I should have been willing some years ago to name without hesitation a third condition of discrimination—saying it would be most developed in that organ which is susceptible of the most various qualities of feeling. The retina is unquestionably such an organ. The colors and shades it perceives are infinitely more numerous than the diversities of skin-sensation. And it can feel at once white and black, whilst the ear can in nowise so feel sound and silence. But the late researches of Donaldson, Blix, and Goldscheider,[170] on specific points for heat, cold, pressure, and pain in the skin; the older ones of Czermak (repeated later by Klug in Ludwig's laboratory), showing that a hot and a cold compass-point are no more easily discriminated as two than two of equal temperature; and some unpublished experiments of my own—all disincline me to make much of this condition now.[171] There is, however, one quality of sensation which is particularly exciting, and that is the feeling of motion over any of our surfaces. The erection of this into a separate elementary quality of sensibility is one of the most recent of psychological achievements, and is worthy of detaining us a while at this point.
The Sensation of Motion over Surfaces.
The feeling of motion has generally been assumed by physiologists to be impossible until the positions of terminus a quo and terminus ad quem are severally cognized, and the successive occupancies of these positions by the moving body are perceived to be separated by a distinct interval of time.[172] As a matter of fact, however, we cognize only the very slowest motions in this way. Seeing the hand of a clock at XII and afterwards at VI, we judge that it has moved through the interval. Seeing the sun now in the east and again in the west, I infer it to have passed over my head. But we can only infer that which we already generically know in some more direct fashion, and it is experimentally certain that we have the feeling of motion given us as a direct and simple sensation. Czermak long ago pointed out the difference between seeing the motion of the second-hand of a watch, when we look directly at it, and noticing the fact of its having altered its position when we fix our gaze upon some other point of the dial-plate. In the first case we have a specific quality of sensation which is absent in the second. If the reader will find a portion of his skin—the arm, for example—where a pair of compass-points an inch apart are felt as one impression, and if he will then trace lines a tenth of an inch long on that spot with a pencil-point, he will be distinctly aware of the point's motion and vaguely aware of the direction of the motion. The perception of the motion here is certainly not derived from a pre-existing knowledge that its starting and ending points are separate positions in space, because positions in space ten times wider apart fail to be discriminated as such when excited by the dividers. It is the same with the retina. One's fingers when cast upon its peripheral portions cannot be counted—that is to say, the five retinal tracts which they occupy are not distinctly apprehended by the mind as five separate positions in space—and yet the slightest movement of the fingers is most vividly perceived as movement and nothing else. It is thus certain that our sense of movement, being so much more delicate than our sense of position, cannot possibly be derived from it. A curious observation by Exner[173] completes the proof that movement is a primitive form of sensibility, by showing it to be much more delicate than our sense of succession in time. This very able physiologist caused two electric sparks to appear in rapid succession, one beside the other. The observer had to state whether the right-hand one or the left-hand one appeared first. When the interval was reduced to as short a time as 0.044'' the discrimination of temporal order in the sparks became impossible. But Exner found that if the sparks were brought so close together in space that their irradiation-circles overlapped, the eye then felt their flashing as if it were the motion of a single spark from the point occupied by the first to the point occupied by the second, and the time-interval might then be made as small as 0.015'' before the mind began to be in doubt as to whether the apparent motion started from the right or from the left. On the skin similar experiments gave similar results.
Vierordt, at almost the same time,[174] called attention to certain persistent illusions, amongst which are these: If another person gently trace a line across our wrist or finger, the latter being stationary, it will feel to us as if the member were moving in the opposite direction to the tracing point. If, on the contrary, we move our limb across a fixed point, it will be seen as if the point were moving as well. If the reader will touch his forehead with his forefinger kept motionless, and then rotate the head so that the skin of the forehead passes beneath the finger's tip, he will have an irresistible sensation of the latter being itself in motion in the opposite direction to the head. So in abducting the fingers from each other; some may move and the rest be still still, but the still ones will feel as if they were actively separating from the rest. These illusions, according to Vierordt, are survivals of a primitive form of perception, when motion was felt as such, but ascribed to the whole content of consciousness, and not yet distinguished as belonging exclusively to one of its parts. When our perception is fully developed we go beyond the mere relative motion of thing and ground, and can ascribe absolute motion to one of these components of our total object, and absolute rest to another. When, in vision for example, the whole background moves together, we think that it is ourselves or our eyes which are moving; and any object in the foreground which may move relatively to the background is judged by us to be still. But primitively this discrimination cannot be perfectly made. The sensation of the motion spreads over all that we see and infects it. Any relative motion of object and retina both makes the object seem to move, and makes us feel ourselves in motion. Even now when our whole object moves we still get giddy; and we still see an apparent motion of the entire field of view, whenever we suddenly jerk our head and eyes or shake them quickly to and fro. Pushing our eyeballs gives the same illusion. We know in all these cases what really happens, but the conditions are unusual, so our primitive sensation persists unchecked. So it does when clouds float by the moon. We know the moon is still; but we see it move even faster than the clouds. Even when we slowly move our eyes the primitive sensation persists under the victorious conception. If we notice closely the experience, we find that any object towards which we look appears moving to meet our eye.
