1
Disciplining Physiological Psychology: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices in the
work of Charles Scott Sherrington and Henri Bergson, 1897-1922.
NB: this is a draft of a forthcoming article, and does not constitute an authoritative
version of the text. If you wish to cite this paper please refer to the final version
published by Science in Context.
1. Introduction
On the 26th of May 1911, the philosopher Henri Bergson gave a lecture to a packed
hall at the University of Oxford. Bergson was at the height of his powers: his 1907 Creative
Evolution had catapulted him into the consciousness not only his native France, but that of a
growing international band of followers. He would go on to be recognised as one of the most
influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Yet, as Jimena Canales (2015) has recently
detailed, not long after this talk Bergson's reputation appeared severely diminished. Merely a
decade after his triumphant tour of England, his philosophy was being portrayed as a
dangerous form of mysticism out of place in the scientific culture of the twentieth century.
Canales identifies a contentious set of debates between Bergson, his fellow Nobel
laureate Albert Einstein, and their respective followers as the immediate cause of the decline
in influence of the former. In so doing, her work opens up Bergson's philosophy to historians
of science, medicine and technology. Along with that of Bruno Latour (2005) and Robert
Brain, (2015, esp. 32-36) it is concerned with it not in relation to the articulation of a
normative conception of existence, but rather insofar as it participated in broader intellectual
and cultural developments.i Bergson's philosophy was not, as has been all-too-frequently
assumed, simply the product of a great mind operating apart from the material and cultural
contexts in which it existed. Rather, it drew on and inspired a range of claims and practices
relating to the interrogation and apprehension of nature that have recently begun to be reappraised by humanities and natural science scholars alike (e.g. Mullarky 1999; Lefebvre and
White 2012; Mullarky and de Mille 2013; Normandin and Wolfe 2013).
A consideration of Bergson's 1911 talk, however, points to an intriguing element of
Canales' analysis that remains unresolved. At Oxford, Bergson was very specific regarding the
significance of modern science for philosophy. Casting philosophical endeavour as a dialogue
between the Western classical tradition and present-day investigation, he argued for a reconsideration of the former in relation to certain scientific disciplines rather than others:
2
Let us... study the ancients, become imbued with their spirit and try to do, as far as
possible, what they themselves would be doing were they living among us.
Endowed with our knowledge (I do not refer so much to our mathematics and
physics, which would perhaps not radically alter their way of thinking, but
especially our biology and psychology), they would arrive at very different results
from those they obtained. (Bergson [1934] 1946, 153-154)
For the Bergson of 1911, the task of philosophy was to reclaim the spirit of classical European
thought, and re-cast it in the light of the new sciences of psychology and biology. Yet in
Einstein's famous 1922 objection to Bergson's ‘durational’ conception of time, the physicist
appealed not only to his own science, but also to psychology, as the only possible sources of
temporal experience. For Einstein, Bergson's conception of time, on which the latter had
founded his thought, simply did not exist: there was 'only a psychological time that differs
from the physicist's' (Anon 1922, on 107. Translation from Canales 2015, 5).. Furthermore,
Einstein found support for his assertion from the only authority on psychology present at the
debate. As Canales notes (though she doesn’t develop the point), Henri Piéron suggested there
that both Einstein and Bergson's perspectives could in fact be experimentally demonstrated, in
the laboratory (Canales 2015, 244-246; Anon 1922, 112-113). On the one hand, Einstein's
physical time was revealed in the operation of the experimental psychologists' instruments.
On the other, Bergson's duration could, just as Einstein had suggested, be identified with
experimentally demonstrable temporal experience – was in fact a psychological phenomenon
of a different order to (and without influence on) physical time.
In response to these challenges, Bergson began to re-consider the relation between his
philosophy and the sciences. Though he sought to remain open to the conclusions of
experimental endeavour, his approach to science as a whole became more circumspect.
Creative Evolution had confidently asserted the harmony of its appeal to an intuitivelyderived 'duration' with emerging biological and psychological research. Duration and
Simultaneity (1922) would in contrast cast philosophy and physical science as 'unlike
disciplines... meant to implement each other' (Bergson [1922] 1999, xxvii; Canales 2015, 14).
Why was it that Bergson did not contest Piéron's interpretation at the debate, merely noting
that laboratory observation was 'imprecise' (Anon 1922, 113)? What had happened to cause
3
him to lose confidence in the sciences that had seemed so philosophically promising eleven
years previously?
This paper considers the significance of physiological and psychological endeavour
conducted during the first decades of the twentieth century for evaluations of the scientific
plausibility of what became one of the most emblematic conceptual tools of Bergson's
philosophy - that of ‘the cinematograph.’ In so doing, it suggests that, by 1922, the scientific
landscape in which Bergson had placed so much hope had shifted under his feet. The
incorporation of cinematographic equipment into physiological and psychological
investigation, it suggests, played a critical role in the re-organization of relations between
physiology, psychology, and philosophy at this time. Indeed, Bergson's generous comments at
Oxford regarding biology and psychology may well even have contributed to this trend. In
1913, Oxford appointed a new Waynflete Professor of Physiology, Charles Scott Sherrington.
In 1906, a year before the emergence of Creative Evolution, Sherrington had published a
monograph, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, that would become an exemplary
study to twentieth-century physiologists.ii Notably, the final chapter of this work centered on a
set of experiments that adapted cinematographic devices to very different purposes than those
Bergson suggested typified scientific endeavour. Having cemented his reputation with this
publication, Sherrington would go on to both prevent followers of Bergson from gaining a
scientific foothold in Britain, and contribute to undermining the claims of internationally
renowned thinkers who found common ground with him. Though he never cited and appears
never to have met Bergson, Sherrington became one of the foremost representatives of an
intellectual tradition that, at least until very recently, seemed impervious to his thought.
Cinematographic devices, this paper contends, played a critical role in the the creation of this
circumstance.
The relation between philosophic and scientific investigation during the first decades
of the twentieth century was actively shaped by considerations of and experimentation with
cinematographic devices. Recent work on the relation between cinematography, physiology
and psychology has highlighted ways in which appeal to the recording and projection of
imagery accompanied a re-conceptualization of scientific objects: where pictorial and
photographic visualisation had fixed and stabilized organisms, cinematographic recording
demonstrated their motility and mutability (Cartwright 1995, esp. 20-29; Winter 2004;
Landecker 2006; idem 2011; Schmidgen 2012). In contrast with these studies, this paper
4
draws on film studies literature to consider cinematographic equipment itself as it was utilised
in experimental endeavour. Two cinematographs might be said to have been simultaneously
present in early-twentieth-century physiological psychological and philosophical thought: that
of the technical cinematograph utilized in laboratories, and the conceptual cinematograph
which came to prominence as a philosophic trope in Bergson’s texts. Emphasising the
mediating function of cinematographic devices rather than the cinematographic recording or
projection of images brings their dual function in relation to scientific and philosophic
practice at this time to the fore.iii
On the one hand, this paper addresses the historical cinematograph as it existed
amongst a range of illusion-generating devices utilised as research tools in laboratories,
didactic tools at exhibitions, and as fairground-like ‘attractions’ during the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. As historians of cinematography have noted, a machine typifying
'the' cinematograph has never existed as such. Rather, cinematographic image-recording
devices emerged in conjunction with a much broader range of equipment designed to produce
temporal and spatial illusions (Mannoni [1994] 2000; Gunning [1986] 2006). On the other
hand however, primarily through Bergson’s influence, ‘the cinematograph’ came to be
understood within philosophy (and later film studies) as a device that stood in for a more
general critical stance vis-a-vis the nature of perceptual experience. For twentieth-century
philosophers, the cinematograph came to stand for a mode of intellectual practice which
sought to differentiate temporal existence into distinct, static elements which could be reassembled to constitute new (‘natural’) wholes. As Elie During and others have shown, the
cinematograph as Bergson characterized it was in many respects an idealised object rather
than an analogy with a tool that existed in practice. Bergson’s cinematograph was an
epistemic device that incorporated such as-yet unusual features as full automation (and with it
absolute constancy of temporal progression), and ignored the phenomena of ‘persistence of
vision’ that, as this article will further highlight, was fundamental to the development of the
(quite different) tools after which it was named (During 2015; Tortajada 2011; Douglass
1999). This paper shows that, despite their differences, the fates of the cinematograph of the
‘cinema of attractions’ and the cinematographic device of Bergson were intimately related.
Though it emphasises the epistemic significance of illusion-generating devices for
physiologists, then, this paper also addresses scholarship concerned with Bergson's
engagement with science via his cinematographic conception of perception. The plausibility
5
of Bergson’s conceptualization of the cinematograph for experiment-oriented scientists, it
contends, depended on a historically specific set of intellectual relations in which physiology,
psychology and philosophy addressed a shared range of concepts and natural objects. The
overlap between these endeavours allowed Bergson to famously portray the operation of the
cinematograph as characteristic of the study of physical nature, and position the experience of
‘duration’ as inaccessible to such study. This paper shows however that the very set of devices
that Bergson named his conceptual formulation after in fact also contributed to the emergence
of ‘durational’ phenomena such as persistence of vision as physiological and psychological
objects. In so doing, these devices, alongside those physiologists and psychologists that
engaged with and constructed them, participated in a more general re-formulation of their
respective endeavours as disciplinarily distinct. Where the physiological psychology of the
turn of the twentieth century was marked by a negotiation between philosophical,
psychological, and physiological claims around a single object (the embodied mind),
physiologists and psychologists of the 1920s had begun to conceive of each other as working
in disciplinarily distinct fields. Each of these enjoyed a particular relation to philosophy. This
change was both dependent on appeals to the epistemic primacy of technical entities such as
constituted the cinema of attractions, and problematic for Bergson’s claim that his philosophy
accorded with the conclusions of positive science. Attending to the device of the
cinematograph thus not only presents a means of better understanding historical changes to
scientific epistemology such as those outlined by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007),
but also brings to the fore a significant episode in the history of relations between metaphysics
and knowledge concerning nature more generally. Though Daston and Galison present a
greatly more satisfying account of the epistemological concerns of turn-of-the-twentiethcentury scientists than did Bergson, they similarly characterize the technical epistemology of
the time as ‘mechanical.’ This paper shows that such terminology obscures both conceptual
changes within early-twentieth century physiology and psychology, and the historical status of
tools as participants in these changes.
Each part of the study addresses cinematographic devices in one of the
aforementioned ways that they were present in early twentieth century intellectual practice.
The first part thus examines Bergson’s cinematographic characterization of mechanism, along
with the ‘vital’ evolution to which he opposed it. It considers the relevance of this opposition
to Sherrington’s physiological science, thereby examining the interaction between
6
mechanical, vital, and physical modes of explanation in physiological psychology at this time
(Young [1970] 1990; Smith 1973; Daston 1978; Jacyna 1981). Two conclusions emerge from
this part of the study: first, that Sherrington should be identified as a key figure in the
importation to Britain of physical approaches to physiology such as had been developed in
Germany since the 1860s; and second, that this importation contributed to the break-down of
Bergson’s characterization of physiology as split between vitalist and mechanist modes of
scientific
explanation.
Whilst
Bergson’s
interpretation
of
scientific
intellect
as
cinematographic was particularly appropriate in relation to mechanistic approaches to bodily
investigation, the increasing prominence of physical physiology undermined Bergson’s
contrast between (cinematographic) mechanical and (non-cinematographic) vital science. The
notions of vital action in which followers of Bergson – including colleagues of Sherrington’s invested were thus increasingly coming to be assimilated into the physically-oriented science
of the nervous system that came to prominence in the half century or so leading up to the First
World War. Bergson’s physiological alternative to the mechanistic conception of life – which
he characterized in terms of his ‘élan vital’ – had by 1922 come to be understood as
physiologically obsolete.
The second part of the paper highlights however that it was not the implausibility for
physiological researchers of Bergson’s claims that had the most significant implications for
the status of his contentions, but rather a set of epistemological and institutional changes that
occurred within physiology and psychology. It emphasises that the establishment of technical
epistemic commitments within these sciences during the late nineteenth century contributed to
the emergence of disciplinary boundaries between these fields. Drawing on recent historical
work addressing the roles of media tools in physiological and psychological investigation (de
Chadarevian 1993; Brain and Wise 1994; Otis 2001; Schmidgen [2009] 2014; Cat 2013; Brain
2015), it shows how the engagement by Sherrington and others with devices that emerged
from within the cinema of attractions contributed to the break-down of the physiological
psychological presumption that philosophic and physiologic investigation shared common
categories of analysis. Bergson’s contention that Einstein’s physics could not escape referring
ultimately to his philosophic concept of ‘duration’ relied on an epistemic claim that the nature
of the body (and by implication nature more generally) could be apprehended by vital mental
effort. As it came to be appreciated within experimental physiological and psychological
science, the cinematograph, rather than epitomising the tendencies of mechanical philosophy,
7
in fact embodied the technical refutation of this claim. The mediating device of the
cinematograph thus operated not as a clue to the nature of scientific perception, but rather as a
means by which epistemic attitudes were actively shaped and established.
In this latter spirit, this paper also appeals to a mediating device – a website - in an
attempt to embody as well as articulate its claims. By following the hyperlinks inserted at
intervals through the paper, the reader is invited to engage with the sources on which its relies
directly. It is hoped that such engagement will facilitate more acute critical appreciation of the
discussion than might be afforded by perusal of a printed text alone. iv
Part I.: Bergson’s Cinematograph and the Emergence of Physical Physiology in Britain
2. Sherrington and mechanical observation
As one of the first scientists to be trained in the newly-founded physiology
laboratories of 1880s Britain, Charles Scott Sherrington was early on immersed in a culture in
which the recording, measurement and delineation of bodies held precedence over discussion
of what might contribute to their creation. The laboratory founded by Michael Foster at
Cambridge, in which Sherrington completed his undergraduate studies, took its epistemic cue
from the simultaneously-founded Cavendish physics laboratory. Figures such as Foster, John
Newport Langley and Sherrington's mentor Walter Holbrook Gaskell strove there to develop
means by which the rhythms of living organs and their relation to one another could be made
visible and mappable, and thereby subject to precise calculation (Geison 1978, esp. 112-115).
At the Cambridge laboratory mechanical recording and anatomical mapping went hand in
hand, and ultimately held out the prospect of the development of explanations of the relation
between organic activities and organs of the body that were consistent with the laws
uncovered at its physics-oriented sister institution.
Sherrington's early research fitted closely with the aims and goals of his Cambridge
mentors. In particular, his laboratory training placed him in a position to take advantage of the
emergence of a relatively new technique of nerve investigation: that of the instigation of
'secondary degeneration' in experimental animals. Though experimental intervention in nerves
had become increasingly routine for French and German physiologists by the 1860s, and the
phenomenon in which nerves disintegrated following the introduction of a lesion to them had
8
been described by Augustus Volney Waller as early as 1850, it was only during the 1870s and
1880s - when Sherrington was a student at Cambridge - that 'degeneration' studies began to be
taken up by British physiologists in any systematic manner (Lesch 1984, 175-178, 191-196;
Clarke and Jacyna 1987, 197-202, 249-259; Lawrence 2009, 456-457, 464-466). Starting in
1884, Sherrington gradually built up a reputation as one of degeneration's most acute and
productive proponents. His approach, which came to be known as 'successive degeneration',
was simple: first, identify the areas of a body at which electrical stimulation produced a
particular reaction; and second, systematically cut the nerves leading away from these areas,
applying further stimulation as each nerve is cut (Swazey 1969, 57-60 and 63-66). By
monitoring changes in the reactions of the animals subject to this technique, it would
(experimental physiologists believed) be possible to identify the specific nerves responsible
for the instigation of specific bodily activities. Bodily functions, it seemed, could be linked to
the structure of the nervous system with hitherto unattainable accuracy.
For the first two decades of his career, Sherrington presented his degeneration studies
as cautious contributions to the gradual accumulation of evidence regarding the mechanical
nature of nervous life. He focused almost exclusively on the simpler forms of nervous
existence (especially those associated with antagonistic muscular actions such as the 'knee
jerk') (Swazey 1969, 52-55). Furthermore, the mode in which Sherrington presented his work
owed as much to the formulae, tables and calculations of the Cavendish physicists as it did to
the anatomic accuracy of his physiological mentors. Rather than present lavish hand-drawn
illustrations of his nerve investigations, as had Gaskell, Sherrington supplied tables of
response measurements, graphs of reaction-intensities, and introduced grids with which he
might reduce the complexity of nervous anatomy (fig. 1). His study addressing the pioneering
histological work of Angelo Ruffini similarly replaced the latter's all-encompassing
delineations with a series of microphotographs (fig. 2) (Sherrington 1893; Sherrington 1894).
