第67章

Smell, taste, touch, sense of temperature, etc., were all found to fluctuate when lights were seen and sounds were heard.Individuals varied much in the degree and kind of effect produced, but almost every one experimented on seems to have been in some way affected.The phenomena remind one somewhat of the 'dynamogenic' effects of sensations upon the strength of muscular contraction observed by M.Féré, and later to be described.

The most familiar examples of them seem to be the increase of pain by noise or light, and the increase of nausea by all concomitant sensations.Persons suffering in any way instinctively seek stillness and darkness.

Probably every one will agree that the best way of formulating all such facts is physiological: it must be that the cerebral process of the first sensation is reinforced or otherwise altered by the other current which comes in.No one, surely, will prefer a psychological explanation here.Well, it seems to me that all cases of mental reaction to a plurality of stimuli must be like these cases, and that the physiological formulation is everywhere the simplest and the best When simultaneous red and green light make us see yellow, when three notes of the scale make us hear a chord, it is not because the sensations of red and of green and of each of the three notes enter the mind as such, and there 'combine' or 'are combined by its relating activity' into the yellow and the chord, it is because the larger sum of light-waves and of air-waves arouses new cortical processes, to which the yellow and the chord directly correspond.Even when the sensible qualities of things enter into the objects of our highest thinking, it is surely the same.Their several sensations do not continue to exist there tucked away.They are replaced by the higher thought which although a different psychic unit from them, knows the same sensible qualities which they know.

The principles laid down in Chapter VI

seem then to be corroborated in this new connection.You cannot build up one thought or one sensation out of many; and only direct experiment can inform us of what we shall perceive when we get many stimuli at once.

THE 'ECCENTRIC PROJECTION' OF SENSATIONS.

We often hear the opinion expressed that all our sensations at first appear to us as subjective or internal, and are afterwards and by a special act on our part 'extradited' or 'projected'

so as to appear located in an outer world.Thus we read in Professor Ladd's valuable work that "Sensations...are psychical states whose place -- so far as they can be said to have one -- is the mind.

The transference of these sensations from mere mental states to physical processes located in the periphery of the body, or to qualities of things projected in space external to the body, is a mental act.It may rather be said to be a mental achievement , for it is an act which in its perfection results from a long and intricate process of development.

...Two noteworthy stages, or 'epoch-making' achievements in the process of elaborating the presentations of sense, require a special consideration.

These are 'localization', or the transference of the composite sensations from mere states of the mind to processes or conditions recognized as taking place at more or less definitely fixed points or areas of the body; and 'eccentric projection I (sometimes called 'eccentric perception')

or the giving to these sensations an objective existence (in the fullest sense of the word I objective') as qualities of objects situated within a field of space and in contact with, or more or less remotely distant from, the body."

It seems to me that there is not a vestige of evidence for this view.It hangs together with the opinion that our sensations are originally devoid of all spatial content, an opinion which I confess that I am wholly at a loss to understand.As I look at my bookshelf opposite I cannot frame to myself an idea, however imaginary, of any feeling which I could ever possibly have got from it except the feeling of the same big extended sort of outward fact which I now perceive.So far is it from being true that our first way of feeling things is the feeling of them as subjective or mental, that the exact opposite seems rather to be the truth.Our earliest, most instinctive, least developed kind of consciousness is the objective kind; and only as reflection becomes developed do we become aware of an inner world at all.Then indeed we enrich it more and more, even to the point of becoming idealists, with the spoils of the outer world which at first was the only world we knew.But subjective consciousness, aware of itself as subjective, does not at first exist.

Even an attack of pain is surely felt at first objectively as something in space which prompts to motor reaction, and to the very end it is located, not in the mind, but in some bodily part.

"A sensation which should not awaken an impulse to move, nor any tendency to produce an outward effect, would manifestly be useless to a living creature.On the principles of evolution such a sensation could never be developed.Therefore every sensation originally refers to something external and independent of the sentient creature.