Chapter Four
Human Physiology
Man the machine? I don't think so!:
Let us take a look at the Penguin book Every Subject On Earth --- WHITAKER’S WORLD OF FACTS by Russell Ash. When you say Penguin book you know you are talking about the elite of the intellectual establishment. That is why it is so interesting to find out what they really think. Let us look at the chapter entitled “Human Body.” Opposite a picture of “A tiny section of DNA” we read: “The human body is one of the most complicated machines on the planet. In recent years some of its secrets have been discovered, including the structure of DNA molecules, which form the building blocks of life itself.” This is the sort of “truth” that our intellectual mentors of the establishment would like to purvey to our children. If they say it is only a metaphor, fine; but I do not think it a good one.
Against this view, I go back to 1935, to a book written by Dr.Alexis Carrel, Man the Unknown. I have taken the liberty of using bold print for those short passages that support my arguments, otherwise they will tend to get obscured in the soporific mass of complexity we are here dealing with. Whatever his political opinions may have been, this famous surgeon was one of the world’s leading experts on human physiology. That is the subject I am interested in at this point. He wrote on page 90 ff:
“Section 13 Indeed, both a machine and our body are organisms. But the organization of the body is not similar to that of a machine. A machine is composed of many parts, originally separate. Once these parts are put together, its manifoldness becomes unity. Like the human individual, it is assembled for a specific purpose. Like him, it is both simple and complex. But it is primarily complex and secondarily simple. On the contrary, man is primarily simple and secondarily complex. He originates from a single cell. This cell divides into two others, which divide in their turn, and such divisions continue indefinitely. In the course of this process of structural elaboration, the embryo retains the functional simplicity of the egg. The cells seem to remember their original unity, even when they have become the elements of an innumerable multitude. They know spontaneously the functions attributed to them in the organized whole. If we cultivate epithelial cells over a period of several months, quite apart from the animal to which they belong, they arrange themselves in a mosaic, exactly as if to protect a surface. Yet the surface to be protected is lacking. Leucocytes, living in flasks, industriously devour microbes and red corpuscles, although there is no organism to be defended against the incursions of these enemies. The innate knowledge of the part they play in the whole is a mode of being of all elements of the body.”
(JRT) No machine can grow from a single cell, and the parts of a machine do not show knowledge of their relationship to all other parts. Our cells evince CONSCIOUS AWARENESS, CO-OPERATIVE AWARENESS, and CREATIVE ABILITIES far in excess of what we experience in our ordinary waking consciousness. Whatever is controlling them, it is a lot smarter than we are.
“Indeed cells have the singular power of reproducing, without direction or purpose, the edifices characterizing each organ. If a few red corpuscles, impelled by gravity, flow from a drop of blood placed in liquid plasma and form a tiny stream, banks are soon built up. Then, these banks cover themselves with filaments of fibrin, and the stream becomes a pipe, through which the red cells glide just as in a blood-vessel. Next, leucocytes come, adhere to the surface of the pipe, and surround it with their undulating membrane. The blood-stream now assumes the appearance of a capillary vessel enveloped in a layer of contractile cells. Thus, isolated red and white corpuscles manage to construct a segment of circulatory apparatus, although there is neither heart, circulation, nor tissues to be irrigated. Cells are like bees creating their geometrical alveoli, synthesizing honey, feeding their embryos, as though each of them understood mathematics, chemistry, and biology, and unselfishly acting for the interest of the entire community. The spontaneous tendency toward formation of the organs by their constitutive cells, like the social aptitude of the insects, is a primary datum of observation. It cannot be explained in the light of our present concepts.”
(JRT) A single brick cannot multiply itself and build a house, changing its form to make windows, doors, roofing slates etc. But the cells are only intelligent within a narrow range of functions. This is proved by the fact that, as long as they are alive, they work the same way whether they are connected to the whole body or not. Apparently, they do not know if they are connected to the whole body or not. Therefore, the higher purposes they serve must emanate from some higher controlling intelligence, not coterminous with the cells by themselves.
