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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE, 'visitors' from the without from joining one another and presenting themselves, hand in hand, to the soul. It is thus clear that unless the soul itself become impervious to all except the sensory stimulus to which it may be attending at the time, it ought to feel all those of its affections which arise together simultaneously, that is at one and the same time. But since this is never known to take place in actual experience, the argument conclusively proves our proposition.
It will be further observed that the function of mind in the economy of life, is not of making the soul feel the sensory stimulus in a place where it is not, as some persons maintain, for that would be tantamount to a mental fiction pure and simple, but of summoning any particular impulse, at will, into the centre of the most intensely conscious part of the field, diverting it from its normal path where it would have invariably exhausted itself in the shape of a motor discharge.
When a sensory impulse is called up by the mind, it travels along a nervous loop- if we may so call the arrangement which connects the system of what are technically known as direct reflexes with the mechanism of mind--and is then subjected to a deliberative analysis, more or less elaborate according to the development of the individual. This happens only in those beings who are endowed with a mind; in the lower animals which are not so endowed, and which cannot, therefore, pause, postpone, deliberate, compare, or nicely weigh one motive against another, the movement at once passes through the prescribed channels of reflexes into a motor discharge, resulting in the contraction
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