The primitive chaos thus subsists to a great degree through life so far as our immediate sensibility goes. We feel our various objects and their bignesses, together or in succession; but so soon as it is a question of the order and relations of many of them at once our intuitive apprehension remains to the very end most vague and incomplete. Whilst we are attending to one, or at most to two or three objects, all the others _lapse_, and the most we feel of them is that they still linger on the outskirts and can be caught again by turning in a certain way. Nevertheless _throughout all this confusion we conceive of a world spread out in a perfectly fixed and orderly fashion, and we believe in its existence. The question is: How do this conception and this belief arise? How is the chaos smoothed and straightened out?_ * * * * * Mainly by two operations: Some of the experiences are apprehended to exist out- and alongside of each other, and others are apprehended to interpenetrate each other, and to occupy the same room. In this way what was incoherent and irrelative ends by being coherent and definitely related; nor is it hard to trace the principles, by which the mind is guided in this arrangement of its perceptions, in detail.
In the first place, following the great intellectual law of economy, we simplify, unify, and identify as much as we possibly can. _Whatever sensible data can be attended to together we locate together. Their several extents seem one extent. The place at which each appears is held to be the same with the place at which the others appear. They become, in short, so many properties of_ ONE AND THE SAME REAL THING. This is the first and great commandment, the fundamental 'act' by which our world gets spatially arranged.
In this _coalescence in a 'thing_,' one of the coalescing sensations is held to _be_ the thing, the other sensations are taken for its more or less accidental _properties_, or modes of appearance.[182] The sensation chosen to be the thing essentially is the most constant and practically important of the lot; most often it is hardness or weight. But the hardness or weight is never without tactile bulk; and as we can always see something in our hand when we feel something there, we equate the bulk felt with the bulk seen, and thenceforward this common bulk is also apt to figure as of the essence of the 'thing.' Frequently a shape so figures, sometimes a temperature, a taste, etc.; but for the most part temperature, smell, sound, color, or whatever other phenomena may vividly impress us simultaneously with the bulk felt or seen, figure among the accidents. Smell and sound impress us, it is true, when we neither see nor touch the thing; but they are strongest when we see or touch, so we locate the _source_ of these properties within the touched or seen space, whilst the properties themselves we regard as overflowing in a weakened form into the spaces filled by other things. _In all this, it will be observed, the sense-data whose spaces coalesce into one are yielded by different sense-organs._ Such data have no tendency to displace each other from consciousness, but can be attended to together all at once. Often indeed they vary concomitantly and reach a maximum together. We may be sure, therefore, that the general rule of our mind is to locate IN _each other all_ sensations which are associated in simultaneous experience, and do not interfere with each other's perception.[183] _Different impressions on the same sense-organ_ do interfere with each other's perception, and cannot well be attended to at once. Hence _we do not locate them in each other's spaces, but arrange them in a serial order of exteriority, each alongside of the rest, in a space larger than that which any one sensation brings._ This larger space, however, is an object of conception rather than of direct intuition, and bears all the marks of being constructed piecemeal by the mind. The blind man forms it out of tactile, locomotor, and auditory experiences, the seeing man out of visual ones almost exclusively. As the visual construction is the easiest to understand, let us consider that first.
* * * * * * * * * * Every single visual sensation or 'field of view' is limited. To get a new field of view for our object the old one must disappear. But the disappearance may be only partial. Let the first field of view be A B C. If we carry our attention to the limit C, it ceases to be the limit, and becomes the centre of the field, and beyond it appear fresh parts where there were none before:[184] A B C changes, in short, to C D E. But although the parts A B are lost to sight, yet their image abides in the memory; and if we think of our first object A B C as having existed or as still existing at all, we must think of it as it was originally presented, namely, as spread out from C in one direction just as C D E is spread out in another. A B and D E can never coalesce in one place (as they could were they objects of different senses) because they can never be perceived at once: we must lose one to see the other. So (the letters standing now for 'things') we get to conceive of the successive fields of things after the analogy of the several things which we perceive in a single field. They must be out- and alongside of each other, and we conceive that their juxtaposed spaces must make a larger space. A B C + C D E must, in short, be imagined to exist in the form of A B C D E or not imagined at all.