“An organ builds itself by techniques very foreign to the human mind. It is not made of extraneous material, like a house. Neither is it a cellular construction, a mere assemblage of cells. It is, of course, composed of cells, as a house is of bricks. But it is born from a cell, as if the house originated from one brick, a magic brick that would set about manufacturing other bricks. Those bricks, without waiting for the architect’s drawings or the coming of the bricklayers, would assemble themselves and form the walls. They would also metamorphose into window-panes, roofing-slates, coal for heating, and water for the kitchen and the bathroom. An organ develops by means such as those attributed to fairies in the tales told to children in bygone times. It is engendered by cells which, to all appearances, have a knowledge of the future edifice, and synthesize from substances contained in the blood plasma the building material and even the workers.”
(JRT) Our mind is not capable of making a machine to duplicate all the organic functions of our body. It cannot find a way to make a machine truly alive. Such life comes from a level of reality far above the finite worlds. Here we have a clear illustration of the superiority of living matter over inert matter. This superiority cannot be explained by physics and chemistry alone. Mind is there.
“These methods used by the organism do not have the simplicity of ours. They appear strange to us. Our intelligence does not encounter itself in the intraorganic world. It is herefo on the simplicity of the cosmic universe, and not on the complexity of the inner mechanisms of living beings. For the moment, we cannot understand the mode of organization of our body and its nutritive, nervous, and mental activities. The laws of mechanics, physics, and chemistry are completely applicable to inert matter (but only) partly to man. The illusions of the mechanists of the nineteenth century, the dogmas of Jacques Loeb, the childish physicochemical conceptions of the human being, in which so many physiologists and physicians still believe, have to be definitely abandoned. We must also dismiss the philosophical and humanistic dreams of physicists and astronomers. Following many others, Jeans believes and teaches that God, creator of the sidereal universe, is a mathematician. If that is so, the material world, the living beings, and man have been created, obviously, by different Gods. How naïve (are) our speculations! Our knowledge of the human body is, in truth, most rudimentary. It is impossible, for the present, to grasp its constitution. We must, then, be content with the scientific observation of our organic and mental activities. And, without any other guide, march forward into the unknown.”
In Chapter 3, “Body and Physiological Activities” he writes:
“Section 1 We are conscious of existing, of possessing an activity of our own, a personality. We know that we are different from other individuals. We believe our will is free. We feel happy or unhappy. These intuitions constitute for each of us the ultimate reality.
“Our states of consciousness glide through time as a river through a valley. Like the river, we are both change and permanence. We are independent of our environment, much more so than are the other animals. Our intelligence has set us free. Man is, above all, the inventor of tools, arms, and machines. With the aid of these inventions he was able to manifest his specific characteristics, and to distinguish himself from all other living beings. He has expressed his inner tendencies in an objective manner by erecting statues, temples, theatres, cathedrals, hospitals, universities, laboratories and factories. He has, in this way, stamped the face of the earth with the mark of his fundamental activities---that is, of his aesthetic and religious feelings, his moral sense, his intelligence, and his scientific curiosity.
“This focus of mighty activities can be observed from within or from without. Seen from within, it shows to the lone observer, who is our self, his own thoughts, tendencies, desires, joys, and sorrows. Seen from without, it appears as the human body, our own, and also that of our fellow creatures. Thus man assumes two totally different aspects. For this reason, he has been looked upon as being made up of two parts, the body and the soul. However, no one has ever observed a soul without a body, or a body without a soul. Only the outer surface of our body is visible to us. We perceive our functional activities as a vague sense of well-being. But we are not conscious of any of our organs. The body obeys mechanisms entirely hidden from us. It discloses its constitution only through the techniques of anatomy and physiology. Then, a stupendous complexity appears under its seeming simplicity. Man never allows himself to be observed simultaneously in his outer and public aspect, and in his inner and private one. Even if we penetrate the inextricable mass of the brain and the nervous functions, nowhere do we meet with consciousness. Soul and body are creations of our methods of observation. They are carved by those methods from an indivisible whole.
(JRT) The body obeys mechanisms entirely hidden from us. But the UB says we create our body by means of our own mind. If so, the part of our mind that does this is not accessible to our ordinary waking consciousness. It is known to psychologists as the unconscious mind, which they also call ‘the mind of the body’.
