The figure represents a tracing made by a muscle-nerve preparation.
A living muscle taken from an animal has been attached to a light
lever, the end of which makes a scratch on a piece of smoked paper.
The paper is fastened on a revolving cylinder and so long as the
muscle is motionless the end of the lever marks a horizontal line on
the paper. But if the muscle is stimulated so that it contracts and
then relaxes again the lever is pulled up and is then lowered, and so
its point makes a curve on the paper. The nerve going to the muscle
can be stimulated electrically and the moment of the stimulation can
be recorded by another lever, which makes a mark on the paper below
the trace made by the lever which is attached to the muscle. Two
such shocks have been applied to the nerve and they have elicited
two contractions of the muscle and these two contractions have fused
together.
In the actual experiment the operators could _see_ that the muscle
moved, and they could _feel_ that a certain interval of their own
duration coincided with the interval between the first and second
depressions of the key that made the electric shocks. But the extent
of motion of the muscle was too small, and the depressions of the key
succeeded each other too rapidly to be easily observed, and therefore
all these events were made to record themselves on the myogram. The
series of little notches at the base of the figure represent the
movements of the time-lever, that is, they are scratches made on
the paper by a little lever which moves up and down at a rate fixed
beforehand. Now when this time lever had made ten notches on the paper
the first shock was applied to the nerve, and at the eleventh the
muscle began to contract. At the seventeenth notch the second shock
was applied and the muscle continued to contract. At the twenty-fifth
notch the muscle ceased to contract and began to relax, and at the
forty-second notch the muscle had ceased to contract. Everything now
becomes clear and easy to represent mentally; the time-lever makes 100
notches on the paper in a second, so that there was an interval of
0.07 seconds between the two stimuli, and these two stimuli produced a
compound contraction of the muscle lasting for 0.1 second. This is what
the experimenters might have perceived, had human unaided senses been
sufficiently acute. But they are not, and so the crude perception of
the results of the experiment is replaced by a conception of the train
of events involved in the operation. Duration and succession disappear
and the myogram represents only a series of simultaneous events of
this nature; the first stimulus occurs simultaneously with the tenth
movement of the time-lever; the second stimulus with the seventeenth,
and so on. In seeing the experiment the operators had to _wait_ for one
phase to be completed before they could observe another one, but in
reasoning about it all the phases are spread out and are present in the
conception at once.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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