A resource for teaching Science, art and creativity by Dr Lizzie Burns - https://history.medsci.ox.ac.uk/art
Quotesfrom'ManonhisNature'bySirCharlesScott
Sherrington(1940)
A selection of quotes by Dr Lizzie Burns as part of a project with the University
of Oxford funded by the Wellcome Trust to share Sherrington's creative way of
looking at the world and passion for teaching.
For further information: https://history.medsci.ox.ac.uk/art
His book was described on the cover as “A free, fearless, and invigorating expression
of a biologist’s philosophy”
Titles of the chapters include:
- Life in little
- The wisdom of the body
- Earth’s reshuffling
- A whole presupposed of its parts
- The brain and its work
- The organ of liaison
- Brain collaborates with psyche
- Earth’s alchemy
- Two ways of one mind
“The human individual is an organised family of cells, a family so integrated as to
have not merely corporate identity but a corporate personality.”
“Each of us at the outset of his her individual life story is microscopic.”
“Each cell is an organised life-system centered upon itself. The cell is a unit life”
“Some of our cells, although they are part and parcel of us, have not even fixed
coherence with our ‘rest’. Such cells are called ‘free’. The original cell which started
the whole body was free, as are all those of that particular kind. And others are free.
The cells of our blood are as free as fish in a stream. They are in a stream of the
blood. Some of them resemble in structure and ways so closely the living freeswimming amoeba of the pond as to be called amoeboid… They catch and digest
particles, should I get a wound they contribute to its healing.”
“In the spongework of the cell foci coexist for different operations, so that a thousand
different processes go forward at the same time within it. … Let a catastrophe befall
which is death, and these catalysts become a disorderly mob and pull the very fabric
of the cell to pieces.”
“There is in every cell a visible kernel called the nucleus. It is directive: a nest of
ferments. Remove it from the cell and the cell’s rest gets out of gear and it dies.”
A resource for teaching Science, art and creativity by Dr Lizzie Burns - https://history.medsci.ox.ac.uk/art
“The red pigment of our blood does exquisite things. Our blood pigment uses the
circumstance that iron is a metal which plays fast and loose with oxygen… Our red
pigment owes its colour to iron. It picks up oxygen from the air at the bottom of the
lungs and travels with it and distributes it to all the several organs of the body.”
“Life as we know it is always specific – specific in time and place. Surely, it is of
where and when it is, and no other where or when. All of life as we know it could
exist probably nowhere else than on this planet’ surface, where it is.”
“Of ourselves, yes, we know we have a mind. And the dragon-fly? Yes it may have a
mind. And amoeba?”
“Life as an energy-system is so woven into the fabric of Earth’s surface that to
suppose a life isolated from the rest of that terrestrial world even briefly gives an
image too distorted to resemble life. All is dovetailed together.”
“Recruitment of living from lifeless is going on in an almost endless variety on land,
in sea, and river, and unceasingly. But in all its instances its starting-point is always
existing life. The individual as observed is always a bud from a previous one.”
“We dismiss wonder commonly with childhood. Much later we may return. Then the
whole world becomes wonderful.”
“The body is made up of cells, thousands of millions of them, in our instance about
1000 billions. It is a unity which has become multiplicity while keeping its unity. At
its beginning it is jut one cell, and the whole body is the progeny of that one. Its
ancestry converges back to that one ancestral cell. And that, in its turn, was from the
ancestral cell of the next preceding family of cells.”
“Before the coming of the microscope the earliest chapters of this life-story baffled
the wisest… When the microscope did come to it set itself to trace this Odyssey, this
journey from pin’s-head egg to a grown man. The truth was stranger still. All there
was to see was a speck of granular jelly, bearing no likeness to either parent or man at
all.”
“At its outsetting that speck grew and, presently tearing its tiny self in two, made an
adhering pair. Then they 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on; only to slow down after reaching
millions upon millions. Not to stop altogether until by misadventure or, after years, by
natural term, there falls on the whole assembly that subversive change called ‘death’.”
“The nerve cell is as obviously a nerve cell whether from man or fish. The cells of the
various parts of the assembly assume special shapes, octagonal, stellate, threadlike, or
what not. They as the case may require, pour cement which binds, or fluid in which
they shall move free. Some will have changed their stuff and become rigid bone, or
harder still, the enamel of a tooth; some become fluid, so as to flow along tubes too
fine for the eye to see. Some become clear as glass, some opaque as stone, some
colourless, some red, some black. Some become factories of a furious chemistry,
some become inert as death. Some become engines of mechanical pull, some
scaffoldings of static support. Some a system transmitting electrical signs. It might
A resource for teaching Science, art and creativity by Dr Lizzie Burns - https://history.medsci.ox.ac.uk/art
serve as a text for democracy. It is as if the life of each one of all those millions has
understood its special part. Thus arises the new integral individual to be.”
“the cell surface becomes a boundary and a medium of exchange between two
chemical worlds, one inside the cell ‘alive’ and the other outside of it lifeless.”