“This whole consists of tissues, organic fluids, and consciousness. It extends simultaneously in space and time. It fills the three dimensions of space, and that of time with its heterogeneous mass. However, it is not comprised fully within these four dimensions. For consciousness is located both within the cerebral matter and outside the physical continuum. The human being is too complex to be apprehended in his entirety. We have to divide him into small parts by our methods of observation. Technological necessity obliges us, therefore, to describe him as being composed of a corporeal substratum and of various activities; And also to consider separately the temporal, adaptive, and individual aspects of these activities. At the same time we must avoid making the classical errors of reducing him to a body, or a consciousness, or an association of both, and of believing in the concrete existence of the parts abstracted from him by our mind.”
(JRT) This is a very important consideration. We must not allow the distinction between ontology and epistemology to become blurred. In the effort to describe something we often make purely abstract distinctions that have no sound basis in reality. There is perhaps more unity in reality than our mind can grasp.
“Section 2: The human body is placed, on the scale of magnitude, half way between the atom and the star. According to the size of the object selected for comparison, it appears either large or small. Its length is equivalent to that of two hundred thousand tissue cells, or of two millions of ordinary microbes, or of two billions of albumin molecules, placed end to end. Man is gigantic in comparison to an electron, an atom, a molecule, or a microbe. But when compared with a mountain, or with the earth, he is tiny. More than four thousand individuals would have to stand one upon the other in order to equal the height of Mount Everest . A terrestrial meridian is approximately equivalent to twenty millions of them placed end to end. Light, as is well known, travels about one hundred and fifty million times the length of our body in one second. The interstellar distances are such that they have to be measured in light years. Our stature, in relation to such a system of reference, becomes inconceivably small. For this reason, Eddington and Jeans, in their books of popular astronomy, always succeed in impressing their readers with the complete insignificance of man in the universe. In reality, our special greatness or smallness is without importance. For what is specific of man has no physical dimensions. The meaning of our presence in the world assuredly does not depend upon our size…
“Our form is moulded by our physiological habits, and even by our usual thoughts. Its characteristics are partly due to the muscles running under our skin or along the bones. The size of these muscles depends on the exercise to which they are subjected. The beauty of the body comes from the harmonious development of the muscles and the skeleton. It reached the height of perfection at the epoch of Pericles, in the Greek athletes whom Phidias and his disciples immortalized in their statues. The shape of the face, the mouth, the cheeks, the eyelids, and the lines of the visage are determined by the habitual condition of the flat muscles, which move in the adipose tissue underlying the skin. And the state of these muscles depends on that of the mind. Indeed, each individual can give his face the expression that he chooses. But he does not keep such a mask permanently. Unwittingly, our visage progressively models itself upon our states of consciousness. With the advance of age it becomes more and more pregnant with the feelings, the appetites, and the aspirations of the whole being. The beauty of youth comes from the natural harmony of the lineaments of the human face. That, so rare, of an old man, from his soul.
“The visage expresses still deeper things than the hidden activities of consciousness. In this open book one can read not only the vices, the virtues, the intelligence, the stupidity, the feelings, the most carefully concealed habits of an individual, but also the constitution of his body, and his tendencies to organic and mental diseases. In fact, the aspect of bones, muscles, fat, skin, and hair, depends on the nutrition of tissues. And the nutrition of tissues is regulated by the composition of blood plasma, that is, by the activity of the glandular and digestive systems. … Each man bears on his face the description of his body and of his soul.”
“Section 3 The skin, which covers the outer surface of the body, is impermeable to water and to gases. It does not allow the microbes living on its surface to enter the organism. It is capable of destroying them with the aid of substances secreted by its glands. But it can be crossed by the minute and deadly beings, which we call viruses. Its external face is exposed to light, wind, humidity, dryness, heat, and cold. Its internal face is in contact with an aquatic world, warm and deprived of light, where cells live like marine animals. Despite its thinness, the skin effectively protects the organic fluids against the unceasing variations of cosmic surroundings. It is moist, subtle, extensible, elastic, durable. Its durability is due to its mode of constitution, to its several layers of cells, which slowly and endlessly multiply. These cells die while remaining united to one another like the slates of a roof—like slates ceaselessly blown away by the wind and continually replaced by new slates. The skin nevertheless, retains its moistness and suppleness, because small glands secrete on its surface both water and fatty substances. At the nostrils, mouth, anus, urethra, and vagina, it joins the mucosas, those membranes that cover the inner surface of the body. All its orifices, with the exception of the nostrils, are closed by elastic and contractile rings, the sphincters. Thus, it is the almost perfectly fortified frontier of a closed world.
