time: the refreshing river 



sixteenth-century, the first textbook of physiology was the De 

 Homine of Descartes, completed in 1637 but not published till 1662. 

 Here mind and matter were absolutely separated. But as knowledge 

 of the nervous system grew during the eighteenth and nineteenth 

 centuries, it became more and more impossible to uphold this separa- 

 tion. As Whitehead acutely remarks,^ *'The effect of physiology was 

 to put mind back into nature. The neurologist traces first the effect 

 of stimuli along the bodily nerves, then integration at nerve centres, 

 and finally the rise of a projective reference beyond the body with a 

 resulting motor efficacy in renewed nervous excitement." 



Elsewhere he sums up the situation thus:^ "Descartes expresses 

 dualism with the utmost distinctness. For him, there are material 

 substances with spatial relations, and mental substances. The mental 

 are external to the material substances. Neither type requires the other 

 type for the completion of its essence. Their unexplained interrelations 

 are unnecessary for their respective existences. In truth this formulation 

 of the problem in terms of minds and matter is unfortunate; it omits 

 the lower forms of life such as vegetation and the primitive animal 

 types. These forms touch upon human mentality at their highest 

 and upon inorganic nature at their lowest. The effect of this sharp 

 distinction between nature and life has poisoned all subsequent 

 philosophy. Even when the co-ordinate existence of the two types of 

 actuality is abandoned, tliere is no proper fusion of the two in most 

 modem schools of thought. For some, nature is mere appearance and 

 mind the sole reality. For others, physical nature is the sole reality 

 and mind an epiphenomenon. Here the phrases *mere appearance' 

 and 'epiphenomenon' obviously carry the implication of slight 

 importance for the understanding of the final nature of things. The 

 doctrine that I am maintaining is that neither physical nature nor 

 life can be understood unless we fuse them together as essential 

 factors in the composition of 'really real' things, whose intercon- 

 nections and individual characters constitute the universe." This is a 

 fine statement of the true scientific attitude to the problem of minds 

 and bodies, and would be as acceptable to the dialectical materialists 

 as to the emergent evolutionists. It means that when we speak of 

 mind we mean (as Eddington would say) "mind (in the sense of 

 Pavlov and Sherrington)" and not "mind (loud and prolonged 

 applause)." 



1 S & MW, p. 213. 2 N & L, pp. 56, 57. 



202 



