Psychology: Briefer Course

The Part played by the Intellect in Space-perception.—But although Berkeley was wrong in his assertion that out of optical experience alone no perception of distance can be evolved, he gave a great impetus to psychology by showing how originally incoherent and incommensurable in respect of their extensiveness our different sensations are, and how our actually so rapid space-perceptions are almost altogether acquired by education. Touch-space is one world; sight-space is another world. The two worlds have no essential or intrinsic congruence, and only through the 'association of ideas' do we know what a seen object signifies in terms of touch. Persons with congenital cataracts relieved by surgical aid, whose world until the operation has been a world of tangibles exclusively, are ludicrously unable at first to name any of the objects which newly fall upon their eye. "It might very well be a horse," said the latest patient of this sort of whom we have an account, when a 10-litre bottle was held up a foot from his face.[45] Neither do such patients have any accurate notion in motor terms of the relative distances of things from their eyes. All such confusions very quickly disappear with practice, and the novel optical sensations translate themselves into the familiar language of touch. The facts do not prove in the least that the optical sensations are not spatial, but only that it needs a subtler sense for analogy than most people have, to discern the same spatial aspects and relations in them which previously-known tactile and motor experiences have yielded.

Conclusion.—To sum up, the whole history of space-perception is explicable if we admit on the one hand sensations with certain amounts of extensity native to them, and on the other the ordinary powers of discrimination, selection, and association in the mind's dealings with them. The fluctuating import of many of our optical sensations, the same sensation being so ambiguous as regards size, shape, locality, and the like, has led many to believe that such attributes as these could not possibly be the result of sensation at all, but must come from some higher power of intuition, synthesis, or whatever it might be called. But the fact that a present sensation can at any time become the sign of a represented one judged to be more real, sufficiently accounts for all the phenomena without the need of supposing that the quality of extensity is created out of non-extensive experiences by a super-sensational faculty of the mind.