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It is safer to say that we are ignorant of the degree in which the two resemble or differ from each other. It is very probably the receiving centres which are specific. It is owing to them and to their mechanism that we ought to feel, from the same excitant, a sensation of sound or one of colour, that is to say, impressions which appear, when compared, as the most different in the world.
Be it so, I have the right to answer; but if all that I perceive is sensation, my nervous system itself is a sensation; if it is only that, it is no longer an intermediary between the excitant and myself, and it is the fact that we perceive things as they are.
Their gestures were lost in the tumult and the darkness; what the crowd did see seemed to act only as an excitant. And I promise you there was no need of that.
The extent to which the threshold to pain or to any other excitant is affected by Graves' disease is illustrated by the almost fatal reaction which I once saw result from the mere pricking with a hypodermic needle of a patient with this disease. As the result of a visit from a friend, the pulse-rate of a victim of this disease may increase twenty beats and his temperature rise markedly.
Or if they are themselves at once both the excitant and the excitability, I miss the connecting link between this imaginary ether and the visible body, which then becomes no otherwise distinguished from inanimate matter, than by its juxtaposition in mere space, with an heterogeneous inmate, the cycle of whose actions revolves within itself.
Opium, the type of the latter class, is in its primary action excitant, but secondarily narcotic. The opium-eaters are familiar with this, and learn by experience to regulate the dose so as to prolong the first and shorten the second effects, as much as possible. Tobacco, on the other hand, is primarily sedative and relaxing. A high authority says of its physiological action:
To make the question clearer, we will begin it afresh, as if it were new, and as if the facts hitherto analysed did not already prejudge the solution. Let us begin by giving a definition of sensation from the point of view of experimental psychology. Sensation, then, is the phenomenon which is produced and which one experiences when an excitant has just acted on one of our organs of sense.
The same external observation proves to us at once that there exists an object distinct from our nerves, and that our nerves separate us from it. I insist on this point, for the reason that some authors, after having unreservedly admitted that our knowledge is confined to sensations, have subsequently been hard put to it to demonstrate the reality of the excitant distinct from the sensations.
To sum up, in addition to the natural excitant of our sensory nerves, there are two which can produce the same sensory effects, that is to say, the mechanical and the electrical excitants.
Youth is a blessed season after all; my stay at Wick was in the year of VOCES FIDELIUM and the rose-leaf room at Bailie Brown's; and already I did not care two straws for literary glory. Posthumous ambition perhaps requires an atmosphere of roses; and the more rugged excitant of Wick east winds had made another boy of me.
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