Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/334

328 I am well aware that I shall be charged by some, both physiologists and psychologists, of harping again upon the same old string. But I confess that I am more and more indifferent to this charge. For I am more and more convinced that neither the idealistic nor the psychoparallelistic theories of the relations of the nervous mechanism to the life of consciousness explain such a case of recovery from paralysis as this to which your attention has just been called. Indeed, both forms of theory seem to me to introduce a confusion, which increases rather than clears up, the fundamental mystery of the facts. To my thinking, nothing which can possibly be said as to why the mind has a body goes any way at all toward explaining how this patient got control of his paralyzed facial muscles, for purposes expressive of his emotions and his volitions, through the N. accessorius and its cortical center, after the direct connection by the N. facialis with its center had been totally destroyed. Nor does any explanation which could conceivably express itself in terms of psycho-physical parallelism seem much more satisfactory.

In a word, this suggestive case of anastomosis, and all similar cases, together with hundreds of other species of phenomena—some of them belonging to our ordinary experience and some of them due to extraordinary situations and developments—all seem to me to point unmistakably to the existence of dynamical relations between the nervous mechanism and the conscious mental life. And is not our science, whether we start from the physiological or from the psychological point of view, nothing but a description of this net-work of dynamical interrelations? But in being this, how is it any less scientific or any more essentially mysterious than is any other science? To all science, indeed, of every species, it is just these dynamical interrelations which are the ultimate facts. Behind them it is impossible for science to go. Every science consists in the discovery, classification and formulating under so-called 'laws' of these interrelations. To say a priori that that can not be, or is not, which most obviously is—this is to be essentially unscientific.