The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)

[140] Reprinted, with considerable revision, from 'Mind' for 1887.

[141] Prof. Jastrow has found that invariably we tend to underestimate the amount of our skin which may be stimulated by contact with an object when we express it in terms of visual space; that is, when asked to mark on paper the extent of skin affected, we always draw it much too small. This shows that the eye gets as much space feeling from the smaller line as the skin gets from the larger one. Cf. Jastrow: Mind, xi. 546-7; American Journal of Psychology, iii. 53.

[142] Amongst sounds the graver ones seem the most extensive. Stumpf gives three reasons for this: 1) association with bigger causes; 2) wider reverberation of the hand and body when grave notes are sung; 3) audibility at a greater distance. He thinks that these three reasons dispense us from supposing an immanent extensity in the sensation of sound as such. See his remarks in the Tonpsychologie, i. 207-211.

[143] Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th Edition, article Psychology, pp. 46, 58.

[144] Philosophical Transactions (1841).

[145] Hermann's Handb. d. Physiol., Bd. iii. 1, §. 575.

[146]Loc. cit. §. 572.

[147] Elemente der Psychophysik, ii. 475-6.

[148] See Foster's Text-book of Physiology, bk. iii. c. vi. § 2.

[149] Fechner, who was ignorant of the but lately discovered function of the semi-circular canals, gives a different explanation of the organic seat of these feelings. They are probably highly composite. With me, actual movements in the eyes play a considerable part in them, though I am hardly conscious of the peculiar feelings in the scalp which Fechner goes on to describe thus: "The feeling of strained attention in the different sense-organs seems to be only a muscular one produced in using these various organs by setting in motion, by a sort of reflex action, the set of muscles which belong to them. One can ask, then, with what particular muscular contraction the sense of strained attention in the effort to recall something is associated? On this question my own feeling gives me a decided answer; it comes to me distinctly not as a sensation of tension in the inside of the head, but as a feeling of strain and contraction in the scalp, with a pressure from outwards in over the whole cranium, undoubtedly caused by a contraction of the muscles of the scalp. This harmonizes very well with the expressions, sich den Kopf zerbrechen, den Kopf zusammennehmen. In a former illness, when I could not endure the slightest effort after continuous thought, and had no theoretical bias on this question, the muscles of the scalp, especially those of the back-head, assumed a fairly morbid degree of sensibility whenever I tried to think." (Elem. der Psychophysik, ii, 490-91.)

[150] That the sensation in question is one of tactile rather than of acoustic sensibility would seem proved by the fact that a medical friend of the writer, both of whose membranæ tympani are quite normal, but one of whose ears is almost totally deaf, feels the presence and withdrawal of objects as well at one ear as at the other.

[151] The skin seems to obey a different law from the eye here. If a given retinal tract be excited, first by a series of points, and next by the two extreme points, with the interval between them unexcited, this interval will seem considerably less in the second case than it seemed in the first. In the skin the unexcited interval feels the larger. The reader may easily verify the facts in this case by taking a visiting-card, cutting one edge of it into a saw-tooth pattern, and from the opposite edge cutting out all but the two corners, and then comparing the feelings aroused by the two edges when held against the skin.

[152] Classen, Physiologie des Gesichtssinnes, p. 114; see also A. Riehl, Der Philosophische Kriticismus, ii. p. 149.

[153] It is worth while at this point to call attention with some emphasis to the fact that, though the anatomical condition of the feeling resembles the feeling itself, such resemblance cannot be taken by our understanding to explain why the feeling should be just what it is. We hear it untiringly reiterated by materialists and spiritualists alike that we can see no possible inward reason why a certain brain-process should produce the feeling of redness and another of anger: the one process is no more red than the other is angry, and the coupling of process and feeling is, as far as our understanding goes, a juxtaposition pure and simple. But in the matter of spatial feeling, where the retinal patch that produces a triangle in the mind is itself a triangle, etc., it looks at first sight as if the sensation might be a direct cognition of its own neural condition. Were this true, however, our sensation should be one of multitude rather than of continuous extent; for the condition is number of optical nerve-termini, and even this is only a remote condition and not an immediate condition. The immediate condition of the feeling is not the process in the retina, but the process in the brain; and the process in the brain may, for aught we know, be as unlike a triangle,—nay, it probably is so,—as it is unlike redness or rage.

