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No 20 George Ellett Coghill (1872-1941) (II) Gerald Foley CTC 12 March 2013

1. Last time I gave you some biographical background on George Ellett Coghill, the scientist who wrote the Appreciation in The universal constant in living. We saw how the greater part of his scientific career was devoted to studying on the early life of a little newt-like creature called amblystoma.

2. We saw the ups and downs of his life and fortunes and had reached the final stage where he had retired to a small farm in Gainesville in Florida. It was there that he learned about the Alexander Technique in 1939 – just two years before he died.

3. It happened because of an article written about Coghill by an American journalist, Arthur F. Busch, who happened to be a pupil of F.M.’s brother, A. R. Alexander. In this article, which was published in the Brooklyn Citizen, Busch said that Coghill’s work confirmed “the scientific basis of Alexander’s practical work.”1

4. This was brought to F M Alexander’s attention in London and led to a correspondence between Busch, Coghill and Alexander. As a result, Alexander sent Coghill copies of Man’s supreme inheritance and Constructive conscious control of the individual.

5. Coghill wrote to Alexander about the books I am reading these with a great deal of interest and profit, amazed to see how you, years ago, discovered in human physiology and psychology the same principles which I worked out in the behaviour of lower vertebrates.2

6. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Alexander who was then in his early seventies, was persuaded for his own safety to go to America. There was genuine fear that Britain would be invaded by Germany and Alexander was reputed to be on Hitler’s wanted list because of some of the things he had said about the German people in Man’s supreme inheritance. He had, for example, described them as an unfortunate and deluded people.3

1 Barlow (1978)p256 2 Ibid.257 3 Alexander (1910)p103

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7. Because of his contact with Coghill, Alexander made a point of visiting him in Gainesville in February 1941 but by this time Coghill was in very poor health suffering from arthritis and a very bad heart. Alexander worked with him for three days over a weekend and they got on very well together.

8. In a letter to Walter Carrington, Alexander described the work with Coghill as “his longest session”.4 Some years later, he wrote to Coghill’s biographer that:

My meeting with Coghill was a notable and valuable happening in my 81 years experience.5

9. Coghill wrote to a friend after Alexander’s visit and said: Mr Alexander seems to me to be a very unusual man. He has grasped the same scientific principles through practical work with human beings that I have found through my investigations of detailed anatomy in the lower forms.6

10. Because they had got on so well, and Coghill was so scientifically supportive of the AT, Alexander asked him to write the Appreciation that appears in The universal constant in living and Coghill did so even though he was at this stage a desperately ill man with only a few months to live. He finished the Appreciation it just a few weeks before he died of heart failure in June 1941 at the age of 69.

11. There is an account of the whole Coghill-Alexander episode given by Edward H. Owen, in the 1961 Alexander Memorial Lecture, which is reprinted in Wilfred Barlow’s book More Talk of Alexander7.

12. On the face of it, Alexander and Coghill did not have a great deal in common. Knowing about the neuromuscular development of newly hatched newts does not tell us a great deal about the Alexander Technique as a means for the psycho-physical re-education of fully grown human beings. It also seems a long way from the chair and table work we do with our pupils.

13. But having read Alexander’s books, talked to him and experienced the AT through Alexander’s hands, this is exactly

4 Alexander (1946)p234 5 Barlow (1978)p258 6Alexander (1946)p234 7 Barlow (1978)pp256-259

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what Coghill believed. So what we have to ask ourselves is why he did so and what can we as AT practitioners learn from it.

14. In thinking about this, we need remind ourselves that despite the fact that he had devoted forty years of his working life to the study of amblystoma, Coghill was far more than a scientific technician. Like Sherrington and Magnus, he was in pursuit of much higher things.

15. Right at the beginning of his scientific career, Coghill had said that his aim was to investigate “the nature and interrelation of sensation, perception and thought.”8 That is about as Alexandrian an agenda as one could want.

