the universe and to its history. Let us hold to the appearances; I will formulate purely and simply what I feel and what I see: All seems to take place as if, in this aggregate of images which I call the universe, nothing really new could happen except through the medium of certain particular images, the type of which is furnished me by my body.
I pass now to the study, in bodies similar to my own, of the structure of that particular image which I call my body. I perceive afferent nerves which transmit a disturbance to the nerve centres, then efferent nerves which start from the centre, conduct the disturbance to the periphery, and set in motion parts of the body or the body as a whole. I question the physiologist and the psychologist as to the purpose of both kinds. They answer that as the centrifugal movements of the nervous system can call forth a movement of the body or of parts of the body, so the centripetal movements, or at least some of them, give birth to the representation[1] of the external world, What are we to think of this?
The afferent nerves are images, the brain is an image, the disturbance travelling through the sensoryYet the brain is only an image among other images. nerves and propagated in the brain is an image too. If the image which I term cerebral disturbance really
- ↑ The word representation is used throughout this book in the French sense, as meaning a mental picture, which mental picture is very often perception. (Translators' note.)
