Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/560

THE PEECEPTION OF SPACE. (iV.) 547 appear, this must be accounted a " fact," due merely " to the nature of the soul ". 1 Lipps, and almost all the anti-sensationalist theorists except Helmholtz, seem guilty of that confusion which Mr. Shad worth Hodgson has done so much to clear away, viz., the confounding the analysis of an idea with the means of its production. Lipps, for example, finds that every space we think of can be broken up into positions, and concludes that in some undefined way the several positions must have pre- existed in thought before the aggregate space could have appeared to perception. Similarly Mr. Spencer, defining extension as an " aggregate of relations of coexistent posi- tion," says " every cognition of magnitude is a cognition of relations of position," 2 and "no idea of extension can arise from the simultaneous excitation" of many nerves " unless there is a knowledge of their relative positions ". 3 Just so Prof. Bain insists that the very meaning of space is scope for movement, 4 and that therefore distance and magnitude can be no original attributes of the eye's sensibility. Similarly be- cause movement is analysable into positions occupied at suc- cessive moments by the mover, philosophers (e.g., Schopen- hauer, as quoted above) have repeatedly denied the possibility of its being an immediate sensation. We have however seen that it is the most immediate of all our space-sensations. Because it can only occur in a definite direction the im- possibility of perceiving it without perceiving its direction has been decreed a decree which the simplest experiment I / overthrows. 5 It is a case of what I have elsewhere (MiND ix. 20) called the ' psychologist's fallacy ' : mere acquaint- ance with space is treated as tantamount to every sort of knowledge about it, the conditions of the latter are demanded of the former state of mind, and all sorts of mythological processes are brought in to help. 6 As well might one say that because the world consists of all its parts, therefore we can 1 Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, 1883, pp. 480, 591-2. 2 Psychology, ii., p. 174. 3 Ibid., p. 168. 4 Senses and Intellect, 3rd edition, pp. 366-75. 5 Cf. Hall and Donaldson in MIND x. 559. 6 As other examples of the confusion, take Mr. Sully : " The fallacious assumption that there can be an idea of distance in general, apart from particular distances" (MiND iii., p. 177); and Wundt : "An indefinite localisation, which waits for experience to give it its reference to real space, stands in contradiction with the very idea of localisation, which means the reference to a determinate point of space " (Physiol. Psych., Ite Aufl., p. 480).