Brain Advance Access originally published online on April 23, 2007
Brain 2007 130(8):1984-1987; doi:10.1093/brain/awm075
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Sherrington's philosophical writings–A ‘zest for life’
Peninsula Medical School, Exeter, EX2 4UD, UK
Correspondence to: Adam Zeman, Peninsula Medical School, Exeter, EX2 4UD, UK E-mail: adam.zeman{at}pms.ac.uk
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Sherrington's late writings are often described as dualistic, yet Sherrington was deeply uneasy with theories that radically separate mind and brain. His questioning, open-minded and historically-informed approach to their relationship eschews dogmatic solutions.
Key Words: Sherrington; mind-brain problem; soul
Sherrington delivered the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology, later published as Man on His Nature, in Edinburgh in 1937–38, at the age of 80 (Sherrington, 1953
). The Endeavour of Jean Fernel, his life of the French 16th century physician, whose thinking provides Sherrington's point of departure in the Edinburgh lectures, was published in 1946 (Sherrington, 1946). In these late works, he explored themes that had fascinated him throughout his long career, especially the nature of mind and its relationships to life and matter. Described as the ‘leading proponent of dualism after Socrates and Descartes’, these books might be approached with guarded pessimism. But this description does Sherrington a disservice. The writings are immensely subtle, thoughtful, playful and prescient, harbouring the seeds of many key ideas in contemporary neurology and cognitive science.
Sherrington's decision to begin Man on His Nature with a chapter devoted to a physician scientist of the French Renaissance, Jean Fernel—no household name—might appear unnecessarily oblique or even obscurantist. It is, as it turns out, an ingenious tactic. Fernel's views, sympathetically presented, provide an historical perspective on more modern theories of life and mind that Sherrington evokes repeatedly to remind us, sotto voce, how radically the views of humane and intelligent people on these topics have changed over the ages. We can assume the further intended implication that the process of change will continue. In this way, Fernel becomes a great aid to Sherrington in his perplexity, as their fingers touch across the centuries.
Sherrington singles out Fernel's study De abditis rerum causis [Paris, 1548: referred to by Fernel as Dialogi (most recently translated as On hidden causes of things: forms, souls and occult disease in Renaissance medicine by John M Forrester and John Henry, Brill 2005] which restated a question Hippocrates had posed, and answered in the negative—‘whether in disease there is not something supernatural?’ For Sherrington, of course, the question of interest was broader: does a full understanding of what there is require that we invoke supernatural entities? To this broad question Fernel's answer was as follows: ‘there is in man nothing whatsoever which does not come within the law of nature, nothing whatsoever excepting only his knowledge and his power to will.’ Thus, Fernel exempted the human mind from the law of nature—but, as ‘his bias was not to distinguish between life and mind,’ a great deal in fact turns out to fall within his ‘nothing whatsoever.’ ‘He considered the action of the mind as part of physiology because for him all the workings which went on in the body were ... acts of ... the soul.’
Sherrington needless to say, had moved intellectual light years from this point of view. Life, he was persuaded, lay squarely within the domain of science—in fact, he suggests that the discoveries of biochemistry have made the boundary between the lifeless and the living something of a ‘figment.’ But while Sherrington was clear that ‘Thinking ... appears as a phase of living’ he was unable, quite, to follow through to the tempting conclusion that thinking, like living, lies wholly within the realm of science. Fernel ‘would have smiled ... . For him there is no difference between thought and the rest of living’—because both depend on a ‘principle self-contained and free, indivisible, immortal,’ originating ‘above the visible world ... in a world not accessible to sense.’ For Sherrington, Fernel's simple, imperishable principle of life had, once and for all, ‘resolved itself into millions of local principles’: but the principle of mind remained an agonizing problem.
