To speak, therefore, of an electric current in the nerves, is to use quite as symbolic an expression as if we compared the action of the nervous principle with light or magnetism.

Sensation is not the conduction of a quality or state of external bodies to consciousness, but the conduction of a quality or state of our nerves to consciousness, excited by an external cause.

We shall probably never attain the power of measuring the velocity of nervous action for we have not the opportunity of comparing its propagation through immense space, as we have in the case of light.

A good physiological experiment like a good physical one requires that it should present anywhere, at any time, under identical conditions, the same certain and unequivocal phenomena that can always be confirmed.

The essential attribute of a new sense is, not the perception of external objects or influences which ordinarily do not act upon the senses, but that external causes should excite in it a new and peculiar kind of sensation different from all the sensations of our five senses.