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528 major importance. Both by reason of its early start in advance of our other senses in performing this particular function, and the special fitness for mediating all kinds of neural energies which its first selection as a primary sense seems to indicate, it seems not improbable that the primary sense, under the general processes of neural specialization, became devoted to central functions, similarly as the other senses became devoted to those functions to which their fitness and date of origin destined them.

Though the peripheral fibres of our primary sense system have, therefore, been largely submerged, and their functions lost, its central parts, with their functions and their particular mental characteristics, have yet been preserved to us essentially unaltered. We cannot fail to observe that this specialization of our primary sense to central functions would make it characteristically 'associative' in comparison with the peripheral senses. For, except in so far as we grant absolute spontaneity to the cortex, our primary sense would now be chiefly dependent for stimulation upon its function of associating or connecting various in-coming impulses with proper out-going impulses. This corresponds with the 'associative' nature of our aesthetic pleasures, which we discovered in our analysis of those matters, and to that degree favors our postulate that pleasure is our primary sense.

But to substantiate our theory we must now inquire how these morphologic developments affect the present individual. Our postulate is likely to incur prejudice, in that it declares that we experience particular pleasure, without previous correspondent stimulation of any peripheral pleasure nerves. We are indebted to Professor William James for taking ground emphatically against the notion that there is nothing in the mind not let in by our sensations. This author declares that "the mind is filled with necessary and eternal relations" which "it in no way gets through experience." Yet each of these relations he holds to be a definite feeling based, as are all other feelings, upon some definite cortical action. Thus, his "fringe" feelings, his feelings of "if," "and," "but," "like," "equal," "different," "more,"