Science Quote by Charles Scott Sherrington

Sherrington is quietly detonating a tidy, mechanical view of the body. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, physiology often treated movement like a puppet system: one muscle pulls, its antagonist relaxes, and the nervous system is basically a switchboard coordinating the tug-of-war. His sentence turns that picture inside out. Central inhibition, he argues, isn’t a niche feature reserved for smoothing out opposing muscle groups during “taxis” (directed movement). It’s “too extensive and ubiquitous” to be merely a local trick.

The intent is methodological as much as theoretical: follow the evidence past the comforting simplicity of antagonistic pairs. “Further study… finds” reads like a lab notebook verdict, but the rhetorical punch lies in the scale words. “Extensive” and “ubiquitous” are doing the heavy lifting, reframing inhibition from an exception into a governing principle. The subtext is a challenge to reductionism: if inhibition is everywhere, then the nervous system isn’t just an excitatory engine that occasionally hits the brakes. It’s a regulatory architecture built as much on restraint as on drive.

Context matters. Sherrington helped establish the modern concept of the synapse and mapped reflexes with unprecedented rigor. This line sits in that intellectual campaign: replacing folk-mechanical metaphors with circuitry and coordination. It foreshadows a 20th-century understanding of the brain as a system of selective silencing - attention, posture, reflex gating, and even perception depend on what the nervous system prevents, not only what it triggers.