Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/546

530 to certain characteristics inherited in every human cortex for numerous mental traits exhibited in common by all men; and that, of certain other differences more peculiar to individual lives, we should attribute some, perhaps, to congenital temperaments or 'working traits,' but more to the endless variety of education and of human experience.

As there is nothing strange in the arrangement of our aesthetic paths, so there is nothing fundamentally peculiar in their mode of work; in the manner in which they respond to whatever stimulations their definite arrangements bring to them. We have said it is the fundamental function of every sensory state to tend to some act. Suppose a child to open his eyes for the first time, that they fall on a red blanket, and that they then close. We are not to think that his retinal stimulations would run up to the cortex and stop there at the first cells reached. They would push on to some sort of activity. The resulting activity might seem to us a merely inco-ordinate kicking of limbs and working of muscles. Yet, physiologically, the movements would be as definite as playing the piano. They would be the movements most naturally beneficial to the life of man as a whole, in response to that kind of experience in the abstract. If the glance at the blanket was brief, the resulting movement might be beyond our scrutiny. If the red blanket attracted attention for sufficient time, the kicking would, very likely, be considerable.

Now what does the child feel as the sensory side of such a first occurrence? Those who have watched babies know they appear to feel something more than the mere optic sensations. Professor James, with his peculiar notion as to emotions, would say the child feels happy because he kicks. But, according to this author's own views with reference to volition and innervation-sense, he ought rather to say, as we shall, The child feels the natural ideo-motor pleasure-state which makes him kick. It is our postulate that, frequently on such early occasions, such optic stimulations (and others of various kinds similarly) discharge to their appropriate acts through the inherited paths of primary pleasure sense, and that what the child feels, in