It is simply a coincidence that in the case of space one of the organic conditions, viz., the triangle impressed on the skin or the retina, should lead to a representation in the mind of the subject observed similar to that which it produces in the psychological observer. In no other kind of case is the coincidence found. Even should we admit that we cognize triangles in space because of our immediate cognition of the triangular shape of our excited group of nerve-tips, the matter would hardly be more transparent, for the mystery would still remain, why are we so much better cognizant of triangles on our finger-tips than on the nerve-tips of our back, on our eye than on our ear, and on any of these parts than in our brain? Thos. Brown very rightly rejects the notion of explaining the shape of the space perceived by the shape of the 'nervous expansion affected.' "If this alone were necessary, we should have square inches and half inches, and various other forms, rectilinear and curvilinear, of fragrance and sound." (Lectures, XXII.)

[154] Musical tones, e.g., have an order of quality independent either of their space- or time-order. Music comes from the time-order of the notes upsetting their quality-order. In general, if a b c d e f g h i j k, etc., stand for an arrangement of feelings in the order of their quality, they may assume any space-order or time-order, as d e f a h g, etc., and still the order of quality will remain fixed and unchanged.

[155] The whole science of geometry may be said to owe its being to the exorbitant interest which the human mind takes in lines. We cut space up in every direction in order to manufacture them.

[156] Kant was, I believe, the first to call attention to this last order of facts. After pointing out that two opposite spherical triangles, two gloves of a pair, two spirals wound in contrary directions, have identical inward determinations, that is, have their parts defined with relation to each other by the same law, and so must be conceived as identical, he showed that the impossibility of their mutual superposition obliges us to assign to each figure of a symmetrical pair a peculiar difference of its own which can only consist in an outward determination or relation of its parts, no longer to each other, but to the whole of an objectively outlying space with its points of the compass given absolutely. This inconceivable difference is perceived only "through the relation to right and left, which is a matter of immediate intuition." In these last words (welches unmittelbar auf Anschauung geht—Prolegomena, § 12) Kant expresses all that we have meant by speaking of up and down, right and left, as sensations. He is wrong, however, in invoking relation to extrinsic total space as essential to the existence of these contrasts in figures. Relation to our own body is enough.

[157] In the eyes of many it will have seemed strange to call a relation a mere line, and a line a mere sensation. We may easily learn a great deal about any relation, say that between two points: we may divide the line which joins these, and distinguish it, and classify it, and find out its relations by drawing or representing new lines, and so on. But all this further industry has naught to do with our acquaintance with the relation itself, in its first intention. So cognized, the relation is the line and nothing more. It would indeed be fair to call it something less; and in fact it is easy to understand how most of us come to feel as if the line were a much grosser thing than the relation. The line is broad or narrow, blue or red, made by this object or by that alternately, in the course of our experience; it is therefore independent of any one of these accidents; and so, from viewing it as no one of such sensible qualities, we may end by thinking of it as something which cannot be defined except as the negation of all sensible quality whatever, and which needs to be put into the sensations by a mysterious act of 'relating thought.'

Another reason why we get to feel as if a space-relation must be something other than the mere feeling of a line or angle is that between two positions we can potentially make any number of lines and angles, or find, to suit our purposes, endlessly numerous relations. The sense of this indefinite potentiality cleaves to our words when we speak in a general way of 'relations of place,' and misleads us into supposing that not even any single one of them can be exhaustively equated by a single angle or a single line.

[158] This often happens when the warm and cold points, or the round and pointed ones, are applied to the skin within the limits of a single 'Empfindungskreis.'

[159] Vierordt, Grundriss der Physiologie, 5te Auflage (1877), pp. 326, 436.

[160] Vorlesungen üb. Menschen- u. Thierseele (Leipzig, 1863), i. 214. See also Ladd's Physiological Psychology, pp. 396-8, and compare the account by G. Stanley Hall (Mind, x. 571) of the sensations produced by moving a blunt point lightly over the skin. Points of cutting pain, quivering, thrilling, whirling, tickling, scratching, and acceleration, alternated with each other along the surface.

