The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)James, William
Science
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
So far, all we have established or sought to establish is the existence
of the vague form or _quale_ of spatiality as an inseparable element
bound up with the other peculiarities of each and every one of our
sensations. The numerous examples we have adduced of the variations of
this extensive element have only been meant to make clear its strictly
sensational character. In very few of them will the reader have been
able to explain the variation by an added intellectual element, such as
the suggestion of a recollected experience. In almost all it has seemed
to be the immediate psychic effect of a peculiar sort of nerve-process
excited; and all the nerve-processes in question agree in yielding
what space they do yield, to the mind, in the shape of a simple total
vastness, in which, _primitively_ at least, no _order of parts_ or of
_subdivisions_ reigns.
Let no one be surprised at this notion of a space without order. There
may be a space without order just as there may be an order without
space.[154] And the primitive perceptions of space are certainly of an
unordered kind. The order which the spaces first perceived potentially
include must, before being distinctly apprehended by the mind, be woven
into those spaces by a rather complicated set of intellectual acts. The
primordial largenesses which the sensations yield must be _measured and
subdivided_ by consciousness, and _added_ together, before they can
form by their synthesis what we know as the real Space of the objective
world. In these operations, imagination, association, attention, and
selection play a decisive part; and although they nowhere add any new
material to the space-data of sense, they so shuffle and manipulate
these data and hide present ones behind imagined ones that it is no
wonder if some authors have gone so far as to think that the sense-data
have no spatial worth at all, and that the intellect, since it makes
the subdivisions, also gives the spatial quality to them out of
resources of its own.
* * * * *
As for ourselves, having found that all our sensations (however as
yet unconnected and undiscriminated) are of extensive objects, _our
next problem, is: How do we_ ARRANGE _these at first chaotically given
spaces into the one regular and orderly 'world of space' which we now
know?_
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