Sherrington's work was well received. As James Mussell highlights, his papers came to be
held up as exemplars of effective scientific communication (Mussell 2009, paragraphs 17-22).
The science of experimental physiology as it developed in Sherrington and his
contemporaries' work can thereby be closely associated with a tendency towards the analysis
and delineation of nature by technical means. These means, furthermore, were by-and-large
applied within an already well-established epistemic mode: that of the 'analytic' reduction of
natural objects into comparatively simple components, and the 'synthetic' reconstruction of
9
these into new natural wholes (Pickstone 2000, esp. 117-121. See also Canales 2011, 345351).
Figs. 1 (left) and 2 (right): Left: part of plate XIV from Sherrington 1893). Right:
plate VII from Sherrington 1894.
Bergson characterized the analytic and synthetic mode in which much mid-to-late
nineteenth-century physiology was conducted as ‘mechanical.’ Though he initially articulated
the critical stance he would apply to physical and physiological endeavour in relation to the
German tradition of psychological research (especially that of Wilhelm Wundt and Gustav
Fechner. See Carroy and Schmidgen 2002, 13; Heidelberger [1993] 2004; Araujo 2016),
Creative Evolution identified British physiological psychology as it’s principle object of
philosophic concern. In this work Bergson identified such writers as Herbert Spencer and
Alexander Bain with what he characterised as a particularly problematic intellectual trend.
10
Spencer and his contemporaries had articulated what they understood as a simultaneously
mechanical and philosophic psychology, in which nerves were conceived as the material
corollaries of mental states (Young, [1970] 1990, esp. 172-180. See also Daston 1978; Smith
2013, 45-49). Though he concurred with physiological psychologists’ combination of
biological research and metaphysical speculation, Bergson opposed what he called Spencer's
'false evolutionism', which he identified with the latter's purported belief that it was possible
to reduce the entirety of nature to 'fragments'. Furthermore, Bergson found the more general
associationist claims of which Spencer's philosophy partook unconvincing (Bergson [1907]
1911, xiii). Starting with Matter and Memory (1896), Bergson consistently opposed what he
characterized as the mechanism-oriented 'mathematical deduction' of thinkers such as Wundt
to his own conception of philosophically-lived experience. This latter, he suggested in
Creative Evolution, was constituted not primarily by a set of bodily or material conditions, but
by the interrelation of sets of thought-images which the philosopher (he supposed) brings into
contact.
From this position, Bergson developed a critique of the scientific realism that he
claimed mechanism-reliant analysis of nature relied upon. Those who adopted associationist
assumptions in their investigations of nature were, he suggested, unable to reconcile two
radically different claims to which they adhered: firstly, that nature in fact consisted in
material changes within space that could be reduced to a series of capturable moments;
secondly, that these moments could be arranged in consciousness as a set of natural objects that each captured moment could be retained and re-arranged into a coherent, calculable
whole (Bergson [1889] 1910, e.g. pp. 75-79; idem [1896] 1988, e.g. 69-71). In Creative
Evolution, Bergson characterized these assumptions as ‘cinematographic.’ Against this view,
he posited a re-appraisal of the role of immediate experience in the establishment of
knowledge. By immersing oneself in the world, he claimed, it would be possible to evolve a
fuller conception of existence: one in which space and matter would be re-assessed in terms of
a more fundamental temporal experience, referred to as ‘duration.’
3. Bergson's physiological psychology
By 1907, Bergson had come to rely on a particular strand of biological thinking that he
11
believed accorded more closely with his philosophy than did the claims of mechanists. Matter
and Memory had conveyed a conception of existence in which memorial experience
transcended both subjective ('idealist') and objective ('realist') enquiry (Bergson [1896] 1988,
69-71). By the time Creative Evolution came to be published however, Bergson was willing to
go further: biological science was to be returned within the purview of philosophy, as it had
been in classical European thought. This was to be achieved, he argued, through the
constitution of a theory of knowledge that, because based in immediate experience, would
also be a theory of life. 'Together', he contended, these theories would 'solve by a method
more sure, brought nearer to experience, the great problems that philosophy poses.' By
thinking together a set of contentions regarding the originary nature of life with his own
conclusions regarding the nature of memory and experience, it would be possible to arrive at a
situation in which biological and indeed all science would appear merely as 'psychics
inverted.' Ultimately, living matter evinced an ‘intuitive’ psychological process which was 'in
its essence... an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels,
changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work'
(Bergson [1907] 1911, quotes on xiii, 202 and 253-254. See also idem [1896] 1988, e.g. 28-31
and 41-46 On intuition in Bergson see Massey 2014). Philosophical practice similarly
consisted in a process of accumulation and dissimilation, of conscious awareness.
Philosophically-lived experience should alternate between an intellectual state in which the
'whole personality concentrate[s] itself', and a dream-like, 'scattered' state in which the
originary nature of matter becomes perceptible. The vital mind thus 'uses' space 'like a net
with meshes that can be made and unmade at will, which thrown over matter, divides it as the
needs of our action demand' (Bergson [1907] 1911, 201-202). The life sciences, properly
conducted, constituted an intuition-guided investigation of the processes of extension and
retraction as they manifested themselves in the living substance.
Recent historiography on relations between psychology and life science in Europe at
the turn of the twentieth century suggests that the hope that Bergson held out for the latter was
by no means misplaced. For example, Judy Schloegel and Henning Schmidgen point to the
prominence during the final decades of the nineteenth century of a physiological tradition in
which psychological existence was associated with that of the most simple known forms of
organic matter; in the work of Ernst Haeckel, Max Verworn, and Alfred Binet, amongst
others, psychological properties such as sensation, volition and intention were discovered in
12
apparently primordial forms of life, most notably the cell (Schloegel and Schmidgen 2002,
esp. 622-633). Though these investigators differed regarding the extent to which they
regarded such properties as inhering in protoplasmic or nucleic parts of cells, all agreed that
each could be considered an independent psychic unit. Human psychology was the
manifestation of the simultaneous action of the countless autonomously-acting individuals
that composed their bodies: properly understood, mind was indeed able to dissimilate into its
originary nature. Histological studies of nerve cells and their relations thereby came to carry
particular weight within physiological psychology.
One of the most pressing questions facing those who adhered to cell-centred
conceptions of psychology was that of how independently-acting individuals could combine
to form more complex psychological wholes. Different tendencies existed within the
conceptual framework of cellular individuality. One contention that gained considerable
traction during the final years of the nineteenth century was the so-called 'amoeboid' theory.
Just as individual cells could be identified as manifesting vital capacities such as autonomous
extension and contraction, each nerve-cell or 'neuron' was in the conception of such
histologists as Mathias-Marie Duval an independently-acting contributor to the neurological
whole. Ramón y Cajal, suggested in a study of 1890 that nerve fibres could be seen to grow
outwards from their cellular origins. He and like-minded theorists believed at this time that
such observations constituted evidence that nerve cells behaved just like amoeba, in that they
expanded, contracted, and moved their extremities from place to place (Black 1981, on 35-36
and 38-39). The possibility of psychological variation was thereby assured: by altering the
proximity of each cell to one another, amoeboid movement altered the extent to which
electrical nerve-impulses could be communicated. The psychologically-individual cells of the
nervous system combined to create a greater whole.
Contrasting with this conception of cellular activity was an alternative, 'network'centred vision of neurological connection (Otis 2001, 55-69). Though the notion that the body
was permeated by a fibrous network of nerves through which organs communicated had been
prominent in physiology prior to the nineteenth century, this had been sidelined as the cell
theory had been established (Clarke and Jacyna 1987, 311-315. 350-367). In 1869 however,
Thomas Henry Huxley prominently declared a new network-making substance, ‘protoplasm’,
the 'physical basis of life'. First propounded by Max Schultze in 1860, it had been Haeckel
who presented the most influential discussion of its relevance to psychology. As Brain notes,
13
Haeckel's contention that that protoplasm 'had the ability to receive and maintain the
waveform vibrations of the external world' and thereby pass on organic characteristics from
one generation to the next achieved great prominence during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Haeckel further argued that a protoplasmic capacity for the reception and
storage of wave-forms endowed cells with a psychological capacity (Brain 2009, on 94-95
and 101-104). Well into the twentieth century, histologists such as Camillo Golgi, Hans Held,
Stephan Apáthy and Albrecht Bethe presented evidence that nerves could link together via
continuously connecting organic structures (Breidbach 1996, 200-201). A significant strand of
late-nineteenth-century physiological psychology thereby identified the variability of nervous
excitation not with the properties of individual cells as such, but with the vital and extensible
properties of the protoplasm common to them all.
Adherents of cellularly-distinct conceptions of neuronal connection portrayed them as
confirming associationist contentions regarding the nature of psychology (Black 1981, 44-45).
For example, the American physician Francis Xavier Dercum argued that the 'amoeboid'
expansion and retraction of individual cells underlay variously hysteria, hypnotic and dream
states, sleep, and trains of thought themselves. These latter, Dercum contended, appeared 'to
follow purely mechanical lines' of association and disassociation between the sense
impressions that they carried (Dercum 1896, esp. 520-523. Quote on 522. Original emphasis).
In 1898, Boris Sidis and Ira van Gieson elaborated this thesis to account for states of sanity
and insanity: in Gieson's words, 'unsoundness of mind' was caused by the 'dissociation' of the
'higher and last evolved parts of the brain, in the presence of pathogenic stimuli' (van Gieson
1899, 87; Sidis 1919, 208-215.). For amoeboid theorists, the apparent mechanical capacity of
nerve cells to alter their proximity to one another presented physical confirmation of the
existence of psychological associations.
In a similar way, adherents of the protoplasmic conception of neuronal connection
identified mental activity with the presumed properties of this vital substance. Especially
prominent amongst these was the renowned German physiologist Ewald Hering. Calling for
physiologists to 'cease considering physiology merely as a sort of applied physics and
chemistry,' Hering argued that the causes of nervous action were to be found in two
independent and contradictory tendencies of protoplasmic matter (Hering 1900, on 169.). On
the one hand, a tendency towards 'assimilation' could be perceived within living substance.
This was balanced by an equal and opposite tendency, that towards 'dissimilation'. Where
14
assimilation predominated, organic matter increased in activity. Where dissimilation
predominated, activity decreased. The variable energetic states of protoplasm expressed itself
in the nervous system as the throwing-out of countless connections between cellular bodies: 'a
nerve-trunk is... a bundle of living arms which the elementary organisms of the nervous
system send forth for the purpose of entering into functional connexion with one another, or
of permitting the phenomena of the outside world to act upon them, or of exercising control
over other organs' (Hering 1900, 177-178). Sensation was not so much the consequence of
impressions on sensory organs that were then conveyed to the mind via the nerves, as the
establishment of sympathetic rhythms between the various realms of existence. Thus in the
case of visual sensations, Hering argued that protoplasm vibrated according to the frequency
of light-waves connecting with the retina (Hering 1900, 183, 186). Brain recounts how at the
Paris Société de Biologie, Binet and others developed similar explanatory schema to account
variously for hypnotic and hysteric states, sleep, aesthetic experience, and even paranormal
phenomena (Brain 2013, 125-127). Protoplasm spread both inwards and outwards from the
vital mind, bringing mental life into vibratory harmony with all that it touched.
Given Bergson’s dissatisfaction with associationism it is not surprising that he found
particular inspiration in this protoplasmic conception of psychological activity. In its
insistence on the active, temporally extensive nature of both bodily and psychological
existence, Creative Evolution appealed to a particular research tradition within physiological
science. For Bergson, such studies as those detailed above indicated that 'life is a movement,
materiality is the inverse movement, and each of these two movements is simple, the matter
which forms a world being an undivided flux' (Bergson [1907] 1911, 249). Just as the
philosopher brought thought-images into contact with one another, protoplasm formed
psychic connections amongst material nature. Here then was confirmation of the
philosophical import of physiological investigation: to the extent that physiology confirmed
the evidence of ’intuitive’ experience, it presented a means by which the philosopher might
demonstrate the creative presence of thought within the body.
Bergson not only asserted the scientific relevance of his own views regarding life and
mind, however, but argued for the superiority of his own approach over that with which he
contrasted it. To do so, he employed a vivid metaphor. As already noted, Bergson suggested
that both mechanistic science and associationism had adopted and expanded out of all
proportion a tendency within classical philosophy (exemplified by the paradoxes of Zeno of
15
Elea) in which phenomena were considered in terms of series of isolated moments (Bergson
[1907] 1911, 308-313. See also Bergson [1896] 1988, 188-193). The fallacy of this tendency,
Bergson suggested, was revealed in the mechanics of an idealised cinematograph. During the
nineteenth century conscious experience had been for Bergson an automatic, passive
recording device that captured a series of images as they passed before it. Reconstituting or
replaying this series in memory had created an illusion of change. But such re-constitution
was only that: an illusion. Once, through an examination of the cinematographic mechanism,
one became aware of the illusory nature of serial sensation, it would be possible to attain a
truly philosophic sense of time and nature (Bergson [1907] 1911, 304-308). Intuitive
philosophy would reveal that life and mind were not an agglomeration of innumerable
isolatable elements and moments, but a single, flowing continuity of image-relations that
could not be differentiated without loss of awareness of the whole.
Nevertheless, as will be shown, the biological propositions to which Bergson appealed
to legitimate his philosophic approach were highly contentious amongst physiologists. For
example, Sherrington’s above-mentioned microscopic studies emerged out of an extended
consideration of the nature of cellular life. These emphasised the functional significance of
strictly mechanical cellular bodies. And it was the mechanical emphasis within British
physiology that that constituted the interpretive context for physiological and psychological
studies that utilised cinematographic equipment in laboratories. The rest of this paper then
takes Bergson's suggestion that examination of cinematographic mechanisms might provide a
clue to the study of perception as a cue for historical investigation. Despite the broad validity
of his characterization of scientific realism at the end of the nineteenth century as centred on
technical representation (Daston and Galison 2007, esp. 11-16, 138-161), Bergson was not
fully aware of the significance that the equipment that constituted the cinema of attractions
had in fact attained in the physiological laboratories of Europe and the United States. The use
of cinematograph-like devices in laboratory investigation didn’t only facilitate the reduction
of natural objects to singular analytic components (as Bergson suggested it would). Their
adaptation and use also helped constitute quite different conceptions of both physiological and
psychological nature than had been conceived of hitherto. Experimentation with
cinematograph-like devices facilitated the assimilation within experimental science of many
of the contentions that Bergson introduced via his vital philosophy. Moreover, the negotiation
of how such devices could be used effectively within these fields contributed to a more
16
general differentiation between physiological and psychological disciplines. As already noted,
Bergson's appeal to intuitive experience as a means of interrogating vital nature was grounded
in a mode of scientific organisation in which philosophical, physiological and psychological
claims spoke directly to one another. This organizational mode did not survive the
assimilation into it of the very kind of device that he brought to bear in his characterization
(and rejection) of established scientific epistemology.
Before detailing this assimilation itself, however, it is first necessary to note the
differing contexts in which illusion-generating mechanisms were in fact appealed to in
physiological science: it was by no means coincidental that physiologists such as Sherrington,
trained as they were in the precision measurement and mechanical delineation of bodies,
played a critical role in the above-described process. Bergson’s characterization of scientific
methodology appears to have been apt as far as both Marey’s studies and Wundt’s program of
‘psycho-physics’ was concerned (Carroy and Schmidgen 2002, 13). However, the almost
exclusive emphasis within British physiological psychology on the association of spatially(rather than temporally-) differentiated perceptual elements helped constitute very different
conditions for the utilization of equipment relating to the cinema of attractions within
laboratories than those present in France and Germany.
4. Physical physiology and inhibition in Britain
In Integrative Action, Sherrington broke with the physiological traditions in which he
had been trained to articulate a holistic conception of nervous action that centred on a physical
(rather than simply mechanical) interpretation of the interaction between nervous elements. In
so doing, he aligned hismself with the German tradition of ‘organic physics’ (Lenoir 1987).
Cells featured particularly prominently in his analysis. In the opening words of the book he
declared that 'nowhere does the cell-theory reveal its presence more frequently in the very
framework of the argument than at the present time in the study of nervous reactions.'
Furthermore, he suggested, 'the progress of natural knowledge' had enabled biology to pass
'beyond the confines of the study of merely visible form, and... [turn] more and more to the
subtler and deeper sciences that are branches of energetics' (Sherrington [1906] 1947, 1). Such
emphasis on the physical nature of nervous activity was not without its problems however.