But the most valuable contribution to the subject is the paper of G. H. Schneider,[175] who takes up the matter zoologically, and shows by examples from every branch of the animal kingdom that movement is the quality by which animals most easily attract each other's attention. The instinct of 'shamming death' is no shamming of death at all, but rather a paralysis through fear, which saves the insect, crustacean, or other creature from being noticed at all by his enemy. It is parallelled in the human race by the breath-holding stillness of the boy playing 'I spy,' to whom the seeker is near; and its obverse side is shown in our involuntary waving of arms, jumping up and down, and so forth, when we wish to attract someone's attention at a distance. Creatures 'stalking' their prey and creatures hiding from their pursuers alike show how immobility diminishes conspicuity. In the woods, if we are quiet, the squirrels and birds will actually touch us. Flies will light on stuffed birds and stationary frogs.[176] On the other hand, the tremendous shock of feeling the thing we are sitting on begin to move, the exaggerated start it gives us to have an insect unexpectedly pass over our skin, or a cat noiselessly come and snuffle about our hand, the excessive reflex effects of tickling, etc., show how exciting the sensation of motion is per se. A kitten cannot help pursuing a moving ball. Impressions too faint to be cognized at all are immediately felt if they move. A fly sitting is unnoticed,—we feel it the moment it crawls. A shadow may be too faint to be perceived. As soon as it moves, however, we see it. Schneider found that a shadow, with distinct outline, and directly fixated, could still be perceived when moving, although its objective strength might be but half as great as that of a stationary shadow so faint as just to disappear. With a blurred shadow in indirect vision the difference in favor of motion was much greater—namely, 13.3:40.7. If we hold a finger between our closed eyelid and the sunshine we shall not notice its presence. The moment we move it to and fro, however, we discern it. Such visual perception as this reproduces the conditions of sight among the radiates.[177]
Enough has now been said to show that in the education of spatial discrimination the motions of impressions across sensory surfaces must have been the principal agent in breaking up our consciousness of the surfaces into a consciousness of their parts. Even to-day the main function of the peripheral regions of our retina is that of sentinels, which, when beams of light move over them, cry 'Who goes there?' and call the fovea to the spot. Most parts of the skin do but perform the same office for the finger-tips. Of course finger-tips and fovea leave some power of direct perception to marginal retina and skin respectively. But it is worthy of note that such perception is best developed on the skin of the most movable parts (the labors of Vierordt and his pupils have well shown this); and that in the blind, whose skin is exceptionally discriminative, it seems to have become so through the inveterate habit which most of them possess of twitching and moving it under whatever object may touch them, so as to become better acquainted with the conformation of the same. Czermak was the first to notice this. It may be easily verified. Of course movement of surface under object is (for purposes of stimulation) equivalent to movement of object over surface. In exploring the shapes and sizes of things by either eye or skin the movements of these organs are incessant and unrestrainable. Every such movement draws the points and lines of the object across the surface, imprints them a hundred times more sharply, and drives them home to the attention. The immense part thus played by movements in our perceptive activity is held by many psychologists[178] to prove that the muscles are themselves the space-perceiving organ. Not surface-sensibility, but 'the muscular sense,' is for these writers the original and only revealer of objective extension. But they have all failed to notice with what peculiar intensity muscular contractions call surface-sensibilities into play, and that the mere discrimination of impressions (quite apart from any question of measuring the space between them) largely depends on the mobility of the surface upon which they fall.[179]
2. The Measurement of the sense-spaces against each other.
What precedes is all we can say in answer to the problem of discrimination. Turn now to that of measurement of the several spaces against each other, that being the first step in our constructing out of our diverse space-experiences the one space we believe in as that of the real world.