“Through its outer surface, the body enters into communication with all the things of the cosmic universe. In fact, the skin is the dwelling-place of small receptor organs, each of which registers, according to its own structure, the changes taking place in the environment. Tactile corpuscles scattered all over its surface are sensitive to pressure, to pain, to heat, or to cold. Those situated in the mucosa of the tongue are affected by certain qualities of food, and also by temperature. Air vibrations act on the extremely complex membrane and the bones of the middle ear. The network of olfactory nerves, which extends into the nasal mucous membrane, is sensitive to odours. A strange phenomenon occurs in the embryo. The brain causes a part of itself, the optic nerve and the retina, to shoot out towards the surface of the body. The part of the skin overlying the young retina undergoes an astonishing modification. It becomes transparent, forms the cornea and the crystalline lens, and unites with other tissues to build up the prodigious optical system which we call the eye. The brain is, thus, enabled to record the electromagnetic waves comprised between red and violet.”
(JRT) The growth of the foetus demonstrates the indwelling of an intelligence that plans ahead into what we think of as future time. Compared with the average intelligence evinced by humans in their daily life, this indwelling intelligence is supernal – higher than genius. It far exceeds the intelligence demonstrated by adult humans in ordinary waking consciousness. Yet it is indissolubly united even with a foetus. Much more so is it probably united with the adult human. But the foetus is too simple to interfere with its perfect functioning, while the adult human can certainly do so, for example by smoking and drinking alcohol to excess.
“Innumerable nerve fibres radiate from all these organs and connect them with the spinal cord and the brain. Through the agency of these nerves the central nervous system spreads like a web over the entire surface of the body where it enters into contact with the outer world. The aspect of the universe depends on the constitution of the sense organs, and on their degree of sensitiveness….
“We ignore things which have no action on the nerve endings of the surface of the skin. Therefore, we do not perceive cosmic rays, although they pass right through our body. It seems that everything reaching the brain has to enter the sensory organs---that is, to influence the nervous layer enveloping our body. The unknown agent of telepathic communications is perhaps the only exception to this rule. In clairvoyance, it looks as though the subject directly grasps the external reality without the help of the usual nerve channels. But such phenomena are rare. As a rule, the senses are the gateway through which the physical and psychological universe penetrates our organism. Thus, the quality of an individual partly depends on that of his surface. For the brain is moulded by the continual messages it receives from the outer world. Therefore, the state of our envelope should not be modified thoughtlessly by new habits of life….
(JRT) The range of awareness we can attain through our sensory apparatus is very limited. It cannot attain to cosmic particles bombarding the body and passing right through it. Still less can it attain to purely spiritual levels of reality.
“Our internal frontier begins at the mouth and the nose, and ends at the anus. Through these openings the outside world penetrates into the respiratory and digestive systems. While the skin is impervious to water and to gas, the mucous membranes of the lungs and the intestines allow these substances to pass. They are responsible for the chemical continuity of our body with its surroundings. Our inner surface is far greater than that of our skin. The area covered by the flat cells of the pulmonary alveoli is immense. It is approximately equal to five hundred square meters. The thin membrane formed by these cells is traversed by oxygen from the air and by carbon dioxide from the venous blood. It is easily affected by poisonous gases and by bacteria, and more particularly by pneumococci. Atmospheric air, before reaching the pulmonary alveoli, passes through the nose, the pharynx, the larynx, the trachea, and the bronchi, where it is moistened and freed from dust and microbes. But this natural protection is now insufficient because the air of cities has been polluted by coal dust, gasoline fumes, and bacteria set free by the multitude of human beings. Respiratory mucosa is much more delicate than skin. It is defenseless against strong irritants. Its fragility may cause entire populations to be exterminated by toxic gases in the great wars of the future.
