ABSTRACT
Since our goal is to give an account of the organization of action that rests on experimentally documented mechanisms of the central nervous system, a minimal respect for the history of scientific work on this topic demands that we start with the work of Sir Charles Sherrington. Sherrington's landmark book, The integrative action of the nervous system, first published in 1906, set a new standard for the analysis of organized action in terms of neural processes whose nature had been established by careful and extensive behavioral experimentation. Sherrington's analysis of action rested on, and was illumined by, extensive experiments on the reflex actions mediated by the neural machinery in the spinal cord of the monkey, the dog, and the cat. In the opening pages of his book Sherrington summarized his experimental findings on the reflex actions of the spinal cord and the conclusions he drew from these findings. This summary is sufficiently clear and comprehensive to make further introduction superfluous.