17
For example, whilst discussions of the physically-derived activities of individual nerves might
be brought to bear in analyses of nervous action, the physical means by which cells interacted
remained far from clear. Indeed, as already discussed, many of the most plausible
explanations of nerve cell interaction centred on properties considered unique to life rather
than concepts drawn from physics. In developing his conception of nervous action, then,
Sherrington was forced to engage directly with traditions of research that lay outside his
training.
Despite Sherrington's physicalist sympathies, he (like most late-nineteenth-century
physiologists) remained firmly within a natural philosophic discourse in which philosophers,
psychologists and physiologists shared both conceptual terms and objects of explanation.
Roger Smith has shown for example how the concept of 'inhibition' served as a place-holder
for debates regarding mental hierarchies at this time. Able to denote both the suppression of
nervous response and the control of bodily impulse, inhibition constituted a site at which
physiological and psychological claims came together to address a common object. At stake
in discussions of it was not only the possibility that nerve activity might depend on the
autonomous actions of psychologically individual cells, but the relation between mind, the
brain, and the nervous system more generally (Smith 1993, 16-19; see also Smith 1973). For
most physiologists, inhibition denoted a negotiation of relations between the latter two of
these categories. Was the suppression of certain actions and the manifestation of others due to
changes in individual nerves, or to some other cause such as cerebral influence? How, if not
by the autonomous creation and destruction of links between themselves, could nerves
manifest variable levels of response to stimuli?
Sherrington was not the only physiologist to appeal to physical modes of explanation
at the turn of the twentieth century. Physically-inclined physiologists such as Emil du BoisReymond’s students Ludimar Hermann and Julius Bernstein sought to articulate conceptions
of inhibition that a) did not rely on an appeal to vital forces inherent to cells, and b) could
nevertheless account for the psychological processes in which particular nerve functions
predominated over others. For example, the emergence of osmotic concepts within physical
chemistry at this time prompted a re-evaluation by physiologists of the widely-held
assumption that the wave-like electrical phenomena produced by nerves was a product of the
release of a kind of chemical energy specific to them (Lenoir 1986, 19-26; Finkelstein 2013,
182-187). Physical chemists working in the 1880s and 1890s had begun to portray electrical
18
potential as a product of the internal dynamics of battery cells. By introducing a semipermeable membrane between differently-concentrated solutions of liquids, investigators
argued, it was possible to model electrochemical phenomena in terms of the production and
release of 'osmotic pressure': galvanic current was produced by the migration of ions between
differently-concentrated regions of a battery cell (Barkan 1999, 46-57). At the end of the
nineteenth century, Bernstein influentially drew on such contentions to develop a
mathematical model of electricity transmission that did not require any expenditure of cellspecific energy: rather, changes in rates of transmission were due to ionic exchange (Lenoir
1986, 39-47; Seyfarth 2006; cf. De Palma and Pareti 2011). For a small number of
physiologists working at the start of the nineteenth century then, bio-electricity could no
longer be considered the product of a vital force: rather, it was the result of an in-principle
calculable alteration in ionic densities between liquids.
With his 1897 appointment as Holt Professor of Physiology at the University of
Liverpool, Sherrington had been afforded a front-row seat from which to follow these
developments. In 1891, John Smyth Macdonald had been appointed a Holt Fellow at
Liverpool under Francis Gotch. By 1899, he had attained the rank of Senior Lecturer, and had
moved away from Gotch's emphasis on relating galvanometric changes to changes in body
temperature (O'Connor 1991, 335-336). Instead, Macdonald began to identify electrical
variability with interactions between nerve cells and their environments. Macdonald
suggested that nervous current was produced not within a single, undifferentiated cell, but by
interaction between a series of ion-carrying 'relays placed at every point of the nerve to ensure
the continuous propagation of the excited state' (Macdonald 1905, 323-324). Significantly,
these relays presented an explanation for the both the variability and the uni-directionality of
nerve conductivity (Macdonald 1905, 340). Like Cambridge contemporaries such as William
Bate Hardy, Macdonald also doubted the existence of an autonomously-acting protoplasmic
network extending outwards from nerve cells. He proposed in its place an explanation of the
variability of nerve cell conductivity which appealed to the changing proportions of ioncarrying compounds in the fluids within and surrounding cells. Inhibition of individual nerve
cells was thus due to 'a reversible change during which electrolytes are set free into a state of
simple solution, and are then recovered from this state back into their original condition'
(Macdonald 1905, 330-333). The vibrations detected by protoplasm theorists were not the
products of organic fibrils connecting inner life with its external conditions, but changes in the
19
ionic concentrations of fluids behaving according to mathematical laws of osmosis.
It is not then surprising that in announcing his explicitly physical conception of
neurological existence in 1906, Sherrington invested significantly in Macdonald's research. v
This was to a great extent due to the possibilities that he saw in it regarding a more general
explanation of physiological inhibition. After a brief consideration (and rejection) of Gaskell
and Hering's metabolic propositions, Sherrington devoted nearly three pages of Integrative
Action to Macdonald's conclusions. Summarizing the latter's research as leading to the
proposition that 'inhibition is the condition in which the possibilities of free motion are most
reduced', he suggested that Macdonald's views were 'fertile in suggestion for future
experiment' (Sherrington [1906] 1947, 197-200. Quotes on 199-200). Such enthusiasm
reflected a new emphasis within physiology on the study of nerve junctions themselves as
sites at which conduction might be interrupted. In his Textbook of Physiology of 1900, Edward
A. Schäfer had suggested that impulses were 'momentarily arrested at these places of contact
of nerve cells with one another', which he referred to as 'synapses' (Schäfer 1900, 608).
Sherrington, characterizing such interruptions as manifestations of a 'neurone threshold',
identified it unequivocally with a discontinuous synaptic transmission:
at each synapse a small quantity of energy... acts as a releasing force to a fresh
store of energy not along a homogeneous train of conducting material,... but
across a barrier which whether lower or higher is always to some extent a barrier
(Sherrington [1906] 1947, 157).vi
This insistence on the functional significance of barriers between cells marks a critical change
of emphasis within physiological considerations of the causes of inhibition. Where
explanations of variations in the rate of electrical transmission along nerves had centred on
cells and the substances that composed them, Sherrington and his colleagues characterized
such variability as dependent on changes in the thresholds at which transmission between
cells could be effected. Neither cell bodies nor protoplasm were the most physiologically
significant conditions for variation in the transmission of nervous impulses: rather, 'synapses'
were.
It would be a mistake however to suggest that Sherrington relied on strictly physicalist
conclusions regarding nervous action to establish his contentions regarding inhibitory activity.
20
Significantly, in the passage of Integrative Action immediately following that recommending
Macdonald's research, Sherrington moved on to discuss a somewhat more complex aspect of
the variation of nervous function. This section, which he disassociated from inhibition proper,
concerned the effects of stimulation of more than one nerve at the same time.
5. Sherrington’s Physical Appropriation of Vital Psychology
It was well known amongst physiologists that if particular areas of an experimental
animal's skin were stimulated, one response could be elicited for a certain time, following
which an entirely different response might take over. Stimulations of the same points or areas
of skin could elicit radically different actions depending on their longevity. Sherrington had
sought to make this area of investigation his own. In a long series of notes presented to the
Royal Society between 1893 and 1909, he set out to define the nature of the so-called 'knee
jerk' reaction, and with it what he would call 'antagonistic muscle action.' As a reaction that
was dependent on the 'reciprocal innervation' (i.e. simultaneous antagonistic action) of two
muscles working in opposite directions, this latter topic presented a more complex problem
than that concerning excitation of a single nervous pathway. The variability of antagonistic
reactions, Sherrington found, was dependent on the initial posture of the animal, the extent to
which stimulation had previously been applied, and the strength of the stimulus. Particularly
notable were situations in which two reactions would alternate between one another (Swazey
1969, 84-90). In Integrative Action, such dynamic alterations constituted a significant
stepping-stone between the explanation of the inhibition of simple nervous reactions and that
of reflex activities more generally.
As set forth in 1906, however, Sherrington's explanation of alternating 'antagonistic'
reactions appealed not primarily to his own studies, but to the research of the physiologist and
psychologist William McDougall. As with Macdonald, Sherrington knew McDougall
personally.vii McDougall's explanation of reflex action was heavily indebted to Sherrington's
studies of nervous action. Moreover, it identified the critical variable in the alteration of
nervous response in functionally significant 'gaps' between cells. Though previous studies had
characterized inhibition as a phenomenon inherent to cellular physiology (for example in
Hering's appeal to contradicting physiological forces within cells) such conclusions were not
21
universally accepted. In opposition to such claims, McDougall ascribed the inhibition of all
nervous processes to the predomination of others. Inhibition was, he suggested, 'always the
result of the setting in of some other mental process' (McDougall 1903, 155-160, 169). Thus,
given two 'antagonistic' nerve arcs entering a synaptic gap, the manifestation of one of these
would prevent the other from gaining expression. Similarly, when an initially-predominating
reflex diminished in strength, the nerve arc that had not yet found expression would take over
(McDougall 1903, 174-176). In an extended critique of theories of depth- and colour
perception prominent amongst German experimental psychologists, McDougall employed this
schema to account for the wavering of attention between fields of vision when each eye was
presented with different forms of stimulus (McDougall 1901a, 91, 242; On vision research in
German physiological psychology see especially Turner 1994; Hatfield 1990; Wade 2005).
Here then was a conclusion that appeared complementary to Macdonald's studies. As in
Macdonald, changes in nervous response were to be identified not with the activities of
individual nerves, but with changing conditions at the sites of interaction between them.
Synapses were sites at which peripheral nerves competed for access to what Sherrington
would term a 'final common path' that would register their stimulation more widely through
the system.
Crucially, McDougall had arrived at his conclusions not primarily through
experimental or anatomical study of nerves, but that of his own sensory impressions. After a
period on the Cambridge University-led Torres' Strait expedition and a short-lived career in
medicine, he had sought out the Göttingen psychologist Georg Elias Müller, 'then the leading
exponent of the exact laboratory methods in psychology' (McDougall 1961, 203-204). Despite
reporting himself to have been ‘not in close intellectual sympathy’ with Müller, this training
had nevertheless brought him into contact with the few British psychologists who had begun
to engage psychological experimentation at this time, including W.H.R. Rivers, and James
Sully (McDougall 1961, 203-204). In an effort to import the German tradition of experimental
study of mind to Britain, Sully had in 1897 acquired a set of laboratory equipment from
Müller’s rival Hugo Münsterberg that the latter had created for his own psychological
laboratory in Freiburg (Valentine 1999, 212-213. On Münsterberg’s equipment at Freiburg see
Schmidgen 2008, 2-3). Without experimental training of his own, Sully persuaded McDougall
to return to Britain to take up research at University College London. This in 1903 led to
McDougall's appointment there in the newly-created post of Reader in Experimental
22
Psychology. McDougall thereby spent the first years of the twentieth century living in a small
house on the Surrey Downs, manipulating his visual experiences using a set of tools
developed within the then-emerging German schools of experimental psychological research,
and adapting his conclusions regarding these to the British context (McDougall 1961, 205). In
1904, he was appointed Wilde Reader in Psychology at Oxford, thus becoming one of the
foremost representatives of academic psychological science in Britain.
Furthermore, McDougall conveyed his findings in terms that went directly against the
mechanistic and associationist tendencies of late nineteenth century British physiological
physiology. He began his career by rejecting the widely-held proposition amongst British
physiological psychologists that mental faculties could be identified with one or another
anatomical part of the brain or nervous system. Instead, he proposed, awareness was
‘immediately determined' by 'neural processes' as a whole (McDougall 1898, 15, 365). Thus
an increase in nervous excitability could be attributed to a 'diminution of the resistance
offered by that delicate and complex inter-cellular substance which, as it seems to me, we
have to regard as the seat of the psycho-physical processes.' According to McDougall this
substance was not protoplasm, but a physically-independent vital fluid which he termed
'neurin.' Build-ups of neurin overcame the resistance of synaptic barriers, causing chains of
like reactions through the whole system (McDougall 1901b, 590, 614 and 616). McDougall,
then, considered his investigations as contributing to a different, but similarly vitalist tradition
of research as that in which Bergson had invested: like Bergson, he characterized the defining
attribute of life as an activity (flow) rather than a structure such as the cell; like Bergson, he
accorded a non-rational concept (‘instinct’ rather than Bergson’s ‘intuition’) a fundamental
role in the psyche (McDougall 1908); and like Bergson, he was fascinated by what he
characterized as the as-yet unknown potentialities of vital existence. It is notable in this later
regard that both served as presidents of the Society for Psychical Research (Valentine 2012,
70-71, 81). By the time Bergson spoke at Oxford, McDougall had begun to actively promote
the philosophy of the former amongst his scientific peers (McDougall 1911, e.g. 84). In so
doing, he became one of the few British scientists to explicitly take up Bergsonian themes in
his work. For Sherrington then, McDougall represented his most immediate contact with a
burgeoning tradition of research that, though it presented an alternative to the mechanical
tradition that he was seeking to move away from, also threatened to undermine his own
contentions regarding the physical nature of life.
23
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sherrington's connection with McDougall appears to have
caused consternation within Britain's community of mechanist physiologists. For example,
when on his appointment to the Wilde chair McDougall invited Sherrington to lecture at
Oxford, Sherrington's predecessor in the Waynflete chair, John Scott Burdon-Sanderson,
wrote to the former expressing his surprise. In his note Sanderson related how he had 'just
become aware that you are to deliver a lecture here' at the behest of McDougall, that he could
not 'be sure whether it is to be on Physiology or Experimental Psychology', and requesting
that Sherrington attend luncheon with him after the lecture. He further added, with something
seemingly approaching sarcasm, 'if it would suit you... to dine with us tout niveux [sic].'viii
Sherrington had spent the previous two decades building up a reputation as one of the most
productive physiologists in Britain, and identified Oxford as a place in which he might further
his own physiological goals (he had unsuccessfully sought appointment there in 1895. Swazey
1969, 18-19). Burdon-Sanderson could thereby be sure that his expression of uncertainty
regarding Sherrington's intellectual commitments would be well attended to.
Most likely mindful of the incompatibility of McDougall’s views both with those of
his mechanistically-oriented colleagues and his own physical commitments, Sherrington was
careful in Integrative Action to avoid uncritical reliance on McDougall’s conclusions. Despite
his enthusiasm regarding McDougall's explanation of 'reciprocal innervation', Sherrington's
characterization of it limited its explanatory scope to a particular aspect of a broader, physical,
phenomenon. He admitted that McDougall's proposals presented 'an explanation for the
transition from one antagonistic reflex to another' (Sherrington [1906] 1947, 200). As a
framework for inhibition, however, they tended
to sever... central nervous inhibition – of which I regard reciprocal innervation of
antagonistic muscles as but one widely spread case – from other forms.... It
appears to me unlikely that in their essential nature all forms of inhibition can be
anything but one and the same process (Sherrington [1906] 1947, 203).
Other forms of inhibition, a uniformly-caused function of nervous action, could not be
explained by McDougall's scheme. McDougall's psychological insights were thereby re-cast
in Integrative Action as contributions to the experimental study of physical (rather than
mechanical) nervous function.
24
Though McDougall sought to forge an alliance with Sherrington, it is clear that his
advances were not reciprocated. Sherrington adopted something of an institutionally hostile
stance towards McDougall during the time both were in Oxford. For example, at the end of
the First World War Sherrington (now in the Waynflete chair) requisitioned the rooms in the
Oxford Laboratory of Physiology that McDougall used for his psychological experimentation
for more strictly physiological investigations. In 1920 McDougall left the department
altogether to take up James’s old chair at the department of psychology at Harvard (Oldfield
1950, 382). Though these events cannot unequivocally be identified with Sherrington alone,
they reflected a commitment by him and many of his colleagues to the differentiation of
physiological from psychological endeavour (explored more fully in the second part of this
paper). As will be seen, Sherrington’s simultaneous appropriation of McDougall’s conclusions
and practical opposition to his investigations was only the most immediate attempt by him to
limit the reach of ideas complementary to Bergson’s holistic philosophy. In other areas of his
work he would employ similar strategies that would hinder the reach and influence of figures
sympathetic to Bergson’s ideas who enjoyed far greater international recognition. Though he
did not engage with Bergson’s philosophy directly, Sherrington was a significant figure in the
establishment of conditions within which Bergson’s contentions regarding life and perception
came to be understood as problematic. As will be shown, technical (rather than conceptual)
cinematographic devices played a critical role in this process.
