328 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



I am well aware that I shall be charged by some, both physiologists 

 and psychologists, of harping again upon the same old string. But I 

 confess that I am more and more indifferent to this charge. For I 

 am more and more convinced that neither the idealistic nor the psycho- 

 parallelistic theories of the relations of the nervous mechanism to the 

 life of consciousness explain such a case of recovery from paralysis as 

 this to which your attention has just been called. Indeed, both forms 

 of theory seem to me to introduce a confusion, which increases rather 

 than clears up, the fundamental mystery of the facts. To my think- 

 ing, nothing which can possibly be said as to why the mind has a body 

 goes any way at all toward explaining how this patient got control of 

 his paralyzed facial muscles, for purposes expressive of his emotions 

 and his volitions, through the N. accessorius and its cortical center, 

 after the direct connection by the N. facialis with its center had been 

 totally destroyed. Nor does any explanation which could conceivably 

 express itself in terms of psycho-physical parallelism seem much more 

 satisfactory. 



In a word, this suggestive case of anastomosis, and all similar cases, 

 together with hundreds of other species of phenomena — some of them 

 belonging to our ordinary experience and some of them due to extra- 

 ordinary situations and developments — all seem to me to point unmis- 

 takably to the existence of dynamical relations between the nervous 

 mechanism and the conscious mental life. And is not our science, 

 whether we start from the physiological or from the psychological 

 point of view, nothing but a description of this net-work of dynamical 

 interrelations? But in being this, how is it any less scientific or any 

 more essentially mysterious than is any other science? To all science, 

 indeed, of every species, it is just these dynamical interrelations which 

 are the ultimate facts. Behind them it is impossible for science to go. 

 Every science consists in the discovery, classification and formulating 

 under so-called ' laws ' of these interrelations. To say a priori that 

 that can not be, or is not, which most obviously is — this is to be esson- 

 tiallv unscientific. 



