CHAPTER XXVI 

 THE NERVOUS SYSTEM 



IN the introductory chapter it was said in substance 

 that the one word which most nearly covers the work of the 

 nervous system is the word co-ordination. This state- 

 ment arouses in one the impulse to protest that it leaves 

 out of account the relations subsisting between the nervous 

 system and the states of consciousness which are of the 

 most immediate interest to us all. The physiologist, being 

 human, sympathizes with such a protest, but he must 

 continue to treat his material for the most part from an 

 external point of observation. This is not for want of 

 respect for the psychologic method; it is rather with frank 

 recognition of the vastness of the realm in which that 

 method is applicable. It is because he must defer to 

 experts in that field that he will not enter upon it as an 

 amateur. 



Most readers need to be told with the utmost emphasis 

 and with frequent reiteration that consciousness is the 

 accompaniment of an excessively small share of the mani- 

 fold reactions of the nervous system. In the words of 

 President Hall, it is "a little candle burning in one room of 

 the mind's museum." All that occurs from first to last in 

 the life history of a fish or a frog can be explained as reflex 

 adjustment, without the assumption of self-knowledge or 

 conscious purpose on the part of the animal. That was a 

 weird and fascinating picture which duBois Reymond once 

 drew of a world precisely like our own, save that its in- 

 habitants were unconscious. In such a world an artist 

 without will or pleasure in his work might create a faultless 

 statue because his inherited nervous mechanism and the 



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