The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)James, William
Science
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
How lax the connection between the system of visual and the system
of tactile directions is in man, appears from the facility with
which microscopists learn to reverse the movements of their hand in
manipulating things on the stage of the instrument. To move the slide
to the _seen_ left they must draw it to the _felt_ right. But in a very
few days the habit becomes a second nature. So in tying our cravat,
shaving before a mirror, etc., the right and left sides are inverted,
and the directions of our hand movements are the opposite of what they
seem. Yet this never annoys us. Only when by accident we try to tie
the cravat of another person do we learn that there are two ways of
combining sight and touch perceptions. Let any one try for the first
time to write or draw while looking at the image of his hand and paper
in a mirror, and he will be utterly bewildered. But a very short
training will teach him to undo in this respect the associations of his
previous lifetime.
Prisms show this in an even more striking way. If the eyes be armed
with spectacles containing slightly prismatic glasses with their bases
turned, for example, towards the right, every object looked at will be
apparently translocated to the left; and the hand put forth to grasp
any such object will make the mistake of passing beyond it on the left
side. But less than an hour of practice in wearing such spectacles
rectifies the judgment so that no more mistakes are made. In fact the
new-formed associations are already so strong, that when the prisms are
first laid aside again the opposite error is committed, the habits of a
lifetime violated, and the hand now passed to the right of every object
which it seeks to touch.
The primitive chaos thus subsists to a great degree through life so
far as our immediate sensibility goes. We feel our various objects
and their bignesses, together or in succession; but so soon as it
is a question of the order and relations of many of them at once
our intuitive apprehension remains to the very end most vague and
incomplete. Whilst we are attending to one, or at most to two or
three objects, all the others _lapse_, and the most we feel of them
is that they still linger on the outskirts and can be caught again by
turning in a certain way. Nevertheless _throughout all this confusion
we conceive of a world spread out in a perfectly fixed and orderly
fashion, and we believe in its existence. The question is: How do
this conception and this belief arise? How is the chaos smoothed and
straightened out?_
* * * * *
Mainly by two operations: Some of the experiences are apprehended to
exist out- and alongside of each other, and others are apprehended
to interpenetrate each other, and to occupy the same room. In this
way what was incoherent and irrelative ends by being coherent and
definitely related; nor is it hard to trace the principles, by which
the mind is guided in this arrangement of its perceptions, in detail.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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