SENSATION. 41 



whereas, at bottom, it is only his different way of talking about the same 

 experience." * 



The other cases of translocation of our sensations are 

 equally easily interpreted without supposing any ' projec- 

 tion ' from a centre at which they are originally perceived. 

 Unfortunately the details are intricate ; and what I say now 

 can only be made fully clear when we come to the next 

 chapter. We shall then see that we are constantly select- 

 ing certain of our sensations as realities and degrading 

 others to the status of sig^is of these. When we get one of 

 the signs we think of the reality signified ; and the strange 

 thing is that then the reality (which need not be itself a 

 sensation at all at the time, but only an idea) is so interest- 

 ing that it acquires an hallucinatory strength, which may 

 even eclipse that of the relatively uninteresting sign and en- 

 tirely divert our attention from the latter. Thus the sen- 

 sations to which our joints give rise when they rotate are 

 signs of what, through a large number of other sensations, 

 tactile and optical, we have come to know as the movement 

 of the whole limb. This movement of the whole limb is 

 what Ave think of when the joint's nerves are excited in that 

 way ; and its place is so much more important than the 

 joint's place that our sense of the latter is taken up, so to 

 speak, into our perception of the former, and the sensation 

 of the movement seems to diffuse itself into our very fingers 

 and toes. But by abstracting our attention from the sug- 

 gestion of the entire extremity we can perfectly well per- 

 ceive the same sensation as if it were concentrated in one 

 spot. We can identify it with a differently located tactile 

 and visual image of 'the joint' itself. 



Just so when we feel the tip of our cane against the 

 ground. The peculiar sort of movement of the hand (im- 

 possible in one direction, but free in every other) which 

 we experience when the tip touches 'the ground,' is a sign 

 to us of the visual and tactile object which we already 



* Revue Philosophique, vii. p. 1 fl., an admirable critical article, in the 

 course of which M. Janet gives a bibliography of the cases in question. 

 See also Dunan: tbid. xxv. 165-7. They are also discussed and siuiilarly 

 interpreted by T. K. Abbot : Sight and Touch (1864), chapter x. 