Finally, Sherrington's strategy of containing McDougall's psychological contentions
within his own physiological schema threatened to severely limit the scope of his conclusions.
Though he had established his reputation with detailed studies of simple forms of cell-based
nervous function, his hope had been that such studies would eventually lead to an explanation
of the function of nervous activity as a whole. Sensations could not for Sherrington be
separated from the more general functions associated with nervous activity. These included
not only visual, but auditory, olfactory, tactile, and visceral experiences and what Sherrington
characterized as both simple ‘feelings’ such as pain and pleasure, and complex ’emotions’
such as fear. It would be in this transition from explaining nerve activity to explaining affect
and sensation that the psychological import of Sherrington’s intellectual hostility to
protoplasm-centred and otherwise vital conceptions of physiological psychology would have
its most direct and visible effects.
25
Conclusion
This first part of the paper has shown how early-twentieth-century physiology,
exemplified by Sherrington, sought to contain vitalist contentions such as those in which
Bergson invested. Bergson’s contrast between a ‘cinematographic’ mode of apprehension that
centred on the conceptualization of living objects as mechanisms and his own conception of
life in which the mind could become aware of its vital nature through intuition thus faced
challenges from within physiology during the first decades of the twentieth century. Yet such
developments cannot by themselves account for the decline of Bergson’s scientific reputation.
Rather, they constituted one aspect of a broader set of developments that, taken together
weakened of Bergson’s intellectual position overall. To arrive at thorough understanding of
the changing fortunes of Bergson’s metaphysics it is necessary to consider the social and
intellectual factors addressed in this part of the paper in conjunction with the technical and
institutional changes that they were accompanied by. The second part will thus demonstrate
ways in which Sherrington’s attempt to employ inscriptive and stimulatory devices in support
of his physical physiology contributed to the differentiation of physiological from
psychological and philosophical modes of intellectual practice. It will outline the
consequences for Bergson’s philosophy of the adoption of technical epistemology, and
demonstrate how it contributed to a growing sense of scepticism regarding the scientific
plausibility of Bergson’s claims.
Part II. Physiology, Psychology, and the Anti-Bergsonian Cinematograph
Introduction
In the first part of this study, it was demonstrated that Bergson’s characterization of
physiological science as marked by two contrasting epistemic modes - that of a
‘cinematographic’ mechanics of association on the one hand and an ‘intuitive’ vitalism on the
other – had begun to break down within physical physiology during the early twentieth
century. Whilst the definition of nerve physiology as subject to physical rather than either
mechanical or vital law might be portrayed as itself detrimental to the scientific plausibility of
26
Bergson’s thought, this second part of the study demonstrates that it was less the intellectual
claims that physiologists and psychologists made, than the kinds of practices that they
adopted, that had the greatest significance for Bergson’s changing scientific fortunes. In
particular, it shows that the increasingly technical (rather than mechanical) character of
physiological endeavour at this time helped constitute a very different appreciation of the role
that entities such as cinematographs played in intellectual practice than Bergson assumed.
Appeal to the capacities of tools (and in particular tools that emerged from the cinema of
attractions) as guarantors of scientific objectivity helped constitute conceptions of the body
and perception that were quite different from those Bergson appealed to. For the physiologists
and especially the psychologists of the 1920s, cinematographic devices had attained
significance not only as means by which nature might be analysed and re-constructed, but as
themselves objects of scientific concern.
6. Inscriptions of Affect
As outlined in Part I, in positing vibratory bodily perception in opposition to what he
characterized as ‘cinematographic’ mechanical observation Bergson was implicitly investing
in a current of psycho-physiological science that had gained considerable traction during the
final decades of the nineteenth century. Critically, as well as articulating a conception of life
as adhering to different laws as those believed to govern non-living nature, this current of
thought helped elevate a category (or rather set of categories) of psychological existence that
had historically been conceived of as obstacles to thought (affective states) to the status of
epistemic primacy. Thus, where previous thinkers had conceived of passions or emotions (on
the transition between these categories see Dixon 2003) as either problems to be overcome by
observers or (as in the Kantian tradition) as aspects of experience to be balanced by rational
comprehension, Bergson made them foundational to his philosophy. ‘Duration’, Bergson
claimed, could only be apprehended by attending to what he characterised as the vibratory
conditions of existence. This existence moreover could not be perceived via the rational
association of sensory effects: it must be ‘intuited’ (e.g. Bergson, 1911 [1907], 176; Massey
2014). Further, given that the vibratory conditions of mental existence had their primary
manifestation in organic life, it was to the philosopher’s own body (rather than the external
world) that intuition must initially be directed.
27
Bergson’s insistence that philosophically-lived experience must be intuitive found its
corollary in a similarly substantive strand of physiological psychology. The foremost advocate
of this strand at the turn of the twentieth century was William James, Bergson’s correspondent
and principal ally in the English speaking world. James and Bergson found particular cause
for mutual admiration in their respective conceptions of the status of affective or otherwise
non-rational (for Bergson intuitive, for James emotional) states in perception. However, James
found a range of physiologic and psychologic voices (Sherrington’s not least among them)
ranged against him at the end of the nineteenth century. Since Sherrington and his
physiological colleagues’ opposition to James’s conception of emotion played an important
part in the more general retreat from scientific respectability of views complimentary to
Bergson’s, it is necessary to examine it before moving on to consider the significance of
Sherrington’s cinematograph studies themselves. As Otniel Dror (1999b; 2011) has shown,
the relative prominence of different representational techniques in studies of emotion had
direct relevance for the sorts of claims that they carried. Sherrington’s technical epistemic
commitments, this section demonstrates, helped foster an approach to the study of emotions
that not only cast doubt on the scientific claims that Bergson invested in, but precluded the
possibility that intuition might present a means of accessing the nature of vital existence at all.
The vital body played a critical role in James’s understanding of emotion. In a phrase
that had strong parallels with Bergson’s protoplasmic conception of life, James referred to the
body as a ‘sounding board’ through which emotions were conveyed and experienced
(Wassmann 2014, 173-174. See also Deigh 2014). Announcing what he characterized a selfgenerated ‘revolution’ in the investigation of emotion, he argued that it was not (as
associationists had presumed) sensations of the external world that had the greatest salience
for psychological experience. Rather, apprehension of the world outside of the body was
intimately bound up with, and indeed characterised by, that of its inside. Emotions, James
claimed, were in fact themselves kinds of sensation. What differentiated them from the more
familiar touch, sight, sound, taste and smell was not their function in the psyche, but rather the
world to which they were directed: where the traditional sensations represented information
gathered from the surrounding environment, emotions constituted information gathered from
the visceral changes of the body. Emotions were nothing more than vital bodily changes
apprehended by the individual.
James’s publications on emotion challenged two claims that had found prominence
28
amongst associationist physiological psychologists during the latter half of the nineteenth
century. The first of these was that it was possible to apprehend one’s own body using similar
means as those employed to sense the external world without disrupting the functioning of the
rational mind. Drawing on French physiological studies of the early nineteenth century,
British physiological psychologists including Spencer and Bain had suggested during the
1860s that experience was not simply the consequence of external perception, but was rather
built up from a more fundamental source, which they termed ‘muscle sense’ (Smith 2011).
Closely associated with physical movement of the body, this sense was conceived of as
entirely separate from what were characterised as the more complex states of thought and
emotion. Though gained from both the inside and outside of the body, perceptual experience,
for these psychologists, could be entirely explained by reference to the conjunction of the
sense-impressions that Bergson found so problematic. James, in contrast, argued that even the
experience of external reality was inevitably coloured by the emotional apprehensions
presented by the viscera (James 1884; 1894, 523-524). Secondly (and more explicitly), James
challenged the physiological psychological claim that emotions could be identified with a
specific part or region of the body or nervous system. Though Wundt for example accorded a
greater role to emotion in the perceptual process that either Spencer or Bain, he had like them
contended that it was primarily a property of the brain. Emotions (Gefül) for Wundt were not
simply reports of the vital situation of the body, as James claimed, but in fact caused change
within it. Emotions in this latter sense could be means by which the body became passive to
the nervous mind, and controlled by it (Wassmann 2014, 169-171; Wassmann 2009). For
James in contrast, emotions were the bodily accompaniment of external sensation, and as such
constituted an active component of perception itself.
There can be little wonder then that both James and Bergson found the claims made by
the other so appealing (see e.g. Loerzer 2014). James, like Bergson, accorded affective and
non-rational states a foundational role in perception. Both portrayed the vital body in terms of
vibratory resonances with their surroundings. Both found the claims made for sensory
association problematic. And both sought to put in their place a conception of mind in which
the affective body enjoyed far greater psychological prominence than it had hitherto. Where
Bergson appealed to intuition, James advocated emotional sensation. Both concepts suggested
that the only means by which bodily nature could be apprehended without disturbing its
nature were ultimately dependent on the experiencing subject (Carroy and Schmidgen 2002, 5
29
and 13). Bergson and James prominently proclaimed their mutual admiration, with James
devoting lectures to Bergson, and Bergson writing the preface to the French translation of
Pragmatism in 1911.
That Sherrington was during the first decades of the twentieth century recognised as
having published one of the most incisive studies to cast doubt on the scientific plausibility of
James’s theories (Wassmann 2014, 178-179) can therefore be read as having significance
beyond the immediate claims that it made concerning James himself. In publishing two
articles (which appeared in 1900), and repeating their conclusions in Integrative Action,
Sherrington positioned himself as an important and increasingly influential antagonist of some
of the more strident claims being made for affective states as a necessary condition and
generative source of apprehension (Dror 1999a, 214-215). This is not to say that Sherrington
sought to deny emotion a role in the investigative process: indeed, as an author of both poetry
and prose he appears to have considered it of great importance. Rather, it is to note that he
placed strict limits on the role that it (and by implication instinct and intuition) could play in
scientific investigation (Smith 2000, 304). Though emotion might have been appropriate
within self-expressive genres and disciplines, Sherrington’s highly technical scientific
publications convey little affective input.
Significantly, Sherrington’s initial physiological study of emotion drew primarily not
(as did Bergson and James’ works) on the artistic and literary traditions through which affect
had conventionally been considered but on recently established practices of physiological
representation. As Dror highlights, studies such as Bergson and James’s drew on longestablished investigative practices that ‘framed observation around the embodied-experiential
reactions of observers’ (Dror 2011, 327). In contrast, the strand of physiological psychology
to which Sherrington sought to contribute approached emotion as something that could be
made visible via the application of tools to bodies. Though they for the most part remained
wedded to categories of psychological analysis established within philosophy, physiologists
working in the mid-to-late nineteenth century such as Duchenne de Bolougne, Angelo Mosso,
and Paolo Mantegazza sought to capture emotions by recording them, thereby making them
apprehensible to communities of observers rather than the experiential subject alone.
Notably, the visualization tool to which Sherrington appealed was concerned neither
with Wundtian attempts to measure the temporal nature of conscious experience, nor the
mapping of a specific region or organ of the body, but with the delineation of spatial change at
30
a single point within it over time. Perhaps unsurprisingly given his training, Sherrington
utilised a piece of equipment that was foundational to the disciplinary conduct of physiology
(Brain and Wise 1994; de Chadarevian 1993). Moreover, this tool was not (at least directly)
implicated in Bergson’s critique of scientific recording (Brain 2015, 32-33). The kymograph,
with its body-sensitive needle point resting on a rotating drum of soot or paper, was the
emblematic physiological tool of the late nineteenth century. Notably, it constituted exactly
the inverse relation between space and time than the cinematograph as characterised by
Bergson. Bergson emphasized in Creative Evolution that the cinematographic sense of reality
depended on the successive juxtaposition of images that represented effectively non-existent
points in time (Bergson [1907] 1911, 304-308). In stark contrast, kymographic traces cast
space, rather than time, as reducible to an effectively non-existent point. Thus whereas the
successive photographic and pictorial representations such as those of Duchenne and
Mantegazza appeared (deceptively according to Bergson) to capture outward expressions in
their visual entirety (Moruno 2016, esp. 150-154; Rees, 2014), kymographs charted the
vibratory fluctuations of single bodily points along extended uninterrupted temporal paths.
Ideally singular spatial points were taken in kymographic studies as indexes of the broader
physiological functioning of the body. Thus Claude Bernard identified the heartbeat as the
index of bodily emotional expression (Dror 2011, 337). Though later studies sought to
combine a range of bodily processes including blood pressure, electrical resistance of the skin,
and respiration into a composite physiological picture (Dror 2006, 135), the fact remained that
however overlaid, every kymographic recording produced assumed a single, ideally minute
point in space from which a reading could be taken.
Sherrington’s emotion studies centred on only a single kymographic recording: that of
the changing pressure of the femoral artery of a dog that he had vivisected whilst a visitor to
Mosso’s laboratory (Dror 1999a, 215-216).
The single line traced across the page, a
comparatively flat set of undulations interrupted by a dramatic increase in magnitude in their
centre, showed what Sherrington claimed to be direct evidence that emotions were not
psychological representations of bodily conditions at all. Rather, Sherrington contended that
emotions (which he defined as ‘feelings... excited not by a simple unelaborated sensation, but
by a group or train of ideas’) played an active role in the production of bodily effects
(Sherrington 1900, 328. Cf. Dror 2006, 129-130).
In the course of investigating the ‘scratch’ reflex in a dog, Sherrington had cut the
31
efferent nerves from its’ body to the brain, thereby preventing any communication by the
former reaching the latter. Preparing to apply a current to a hind leg of the animal, he had
turned to test the electrical equipment that he was using. This made a whirring sound. Upon
returning to the animal, he reported, he had noticed that its blood pressure had increased
dramatically (represented by a large increase in magnitude on the kymographic trace). After a
few attempts to ameliorate this increase prior to testing, Sherrington had come to the
conclusion that it was the whirring sound of the equipment, rather than any deliberate
intervention, that was causing the disturbance. Remembering that he had previously used this
animal as a test subject for evaluating the limits at which anaesthesia remained effective (a
procedure that would necessarily have caused the animal considerable discomfort),
Sherrington concluded that it was the dog’s recollection that the whirring was followed by the
experience of pain that was causing the blood pressure increase: the memory of pain was
making it afraid (Sherrington 1899-1900, 393-396). But how, Sherrington asked, could this
dog, insensitive to its own body as he presumed it to be, have experienced fear if emotions
were in any sense representations of bodily sensations?
Sherrington’s study had both normative and epistemic influence on subsequent
physiological investigations relating to affect. In presenting his studies, he had related a
further set of experiments on ‘spinal’ dogs (ie. dogs which had had the nerves communicating
from the body to the brain severed), in which he drew inferences regarding their emotional
states from their behaviours in his Liverpool laboratory (Sherrington, 1899-1900, 396-403).
Taken together, he contended, these studies precluded the possibility that ‘higher’ emotions
could be associated with anything other than cerebral processes. Whether or not the
experience of emotion preceded the cerebral change, or the two were concomitant, it seemed
clear to him that they were phenomena that did not proceed from an originally non-cerebral
(i.e. visceral) change (Sherrington 1900, 330; Sherrington [1906] 1947, 256-269).
Physiologists working after 1900 not only took this assertion as their point of investigative
departure, but accorded epistemic primacy to the equipment to which Sherrington had
appealed. Thus James’s Harvard colleague Walter B. Cannon’s Bodily Changes in Pain
Hunger Fear and Rage (1915), a publication that set the tone for subsequent physiological
work in the field, relied on kymographic recordings almost to the exclusion of other forms of
evidence. This work re-affirmed Sherrington’s contention regarding the continuation of
emotional expression following the dissociation of the brain from the body. Further, it
32
compounded objections to James’s theory: quite different emotions, Cannon contended,
produce physiologically similar effects; the physiological processes that accompanied
emotional experience did not act quickly enough to provide ‘sensory’ information; and even
when such visceral changes did in fact take place, the relevant emotion was not according to
Cannon necessarily experienced (Wassmann 2014, 179-180; See also Dror 2014).
Kymographic recording thus became the principal means by which physiologists sought to
define the relations of emotions to bodily processes. Emotion could not for these practitioners
itself function as a means of apprehending nature (by for example providing clues to the
nature of vital rhythmicity), but appeared rather as a psychological object capable of causing
physiological effects.