On the one hand, Sherrington was persuaded, with all the force of common sense and the evidence of neurophysiology, that mind must be material. Some of the most passionate passages in Man on his Nature urge this case: ‘Man's life of all lives is the most completely and fully bound to earth because life's experience, wholly earthly, is in man's case the most profound and full ... Man is the most, not the least, earthly of all creatures.’ His thinking is pervaded by the idea of evolution, and he believed that this was just as relevant to mind as to life: ‘Organic evolution ... appears to the biologist to treat and handle body and mind together as one affair.’ He envisaged mind ‘progressing under progressive organisation of those types of system which unfold life. The whole presents itself as one great graduated scale of seething organisation.’ This gives rise to some foreshadowing of evolutionary psychology, as in a mention of the dog's ‘inherited disposition toward the social’ which he compares with ours ‘in regard to civilisation.’ There is another interesting corollary: on several occasions, with reference to Freud, but also when considering the ‘becoming’ of our experience, already fully articulated by the time it reaches our awareness, Sherrington touches on unconscious mind, a half-way house between unconscious life and conscious mind: ‘There would seem therefore to be a grade or grades of mind which we do not experience, as well as the mind which is our mental experience ... . The mind which we experience is in part at least the outcome of mind which we never experience as such.’ Accordingly, of Descartes’ view that non-human animals are ‘automata without mind’, he wrote with uncharacteristically vehement indignation: ‘The Cartesian lack of sympathy and understanding in this matter of creature-kind [is] an unaccountable trespass both against our fellow creatures, and against common sense.’ In an equally feeling passage, he offers a sharp critique of the religious conception of the soul: ‘With insertion into the human individual an immortal soul, again a trespass is committed ... . It is an irrational blow at the solidarity of the individual; it seems aimed against the very harmony that unites the concepts as sister-concepts. It severs them and drives off one of them, lonelily enough, on a flight into the rainbow's end.’
If mind was material, Sherrington wanted to be able to tell a scientific story about its genesis and functional role. In his Rede lecture, given in Cambridge in 1933, The Brain and its Mechanism, he proposes some ideas with a distinctly contemporary ring (Sherrington, 1933). Noting that conscious mind, at least, appears to be associated with some but not other brain regions, and that the constituent cells in the two kinds of region appear identical, he concludes that experience must depend upon ‘some attribute of ... organisation itself.’ He later suggests that recurrent circuitry creating ‘circular back-waters [in which] the signalling might be long-maintained’ may play a crucial role, anticipating the ‘re-entrant signalling’ of modern theorists such as Gerald Edelman (Edelman, 1994). A sentence or two later he anticipates Marcel Mesulam (Mesulam, 1998) on the importance to cognition of the lengthening of the ‘synaptic bridge’ that links sensation and action: ‘The mental action lies buried in the brain ... in that part most deeply recessed from the outside world, that is furthest from input and output.’ In his quest for a mechanism, he sets himself a daunting target, biting the bullet that less clear-thinking authors often merely nibble: as he writes in Man on his Nature, ‘... in looking for mind in energy we are not looking for a form of energy then to translate it into mind ... .What we look for is an energy which is mind.’
What of the functional role of mind? Here Sherrington anticipates the global workspace theory of Bernard Baars (1988) and Stan Dehaene (2001): while reflex and habit allow us to economise on expenditure of mental effort, experience, mind-in-the-full, is required to allow us to exercise voluntary control over one ‘main act of the moment’—‘amid a natural world a happening which we control.’ Consciousness is most to be found where ‘doings ... are most modifiable.’ Sherrington sided with Lloyd Morgan: "the primary aim, object and purpose of consciousness is control." Dame Nature seems to have taken the same view.’
So far, we seem to be in the familiar company of a 20th century neuroscientist, cultured, perhaps a little given to purple passages, but of decidedly materialistic inclinations. What holds him back from the brink of physicalism? First his keen sense of the ‘manifold variety of mind’; second, the problem of personal meaning; and third, the ineradicable—or so it seemed to Sherrington—subjectivity of experience. In an appreciation of Sherrington written in 1957, on the centenary of his birth, Wilder Penfield, an affectionate past student, mentions that ‘he lectured to us using copious headings and subheadings which he chalked on the board ... sometimes leaving his hearers in a state of frustrated confusion’ (Penfield, 1957). The account of these obstacles to materialism in Man on his Nature is given in softer and more subtle tones.
