Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/746

726 front called the biceps muscle; it is shortened till it becomes thicker. If I move any of my limbs, the reason is the same. As I now speak to you, the different tones of my voice are due to the exquisitely accurate adjustments and adjusted contractions of a multitude of such particles of flesh; and there is no considerable and visible movement of the animal body which is not, as Descartes says, resolvable into these changes in the form of matter termed muscle. But Descartes went further, and he stated that in the normal and ordinary condition of things these changes in the form of muscle in the living body only occur under certain conditions; and the essential condition of the change was, says Descartes, the motion of the matter contained within the nerves, which go from the central apparatus to the muscle. Descartes gave this moving material a particular name—he animal spirits. Nowadays we should not say that the animal spirits existed, but we should say that a molecular change takes place in the nerve, and that that molecular change is propagated at a certain velocity which has been measured from the central apparatus to the muscle. Modern physiology has measured the rate of the change to which I have referred.

Next, Descartes says that, under ordinary circumstances, this change in the contents of a nerve, which gives rise to the contraction of a muscle, is produced by a change in the central nervous apparatus, as, for example, the brain. We say at the present time exactly the same thing. Descartes said that the animal spirits were stored up in the brain, and flowed out from the motor nerve. We say that a molecular change takes place in the brain that is propagated along the motor nerve. Further, Descartes stated that the sensory organs which give rise to our feelings gave rise to a change in the sensory nerves, to a flow of animal spirits along those nerves, which flow was propagated to the brain. If I look at this candle before us, the light falling on the retina of my eye gives rise to an affection of the optic nerve, which affection Descartes described as a flow of the animal spirits to the brain; but the fundamental idea is the same. In all our notions of the operations of nerve we are building upon Descartes's foundation. He says that, when a body which is competent to produce a sensation touches the sensory organs, what happens is the production of a mode of motion of the sensory nerves. That mode of motion is propagated to the brain. That which takes place in the brain is still nothing but a mode of motion. But, in addition to this mode of motion, there is, as everybody can find by experiment for himself, something else which can in no way be compared to motion, which is utterly unlike it, and which is that state of consciousness which we call a sensation. Descartes insists over and over again upon this total disparity between the agent which excites the state of consciousness and the state of consciousness itself. He tells us that our sensations are not pictures of external things, but that they are symbols or signs of them; and in doing that he made one of the greatest possible revolutions, not only