Sir Charles Sherrington's Man on his Nature

Physical science is concerned with a world of shadows.

The very recent advance does not lie in the world of physics itself having acquired this shadowy character.

it had it ever since Democritus of Abdera and even before, but we were not aware of it; we thought we were dealing with the world itself; expressions like model or picture for the conceptual constructs of science canle up in the second half of the nineteenth century, and not earlier, as far as I know.

Sir Charles Sherrington published his momentous Man on his Nature.2

The book is pervaded by the honest search for objective evidence of the interaction between matter and mind. I stress the epithet ‘honest’, because it does need a very serious and sincere endeavour to look for some- thing which one is deeply convinced in advance cannot be found, because (in the teeth of popular belief) it does not exist.

A brief summary of the result of this search is on p. 357: Mind, the anything perception can compass, goes therefore in our spatial world more ghostly than a ghost.

Invisible, intangible, it is a thing not even of outline; it is not a ’thing’. I t remains without sens ual confirmation and remains wi thou tit forever.

Mind has erected the objective outside world of the natural philosopher out of its own stuff.

Mind could not cope with this gigantic task otherwise than by the simplifying device of excluding itself - withdrawing from its conceptual creation. Hence the latter does not contain its creator.

I cannot convey the grandeur of Sherrington’s immortal book by quoting sentences; one has to read it oneself. Still, I will mention a few of the more particularly characteristic. Physical science … faces us with the impasse that mind per se cannot play the piano - mind per se cannot move a finger of a hand

Then the impasse meets us. The blank of the ‘how’ of mind’s leverage on matter. The inconsequence staggers us. Is it a misunderstanding? (p. 232).

Hold these conclusions drawn by an experimental physiologist of the twentieth century against the simple statement of the greatest philosopher of the seventeenth century: B.

The impasse is an impasse.

Are we thus not the doers of our deeds? Yet we feel responsible for them, we are punished or praised for them, as the case may be. It is a horrible antinomy. I maintain that it cannot be solved on the level of present-day science which is still entirely engulfed in the ’exclusion principle’ - without knowing it - hence the antinomy. To realize this is valuable, but it does not solve the problem. You cannot remove the ’exclusion principle’ by act of parliament as it were. Scientific attitude would have to be rebuilt, science must be made anew.

So we are faced with the following remarkable situation.

While the stuff from which our world picture is built is yielded exclusively from the sense organs as organs of the mind, so that every man’s world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence, yet the conscious mind itself remains a stranger within that construct, it has no living space in it, you can spot it nowhere in space. We do not usually realize this fact, because we have entirely taken to thinking of the personality of a human being, or for that matter also that of an animal, as located in the interior of its body.

To learn that it cannot really be found there is so amazing that it meets with doubt and hesitation, we are very loath to admit it. We have got used to localizing the conscious personality inside a person’s head -

I should say an inch or two behind the midpoint of the eyes. From there it gives us, as the case may be, understanding or loving or tender - or suspicious or angry looks. I wonder has it ever been noted that the eye is the only sense organ whose purely receptive character we fail to recognize in naIve thought. Reversing the actual state of affairs, we are much more inclined to think of ‘rays of vision’, issuing from the eye, than of the ‘rays of light’ that hit the eyes from outside. You quite frequently find such a ‘ray of vision’ represented in a drawing in a comic paper, or even in some older schematic sketch intended to illustrate an optic instrunlent or law, a dotted line emerging from the eye and pointing to the object, the direction being indicated by an arrowhead at the far end. - Dear reader or, or better still, dear lady reader, recall the bright, joyful eyes with which your child beams upon you when you bring him a new toy, and then let the physicist tell you that in reality nothing emerges from these eyes; in reality their only objectively detectable function is, continually to be hit by and to receive light quanta. In reality! A strange reality! Something seems to be missing in it.

It is very difficult for us to take stock of the fact that the localization of the personality, of the conscious mind, inside the body is only symbolic, just an aid for practical use. Let us, with all the knowledge we have about it, follow such a ’tender look’ inside the body. We do hit there on a supremely interesting bustle or, if you like, machinery. We find millions of cells of very specialized build in an arrangement that is unsurveyably intricate but quite obviously serves a very far-reaching and highly consummate mutual communication and collaboration; a ceaseless hammering of regular electro- chemical pulses which, however, change rapidly in their configuration, being conducted from nerve cell to nerve cell, tens of thousands of con tacts being opened and blocked wi thin every split second, chemical transformations being induced and maybe other changes as yet undiscovered. All this we meet and, as the science of physiology advances, we may trust that we shall come to know more and more about it.

But now let us assume that in a particular case

Assume we observe several efferent bundles of pulsating currents which come from the brain.

Through long cellular protrusions (motor nerve fibres), are conducted to certain muscles of the arm, which, as a consequence, tends a hesitating, trembling hand to bid you farewell - for a long, heart-rending separation;

at the same time you may find that some other pulsating bundles produce a certain glandular secretion so as to veil the poor sad eye with a crape of tears.

But nowhere along this way from the eye through the central organ to the arm muscles and the tear glands - nowhere, you may be sure, however far physiology advances, will you ever meet the personality, will you ever meet the dire pain, the bewildered worry within this soul, though their reality is to you so certain as though you suffered them yourself - as in actual fact you do!

The picture that physiological analysis vouchsafes to us of any other human being, be it our most intimate friend, strikingly recalls to me Edgar Allan Poe’s masterly story, which I am sure many a reader remembers well; I mean The Masque oj’the Red Death.

A princeling and his retinue have withdrawn to an isolated castle to escape the pestilence of the red death that rages in the land. After a week or so of retirement they arrange a great dancing feast in fancy dress and mask.

One of the masks, tall, entirely veiled, clad all in red and obviously intended to represent the pestilence allegorically, makes everybody shudder, both for the wantonness of the choice and for the suspicion that it might be an intruder. At last a bold young man approaches the red mask and with a sudden jolt tears off veil and head-gear. It is found empty.

Now our skulls are not empty. But what we find there, in spite of the keen interest it arouses, is truly nothing when held against the life and the emotions of the soul.

To become aware of this may in the first moment upset one.

To me it seems, on deeper thought, rather a consolation. If you have to face the body of a deceased friend whom you sorely miss, is it not soothing to realize that this body was never really the seat of his personality but only symbolically ‘for practical reference’?