[168] M. Binet (Revue Philosophique, Sept. 1880, page 291) says we judge them locally different as soon as their sensations differ enough for us to distinguish them as qualitatively different when successively excited. This is not strictly true. Skin-sensations, different enough to be discriminated when _successive_, may still fuse locally if excited both at once.
[169] It may, however, be said that even in the tongue there is a determination of bitter flavors to the back and of acids to the front edge of the organ. Spices likewise affect its sides and front, and a taste like that of alum localizes itself, by its styptic effect on the portion of mucous membrane, which it immediately touches, more sharply than roast pork, for example, which stimulates all parts alike. The pork, therefore, tastes more spacious than the alum or the pepper. In the nose, too, certain smells, of which vinegar may be taken as the type, seem less spatially extended than heavy, suffocating odors, like musk. The reason of this appears to be that the former inhibit inspiration by their sharpness, whilst the latter are drawn into the lungs, and thus excite an objectively larger surface. The ascription of height and depth to certain notes seems due, not to any localization of the sounds, but to the fact that a feeling of vibration in the chest and tension in the gullet accompanies the singing of a bass note, whilst, when we sing high, the palatine mucous membrane is drawn upon by the muscles which move the larynx, and awakens a feeling in the roof of the mouth.
The only real objection to the law of partial stimulation laid down in the text is one that might be drawn from the organ of hearing; for, according to modern theories, the cochlea may have its separate nerve-termini exclusively excited by sounds of differing pitch, and yet the sounds seem all to fill a common space, and not necessarily to be arranged alongside of each other. At most the high note is felt as a thinner, brighter streak against a darker background. In an article on Space, published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for January, 1879, I ventured to suggest that possibly the auditory nerve termini might be "excited all at once by sounds of any pitch, as the whole retina would be by every luminous point if there were no dioptric apparatus affixed." And I added: "Notwithstanding the brilliant conjectures of the last few years which assign different acoustic end-organs to different rates of air-wave, we are still greatly in the dark about the subject; and I, for my part, would much more confidently reject a theory of hearing which violated the principles advanced in this article than give up those principles for the sake of any hypothesis hitherto published about either organs of Corti or basilar membrane." Professor Rutherford's theory of hearing, advanced at the meeting of the British Association for 1886, already furnishes an alternative view which would make hearing present no exception to the space-theory I defend and which, whether destined to be proved true or false, ought, at any rate to make us feel that the Helmholtzian theory is probably not the last word in the physiology of hearing. Stepano, ff. (Hermann und Schwalbe's Jahresbericht, xv. 404, Literature 1886) reports a case in which more than the upper half of one cochlea was lost without any such deafness to deep notes on that side as Helmholtz's theory would require.
[170] Donaldson, in Mind, x. 399, 577; Goldscheider, in Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiologie; Blix, in Zeitschrift für Biologie. A good résumé may be found in Ladd's Physiol. Psychology, part ii. chap. iv. §§ 21-23.
[171] I tried on nine or ten people, making numerous observations on each, what difference it made in the discrimination of two points to have them alike or unlike. The points chosen were (1) two large needle-heads, (2) two screw-heads, and (3) a needle-head and a screw-head. The distance of the screw-heads was measured from their centres. I found that when the points gave diverse qualities of feeling (as in 3), this facilitated the discrimination, but much less strongly than I expected. The difference, in fact, would often not be perceptible twenty times running. When, however, one of the points was endowed with a rotary movement, the other remaining still, the doubleness of the points became much more evident than before. To observe this I took an ordinary pair of compasses with one point blunt, and the movable leg replaced by a metallic rod which could, at any moment, be made to rotate _in situ_ by a dentist's drilling-machine, to which it was attached. The compass had then its points applied to the skin at such a distance apart as to be felt as one impression. Suddenly rotating the drill-apparatus then almost always made them seem as two.
[172] This is only another example of what I call 'the psychologist's fallacy'--thinking that the mind he is studying must necessarily be conscious of the object after the fashion in which the psychologist himself is conscious of it.
[173] Sitzb. der. k. Akad. Wien, Bd. lxxii., Abth. 8 (1875).
[174] Zeitschrift für Biologie, xii. 226 (1876).
