Harvey seems to have attributed more importance to the auricular systoles than do the physiologists of to-day, he making the ventricles depend very greatly for their charge of blood upon the systole of the auricles. This view appears in three passages already quoted; and is tersely put by Harvey when he says elsewhere that the heart "is dilated by the auricle, contracts of itself";[231] that "the auricles are prime movers of the blood."[232] The unduly high value set by him upon the auricular systole agrees well with the polemical vigor with which Harvey exalted impulsion and rejected suction,[233] in his general physiology as well as in the physiology of the heart. In the heart especially the force of suction had played for centuries a part which Harvey rejected more completely than the physiologists of to-day feel warranted in doing. Again he shall speak for himself, saying tersely:-- "Hence it is made plain how the blood enters the ventricles; not by reason of being drawn in, or of the heart expanding, but because sent in by the pulse of the auricles."[234] "The expansion of the heart," he has told us already, "is a movement of a certain violence, produced by impulsion, not by attraction of some sort." He says that he maintains these views "against the commonly received opinion; because neither the heart nor anything else can so expand itself that it can draw anything into itself in its diastole, unless as a sponge does which has first been forcibly compressed and is returning to its natural state."[235] But, one may ask oneself, how does that modified seething in the vena cava which produces the diastole of the right auricle produce the diastole, the simultaneous diastole, of the left auricle? In his lecture notes Harvey had stated, as Columbus had before him, that the venous artery does not pulsate--at least, he means, not in the same sense as the auricle, or ventricle, or artery.[236] Obviously regarding the left auricle there could be available, for Harvey, no explanation parallel to that of to-day, viz.: the swift conduction of a stimulus from point to point of the texture of a wall which is common to both auricles. He is careful to state that corresponding auricular events occur simultaneously and in the same way in the two auricles; and incidentally but frankly he confesses ignorance of the reasons why, in the following passage:-- "From those who declare the causes and reasons of all things in such a smattering way, I would be glad to learn how it is that both eyes move together hither and thither and in every direction when they look; how it is that this eye does not turn by itself in that direction, that eye in this; likewise, both auricles of the heart; and so forth."[237]