In this connection it must be emphasized that control of the erotic situation by the husband is absolutely and unequivocally mental.
In order also to give due weight to the reply to an objection that might be made here, two new terms will be proposed. The objection is that the distinction between mental and physical is purely arbitrary, so it is futile to say that the control is exclusively mental, because the exclusively mental does not exist. Mind, apart from body, is non-existent.
The answer: All phenomena into which a so-called mental element enters can be graded into what would be called without objection on the part of anyone, more mental or less mental, meaning, of course, consciously mental. Thus digestion is less mental than phantasying or day-dreaming, and some emotions might be called less mental than others.
But because we are required by everything that we know about the mind-body combination, to suppose that no so-called purely mental state is without its physical substratum without which it would not exist, and because no physiological process is totally outside of all causal connection with the mind, we are justified in saying that mind is more highly organized body, and body less highly organized mind.
Regarding then any human phenomenon as conditioned by both mental and physical causes we can remove the difficulty, and at the same time the objection that is being answered here, by adopting three Greek words and coining two new English words from them.
Soma is the Greek for body; hyper for upper, or above; and hypo for under or below. So we may call the ordinary physiological movements and processes hyposomatic or a lower form of action of the mind-body combination. Similarly we may use the name hypersomatic for the various degrees of mentality. From the point of view of this book all human action is somatic. Some of it such as digestion, glandular secretion, is hyposomatic or at one end of a series of degrees of complexity. Some human action is hypersomatic, such as remembering. Some of the human phenomena, like emotions, partake of both ends of the series in apparently more or less equal proportions.
§ 30
To return, then, after this digression, to the statement that control is entirely mental: By this, of course, is meant control according to a hypersomatic pattern. There is no control without a pattern. One never is said to control one’s actions unless he has an idea according to which he is going to act. Otherwise his actions are automatic—not controlled.
The immediate connection of this with our present argument is this then (an argument that runs right along with the ideas of autosuggestion): any man can do what any man has done, if he has the same hypersomatic pattern according to which his actions are carried out.