We can usually recover anything lost from sight by moving our attention and our eyes back in its direction; and through these constant changes every field of seen things comes at last to be thought of as always having a fringe of _other things possible to be seen_ spreading in all directions round about it. Meanwhile the movements concomitantly with which the various fields alternate are also felt and remembered; and gradually (through association) this and that movement come in our thought to suggest this or that extent of fresh objects introduced. Gradually, too, since the objects vary indefinitely in kind, we abstract from their several natures and think separately of their mere extents, of which extents the various movements remain as the only constant introducers and associates. More and more, therefore, do we think of movement and seen extent as mutually involving each other, until at last (with Bain and J. S. Mill) we may get to regard them as synonymous, and say, "What is the _meaning of the word extent_, unless it be possible movement?"[185] We forget in this conclusion that (whatever intrinsic extensiveness the movements may appear endowed with), that seen spreadoutness which is the pattern of the abstract extensiveness which we imagine came to us originally from the retinal sensation.
The muscular sensations of the eyeball _signify_ this sort of visible spreadoutness, just as this visible spreadoutness may come in later experience to _signify_ the 'real' bulks, distances, lengths and breadths known to touch and locomotion.[186] To the very end, however, in us seeing men, the quality, the nature, the _sort of thing we mean_ by extensiveness, would seem to be the sort of feeling which our retinal stimulations bring.
* * * * * In one deprived of sight the principles by which the notion of real space is constructed are the same. Skin-feelings take in him the place of retinal feelings in giving the quality of lateral spreadoutness, as our attention passes from one extent of them to another, awakened by an object sliding along. Usually the moving object is our hand; and feelings of movement in our joints invariably accompany the feelings in the skin. But the feeling of the skin is what the blind man _means_ by his skin; so the size of the skin-feelings stands as the absolute or real size, and the size of the joint-feelings becomes a sign of these. Suppose, for example, a blind baby with (to make the description shorter) a blister on his toe, exploring his leg with his finger-tip and feeling a pain shoot up sharply the instant the blister is touched. The experiment gives him four different kinds of sensation--two of them protracted, two sudden. The first pair are the movement-feeling in the joints of the upper limb, and the movement-feeling on the skin of the leg and foot. These, attended to together, have their extents identified as one objective space--the hand moves through the same space in which the leg lies. The second pair of objects are the pain in the blister, and the peculiar feeling the blister gives to the finger. Their spaces also fuse; and as each marks the end of a peculiar movement-series (arm moved, leg stroked), the movement-spaces are _emphatically_ identified with each other at _that_ end. Were there other small blisters distributed down the leg, there would be a number of these emphatic points; the movement-spaces would be identified, not only as totals, but point for point.[187] Just so with spaces beyond the body's limits. Continuing the joint-feeling beyond the toe, the baby hits another object, which he can still think of when he brings his hand back to its blister again. That object at the end of that joint-feeling means a new place for him, and the more such objects multiply in his experience the wider does the space of his conception grow. If, wandering through the woods to-day by a new path, I find myself suddenly in a glade which affects my senses exactly as did another I reached last week at the end of a different walk, I believe the two identical affections to present the same persisting glade, and infer that I have attained it by two differing roads. The spaces walked over grow congruent by their extremities; though apart from the common sensation which those extremities give me, I should be under no necessity of connecting one walk with another at all. The case in no whit differs when shorter movements are concerned. If, moving first one arm and then another, the blind child gets the same kind of sensation upon the hand, and gets it again as often as he repeats either process, he judges that he has touched the same object by both motions, and concludes that the motions terminate in a common place. From place to place marked in this way he moves, and adding the places moved through, one to another, he builds up his notion of the extent of the outer world. The seeing man's process is identical; only his units, which may be successive bird's-eye views, are much larger than in the case of the blind.
FEELINGS IN JOINTS AND FEELINGS IN MUSCLES.
1. _Feelings of Movement in Joints._ I have been led to speak of feelings which arise in joints. As these feelings have been too much neglected in Psychology hitherto, in entering now somewhat minutely into their study I shall probably at the same time freshen the interest of the reader, which under the rather dry abstractions of the previous pages may presumably have flagged.
