But note now the peculiarity of the nerve-processes of all these local signs: though they may give no line when excited successively, when excited together they do give the actual sensation of a line in space. The sum of them is the neural process of that line; the sum of their feelings is the feeling of that line; and if we begin to single out particular points from the line, and notice them by their rank, it is impossible to see how this rank can appear except as an actual fixed space-position sensibly felt as a bit of the total line. The scale itself appearing as a line, rank in it must appear as a definite part of the line. If the seven notes of an octave, when heard together, appeared to the sense of hearing as an outspread line of sound—which it is needless to say they do not—why then no one note could be discriminated without being localized, according to its pitch, in the line, either as one of its extremities or as some part between.
But not alone the gradation of their quality arranges the local-sign feelings in a scale. Our movements arrange them also in a time-scale. Whenever a stimulus passes from point a of the skin or retina to point f, it awakens the local-sign feelings in the perfectly definite time-order abcdef. It cannot excite f until cde have been successively aroused. The feeling c sometimes is preceded by ab, sometimes followed by ba, according to the movement's direction; the result of it all being that we never feel either a, c, or f, without there clinging to it faint reverberations of the various time-orders of transition in which, throughout past experience, it has been aroused. To the local sign a there clings the tinge or tone, the penumbra or fringe, of the transition bcd. To f, to c, there cling quite different tones. Once admit the principle that a feeling may be tinged by the reproductive consciousness of an habitual transition, even when the transition is not made, and it seems entirely natural to admit that, if the transition be habitually in the order abcdef, and if a, c, and f be felt separately at all, a will be felt with an essential earliness, f with an essential lateness, and that c will fall between. Thus those psychologists who set little store by local signs and great store by movements in explaining space-perception, would have a perfectly definite time-order, due to motion, by which to account for the definite order of positions that appears when sensitive spots are excited all at once. Without, however, the preliminary admission of the 'ultimate fact' that this collective excitement shall feel like a line and nothing else, it can never be explained why the new order should needs be an order of positions, and not of merely ideal serial rank. We shall hereafter have any amount of opportunity to observe how thoroughgoing is the participation of motion in all our spatial measurements. Whether the local signs have their respective qualities evenly graduated or not, the feelings of transition must be set down as among the veræ causæ in localization. But the gradation of the local signs is hardly to be doubted; so we may believe ourselves really to possess two sets of reasons for localizing any point we may happen to distinguish from out the midst of any line or any larger space.
[168] M. Binet (Revue Philosophique, Sept. 1880, page 291) says we judge them locally different as soon as their sensations differ enough for us to distinguish them as qualitatively different when successively excited. This is not strictly true. Skin-sensations, different enough to be discriminated when successive, may still fuse locally if excited both at once.
[169] It may, however, be said that even in the tongue there is a determination of bitter flavors to the back and of acids to the front edge of the organ. Spices likewise affect its sides and front, and a taste like that of alum localizes itself, by its styptic effect on the portion of mucous membrane, which it immediately touches, more sharply than roast pork, for example, which stimulates all parts alike. The pork, therefore, tastes more spacious than the alum or the pepper. In the nose, too, certain smells, of which vinegar may be taken as the type, seem less spatially extended than heavy, suffocating odors, like musk. The reason of this appears to be that the former inhibit inspiration by their sharpness, whilst the latter are drawn into the lungs, and thus excite an objectively larger surface. The ascription of height and depth to certain notes seems due, not to any localization of the sounds, but to the fact that a feeling of vibration in the chest and tension in the gullet accompanies the singing of a bass note, whilst, when we sing high, the palatine mucous membrane is drawn upon by the muscles which move the larynx, and awakens a feeling in the roof of the mouth.
The only real objection to the law of partial stimulation laid down in the text is one that might be drawn from the organ of hearing; for, according to modern theories, the cochlea may have its separate nerve-termini exclusively excited by sounds of differing pitch, and yet the sounds seem all to fill a common space, and not necessarily to be arranged alongside of each other. At most the high note is felt as a thinner, brighter streak against a darker background. In an article on Space, published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for January, 1879, I ventured to suggest that possibly the auditory nerve termini might be "excited all at once by sounds of any pitch, as the whole retina would be by every luminous point if there were no dioptric apparatus affixed." And I added: "Notwithstanding the brilliant conjectures of the last few years which assign different acoustic end-organs to different rates of air-wave, we are still greatly in the dark about the subject; and I, for my part, would much more confidently reject a theory of hearing which violated the principles advanced in this article than give up those principles for the sake of any hypothesis hitherto published about either organs of Corti or basilar membrane." Professor Rutherford's theory of hearing, advanced at the meeting of the British Association for 1886, already furnishes an alternative view which would make hearing present no exception to the space-theory I defend and which, whether destined to be proved true or false, ought, at any rate to make us feel that the Helmholtzian theory is probably not the last word in the physiology of hearing. Stepano, ff. (Hermann und Schwalbe's Jahresbericht, xv. 404, Literature 1886) reports a case in which more than the upper half of one cochlea was lost without any such deafness to deep notes on that side as Helmholtz's theory would require.
[170] Donaldson, in Mind, x. 399, 577; Goldscheider, in Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiologie; Blix, in Zeitschrift für Biologie. A good résumé may be found in Ladd's Physiol. Psychology, part ii. chap. iv. §§ 21-23.
[171] I tried on nine or ten people, making numerous observations on each, what difference it made in the discrimination of two points to have them alike or unlike. The points chosen were (1) two large needle-heads, (2) two screw-heads, and (3) a needle-head and a screw-head. The distance of the screw-heads was measured from their centres. I found that when the points gave diverse qualities of feeling (as in 3), this facilitated the discrimination, but much less strongly than I expected. The difference, in fact, would often not be perceptible twenty times running. When, however, one of the points was endowed with a rotary movement, the other remaining still, the doubleness of the points became much more evident than before. To observe this I took an ordinary pair of compasses with one point blunt, and the movable leg replaced by a metallic rod which could, at any moment, be made to rotate in situ by a dentist's drilling-machine, to which it was attached. The compass had then its points applied to the skin at such a distance apart as to be felt as one impression. Suddenly rotating the drill-apparatus then almost always made them seem as two.
[172] This is only another example of what I call 'the psychologist's fallacy'—thinking that the mind he is studying must necessarily be conscious of the object after the fashion in which the psychologist himself is conscious of it.
[173] Sitzb. der. k. Akad. Wien, Bd. lxxii., Abth. 8 (1875).
[174] Zeitschrift für Biologie, xii. 226 (1876).