The raw materials of higher central nervous systems are furnished
even in lowly Vertebrates by the neurones and their processes, and
the pathways into the grey matter by the “canalizing force of habit”
in the receptors and afferent fibres. Facilitation, discovered in
higher Vertebrates, such as dogs and cats, throws backwards a light on
the earliest struggles towards success and integration among phyla,
sub-phyla and smaller groups, and here again the well-known may lead
to the less-known. We may then frame a legitimate hypothesis, or at
least an ideal construction of trials and errors and success, if those
of lower levels were ever to be introduced to the career of progress
and achievement. But to make good this claim it is necessary that it
be based on the important doctrine taught by Hughlings Jackson of the
three (or more) levels of sensori-motor arcs--those of the spinal or
lowest, of the sensory or intermediate, and those of the third or
highest level, in which the association-areas of the Primate brain are
at once the means and the title to his primacy, or headship of the
sentient world. The light of this doctrine guides the mind backwards to
the frog-stage of animal evolution with its highly organized congenital
system of arcs of the spinal level, so efficient for its life that,
even when the brain is removed, the frog can execute under certain
stimuli a purposeful complicated movement such as that of trying to
wipe away with its foot an irritant drop of acid applied to its head
or back; or, still more, if touched lightly between the scapulæ, will
“lower its head at the first touch, and again more so at a second,
and at a third will, besides lowering the head, draw the front half
of its trunk slightly backwards; at a fourth the same movement with
stronger retraction; at a fifth give an ineffectual sweep with its
hind or fore-foot; at a sixth a stronger sweep; at a seventh a feeble
jump; at an eighth a free jump, and so on.” Probably such an animal as
the frog has all its reflexes congenitally organized, whereas a dog,
reaching the sensory level, has added countless reflex-arcs to those
inherited from its early ancestors of the Insectivores which had long
emerged from the spinal level, retaining its old, perfecting its new
inheritance, and eliminating the unfit. Perhaps a faint picture of this
long process may be afforded by watching an experienced mountain guide
ascending an ice-slope with the aid of ice-axe, hand and foot.
Integration of Raw Materials.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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