Science Quote by Charles Scott Sherrington

Sherrington is doing something quietly radical here: making room for contradiction inside the body without treating it as a problem. The line is packed with the calm authority of early neurophysiology, when the nervous system was still being mapped less like a circuit board and more like a political system - competing factions, partial coalitions, messy outcomes. A single “strong stimulus” hitting an afferent nerve (sensory input) doesn’t behave like a simple on-switch. If it recruits “most or all” fibers, the result at the muscle can be simultaneous go and stop: excitation and inhibition arriving together.

The specific intent is methodological as much as theoretical. Sherrington is warning the reader not to expect clean, one-to-one causality from sensory input to motor output. “Not surprising” is a strategic understatement; he’s normalizing complexity so that anomalous experimental results stop looking like errors and start looking like evidence. Subtext: if your lab setup delivers a big, indiscriminate shock, you are effectively summoning multiple pathways at once - reflex arcs that facilitate movement and interneuronal circuits that suppress it. The nervous system is already doing integrative computation, and crude stimulation exposes that integrative layer.

Context matters: Sherrington’s work on reflexes and reciprocal innervation helped overturn a simplistic “wire model” of nerves. This sentence is an argument for physiology as coordination, not mere conduction. It also smuggles in a broader view of control: effective movement depends on inhibition just as much as excitation, and the two are not sequential virtues but concurrent necessities.