The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)James, William
Science
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
Take again the contractions of the muscles which make the eyeball
rotate. The feeling of these is supposed by many writers to play the
chief part in our perceptions of extent. The space seen between two
things _means_, according to these authors, nothing but the amount
of contraction which is needed to carry the _fovea_ from the first
thing to the second. But close the eyes and note the contractions in
themselves (even when coupled as they still are with the delicate
surface sensations of the eyeball rolling under the lids), and we
are surprised at finding how vague their space-import appears. Shut
the eyes and roll them, and you can with no approach to accuracy
tell the outer object which shall first be seen when you open them
again.[200] Moreover, if our eye-muscle-contractions had much to do
with giving us our sense of seen extent, we ought to have a natural
illusion of which we find no trace. Since the feeling in the muscles
grows disproportionately intense as the eyeball is rolled into an
extreme eccentric position, all places on the extreme _margin_ of
the field of view ought to appear farther from the centre than they
really are, for the fovea cannot get to them without an amount of this
feeling altogether in excess of the amount of actual rotation.[201]
When we turn to the muscles of the body at large we find the same
vagueness. Goldscheider found that the minimal perceived rotation
of a limb about a joint was no less when the movement was 'active'
or produced by muscular contraction than when it was 'passively'
impressed.[202] The consciousness of active movement became so blunt
when the joint (alone!) was made anæsthetic by faradization, that it
became evident that the feeling of contraction could never be used for
_fine_ discrimination of extents. And that it was not used for coarse
discriminations appeared clear to Goldscheider from certain other
results which are too circumstantial for me to quote in detail.[203]
His general conclusion is that we feel our movements exclusively in
our articular surfaces, and that our muscular contractions in all
probability hardly occasion this sort of perception at all.[204]
My conclusion is that the 'muscular sense' must fall back to the humble
position from which Charles Bell raised it, and no longer figure in
Psychology as the leading organ in space-perception which it has been
so long 'cracked up' to be.
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