Note f — MOTION.

“Objects laid upon the surface will come to be distinguished from each other by the relative lengths of the series they cover; or, when broad as well as long, by the groups of series which they cover.… By habit these simultaneous excitations, from being at first known indirectly by translation into the serial ones, will come to be known directly, and the serial ones will be forgotten: just as in childhood the words of a new language, at first understood by means of their equivalents in the mother tongue, are presently understood by themselves; and if used to the exclusion of the mother tongue, lead to the ultimate loss of it.” We see that “a set of [nervous] elements may be excited simultaneously as well as serially; that so, a quasi single state of consciousness becomes the equivalent of a series of states; that a relation between what we call coexistent positions thus represents a relation of successive positions, and that this symbolic relation being far briefer, is habitually thought of in place of that it symbolizes; and that, by the continued use of such symbols, and the union of them with more complex ones, are generated our ideas of … extension—ideas which, like those of the algebraist working out an equation, are wholly unlike the ideas symbolized, and which yet, like his, occupy the mind to the entire exclusion of the ideas symbolized.”—(pp. 222—224.)