[175] Vierteljahrsch. für wiss. Philos., ii. 377.
[176] Exner tries to show that the structure of the faceted eye of articulates adapts it for perceiving motions almost exclusively.
[177] Schneider tries to explain why a sensory surface is so much more excited when its impression moves. It has long since been noticed how much more acute is discrimination of successive than of simultaneous differences. But in the case of a moving impression, say on the retina, we have a summation of both sorts of difference; whereof the natural effect must be to produce the most perfect discrimination of all.
In the left-hand figure let the dark spot B move, for example, from right to left. At the outset there is the simultaneous contrast of black and white in B and A. When the motion has occurred so that the right-hand figure is produced, the same contrast remains, the black and the white having changed places. But in addition to it there is a double successive contrast, first in A, which, a moment ago white, has now become black; and second in B, which, a moment ago black, has now become white. If we make each single feeling of contrast = 1 (a supposition far too favorable to the state of rest), the sum of contrasts in the case of motion will be 3, as against 1 in the state of rest. That is, our attention will be called by a treble force to the difference of color, provided the color begin to move.--(Cf. also Fleischl, Physiologische Optische Notizen, 2te Mittheilung, Wiener Sitzungsberichte, 1882.)
[178] Brown, Bain, J. S. Mill, and in a modified manner Wundt, Helmholtz, Sully, etc.
[179] M. Ch. Dunan, in his forcibly written essay 'l'Espace Visuel et l'Espace Tactile' in the Revue Philosophique for 1888, endeavors to prove that surfaces alone give no perception of extent, by citing the way in which the blind go to work to gain an idea of an object's shape. If surfaces were the percipient organ, he says, "both the seeing and the blind ought to gain an exact idea of the size (and shape) of an object by merely laying their hand flat upon it (provided of course that it were smaller than the hand), and this because of their direct appreciation of the amount of tactile surface affected, and with no recourse to the muscular sense...But the fact is that a person born blind never proceeds in this way to measure objective surfaces. The only means which he has of getting at the size of a body is that of running his finger along the lines by which it is bounded. For instance, if you put into the hands of one born blind a book whose dimensions are unknown to him, he will begin by resting it against his chest so as to hold it horizontal; then, bringing his two hands together at the middle of the edge opposite to the one against his body, he will draw them asunder till they reach the ends of the edge in question; and then, and not till then, will he be able to say what the length of the object is" (vol. xxv. p. 148). I think that anyone who will try to appreciate the size and shape of an object by simply 'laying his hand flat upon it' will find that the great obstacle is that he _feels the contours_ so imperfectly. The moment, however, the hands move, the contours are emphatically and distinctly felt. All perception of shape and size is perception of contours, and first of all these must be made _sharp_. Motion does this; and the impulse to move our organs in perception is primarily due to the craving which we feel to get our surface-sensations sharp. When it comes to the naming and measuring of objects in terms of some common standard we shall see presently how movements help also; but no more in this case than the other do they help, because the quality of extension itself is contributed by the 'muscular sense.'
[180] Fechner describes (Psychophysik, i. 132) a 'method of equivalents' for measuring the sensibility of the skin. Two compasses are used, one on the part A, another on the part B, of the surface. The points on B must be adjusted so that their distance apart appears equal to that between the points on A. With the place A constant, the second pair of points must be varied a great deal for every change in the place B, though for the same A and B the relation of the two compasses is remarkably constant, and continues unaltered for months, provided but few experiments are made on each day. If, however, we practise daily their difference grows less, in accordance with the law given in the text.
[181] Prof. Jastrow gives as the result of his experiments this general conclusion (Am. Journal of Psychology, iii. 53): "The space-perceptions of disparate senses are themselves disparate, and whatever harmony there is amongst them we are warranted in regarding as the result of experience. The spacial notions of one deprived of the sense of sight and reduced to the use of the other space-senses must indeed be different from our own." But he continues: "The existence of the striking disparities between our visual and our other space-perceptions without confusing us, and, indeed, without usually being noticed, can only be explained by the tendency to interpret all dimensions _into their visual equivalents_." But this author gives no reasons for saying 'visual' rather than 'tactile;' and I must continue to think that probabilities point the other way so far as what we call real magnitudes are concerned.
