The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)James, William
Science
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
Lipps, and almost all the anti-sensationalist theorists except
Helmholtz, seem guilty of that confusion which Mr. Shadworth Hodgson
has done so much to clear away, viz., the confounding the analysis
of an idea with the means of its production. Lipps, for example,
finds that every space we think of can be broken up into positions,
and concludes that in some undefined way the several positions must
have pre-existed in thought before the aggregate space could have
appeared to perception. Similarly Mr. Spencer, defining extension as an
'aggregate of relations of coexistent position,' says "every cognition
of magnitude is a cognition of relations of position,"[281] and "no
idea of extension can arise from the simultaneous excitation" of many
nerves "unless there is a knowledge of their relative positions."[282]
Just so Prof. Bain insists that the very _meaning_ of space is scope
for movement,[283] and that therefore distance and magnitude _can_ be
no original attributes of the eye's sensibility. Similarly because
movement is analyzable into positions occupied at successive moments
by the mover, philosophers (e.g. Schopenhauer, as quoted above)
have repeatedly denied the possibility of _its_ being an immediate
sensation. We have, however, seen that it is the most immediate of all
our space-sensations. Because it can only occur in a definite direction
the impossibility of perceiving it without perceiving its direction has
been decreed--a decree which the simplest experiment overthrows.[284]
It is a case of what I have called the 'psychologist's fallacy':
mere acquaintance with space is treated as tantamount to every sort
of knowledge about it, the conditions of the latter are demanded of
the former state of mind, and all sorts of mythological processes
are brought in to help.[285] As well might one say that because the
world consists of all its parts, therefore we can only apprehend it
at all by having unconsciously summed these up in our head. It is the
old idea of our actual knowledge being drawn out from a pre-existent
potentiality, an idea which, whatever worth it may metaphysically
possess, does no good in psychology.
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