Man and His Mind

Science proceeds by tiny steps. Yet its ten thousand little leaps, its experiments on tadpoles, molecules and proteins must have landed science somewhere. Where?

Last week a distinguished scientist, Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, Britain's greatest physiologist, ventured an answer--a 413-page book entitled Man on His Nature (Macmillan, $3.75). Sherrington's studies of the nervous system won him a Nobel Prize in 1932.

Celestial Life. "The trend [of scientific thought] can be better judged," says Sherrington, "by comparison of general positions taken a significant interval apart." For contrast with his own views, Sherrington selects those of Jean-Fernel, greatest physician of the 16th Century. In an age obsessed with magic and astrology, hardheaded Fernel insisted on natural rather than supernatural causes for disease.

The body, to Fernel, had no powers of its own. "It does not work; it is worked." Into the material embryo, about 40 days after conception, life entered from the outermost sphere of the Earth-centered Ptolemaic universe. Before this infusion of celestial life, the embryo was merely part of the mother.

Yet Fernel did not hold man apart from nature. Plants too had souls--vegetative souls. Animals had vegetative and sentient souls. Man had a vegetative, sentient and--uniquely--a rational soul. Man was thus nature's greatest work.

Chemical Life. Some decades after Fernel, Galileo with his telescope discovered the immensity of the universe. The profoundest change in science came when Galileo, seeing a stone fall, asked not why but how.

Through asking how, Sherrington explains, modern science has come to know what life is. Life is a chemico-physical system--nothing else. There is no boundary, no essential difference between the living and the nonliving.

Matter and energy are manifestations of the same thing: matter is energy "frozen" into electric particles. These whirl in energy systems called atoms, which in turn form larger energy systems called molecules. These form dynamic energy systems called cells, which we refer to as "alive." Thus the difference between "dead" atoms and "living" cells is not of ultimate nature but of complexity. Man is an aggregate of 1,000 billion cells, each of them an individual, self-centred organism, which work together by means of chemical signals and the nervous system. This final complexity, "living" man, evolved from nonlife.

What is Mind? "There remains however among the happenings met with in such a compound organism as ourselves," says Sherrington, "... a certain residue seemingly not thus resoluble" into chemico-physical energy-systems. This nonmaterial residue is the mind. Sherrington's half-century of studying the human brain has proved that mental behavior is not entirely reflex and thus rooted ultimately in matter (as Pavlov's Soviet disciples believe).

A reflex act must begin with a stimulus outside the body, but man's mind can will motor activity spontaneously, can even pursue pure contemplation (as in pondering a problem). "Between energy [i.e., matter] and mind," says Sherrington, "science has found no 'how' of give and take. . . . Physiology has not enough to offer about the brain in relation to the mind to lend the psychiatrist much help."

Nevertheless, mind, like the brain and body it inhabits, has evolved. Here Physiologist Sherrington is mightily puzzled. "The present individual is the latest bud from an energy-pattern which has without intermission been throwing off buds of its pattern for these last 20 million years or more. . . . The continuum is a material continuum. ... But the long history [of the psychical component] has not been a continuous one. It has been a succession of brief discontinuities. ... At the beginning of each successive generation of the energy-system, the psyche lapsed, only to appear after that physical system had reached a certain stage. For a time in each generation the individual ... has no demonstrable mental component.

"I have therefore to think of the brain as an organ of liaison between energy and mind, but not as a converter of energy into mind or vice versa."

Biology's Dilemma. This irreducible duality of energy and mind Sherrington calls "the biological dilemma." Mind in a sense is thus supernatural--it stands apart from the energy-system embracing star, rose and dog which we call nature. But mind knows only what its five senses can perceive. Through the long ages of evolving life, these senses have remained five. They were never better integrated than in the human brain. Therefore "Man is the most, not the least earthly of creatures. His knowledge, feeling, strivings, all conspire with his body to make him so to a degree unknown to other life. . . .

"Mind, for anything perception can compass, goes in our spatial world more ghostly than a ghost. . . . What then does it amount to? All that counts in life. Desire, zest, truth, love, knowledge, 'values' and seeking metaphor to eke out expression, hell's depth and heaven's utmost height. . . .

"Between these two, naked mind and the perceived world, is there then nothing in common. . . . We are the tie between them. Perhaps we exist for that."

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