[161] Of the anatomical and physiological conditions of these facts we know as yet but little, and that little need not here be discussed. Two principal hypotheses have been invoked in the case of the retina. Wundt (Menschen- u. Thierseele, i. 214) called attention to the changes of color-sensibility which the retina displays as the image of the colored object passes from the fovea to the periphery. The color alters and becomes darker, and the change is more rapid in certain directions than in others. This alteration in general, however, is one of which, as such, we are wholly unconscious. We see the sky as bright blue all over, the modifications of the blue sensation being interpreted by us, not as differences in the objective color, but as distinctions in its locality. Lotze (Medizinische Psychologie, 333, 355), on the other hand, has pointed out the peculiar tendency which each particular point of the retina has to call forth that movement of the eyeball which will carry the image of the exciting object from the point in question to the fovea. With each separate tendency to movement (as with each actual movement) we may suppose a peculiar modification of sensibility to be conjoined. This modification would constitute the peculiar local tingeing of the image by each point. See also Sully's Psychology, pp. 118-121. Prof. B. Erdman has quite lately (Vierteljahrsschrift f. wiss. Phil., x. 324-9) denied the existence of all evidence for such immanent qualia of feeling characterizing each locality. Acute as his remarks are, they quite fail to convince me.

On the skin the qualia are evident, I should say. Where, as on the retina, they are less so (Kries and Auerbach), this may well be a mere difficulty of discrimination not yet educated to the analysis.

[162] 1852, p. 331.

[163] Maybe the localization of intracranial pain is itself due to such association as this of local signs with each other, rather than to their qualitative similarity in neighboring parts (supra, p. 19); though it is conceivable that association and similarity itself should here have one and the same neural basis. If we suppose the sensory nerves from those parts of the body beneath any patch of skin to terminate in the same sensorial brain-tract as those from the skin itself, and if the excitement of any one fibre tends to irradiate through the whole of that tract, the feelings of all fibres going to that tract would presumably both have a similar intrinsic quality, and at the same time tend each to arouse the other. Since the same nerve-trunk in most cases supplies the skin and the parts beneath, the anatomical hypothesis presents nothing improbable.

[164] Unless, indeed, the foot happen to be spontaneously tingling or something of the sort at the moment. The whole surface of the body is always in a state of semi-conscious irritation which needs only the emphasis of attention, or of some accidental inward irritation, to become strong at any point.

[165] It is true that the inside of the forearm, though its discriminative sensibility is often less than that of the outside, usually rises very prominently into consciousness when the latter is touched. Its æsthetic sensibility to contact is a good deal finer. We enjoy stroking it from the extensor to the flexor surface around the ulnar side more than in the reverse direction. Pronating movements give rise to contacts in this order, and are frequently indulged in when the back of the forearm feels an object against it.

[166] These facts were first noticed by Wundt: see his Beiträge, p. 140, 202. See also Lamansky, Pflüger's Archiv, xi. 418.

[167] So far all has been plain sailing, but our course begins to be so tortuous when we descend into minuter detail that I will treat of the more precise determination of locality in a long note. When P recalls an ideal line leading to the fovea the line is felt in its entirety and but vaguely; whilst P, which we supposed to be a single star of actual light, stands out in strong distinction from it. The ground of the distinction between P and the ideal line which it terminates is manifest—P being vivid while the line is faint; but why should P hold the particular position it does, at the end of the line, rather than anywhere else—for example, in its middle? That seems something not at all manifest.

To clear up our thoughts about this latter mystery, let us take the case of an actual line of light, none of whose parts is ideal. The feeling of the line is produced, as we know, when a multitude of retinal points are excited together, each of which when excited separately would give rise to one of the feelings called local signs. Each of these signs is the feeling of a small space. From their simultaneous arousal we might well suppose a feeling of larger space to result. But why is it necessary that in this larger spaciousness the sign a should appear always at one end of the line, z at the other, and m in the middle? For though the line be a unitary streak of light, its several constituent points can nevertheless break out from it, and become alive, each for itself, under the selective eye of attention.