“From mouth to anus, the body is traversed by a stream of nutritive substances. The digestive membranes determine the nature of the chemical relations between the external world and the inner world of our tissues and organic fluids. But their functions are far more complex than those of the respiratory ones. They must profoundly transform the foodstuffs which reach their surface. They are not only a filter, but also a chemical factory. The ferments secreted by their glands collaborate with those of the pancreas in decomposing the aliments into substances capable of being absorbed into the intestinal cells. The digestive surface is extraordinarily vast. The mucosas secrete and absorb large quantities of fluids. Their cells allow the foodstuffs, when digested, to enter the body. But they resist the penetration of the bacteria that swarm in the digestive tract. These dangerous enemies are generally held in control by the thin intestinal membrane, and the leucocytes defending it. But they are always a menace. Viruses thrive in the pharynx and the nose such as streptococci and staphylococci; and microbes of diphtheria in the tonsils. The bacilli of typhoid fever and of dysentery multiply with facility in the intestines. The soundness of the respiratory and intestinal membranes governs, in a large measure, the resistance of the organism to infectious diseases, its strength, it equilibrium, its effectivity, its intellectual attitude.
“Thus, our body constitutes a closed universe, limited on one side by the skin, and on the other by the mucosa covering our inner surfaces. If these membranes are impaired at any point, the existence of the individual is endangered. Even a superficial burn, when extending over a large area of the skin, results in death. This covering separates our organs and humours from the cosmic environment, and yet allows most extensive physical and chemical communication between these two worlds. It accomplishes the miracle of being a barrier at once closed and open. But it does not protect our nervous system against our mental surroundings. We may be wounded and even killed by subtle enemies which, ignoring our anatomical frontiers, invade our consciousness, like aviators bombarding a city without taking any notice of its fortifications.
“Section 4 The inside of our body does not resemble the descriptions of classical anatomy. This science has constructed a schema of the human being that is purely structured and quite unreal. It is not merely by opening a corpse that one may learn how man is constituted. Of course, we can observe in this way his framework, the skeleton and the muscles, which are the scaffold of the organs. In a cage formed by the spinal column, the ribs, and the sternum, are suspended the heart and the lungs. The liver, spleen, kidneys, stomach, intestines, and sexual glands are attached, by the folds of the peritoneum to the inner surface of a large cavity whose bottom is formed by the pelvis, the sides by the abdominal muscles, and the roof by the diaphragm. The most fragile of all the organs, the brain and the cord, are enclosed in osseus boxes, the cranium and the spine. They are protected against the hardness of the walls of their lodgings by a system of membranes and a cushion of liquid.
“One cannot understand the living being by studying a dead body: For the tissues of the corpse have been deprived of the circulating blood and of their functions. In reality, an organ separated from its nutritive medium no longer exists. In the living body, blood is present everywhere. It pulsates in the arteries, glides through the veins, fills the capillary vessels, bathes all tissues in transparent lymph. In order to apprehend the inner world as it is, more delicate techniques than those of anatomy and of histology are indispensable. We must study organs of living animals and of men, as they are seen in the course of surgical operations, and not simply those of cadavers prepared for dissection. Their structure should be learned, both from microscopical sections of dead tissues more or less modified by fixatives and dyes, and from living tissues while functioning; also from cinematographic films on which their movements have been recorded. We must not separate cells from medium and function from structure, as anatomy has done.
(JRT) This is exactly the same argument as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg put forward. We can never understand a living body by examining a corpse. It is totally different. Life is a primal given fact that must be accepted as such. It cannot be explained or described by anything else. Life is known only by itself. Light is known only by itself. Love is known only by itself. God is known only by Himself. All such ‘things’ – for want of a better word – are actually rooted in the divine.
