The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)James, William
Science
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
Another reason why we get to feel as if a space-relation must be
something other than the mere feeling of a line or angle is that
between two positions we can potentially make any number of lines and
angles, or find, to suit our purposes, endlessly numerous relations.
The sense of this indefinite potentiality cleaves to our words when we
speak in a general way of 'relations of place,' and misleads us into
supposing that not even any single one of them can be exhaustively
equated by a single angle or a single line.
[158] This often happens when the warm and cold points, or the round
and pointed ones, are applied to the skin within the limits of a single
'Empfindungskreis.'
[159] Vierordt, Grundriss der Physiologie, 5te Auflage (1877), pp. 326,
436.
[160] Vorlesungen üb. Menschen- u. Thierseele (Leipzig, 1863), i. 214.
See also Ladd's Physiological Psychology, pp. 396-8, and compare the
account by G. Stanley Hall (Mind, x. 571) of the sensations produced
by moving a blunt point lightly over the skin. Points of cutting pain,
quivering, thrilling, whirling, tickling, scratching, and acceleration,
alternated with each other along the surface.
[161] Of the anatomical and physiological conditions of these facts we
know as yet but little, and that little need not here be discussed.
Two principal hypotheses have been invoked in the case of the retina.
Wundt (Menschen- u. Thierseele, i. 214) called attention to the changes
of color-sensibility which the retina displays as the image of the
colored object passes from the fovea to the periphery. The color alters
and becomes darker, and the change is more rapid in certain directions
than in others. This alteration in general, however, is one of which,
_as such_, we are wholly unconscious. We see the sky as bright blue
all over, the modifications of the blue sensation being interpreted by
us, not as differences in the objective color, but as distinctions in
its locality. Lotze (Medizinische Psychologie, 333, 355), on the other
hand, has pointed out the peculiar tendency which each particular point
of the retina has to call forth that movement of the eyeball which
will carry the image of the exciting object from the point in question
to the _fovea_. With each separate tendency to movement (as with each
actual movement) we may suppose a peculiar modification of sensibility
to be conjoined. This modification would constitute the peculiar local
tingeing of the image by each point. See also Sully's Psychology, pp.
118-121. Prof. B. Erdman has quite lately (Vierteljahrsschrift f. wiss.
Phil., x. 324-9) denied the existence of all evidence for such immanent
_qualia_ of feeling characterizing each locality. Acute as his remarks
are, they quite fail to convince me. On the skin the _qualia_ are
evident, I should say. Where, as on the retina, they are less so (Kries
and Auerbach), this may well be a mere difficulty of discrimination not
yet educated to the analysis.
[162] 1852, p. 331.
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