VII - The Brain and its Work

Summary

The chief function of the central nervous system is to send messages to the muscles which will make the body move effectively as a whole.

E. D. Adrian, The Mechanism of Nervous Action.

L'homme n'est qu'un roseau le plus faible de la nature; mais c'est un roseau pensant.

Pascal.

Biology analyses the organism in the instance of ourselves. and many others like us into an assemblage of quasiindependent minuter living units. It clinches that finding by showing that each of us for a short time lives as one such single unit. Physical science, with its units of a different order, carrying out on us search for its units finds that they likewise make us up. It finds us like the rest of what it has examined, a mass entirely resoluble into units of what it calls ‘energy’. Of all that a compound organism, such as one of ourselves, does, the greater part is satisfactorily traceable by biological analysis to the properties of the component biological units, in this case the ‘cells’ of the composite individual. So, similarly, under physical analysis, item after item of the behaviour of the whole is resoluble into behaviour of the subvisible physical units. These latter our fancy can perhaps think of ultimately as electrically charged ‘packets of motion’.

There remains however among the happenings met with in such a compound organism as ourselves and our like a certain residue seemingly not thus resoluble. Neither by the biologist with his analysis, nor, and even more definitely negatively, by the physicist with his analysis.