“Within the body, the cells behave like small organisms plunged in an aerated and nutritive medium. This medium is analogous to sea water. The leucocytes of the blood and cells covering the walls of the blood-vessels and lymphatics are like fish swimming freely in the depth of the ocean or flat on the sandy bottom. They are comparable not only to fish but to amphibians inhabiting marshes or moist sand. All living cells depend absolutely on the medium in which they are immersed. They modify this medium unceasingly, and are modified by it. In fact, they are inseparable from it; as inseparable as their body is from its nucleus. Their structure and functions are entirely subordinated to the physical, physiochemical, and chemical conditions of the surrounding fluid. This fluid is the interstitial lymph which at once produces, and is produced by, blood plasma. Cells and medium, structure and function, cannot be separated from one another. The isolation of cells from their natural environment is altogether unwarranted. However, methodological necessity forces us to divide this ensemble into fragments, and to describe, on one side, the cells and tissues, and, on the other, the organic medium ---that is the blood and the humours.
“The cells congregate in societies, which are called tissues and organs. But the analogy of these societies to human and insect communities is quite superficial. For the individuality of cells is much less definite than that of men and even of insects. The rules of their associations are merely the expression of the inherent properties of the individuals. The characteristics of human beings are more easily learned than those of their societies. Physiology is a science. Human sociology is not. On the contrary, cell sociology is more advanced than the science of the structure and functions of the cell as an individual. Anatomists and physiologists have long since known the characteristics of tissues and organs ---that is of cell societies. Only recently have they succeeded in analyzing the properties of the cells themselves, of the individuals making up the organic associations. Owing to the new procedures for the cultivation of tissues, it has been possible to study living cells in a flask as easily as bees in a hive. Those cells have revealed themselves as endowed with unsuspected powers, with astounding properties. Virtual in the normal conditions of life, these properties actualize under the influence of diseases, when the organic medium undergoes certain physiochemical changes. These functional characteristics, far more than their structure, give to tissues the power of building up the living body.”
(JRT) The mysterious intelligence shown equally by individual cells as well as a group of cells working together is a phenomenon quite unfamiliar to our human mindset. It is far beyond anything we are capable of constructing artificially. We cannot understand how it works. Both mechanical and vitalistic theories have proved inadequate to describe it. There is something here far beyond the reality familiar to mortal man. This intelligence is indeed demonstrated by the cells, but is it actually in the cells themselves? I very much doubt it. As in the case of intelligence shown by ants, although it somehow controls the ants, there is no way each individual ant could contain it. Outside a narrow range of activities, I have found individual ants to be totally stupid, even suicidal. They have a very limited awareness of their environment.
“Despite its minuteness, each cell is a very complex organism. It does not in any way resemble the favorite abstraction of chemists, a drop of gelatin surrounded by a semi-permeable membrane. The substance, which biologists call protoplasm, is found neither in its nucleus nor in its body. Protoplasm is a concept deprived of objective meaning. Just as the concept anthropoplasm would be, if by such a concept one attempted to define the content of the human body. Cells can now be filmed and magnified to such an extent that, when thrown on the screen, they are larger than a man. All their organs are then visible. In the middle of their body floats a kind of ovoid, elastic-walled balloon, the nucleus, which appears to be full of an inert and transparent jelly. In this jelly are seen two nucleoli, which slowly and unceasingly change their shape. Around the nucleus there is a great agitation of small particles. The movements are particularly active around a cluster of vesicles, corresponding to the organ called by anatomists the apparatus of Golgi or Renaut, and whose functions are connected with the nutrition of the cell. Small and indistinct granules form a kind of whirlpool in that same district. Larger globules endlessly zigzag through the cell, going as far as the extremities of its mobile and transitory arms. But the most remarkable organs are long filaments, the mitochondrias, which resemble snakes or, in certain cells, short bacteria. Vesicles, granulations, globules, and filaments glide, dance, and undulate perpetually in the free spaces of the cell body.
“This structured complexity of the living cell is disconcerting, but its chemical composition is still more intricate. The nucleus, with the exception of the nucleoli, appears to be completely empty, contains substances of a truly marvelous nature. The simplicity attributed by chemists to its constituent nucleoproteins is an illusion. In fact, the nuclear substance comprises the genes, those mysterious beings …that carry the hereditary tendencies of cells and of men. Instead of being simple, the chemical composition of the nucleus must be of bewildering complexity. The genes are generally invisible. However, we know that they dwell in the chromosomes, those elongated bodies seen in the clear fluid of the nucleus when the cell is going to divide. At this moment the chromosomes form, in a more or less distinct manner, two groups. These groups move away from each other. At the same time, the entire cell shakes violently, tosses its contents in all directions, and divides into two parts. These parts, the daughter cells, withdraw from each other whole still united by some elastic filaments. These filaments stretch and finally give way. Thus, two new elements of the organism have become individualized.
