CONSCIOUSNESS IQQ 



philosophical position is commonly identified as mate- 

 rialism/ but the term naturalism' is to be preferred— be- 

 cause the ultimate nature of matter and energy remains 

 unknown, and the task of science and philosophy is to 

 study nature as given, and without prejudicial precon- 

 ceptions. 



Among the modem writers who have discussed the 

 mind-body' problem at length is Sir Charles Scott Sher- 

 rington ( 1861-1952) , to whom the world is indebted for 

 the basic principles of neurophysiology, especially as re- 

 lated to the function of the central nervous system. Sher- 

 rington pointed out in his book, Man on His Nature 

 (1941), that mind' is not equally an attribute of all Hv- 

 ing things. It is apparently absent in the molds, yeasts, 

 fungi, and in the whole of the plant kingdom. Possibly 

 present as some primordial awareness in the protozoa 

 and lower metazoa, it makes its definitive appearance in 

 the higher metazoa and reaches its maximal develop- 

 ment in man. Yet even in such vertebrates as exhibit it 

 in the adult stage, it is absent in the ovum and sperma- 

 tozoon, and very meagerly developed, if at all, in the 

 embryo. A newborn human infant cannot be said to have 

 a 'mind' beyond the elementary perception of such 

 things as himger, discomfort, and fatigue. In every spe- 

 cies, 'mind' appears only at a late stage in the develop- 

 ment of the brain. Sherrington noted that the cells of 

 the body are reproduced by cell division from the ger- 

 minal cells, even as the germinal cells, carried in the re- 

 productive organs, themselves divide and redivide, gen- 

 erations without end, so that the physical inheritance of 

 the body goes back generation through generation into 

 the geologic past. But there is no such continuity in re- 

 spect to 'mind,' which, as it were, appears out of nihil, 

 out of absolutely nothing, in each individual at a time 

 when the brain has reached a critical stage of anatomic 

 development; in other words 'mind,' urJike body, ap- 

 pears to be biologically discontinuous, or episodic. (Sher- 

 rington used the word 'phasic.') 



