Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/202

192 its entire intellectuality, by virtue of which, as Euler says, we apprehend the thing itself, and as external to us, finds an analogy in the way in which we feel the parts of our own bodies, especially when they suffer pain, which when we do feel them is generally the case. Just as we imagine that we perceive things where they are, while the perception really takes place in the brain, we believe that we feel the pain of a limb in the limb itself, while in reality it also is felt in the brain, to which it is conducted by the nerve of the affected part. Therefore, only the affections of those parts whose nerves go to the brain are felt, and not those of the parts whose nerves belong to the sympathetic system, unless it be that an unusually strong affection of these parts penetrates by some roundabout way to the brain, where yet for the most part it only makes itself known as a dull sense of discomfort, and always without definite determination of its locality. Hence, also, it is that we do not feel injuries to a limb whose nerve-trunk has been severed or ligatured. And hence, finally, the man who has lost a limb still sometimes feels pain in it, because the nerves which go to the brain are still there. Thus, in the two phenomena here compared, what goes on in the brain is apprehended as outside of it; in the case of perception, by means of the understanding, which extends its feelers into the outer world; in the case of the feeling of our limbs, by means of the nerves.