Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/557

544 w. JAMES : from other theories of the same class, he names it a " theory of complex local signs ". " It supposes two systems of local signs, whose relations taking the eye as an example we may think as ... the measuring of the manifold local sign-system of the retina by the simple local sign-system of the move- ments. In its psychological nature this is a process of associative synthesis : it consists in the fusion of both groups of sensations into a product, whose elementary components are no longer separable from each other in idea. In melting wholly away into the product which they create they become consciously undistinguishable, and the mind apprehends only their resultant, the intuition of space. Thus there obtains a certain analogy between this psychic synthesis and that chemical synthesis which out of simple bodies generates a compound that appears to our immediate percep- tion as a homogeneous whole with new properties." Now let no modest reader think that if this sounds obscure to him it is because he does not know the full context ; and that if a wise professor like Wundt can talk so fluently and plausibly about " combination " and " psychic synthesis," it must surely be because those words convey a so much greater fulness of positive meaning to the scholarly than to the unlearned mind. Really it is quite the reverse ; all the virtue of the phrase lies in its mere sound and skin. Learn- ing does but make one the more sensible of its inward unintelligibility. Wundt's " theory " is the flimsiest thing in the world. It starts by an untrue assumption, and then corrects it by an unmeaning phrase. Retinal sensa- tions are spatial ; and were they not, no amount of " syn- thesis " with equally spaceless motor - sensations could intelligibly make them so. Wundt's theory is, in short, but an avowal of impotence, and an appeal to the inscrutable powers of the soul. 1 It confesses that we cannot analyse the constitution or give the genesis of the spatial quality in consciousness. But at the same time it says the antecedents thereof are psychical and not cerebral facts. In calling the quality in question a sensational quality, our own account equally disclaimed ability to analyse it, but said its ante- cedents were cerebral, not psychical in other words, that it was a first psychical thing. This is merely a question of probable fact, which the reader may decide. And now what shall be said of Helmholtz ? Can I find fault with a book which, on the whole, I imagine to be one of 1 Why talk of ' genetic theories ' 1 when we have in the next breath to write as' Wundt does : " If then we must regard the intuition of space as a product that simply emerges from the conditions of our mental and physical organisation, nothing need stand in the way of our designating it as one of the a priori functions with which consciousness is endowed.' Logik, ii. 460.