When, by simply flexing my right forefinger on its metacarpal joint, I trace with its tip an inch on the palm of my left hand, is my feeling of the size of the inch purely and simply a feeling in the skin of the palm, or have the muscular contractions of the right hand and forearm anything to do with it? In the preceding pages I have constantly assumed spatial sensibility to be an affair of surfaces. At first starting, the consideration of the 'muscular sense' as a space-measurer was postponed to a later stage. Many writers, of whom the foremost was Thomas Brown, in his _Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind_, and of whom the latest is no less a Psychologist than Prof. Delbœuf,[188] hold that the consciousness of active muscular motion, aware of its own amount, is the _fons et origo_ of all spatial measurement. It would seem to follow, if this theory were true, that two skin-feelings, one of a large patch, one of a small one, possess their difference of spatiality, not as an immediate element, but solely by virtue of the fact that the large one, to get its points _successively_ excited, demands more muscular contraction than the small one does. Fixed associations with the several amounts of muscular contraction required in this particular experience would thus explain the apparent sizes of the skin-patches, which sizes would consequently not be primitive data but derivative results.
_It seems to me that no evidence of the muscular measurements in question exists;_ but that all the facts may be explained by surface-sensibility, provided we take that of the joint-surfaces also into account.
The most striking argument, and the most obvious one, which an upholder of the muscular theory is likely to produce is undoubtedly this fact: if, with closed eyes, we trace figures in the air with the extended forefinger (the motions may occur from the metacarpal-, the wrist-, the elbow-, or the shoulder-joint indifferently), what we are _conscious of_ in each case, and indeed most acutely conscious of, is the geometric path described by the finger-tip. Its angles, its subdivisions, are all as distinctly felt as if seen by the eye; and yet the surface of the finger-tip receives no impression at all.[189] But with each variation of the figure, the muscular contractions vary, and so do the feelings which these yield. Are not these latter the sensible data that make us aware of the lengths and directions we discern in the traced line?
Should we be tempted to object to this supposition of the advocate of perception by muscular feelings, that we have _learned_ the spatial significance of these feelings by reiterated experiences of _seeing_ what figure is drawn when each special muscular grouping is felt, so that in the last resort the muscular space feelings would be derived from retinal-surface feelings, our opponent might immediately hush us by pointing to the fact that in persons born blind the phenomenon in question is even more perfect than in ourselves.
If we suggest that the blind may have originally traced the figures on the cutaneous surface of cheek, thigh, or palm, and may now remember the specific figure which each present movement formerly caused the skin-surface to perceive, he may reply that the delicacy of the motor perception far exceeds that of most of the cutaneous surfaces; that, in fact, we can feel a figure traced only in its differentials, so to speak,--a figure which we merely _start_ to trace by our finger-tip, a figure which, traced in the same way _on_ our finger-tip by the hand of another, is almost if not wholly unrecognizable.
* * * * * The champion of the muscular sense seems likely to be triumphant _until we invoke the articular cartilages_, as internal surfaces whose sensibility is called in play by every movement we make, however delicate the latter may be.
To establish the part they play in our geometrizing, it is necessary to review a few facts. It has long been known by medical practitioners that, in patients with cutaneous anæsthesia of a limb, whose muscles also are insensible to the thrill of the faradic current, a very accurate sense of the way in which the limb may be flexed or extended by the hand of another may be preserved.[190] On the other hand, we may have this sense of movement impaired when the tactile sensibility is well preserved. That the pretended feeling of outgoing innervation can play in these cases no part, is obvious from the fact that the movements by which the limb changes its position are passive ones, imprinted on it by the experimenting physician. The writers who have sought a _rationale_ of the matter have consequently been driven by way of exclusion to assume the articular surfaces to be the seat of the perception in question.[191] _That the joint-surfaces are sensitive_ appears evident from the fact that in inflammation they become the seat of excruciating pains, and from the perception by everyone who lifts weights or presses against resistance, that every increase of the force opposing him betrays itself to his consciousness principally by the starting-out of new feelings or the increase of old ones, in or about the joints. If the structure and mode of mutual application of two articular surfaces be taken into account, it will appear that, granting the surfaces to _be_ sensitive, no more favorable mechanical conditions could be possible for the delicate calling of the sensibility into play than are realized in the minutely graduated rotations and firmly resisted variations of pressure involved in every act of extension or flexion. Nevertheless it is a great pity that we have as yet no direct testimony, no expressions from patients with healthy joints accidentally laid open, of the impressions they experience when the cartilage is pressed or rubbed.
