[149] Fechner, who was ignorant of the but lately discovered function of the semi-circular canals, gives a different explanation of the organic seat of these feelings. They are probably highly composite. With me, actual movements in the eyes play a considerable part in them, though I am hardly conscious of the peculiar feelings in the scalp which Fechner goes on to describe thus: "The feeling of strained attention in the different sense-organs seems to be only a muscular one produced in using these various organs by setting in motion, by a sort of reflex action, the set of muscles which belong to them. One can ask, then, with what particular muscular contraction the sense of strained attention in the effort to recall something is associated? On this question my own feeling gives me a decided answer; it comes to me distinctly not as a sensation of tension in the inside of the head, but as a feeling of strain and contraction in the scalp, with a pressure from outwards in over the whole cranium, undoubtedly caused by a contraction of the muscles of the scalp. This harmonizes very well with the expressions, _sich den Kopf zerbrechen, den Kopf zusammennehmen_. In a former illness, when I could not endure the slightest effort after continuous thought, and had no theoretical bias on this question, the muscles of the scalp, especially those of the back-head, assumed a fairly morbid degree of sensibility whenever I tried to think." (Elem. der Psychophysik, ii, 490-91.) [150] That the sensation in question is one of tactile rather than of acoustic sensibility would seem proved by the fact that a medical friend of the writer, both of whose _membranæ tympani_ are quite normal, but one of whose ears is almost totally deaf, feels the presence and withdrawal of objects as well at one ear as at the other. [151] The skin seems to obey a different law from the eye here. If a given retinal tract be excited, first by a series of points, and next by the two extreme points, with the interval between them unexcited, this interval will seem considerably less in the second case than it seemed in the first. In the skin the unexcited interval feels the larger. The reader may easily verify the facts in this case by taking a visiting-card, cutting one edge of it into a saw-tooth pattern, and from the opposite edge cutting out all but the two corners, and then comparing the feelings aroused by the two edges when held against the skin. [152] Classen, Physiologie des Gesichtssinnes, p. 114; see also A. Riehl, Der Philosophische Kriticismus, ii. p. 149.