Apart from the obvious appeal of his prose, which must surely give rise to an element of regret at the rather stolid constraints of modern science writing, one hears in this quotation of Sherrington's his profound fascination for the very nature of sensory development in the human fetus. Elsewhere in his wonderful book 'Man on his Nature' he turns specifically to the issue of multisensory integration: "The naive would have expected evolution in its course to have supplied us with more various sense organs for ampler perception of the world...The policy has rather been to bring by the nervous system the so called 'five' into closer touch with one another.. .A central clearing house of sense has grown up...Not new senses, but better liaison between old senses is what the developing nervous system has in this respect stood for".
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