apprehensions, functions as a fundamental physical qualification of
things in Spencer's 'law of evolution,' and doubtless passes with most
readers for all right.
Psychologists, studying our perceptions of movement, have unearthed
experiences in which movement is felt in general but not ascribed
correctly to the body that really moves. Thus in optical vertigo, caused
by unconscious movements of our eyes, both we and the external universe
appear to be in a whirl. When clouds float by the moon, it is as if both
clouds and moon and we ourselves shared in the motion. In the
extraordinary case of amnesia of the Rev. Mr. Hanna, published by Sidis
and Goodhart in their important work on _Multiple Personality_, we read
that when the patient first recovered consciousness and "noticed an
attendant walk across the room, he identified the movement with that of
his own. He did not yet discriminate between his own movements and those
outside himself."[79] Such experiences point to a primitive stage of
perception in which discriminations afterwards needful have not yet been
made. A piece of experience of a determinate sort is there, but there at
first as a 'pure' fact. Motion originally simply _is_; only later is it
confined to this thing or to that. Something like this is true of every
experience, however complex, at the moment of its actual presence. Let
the reader arrest himself in the act of reading this article now. _Now_
this is a pure experience, a phenomenon, or datum, a mere _that_ or
content of fact. _'Reading' simply is, is there_; and whether there for
some one's consciousness, or there for physical nature, is a question
not yet put. At the moment, it is there for neither; later we shall
probably judge it to have been there for both.
With the affectional experiences which we are considering, the
relatively 'pure' condition lasts. In practical life no urgent need has
yet arisen for deciding whether to treat them as rigorously mental or as
rigorously physical facts. So they remain equivocal; and, as the world
goes, their equivocality is one of their great conveniences.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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