Kymographic studies can thereby be understood as contributing to the replacement of
the broad-ranging academic discussions of emotions and passions of the nineteenth century
with the narrow, highly-focused contributions of a small community of recognised
physiological and psychological specialists during the twentieth. Whilst the study of the
relations of emotions to bodily processes was in Sherrington’s view one of the ‘points where
physiology and psychology touch’ (Sherrington [1906] 1947, 257), the place of introspection
in these fields was less certain. Sherrington spoke for many physiologists when he noted that
in discussion of the results of experiments on emotion involving the manipulation of animals’
nervous systems ‘we are... hopelessly cut off from introspective help’ (Sherrington 1900,
330). Psychologists and psychiatric practitioners of course experienced a far more ambiguous
relation to introspection and indeed intuition as investigative modes. But even here discussion
decreasingly focused on the personal experience of those who instigated lines of inquiry, and
increasingly appealed to self-reports of experiment participants selected for their
observational acuity, alongside technical recording or measurement of bodily response (e.g.
Engstrom 2003, Ch. 5; Green 2010; Young 2015). Investigators working in the growing
number of laboratories devoted explicitly to experimental psychology appealed to tools such
as the Hipp chronoscope and various forms of tachistoscope to legitimate their claims to be
conducting scientifically rigorous investigations (Carroy and Schmidgen 2002, 6-11, 19-20,
26; Benschop 1998). The increasingly prevalent epistemic ideal of producing recordable and
therefore (it seemed) verifiable psychological effects can thus be considered as part of the
same historical phenomenon in which kymographic recording came to be understood as the
principal means by which the relevance of emotional to visceral nature might be understood
33
(Daston and Galison 2007, esp. 168-171, 183-187; Green 2010)..
Within physiology, and for many psychological investigators during the early
twentieth century then, emotion became a field of study in which particular techniques of
representation and observation came to be lauded over the introspective or intuitive
conclusions of individual observers. Use of kymographs and other recording and measuring
tools including chronoscopes and tachistoscopes became emblematic of a set of investigative
commitments that precluded the possibility that knowledge might be grounded first and
foremost in personal experience. Not only the specific claims that James and Bergson made
regarding the apprehension of bodily nature, but the very form of evidence that they appealed
to in their discussions of emotion had by the 1920s begun to be understood as scientifically
suspect. In opposing a specifically intuition-derived duration to a spatializing cinematographic
mode of intellectual conduct, Bergson had invested in a conception of psychology as a
practice that was capable of speaking directly to the physiological nature that it was
underpinned by. Similarly, James’s conception of emotions implied that their experience could
provide clued to visceral nature. Sherrington’s studies of emotion refused this capacity of
psychological study, and appealed to the experimental evidence of graphic inscription to
directly contradict James’s claims. In so doing, they put in their place a conception of two
complementary fields that ‘touched’ at particular ‘points’ and shared epistemic commitments,
but nevertheless addressed distinct objects. Thus James and Bergson were confronted not with
a critique based on one or another specific claim regarding emotion, but an assumption
regarding the limits (ideal if not always enforced - see Dror 2006, 135-136) of disciplinary
explanation. Visceral activity might be caused by emotions emanating from the brain, but the
study of viscera could not reveal anything regarding the nature of emotions themselves.
Similarly, the study of emotion as a psychological category did not in itself reveal anything of
the nature of bodily processes. Instead, physiologists were to limit themselves to strictly
technical study of organic responses: a circumstance in which cinematographic equipment,
but not Bergson’s vital alternative to his cinematographic mechanism, could be accorded
epistemic weight. We are now finally then in a position to address Sherrington’s
cinematograph studies and their significance for Bergson’s claims.
7. The cinematographic physiology of sensation
34
In Integrative Action, Sherrington introduced his cinematograph studies as a response
to the question of whether or not it was possible to extend his conclusions regarding nervous
activity in simple reflexes and more complex emotions to the study of sensations. For the
majority of the book, he had supposed the animal to be 'a puppet without passions, memory,
feelings, sensations, let alone ideas concrete or abstract.' Now, in his final chapter, he queried
whether 'we [can] at all compare with the simultaneous co-ordination of the nervous factors in
a motor reflex the synthesis of the nervous elements whose combination underlies a simple
sense-perception?' (Sherrington [1906] 1947, 353, 355) Though he notably did not go so far
as to make any positive claim, he intimated that the ‘most complex’ psychological phenomena
might be explained by reference to his physical interpretation of nervous action. ix Less clear
from Sherrington's text, however, is that were such a claim to have been established, it would
have turned back a tide of opinion that had been gaining ground in physiology since at least
the middle of the nineteenth century.
It was no coincidence that Bergson’s British supporter McDougall had arrived at his
conclusions following a close engagement with German physiological psychological research
practices. By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the combined influence of Kant
and Naturphilosophie on German scholarship had encouraged an intimate relation to emerge
there between the study of the senses through the generation of illusion, and debates
surrounding physical and vital explanations of physiological function (Schickore 2006, esp.
385-391; Friedman and Nordmann 2006; Leary 1982). Most prominently, Hermann von
Helmholtz had argued that the perception of nature ultimately depended on an act of
judgement that could not be understood in terms of bodily activities. The living body, as the
Helmholtz of the 1860’s conceived it, was a physical structure the behaviour of which could
be characterized in terms of mathematical laws. As such, it constituted a medium through
which impulses from the external world were conveyed to the mind. Whilst nerves were
conveyors of sensory stimulations, it was the function of a physiologically-inaccessible mind
to arrive at judgements regarding nature. Mind and sense organs thereby constituted two
entirely distinct elements of the perceptual process (Lenoir 1993, 123-125; Turner 1994, 7380). Helmholtz’s sensory model had not gone unopposed however. Starting in 1863, Hering
had waged a lengthy campaign against any separate consideration of sensations and senseorgans themselves. Hering and his supporters drew on a longer-established tradition of
psycho-physiological research to develop a sophisticated set of demonstrations and arguments
35
identifying visual illusions not with the inaccurate judgements of a physiologicallyindependent mind, but with the physiological make-up of the organs of sense (Turner 1994,
89-93). As already noted, Hering thereby came to characterize sensation as the product of
autonomously-acting organic forces that had only oblique relation to any bodily-independent
judgement. This, along with the British tradition of optics, was the principal intellectual
condition in relation to which the cinema of attractions took shape during the final decades of
the nineteenth century.
One of the principal means by which Helmholtz, Hering and their various supporters
and detractors conducted their disputes was via the creation and demonstration of a vast array
of illusion-generating devices (Wade 2005, esp. 126-131). Though they differed profoundly as
to their conclusions, all participants understood these as the epistemic means by which
relations between life and sensation could be established. Müller's Göttingen laboratory had
been well stocked with equipment developed for the study of colour vision via illusion, and
Münsterberg's wide range of devices for sensory and particularly visual experimentation at
Freiburg has already been referred to (McDougall 1961, 204-205; Schmidgen 2008). In
acquiring Münsterberg's psychological laboratory, Sully had helped bring a set of research
questions to Britain that had hitherto generally only appeared in the country in terms of
broader enquiries concerning the relation of matter to spirit (for example in the study of
Mesmerism, or, as frequently, optics) (Hayward 2007, 40-56; Schickore 2006, 396-401). The
tools that Münsterberg's laboratory contained invited investigation of sensory and more
generally psychological problems within a very different setting than these latter sciences. For
example, Richet, Binet, Bergson, James, and such colleagues of Sherrington’s as McDougall,
Cyril Burt and the physicist Oliver Lodge found common ground in their belief that
spiritualist phenomena constituted an epistemologically significant site of analysis (Valentine
2012). Physiological psychologists sympathetic to the aims (if not always the specific claims
or techniques) of Wundt’s ‘psycho-physics’ on the other hand, including Théodule Ribot,
Müller, Münsterberg and Sherrington, as well as later investigators such as Max Wertheimer,
invested far more heavily in the technical production of visual effects. For these latter figures,
the apparent embodiment of vital capacities in living individuals remained epistemologically
secondary to the quantifiable (or at least recordable) effects of controlled stimulation of living
bodies. This technical emphasis was often accompanied by scepticism regarding the
exceptionality of vital substances or effects from physical laws more generally.
36
It is not surprising then that Sherrington's initial foray into the study of visual
sensations, published in 1897, relied on an illusion-generating device in the shape of a multicoloured disc that could be rotated to produce the sensation of a single colour. This suggested
a direct parallel between two phenomena that had been current amongst philosophers of optics
since the eighteenth century (Wade 2005, 112-116; Mannoni [1994] 2000, 204-212). These
were studies relating on the one hand to the shortest time that an eye could be exposed to a
flash of light and an associated light-sensation be experienced, and on the other to the
production of a sense of continuous experience via repeated exposure to radically different
visual stimuli. Regarding the first of these, eighteenth- and especially nineteenth-century
natural philosophers had come to concern themselves with a wide range of phenomena that
occurred over very short intervals of time. The nature of sparks, bubbles and vibrations (to
give three amongst many possible examples) were interrogated using tools designed for the
visual 'fixing' of transient phenomena (Ramalingam 2015; Canales 2009, Ch. 5; Schaffer
2004, esp. 170-177). Within the German context especially, a set of physiological problems
associated with these phenomena had emerged that considered the processes by which
stimulation of the eye actually resulted in visual experience (Schickore 2006, 123-126). One
particularly prominent theme was the fact, embodied by the motion-sensation-generating
phenakistoscope (and later Muybridge's zoopraxiscope), that a series of short stimulations
could, through the phenomena of 'persistence of vision', create an illusion of temporal
continuity (Mannoni [1994] 2000, 213-222). In 1885, Marey's associate Adolph-Moïse Bloch
adapted a version of the intermittently-obscured lamps that William Henry Fox Talbot and
Simon von Stampfer had developed during the 1830s to physiological investigation. Where
Talbot aimed to measure light intensity itself, Bloch sought to establish a law regarding the
rates at which individual sensation-flashes produced a continuous light-sensation under
different conditions (Bloch 1885, 493-495; Schickore 2006, 254-255). Such studies prompted
a range of physiological investigations into Stampfer's 'stroboscopic' effects during the 1890s
(e.g. Charpentier 1890; Schenck 1896; Marbe 1898).
Sherrington's 1897 paper however dealt primarily with a parallel set of investigations
into the 'fusion' not of light-, but of colour-sensations. Building on the optical studies of
colour by Talbot, Thomas Young, James Clerk Maxwell, Thomas Sutton and others, the
physicist Ogden Rood had in 1893 presented what he considered method by which colours
might be differentiated according to their 'reflecting power.' Spinning a circular disc on which
37
alternating bands of light and shade had been painted, Rood measured the rate of rotation
required to eliminate the sense of intermingling or 'flicker' between them (Rood 1893. For
context see Ramalingam 2013, 252-257; Cat 2013). Exposing observers to intermittently
contrasting stimuli created sensory effects not present when equipment was at rest. Sensation
was increasingly coming to be addressed not in terms of phenomena of spatial differentiation,
but rather in relation to questions regarding temporal continuity (Crary 1999, 127-148). The
phenomena studied by Sherrington - the physiological conditions pertaining to the production
of light- and colour-sensation - thus came together (or rather were re-connected) via a set of
experiments that had been foundational for the emergence of illusion generation as a mode of
laboratory investigation.
Despite the relative paucity of illusion experiments amongst British physiologists
compared to their Germany counterparts at this time, Sherrington’s colleagues did experiment
with illusions of temporal continuity. Shortly after Sherrington's initial flicker study came out,
his Cambridge compatriot Otto Fritz Frankeau Grünbaum published a two-part paper in the
Journal of Physiology (Grünbaum 1897-1898). This study, which also addressed the rate at
which alternating stimuli fused into continuous perception, strove for far greater precision
than had Sherrington. Rather than direct both eyes to an external stimulus in the shape of a
rotating disc, Grünbaum created an experimental device (fig. 3) that could project two
separate beams of light onto the retina of a single eye. One of these beams was constant, thus
constituting a point of comparison. The other however was interrupted by a disc with angular
segments cut out of it. By rotating this disc at different speeds, and recording the speed of
rotation when the brightnesses of the two beams became indistinguishable, Grünbaum sought
to arrive at a more accurate estimation of the rates of exposure necessary for the experiences
of different brightnesses. The parallels between the establishment of illusion-generating
devices within physiology laboratories and that of cinematography more generally are
prominent here. One of the key elements of cinematographic devices - and one of the most
difficult pieces to co-ordinate with the movement of celluloid film-strips - was a disc or
'shutter' (similar to the ones Talbot and von Stampfer had developed) that cut off the
projection of light at intervals proportional to the replacement of images on the projector. The
minimal rate at which cinematographic images had to be replaced and exposed to view was
determined by the rate at which images could be perceived as individual, rather than a
continuous moving picture - i.e. by the phenomena of persistence of vision. By the late 1890s,
38
then, it is possible to detect a convergence between the laboratory devices that emerged in
conjunction with the cinema of attractions, and tools that would come to be recognised as
‘cinematographic’ in Bergson’s sense of the word. During the 1890s, the physiological study
of the persistence of vision and the construction of ever more complex illusion-generating
devices went hand in hand, and became decreasingly differentiable from the cinematograph
that we associate with the period today.
By 1902, Sherrington had begun to develop a device that was cinematographic in this
above-described sense. This device both surpassed Grünbaum's in experimental precision, and
anticipated many of the features that Bergson would deploy in his idealized device.x Crucially,
in addition to constituting a means by which the temporal phenomenon of visual flicker could
be studied, Sherrington’s experiment also incorporated a means of producing spatially
differentiated experience. Sherrington's experiment (fig. 4) placed an incandescent lamp (such
as might be used in a projecting device) in the middle of a rotating cylindrical screen, into
which three rows of rectangular windows had been cut. Surrounding this cylinder was a
casing, with a further four small holes cut in a step formation on its side. As the inner cylinder
turned, thin beams of light were intermittently projected at intervals through these holes
(Sherrington 1904, 27-30). Just as in Grünbaum's study, the rate at which light was projected
could be varied and the rotation rates at which the sensation of flicker appeared and
disappeared ascertained. But Sherrington sought even greater accuracy than had Grünbaum.
By making the holes through which light passed very small, he sought to confine the optical
effects produced to as few nerves and as small an area of the retina as possible. The constancy
of the rotation rate of the device was ensured through utilization of a motor such as that which
During notes was central to Bergson’s conceptualisation (During 2015). Moreover, by
positioning the experimental subject at a carefully calculated distance from the lamp, and
providing them with correcting lenses, the holes on each side would project light onto an
optically 'equivalent' point on each retina. Whereas Grünbaum's device had exposed different
halves of one retina to different rates of stimulation, Sherrington's could (by varying the size
of the rectangles cut into the cylindrical screen) expose the 'corresponding' points of both
retinas to the same (Sherrington 1904, 31). Since the 1860’s, physiologists had debated
different propositions regarding the combination of retinal sensations into a single experience
of vision (Turner 1994, esp. 41-48, 58-60, 162-168; Banks 2001). Sherrington’s device put
these spatially-oriented concerns into contact with the related but hitherto largely separate
39
debate regarding the persistence of vision (i.e. the production of experiences of temporal
continuity).
Fig. 3: from Grünbaum 1898.
Sherrington brought all of the resources that Daston and Galison associate with
‘mechanical objectivity’ to bear in conducting his cinematographic experiment (Daston and
Galison 2007, Ch. 3). Observers were provided with an electronic key that, when pressed,
would (again recalling During’s Bergson) mark a motor-driven myograph cylinder, on which
the rate of rotation of the screen at that point was recorded. Even more strikingly, Sherrington
went to great lengths to ensure that observers remained as passive as possible to the
40
phenomena that they experienced. Seated in a 'dark compartment' screened off from the
experimental set-up, the subject was made to 'give his sole attention to the watching of the
illuminated discs.' Once the beams of light had been corrected by the lenses, the interruption
of further light sources as well as changes in retina size were ameliorated by the introduction
of 'artificial pupils' between the lenses and the eye. The propensity of some observers to move
their head when they closed one or another eyelid was eliminated by the utilization of
'blackened aluminium side-flaps' that could be secured in place as needed. Finally, 'fixation of
the observer's head was secured by a solidly made wooden rest, supporting adjustable chin
and forehead pieces' (Sherrington 1904, 29-30). The passivity of subjects to the stimulating
device was thereby, it seemed, ensured.
Fig. 4: 'Rotating Lantern', from Sherrington 1904.
41
Even before Bergson had published his idealised conception of the cinematograph in
its fully articulated form, then, Sherrington had begun to bring the production of
cinematographic effects of continuity within the purview of his physical physiological
schema. His goal was not merely to arrive at an accurate estimation of the rate at which
flickering sensations transformed into continuous ones, but also to interrogate the relationship
between the retina, the nerves, and visual sensations more generally. Hering's studies had
suggested that the optic nerves had to connect before they arrived at the centre of
consciousness, as it was in the eyes and their associated nerves that vision was produced.