[182] Cf. Lipps on 'Complication,' Grundtatsachen, etc., p. 579.
[183] Ventriloquism shows this very prettily. The ventriloquist talks without moving his lips, and at the same time draws our attention to a doll, a box, or some other object. We forthwith locate the voice within this object. On the stage an actor ignorant of music sometimes has to sing, or play on the guitar or violin. He goes through the _motions_ before our eyes, whilst in the orchestra or elsewhere the music is performed. But because as we listen we see the actor, it is almost impossible not to _hear_ the music as if coming from where he sits or stands.
[184] Cf. Shand, in Mind, xiii. 340.
[185] See, e.g., Bain's Senses and Intellect, pp. 366-7, 371.
[186] When, for example, a baby looks at its own moving hand, it sees one object at the same time that it feels another. Both interest its attention, and it locates them together. But the felt object's size is the more constant size, just as the felt object is, on the whole, the more interesting and important object; and so the retinal sensations become regarded as its signs and have their 'real space-values' interpreted in tangible terms.
[187] The incoherence of the different primordial sense-spaces _inter se_ is often made a pretext for denying to the primitive bodily feelings any spatial quality at all. Nothing is commoner than to hear it said: "Babies have originally no spatial perception; for when a baby's toe aches he does not place the pain in the toe. He makes no definite movements of defence, and may be vaccinated without being held." The facts are true enough; but the interpretation is all wrong. What really happens is that _the baby does not place his 'toe' in the pain_; for he knows nothing of his 'toe' as yet. He has not attended to it as a visual object; he has not handled it with his fingers; nor have its normal organic sensations or contacts yet become interesting enough to be discriminated from the whole massive feeling of the foot, or even of the leg to which it belongs. In short, the toe is neither a member of the babe's optical space, of his hand-movement space, nor an independent member of his leg-and-foot space. It has actually no mental existence yet save as this little pain-space. What wonder, then, if the pain seem a little space-world all by itself? But let the pain once associate itself with these other space-worlds, and its space will become part of their space. Let the baby feel the nurse stroking the limb and awakening the pain every time her finger passes towards the toe; let him look on and see her finger on the toe every time the pain shoots up; let him handle his foot himself and get the pain whenever the toe comes into his fingers or his mouth; let moving the leg exacerbate the pain,--and all is changed. The space of the pain becomes identified with that part of each of the other spaces which gets felt when it awakens; and by their identity with _it_ these parts are identified with each other, and grow systematically connected as members of a larger extensive whole.
[188] 'Pourquoi les Sensations visuelles sont elles étendues?' in Revue Philosophique, iv. 167.--As the proofs of this chapter are being corrected, I receive the third 'Heft' of Münsterberg's Beiträge zur Experimentellen Psychologie, in which that vigorous young psychologist reaffirms (if I understand him after so hasty a glance) more radically than ever the doctrine that muscular sensation proper is our one means of measuring extension. Unable to reopen the discussion here, I am in duty bound to call the attention of the reader to Herr M.'s work.
[189] Even if the figure be drawn on a board instead of in the air, the variations of contact on the finger's surface will be much simpler than the peculiarities of the traced figure itself.
[190] See for example Duchenne, Electrisation localisée, pp. 727, 770, Leyden; Virchow's Archiv, Bd. xlvii. (1869).
[192] 'Ueber den Kraftsinn,' Virchow's Archiv, Bd. lxxvii. 134.
[194] Direction in its 'first intention,' of course; direction with which so far we merely become _acquainted_, and _about_ which we know nothing save perhaps its difference from another direction a moment ago experienced in the same way!
[195] I have said hardly anything about associations with visual space in the foregoing account, because I wished to represent a process which the blind and the seeing man might equally share. It is to be noticed that the space suggested to the imagination when the joint moves, and projected to the distance of the finger-tip, is not represented as any _specific_ skin-tract. What the seeing man imagines is a visible path; what the blind man imagines is rather a generic image, an abstraction from many skin-spaces whose local signs have neutralized each other, and left nothing but their common vastness behind. We shall see as we go on that this generic abstraction of space-magnitude from the various local peculiarities of feeling which accompanied it when it was for the first time felt, occurs on a considerable scale in the acquired perceptions of blind as well as of seeing men.
