THE PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT 303 
indicated by Dr. Sherrington which is full of suggestion and 
interest. 
“Tt is significant in the evolution of animal form,” he 
says,* “that the organ that exhibits most uninterrupted and 
harmonious increase in development, as studied successively in 
passing from lowest to highest, is the brain. And it is signifi- 
cant that in the nervous system—segmental system as it is— 
the brain is developed, not in those segments whose sense 
organs are ordinary cutaneous (tactual, etc.), muscular and 
visceral, but in the segments connected with the visual, olfac- 
tory, and auditory sense-organs ; in other words, the brain is 
developed in the head. The head is, so to say, the individual ; 
it has the mouth, it takes the food, including air and water, 
and it has the main sense organs providing data for both space 
and time. ‘To this the body, an elongated motor organ with a 
share of the viscera and the skin, is appended primarily as 
a machine for locomotion. ‘This latter must of necessity lie at 
the behest of the great sense organs of the head.” 
Now let us try and picture to ourselves a spinal animal, or 
one which retains only the lowest portion of the brain, the 
part known as the bulb or medulla oblongata; let us assume 
that it is conscious and capable of acquiring experience through 
the association and coalescence of the data afforded by the 
senses that remain to it; and let us try to imagine the con- 
scious situations which would arise, and their value in the 
guidance of behaviour. ‘The senses that remain are touch and 
the temperature sense, the motor sense affording data from the 
muscles, joints, and tendons, and those which supply certain 
visceral sensations. ‘There is not one of much, if any, guiding 
value left. There is not one of what we may term anticipatory 
use. There is not one which could serve to infuse anything 
like definite meaning into the situation. For, after all, 
meaning is expectation. ‘There is an element of anticipation 
in all those senses which are of any real guiding value in 
the conscious situation. Sight, hearing, and, especially for 
some animals, smell,—these are the senses which forewarn of 
* Op. cit., p. 18, 
