Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/208

THE PEECEPTION OF SPACE. (ll.) 195 The incoherence of the different primordial sense-spaces inter se is often made a pretext for denying to the primitive bodily feelings any spatial quality at all. Nothing is com- moner than to hear it said : " Babies have originally no spatial perception ; for when a baby's toe aches it does not place the pain in the toe ". But this is all wrong. The ache is a space ; and it will be located within whatever movement- space may call it forth, or whatever pressure-space, heat- space or what not, may envelop it. What happens is, that the baby does not place his toe in the pain ; for he knows nothing of his toe as yet. He has not attended to it as a visual object ; he has not handled it with his fingers ; nor have its normal organic sensations or contacts yet become interesting enough to be discriminated from the whole massive feeling of the foot, or even of the leg to which it belongs. In short, the toe is neither a member of the babe's optical space, of his hand-movement space, nor of his leg-and-foot space. It has actually no mental existence but as this little pain-space. What wonder then if the pain seem a little space-world all by itself? 1 But let the pain once associate itself with these other space-worlds, and its space will become part of their space. Let the baby feel the nurse stroking the limb and awaken- ing the pain every time her finger passes towards the toe ; let him look on and see her finger on the toe every time the pain shoots up ; let him handle his foot himself and get the pain whenever the toe comes into his grasp ; let heating the whole foot or moving the leg exacerbate the pain ; and all is changed. The space of the pain becomes identified with that part of each of the other spaces which is being felt when it awakens ; and by their identity with it these parts are identified with each other, and their totals grow systemati- cally connected. The general principles of the baby's action in all this have now to be examined. As we found a little while ago that the different seen magnitudes are reduced to repre- vine hanging over a tree branch, the other end of it is seen to rise. And thus even in infra-human creatures a certain indeterminateness of con- nexion between visual and tactile directions of movement may be kept up. The topic is one which might repay evolutionist philosophers for more minute study. 1 Surgical operations on babies sometimes reveal an almost incredible incoherence among their earliest bodily feelings. There is lacking in them that system of pre-organised reflex " movements of defence " which in lower creatures carry the mouth or the foot straight to the Dart attacked. A baby may be vaccinated without being held.