Page:Mind and the Brain (1907).djvu/242

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sensibility are much more numerous than those of movements and of adaptation; very probably, as is seen in an attentive study of infancy, sensibility precedes the power of motion in its differentiations. A child shows an extraordinary acuteness of perception at an age when its hand is still very clumsy. The correlation, then, is not absolute. And then even if it were so, it would not follow that the suppression of any movement would produce by rebound the suppression of the sensation to which this movement habitually corresponds. On this hypothesis, a sensation which loses its motor effect becomes useless. Be it so; but this does not prove that the uselessness of a sensation is synonymous with insensibility. I can very well imagine the movement being suppressed and the useless sensation continuing to evoke images and to be perceived. Does not this occur daily? There are patients who, after an attack of paralysis remain paralysed in one limb, which loses the voluntary movement, but does not necessarily lose its sensibility. Many clear cases are observed in which this dissociation takes place.

I therefore own that I cannot follow M. Bergson in his deduction. As a physiologist, I am obliged to believe firmly in the existence of the sensory nerves, and therefore I continue to suppose that our conscious sensations are consequent to the