A writer in _The Atlantic Monthly_ says:
The spinal cord runs along the back, with all its ganglia; the
weight of the brain is well behind; yet we are not there. In
other words, the curious thing is that we feel ourselves to be,
not in the region where impressions are received and answered
in the brain, and spinal cord, but where they first meet the
nerve-extremities. We seem to inhabit not the citadel, but the
outer walls. At the point of peripheral expansion of the nerves
of sense, where the outer forces begin to be apprehended by
us as inner--“in front,” where the fingers feel, and the nose
smells and the eyes see--there, if anywhere, we find ourselves
to be.
I have often been interested to notice whereabouts on our
bodily surface another animal looks to find us. The man or even
the little child, looks at the face. Is it because the voice
issues thence? Yet it is the eyes, rather than the mouth that
is watched. Is it because the expression, the signal-station
for the changing moods, is there more than elsewhere? A dog,
also, invariably looks up into the face. So does a bird,
notwithstanding the fact that the food comes from the hand. Why
does he not consider the “I,” so far as his needs are concerned,
to lie in the part that feeds him? But no; he cocks his head to
one side, and directs his lustrous little eye straight to our
own, in order to establish what communion he can with the very
“him” of his master and friend.
It is hardly less pathetic than our own human efforts to pierce,
by the searching penetration of eyes, to the real personality of
each other. We never succeed.
(2360)
=Personality, Multiplex=--See MULTIPLE CONSCIOUSNESS.
=Personality Superior to Misfortune=--See MISFORTUNE,
SUPERIORITY TO.
=Perspective=--See POINT OF VIEW.
=Perturbation=--See BAPTISM.
=Perversion=--See GUIDANCE EVILWARD.