ceived, and the melody alone continues to be heard.
It is in this precisely that my hypothesis consists. We will suppose a nerve current starting from one of the organs of the senses, when it is excited by some object or other, and arriving at the centre of the brain. This current contains all the properties of the object, its colour, its form, its size, its thousand details of structure, its weight, its sonorous qualities, &c., &c., properties combined with and connected by the properties of the nerve-organ in which the current is propagated. The consciousness remains insensible to those nervous properties of the current which are so often repeated that they are annulled; it perceives, on the contrary, its variable and accidental properties which express the nature of the excitant. By this partial sensibility, the consciousness lays bare that which, in the nerve current, represents the object—that is to say, a cognition; and this operation is equivalent to a transformation of the current into a perception, image, or idea. There is not, strictly speaking, a transformation, but an analysis; only, the practical result is the same as that of a transformation, and is obtained without its being necessary to suppose the transmutation of a physical into a mental phenomenon.
Let us place ourselves now at the moment when