In The Brain and its Mechanism, Sherrington states with disarming frankness the first difficulty that confronts anyone seeking to reduce the mind to matter: ‘It seems ludicrous to range such a paucity of nerve-process alongside the manifold variety of mind.’ Leibniz had written in similar terms in a precocious thought experiment: ‘... supposing there were a machine so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we could conceive of it as enlarged and yet preserving the same proportions, so that we might enter into it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push against one another, but never anything by which to explain perception’ (Leibniz, 1714). Sherrington keenly appreciated the ‘manifold variety’ of experience. He had written of
Such old enchantments as a boy's—and had lived a long lifetime to the full. He was perplexed by the daunting problem of how to extract ‘the wine of experience’ from ‘the water of the brain’ (McGinn, 1991When life first whispers use of life ...
). In a similar vein he noted that ‘Physiology has not enough to offer about the brain in relation to the mind to offer the psychiatrist much help.’ Times have, of course, changed: it would be fascinating to see Sherrington's response to the past 50 years of research in cognitive neuroscience and biological psychiatry. Sherrington's second, related, misgiving about the reduction of mind to physical process concerns the absence of personal meaning, the absence of self, in the discourse of science. In seeking to understand mind we ‘face something which not only transmits signals but reads them.’ Physiology brings us ‘the brain as telephone exchange,’ when what we really wanted was ‘The subscribers with their thoughts, their desires, their anticipations, the motives, their anxieties, their rejoicings.’ Or as—Sherrington supposes—Fernel would have said, the brain constructs ‘a tenement for mind’ but fails to disclose the tenant.
His third concern is the most fundamental, and arguably underpins the other two. Our experience, in all its manifold variety, appears to be invisible to science: ‘Our mental experience is not open to observation through any sense organ ... . The perceptible [is] rooted in sense. Our mental experience has no such channel of entrance to the mind. It is already of the mind ....’
Thus despite his conviction that energy and mind must be two ‘contrasted constituents’ of a unity, that both thought and action are ‘psycho-physical throughout,’ Sherrington could not yet see a way across the gap dividing mind and matter. The brain, he firmly, believed is the indispensable organ of experience, the ‘provider of mind’—yet however we gaze at its workings we find not experience, but only neurons, in their cosmic numbers, interlinked and ceaselessly communicating; we can discern nothing that corresponds to a subject of experience, who finds meanings in the world; and, worst of all, there seems to be no possibility of bringing the object of interest, experience, properly within the scientist's field of observation. Thus ‘To man's understanding the world remain[s] obstinately double.’ Sherrington felt that a biologist should ask how ‘brain and mind go together’—but also ‘... make plain how far he is from answer.’
He was not, at all, happy with this state of affairs. He felt it was ‘in some ways ... embarrassing for biology.’ And time and time again in Man on his Nature, clearly dissatisfied and uneasy, he hunts around for a more satisfactory solution. He was, after all, the master of the reflex, so his first resort is to consider whether experience may be reducible to movement. ‘Life's aim is an act not a thought,’ the brain is primarily a ‘manager of muscle.’ Given that mind is ‘at outset a sort of adjunct to the management of motor behaviour, is it in fact any more?’ Or again: ‘Energy acts, ie is motion. Of mind a difficulty is to know whether it is motion.’ But Sherrington cannot persuade himself of this solution to his problem. So he returns to the chase. He begins to worry that the question he is asking about mind and matter might somehow be misconceived: could he be committing a ‘category error,’ seeking to relate two concepts that are of the wrong logical kinds to treat in this way? He quotes Kant: ‘If I am asked where the seat of the soul is in the body, I begin to suspect something crooked in the question’ and Aristotle; ‘... to speak of the soul as feeling angry is no more appropriate than to speak of the soul as weaving or building ... it is better to say that the man does so through his soul.’ Perhaps there may be a way forward here, but either Sherrington is not satisfied by this idea or he cannot see how to pursue it. He remains uneasy. He is willing to consider subversive accounts of mental acts that could help to demystify them. For instance, he raises the possibility that our impression of free choice rests not on a metaphysical property of actions, but on our human capacity to imagine several possible outcomes ahead of an event, which simply must in the end be a single ‘main act.’ Dan Wegner's recent Illusion of Conscious Will takes up this story where Sherrington left off (Wegner, 2002).
