THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 189 



FEELINGS IN JOINTS AND PEELINGS IN MUSCLES. 



1. Fedings of Movement in Joints. 



I have been led to speak of feelings which arise in 

 joints. As these feelings have been too much neglected in 

 Psychology hitherto, in entering now somewhat minutely 

 into their study I shall probably at the same time freshen 

 the interest of the reader, which under the rather dry ab- 

 stractions of the previous pages may presumably have 

 flagged. 



When, by simply flexing my right forefinger on its meta- 

 carpal joint, I trace with its tip an inch on the palm of my 

 left hand, is my feeling of the size of the inch purely and 

 simply a feeling in the skin of the palm, or have the mus- 

 cular contractions of the right hand and forearm anything 

 to do with it ? In the preceding pages I have constantly 

 assumed spatial sensibility to be an afiair of surfaces. At 

 first starting, the consideration of the ' muscular sense ' as 

 a space-measurer was postponed to a later stage. Many 

 writers, of whom the foremost Avas Thomas Brown, in his 

 Lectures on the Philosopliy of the Human Mind, and of whom 

 the latest is no less a Psychologist than Prof. Delboeuf,* 

 hold that the consciousness of active muscular motion, 

 aware of its own amount, is the fans et origo of all spatial 

 measurement. It would seem to follow, if this theory were 

 true, that two skin-feelings, one of a large patch, one of a 

 small one, jDossess their difierence of spatiality, not as an 

 immediate element, but solely by virtue of the fact that the 

 large one, to get its points successively excited, demands 

 more muscular contraction than the small one does. Fixed 

 associations with the several amountsof muscular contrac- 

 tion required in this particular experience would thus ex- 



* ' Pourquoi les Sensations visuelles sont elles etendues?' in Revue 

 Philosophique, iv. 167. — As the proofs of this chapter are being corrected, 

 I receive the third 'Heft ' of Miinsterberg's Beitrage zur Experimentelleu 

 Psychologic, in which that vigorous young psychologist reaffirms (if I 

 understand him after so hasty a glance) more radically than ever the doc- 

 trine that muscular sensation proper is our one means of measuring exten- 

 sion. Unable to reopen the discussion here, I am in duty bound to call 

 the attention of the reader to Herr M.'s work. 



