Books of the Day
Man's World
PROFESSOR LANCELOT HOGBEN, in one of his witty diatribes against those scientists who confuse science and religion together, once went out of his way to congratulate Sir Charles Sherrington (one of the greatest physiologists of our time) not only on having written a book of poems, The Assaying of Brabantius, as well as the classical Integration of the Nervous System, but on not having bound the two- up together in one volume of Gifford Lectures. But now a real volume of Gifford Lectures from the pen of Sir Charles Sherrington has appeared. It is a true assaying of man's world, and it will delight not only Hogben but all of us who know something of the evolutionary processes which have preceded human life, and who wish to learn what are the grounds of hope for human society, what we should think of human mind, and whether there is such a thing as " progress." It is a book which everyone with intellectual curiosity ought to read, for the scientist will find in it many new valuations of facts grown too familiar by close contact, all leading to a clear and consistent view of man's world, while the " layman " will be entranced with the almost lyrical passages where Sir Charles Sherrington describes some of the processes of nature in living organisms. The style of his prose, too, is interesting in itself, not like anyone else's, always rather com- pressed, with sentences sometimes unusually long and sometimes unusually short, but always graphic and vigorous with a quality quite of their own, reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Bridges, such men as one imagines Sherrington must certainly have itnown during his long tenure of the Physiology chair at Oxford.
The first chapters of the book are mainly concerned with the difference between our outlook on Nature today after several centuries of the successful application of the scientific method and that of the mediaeval and renaissance physicians, astrologers and engineers who were the forerunners of our men of science. As his principal witness here, though there are many subsidiary ones, Sir Charles Sherrington calls Dr. Jean Fernel, the Fernelius of the Paris Faculty of Medicine of r542, the first man to use the word Physiology in the modern sense. Sherrington_ has been a great student of Fernelius, and certainly no better representa- tive of the Aristotelian poilat of view in early science could be found, though there were other streams of thought, especially astrology, which have to be taken into account. But after this historical part the author launches forth on a wonderful series of imaginative descriptions of the living organism, the living cell, and so on. If this may be called " popular science," it is its apotheosis. Unfortunately, space prevents any extensive quotation, but one may draw attention to the description of biochemical events in the cell, the picture of the rhythmic activity of the human nervous system during sleep, with the electric dis- charges of individual neurons imagined like the starry heavens or a city's air-seen lights, or the story of the malaria parasite. Of the first of these one must give a few sentences:
The cell is a scene of energy-cycles, suites of oxidation and reduction, concatenated ferment actions. It is like a magic hive the walls of whose chambered spongework are shifting veils of ordered molecules, and rend and renew as operations rise and cease. A world of surfaces and streams. We seem to watch battalions of specific catalysts, like " Maxwell's demons," lined up, each waiting, stop-watch in hand, for its moment to play the part assigned to it, a step in one or other great thousand- linked chain process. Yet each and every step is understandable chemistry. The cell has proved to be a perfect swarm of catalysts, or of trains of catalysts, each a link in a serial suite of chemical action.
And one might add that Sherrington is well aware (as is un- usual in this country) of the great advances which biochemistry has made with embryology in recent years, as one can see from his fine passages on the development of the egg into the child.
Arising then out of the general picture of Nature, especially living Nature, which Sherrington presents, there comes into view, during the second half of the book, the realisation that Nature is a complex unity in which successive levels of organisation are to be distinguished. Particle, atom, molecule, colloidal micelle, the living cell, the living organ, the living body, the classifiable sorts of living- body from the most primitive many- celled organisms up to man himself—in this succession we have not only the evolutionary succession in which, as we know, this planet developed, but also, in a sense (as is explicit on page 300), the succession of " envelopes " of which we ourselves are con- stituted. The ideas of Fernel and his friends about the microcosm (man) being a mirror of the macrocosm contained, then, a grain of truth.
But now, when we arrive at the human level, there are two ways into which the evolutionary succession seems to diverge, the way of mental evolution, of mind, and the way of social evolution, of society. One cannot escape the conviction that in some curious way these two are the same, but at first Sir Charles Sherrington (as a master of neuro-physiology has every right to do) considers primarily in a number of chapters, perhaps the most difficult and fascinating of the entire book, the exact place
of mind and its relations to the body. For the scientist the one- ness of mind and body is inescapable, and the conative aspect of the motor side of the reflex arc is identified as the earliest nurse of mind. Here Descartes receives due, though by his- torians too often withheld, praise for his De Homine. Mind and body are sometimes compared with particle and wave, and the exact relation of mind with energy is often discussed ; but in the end we can look on human mind in no other way than as the highest level of mental organisation we know, inseparably bound up with the most highly organised nervous systems the world has yet brought forth.
The reader is beginning to fear that Sherrington is going to confine himself to the mental side of evolution ; but from that point onwards every emphasis is devoted to demonstrating that man is fundamentally social, that social man will in the end over- come predaceous man, that social evolution is continuous with biological evolution, and that therefore the future of mankind, though it may be long in coming, authorises a certain optimism. Only through the community of observers can science grow. Only by contribution to human fellowship can the liquidation of Homo praedatorius, doomed by an evolution which is never standing still, be hastened. Some of us would have been more explicit in naming his representatives here and now, but we are grateful indeed for the book's closing words :
We have, because human, an inalienable prerogative of respon- sibility which we cannot devolve, no, not as was once thought, even upon the stars. We can share it only with each other.
Sir Charles Sherrington's book is in a class by itself. It is that of an old man wise and fearless, from whom life has taken away illusions but left no cynicism, and to whom physiology has given freedom from sentimentality without destroying sympathy. There are few who have not much to learn from it.
JOSEPH NEEDHAM.
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