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Laboratory reflexes resemble the movements of a man who walks in the dark and whose tactile organs, feet and legs function in isolation, as it were. This functioning by separated parts represents a late acquisition in animal ontogenesis. Reflexes properly so called are found only in the adult salamander; the embryo executes the movements of the ensemble, global and undifferentiated movements of swimming. It may even be that pure reflexes will be most easily found in man because man is perhaps alone in being able to abandon this or that part of his body separately to the influences of the milieu...Thus the reflex--effect of pathological disassociation characteristic not of the fundamental activity of the living being but of the experimental apparatus which we use for studying it, or a luxury activity developing later in ontogenesis as well as phylogenesis--cannot be considered as a constituent element of animal behavior except by an anthropomorphic illusion. But neither is the reflex an abstraction, and in this respect Sherrington is mistaken: the reflex exists; it represents a very special case of behavior, observable under certain determined conditions. But it is not the principal object of physiology; it is not by means of it that the remainder can be understood.
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