Helmholtz's insistence that knowledge was a judgemental construct, in contrast, seemed to
imply that all sensory organs were connected with the cerebrum individually - it was only
through the mind bringing individual sense-experiences together than external perception was
generated. By creating a situation in which 'corresponding' points on the retina could be
stimulated in similar but crucially alterable ways, Sherrington sought to establish the modes
of interaction between visual fields with greater confidence than had these physiological
psychologists. His cinematographic device was deployed as a guarantor of observational
consistency – an issue that was notoriously problematic for physiological psychologists who
appealed to the evidence of their own sensory experiences (Turner 1994, 59-60). By blocking
off some of the holes and one or another of the rectangles cut into the rotating screen, it was
possible to create situations in which retinal points could be stimulated either simultaneously
or alternately, but always at the same rate. Thus, Sherrington hoped, it would be possible to
examine whether stimulatory effects were 'additive' between corresponding nerves, or whether
contentions regarding their 'mutual inhibition' were in fact accurate (e.g. McDougall 1901b;
Sherrington [1906] 1947, 375-378). If binocular visual sensation could be shown to be
additive, Helmholtz's conclusions could be confirmed. If they inhibited one another, Hering
would be supported. Here then appeared a crucial test of a long-standing dispute within
physiological psychology.
Despite the lengths to which Sherrington went to ensure that both his subjects and his
objects were as carefully arranged and closely controlled as possible, however, he was unable
to reach any firm conclusions regarding his results. Sherrington's aim had been to evaluate the
extent to which his conclusions regarding the physical nature of simple reflex action could be
brought to bear on the interpretation of complex sensory phenomena. But when it came to
drawing conclusions from these studies, he himself wavered between the two above-noted
42
possibilities. The problem was not - as had hampered so many prior studies in this vein disagreement amongst individuals, as experimental conditions had it seemed ensured
agreement between subjects. Rather, it concerned the seemingly contradictory nature of the
results themselves. Whether retinal stimulations could be said to sum together or mutually
interfere depended, it seemed, on the mode of stimulation. In a statement that had direct
relevance to the Einstein-Bergson debate, and to which Piéron would gesture in his final
remarks there, Sherrington perplexedly concluded that ''corresponding retino-cerebral' points'
'retain individuality as regards time-relations... [but are] completely confluent by reference to
visual space' (Sherrington [1906] 1947, 366). Furthermore the 'rule of combination' revealed
by the experiment 'finds little solution by appeal to summation or interference of retinal and
purely physiological processes' (Sherrington [1906] 1947, 369). Though Sherrington leant
towards a Helmholtzian conception of visual sensation, technically mediated investigation of
sensory experience, even when conducted under carefully controlled laboratory conditions,
did not lead to clear-cut physiological conclusions.
The possibility that the study of visual illusion could inform study of the extent to
which optic nerves actively contributed to sensation had taken Sherrington a long way from
his starting point of the physical interaction of individual nerves. Integrative Action continued
to portray the study of 'sensual reaction' as at least potentially part and parcel of that of nerve
reactions more generally. Although the difficulty of interpreting the binocular flicker
experiment showed that 'hasty conclusions' regarding the parallels between simple and
'sensual' reflexes were unwise, it was nevertheless possible to insist on a 'likeness of nervous
reactions expressed by muscular and other effector-organs to reactions whose evidence is
sensual' (Sherrington [1906] 1947, 384). More generally, the correspondence of sensations to
positions in space, to which the body could direct its actions, indicated that 'physiology and
psychology, instead of prosecuting their studies... more strictly apart... will find it serviceable
for each to give the results achieved by the other even closer heed than has been customary
hitherto' (Sherrington [1906] 1947, 385). Nevertheless, the failure of Sherrington’s
cinematograph study to support claims regarding the physiological conditions of vision did
not recommend the device for physiological investigation more generally. Sherrington’s study
in many ways marks the point at which the physiological study of optics and the
psychological study of vision began to go separate ways.
Though Sherrington's cinematograph studies were not a success in his own
43
(physiological) terms, and he would not produce any further work in this vein, they did
confirm to him that sensory experimentation was irrelevant to physiological investigation.
Just as the utilization of kymographs helped construct a specifically physiological (rather than
physiological psychological) approach to the study of emotion, Sherrington’s cinematograph
experiment helped define the limits of physiological vis-a-vis psychological investigation. In
subsequent years, Sherrington, as head of the Oxford Laboratory of Physiology and an
increasingly lauded figure amongst his fellow physiologists, would use his position to
promote a physiology and psychology as complementary but nevertheless disciplinarily
distinct endeavours. Though tools such as the myograph and cinematograph would play
significant roles in both fields of study (the latter for example being utilized in both the
representation of nerves and the production of sensory effects) they would come to be directed
to distinct problems in each.xi Physiology and psychology would share a decreasing number
of conceptual problems and definitional terms as the twentieth century progressed.
8. Experimentation and disciplinarity: assimilating Bergson
That Sherrington ended his scientific engagement with experimental devices designed
to produce sensory effects around 1906 should not be taken as evidence that cinematographs
themselves had decreasing significance for physiological practitioners during the first two
decades of the twentieth century. As Hannah Landecker and others have shown, it was for
their recording and representational rather than their stimulatory capacities that these tools
were most prominently adopted within physiology. During the first decades of the twentieth
century, cinematographic recording was frequently deployed in attempts to inscribe and
represent the motile aspects of life. Such interests were accompanied by further innovations in
cinematographic tools themselves. For example, at the Institut Marey, Charles-Émile
François-Franck and Lucien Bull developed means of recording and projecting living nature
in three dimensions, and adapted celluloid film for the creation of highly sensitive
myographic equipment (Bull 1910; Cartwright 1995, 40-46). During the 1920s, Sherrington
and the group of his students and colleagues associated with the Oxford laboratory of
physiology would adapt these latter tools to their 'optical myograph' studies of minute muscle
movements (Sherrington 1921, 245-246). Such studies constituted a re-assertion of the
44
representational (Bergson’s ‘cinematographic’) over the stimulatory possibilities that illusiongenerating devices afforded. This also entailed the adoption of representation-centred modes
of investigation even where tools invited novel forms of sensory testing. Thus during the
1920s, physiological engagement with radio transmission and reception devices was largely
confined to their adaptation for recording purposes rather than any sensory effects that they
might have had (Garson 2015).
By the 1920s, the questions that motivated physiological psychological studies of
illusion had mutated into more disciplinarily specific concerns. Where physiologists utilized
cinematograph-like devices to represent the movements of life, psychologists concerned
themselves more intensely with their potential as a source of visual effects. Mitchell Ash thus
notes the significance of a tachistoscopic device designed to produce sensations of movement
(the experiential example that Bergson had put forward as beyond the purview of
associationist/mechanistic perception) in a controlled, recordable manner for the
establishment of laboratory-centred psychology in Weimar Germany. As Ash highlights,
tachistoscopic studies by such figures as Wertheimer marked the culmination of long-standing
trends within German academies, in which psychology began to emerge as a discipline
independent from physiology and psychology (Ash 1998, esp. 125-129, 203-218). Beginning
in 1910, Wertheimer had contended that sensation could not be studied by reference to
individually isolatable sense-impressions, but was rather apprehensible only in terms of an
immediately perceptible whole or 'Gestalt'. Wertheimer's collaborators Kurt Koffka and
Wolfgang Köhler invited their students to engage with Bergson in their seminars. But it was
in the laboratory that the latter's critique of associationism had its greatest influence. 'Though
he did not cite Bergson', Ash notes, Wertheimer's tachistoscope studies had, at least by the
time of their full articulation around 1920, 'provided empirical evidence for the claims the
Frenchman had made' (Ash 1998, 9-10, 69, 128-129). Such influence was nevertheless
double-edged as far as Bergson's cinematographic epistemology was concerned. In deploying
cinematographs as experimental (rather than conceptual) devices, psychologists were
beginning to arrive at an appreciation of them as holding quite different significance to that
ascribed by Bergson.
The most significant study to emerge from early-twentieth century experimental
psychology as far as the conceptualisation of the cinematograph as we understand it today
was concerned however was that of Münsterberg. As well as becoming the most significant
45
institutional rival to James at Harvard, Münsterberg embarked on a lengthy series of studies
that sought to gauge the psychological significance of cinema as an experiential medium
(Blatter 2015; Brain 2012; Bruno, 2009. On Münsterberg and James’s rivalry see Bordogna
2008, 224-255). Significantly, Münsterberg’s principal publication on the topic not only
adopted a conception of the relation between stimulation and sensation that drew directly on
the experimental tradition to which Sherrington sought to contribute, but characterised the
cinematograph itself in radically different terms to those Bergson had employed. The
Photoplay (1915) conveyed a conception of cinematographs not as exemplifying a particular
mode of apprehension, but as a means by which specific conceptions of natural and human
existence found expression. The representational possibilities of cinematography did not for
Münsterberg reduce phenomena to analytic moments, but rather brought the motile aspects of
even things hitherto considered ‘lifeless’ to the attention of interested observers. In the
photoplay, ‘our ideas and feelings and impulses group themselves around the attended object.
It becomes the starting point for our actions while all the other objects in the sphere of our
senses lose their grip on our ideas and feelings’ (Münsterberg 1915, 85). Bergson’s claims
regarding the active shaping of life by mind are for Münsterberg only made possible by the
photoplay, wherein ‘it is as if reality...has become shaped by the demands of our soul.’ Indeed,
it is as if, through the cinematograph, ‘the outer world were woven into our mind and were
shaped... by the acts of our attention’ (Münsterberg 1915, 91, 95). It is not for Münsterberg in
the vital body, but in the production of cinematic effects that the active aspects of
consciousness find their expression. Such productions are moreover irretrievably both
simultaneously technical and performative. Where Bergson’s cinematograph was entirely
‘automatic’, Münsterberg found the most interesting effects of cinematography to depend on
its operators: ‘the same series of moving pictures may be given to us with a very slow or with
a rapid turning of the crank’, and thus produce very different emotive and perceptual effects
(Münsterberg 1915, 127-128). The Photoplay thereby marks the cinematographic culmination
of a specifically technical tradition of psychological research, in which cinematographs
feature not as devices whose workings reveal the nature of mental existence, or even as
counterpoints to a philosophically promising mode of investigation, but as a means of
extending mind into the world (Brain 2012, esp. 330-334, 341-349). In stark contrast to
Bergson’s ‘intuitive’ vital mind, Münsterberg thereby posited cinematographs as the then-preeminent means of psychological (and by implication vital) realisation.
46
By the end of the First World War then, a number of strands of experimental
physiological and psychological research had emerged that both avoided the cinematographic
characterization that Bergson had put forward in 1907, and asserted a radically different set of
claims concerning life, perception, and the technical conditions of experience than Bergson
had proposed. Firstly, regarding the nature of nervous life, the formulation of a physical rather
than a mechanical or a vitalist physiology enabled physiologists to incorporate vitalist claims
within explanatory schema that continued to address living matter as subject to natural law
more generally. Secondly, the emergence of kymograph-centred approaches to the bodily
manifestation of emotion contributed to a more general differentiation between physiological
and psychological endeavour. This differentiation encouraged physiologists to cordon off
studies of visceral emotional effects from the consideration of emotions per se – a topic that
was increasingly left to specialists in psychological fields. And finally, an increasing emphasis
on studies of visual illusion within physiological psychology led to ever more sophisticated
forms of experimentation with cinematographic devices and tools relating to them. Within
Sherrington’s physical physiology, this experimentation constituted a limit case that
demonstrated the inability of studies of sensory experience to speak to questions concerning
the nature of bodily processes. Experimental psychologists such as Münsterberg, on the other
hand, began to articulate a conception of cinematography that constituted a clear alternative to
Bergson’s idealization. Bergson’s cinematograph had by 1920 thus become more a caricature
rather than (as it had been in 1907) a fair characterization of predominant modes of conduct
within these sciences. Moreover, these very sciences had accommodated the alternative
conception of existence to which he subscribed within separate disciplinary realms.
The above-enumerated trends did not go uncontested. For those most enthused by
Bergson’s ideas the relevance of metaphysical and (especially) psychological speculation to
the study of life remained self-evident; an assumption confirmed in Bergson’s insistence
during his debate with Einstein that physical nature could not be treated as independent of the
embodied experience of duration. In addition to the philosophers and physicists addressed by
Canales, Sherrington, along with Cannon, Münsterberg, Wertheimer and others, continued to
contribute to a wider effort to discredit such assertions. In May 1918, for example,
Sherrington played a critical role in preventing one of the most prominent figures in Germany
sympathetic to Bergson’s philosophy from gaining a hearing in post-First World War Britain.
As Mark Chapman recounts, Sherrington adopted a seemingly highly contradictory attitude
47
towards intellectual rapprochement at the end of the war. On the one hand, he presided over
the election of Einstein as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, thereby contributing to the
acknowledgement that German physics had attained something approaching international
ascendancy over the previous decades. Yet it was also almost entirely down to Sherrington
that the German theologian Ernst Troeltsch, himself hailed as ‘a kind of Einstein of the
religious world’, failed to gain a hearing in the country (Chapman 2017, 106-122; Chapman
2001, 180). At a crucial moment, just as negotiations for Troeltsch to tour Britain were being
finalised, Sherrington wrote to The Times alleging that the theologian (with whom he claimed
he had briefly been acquainted) had in conversation with him in 1907 expressed deeply
belligerent views on Germany’s superiority over Britain as a nation. Sherrington’s
‘inexplicable intervention’ (Chapman 2017, 118) is only comprehensible if the context of the
broader debate regarding the relation between science and intuition, and the relevance of
perception studies to philosophical speculation, is taken into account. Troeltsch had over the
previous three decades articulated a set of theological and historical claims which, in their
assertion of the ‘irrational’ primacy of the creative act and the necessity of this act to
comprehension of individual action, had deep resonances with those of Bergson (Ricci, 2012,
Ch. 4, esp. pp. 72-73). Less abstractly, during the war Troeltsch had accused the neo-Kantian
journal Kant-Studien, of which Einstein’s supporter Ernst Cassirer was an editor, of having
descended into ‘Jewish terrorism’ (Gordon 2010, 56; Canales 2015, 132-135. On Cassirer’s
relation to psychophysics see Biagioli 2016; Giovanelli 2017, esp. 287-288, 313-316). Ash
has noted the extent to which both experimental psychologists and physical realists found
themselves under attack from philosophers and theologians in inter-war Germany (Ash 1995,
286, 288-291). In supporting Einstein and undermining Troelstch, Sherrington thus may well
have considered himself to be participating in a broader defence of the disciplinary interests
of physical physiology and experimental psychology, both in Britain and further afield.
In his 1922 reference to psychological time as the only alternative to his own physical
time, Einstein appealed not then to a field in which contentions regarding the nature of mind
could directly inform studies of the nature of bodies, but rather to an increasingly laboratorybased discipline that addressed questions that at least nominally fell outside of the purview of
physiological research. It is significant in this respect that he had since 1916 cultivated a close
relationship with Wertheimer. In 1922 Einstein asked Wertheimer to deputise for him at the
League of Nations' Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, over which Bergson presided, and
48
under the auspices of which the two debated. In the same year, in the first of a number of such
letters, he also penned a recommendation for Wertheimer (to Moritz Schlick at Kiel) on the
basis of both his personal acquaintance and his psychological expertise. xii Though Einstein
was eventually persuaded by Wertheimer that he would be the most appropriate representation
of Germany on the Committee (thus precipitating the debate), it is notable that it was the
experimental psychologist (and founder of the Institut de Psychologie) Piéron that spoke most
incisively for Einstein’s point of view there. Indeed, that Piéron appealed precisely to
experiments in which 'two symmetrical points of the retina receive a luminous impression' (a
direct reference to Sherrington’s cinematograph studies) to insist that Bergson's introspective
duration must remain 'a foreigner to physical time' indicates the critical role that
experimentation with cinematographic devices played in constituting a psychology that could
accommodate Bergson’s claims (Anon 1922, 369-370).xiii In psychological experimentation
with illusion-generating equipment, Bergson's ‘cinematographic’ admonition that experience
could not be reduced to a set of isolated moments had, paradoxically, found purchase in the
very ground that he sought to critique. Laboratory psychology incorporated his insistence on
the holistic, intuition-centred, active nature of perception, but produced it as a scientific object
rather than philosophic insight. Indeed, cinematographic devices came to be positioned by
figures such as Münsterberg as material corollaries of this object. Crucially, the adoption by
psychologists of concepts emphasised by Bergson did not rely on more general claims
regarding the place of mind in life, but rather on the claim that they could speak to specific
propositions regarding the nature of sensory or affective experience. Problematically for
Bergson, it had been exactly this particularization of discussion that his philosophy sought to
ward against: for him, direct, unmediated experience should be the grounds for the
apprehension of nature as a whole, rather than specific psychological, physiological, or indeed
physical parts of it.
