Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/221

208 w. JAMES : ideal and uniform enlargement of a system of sensations is nothing exceptional. Vision is full of it ; and in the manual arts, where a workman gets a tool larger than the one he is accustomed to and has suddenly to adapt all his movements to its scale, or where he has to execute a familiar set of movements in an unnatural position of body; where a piaiio- player meets an instrument with unusually broad or narrow keys ; where a man has to alter the size of his handwriting, we see how promptly the mind multiplies once for all, as it were, the whole series of its operations in advance by a constant factor, and has not to trouble itself after that with further adjustment of the details. We have now to pass to the great subject of Visual Space, and in view of what is to follow may best at this stage append (in a Supplementary Note) some remarks on the peculiarities of the blind man's perception. But before closing the present section, let us look back for a moment upon the results of the last pages, and ask ourselves again whether the building up of the more systematic and orderly space-perceptions out of the more chaotic primitive ones requires any other mental powers than those displayed in ordinary intellectual operations. I think it is obvious granting the spatial quale to exist in the primitive sensa- tions, that discrimination, association, addition, multiplica- tion and division, blending into generic images, substitution of similars, selective emphasis, and abstraction from un- interesting details, are quite capable of giving us all the space-perceptions we have so far studied, without the aid of any mysterious "mental chemistry" or power of "synthesis" to create elements absent from the original data of feeling. It cannot be too strongly urged in the face of mystical attempts, however learned, that there is not a landmark, not a length, not a point of the compass in real space which is not some one of our feelings, either experienced directly as a presentation or ideally suggested 1 by another feeling which has come to serve as its sign. In degrading some sensations to the rank of signs and exalting others to that of realities signified, we smooth out the wrinkles of our first chaotic impressions and make a continuous order of what was a rather incoherent multiplicity. But the content of the order remains identical with that of the multiplicity sensational both, through and through. 1 A generic image of several space-feelings of the same sphere of sensibility may take the place of an individual image in the case of ideal -suggestion, where the latter is not of a definitely measured extension.