Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/515

THE SPATIAL HARMONY OF TOUCH AND SIGHT. 501 direction, and when you are there stretch out your hand.' The patient walks readily in the direction of the door, stops two steps short and directs his hand without much accuracy, and yet with evident purpose, off to one side of the brass handle, which he finally finds after groping around it." The groping is exactly what the view above presented would lead us to expect, and the only difficulty is in his starting off in the direction of the door as if the sight of the handle immedi- ately showed him in what direction to move. The experiment seems to have been so loosely conducted that it really gives little evidence whether vision really had much to do with the movement in this instance. The physician's sternness might account for the " facilitd" with which the poor peasant started off, and the direction of the door was gained perhaps from other than visual clues. But it must not be supposed that the temptation to ex- plain away evidence of this kind (I have given all the damaging testimony I could find 1 ) is merely because it conflicts with some pet theory. It really conflicts most of all with the weight of evidence in just such cases. Where the experiments seem to have been most critically con- ducted and reported, the results are unambiguous, and show that visually guided movements are always cautious and tentative. Franz, for instance, who seems to have been very careful and exact, and who had an unusually intelligent subject for his experiments a young gentleman with cataracts from birth obtained results exclusively of this sort. Several days after the operation the patient was shown a piece 1 Perhaps some reference ought to be made to the oft-cited testimony of Cheselden's patient (Philosophical Transactions, 1728) and, later, of Home's first patient (ibid., 1807), that the things they saw seemed to touch their eyes; which some might think implied an immediate and definite (even if we say erroneous) tactual localisation of visual impres- sions. Both of these patients were greatly distressed by the light, and this sense of distress from the watery suffusion, the muscular spasms, and the pain in the eye-ball was doubtless the same as if something were actually touching their eyes. But their naive remark need not be taken as if they were psychologists and distinguished the pure light impression from its violent organic accompaniments. The experience was largely made up of muscular and tactual and pain sensations, and the fact that these determined the localisation of the experience as a whole teaches nothing as to the relative tactual locality of different places in the visual field. Home's second patient, who suffered little, testified that things did not seem to touch his eyes, but he could not say how far off they were. The other observers, so far as I can discover, say the same or are silent on this point. I have not seen Nunnely's nor v. Francke's report, nor that of Uhthoff 's first case.