Licence: In copyright
Credit: The nature of nervous processes / by W. McDougall. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![that these conceptions of the physicist and chemist have not attained any final and complete form, and that they are in process of change and evolution. This has been rendered very obvious by the recent great discoveries of physicists, the wonders of which are in all men’s mouths. At the present moment the arbitrary theories of trans- mission of energy seem to be severely shaken, and threatened with a resurrection of their old enemy, the emission theory in a modified form. Even the distinction between matter and energy seems to have become strangely uncertain and vague, and the attacks of the Energetikers led by Prof. Ostwald seem to threaten to destroy matter itself, and to leave us with various forms and collocations of energy only as our basal working conceptions. It may well be then that the current conceptions of physics are still inadequate, and perhaps for many years to come will be inadequate, for dealing with all the processes of the animal body, especially with the processes of the nervous system which we have reason to regard as the most highly evolved and complex of all material processes. It may be, e.g., that we shall have to recognize as playing their part in the animal body forms of energy that have not been met with, and perhaps never can be met with outside such bodies, and, in fact, I think we may infer with some confidence that this is the case. Physiologists should, I think, always bear in mind the great part played by the observations of Galvani, a physio- logist, on the legs of a frog, in promoting the growth of the physicists’ knowledge of electrical processes, of the galvanic current in particular; and should be emboldened by this example to formulate their hypotheses with some independence. After these preliminary remarks I will plunge into the midst of my subject, and outline the scheme I have in mind. And first as to the processes within the vital unit [,8] D](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22471492_0007.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