“step by step things shape. There appear, tiny at first, what to the eye of the expert are
recognisable as rudiments of parts of the future creature.”
“The early units which formed the family when it was but a tiny ball take into their
counsel water. The ball they form is filled with it. The growing membrane, halffloating, can then fold. It shapes itself, it feeds, water is a generous solvent; and it
admits electrical activities, chemical compounds separating with opposite charges.
Water, within and without, allows the cell free scope for action. Water is a wonderful
‘surround’ and the germinal cell seems to appreciate it.”
“the cell has architecture. As to the stone of its architecture, they are ‘proteins’”
“the protein coat of the fertilised egg-cell which restrains the daughter-cell from
becoming spherical behaves as a sheet of elastic jelly”
“the essential service of muscle to life is, quickly and reversibly, to shorten so as to
pull. It’s shortening is called ‘contraction’. The importance of muscular contraction
to us can be stated by saying that all man can do is to move things, and his muscular
contraction is his sole means thereto.”
“the body of a worm and the face of a man alike have to be taken as chemical
responses”
“A motion-picture photographed from cells in growth almost startles us in growth
almost startles us by the intensity of the activity they show. Protein synthesis is in
flood – a riot of activity, but always an ordered riot”
“how is it that the visual picture proceeds – if that is the right word – from an
electrical disturbance in the brain?”
“the eye sends into the cell-and-fibre forest of the brain throughout the waking day
continual rhythmic streams of tiny, individually evanescent electrical potentials. This
throbbing streaming crowd of electrified shifting point in the spongework of the brain
resembles the tiny two-dimensional upside-down picture of the outside world”
“that little picture sets up an electrical storm. And that electrical storm so set up is one
which affects a whole population of brain cells.”
“there are motor acts of which quite usually we are unaware; the ordinary snapping of
the eyelids is such. But there are a host of motor acts, more complex and more varied,
of which we are on some occasions fully aware, at others less aware, and sometimes
not aware. There are act of which it can be said that concurrence with a main act
excludes them from awareness altogether”
A resource for teaching Science, art and creativity by Dr Lizzie Burns - https://history.medsci.ox.ac.uk/art
“We think of ourselves and others as engaged from one moment to moment in doing
this or that. That is a convenience of speech. Each of us at any moment of the waking
day is a whole bundle of acts simultaneously”
“the main act of the moment enjoys a special position. It seems to each of us, amid a
natural world a happening which we control”
“I am perhaps rather disappointed at the very little that my mind has to tell me. When
it gives its attention to my standing it can make me fully aware that I am standing, but
as or telling me how it is that I stand I get extremely little from it”
“there is in the brain a spot which, by mean of nerves going thither and thence, works
the breathing movement of the chest”
“let us seek where we first trace mind. Does it not begin with the urge to live?”
“an act which in the learning required full attention becomes by repetition so facile
that the mind can wander from it and it may be done better than if attended to. The
pianist will tell us that his thought can wander”
“I added a speck (of cholera germ) to the clear water just before leaving the laboratory
late in the summer afternoon. Next afternoon, to my extreme astonishment the whole
tall column of water in one jar was faintly opalescent. I microscoped a drop. It
teemed with myriads of cholera germs, the progeny of my speck the day before”
“along the scale of life, muscle is there before nerve, and nerve is there before mind”
“the influence of mind on the doings of life makes mind an effective contribution to
life”
“the taking of a morsel of food is an act presenting successive phases…. The morsel
and what is being done to it are then present to the mind; the minds ‘attention’ can be
turned to it… We can manoeuvre it with the mouth… So long as the morsel is within
grip… and is experienced by the mind.. it would seem, at ‘will.’… The morsel passes
over… to sweep the morsel into the interior of the body. With that transit the morsel
becomes forthwith lost to mind”
“the heart with its tubular system, pouring nutriment into every nook and corner of the
living body, is an integrating mechanism and of supreme importance. If it stop for a
minute or so our life stops. The highest integrations by the nervous system are not so
urgently important as is it.”
“a healthy man is a set of organs of interlocking action regulating each other, the
whole making a self-regulating system. This partnership of the organs is worked
greatly by secretion within the body”
A resource for teaching Science, art and creativity by Dr Lizzie Burns - https://history.medsci.ox.ac.uk/art
“we sometimes call these electrical potentials ‘messages’, but we have then to bear in
mind that they are not messages in the sense of meaningful symbols… The signals
travel by simply disturbing electrically the next piece of their route”
“a very simple reflex is the ‘knee jerk’… Tap on the tendon releases within the
muscle a nerve-signal which on reaching the spinal cord fires one back again into the
muscle, making the muscle twitch. That is all”
“the knee-jerk is reflex. Mind does not accompany it”
“To the reacting individual himself his behaviour normally occasions no surprise.