9. Conclusion
Given the above changing conditions in relation to which Bergson articulated his
philosophy, his dispute with Einstein begins to appear in a different light. Canales relays a
Bergson under attack, subject to the imperialistic impulses of a radical, ambitious and
49
somewhat ruthless early twentieth-century physics (Canales 2015, esp. 13, 163-171). In
contrast, this article has conveyed a Bergson deeply invested in a historically specific mode of
intellectual practice in which consideration relating to sensation had direct relevance to that
relating to bodily nature. Einstein's dispute with Bergson came at a time in which this mode
was undergoing severe and seemingly irreversible decline. Einstein and his followers' success
in casting Bergson's philosophy as outside of the purview of a properly scientific culture had
as much to do with the disintegration of this mode as with the specificities of their encounter.
The constitution of a psychological science that did not necessarily refer directly to
physiology (and vice versa) was a critical condition for Bergson's characterization as
scientifically inappropriate. That Bergson did not appeal to psychological or physiological
science in 1922, then, reflected the changing structure of academic endeavour during the
previous two decades.
This is not however to dismiss the significance of either Bergson's claims regarding
the primacy of intuitive experience in philosophical investigation, or Canales conclusions
regarding the cultural positioning of Bergson during the twentieth century. Indeed, the two
insights are linked in significant ways. Though it remained outside of the purview of the
experimental disciplines, Bergson's introspection-derived insistence on the inherent
temporality of experience became a critical source of both insight and provocation for
science-oriented philosophy. Though the thinkers most frequently identified with his thought
are Alfred North Whitehead, Georges Canguilhem and Gilles Deleuze, recent work has
demonstrated the importance of Bergsonian themes in structuring work by Jean Cavaillès,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and others (Bianco 2011; further explicated in
Bianco 2015). In the United States, Arthur O. Lovejoy drew on Bergson's writings for his
explorations of 'organic autonomy' and the history of evolutionary concepts (Russell 2015,
esp. 43-46 and 62-63). Canales' concerns mesh well with a body of work which, as Ruth Leys
notes, has become especially prominent in conjunction with appeals to biology as a
transhistorical mode of explanation (Leys 2011, 441-443). Nevertheless, as this paper
suggests, a significant problem with the rehabilitation of Bergson's philosophy specifically is
that his holistic epistemology has not been able to accommodate the establishment of
experimentation as a critical guarantor of intellectual legitimacy in fields in which his
followers participate. During the first part of the twentieth century, particular experimental
fields brought particular aspects of Bergson's claims to bear on their objects of study. Thus
50
holistic functional explanation came to complement rather than supplant particular structural
delineation in physiology. Intuitive perceptual experience was similarly brought into contact
with but did not supersede the analysis and recording of sensory experience and response in
psychology. In each case, strong 'Bergsonian' claims regarding the primacy of intuitive
perception were not refuted but rather moderated and incorporated into already-existing
traditions via disciplined interaction with technical entities.
The insight of Bergson's most relevant to present-day historical practice then is not
that relating to the primacy of intuition in psychological experience, or an organic vital force,
or even a temporal absolute, but rather his insistence that all intellectual endeavour
simultaneously responds to and constitutes material change (i.e. occurs within history). With
Bergson, we cannot expect either the current contentions of psychology, biology or physics, or
the plausibility of particular ethical, aesthetic or indeed historical interpretations to remain
absolutely stable. Most importantly, we certainly cannot expect the currently accepted means
by which knowledge in any of these fields (or their progeny) is established to persist
indefinitely. Bergson's philosophy speaks to current modes of historical investigation - not
least in its assertion that all experience (including that on which the claims of both physical
science and philosophy are based) is in some sense that of a past (Bergson [1896] 1988, 7176; Kerslake 2008; Amad 2010, esp. 117-123 and 166-170; Lundy 2013). Yet his attempt to
locate the material presence of philosophic insight primarily within the living body foundered
in the face of the establishment of experimental disciplinary practices. One way of addressing
Bergson historiographically then might be, as this paper has attempted, to consider his thought
in relation not only to contemporary ideals of bodily and psychological nature, or even to
historically and geographically specific modes of embodied experience, but also,
simultaneously, to the technical (and with them institutional) changes that accompany their
respective performance and articulation. Historians, like physiologists and psychologists
before them, might thereby come to a more acute appreciation of technical entities not only as
objects of historical explanation, but also as contingent, contested, and potentially deeply
problematic constituents of the disciplinary study of history itself.
Archives
51
Sherrington Collection. c.1894-1952. Sherrington Library. Department of Physiology,
Anatomy and Genetics. University of Oxford.
Sir Charles Scott Sherrington Fonds. 1663-1976. RBSC-ARC-1733. University of British
Columbia Library Rare Books and Special Collections. University of British Columbia,
Vancouver.
References
Amad, Paula. 2010. Counter-Archive: Film, The Everyday, and Albert Kahn's Archives de la
Planète. New York: Colombia University Press.
Anon. 1922. "La Théorie de la relativité: séance du 6 avril 1922", Bulletin de la Société
française de philosophie 22:91-113.
Antliff, Mark. 1993. Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde.
Princeton: University Press.
Araujo, Saulo de Freitas. 2016. Wundt and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychology.
New York, NY.: Springer.
Ash, Mitchell G. 1988. Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890-1967: Holism and the
Quest for Objectivity. Cambridge: University Press.
Banks, Erik C. 2001. “Ernst Mach and the Episode of the Monocular Depth Sensations”,
Journal
of
the
History
of
the
Behavioral
Sciences
37
:237-348.
Barkan, Diana Kormos. 1999. Walter Nernst and the Transition to Modern Physical Science.
Cambridge: University Press.
52
Benschop, Ruth. 1998. “What is a Tachistoscope? Historical Explorations of an Instrument”,
Science in Context 11:23-50.
Bergson, Henri-Louis. [1889] 1910. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Data of
Consciousness. Translated by F.L. Pogson. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Bergson, Henri-Louis. [1896] 1988. Matter and Memory . Translated by Nancy M. Paul and
W. Scott Palmer. New York; Zone Books.
Bergson, Henri-Louis. [1907] 1911. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New
York: Henry Holt and C
Bergson, Henri-Louis. [1922] 1999. Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian
Universe. Translated by Leon Jacobson. Manchester: Clinamen Press.
Bergson, Henri-Louis. [1934] 1946. "The Perception of Change." in H. Bergson (trans. M.L.
Andison), The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Henri Bergson. Translated by
Mabelle L. Andison, 153-186. New York: The Philosophical Library.
Bianco, Guiseppe. 2011. "Experience v's Concept? The role of Bergson in Twentieth-Century
French Philosophy'", The European Legacy 16:855-872.
Bianco, Guiseppe. 2015. Après Bergson: Portrait de group avec philosophe. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
Biagioli, Francesca. 2016. Space, Number, and Geometry from Helmholtz to Cassirer. New
York, NY.: Springer.
Black, Sandra Elizabeth. 1981. ""The Osler Medal Essay": Pseudopods and Synapses: The
Amoeboid Theories of Neuronal Mobility and the Early Formation of the Synapse Concept",
Bulletin of the History of Medicine 55:34-58.
53
Blatter, Jeremy. 2015. "Screening the Psychological Laboratory: Hugo Münsterberg,
Psychotechnics, and the Cinema, 1892-1916", Science in Context 28:53-76.
Bloch, Adolph-Moïse. 1885. "Expériences sur la vision", Comptes rendus des séances de la
Société de biologie 37:493-495.
Bordogna, Francesca. 2008. William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science, and the
Geography of Knowledge. Chicago, IL. And London: University of Chicago Press.
Brain, Robert Michael. 2009. "Protoplasmania", in B. Larson and F. Brauer (eds.), The Art of
Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture. Edited by Barbara Larson and Fae
Brauer, 92-123. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.
Brain, Robert Michael. 2012. “Self-Projection: Hugo Münsterberg on Empathy and
Oscillation in Cinema Spectatorship”, Science in Context 25:329-353.
Brain, Robert Michael. 2013. "Materialising the Medium: Ectoplasm and the Quest for SupraNormal Biology in Fin-de-Siècle Science and Art", in Vibratory Modernism. Edited by
Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, 115-144. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Brain, Robert Michael. 2015. The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in fin-desiècle Europe. Seattle and London; University of Washington Press.
Brain, Robert Michael and Wise, Matthew Norton. 1994. "Muscles and Engines: Indicator
Diagrams and Helmholtz’s Graphical Methods", in Universalgenie Helmholtz. Rückblick nach
100 Jahren . Edited by Krüger, Lorenz, 124-148. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Bruno, Guiliana. 2009. “Film, Aesthetics, Science: Hugo Münsterberg’s Laboratory of
Moving Images”, Grey Room 36:88-113.
Breidbach, Olaf. 1996. "The Controversy over Stain Technologies – an Experimental
54
Reexamination of the Dispute on the Cellular Nature of the Nervous System around 1900",
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 18:195-212.
Bull, Lucien. 1910. "La chronophotographie des mouvement rapides", Travaux de
l'association l'Institut Marey 2:51-75.
Canales, Jimena. 2009. A Tenth of a Second: A History. Chicago, IL. and London: Chicago
University Press.
Canales, Jimena. 2011. "Desired Machines: Cinema and the Word in its Own Image", Science
in Context 24:329-359.
Canales, Jimena. 2015. The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate
That Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Cannon, Walter B. 1915. Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear And Rage: An Account of
Recent Researches into the Function of Emotional Excitement. New York and London: D.
Appleton and Company.
Carroy, Jacqueline and Schmidgen, Henning. 2002. “Psychologies Experimentales: LeipzigParis (1890-1910)”, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte Preprint 206. Berlin
Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte.
Cartwright, Lisa. 1995. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture. Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Cat, Jordi. 2013. Maxwell, Sutton and the Birth of Colour Photography. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
de Chadarevian, Soraya. 1993. "Graphical Method and Discipline: Self-Recording
Instruments in Nineteenth-Century Physiology", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Part A 24:267-291.
55
Chapman, Mark D. 2001. Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology: Religion and Cultural
Synthesis in Wilhelmine Germany. Oxford: University Press.
Chapman, Mark D. 2017. Theology at War and Peace: English Theology and Germany in the
First World War. Abingdon: Routledge.
Charpentier, Augustin. 1890. "Recherches sur la persistence des impressions rétiniennes et sur
les excitations lumineuses de courte durée", Archives d'Opthalmologie 10:10, 108-135, 212230, 340-356, 406-429 and 522-537.
Clarke, Edwin and Jacyna, L.S. 1987. Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific
Concepts. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and London: University of California Press.
Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture.
Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
CSlide, Ver. 1.0. 2014. Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of
Oxford. 4 January 2017. https://cslide.medsci.ox.ac.uk/.
Daston, Lorraine. 1978. "British Responses to Psycho-Physiology, 1860-1900", Isis 69:192208.
Daston, Lorraine and Galison, Peter. 2007. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.
De Palma, Armando and Pareti, Germana. 2011. “Bernstein’s Long Path to Membrane
Theory: Radical Change and Conservation in Nineteenth-Century Electrophysiology”,
Journal of the History of the Neuroscoiences 20:306-337.
Deigh, John. 2014. “William James and the Scientific Study of Emotion”, Emotion Review
6:4-12.
56
Dercum, Francis Xavier. 1896. "The Functions of the Neuron", Journal of Nervous and
Mental Diseases 23:513-523.
Dixon, Thomas. 2003. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological
Category. Cambridge: University Press.
Douglass, Paul. 1999. “Bergson and Cinema: Friends or Foes?”, in The New Bergson. Edited
by Mullarky, John, 209-227. Manchester: University Press.
Dror, Otneil E. 1999a. “The Affect of Experiment: The Turn to Emotions in Anglo-American
Physiology, 1900-1940”, Isis 90:205-237.
Dror, Otniel E. 1999b. “The Scientific Image of Emotion: Experience and Technologies of
Inscription”, Configurations 7:355-401.
Dror, Otniel E. 2001. "Techniques of the Brain and the Paradox of Emotions, 1880-1930",
Science in Context 14:643-660.
Dror, Otniel E. 2006. “Fear and Loathing in the Laboratory and Clinic”, in Medicine,
Emotion, and Disease, 1700-1950. Edited by Alberti, Fay Bound, 125-143. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Dror, Otniel E. 2011. “Seeing the Blush: Feeling Emotions”, in Histories of Scientific
Observation. Edited by Daston, Lorrainne and Lunbeck, Elizabeth, 326-348. Chicago:
Universtiy Press.
Dror, Otniel E. 2014. “The Cannon-Bard Thalmic Theory of Emotions: A Brief Genealogy
and Reappraisal”, Emotion Review 6:13-20.
During, Elie 2015. “Notes on the Bergsonian Cinematograph”. Translated by Franck le Gac.
In Cine-Dispositives: Essays in Epistemology Across Media. Edited by Albera, François and
Tortajada, Maria. 115-128. Amsterdam: University Press.
57
Engstrom, Eric J. 2003. Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany: A History of Psychiatric
Practice. Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press.
Fearing, Franklin. [1930] 1970. Reflex Action: A Study in the History of Physiological
Pscyhology. Cambridge, MA. and London: MIT Press.
Finkelstein, Gabriel. 2013. Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in
Nineteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge and London: MIT Press.
Fitzgerald, Des and Callard, Felicity. 2015. "Social Science and Neuroscience beyond
Interdisciplinarity: Experimental Entanglements", Theory, Culture & Society 32:3-32.
Friedman, Micheal and Nordmann, Alfred (editors). 2006. The Kantian Legacy in NineteenthCentury Science. Cambridge, MA. and London: MIT Press.
Garson, Justin. 2015. "The Birth of Information in the Brain: Edgar Adrian and the Vacuum
Tube", Science in Context 28:31-52.
Geison, Gerald L. 1978. Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology: the
Scientific Enterprise in Late Victorian Society. Princeton: University Press.
Giovanelli, Marco. “The Sensation and the Stimulus: Psychophysics and the Prehistory of the
Marburg School”, Perspectives on Science 25:287-323.
van Gieson, Ira. 1899. The Correlation of Sciences in the Investigation of Nervous and Mental
Disease. Utica, NY: State Hospitals Press.
Gilles, Mary Ann. 1996. Henri Bergson and British Modernism. Montreal: McGill-Queen's
University Press.
Gordon, Peter E. 2010. Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. Cambridge, MA. and
58
London: Harvard University Press.
Green, Christopher D. 2010. “Scientific Objectivity and E.B. Titchener’s Experimental
Psychology”, Isis 101:697-721.
Grogin, Robert C. 1988 The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900-1914. Calgary:
University Press.
Grünbaum, Otto Fritz Frankeau. 1897-1898. "On Intermittent Stimulation of the Retina (Parts
I and II.)", Journal of Physiology 21:396-402 and 22:433-450.
Gunning, Tom. [1986] 2006. "The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, The Spectator, and the
Avant Garde", in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Edited by Strauven, Wanda, 381-388.
Amsterdam: University Press.
Hatfield, Gary. 1990. The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from
Kant to Helmholtz. Cambridge, MA. and London: MIT Press.
Hayward, Rhodri. 2007. Resisting History: Religious Transcendence and the Invention of the
Unconscious. Manchester: University Press.
Heidelberger, Michael. [1993] 2004. Nature from Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and His
Psychophysical Worldview. Translated by Klohr, Cynthia. Pittsburgh, PA.: University Press.
Hering, Ewald. 1897. "Theory of the Functions of Living Matter", Brain 20:232-258.
Hering, Ewald. 1900. "On the Theory of Nerve Activity", The Monist 10:167-187.
Jacyna, L.S. 1981. "The Physiology of Mind, the Unity of Nature, and the Moral Order in
Victorian Thought", British Journal for the History of Science 14:109-132.
James, William. 1884. “What is an Emotion?”, Mind 9:188-205.
59
James, William. 1894. “The Physical Basis of Emotion”, Psychological Review 1:516-529.
Kerslake, Christian. 2008. “Becoming Against History: Toynbee, Deleuze, and Vitalist
Historiography”, Parrhesia 4:17-48.