[196] The ideal enlargement of a system of sensations by the mind is nothing exceptional. Vision is full of it; and in the manual arts, where a workman gets a tool larger than the one he is accustomed to and has suddenly to adapt all his movements to its scale, or where he has to execute a familiar set of movements in an unnatural position of body; where a piano-player meets an instrument with unusually broad or narrow keys; where a man has to alter the size of his handwriting--we see how promptly the mind multiplies once for all, as it were, the whole series of its operations by a constant factor, and has not to trouble itself after that with further adjustment of the details.
[198] Untersuchungen im Gebiete der Optik, Leipzig (1863), p. 188.
[199] Problems of Life and Mind, prob. vi. chap. iv. § 45.
[200] Volkmann, _op. cit._ p. 189. Compare also what Hering says of the inability in his own case to make after-images seem to move when he rolls his closed eyes in their sockets; and of the insignificance of his feelings of convergence for the sense of distance (Beiträge zur Physiologie, 1881-2, pp. 31, 141). Helmholtz also allows to the muscles of convergence a very feeble share in producing our sense of the third dimension (Physiologische Optik, 649-59).
[201] Compare Lipps, Psychologische Studien (1885), p. 18, and the other arguments given on pp. 12 to 27. The most plausible reasons _for_ contractions of the eyeball-muscles being admitted as original contributors to the perception of extent, are those of Wundt, Physiologische Psychologie, ii. 96-100. They are drawn from certain constant errors in our estimate of lines and angles; which, however, are susceptible, all of them, of different interpretations (see some of them further on).--Just as my MS. goes to the printer, Herr Münsterberg's Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie, Heft 2, comes into my hands with experiments on the measurement of space recorded in it, which, in the author's view, prove the feeling of muscular strain to be a principal factor in our vision of extent. As Münsterberg worked three hours a day for a year and a half at comparing the length of lines, seen with his eyes in different positions; and as he carefully averaged and 'percented' 20,000 observations, his conclusion must be listened to with great respect. Briefly it is this, that "our judgments of size depend on a comparison of the intensity of the feelings of movement which arise in our eyeball-muscles as we glance over the distance, and which fuse with the sensations of light" (p. 142). The facts upon which the conclusion is based are certain constant errors which Münsterberg found according as the standard or given interval was to the right or the left of the interval to be marked off as equal to it, or as it was above or below it, or stood in some more complicated relation still. He admits that he cannot explain all the errors in detail, and that we "stand before results which seem surprising and not to be unravelled, because we cannot analyze the elements which enter into the complex sensation which we receive." But he has no doubt whatever of the general fact "that the movements of the eyes and the sense of their position when fixed exert so decisive an influence on our estimate of the spaces seen, that the errors cannot possibly be explained by anything else than the movement-feelings and their reproductions in the memory" (pp. 166, 167). It is presumptuous to doubt a man's opinion when you haven't had his experience; and yet there are a number of points which make me feel like suspending judgment in regard to Herr M.'s _dictum_. He found, for example, a constant tendency to underestimate intervals lying to the right, and to overestimate intervals lying to the left. He ingeniously explains this as a result of the habit of _reading_, which trains us to move our eyes easily along straight lines from left to right, whereas in looking from right to left we move them in curved lines across the page. As we _measure intervals as straight lines_, it costs more muscular effort to measure from right to left than the other way, and an interval lying to the left seems to us consequently longer than it really is. Now I have been a reader for more years than Herr Münsterberg; and yet with me there is a strongly pronounced error the other way. It is the rightward-lying interval which to me seems longer than it really is. Moreover, Herr M. wears concave spectacles, and looked through them with his _head fixed_. May it not be that some of the errors were due to distortion of the retinal image, as the eye looked no longer through the centre but through the margin of the glass? In short, with all the presumptions which we have seen against muscular contraction being definitely felt as length, I think that there may be explanations of Herr M.'s results which have escaped even his sagacity; and I call for a suspension of judgment until they shall have been confirmed by other observers. I do not myself doubt that our feeling of seen extent may be _altered_ by concomitant muscular feelings. In Chapter XVII (pp. 28-30) we saw many examples of similar alterations, interferences with, or exaltations of, the sensory effect of one nerve-process by another. I do not see why currents from the muscles or eyelids, coming in at the same time with a retinal impression, might not make the latter seem bigger, in the same way that a greater _intensity_ in the retinal stimulation makes it seem bigger; or in the way that a greater extent of surface excited makes the color of the surface seem stronger, or if it be a skin-surface, makes its heat seem greater; or in the way that the coldness of the dollar on the forehead (in Weber's old experiments) made the dollar seem heavier. But this is a _physiological_ way; and the bigness gained is that of the retinal image after all. If I understand Münsterberg's meaning, it is quite different from this: the bigness belongs to the muscular feelings, as such, and is merely _associated_ with those of the retina. _This_ is what I deny.
