China Learn

Biological View

The better knowledge of our own bodily functions and mental processes gives us a truer and broader view of ourselves and takes away from the word “animal” some of its old bad flavor. The old proverb that “to understand is to forgive” is applicable to our own bodily and mental processes. It may seem strange, but it is true, that the very fact that we have a better understanding of our bodily functions makes it impossible for us to look down upon them with contempt. The important thing is not to say whether our digestive process is noble or ignoble; the important thing is just to understand it, and somehow it becomes extremely noble. This is true of every biological function or process in our body, from perspiration and the elimination of waste to the functions of the pancreatic juice, the gall, the endocrine glands and the finer emotive and cogitative processes. One no longer despises the kidney, one merely tries to understand it; and one no longer looks upon a bad tooth as symbolic of the final decay of our body and a reminder to attend to the welfare of our soul, but merely goes to a dentist, has it examined, explained and properly fixed up. Somehow a man coming out from a dentist’s office no longer despises his teeth, but has an increased respect for them-because he is going to gnaw apples and chicken bones with increased delight. As for the superfine metaphysician who says that the teeth belong to the devil, and the Neo-Platonists who deny that individual teeth exist, I always get a satirical delight in seeing a philosopher suffering from a tooth-ache and an optimistic poet suffering from dyspepsia. Why doesn’t he go on with his philosophic disquisitions, and why does he hold his hand against his cheek, just as you or I or the woman in the next house would do? And why does optimism seem so unconvincing to a dyspeptic poet? Why doesn’t he sing any more? How ungrateful it is, of him, therefore, to forget the intestines and sing about the spirit when the intestines behave and give him no trouble!

Science, if anything, has taught us an increased respect for our body, by deepening a sense of the wonder and mystery of its workings. In the first place, genetically, we begin to understand how we came about, and see that, instead of being made out of clay, we are sitting on the top of the genealogical tree of the animal kingdom. That must be a fine sensation, sufficiently satisfying for any man who is not intoxicated with his own spirit. Not that I believe dinosaurs lived and died millions of years ago in order that we today might walk erect with our two legs upon this earth. Without such gratuitous assumptions, biology has not at all destroyed a whit of human dignity, or cast doubt upon the view that we are probably the most splendid animals ever evolved on this earth. So that is quite satisfying for any man who wants to insist on human dignity. In the second place, we are more impressed than ever with the mystery and beauty of the body. The workings of the internal parts of our body and the wonderful correlation between them com. pel in us a sense of the extreme difficulty with which these correlations are brought about and the extreme simplicity and finality with which they are nevertheless accomplished. Instead of simplifying these internal chemical processes by explaining them, science makes them all the more difficult to explain. These processes are incredibly more difficult than the layman without any knowledge of physiology usually imagines. The great mystery of the universe without is similar in quality to the mystery of the universe within.

The more a physiologist tries to analyze and study the bio-physical and bio-chemical processes of human physiology, the more his wonder increases. That is so to the extent that sometimes it compels a physiologist with a broad spirit to accept the mystic’s view of life, as in the case of Dr. Alexis Carrel. Whether we agree with him or not, as he states his opinions in Man, the Unknown, we must agree with him that the facts are there, unexplained and unexplainable. We begin to acquire a sense of the intelligence of matter itself:

The organs are correlated by the organic fluids and the nervous system. Each element of the body adjusts itself to the others, and the others to it. This mode of adaptation is essentially teleological. If we attribute to tissues an intelligence of the same kind as ours, as mechanists and vitalists do, the physiological processes appear to associate together in view of the end to be attained. The existence of finality within the organism is undeniable. Each part seems to know the present and future needs of the whole, and acts accordingly. The significance of time and space is not the same for our tissues as for our mind. The body perceives the remote as well as the near, the future as well as the present.”

And we should wonder, for instance, and be extremely amazed that our intestines heal their own wounds, entirely without our voluntary effort:

The wounded loop first becomes immobile. It is temporarily paralyzed, and fecal matter is thus prevented from running into the abdomen. At the same time, some other intestinal loop, or the surface of the omentum, approaches the wound and, owing to a known property of peritoneum, adheres to it. Within four or five hours the opening is occluded. Even if the surgeon’s needle has drawn the edges of the wound together, healing is due to spontaneous adhesion of the peritoneal surfaces.”

Why do we despise the body, when the flesh itself shows such intelligence? After all, we are endowed with a body, which is a selfnourishing, self-regulating, self-repairing, self-starting and selfreproducing machine, installed at birth and lasting like a good grandfather clock for three-quarters of a century, requiring very little attention. It is a machine provided with wireless vision and 2 Man, wireless hearing, with a more highly complicated system of nerves and lymphs than the most complicated telephone and telegraph system of the world. It has a system of filing reports done by a vast complexus of nerves, managed with such efficiency that some files, the less important ones, are kept in the attic and others are kept in a more convenient desk, but those kept in the attic, which may be thirty years old and rarely referred to, are nevertheless there and sometimes can be found with lightning speed and efficiency. Then it also manages to go about like a motor car with perfect kneeaction and absolute silence of engines, and if the motor car has an accident and breaks its glass or its steering wheel, the car automatically exudes or manufactures a substance to replace the glass and does its best to grow a steering wheel, or at least manages to do the steering with a swollen end of the steering shaft; for we must remember that when one of our kidneys is cut out, the other kidney swells and increases its function to insure the passage of the normal volume of urine. Then it also keeps up a normal temperature within a tenth of a Fahrenheit degree, and manufactures its own chemicals for the processes of transforming food into living tissues.

Above all, it has a sense of the rhythm of life, and a sense of time, not only of hours and days, but also of decades; the body regulates its own childhood, puberty and maturity, stops growing when it should no longer grow, and brings forth a wisdom tooth at a time when no one of us ever thought of it. Our conscious wisdom has nothing to do with our wisdom tooth. It also manufactures specific antidotes against poison, on the whole with amazing success, and it does all these things with absolute silence, without the usual racket of a factory, so that our superfine metaphysician may not be disturbed and is free to think about his spirit or his essence.