THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 197 



path at which I point.* Biit the ' absorption ' of the joint- 

 feeling by the distant spot, in whatever terms the latter 

 may be apprehended, is never anything but that coales- 

 cence into one ' thing ' already spoken of on page 184, of 

 whatever different sensible objects interest our attention at 

 once. 



2. Feelings of Muscular Contraction. 



Eeaders versed in psychological literature will have 

 missed, in our account thus far, the usual invocation of 

 'the muscular sense.' This word is used with extreme 

 vagueness to cover all resident sensations, whether of 

 motion or position, in our members, and even to designate 

 the supposed feeling of efferent discharge from the brain. 

 We shall later see good reason to deny the existence of the 

 latter feeling. We have accounted for the better part at least 

 of the resident feelings of motion in limbs by the sensibility 

 of the articular surfaces. The skin and ligaments also must 

 have feelings awakened as they are stretched or squeezed 

 in flexion or extension. And I am inclined to think that 

 the sensations of our contracting muscles themselves prohahly play 

 as small a part in building up our exact knoivledge of space as 

 any class of sensations ivhich ice possess. The muscles, indeed, 

 play an all-important part, but it is through the remote 

 effect of their contractions on other sensitive parts, not 

 through their own resident sensations being aroused. In 

 other words, muscular contraction is only iiidirectly instru- 

 mental, in giving us space-perceptions, hy its effects on surfaces. 

 In skin and retina it produces a motion of the stimulus 

 upon the surface ; in joints it produces a motion of the 

 surfaces upon each other — such motion being by far the 



* The ideal enlargement of a system of sensations by the mind is noth- 

 ing exceptional. Vision is full of it ; and in the manual arts, where a 

 workman gets a tool larger than the one he is accustomed to and has sud- 

 denly to adapt all his movements to its scale, or where he has to execute 

 a familiar set of movements in an unnatural position of body; where a 

 piano-player meets an instrument with unusually broad or narrow keys; 

 where a man has to alter the size of his handwriting — we see how promptly 

 the mind multiplies once for all, as it were, the whole series of its opera- 

 tions by a constant factor, and has not to trouble itself after that with fur* 

 ther adjustment of the details. 



