970 CUTANEOUS SENSATIONS. 



from viscera and muscles. Later, E. H. Weber x brought forward reasons for 

 sundering sensations of touch from those of common sensation. Weber was 

 among the earliest (1846) to successfully analyse common sensation into 

 component orders. 2 He seems to have regarded common sensation as simply 

 the sum of visceral and muscular components severally distinguishable. 

 Wundt insisted on the summation not being simply, but involving the 

 building of a more or less complex superstructure by psychical synthesis, the 

 synthesis in so far resembling a chemical synthesis, in that from it results an 

 entity as individual as the component entities. 



Total common sensation is the result of many component sensations. 

 It has at basis multitudinous simple impressions, its raw material, whence 

 in the psychical factory the ccencesthesis is produced. It is the sense of 

 the ajjicirte Lciblichkeit, and is in some ways the antithesis of the 

 Kantian innere Sinnc. The sensations contributing to it might be 

 supposed to take origin in the most various sensifacient parts and 

 organs of the body. As a matter of fact, it is found that stimuli 

 exciting the apparatus of the special senses, visual and auditory, 

 under ordinary circumstances give but little toward " common 

 sensation." The sensations that arise in internal organs and viscera, on 

 the contrary, contribute a great deal. Hence it may be said that it is 

 built of what have been called 3 entoperipheral feelings in contra- 

 distinction to the epiperipheral. What indeed the viscera contribute to 

 " sense " goes entirely toward " common sensation " ; under ordinary 

 circumstances, however, their total contribution to consciousness is but 

 small. The prevailing aspect of healthy perceptive consciousness looks 

 not toward the material " me " but beyond it, or it may be said has 

 a direction of outlook not of inlook. " Common sensation " plays, 

 therefore, a subordinate role in healthy consciousness. The feelings 

 of appetite for food, of need for evacuation of fseces or of urine, 

 etc., all occupy but little of the conscious day. But when visceral 

 sensations are strong, then common sensation plays no subordinate part 

 in consciousness. The forms of special sensation may then be pushed 

 into the background, or attached as mere accessories to the pre-eminent 

 " feeling." This potential intensity — related to emotion — which is 

 latent in visceral sensation will be adverted to again. 



Numerous observations, experimental and clinical, from those by Haller 4 

 and his pupils, through those by Bichat 5 and Budge 6 down to the present day," 

 show clearly that the viscera, the serous membranes, the mucous membranes, 

 except those lining the mouth, nose, throat, rectum, vagina, and entrance to the 

 urethra, and the abdominal contents, except the kidneys in slight degree, anil 

 the generative glands, cannot by irritation with directly and variously applied 

 mechanical, thermal, and chemical stimuli, be demonstrably proven to call forth 

 pain or signs indicative of pain. The kidneys, ovary, and testis, under 

 mechanical compression, do reply, but the first-named does so only very slightly. 

 From their experimental observations on the visceral structures and from 



1 See, among other works, Wagner's " Handworterbuch," 1846, Bd. iii. S. 1. 



2 J. Henle in 1841 wrote of it as an " ungesonderte Chaos," " Allg. Anat.," Leipzig, 

 S. 728. 



3 H. Spencer, "Principles of Psychology," London, 1881, vol. i. pp. 166 and 250, etc. 



4 "De partibus c. h. sensibilibus et irritabilibus," "Comment, soc. reg." Gottingen, 

 1752. 



5 " Anatomie gimdrale," 1812, tomes i. and iii. 



6 Physiol, des Menschen," Leipzig, 1862. 



7 See discussion, Lancet, London, 1892, vol. ii., Gee, Tait, and Sherrington; also II. 

 Head, Brain, London, 1893, vol. xvi. p. 126. 



