Читать книгу Fear - A. Mosso - Страница 18

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If we could hear the soliloquies of the man who is writing a book, many, I think, would renounce for ever the pleasure of setting the printing press in motion. It would be a curious experience, if one could read between the lines the tale of discouragement, uncertainty, trouble, and know the repeated struggles by which some difficulty was overcome, a passage was composed, a clause or a sentence written. In scientific works it would be seen that the most frequent interruptions and exclamations arise always from doubt, and the anxiety which torments an author of not making his meaning clear.

There is no remedy. He who wishes to explain a scientific subject in a clear and simple way must stop from time to time; he must come out of himself and take his reader’s place, forget all he knows in order to listen impartially to his own voice, and to judge if what he has said may be easily understood. And this I shall do, but the reader must not be repulsed by the first difficulties: our first steps cost the greatest effort. In order to comprehend the physical nature of man, and to know how this exquisite machinery of ours works, we must first examine attentively some of the most important organs which are constantly at work in our nervous system. It is in science as in the study of languages, one must first learn the meaning of the most indispensable words in order to understand what is said to us in the foreign tongue.

Till the beginning of this century very confused notions prevailed as to the activity of the brain and spinal cord. Luigi Rolando, the celebrated physiologist of the University of Turin, was the first who clearly showed that the medulla oblongata (that part of the spinal cord which lies nearest the brain) must be regarded as the centre of the whole nervous system. No one in his time knew the structure of the nerve-centres better than he, and it was he who proved that the medulla oblongata 'is the first rudiment of the nervous system, the seat of physical sensibility, of instinct, the director of voluntary movements, the centre of life, and the wonderful cause of most surprising phenomena known under the names of sympathies and consents.’[7]

If one cuts the head of a duck off at a blow, it does not remain motionless but moves, flaps its wings and flutters along, as though it meant to make its escape. It is said that the Emperor Commodus caused the heads of the ostriches in the circus to be shot off with curved arrows, and that the birds still ran on till they reached the goal. If we cut the head of a dog off with a hatchet, we see that the trunk wags the tail. There is a curious irony in the fact, but it need not shock us, for the animal no longer feels. If an irritant is applied to the skin, it draws its tail between its legs as though it were afraid, although it is headless.