Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/512

498 G. M. STRATTON : experience would run in a much longer lapse of time ; and such indications were clearly given, it seems to me, in the gradually increasing frequency with which localisations initially discordant were accepted as identical, and in a gradual enlargement of the areas within which such equiva- lences were felt. With this tendency apparent, it seems merely a question of time when the identifications would become presistent rather than occasional, and all-embracing instead of local and limited. The experiment thus suggests that the principle stated in an earlier paper that in the end we would feel a thing to be wherever we constantly saw it can be justified in a wider sense than I then intended it to be taken. I had in mind only those conflicts of place which arise from difference of position on the retina and which come to us psychically as difference of direction in the visual field. We may now, I think, safely include differences of distance as well, and assert that the spatial coincidence of touch and sight does not require that an object in a given tactual position should appear visually in any particular direction or at any particular distance. In whatever place the tactual impression's visual counterpart regularly ap- peared, this would eventually seem the only appropriate place for it to appear in. 1 If we were always to see our bodies a hundred yards away, we would probably also feel them there. All that is necessary is perfect uniformity, so that the sight of a thing may come to be unhesitatingly and unambiguously translated into touch-experience, and vice versa. The results may therefore be considered an additional obstacle to any theory of the interconnexion of the senses which assumes that their harmony requires an identical location of their images in external space, supposing this to have some intelligible meaning. The harmony evidently can occur when a literal superposition of the different perceptions is out of the question ; so that any adequate view must provide for this astonishing disregard our minds display of absolute locality. The simplest explanation seems to me to be that a correspondence, point by point, 1 Provided, of course, that the rest of the visual experience harmonised with this ; i.e., had the same relation to the given visual impression that the mass of the tactual experience bore to the given tactual impression. I do not imagine, for instance, that there would be harmony between touch and sight if with our present somatic sensations we constantly saw our head between our feet and the ground. Here the incongruity would not be that our head appeared at that particular distance or direction in the visual field, but because the relation among objects as reported by sight did not agree with their interrelations as reported by touch.