16. Coghill believed if he could get somewhere with that task it would enable him

…to achieve “a philosophy, not of being, but of becoming; not of life, but of living, which is itself my supreme experiment.9

17. Again that has an Alexandrian air to it. We are, ourselves, the first focus of our attention because, to put at its simplest, we cannot free anyone else’s neck if we cannot free our own.

18. So from an Alexandrian perspective, Coghill was a really interesting person. It is also noteworthy that according to his biographer

…his work for many years received more attention and had more influence among psychologists than among his colleagues in biology.10

19. The reason for this was that though the details of his work were focused on the anatomical development of newly hatched amblystoma, what really interested him was how this was related to the development of what he called “behaviour”.

20. This is a word which keeps coming up when we are looking at Coghill and it is important to be clear about what Coghill meant by it. It does not have the moral connotation that it is sometimes given it in expressions like good or bad behaviour.

21. Coghill used behaviour in the technical sense of how an organism responds to internal or external stimuli. It is simply the way a creature goes about doing what it does.

8 Coghill (1929)pv 9 Herrick (1949)230 10 Ibid.168

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22. This is quite close to what Alexander meant by the word “use”. In The use of the self Alexander says:

…when I employ the word ‘use’, it is not in that limited sense of the use of any specific part, as, for instance, when we speak of the use of an arm or the use of a leg, but in a much wider and more comprehensive sense applying to the working of the organism in general.11

23. What Coghill wanted to know was how behaviour, or manner of use as we would say, developed in a creature as it matured. In a lecture he gave under the auspices of the department of psychology in Ohio State University in 1931, he referred to his

… curiosity about the question of how the behaviour of vertebrates comes to be what it is in adult life.12

24. At the time he was doing his early research there was a lot of debate about the extent to which, in any particular animal, its behaviour is something inherently determined from the beginning or depends on the influences to which it is exposed as it develops.

25. In philosophical terms, this is the age-old debate about free will and determinism. The way Coghill was phrasing it was whether it is nature or nurture that makes us what we are. Is our nature fixed from the beginning or are we at least partly a product of the influences to which we are subjected as we mature?

26. It is an argument that crops up all the time in different ways. Are we genetically determined and predestined to turn out in a particular way or do we have room for manoeuvre? Do we have a choice

27. For those of a theological disposition, it is the same debate as was taking place in the 5th century between Pelagius and St Augustine. And it is not over yet as we will see when I come round to telling you about Benjamin Libet.

28. In the introduction to Anatomy and the problem of behaviour Coghill drew a distinction between what he called haphazard and orderly development. He wanted to know of the path of a creature’s development is a response to the haphazard or

11 Alexander (1932)22 12 Herrick (1949)p 78

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random events to which it is subject as it develops, or does it happen in an orderly and predictable manner.

29. The way he put it was: It seemed to me basic to a scientific study of behaviour to know whether the behaviour pattern of an animal develops haphazard or in an orderly manner;13

30. He goes on to say …and that, if it should be found that behaviour develops in an orderly manner, then there should be a corresponding order of development structurally and functionally in the nervous system.14

31. That was, in fact, what he found. The key conclusion Coghill reached from his work was that:

Behaviour develops from the beginning through the progressive expansion of a perfectly integrated total pattern and the individuation within it of partial patterns which acquire various degrees of discreteness.15

32. His original question had been about how does behaviour develop? His answer was that the overall organisational pattern for behaviour is there from the beginning. He called this “the total pattern”.

33. Different creatures obviously have different total patterns – dogs develop in different ways from cats or amblystoma. But whether you are a baby rabbit, a baby frog, or a baby human, there is an inherent total pattern into which you will grow as you develop.

34. But if we are completely determined from the beginning by the total pattern, where does this leave freedom and responsibility? Whatever the biology and physiology said, this was not where Coghill the philosopher wanted to be.

35. He believed in some degree of freedom of choice. This something he shared with Sherrington. When I was telling you about Sherrington, I mentioned his remark in relation to the philosopher René Descartes who believed that non-human animals behaved as automata, purely automatic or mechanical beings. Sherrington said this

13 Coghill (1929)vi 14 Ibid.vi 15 Ibid.38

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… lets us feel Descartes can never have kept an animal pet.16

36. Coghill believed that even the little amblystoma has some freedom of choice, some room for manoeuvre. As for humans, we have a great deal more.

