being moved--a mode of receiving an impulse peculiar to certain organs
of animated bodies, which is occasioned by the presence of a material
object that acts upon these organs, and transmit the impulse or shock to
the brain.

Man only feels by the aid of nerves dispersed through his body; which is
itself, to speak correctly, nothing more than a great nerve; or may be
said to resemble a large tree, of which the branches experience the
action of the root, communicated through the trunk. In man the nerves
unite and lose themselves in the brain; that intestine is the true seat
of feeling: like the spider in the centre of his web, it is quickly
warned of all the changes that happen to the body, even at the
extremities to which it sends its filaments and branches. Experience
enables us to ascertain, that man ceases to feel in those parts of his
body of which the communication with the brain is intercepted; he feels
very little, or not at all, whenever this organ is itself deranged or
affected in too lively a manner. A proof of this is afforded in the
transactions of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris: they inform us
of a man who had his scull taken off, in the room of which his brain was
recovered with skin; in proportion as a pressure was made by the hand on
his brain, the man fell into a kind of insensibility, which deprived him
of all feeling. BARTOLIN says, the brain of a man is twice as big as
that of an ox. This observation had been already made by ARISTOTLE. In
the dead body of an idiot dissected by WILLIS, the brain was found
smaller than ordinary: he says the greatest difference he found between
the parts of the body of this idiot, and those of wiser men, was, that
the plexus of the intercostal nerves, which is the mediator between the
brain and the heart, was extremely small, accompanied by a less number
of nerves than usual. According to WILLIS, the ape is, of all animals,
that which has the largest brain, relatively to his size: he is also,