I shall sketch a theory of knowledge compatible with our modem physiology of the knower.

For all
its appeal to epistemic correlates, physiology has, from its beginning, been largely a hypothetical
and deductive system in terms of postulated recognizables constructed to explain the causal
relations of perceived events.

The Haemic Theory of Knowledge

In that beginning one finds several postulated entities called "mixtures." One, sometimes called by
Aristotle the "conate pneuma," an airy blood, is postulated by the Hippocratic school to explain
quickening five months before the first breath. The Atomists supposed pure air pumped from the
lung directly to the foetus, at variance with anatomy; the Empiricists, that quickening only
occurred at birth, at variance with both hearing and feeling!

The second, or perfect, mixture was postulated to account for generation. This mixture specifies to
the female the form of her progeny, thus conserving kind. Thus the perfect mixture is the natural
cause of the conception, formation, and growth of the progeny; its bound cause. Clearly it is the
precursor of the shuffling of genes postulated by Mendel to explain frequency of occurrence of
traits in phenotypes.

The postulation of the determinants of pure form to be embodied by a process of development,

leading to the adult, and ultimately to its death by natural causes, gives us the law of the
conservation of species, much as potential energy gives us a law of the conservation of energy.
Because the bound cause is sharply distinguished from accidental, or casual, causes, it carries with
it a value judgment, those things being good which are to the ends of the living thing and all else
either indifferent or evil to it. The former promote health; the latter produce disease. To
physiology the idea of the bound cause has contributed the notion of a func-tion as the end in, and
of, an operation. We return to it later.

The third mixture is postulated to explain knowledge. With much help from my most scholarly
friends, I think I have begun to understand the origin of that postulate. In the continuum of
sensation and perception, the world is this up to where it is that. Of this continuum Aristotle says
"each this and that contains its end points". When a hand grasps an object, it conforms to the
object, "the fulls of the one filling the hollows of the other", as the seal impresses the signet on
the wax. In the form and proportions determined by the impression, the elements (earth, air, fire,
and water) of the known mix with those of the knower. This mixture forms in the blood of the
knower. The veins, anastomosing, mix the blood from various parts of the knower, and the final
mixture takes place in the heart. Such was the cardiocentric theory of knowledge. The nerves were
only reins to govern the muscles, and the brain a phlegm to cool the blood. The last time I heard
this haemic theory taken seriously, except for hormones and immune reactions, was in the
nineteen-twenties, when the neuro-surgeon, Dandy, declared that he knew to his sorrow that
consciousness was in the left anterior cerebral artery. Any psychiatrist, working with poor
immigrants from backward rural areas, could tell you that to "think with one's blood" is still an
ordinary no-tion. At its best, in the old days this notion yielded theories of contagion and infection,
and so gave us quarantine and sanitation about two thousand years before Paracelsus postulated
that a disease was a living thing, a virus that could be poisoned without killing the patient, thus
laying the theoretical foundation for antibiotics. Pasteur was the first to see a pathogenic
bacterium. Only in the last year has electron microscopy depicted what is thought to be the
smallest virus.

Please note that the germ, the postulated bound cause of a disease, is a mixture of the second
kind, prescribing a process leading to its own multiplication; whereas the reaction of the host, in
forming specific agglutinin, and antibodies generally, makes the blood a mixture of the third kind,
one that knows the antigen. Since the beginning of this theory, it has been postulated that the
protein of the host, the antibody, is specifically shaped to grasp the antigen. No one has yet seen
the shape, but we may expect it to be deduced rather soon, as we have the shape of the molecule
of hemoglobin, which, with oxygen, forms the mixture of the first kind: the conate pneuma, the
vital air.

The genetic structure of a cell is carried by deoxyribonucleic acid. It specifies ribonucleic acid,
which, in turn, specifies the pro-tein to be made. When a cell that makes antibodies to a given
antigen first encounters it, within half an hour there is a great rise in ribonucleic acid, and the
requisite protein synthesis is under way. That cell may live a matter of days before it divides and
its daughter cells inherit the specification for making that antibody. In the case of the virus for
smallpox, the immunity may last some seven years. Such is the memory in the savant mixture of
the blood. Even more, the immunity can be conferred by inoculation with a strain of virus
attenuated for that host. We use cowpox to pro-tect ourselves from smallpox, and we made
vaccination a legal requirement for entry into the U.S.A. while the virus and the antibody were still
postulates, leading by deduction to hypotheses which checked with experience.

In various places in the Hippocratic corpus, and in a fragment of the words of Empedocles, there
are two kinds of attraction to be noted. One is the attraction of likes for each other, as in our
notion of gravity, which he calls "strife." It is to be seen when the rich come together on one side
and the poor against them on the other. The second attraction is called "love" for it resembles that
of opposite electrical charges. It is therefore love that begets knowledge, by mixing things which
are in some way unlike. In the mixture that which is shared is a pure form or shape. In Pylus, the
dry sand is soft and the water is soft, but close to the tideless sea the beach is hard where, by
capillary attraction, the water fills the voids of the sand exactly. Thus the mixture, wet sand, has
properties which are not proportioned between those of the components, as in the mixture of
wine and water. This applies to all three kinds of mixture, and it led Aristotle to reject these
entities because, he argued, there would then be small enough parts to be entirely the one or
entirely the other of the components. Had he been an Atomist, he would have said the same for
wine and water; nor would it have saved him had he imagined chemical combinations. The
rejection of these mixtures left idos and telos without postulated things to embody them, so that
they seem little more than rules of right speaking about living things. Hence his biology remains
marvelous in description and classification, but useless in inquiring into the underlying mechanism
and hence a poor basis for a physiological theory of knowing. Unfortunately, as Aristotle was the
schoolmaster of the western world, epistemology has been slow to become an experimental
science.

The theory of the savant mixture, which served well for smell, taste, and feeling, began to fail for
sight, in which a ray from the eye was supposed to touch the known, much as a blind man might
with his cane. Democritus is believed to have said that all our senses were a kind of feeling.
Without a theory of geometrical optics, which had to wait for Kepler, the alternative theory, that
lighted things shed shells, some of which entered the eye, did not really work. It is here that a new
approach was tried, some say first by Democritus' dissection of animals to learn the seat of
madness. This ultimately transposed knowing from the blood to the brain. This may sound
extreme; but, although on a careful rereading of the Hippocratic texts on epilepsy and on head
injuries we see symptoms correctly attributed to loci in the brain, we still find the brain regarded
only as an organ to cool the blood.

The Nervous Theory of Knowledge