The first approach to direct evidence, so far as I know, is contained in the paper of Lewinski,[192] published in 1879. This observer had a patient the inner half of whose leg was anæsthetic. When this patient stood up, he had a curious illusion about the position of his limb, which disappeared the moment he lay down again: he thought himself _knock-kneed_. If, as Lewinski says, we assume the inner half of the joint to share the insensibility of the corresponding part of the skin, then he _ought_ to feel, when the joint-surfaces pressed against each other in the act of standing, the outer half of the joint most strongly. But this is the feeling he would also get whenever it was by any chance sought to force his leg into a knock-kneed attitude. Lewinski was led by this case to examine the feet of certain ataxic patients with imperfect sense of position. He found in every instance that when the toes were flexed _and drawn upon_ at the same time (the joint-surfaces drawn asunder) all sense of the amount of flexion disappeared. On the contrary, when he pressed a toe _in_, whilst flexing it, the patient's appreciation of the amount of flexion was much improved, evidently because the artificial increase of articular pressure made up for the pathological insensibility of the parts.
Since Lewinski's paper an important experimental research by A. Goldscheider[193] has appeared, which completely establishes our point. This patient observer caused his fingers, arms, and legs to be passively rotated upon their various joints in a mechanical apparatus which registered both the velocity of movement impressed and the amount of angular rotation. No active muscular contraction took place. The minimal felt amounts of rotation were in all cases surprisingly small, being much less than a single angular degree in all the joints except those of the fingers. Such displacements as these, the author says (p. 490), can hardly be detected by the eye. The point of application of the force which rotated the limb made no difference in the result. Rotations round the hip-joint, for example, were as delicately felt when the leg was hung by the heel as when it was hung by the thigh whilst the movements were performed. Anæsthesia of the skin produced by induction-currents also had no disturbing effect on the perception, nor did the various degrees of pressure of the moving force upon the skin affect it. It became, in fact, all the more distinct in proportion as the concomitant pressure-feelings were eliminated by artificial anæsthesia. When the joints themselves, however, were made artificially anæsthetic the perception of the movement grew obtuse and the angular rotations had to be much increased before they were perceptible. All these facts prove according to Herr Goldscheider, that _the joint surfaces and these alone are the starting point of the impressions by which the movements of our members are immediately perceived._ Applying this result, which seems invulnerable, to the case of the tracing finger-tip, we see that our perception of the latter gives no countenance to the theory of the muscular sense. _We indubitably localize the finger-tip at the successive points of its path by means of the sensations which we receive from our joints._ But if this is so, it may be asked, why do we feel the figure to be traced, not within the joint itself, but in such an altogether different place? And why do we feel it so much larger than it really is?
I will answer these questions by asking another: Why do we move our joints at all? Surely to gain something more valuable than the insipid joint-feelings themselves. And these more interesting feelings are in the main produced upon the _skin_ of the moving part, or of some other part over which it passes, or upon the eye. With movements of the fingers we explore the configuration of all real objects with which we have to deal, our own body as well as foreign things. Nothing that interests us is located in the joint; everything that interests us either _is_ some part of our skin, or is something that we see as we handle it. The cutaneously felt and the seen extents come thus to figure as the important things for us to concern ourselves with. Every time the joint moves, even though we neither see, nor feel cutaneously, the reminiscence of skin-events and sights which formerly coincided with that extent of movement, ideally awaken as the movement's import, and the mind drops the present sign to attend to the import alone. The joint-sensation itself, as such, does not disappear in the process. A little attention easily detects it, with all its fine peculiarities, hidden beneath its vaster suggestions; so that really the mind has two space-perceptions before it, congruent in form but different in scale and place, either of which exclusively it may notice, or both at once,--the joint-space which it _feels_ and the real space which it _means_.
