SEJ^SJ TION. %1 



©ration, have been described as bringing their hand close 

 to their eyes to feel for the objects which they at first saw, 

 and only gradually stretching out their hand when they 

 found that no contact occurred. Many have concluded 

 from these facts that our earliest visual objects must seem 

 in immediate contact with our eyes. 



But tactile objects also may be afi'ected with a like am- 

 biguity of situation. 



If one of the hairs of our head be pulled, we are pretty 

 accurately sensible of the direction of the pulling by the 

 movements imparted to the head.* But the feeling of the 

 pull is localized, not in that part of the hair's length which 

 the fingers hold, but in the scalp itself. This seems con- 

 nected with the fact that our hair hardly serves at all as a 

 tactile organ. In creatures with vibrissce, however, and in 

 those quadrupeds whose whiskers are tactile organs, it can 

 hardly be doubted that the feeling is projected out of the 

 root into the shaft of the hair itself. We ourselves have an 

 approach to this when the beard as a whole, or the hair as 

 a whole, is touched. We perceive the contact at some dis- 

 tance from the skin. 



When fixed and hard appendages of the body, like the 

 teeth and nails, are touched, we feel the contact where it 

 objectively is, and not deeper in, where the nerve-termina- 

 tions lie. If, however, the tooth is loose, we feel two 

 contacts, spatially separated, one at its root, one at its 

 top. 



From this case to that of a hard body not organically 

 connected with the surface, but only accidentally in contact 

 witii it, the transition is immediate. With the point of a 

 cane we can trace letters in the air or on a wall just as with 

 the finger-tip ; and in so doing feel the size and shape of 

 the path described by the cane's tip just as immediate!}^ as, 

 without a cane, we should feel the path described by the 

 tip of our finger. Similarly the draughtsman's immediate 

 perception seems to be of the point of his pencil, the sur- 



* This Is proved by "Weber's device of causing the head to be firmly 

 pressed against a support by another person, whereupon the direction of 

 traction ceases to be perceived. 



