Table of Contents
ARTHUR C. CUSTANCE
with a response by
Lee Edward Travis
1980 Zondervan Publishing Co. (Grand Rapids) with Probe
Ministries International (Richardson, Texas)
1997 Arthur Custance Online Library (HTML)
2001 Arthur Custance Online Library 2nd Edition (HTML) (design
Author and Respondent
ARTHUR C. CUSTANCE
(19101985) was born and educated in England before moving
to Canada in 1928. Dr. Custance held a Ph.D. in anthropology
and an M.A. in oriental languages. His Ph.D. work was primarily
completed at the University of Toronto. His Ph.D. degree was
granted at the University of Ottawa following a move to Ottawa
to direct the Human Engineering Laboratories of Canada's Defense
Research Board. During his years there, Dr. Custance also completed
the university's course in medical physiology. His research centred
on the problem of heat regulation in humans under stress. His
reports on this research have been published in a number of scientific
journals. Dr. Custance was the author of a wide range of books
including the ten-volume Doorway Papers, which covers
a broad spectrum of correlations between science and Christian
Dr. Custance was a Member
Emeritus of the Canadian Physiological Society and a Fellow
of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
LEE EDWARD TRAVIS
is a physiological psychologist and a pioneer in the field of
speech pathology. His B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. are from the University
of Iowa, where he became head of the Department of Psychology.
Later at the University of Southern California he founded and
directed the speech and hearing clinic, established the first
laboratory in the United States to record brain waves, was Professor
of Psychology and Speech, and later was Clinical Professor. In
1965 he established the Graduate School of Psychology
at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California, where he
is now Dean Emeritus and Distinguished Professor.
Dr. Travis is a Founding Fellow
with Honours and past president of the American Speech and
Hearing Association. He is a Diplomate in Clinical Psychology
of the American Board of Examiners in Professional Psychology.
His book Speech Pathology, published in 1930, was the
first in its field. He is author or editor of five books and
a prolific contributor to professional journals.
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Note Regarding Terminology
We live in an
age of specialization. Specialization is usually accompanied
by an extension of knowledge; but it also entails a certain hindrance
to communication due to the emergence of technical jargons which,
while they become binding factors within any community of scholars,
at the same time exclude those to whom the jargon is unfamiliar.
Words that are commonly used (or misused) such as mind,
will, consciousness, intelligence are given specialized
meanings which then become intelligible only to those who are
party to them.
At a scientific symposium, people
adopt such jargons and employ them almost like a foreign language
to the mystification of the outsider. Communication ceases to
Another consequence of this is
that when quotable statements are taken from authorities in different
fields in order to contribute light on some common theme, the
same words sometimes mean different things when used by different
authors. This potential for misunderstanding seems virtually
unavoidable when any attempt at synthesis is made.
To seek to obviate this difficulty
by an extensive note on the meaning of each key term as it appears
can only confuse the average reader by leading him to suppose
that every authority whose words are quoted is thereafter using
his terms in this sense and only in this sense,
which can sometimes be a misleading assumption.
Lord Bertrand Russell wisely observed
on one occasion: "To be perfectly intelligible one must
be inaccurate; to be perfectly accurate one has to be almost
unintelligible!" The best one can hope for in a small volume
like this, which calls upon the witness of authorities in one
discipline to shed light upon the subject matter of another discipline,
is at least to communicate some generative ideas. We may by opening
up new lines of thought contribute light to minds of greater
precision who will thus be enabled to hit upon the exact truth.
have therefore followed what I consider to be the rather sane
advice of two of the authors from whom I have drawn some of the
most vital ideas: Sir Karl R. Popper and Sir John C. Eccles.
The former is a philosopher of science with an international
reputation as a profoundly creative thinker, and the latter has
been for many years one of the most renowned neurophysiologists
in the English-speaking world and a Nobel Laureate.
In the preface to their joint work
of recent date (1977), The Self and Its Brain, they wrote:
We agree on the importance of
a presentation that strives for clarity and simplicity. Words
should be used well and carefully (we have certainly not everywhere
succeeded in this); but their meaning should never, we think,
become a topic of discussion or be permitted to dominate the
discussion, as happens so often in contemporary philosophical
writing. . . . What we are interested in is not the meaning
of terms but the truth of (our) theories; and this truth is largely
independent of the terminology used. . . . What is important
is not to prejudge the issue by the terminology used.
In the present
volume the multi-disciplinary sources of information which hopefully
will appeal to readers with diverse backgrounds does not allow
the giving of precise definitions. Such an attempt would be abortive
in the eyes of experts in different areas of research who would
inevitably disagree with them.
A few terms have been "explained"
in circular fashion (as very brief footnotes) i.e., merely
by suggesting their opposites as used elsewhere. Beyond this,
we have to cast the text upon the indulgence of the highly sophisticated
reader in the hope that the more general reader will be as excited
and as stimulated by the current trends in research in this important
field as the writer has been.
Copyright © 1988 Evelyn White. All rights reserved
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