The joint-spaces serve so admirably as signs because of their capacity for _parallel variation_ to all the peculiarities of external motion. There is not a direction in the real world nor a ratio of distance which cannot be matched by some direction or extent of joint-rotation. Joint-feelings, like all feelings, are roomy. Specific ones are contrasted _inter se_ as different directions are contrasted within the same extent. If I extend my arm straight out at the shoulder, the rotation of the shoulder-joint will give me one feeling of movement; if then I sweep the arm forward, the same joint will give me another feeling of movement. Both these movements are felt to happen in space, and differ in specific quality. Why shall not the specificness of the quality just consist in the feeling of a peculiar _direction?_[194] Why may not the several joint-feelings _be_ so many perceptions of movement in so many different directions? That we cannot explain why they _should_ is no presumption that they _do_ not, for we never can explain why any sense-organ should awaken the sensation it does.
But if the joint-feelings are directions and extents, standing in relation to each other, the task of association in interpreting their import in eye- or skin-terms is a good deal simplified. Let the movement _bc_, of a certain joint, derive its absolute space-value from the cutaneous feeling it is always capable of engendering; then the longer movement _abcd_ of the same joint will be judged to have a greater space-value, even though it may never have wholly merged with a skin-experience. So of differences of direction: so much joint-difference = so much skin-difference; therefore, more joint-difference = more skin-difference. _In fact, the joint-feeling can excellently serve as a map on a reduced scale, of a reality which the imagination can identify at its pleasure with this or that sensible extension simultaneously known in some other way._ When the joint-feeling in itself acquires an emotional interest,--which happens whenever the joint is inflamed and painful,--the secondary suggestions fail to arise, and the movement is felt where it is, and in its intrinsic scale of magnitude.[195] The localization of the joint-feeling in a space simultaneously known otherwise (i.e. to eye or skin), is what is commonly called the _extradition or eccentric projection of the feeling_. In the preceding chapter I said a good deal on this subject; but we must now see a little more closely just what happens in this instance of it. The content of the joint-feeling, to begin with, is an object, and _is_ in itself a place. For it to be _placed_, say _in the elbow_, the elbow as seen or handled must already have become another object for the mind, and with its place as thus known, the place which the joint-feeling fills must coalesce. That the latter should be felt 'in the elbow' is therefore a 'projection' of it into the place of another object as much as its being felt in the finger-tip or at the end of a cane can be. But when we say 'projection' we generally have in our mind the notion of a _there_ as contrasted with a _here_. What is the _here_ when we say that the joint-feeling is _there_? The 'here' seems to be the spot which the mind has chosen for its own post of observation, usually some place within the head, but sometimes within the throat or breast--not a rigorously fixed spot, but a region from any portion of which it may send forth its various acts of attention. Extradition from either of _these_ regions is the common law under which we perceive the whereabouts of the north star, of our own voice, of the contact of our teeth with each other, of the tip of our finger, of the point of our cane on the ground, or of a movement in our elbow-joint.
But _for the distance between the 'here' and the 'there' to be felt, the entire intervening space must be itself an object of perception._ The consciousness of this intervening space is the _sine quâ non_ of the joint-feeling's projection to the farther end of it. When it is filled by our own bodily tissues (as where the projection only goes as far as the elbow or finger-tip) we are sensible of its extent alike by our eye, by our exploring movements, and by the resident sensations which fill its length. When it reaches beyond the limits of our body, the resident sensations are lacking, but limbs and hand and eye suffice to make it known. Let me, for example, locate a feeling of motion coming from my elbow-joint in the point of my cane a yard beyond my hand. Either I see this yard as I flourish the cane, and the seen end of it then absorbs my sensation just as my seen elbow might absorb it, or I am blind and imagine the cane as an object continuing my arm, either because I have explored both arm and cane with the other hand, or because I have pressed them both along my body and leg. If I project my joint-feeling farther still, it is by a conception rather than a distinct imagination of the space. I _think_: 'farther,' 'thrice as far,' etc.; and thus get a symbolic image of a distant path at which I point.[196] But the 'absorption' of the joint-feeling by the distant spot, in whatever terms the latter may be apprehended, is never anything but that coalescence into one 'thing' already spoken of on page 184, of whatever different sensible objects interest our attention at once.