Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/269

A. MEINONG, Ueber die Bedeutung des Weberschen Gesetzes. 255 sented, as such, is psychical. He does not explicitly proceed, like Mr. Bradley in a subsequent article, to infer that psychical states may be extended, but this inference seems irresistible. If the presented, as such, is psychical, then every possible object of experience is psychical. This leads either to the philosophy of Berkeley, or to an unknowable thing in itself. To urge, as Herr Meinong does, that imagined space is measurable and divisible, though purely psychical, seems either irrelevant or untrue. For imagined space is as little mental as real space ; it differs from real space only in the fact that it does not exist : while the imagination of space, which does exist, is not divisible. We have an imagination of something divisible, but the imagination, which alone is mental, is not divisible. Such an argument, therefore, cannot prove the exis- tence of psychical quantities which are divisible. This question is too wide for a review, but I cannot avoid the conviction that to regard the presented as necessarily psychical must make havoc of a most fundamental distinction. The discussion of psychical measurement treats extensive and intensive psychical quantities separately. In the supposed case of the former, the author arrives at the conclusion that they are simply proportional to their stimuli. But his chief concern is with dissimilarities. Weber's Law is regarded as showing that, if r^ r 2 r s r 4 be four stimuli, and e l e% e 3 e 4 the corresponding sensa- tions, then if r x : r 2 = r 3 : r 4 , the dissimilarity of e l and e<> is equal to that of e s and e v It follows from the previous section that equal dissimilarities of sensation correspond to equal dissimilarities of stimulus. No inference is possible, in general, as to the magnitude of the (intensive) sensations themselves : Fechner's deduction of the logarithmic formula depends upon a confusion of difference and dissimilarity. The same confusion underlies the hypothesis, propped up by a so-called "law of relativity," that the relative difference of two sensations is to be substituted for the absolute difference in Fechner's deduction. The discussion ends with a criticism of J. Merkel's articles on the relation between stimulus and sensation. 1 Merkel professes to prove experimentally that the sensation midway between two given qualitatively similar sensations corresponds to the arithmetic mean of the stimuli corresponding to the given sensations. On Herr Meinong's hy- pothesis, it should correspond to the geometric mean, and he candidly confesses that his theory is incompatible with this result. But he is amply justified, I think, in holding such experiments to be inconclusive. Merkel supposed numerical measurement directly applicable to quantitative sensations, and accordingly regarded the idea of a mean sensation as perfectly definite. It must rather be held that such a discussion as Herr Meinong's is necessary before such a phrase acquires any meaning. Merkel confesses (Phil. Stud., x., p. 220) that a comparison of feelings of dissimilarity as 1 Phil. Stud., iv., v., x.