The Significance of the Frontal Lobes for Mental Performances.

attitude, as lack of approach to imagined things, as inability to give himself an account of acting or thinking, as inability to make a separation between the ego and the world. At bottom, all these terms and others which one may use to characterize the facts mean the same. The widely different manifestations in behaviour represent, without exception, one and the same defect in the underlying attitude. We can distinguish two different kinds of human attitude toward the world: (1) A concrete attitude, in which we are directed toward given objects and directed in our thinking and acting by them; (2) a more abstract attitude, in which we are moved at first to think about the objects and to give an account of them to ourselves. To each of these attitudes belongs a particular kind of behaviour. In the first we are acting in the world, manipulating the objects; our activity is determined directly by the claims of the objects upon us. In the second attitude we are thinking rather than acting, even our activity being directed by thinking. Our actions are governed not so much by the objects before us as by what we think about them. In the first attitude we behave more passively, in the second, more actively. Some tasks can be performed only by the one type of behaviour, others only by the other. In patients with lesions of the frontal lobe, active (abstract) behaviour is lacking, but the concrete behaviour may be very well