The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)James, William
Science
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
_Confining ourselves to the problem of locality_ for the present,
let us begin with the simple case of a sensitive surface, only two
points of which receive stimulation from without. How, first, are
these two points felt as alongside of each other with an interval of
space between them? We must be conscious of two things for this: of
the duality of the excited points, and of the extensiveness of the
unexcited interval. The duality alone, although a necessary, is not a
sufficient condition of the spatial separation. We may, for instance,
discern two sounds in the same place, sweet and sour in the same
lemonade, warm and cold, round and pointed contact in the same place
on the skin, etc.[158] In all discrimination the recognition of the
duality of two feelings by the mind is the easier the more strongly the
feelings are contrasted in quality. If our two excited points awaken
identical qualities of sensation, they must, perforce, appear to the
mind as one; and, not distinguished at all, they are, _a fortiori_, not
localized apart. Spots four centimetres distant on the back have no
qualitative contrast at all, and fuse into a single sensation. Points
less than three thousandths of a millimetre apart awaken on the retina
sensations so contrasted that we apprehend them immediately as two. Now
these unlikenesses which arise so slowly when we pass from one point to
another in the back, so much faster on the tongue and finger-tips, but
with such inconceivable rapidity on the retina, what are they? Can we
discover anything about their intrinsic nature?
The most natural and immediate answer to make is that they are
unlikeness of _place_ pure and simple. In the words of a German
physiologist,[159] to whom psychophysics owes much:
"The sensations are from the outset (_von vornherein_) localized....
Every sensation as such is from the very beginning affected with the
spatial quality, so that this quality is nothing like an external
attribute coming to the sensation from a higher faculty, but must be
regarded as something immanently residing in the sensation itself."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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