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 
sets 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 