Landecker, Hannah. 2006. "Microcinematography and the History of Science and Film", Isis
97:121-132.
Landecker, Hannah. 2011. "Creeping, Drinking, Dying: The Cinematic Portal and the
Microscopic World of the Twentieth-Century Cell", Science in Context 24:381-416.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. "Trains of Thought: The Fifth Dimension and its Fabrication", in
Thinking Time: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Time. Edited by Perret-Clermont, AnneNelly et. al., 173-187. Cambridge, MA: Hogrefe and Hupher.
Lawrence, Christopher. 2009. "Degeneration Under the Microscope at the fin de siècle",
Annals of Science 66:455-471.
Leary, David E. 1982. “Immanuel Kant and the Development of Modern Psychology”, in The
Problematic ScienceL Psychology in Nineteenth-Century Thought. Edited by Woodward,
William Ray and Ash, Mitchell G, 17-42. New York, NY.: Praeger.
Lefebvre, Alexandre and White, Melanie (editors). 2012. Bergson, Politics and Religion.
Durham, NC. and London: Duke University Press.
Lenoir, Timothy. 1986. "Models and Instruments in the Development of Electrophysiology",
Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 17:1-54.
Lenoir, Timothy. 1987. “Social Interests and the Organic Physics of 1847”, in Science in
Reflection. The Israel Colloquium: Studies in History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science 3.
Edited by Ullmann-Margalit, Edna, 169-191. Dordrecht, Boston MA. and London: Kluwer.
60
Lenoir, Timothy. 1993. "'The Eye as Mathematician: Clinical Practices, Instrumentation, and
Helmholtz's Construction of an Empiricist Theory of Vision", in Hermann von Helmholtz and
the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science. Edited by Cahan, David, 109-153. Berkeley,
L.A. and London: University of California Press.
Lesch, John E. 1984. Science and Medicine in France: The Emergence of Experimental
Physiology, 1790-1855. Cambridge, MA. and London: Harvard University Press.
Leys, Ruth. 2011. "The Turn to Affect: A Critique", Critical Inquiry 37:434-472.
Loerzer, Barbara. 2014. “William James, the French Tradition, and the Incomplete
Transposition of the Spiritual into the Aesthetic”, in William James and the Transatlantic
Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Philosophy of Religion. Edited by Halliwell,
Martin and Rasmussen, Joel D.S., 65-80. Oxford: University Press.
Luchins, E.H. and Luchins, Abraham S. 1979. "Introduction to the Einstein-Wertheimer
Correspondence", Methodology and Science 12:165-202.
Lundy, Craig. 2013. “Bergson, History and Ontology”, in Bergson and the Art of Immanence:
Painting, Photography, Film, Performance. Edited by Mullarky, John and de Mille, Charlotte,
17-31. Edinburgh: University Press.
McDougall, William. 1898. “A Contribution towards Improvement in Psychological Method”
(I.) and (III), Mind (New Series) 7:15-33, and Mind (New Series) 7:364-387.
McDougall, William. 1901a. "Some New Observations in Support of Thomas Young's Theory
of Light- and Colour-Vision (I.) and (II.)", Mind (New Series) 10:52-97 and Mind (New
Series) 10:210-245.
McDougall, William. 1901b. “On the Seat of the Psycho-Physical Processes", Brain 24:579630.
61
McDougall, William. 1903. "The Nature of Inhibitory Processes Within the Nervous System",
Brain 26:153-191.
McDougall, William. 1908. An Introduction to Social Psychology. London: Methuen & Co.
McDougall, William. 1911. Body and Mind: A History and Defence of Animism. New York:
Macmillan.
McDougall, William. 1961. "William McDougall", in A History of Psychology in
Autobiography (Vol. I). Edited by Murchison, Carl, 191-223. New York: Russell and Russell.
Macdonald, John Smyth. 1900. "The Demarcation Current of Mammalian Nerve.
(Preliminary Communication), II: The Source of the Demarcation Current Considered as a
Concentration Cell", Proceedings of the Royal Society 67:315-324.
Macdonald, John Smyth. 1905. "The Structure and Function of Nerve Fibres.-Preliminary
Communication", Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 76:322-350.
Mannoni, Laurent. [1994] 2000. The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the
Cinema . Translated by Richard Crangle. Exeter University Press.
Marbe, Karl. 1898. "Die stroboskopischen Erscheinungen", Philosophische Studien 14:376401.
Massey, Heath. 2014. “Bergsonian Intuition: Getting Back into Duration”, in Rational
Intuition: Philosophical Roots, Scientific Investigations. Edited by Osbeck, Lisa M. and Held,
Barbara S, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Moruno, Dolores Martin. 2016. “Pain as Practice in Paolo Mantegazza’s Science of
Emotions”, Osiris 31:137-162.
62
Mullarky, John (editor). 1999. The New Bergson. Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press.
Mullarky, John and de Mille, Charlotte (editors). 2013. Bergson and the Art of Immanence:
Painting, Photography, Film, Performance. Edinburgh: University Press.
Mussell, James. 2009. "Private Practices and Public Knowledge: Science, Professionalization
and Gender in the Late Nineteenth Century", Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 5. 2
November 2016 http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue52/mussell.htm.
Münsterberg, Hugo. 1900. Grundz̈ge der Psychologie: Band 1, algemeiner Teil, die
Prinzipen der Psychologie. Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth.
Münsterberg, Hugo. 1916. The Photoplay: a Psychological Study. New York and London: D.
Appleton.
Nawrotski, Kristen and Dougherty, Jack (editors). 2013. Writing History in the Digital Age.
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Normandin, Sebastian and Wolfe, Charles T (editors). 2013. Vitalism and the Scientific Image
in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010. Dordrecht: Springer.
O'Connor, W.J. 1991. British Physiologists 1885-1914: A Biographical Dictionary.
Manchester: University Press.
Oldfield, R.C. 1950. "Psychology in Oxford – 1898-1949: Part II", Quarterly Bulletin of the
British Psychological Society, 1:382-387.
Otis, Laura. 2001. Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth
Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Pickstone, John V. 2000. Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and
63
Medicine. Manchester: University Press.
Ramalingam, Chitra. 2013. "The Most Transitory of Things: Talbot and the Science of
Instantaneous Vision", in William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography. Edited by M.
Brusius, Mirjam, Dean, Katrina and Ramalingam, Chitra, 245-268. Yale University Press,
2013.
Ramalingam, Chitra. 2015. "Dust Plate, Retina, Photograph: Imaging on Experimental
Surfaces in Early Nineteenth-Century Physics", Science in Context 28:317-355.
Rees, Danny. 2014. “Down in the Mouth: Faces of Pain”, in Pain and Emotion in Modern
History. Edited by Boddice, Robert Gregory, 164-186. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins
in the Test Tube. Stanford: University Press.
Ricci, Gabriel R. 2012. The Tempo of Modernity. New Brunswick, NJ.: Transaction.
Rood, Ogden N. 1893. "On a Photometric Method which is Independent of Color", American
Journal of Science 46:173-176.
Russell, Douglas. 2015. "Toward a Pragmatist Epistemology: Arthur O. Lovejoy's and H.S.
Jenning's Biophilosophical Responses to Neovitalism", Journal of the History of Biology
48:37-66.
Schäfer, Edward A. 1900. "'The Nerve Cell", in Textbook of Physiology. Edited by Schäfer,
Edward A., 592-615. London and Edinburgh: Young J. Pentland.
Schaffer, Simon. 2004. "A Science Whose Business is Bursting: Soap Bubbles as
Commodities in Classical Physics", in Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science .
Edited by Daston, Lorraine, 147-192. New York: Zone Books.
64
Schenck, Freidrich Wilhelm Julius. 1896. "Ueber intermittirende Netzhautreizung", Pflüger's
Archiv für die gesamte Physiologie des Menschen und der Tiere 64:165-178.
Schickore, Jutta. 2006. "Misperception, Illusion and Epistemological Optimism: Vision
Studies in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain and Germany", British Journal for the History of
Science 39:383-405.
Schloegel, Judy Johns and Schmidgen, Henning. 2002. "General Physiology, Experimental
Psychology, and Evolutionism: Unicellular Organisms as Objects of Psychophysiological
Research, 1877-1918", Isis 93:614-645.
Schmidgen, Henning. 2008. 'Münsterberg's Photoplays: Instruments and Models in his
Laboratories at Freiburg and Harvard (1891-1893)', at The Virtual Laboratory, Max Planck
Institut
für
Wissenschaftsgeschichte.
18
November
2016.
http://vlp.mpiwg-
berlin.mpg.de/essays/data/art71?p=1.
Schmidgen, Henning. 2012. "Cinematography Without Film: Architectures and Technologies
of Visual Instruction in Biology around 1900", in The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and
Pedagogy in the Life Sciences. Edited by Anderson, Nancy and Dietrich, Michael R., 94-120.
Hanover: Dartmouth College Press.
Schmidgen, Henning. [2009] 2014. The Helmholtz Curves: Tracing Lost Time . Translated by
Schott, Nils F. New York: Fordham University Press.
Seyfarth, Ernst-August. 2006. “Julius Bernstein (1839-1917): Pioneer Neurologist and
Biophysicist”, Biological Cybernetics 94:2-8.
Sherrington, Charles Scott. 1893. "Note on the Spinal Portion of some Ascending
Degenerations", Journal of Physiology 14:255-302.
Sherrington, Charles Scott. 1894. "On the Anatomical Constitution of Nerves of Skeletal
Muscles; with Remarks on Recurrent Fibres in the Ventral Spinal Nerve-Root", Journal of
65
Physiology 17:210-254.
Sherrington, Charles Scott. 1899-1900. “Experiments on the Vascular and Visceral Factors for
the Genesis of Emotion”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 66:390-403.
Sherrington, Charles Scott. 1900. “Experimentation on Emotion”, Nature 62:328-331.
Sherrington, Charles Scott. 1904. "On Binocular Flicker and the Correlation of Activity of
'Corresponding' Retinal Points", Journal of Psychology 1:26-60.
Sherrington, Charles Scott. [1906] 1947. The Integrative Action of the Nervous System.
Cambridge: University Press.
Sherrington, Charles Scott. 1921. "Break-Shock Reflexes and 'Supramaximal' ContractionResponse of Mammalian Nerve-Muscle to Single Shock Stimuli", Proceedings of the Royal
Society of London B 92:245-258.
Sidis, Boris. 1919. The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of
Man and Society. New York: D. Appleton.
Smith, Roger. 1973. "The Background of Physiological Psychology in Natural Philosophy",
History of Science 11:75-123.
Smith, Roger. 1992. Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain.
London: Free Association Books.
Smith, Roger. 2000. “The Embodiment of Value: C.S. Sherrington and the Cultivation of
Science”, British Journal for the History of Science 33:283-311.
Smith, Roger. 2001a. "Physiology and Psychology, or Brain and Mind, in the Age of
Sherrington", in Psychology in Britain: Historical Essays and Personal Reflections. Edited by
Bunn, Geoff C., Lovie, A.D. and Richards, Graham D., 223-242. Leicester: BPS Books.
66
Smith, Roger. 2001b. "Representations of Mind: C.S. Sherrington and Scientific Opinion,
c.1930-1950", Science in Context 14:511-539.
Smith, Roger. 2003. "Biology and Values in Interwar Britain: C.S. Sherrington, Julian Huxley,
and the Vision of Progress", Past & Present 178:210-242.
Smith, Roger. 2011. “”The Sixth Sense”: Towards a History of Muscular Sensation”,
Gesnerus 68:218-271.
Smith, Roger. 2013. Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 1870-1910. London:
Pickering and Chatto.
Swazey, Judith P. 1969. Reflexes and Motor Integration: Sherrington’s Concept of Integrative
Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Turner, R. Stephen. 1994. In The Eye's Mind: Vision and the Helmholtz-Hering Controversy.
Princeton, NJ: University Press.
Tortajada, Maria. 2011. “Technique/Discourse: When Bergson Invented his Cinematograph”,
Semiotic Inquiry 31:131-151.
Valentine, Elizabeth R. 1999. "The Founding of the Psychological Laboratory, University
College London: "Dear Galton... Yours truly, J. Sully"", History of Psychology 2:204-218.
Valentine, Elizabeth R. 2012. “Spooks and Spoofs: Relations Between Psychical Research
and Academic Psychology in Britain in the Inter-War Period”, History of the Human Sciences
25:69-90.
The Virtual Laboratory: Essays and Resources on the Experimentalization of Life. Ver 1.0.
c.2001.
Max
Planck
Institut
für
Wissengeschaftsgeschichte.
http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/index_html.
28
October
2016.
67
Wade, Nicholas J. 2005. Perception and Illusion: Historical Perspectives. New York:
Springer.
Wassmann, Claudia. 2009. “Physiological Optics, Cognition and Emotion: A Novel Look at
the Early Work of Wilhelm Wundt”, Journal of the History of Mediicne and Allied Sciences
64:213-249.
Wassmann, Claudia. 2014. “”Picturesque Incisiveness”: Explaining the Celebrity of James’s
Theory of Emotion”, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 50:166-188.
Winter, Alison. "Screening Selves: Sciences of Memory and Identity on Film", History of
Psychology 7:367-401.
Young, Jacy L. “Test or Toy? Materiality and the Measure of Infant Intelligence”, History of
Psychology 18:103-118.
Young, Robert Maxwell. [1970] 1990. Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century:
Cerebraol Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier. Oxford: University
Press.
i
For prior historical consideration of Bergson see e.g. Grogin 1988; Antliff 1993; Gilles
1996.
ii
On Sherrington see Smith 2003; idem 2001b; idem 2000; idem 1992, 179-190;
Swazey 1969, esp. 1-29.
iii
I employ 'device' rather than 'tool' or 'thing' here to denote the literary as well as
practical uses to which cinematographic objects were put. On 'epistemic things' see
Rheinberger, 1997.
iv
This approach to the organization and presentation of historical material is intended as
a contribution to on-going experimental investigation into the significance of digital tools for
historical scholarship. For examples relevant to the history of science, technology and
68
medicine see Nawrotski and Dougherty 2013, and 'The Virtual Laboratory: Essays and
Resources on the Experimentalization of Life' (Max Planck Institut für
Wissengeschaftsgeschichte, c. 2001-), available at http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/index_html
(accessed 28/10/2016). For recent discussion of experimentation as an investigative approach
in the humanities see e.g. Fitzgerald and Callard 2015. The relation between the present
organizational and presentational mode and the topic at hand emerges throughout the
discussion. Enquiries regarding editorial access to CSlide are welcome at
quick.tr@gmail.com.
v
See e.g. letter from C.S. Sherrington to H. Cushing dated January 22 1902 and C.S.
Sherrington to H. Cushing dated July 7 1905 (Sherrington Collection, Box WCG 1-37. WCG
32.6 and WCG 32.13). This investment has been little-noticed: for example Smith's major
study of the term does not address Macdonald's work. Cf. Swazey 1969, 73-74.
vi
On Sherrington's earlier 'reticulist' conception of synapses see Black 1981, 55-56.
vii
For example, one of McDougall's first actions on his 1904 appointment to the Wilde
Readership of Mental Philosophy at Oxford was to invite Sherrington to lecture there. See
letter from J.S. Burdon-Sanderson to C.S. Sherrington dated July 23 [1904] (Sir Charles Scott
Sherrington Fonds, 428).
viii
i.e. 'on any level.' Letter from J.S. Burdon-Sanderson to C.S. Sherrington dated July
23 [1904] (Sir Charles Sherrington Fonds, 428).
ix
For an account of Sherrington's conception of sensation as it emerged later in his
career see Smith 2001a, 232-235.
x
The device is still in existence. It is currently held at the Department for Physiology,
Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford.
xi
See for example Fearing [1930] 1970, 286-310 on differentiation between
physiological and psychological discussions of the reflex.
xii
M. Wertheimer to A. Einstein, 17th Sept. 1922 and A. Einstein-M. Schlick, 28th Apr.
1922, trans. in Luchins and Luchins 1979, 173-174 and 181. Einstein and Bergson's League of
Nations experiences (though not Einstein's invitation to Wertheimer) are related in Canales
2015, esp. 114-130.
xiii
'supposons que deux points symétriques de la rétine reçoivent une impression
lumineuse; il semble que, dans ces conditions, la simultanéité perçue sera un indice certain,
dans les limites d'une approximation donnée, de simultanéité physique... la durée
bergsonienne me paraît devoir rester étrangère au temps physique en général et
particulièrement au temps einsteinien.'