37. The question of freedom of choice is, of course, quite fundamental to our view of society and has a lot to do with the kind of education and justice systems we set up. If we believe people are predestined to behave in a particular way, there is no point in trying to change them or blaming them for what they do.

38. Coghill believed he had identified a biological basis for the freedom enjoyed by vertebrate creatures from amblystoma up to ourselves.

39. He said that during the development of the organism, the nervous system indulges in what he called “forward reference” and that at any given stage in development there is an “overgrowth of neural mechanisms beyond the capacity of the animal to express their full nervous potential in behaviour.”17

40. In other words, at each stage in the early development of the creature, the nervous system extends itself beyond the muscular capacity and skills of the moment – this is what he means by neurological overgrowth. Because of this, once the necessary muscular capacity has developed, the growing creature has the neurological wiring that enables it do new and different things.

41. Even the simple little amblystoma, as it develops, acquires new neurological capacities, new ways of controlling its muscular system, and therefore it has an increasing range of possible ways of responding to different stimuli.

42. This means that at each stage of its development, there is a certain degree of freedom within the constraints imposed by the total pattern. The way Coghill puts it is that the organism

…grows according to its own intrinsic pattern. Within the limitation of this intrinsic pattern of growth it is autonomous both in its reaction to its environment and its action upon its environment; and in this autonomy is

16 Sherrington (1906)pxiv 17 Coghill (1929)92

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the natural source of initiative or freedom in behaviour…18

43. The more complex the creature, the greater the degree of neurological overgrowth and hence the greater freedom it has. This means that cats and dogs have greater freedom to express themselves than amblystoma. We have even greater freedom.

44. Coghill also says the phenomenon of neurological overgrowth creates a dynamic system in which

…may be found, I believe, a natural basis for the interpretation of reflexes and instincts, and for that individual initiative, autonomy or freedom which appears to be essential to psychology and sociology as sciences.19

45. He goes on to say that: …man is, indeed, a mechanism, but he is a mechanism which, within his limitations of life, sensitivity and growth, is creating and operating himself.20

46. But with freedom comes the opportunity for misuse of the self. Here again, humans have a greater degree of freedom to do unnecessary or damaging things when we are using ourselves than other creatures.

47. It is unlikely an amblystoma even furrows its brow when it is wondering about where to go next. But when some people sign their names they tighten their jaws and distort their whole body; others sit in a rigid twisted pose when they are using a computer; some car drivers hold on to the steering wheel as though it were in danger of escaping from them; brushing the teeth is an exercise which for many involves the thighs and buttocks; and so on.

48. In all such cases, the individual movements of the body parts required to carry out an action are accompanied by a series of unnecessary or parasitic muscle actions.

49. So when Coghill was saying that we are limited by our total pattern but within that we have a certain degree of freedom he had to produce a theory or an explanation of how all this and

18 Herrick (1949)222 19 Ibid.p222 20 Ibid.222

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particularly our ability to damage ourselves worked at the practical and philosophical levels.

50. Next time I will try to tell you about Coghill’s later thinking on these questions. I will also tell you why I think the AT provided him with a way out of the intellectual trap in which he found himself caught in his later years.

REFERENCES F. M. ALEXANDER (1910) Man's supreme inheritance - Mouritz, London (1996 edition) F. M. ALEXANDER (1946) The universal constant in living - Mouritz, London (2000 edition) F. M. ALEXANDER (1932) The use of the self - Gollancz, London, (1985 edition) W. BARLOW (1978) More talk of Alexander: aspects of the Alexander Technique - Mouritz, London 2005 G. E. COGHILL (1929) Anatomy and the problem of behaviour - Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1963 edition) C. J. HERRICK (1949) George Ellett Coghill: naturalist and philosopher - University of Chicago Press, Chicago C. SHERRINGTON (1906) The integrative action of the nervous system - Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1947 edition)