Charles Scott Sherrington Posts
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Our mind wondering about itself has at times indulged the thought that it is not earthly. It has judged itself to be of "heavenly" origin. It has so judged sometimes apart from any special revelation of faith. There- fore it is that such a view comes before us here.
The soul, when Omar Khayyám had sent it on its great excursion, returned with answer "I myself am Heaven and Hell"
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Our mind constructs "time" and its time's rate is that of its besouled body's terrestrial habitat; although it, not un- naturally, has supposed it to be an universal and absolute Time. The last preceding turn of its planet is its "yesterday and the next expected turn will be its "tomorrow"
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Adaption and overcome
Later this life invaded the land.
Some of our own early stock took part in that invasion. The moving equilibrium of the cells' life in our carly stock was almost literally an energy-eddy in the sea. The water of the sea conditioned it. Its energy-exchanges were based upon the sea. How if cut off from the sea could such a life exist? The Canadian biologist, Archibald Macallum, gave a reading of this riddle. The salts dissolved in our blood today are those of that long past geological epoch. Already in that sea the vertebrate creature, with many of its cells buried in the body's bulk, away from actual touch with the seawater, had evolved a system of branching tubes and a muscular pump, the heart, bringing to each buried cell a blood of salinity similar to that of the archaic sea, a substitute for that sea- water in which its cells had first arisen, to which their ways of life were adapted. When it left the sea altogether for its Odyssey on land, it had but to carry that habit of manufacture with it. It has done so. With that it has crossed mountain ranges and desert sands carrying its own medium with it. It has invaded air as well as land. It runs, and flies, and walks erect. The water of ocean itself has changed from what in that old sea it was. It has changed with the washings of rivers into it for millions of years since then. But the blood, a dynamic equilibrium, has in respect to those salts remained steady. The poet sang, with more literal truth than perhaps he knew, in- voking the sea, "the salt is lodged for ever in, my blood"s That some of them did give up that old ocean allowed the possibility of our becoming what we are
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. On the other hand for its limb to develop into something utterly different, would be no unlikelihood. What had been for years during a watery existence our apparatus for breathing has now nothing to do with breathing but serves hearing in the air, Evolution can scrap but not revive
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Yes Nature, often as she hugs the old, seems seldom or never to revert to a past once abandoned
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Not adaptaion but cooparation
organization of the aggregate mass in fresh directions does not accompany their coherence Organization with differentiation of component units for this and for that, and at the same time co-operation between them one with another so as to serve the unified composite life; that is the kind of complexity which evolution shows to be the more significant. It is an ampler integration. Does such integrated complexity, as we might call it, bring into being anything absolutely new? Does it create anything? Does it, besides extending the range and powers of life, introduce anything which simpler life has not? Is there anything more in man than in amoeba or paramaecium beyond amplification of powers of the latter? Anything different in kind?
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we are newcommers
It is to be remembered that Earth's periods of time have been of a different order from man's, and her scale of operations of a different order, and that man's cunning in this respect dates but from yesterday.
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I remember well the time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over.
CHARLES DARWIN
Yet not for us to forget is our escape from a long nightmare
The exchange of a monstrous world for one relatively sane. To see, and where we can to disentangle, the facts of Nature free from those perplexing mysteries which were in truth not there. There remains and to spare of deeper mystery. The mystery of Nature needs no superstition. Leonardo's Note- books, portraying Nature without superstition, are yet per- vaded by its mystery. Today man can go out into the natural world without carrying the distortion of monstrosity with him. We can interrogate the natural world with a confidence drawn from riddance of misunderstanding no less than from extension of understanding. We can see with whom it is we talk. What wears a divine livery can without fear or favour display it to man's gaze. The position for reading from Nature's lips what she may have to say of Godhead never yet in the past was what it is for us today.
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Though truly even as purely natural it contains for us still strange surprises. It is, for instance, a world where we are hurled along at the rate of 1100 miles a minute without feeling the movement. A world where little globules around us grow to men and women, without occasioning us surprise, I suppose because we never think about it. A self-contradictory world? On the contrary it is tediously law-abiding and monot- onously self-consistent, it might be thought. Its facts, however opposed some of them may seem, have a perennial habit of ultimately agreeing. Its facts are reconcilable to the degree that if not reconcilable we suspect them of not being facts. What can this reconcilability of natural facts connote? Ob- viously, for one thing, that all Nature is a harmony. Nature as we saw includes man. Then man is of the harmony
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