THE SKIN AND COMMON SENSATION 973 



Under many circumstances on these deep sensations are grafted "pains." 

 It is customary to consider such circumstances as lead to pain "abnormal," 

 and therefore to treat the "pains" occasioned as reactions to abnormal 

 occurrences. If to do so be but a propitiatory compliment to a well-intentioned 

 scheme that helps to minimise harm, well and good ; but with an environment 

 infested by conflict, disease, and mischance, to call such " pains " abnormal 

 reactions is merely a question of personal taste in the adjustment of the 

 relativity of terms. With an organ so open to injury as the skin, the applica- 

 tion of a certain percentage of stimuli noxious, from excess of intensity or 

 duration, may be regarded as strictly normal. Of the more sheltered deep 

 structures of the body, to arbitrarily say the same is, at least, as defensible as 

 to say the reverse. The consideration possesses meaning for any attempt to 

 trace the evolutionary history of " pain sensations." 



It is obvious that the sensory structures, cutaneous and deep, which possess 

 the power of calling up pain (in that term's restricted sense adhered to here) 

 have as common attribute the non-projection of sensations. The kinds of 

 sensation which the mind most fully projects, the " objective " sensations, as 

 sometimes termed, seem always reactions to objects (noumena) that can affect 

 as identical stimuli simultaneously, more than a single individual mind. 

 Although a sensation obtained from the skin does, in many cases, include 

 perception of an external agent causally connected with the sensation, it seems 

 invariably also to include perception of the " material me " (ajicirte Leiblich- 

 keit). In such cases the agent acting on the skin is a noumenon that can 

 affect as an identical stimulus successively, but not simultaneously, more than 

 a single mind. The senses which deal with agents not similarly appellant to 

 several minds at once are deficient in projection. I feel the radiant energy from 

 a lamp with the back of my hand, I see it with my eye ; the latter's sensation 

 does nothing to remind me of my own existence, the former's calls my 

 attention to my hand. And there are a large number of instances of excita- 

 tion of cutaneous, muscular, and visceral sense nerves in which no external 

 agent whatever is perceived, and the perception relates exclusively to the 

 "material me." In these cases the stimuli are furnished by objects, agents, 

 which neither successively nor simultaneously can affect, as identical stimuli, 

 more than a single mind. That one is the " I " resident with the particular 

 " me," of whose material the stimulant agents are themselves part (actions). 

 Concerning this category of internally initiated sensations, it will be obvious 

 from the foregoing, that for their description the external world offers no 

 adequate symbols whatsoever. There is no true basis for a convention of terms 

 by which they can be made describable. Some of them, however, after a partial 

 fashion, offer approach to conventional description, in virtue of their frequence 

 among numerous individuals. An empirical standard for comparison of them 

 becomes practicable, in proportion to their frequence and extension among a 

 community. Hence skin-pains are more describable than others, for applica- 

 tions of painful stimuli to the skin are so common as to be — as above urged— 

 "normal." Indeed, the skin may be said to have evolved for itself a special 

 sense of its own injuries. But where, as in consequence of disease, from time 

 to time and from individual to individual, the deep organs vex the " normal '' 

 flow of consciousness, sensations are experienced which are, so to say, singularly 

 individual and doomed to remain indescribable. The sensible universe has no 

 suitable symbols for their expression. In this difficulty it is true that with 

 intellectual health the sentient mind reflecting on the body often can, as in 

 the case of projected sensations, rightly interpret that which it does feel. 

 But this it does not with the same assurance, there being no such accessible 

 touchstone of Tightness or of wrongness for criterion. Yet one attribute of 

 these sensations, otherwise indescribable though they be, the mind is never at 

 a loss about. There is always distinct in them a pleasurable or a displeasurable 

 "tone." 



