When we compare these results with the show that the skin makes as a
sense-organ in everyday life, we can hardly help bringing against it
the charge of dishonesty. The pressure spots give us tickle, contact
or light pressure, and pressure proper; the pain spots, itch, prick or
sting, and pain proper. The cold spots give cold and cool, the warm
spots lukewarm and warm; cold and warm spots together give heat; cold
and pain give biting cold; cold and warm and pain give burning or
scalding heat; and that is all. Yet the skin pretends to tell us of
hard and soft, wet and dry, light and heavy, rough and smooth, yielding
and resistant, sharp and blunt, clammy and greasy, oily and sticky,
stiff and elastic, and so on. Where do we get all these experiences?
§ 10. =Kinæsthetic Sensations.=—We get them, for the most part,
from the cooperation with the skin of certain deeper-lying tissues.
Psychologists have long suspected the existence of a muscle sense. We
now know that sensations are derived, not only from the =muscles=,
but also from the =tendons= and the capsules of the =joints=. These
tissues are, of course, closely bound together, and are all alike
affected by movement of a limb or of the body. Their disentanglement,
from the point of view of sensation, has been a slow and difficult
matter. Psychology has here been greatly aided by pathology; for there
are diseases in which the skin alone is insensitive, in which skin
and muscles alone are insensitive, and in which the whole limb is
insensitive; so that a first rough differentiation is made for us by
nature herself. It is also possible artificially to anæsthetise muscle
and joint; and psychologists have devised various forms of experiment
whereby some single tissue is thrown into relief above the others.
Not only, however, are the sensations of these tissues aroused by
movement; they also form the sensory basis of our perception of the
movement of body and limbs. For this reason they have been named
=kinæsthetic=, or movement-perceiving. They are of the following kinds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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