[204] _Ibid._ p. 497. Goldscheider thinks that our muscles do not even give us the feeling of _resistance_, that being also due to the articular surfaces; whilst _weight_ is due to the tendons. _Ibid._ p. 541.
[205] "Whilst the memories which we seeing folks preserve of a man all centre round a certain exterior form composed of his image, his height, his gait, in the blind all these memories are referred to something quite different, namely, _the sound of his voice_." (Dunan, Rev. Phil., xxv. 357.)
[206] Vol. xxv. pp. 357-8.
[207] P. 135.
[208] Essay conc. Hum. Und., bk. ii. chap. ix. § 8.
[209] Philosophical Transactions, 1841. In T. K. Abbot's Sight and Touch there is a good discussion of these cases. Obviously, positive cases are of more importance than negative. An under-witted peasant, Noé M., whose case is described by Dr. Dufour of Lausanne (Guerison d'un Aveugle né; 1876) is much made of by MM. Naville and Dunan; but it seems to me only to show how little _some_ people can deal with new experiences in which others find themselves quickly at home. This man could not even tell whether one of his first objects of sight moved or stood still (p. 9).
[210] What may be the physiological process connected with this increased sensation of depth is hard to discover. It seems to have nothing to do with the parts of the retina affected, since the mere inversion of the picture (by mirrors, reflecting prisms, etc.), without inverting the head, does not seem to bring it about; nothing with sympathetic axial rotation of the eyes, which might enhance the perspective through exaggerated disparity of the two retinal images (see J. J. Müller, 'Raddrehung u. Tiefendimension,' Leipzig Acad. Berichte, 1875, page 124), for one-eyed persons get it as strongly as those with two eyes. I cannot find it to be connected with any alteration in the pupil or with any ascertainable strain in the muscles of the eye, sympathizing with those of the body. The exaggeration of distance is even greater when we throw the head over backwards and contract our superior recti in getting the view, than when we bend forward and contract the inferior recti. Making the eyes diverge slightly by weak prismatic glasses has no such effect. To me, and to all whom I have asked to repeat the observation, the result is so marked that I do not well understand how such an observer as Helmholtz, who has carefully examined vision with inverted head, can have overlooked it. (See his Phys. Optik, pp. 488, 723, 728, 772.) I cannot help thinking that anyone who can explain the exaggeration of the depth-sensation in this case will at the same time throw much light on its normal constitution.
[211] "In Froriep's Notizen (1838, July), No. 133, is to be found a detailed account, with a picture, of an Esthonian girl, Eva Lauk, then fourteen years old, born with neither arms nor legs, which concludes with the following words: 'According to the mother, her intellect developed quite as fast as that of her brother and sisters; in particular, she came as quickly to a right judgment of the size and distance of visible objects, although, of course, she had no use of hands.'" (Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille, ii. 44.)
[212] Physiol. Optik, p. 438. Helmholtz's reservation of 'qualities' is inconsistent. Our judgments of light and color vary as much as our judgments of size, shape, and place, and ought by parity of reasoning to be called intellectual products and not sensations. In other places he does treat color as if it were an intellectual product.
[213] It is needless at this point to consider what Helmholtz's views of the nature of the intellectual space-yielding process may be. He vacillates--we shall later see how.
