Now let us try and picture to ourselves a spinal animal, or one which retains only the lowest portion of the brain, the part known as the bulb or _medulla oblongata_; let us assume that it is conscious and capable of acquiring experience through the association and coalescence of the data afforded by the senses that remain to it; and let us try to imagine the conscious situations which would arise, and their value in the guidance of behaviour. The senses that remain are touch and the temperature sense, the motor sense affording data from the muscles, joints, and tendons, and those which supply certain visceral sensations. There is not one of much, if any, guiding value left. There is not one of what we may term anticipatory use. There is not one which could serve to infuse anything like definite meaning into the situation. For, after all, meaning is expectation. There is an element of anticipation in all those senses which are of any real guiding value in the conscious situation. Sight, hearing, and, especially for some animals, smell,--these are the senses which forewarn of something which may follow; of other sensations with which in the course of experience they have coalesced. And they are all cut off from the supposed spinal animal. A light touch might in some cases forewarn of the shock or severe pressure, which would perhaps follow. But the shocks would so often come suddenly that it is questionable whether the warning would be of much avail. Still, touch is a warning and cognitive sense, and through it the environment would acquire a limited amount of meaning. Now, the biological value of coalescent association lies in this very element of warning. The anticipatory senses, sight, hearing, smell, are in their several degrees the “projective” senses, the senses which carry with them the quantity of “outness.” And their “projective” character is the necessary psychological expression of their distinctive biological end. They must be projective, must carry with them “outness,” if they are to convey what we, following Dr. Stout, have so often spoken of as meaning. But if the biological value of coalescent association lies in the expectation it renders possible; and if, in the spinal animal, there are no senses left save touch, which could receive from the environment preparatory warning of what is coming; it would seem exceedingly improbable that it should develop quasi-independent conscious situations of its own. In the unmutilated animal, at any rate, tactual experience would most probably coalesce with that derived from the senses which more distinctively take the lead in the acquisition of meaning. And we may therefore, on these grounds, as well as on others, acquiesce in the current view that the quasi-independent functioning of the spinal cord and its constituent segments is, at best, lit up with those flashes of mere sentience of which Sir Michael Foster speaks in the passage we quoted in an earlier section.[196]