Ants and Some Other Insects: An Inquiry Into the Psychic Powers of These AnimalsForel, Auguste
Science
Ants and Some Other Insects: An Inquiry Into the Psychic Powers of These Animals
Forel, Auguste
Insects -- Biology; Psychology, Comparative
These latter conditions call up in my consciousness much more easily
certain associated visual, tactile, or auditory images (e. g., the
visual image of a violet, a table set for a meal). As ideas they are
commonly to be represented in consciousness only with considerable
difficulty, and sometimes not at all, and they are scarcely capable of
association among themselves. We readily observe, moreover, that visual
images furnish us mainly with space recollections, auditory images with
sequences in time, and tactile images with both, but less perfectly.
These are indubitable and well-known facts.
But when we seek for the wherefore of these phenomena, we find the
answer in the structure of the particular sense-organ and in its manner
of functioning.
It is well known that the eye gives us a very accurate image of the
external world on our retina. Colors and forms are there depicted in
the most delicate detail, and both the convergence of our two eyes and
their movement and accommodation gives us besides the dimensions of
depth through stereoscopic vision. Whatever may be still lacking or
disturbing is supplied by instinctive inferences acquired by practice,
both in memory and direct perception (like the lacunæ of the visual
field), or ignored (like the turbidity of the corpus vitreum). But the
basis of the visual image is given in the coördinated _tout ensemble_
of the retinal stimuli, namely the retinal image.[3] Hence, since the
retina furnishes us with such spatial projections, and these in sharp
details, or relations, definitely coöordinated with one another, the
sense of sight gives us knowledge of space. For this reason, also, and
solely on this account, we find it so easy to supply through memory by
association the missing remnant of a visual spatial image. For this
reason, too, the visual sensations are preëminently associative or
relational in space, to use Spencer’s expression. For the same reason
the insane person so readily exhibits hallucinations of complicated
spatial images in the visual sphere. This would be impossible in the
case of the olfactory sense.
[3] It is well known that in this matter the movements of the eyes, the
movements of the body and of external objects play an essential part,
so that without these the eye would fail to give us any knowledge of
space. But I need not discuss this further, since the antennæ of ants
are at least quite as moveable and their olfactory sense is even more
easily educated in unison with the tactile sense.
Similarly, the organ of Corti in the ear gives us tone or sound scales
in accurate time-sequence, and hence also associations of sequence much
more perfectly than the other senses. Its associations are thus in the
main associations of sequence, because the end-apparatus registers
time-sequences in time-intervals and not as space images.
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