94 CONSCIOUSNESS AND SENSATION. 



the route pursued by impressions from the peri- 

 phery to the brain to be removed, to me it is 

 utterly inconceivable that the sites of irritations 

 over the whole surface of the body should be 

 minutely indicated, and a more vague appreciation 

 of the positions of internal irritations be obtained, 

 by differences in the cerebral termini of the impres- 

 sions conveyed from different parts. The supposi- 

 tion involves the difficulty that there is no mode 

 by which the mind of the child could ever learn to 

 associate the changes taking place at the cerebral 

 termini with changes at different parts of the 

 surface. If the consciousness were ignorant of 

 the surface of the body at the commencement 

 of life, it must continue always to be so, for want 

 of means from which to derive the information ; 

 no amount of custom could avail it, for the mind 

 gets all its experience from the senses, and until it 

 could refer sensations to the parts of the body 

 from which they were derived, it could gain no ex- 

 perience of the external world whatever. Therefore 

 the doctrine of sensation necessitates the assump- 

 tion that the functional union of the parts of the 

 periphery with different termini in the brain is 

 primordial, and that the surface of the body is 

 minutely represented or repeated by a number 

 of points in the brain, which, however confusedly 



