The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)James, William
Science
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
so he can only say that the objects are 'touching it.'
"All his language, borrowed from touch, but applied to the objects
of his sight, make us think that he perceives differently from
ourselves, whereas, at bottom, it is only his different way of
talking about the same experience."[45]
The other cases of translocation of our sensations are equally easily
interpreted without supposing any 'projection' from a centre at which
they are originally perceived. Unfortunately the details are intricate;
and what I say now can only be made fully clear when we come to the
next chapter. We shall then see that we are constantly selecting
certain of our sensations as _realities_ and degrading others to the
status of _signs_ of these. When we get one of the signs we think of
the reality signified; and the strange thing is that then the reality
(which need not be itself a sensation at all at the time, but only an
idea) is so interesting that it acquires an hallucinatory strength,
which may even eclipse that of the relatively uninteresting sign and
entirely divert our attention from the latter. Thus the sensations to
which our joints give rise when they rotate are signs of what, through
a large number of other sensations, tactile and optical, we have come
to know as the movement of the whole limb. This movement of the whole
limb is what we _think of_ when the joint's nerves are excited in
that way; and _its_ place is so much more important than the joint's
place that our sense of the latter is taken up, so to speak, into our
perception of the former, and the sensation of the movement seems to
diffuse itself into our very fingers and toes. But by abstracting our
attention from the suggestion of the entire extremity we can perfectly
well perceive the same sensation as if it were concentrated in one
spot. We can identify it with a differently located tactile and visual
image of 'the joint' itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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