and psychoses is that this diminution of vitality bears