238 THE PROBLEM OF BODY AND MIND 



by-product of the all-important inter-relations of nerve-cells, 

 then we have slipped back again into the slough of material- 

 ism. And it does not seem unfair to put to those who say 

 that thinking is only the phosphorescence of an exuberant 

 cerebral metabolism, the question, " What, then, must the 

 theory of epiphenomenalism be held to be? A will-o'-the- 

 wisp looking at itself ? " 



Against the theory that the mind does not count let us 

 note the opinion of Professor Sherrington, one of the most 

 distinguished investigators of the nervous system. In his 

 important book The Integrative Action of the Nervous 

 System, he says : " The concomitance between certain 

 nervous reactions and psychosis seems an alliance that 

 strengthens the restless striving of the individual animal 

 which is the passport of its species to continuance of exist- 

 ence" (p. 333). . . . "Certain it is that if we study 

 the process by which in ourselves this control over reflex 

 action is acquired by an individual, psychical factors loom 

 large, and more is known of them than of the purely physi- 

 ological modus operandi involved in the attainment of the 

 control" (p. 390). 



Only in the analytic laboratory or systematic museum 

 can we rest satisfied with a view of Animate Nature which 

 maintains that mind does not count. By sympathy if not 

 by science we are sure that to leave mind out is a travesty 

 of the facts. Especially in its higher reaches, life is suffused 

 with feeling and meaning. 



In his Birds and Man Mr. Hudson tells of what his 

 brother once saw on a lonely sheep-farm on the southern 

 frontier of Buenos Ayres. " Immense numbers of upland 

 geese in great flocks used to spend the cold months on the 

 plains where he had his lonely hut; and one morning in 