The uncritical reader, giving his first careless glance at the subject, will say that there is no mystery in this, and that 'of course' local signs must appear alongside of each other, each in its own place;—there is no other way possible. But the more philosophic student, whose business it is to discover difficulties quite as much as to get rid of them, will reflect that it is conceivable that the partial factors might fuse into a larger space, and yet not each be located within it any more than a voice is located in a chorus. He will wonder how, after combining into the line, the points can become severally alive again: the separate puffs of a 'sirene' no longer strike the ear after they have fused into a certain pitch of sound. He will recall the fact that when, after looking at things with one eye closed, we double, by opening the other eye, the number of retinal points affected, the new retinal sensations do not as a rule appear alongside of the old ones and additional to them, but merely make the old ones seem larger and nearer. Why should the affection of new points on the same retina have so different a result? In fact, he will see no sort of logical connection between (1) the original separate local signs, (2) the line as a unit, (3) the line with the points discriminated in it, and (4) the various nerve-processes which subserve all these different things. He will suspect our local sign of being a very slippery and ambiguous sort of creature.

Positionless at first, it no sooner appears in the midst of a gang of companions than it is found maintaining the strictest position of its own, and assigning place to each of its associates. How is this possible? Must we accept what we rejected a while ago as absurd, and admit the points each to have position in se? Or must we suspect that our whole construction has been fallacious, and that we have tried to conjure up, out of association, qualities which the associates never contained?

There is no doubt a real difficulty here; and the shortest way of dealing with it would be to confess it insoluble and ultimate. Even if position be not an intrinsic character of any one of those sensations we have called local signs, we must still admit that there is something about every one of them that stands for the potentiality of position, and is the ground why the local sign, when it gets placed at all, gets placed here rather than there. If this 'something' be interpreted as a physiological something, as a mere nerve-process, it is easy to say in a blank way that when it is excited alone, it is an 'ultimate fact' (1) that a positionless spot will appear; that when it is excited together with other similar processes, but without the process of discriminative attention, it is another 'ultimate fact' (2) that a unitary line will come; and that the final 'ultimate fact' (3) is that, when the nerve-process is excited in combination with that other process which subserves the feeling of attention, what results will be the line with the local sign inside of it determined to a particular place. Thus we should escape the responsibility of explaining, by falling back on the everlasting inscrutability of the psycho-neural nexus. The moment we call the ground of localization physiological, we need only point out how, in those cases in which localization occurs, the physiological process differs from those in which it does not, to have done all we can possibly do in the matter.

This would be unexceptionable logic, and with it we might let the matter drop, satisfied that there was no self-contradiction in it, but only the universal psychological puzzle of how a new mode of consciousness emerges whenever a fundamentally new mode of nervous action occurs.

But, blameless as such tactics would logically be on our part, let us see whether we cannot push our theoretic insight a little farther. It seems to me we can. We cannot, it is true, give a reason why the line we feel when process (2) awakens should have its own peculiar shape; nor can we explain the essence of the process of discriminative attention. But we can see why, if the brute facts be admitted that a line may have one of its parts singled out by attention at all, and that that part may appear in relation to other parts at all, the relation must be in the line itself,—for the line and the parts are the only things supposed to be in consciousness. And we can furthermore suggest a reason why parts appearing thus in relation to each other in a line should fall into an immutable order, and each within that order keep its characteristic place.

If a lot of such local signs all have any quality which evenly augments as we pass from one to the other, we can arrange them in an ideal serial order, in which any one local sign must lie below those with more, above those with less, of the quality in question. It must divide the series into two parts,—unless indeed it have a maximum or minimum of the quality, when it either begins or ends it.

Such an ideal series of local signs in the mind is, however, not yet identical with the feeling of a line in space. Touch a dozen points on the skin successively, and there seems no necessary reason why the notion of a definite line should emerge, even though we be strongly aware of a gradation of quality among the touches. We may of course symbolically arrange them in a line in our thought, but we can always distinguish between a line symbolically thought and a line directly felt.

But note now the peculiarity of the nerve-processes of all these local signs: though they may give no line when excited successively, when excited together they do give the actual sensation of a line in space. The sum of them is the neural process of that line; the sum of their feelings is the feeling of that line; and if we begin to single out particular points from the line, and notice them by their rank, it is impossible to see how this rank can appear except as an actual fixed space-position sensibly felt as a bit of the total line. The scale itself appearing as a line, rank in it must appear as a definite part of the line. If the seven notes of an octave, when heard together, appeared to the sense of hearing as an outspread line of sound—which it is needless to say they do not—why then no one note could be discriminated without being localized, according to its pitch, in the line, either as one of its extremities or as some part between.