'James’s publications on emotion challenged two claims that had found prominence amongst associationist physiological psychologists during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first of these was that it was possible to apprehend one’s own body using similar means as those employed to sense the external world without disrupting the functioning of the rational mind. Drawing on French physiological studies of the early nineteenth century, British physiological psychologists including Spencer and Bain had suggested during the 1860s that perception was not simply the consequence of the operation of external sense, but was rather built up from a more fundamental experiential source, which they termed ‘muscle sense’ (Smith 2011). Closely associated with physical movement of the body, this sense was conceived of as entirely separate from what were characterised as the more complex states of thought and emotion. Though gained from both the inside and outside of the body, perceptual experience, for these psychologists, could be entirely explained by reference to the conjunction of the sense-impressions that Bergson found so problematic. James, in contrast, argued that even the experience of external reality was inevitably coloured by the emotional apprehensions presented by the viscera (James 1884; 1894, 523-524).'