[201] Claude Bernard, Système Nerveux, I. 383.
[202] See the excellent remarks of Dr. Lauder Brunton on this point in his paper on Inhibition in the West Riding Lunatic Asylum Reports, 1874, p. 180.
[203] The interesting question of interference has been experimentally treated by Wundt in his recently published Mechanik der Nerven, 1876, and theoretically as wave-movement by Medem, Grundzüge einer exakten Psychologie, 1876.
[204] On the distinction between first notions and theoretic conceptions, see Problems of Life and Mind, Vol. II. p. 277.
[205] Not transcendental and a priori, as Kant teaches; but immanent in Feeling.
[206] The reader will understand that although mechanical relations are modes of Feeling, as all other relations are, yet their aspect is exclusively objective, referring to objects ideally detached from subjects.
[207] Antoine Cros, Les Fonctions supérieures du Système nerveux, 1875, p. 85.
[208] The solution offered in the present chapter was first offered in Problems of Life and Mind, 1875, II. 465, sq. I mention this because since the publication of that volume other writers have expressed the same ideas, sometimes using my language and illustrations: e. g. M. Taine in the Revue Philosophique, January, 1877, art., Les Vibrations cérébrales et la Pensée.
[209] Problems of Life and Mind, Vol. II. pp. 443 and 482.
[210] “The retinal image is the last effect known of the action of objects on us; what happens beyond the retina we know not; our knowledge of the objective process has at present here its limit.”—Ewald Hering, Beiträge zur Physiologie, 1862, p. 166. That is to say, we have a definite translation of the process in geometric terms as far as the retina, and thence onwards Geometry fails us, and Neurology and Psychology are invoked.