Man on his Nature opens unexpectedly with the ingenious introduction of Jean Fernel, and it ends, just as unexpectedly, with a chapter entitled Altruism. This turns out to contain a detailed account of the life cycle of the mosquito. Once again, Sherrington has his own good reasons. The chapter makes a brilliant conclusion to the work, characteristically subtle and multifaceted, in which Sherrington turns to questions of value, and of evil. Evil predominates—he quotes Hume: ‘Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings animated and organized, sensible and active. You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness!’ Aristotle is no more cheerful: ‘evil is more plentiful than good; what is hateful is more plentiful than what is fair.’
Sherrington is a complex guide to morality, utterly modern, yet even in his most desolate passages one still has the clear sense of being in the presence of a man who knows the rules of cricket. We are alone with our values in the universe, and ‘To look round at the world and find there nothing whose thought partakes his "good" and "evil" excites in man a strange sense of loneliness ... .The human mind is strangely placed ... Grappling with its newly found "values," yet with no experience except its own, no judgment but its own, no counsel but its own.’ Characteristically, Sherrington's endorsement of the values he cherishes—Truth, Beauty, Charity — is not a passive one, but carefully considered, in the troubling knowledge that the pursuit of altruism involves an ‘adverse criticism of [man's] own process of creation. He is becoming an adverse critic of his own’—inevitably selfish—‘zest-to-live.’
To approach these late works with the worry that Sherrington might have turned, late in his life, to mysterious ‘last things’ that, by then, he lacked the powers to illuminate would be quite wrong. Man on his Nature is a marvelously enlightening excursion into questions of mind and matter, to which Sherrington brings clarification when he can, acknowledges confusion when he must. Reading by chance a novel by another Nobel Prize winner in parallel with these last books of Sherrington's, JM Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello is a Sherringtonian figure, a novelist who finds moral questions pressing themselves upon her towards the end of her life (Coetzee, 2004). Sherrington and Costello share a zest—one of Sherrington's favourite words—for thought, and for life. ‘Never the time and the place and the loved one all together,’ he laments, after Browning, in Man on his Nature. We can imagine Sir Charles walking off briskly, with Elizabeth Costello on his arm - at an age at which few of us can walk at all - discussing the lives of animals, and the problem of evil, fiercely united in their ‘being alive to the world.’
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Baars BJ. A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. (1988) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coetzee JM. Elizabeth Costello. (2004) London: Vintage.
Dehaene S, Naccache L. Towards a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: basic evidence and a workspace framework. In: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness.—Dehaene S, ed. (2001) Massachusetts: Bradford Books/The MIT Press. 1–37.
Edelman G. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire. (1994) London: Penguin.
Garber D, Ariew R. Discourse on Metaphysics (1686). In: Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays. (1991) Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.
McGinn C. The Problem of Consciousness. (1991) Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Mesulam MM. From sensation to cognition. [Review]. Brain (1998) 121:1013–52.
Penfield W. Sir Charles Sherrington, poet and philosopher. Brain (1957) 3:402–10.
Sherrington C. Man on his Nature. (1953) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sherrington C. The Brain and its Mechanism. (1933) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sherrington C. The Endeavour of Jean Fernel. (1946) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wegner DM. The illusion of Conscious Will. (2002) Massachusetts: Bradford Books/The MIT Press.
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