THE SPATIAL HARMONY OF TOUCH AND SIGHT. 503 mutual direction and locality, but this meant nothing for the child, because they formed an isolated system, out of all connexion with the rest of his experience. Time and train- ing were necessary, then, not to develop this purely visual arrangement or direction, but to make it signify something in regard to the other sensory fields, and permit a translation of its various localities into muscular and tactual terms. The motor bewilderment of the recently blind, when attempting to guide their acts visually, thus becomes quite intelligible from the point of view already suggested by the results with the inverting lenses and with the mirrors. So that I cannot feel that the observations on these persons, when we consider the reports as a whole, rather than occasional statements in them, are really opposed to the view presented. Inasmuch as they offer additional facts which are exactly what that view would lead us to expect, they might even be regarded as favouring my own explanation to a certain extent. But some might admit that in our developed and normal consciousness touch and sight severally give us a sense of locality, and that the tactual positions become connected with the visual only by observing simultaneous changes in the two senses, and that any visual place could consequently be identified with any tactual place whatever under a suitable sequence of impressions, and yet they would perhaps hesitate to say that the two forms of localisation were not ultimately reducible to one. The experiments on persons like myself, who have seen and touched for years, they would hold, teach nothing as to the sources of the spatial arrangement, as to whether it comes originally from touch alone, or from sight alone, or from both independently. I would of course readily acknowledge that the experi- ments offer nothing decisive of this underlying question. The mere fact that the explanation of my own experiences would also account for the motor confusion of persons suddenly attaining sight is no proof that their confusion really is due to the conditions set forth in this explanation. Their behaviour could arise from other circumstances from a want of original spatial character in sight, as Berkeley and others have supposed, or from a lack of this character in touch, as many persons in daily intercourse with the blind believe. 1 But while experiments on a person long accustomed to both sight and touch give nothing conclusive on this question of 1 See, for instance, Dunan : " L'espace visuel et 1'espace tactile. Obser- vations sur des aveugles," Revue philosophique, xxv., 357 et seq.
Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/517
This page needs to be proofread.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikisource/en/thumb/d/d0/Mind_%28New_Series%29_Volume_8.djvu/page517-1024px-Mind_%28New_Series%29_Volume_8.djvu.jpg)