Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/217

 204 w. JAMES : for the first time felt, occurs on a considerable scale in the acquired perceptions of blind as well as of seeing men. (e) Extradition. It is now necessary to carry our study of the imaginary projection of feelings still further, and to follow out those cases where we seem to perceive directly by the sense of touch what happens at distances far removed from any sensory surface of the body. Take first a few more facts. If one of the hairs of our head be pulled, we are pretty accurately sensible of the direction of the pulling by the movements imparted to the head. 1 But the feeling of the pull is localised, not in that part of the hair's length which the fingers hold, but in the scalp itself. This seems con- nected with the fact that our hair hardly serves at all as a tactile organ. In creatures with vibrissce, however, and in those quadrupeds whose whiskers are tactile organs, it can hardly be doubted that the feeling is projected out of the root into the shaft of the hair itself. We ourselves have an approach to this when the beard as a whole, or the hair as a whole, is touched. We perceive the contact at some distance from the skin. When fixed and hard appendages of the body, like the teeth and nails, are touched, we feel the contact where it objectively is, and not deeper in, where the nerve-termina- tions lie. If, however, the tooth is loose, we feel two contacts, spatially separated, one at its root, one at its top. From this case to that of a hard body not organically con- nected with the surface, but only accidentally in contact with it, the transition is immediate. With the point of a cane we can trace letters in the air or on a wall just as with the finger-tip ; and in so doing feel the size and shape of the cane's path just as immediately as formerly we seemed to feel the path described by the finger. Similarly the draughts- man's immediate perception seems to be of the point of his pencil, the surgeon's of the end of his knife, the duellist's of the tip of his rapier as it plunges through his enemy's skin. When on the middle of a vibrating ladder, we feel not only our feet on the round, but the ladder's feet against the ground far below. If we shake a locked iron gate we feel the middle, on which our hands rest, move, but we equally 1 This is proved by Weber's device of causing the head to be firmly pressed against a support by another person, whereupon the direction of traction ceases to be perceived.