“Cells, like animals, belong to many different races. These races, or types, are defined by both their structural and their functional characteristics. They spring from different fields, such as the thyroid gland, the spleen, the skin, the liver, etc. But, strange to say, cells originating in the same region may assume different types at successive periods of time. The organism is as heterogeneous in time as in space. The cell types that build up the body may be roughly divided into two classes: The fixed cells, whose associations form the tissues and the organs, and the mobile cells, which travel throughout the whole organism. The connective and epithelial types of cells belong to the fixed category. Epithelial cells are the noblest elements of the body. They constitute the brain, skin, the endocrine glands, etc. Connective cells build up the framework of the organs. They are truly ubiquitous. Around them appear various substances, such as cartilage, calcium, fibrous tissue, elastic fibres, which give skeleton, muscles, blood-vessels, and organs the solidity and elasticity indispensable to their functions. In addition, they metamorphose into contractile elements. These are the muscles of the heart, of the vessels, if the digestive apparatus, and also of the locomotive system. Although connective and epithelial cells seem to be immobile and are still called by their old name of fixed cells, nevertheless they move, as cinematography has shown. But their movements are slow. They glide in their medium like oil spreading over the surface of water. They drag with them their nucleus, suspended in the fluid mass of their body. They differ markedly from mobile cells. Those cells include the different types of leucocytes of the blood and of the tissues. Their motion is rapid. The leucocytes, characterized by the presence of several nuclei, resemble amoebas. The lymphocytes move more slowly, like small worms. The larger ones, the monocytes, have the appearance of an octopus. They extrude long tentacles from their substance, and also surround themselves with a thin, undulating membrane. After having enveloped dead cells and microbes in the folds of this membrane, they voraciously devour them.
“When these different cell types are bred in flasks, their characteristics become just as apparent as those of the various kinds of microbes. Each type has its own inherent properties, which remain specific, even when several years have elapsed since its separation from the organism. Cell types are characterized by their mode of locomotion, their way of associating with one another, the aspect of their colonies, the rate of their growth, their response to various chemicals, the substances they secrete, the food they require, as well as by their shape and structure. The broader conception is taking the place of the purely morphological definitions of classical anatomy. The laws of organization of each cell community---that is, of each organ---derive from these elementary properties. Tissue cells, possessing only the characteristics ascribed to them by anatomy, would be incapable of building up a living organism. But they are endowed with much higher powers. They do not manifest all of them. Besides the activities which they usually display, they possess others, generally hidden, but capable of becoming actual in response to certain changes of the medium. They are thus enabled to deal with the unforeseeable events taking place in the course of normal life and during illnesses.”
(JRT) The following paragraph describes how the cells all work together in a unified way in unselfish service for the welfare of the whole body. It is this pattern of unity of purpose that can be discerned whenever the divine becomes immanent in an unrestricted manner. It is a fundamental principle of divinity, and a sure sign that the over-intelligence in the body is of divine origin.
(JRT) The blood itself is an organ. It is also a fluid medium of nutrition, cleaning, and maintenance. If the bloodflow ceases for long enough, the body dies. Then the dead cells are no longer cells at all but merely fossils.
“Cells unite in dense masses, the tissues and organs, whose architectonic depends on the structural and functional needs of the organism in its totality. The human body is a compact and mobile unit. And its harmony is assured by both the blood and the nerves which integrate all cell communities. The existence of tissues cannot be conceived without that of a fluid medium. The necessary relations of the anatomical elements and of the vessels carrying this nutritive medium determine the shape of the organs. Such shape also is influenced by the presence of the ducts through which glandular products are secreted. All spatial ordering of bodily structures is commanded by their food requirements. The architectural plan of each organ is inspired by the need of the cells to be immersed in a medium always rich in foodstuffs and never encumbered by waste products."
This blog is a small excerpt from my longest chapter in God and Reality.
Signed, John Robert Thwaytes at Malbazar on Wednesday February 1st 2012.
