Man on his Nature

by Charles Scott Sherrington

Based on the Gifford Lectures of 1937 8 in Edinburgh, Nobel Prize winner Charles Sherrington's 1940 study addresses the nature of the mind and its relationship to life and matter. The book centres on the writings of the little-known sixteenth-century physician Jean Fernel. After setting out Fernel's views on the nature of man, Sherrington proceeds to develop his own thoughts, drawing upon a wide variety of philosophical theories. Using Fernel as a historical case study, the book demonstrates how any scientific outlook is always part of its age, and shows how views on the eternal enigmas of mankind, mind and life have changed radically over time. Sherrington's book is important in the history of ideas for its assessment of the value of advances in natural science as a framework for the development of natural theology.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Science, Essays, Psychology, Biology

444 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1951

Reviews

[Keshav · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its last chapter on Altruism, though absent of any 'answers', is one of the most thought provoking take on what it can or cannot mean to be a human.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Might not . . . the ancient oracle of medicine choose to convey a profound truth in a cryptic form, with intent that, for a time, only the wise might decipher it?"

Thus Sherrington on Jean Fernel (1497-1558), the French court physician, dead just before Descartes' father was born, whose physiology text On Hidden Causes (1542), never translated out of the Latin, was read into Pascal's world, and begins to make the case for skepticism toward a Natural Theology, for example, in its long entertainment of Hippocrates' aphorism, "Is there the supernatural in disease?" For Sherrington the question implies two others, a question about the human (doctrine long having it that man is made in God's image) and the structurally separate one about nature, in which one might for some time dwell on behalf of the inquiry into the design in, as a course for understanding, the truth.

To return to our first question. I admit Sherrington's book, brought together from the Gifford lectures he gave in Edinburgh the year after he won the Nobel (1936) for his work on neuronal structure, his great contribution to histology (he was Cajal's student), is now 82 years old (in human terms, an elder, if not ancient -- just the age of Sherrington when he delivered the lectures), so it's worth asking of Sherrington's own cryptic form, in this case his using a Latin physiology treatise, translating as he historicizes Fernel's world view, and organizing the twelve lectures around the astrological signs as these guide and warrant the lecturer's discourse. Sherrington was also a poet [as I write this, you will not find The Assaying of Brabantius and other verse on this site], and builds thematically. Sounds pretty cryptic to me, especially given that, as Sherrington admits, astrology has long since gone out of favor as scholarly inquiry and did so within a hundred years of Fernel's death. So as to the wise, how other than slowly to read this text?

It should be said that astrological projections of calendrical movements of the moon and stars offer the scholar a way to reset and jigger the reading from topic to topic and for Sherrington becomes a fair autopoesis for the brain's own regionality, or dynamism among spheres, localizations, and other forms of topological splitting, as against the organism's own "drive" toward homeostasis. Sherrington's great contribution to medicine was the synapse or theory of Neuronal Regions, that must be dynamic not just to the brain's functions, but histologically and to mind and psyche, as well. He offered neurologists like Gerald Edelman a way approaching res extensia through res cogitates thus to reconnect brain scholarship to that Jamesian psychology that would be a science of science.

[Cameron]

This was written / published in 1940. It's not an easy read. I probably could have struggled through but like is too short.

[Karthik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent writing and a great read (some aspects could be dated). Most Gifford lectures are good.

[Liam Porter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rather self-indulgent. I found it difficult to digest. The focus on Fernel was bewildering to me.