From these limited but cogent pieces of evidence I turn to the
larger but confirmatory lines of indirect evidence and inference, of
which such works as those of Professors Sherrington, Bayliss, and
Starling, the notable address of Professor Macdonald at Portsmouth
in 1911, as well as the recent work of Professor Woods Jones on
Arboreal Man, are full. Indeed if the construction of new reflexes
and reflex-arcs in organic evolution “forged by an incident of use”
as Professor Macdonald puts it, were expunged from these works, their
treatment of the physiology of the central nervous system of higher
animals would be emasculated, to say the least of it. And yet not
one of these eminent men is writing _ad hoc_, or for the confusion
of Weismann and his followers. At this point it may perhaps gain for
the remaining pages a little more consideration from opponents if I
give a few quotations from these writers in support of the foregoing
statement--perhaps the breeze of authority may then carry my little
bark a little further on its perilous voyage. Professor Sherrington
remarks on the first page of his well known work, in reference to the
cell-theory, “with the progress of natural knowledge, biology has
passed beyond the confines of the study of merely visible form, and
is turning more and more to the subtle and deeper sciences that are
branches of energetics. The cell-theory and the doctrine of evolution
find their scope more and more, therefore, in the problems of function,
and have become more and more identified with the aim and incorporated
among the methods of physiology.” Again, “Mere experience can apart
from reason mould nervous reactions in so far as they are plastic.
The ‘bahnung’ (or facilitation) of a reflex exhibits this in germ.”
He uses more than once the pregnant phrase, “The canalizing force of
habit”; again, “Progress of knowledge in regard to the nervous system
has been indissolubly linked with the determination of function in
it.” Speaking of the receptive-field he says of the central nervous
system, “To analyse its action we turn to the receptor organs, for to
them is traceable the initiation of the reactions of the centres”;
of the extero-ceptive field he says, “facing outwards on the general
environment it feels and has felt for countless ages the full stream of
the varied agencies for ever pouring upon it from the external world,”
page 20, and “each animal has experience only of those qualities of
the environment which as stimuli excite its receptors, it analyses
its environment in terms of them exclusively. The integration of the
animal associated with these leading segments can be briefly with
partial justice expressed by saying that the rest of the animal, so far
as its motor machinery goes, is but the servant, of them. Volitional
movements can certainly become involuntary, and conversely, involuntary
movements can sometimes be brought under the subjection of the will.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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