[215] Before embarking on this new topic it will be well to shelve, once for all, the problem of what is the physiological process that underlies the distance-feeling. Since one-eyed people have it, and are inferior to the two-eyed only in measuring its gradations, it can have no exclusive connection with the double and disparate images looking at an after-image, do not usually see it draw near or recede with varying convergence, it cannot be simply constituted by the convergence-feeling. For the same reason it would appear non-identical with the feeling of accommodation. The differences of apparent parallactic movement between far and near objects as we move our head cannot constitute the distance-sensation, for such differences may be easily reproduced experimentally (in the movements of visible spots against a background) without engendering any illusion of perspective. Finally, it is obvious that visible faintness, dimness, and smallness _are_ not _per se_ the feeling of visible distance, however much in the case of well-known objects they _may_ serve as signs to suggest it.
A certain maximum distance-value, however, being given to the field of view of the moment, whatever it be, the feelings that accompany the processes just enumerated become so many _local signs_ of the gradation of distances within this maximum depth. They help us to subdivide and measure it. Itself, however, is felt as a unit, a total distance-value, determining the vastness of the whole field of view, which accordingly appears as an abyss of a certain volume. And the question still persists, what neural process is it that underlies the sense of this distance-value?
Hering, who has tried to explain the gradations within it by the interaction of certain native distance-values belonging to each point of the two retinæ, seems willing to admit that the _absolute_ scale of the space-volume within which the natively fixed relative distances shall appear is _not_ fixed, but determined each time by 'experience in the widest sense of the word' (_Beiträge_, p. 344). What he calls the _Kernpunkt_ of this space-volume is the point we are momentarily fixating. The absolute scale of the whole volume depends on the absolute distance at which this _Kernpunkt_ is judged to lie from the person of the looker. "By an alteration of the localization of the _Kernpunkt_, the _inner_ relations of the seen space are nowise altered; this space in its totality is as a fixed unit, so to speak, displaced with respect to the self of the looker" (p. 345). But what constitutes the localization of the _Kernpunkt_ itself at any given time, except 'Experience,' i.e., higher cerebral and intellectual processes, involving memory, Hering does not seek to define.
Stumpf, the other sensationalist writer who has best realized the difficulties of the problem, thinks that the primitive sensation of distance must have an immediate physical antecedent, either in the shape of "an organic alteration accompanying the process of accommodation, or else given directly in the specific energy of the optic nerve." In contrast with Hering, however, he thinks that it is the _absolute_ distance of the spot fixated which is thus primitively, immediately, and physiologically given, and not the relative distances of other things about this spot. These, he thinks, are originally seen in what, broadly speaking, may be termed one plane with it. Whether the distance of this plane, considered as a phenomenon of our primitive sensibility, be an invariable datum, or susceptible of fluctuation, he does not, if I understand him rightly, undertake dogmatically to decide, but inclines to the former view. For him then, as for Hering, higher cerebral processes of association, under the name of 'Experience,' are the authors of fully one-half part of the distance-perceptions which we at any given time may have.
Hering's and Stumpf's theories are reported for the English reader by Mr. Sully (in Mind, iii. pp. 172-6). Mr. Abbott, in his Sight and Touch (pp. 96-8), gives a theory which is to me so obscure that I only refer the reader to its place, adding that it seems to make of distance a fixed function of retinal sensation as modified by focal adjustment. Besides these three authors I am ignorant of any, except Panum, who may have attempted to define distance as in any degree an immediate sensation. And with them the direct sensational share is reduced to a very small proportional part, in our completed distance-judgments.
Professor Lipps, in his singularly acute Psychologische Studien (p. 69 ff.), argues, as Ferrier, in his review of Berkeley (Philosophical Remains, ii. 330 ff.), had argued before him, that it is _logically impossible_ we should perceive the distance of anything from the eye by sight; for a _seen_ distance can only be between _seen_ termini; and one of the termini, in the case of distance from the eye, is the eye itself, which is not seen. Similarly of the distance of two points behind each other: the near one _hides_ the far one, no space is seen between them. For the space between two objects to be _seen_, both must appear _beside_ each other, then the space in question will be _visible_. On no other condition is its visibility possible. The conclusion is that things can properly be seen only in what Lipps calls a surface, and that our knowledge of the third dimension must needs be conceptual, not sensational or visually intuitive.