Stranger still, of all people the reacting individual himself is the last to think himself
reflex. Such a reflex system, operated by sequences of thousand-patterned stimuli
corresponding with total situations of the moment, might well work a Robot for many
purposes indistinguishable from a man”
“A dense constellation of some thousands of nodal point bursts out every few seconds
into a short phase of rhythmical flashing. At first a few lights, then more, increasing
in rate and number with a deliberate crescendo to a climax, then to decline and die
away. After due pause the efflorescence is repeated. With each such rhythmic outburst
goes a discharge of trains of travelling lights along the stalk and out if it all together
into a number of nerve branches What is it doing? It manages the taking of our
breath the while we sleep”
“the brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way
entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head-mass becomes an enchanted loom
where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful
pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of sub-patterns. Now as the
walking body rouses, sub-patterns of this great harmony of activity stretch down the
unlit tracks of the stalk-piece of the scheme. Strings of flashing and travelling sparks
engage the lengths of it. This means that the body is up and rises to meet the waking
day”
“dissolving pattern after dissolving pattern will, the long day through, without
remission melt into and succeed into each other in this scheme by which for the
moment we figure the brain and spinal cord”
“the roof-brain.. the five senses are largely separately identifiable here. Each of them
has there a separate primary ‘enclave’”
On the brain - “a special place for arithmetical calculation, a special place for musical
appreciation and so on”
“so called ‘higher’ motor behaviour in the individual has two components. One
component is reflex, which as the originally predominant one we thought of as basal.
The other is a superstructure and is not reflex. It is this latter which in the higher
animal is supplied by the roof-brain, and is so whether the motor behaviour is
instinctive or rational. It became more prominent as man was approached and most
prominent in man himself.”
A resource for teaching Science, art and creativity by Dr Lizzie Burns - https://history.medsci.ox.ac.uk/art
“this phasic alternation of activity and recuperation in the brain divides each of us,
life-long, into two alternating individual, a waking and sleeping”
“even a fleeting touch say on the foot, is followed a moment later by electrical
disturbance, fleetingly also, at a definite spot of the surface on the roof-brain…. A
map of our tactile skin is spread out on a field of the surface of the brain”
“shut off the stream of impulses reaching the roof-brain from the sense-organs. When
it is done sleep follows”
“the roof-brain spreads like a vaulting over the so-called stem of the brain which
supports it like a column. Buried in this stem where the shaft is still slender there is a
place which, when excited by the electrical current, immediately induces sleep”
“cortex is the region where brain and mind meet”
“has the evolution of the brain produced mind out of no mind?”
“at death mind seems to remerge into no mind. But mind seems to come from nothing
and to return to nothing”
“the brain derives its mind additively from a cumulative mental property of the
individual cells composing it”
“the ability to learn favours survival and is heritable”
“the protective reflexes are painful and innate. Their service we may suppose has
given them survival value. An acute psychical urge is ‘pain’… It is a ‘lesson’”
“the body has a special sense of its own injuries, drastically affecting the mind as to
capture the mind’s attention even to the exclusion for the time being of all else”
“my raging tooth drives me to the dentist”
“our forebrain is so large as to bulge out the contour of the head. Our forebrain is a
monster forebrain”
“the mental act of ‘knowing’ we are aware of, but we cannot sensually observe it. It
is experienced whether we try to observe it or not”
“it is as though our mind were a pool of which the movements on the surface only are
what we experience”
“I have not an awareness of the muscles as such at all. Yet I execute the movement
rightly and without difficulty”
“man in his mood may count himself in his day as a brief spectator of his own
shaping”
A resource for teaching Science, art and creativity by Dr Lizzie Burns - https://history.medsci.ox.ac.uk/art
“it is a planet now with hopes and fears and tentative ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. A planet is
now human”
“mind.. goes therefore in our spatial world more ghostly than a ghost. Invisible,
intangible, it is a thing not even of outline; it is not a ‘thing’… All that counts in life.
Desire, zest, truth, love, knowledge.. Mind, yoked with life, how varied its reaction!”
“oxygen is said to ‘wind the vital clock’. It does so for every cell in the body”
“(malaria) this parasitic animal scourges with misery and death entire regions of
Earth’ surface which might but for it be happy places… Its life is the destroying of
other lives.. It is a product of evolution”
“(malaria) nature has evolved in this plasmodium a means of inflicting pain and
distress to an extent calculable but practically unimaginable”
“the whole man now that his mind has ‘moral values’ must combine his scientific
part-man with his human rest”
“the individual life in virtue of its mind uses strategy to promote its life and that of its
seed, and strategy to avoid death. The unconscious ‘urge-to-live’ is added conscious
‘zest-to-live’”
“life condemned to live by spreading pain and death around it… mind as soon as it
develops is plunged into the thick of life as conflict”
“life is the supreme blessing of the planet; none the less it is also the planet’s
crowning curse”
“when perceiving certain suffering external to itself it so reacts to it that that suffering
becomes its own. That gift is a gift, it would seem almost uniquely human”
“is man one more experiment which Nature makes, later to scrap?”
“without emotion it could not dream of the tasks it does dream of”
“this pursuit of truth involves emotion”