the senses consists in just the sum of the connexions established between the sensory impression and the movement which makes use of it. As the impression is repeated, the connexion is consolidated. Nor is there anything mysterious in the mechanism of the operation. Our nervous system is evidently arranged with a view to the building up of motor apparatus linked, through the intermediary of centres, with sense stimuli; and the discontinuity of the nervous elements, the multiplicity of their terminal branches, which are probably capable of joining in various ways, make possible an unlimited number of connexions between impressions and the corresponding movements. But the mechanism in course of construction cannot appear to consciousness in the same form as the mechanism already constructed. There is something which profoundly distinguishes and clearly manifests those systems of movements which are consolidated in the organism; and that is, we believe, the difficulty we have in modifying their order. It is, again, the preformation of the movements which follow in the movements which precede, a preformation whereby the part virtually contains the whole, as when each note of a tune learnt by heart seems to lean over the next to watch its execution.[1] If, then, every perception has
- ↑ In one of the most ingenious chapters of his Psychologie (Paris, 1893, vol. i, p. 242), Fouillée says that the sense of familiarity is largely due to the diminution of the inward shock which constitutes surprise.
