280 The Older Doctrines [lect. 



knowledge of the real nature and disposition of the elements of 

 the nervous system is most meagre. 



" There abounds indeed a rich plenty of men to whom 

 " everything is clear. Such, dogmatizing with the utmost 

 "confidence, make up and publish the story of the brain and 

 "the use of its several parts with the same assuredness as if 

 " they had mastered with their actual eyes the structure of so 

 "admirable a machine and penetrated into the secrets of the 

 "great artificer." Stensen perhaps especially directed this 

 sarcasm against Descartes, whose merit as a philosopher, 

 however, as we have seen, he duly recognised ; but he doubt- 

 less had in his mind Willis also, with whose mere anatomy 

 moreover he found fault, complaining of his figures as being 

 inaccurate. 



Stensen refused to admit, in face of the lack of all sound 

 anatomical knowledge, any physiological deductions whatever. 

 After pointing out a number of cases in which he shews that 

 adequate anatomical knowledge is wanting, he says, " whence you 

 " may guess how little trust is to be put in explanations based 

 "on such a futile foundation." "I have said nothing of the 

 "use of parts, nothing of the actions which we call animal, 

 "since it is impossible to explain the movements carried out 

 "by a machine, so long as we remain ignorant of the structure 

 " of its parts." 



After pointing out the great difficulties which attend the 

 dissection of the brain and especially all attempts in such 

 tender structures to follow out the course and connections of 

 the strands of fibres and other parts, he delivers himself of 

 this pregnant passage : 



"If indeed the white substance of which I am speaking 

 " be, as in most places it seems to be, wholly fibrous in nature, 

 " we must necessarily admit that the arrangement of its fibres 

 " is made according to some definite pattern on which doubtless 

 "depends the diversity of sensations and movements." Had 

 he who in the earlier half of the seventeenth century thus 

 foreshadowed the results of the last decades of the nineteenth 

 century, been led to devote to the problems of the brain the 

 same brilliant talents which had gathered in such valuable 



