Suppose a colonel in front of his regiment at dress-parade, and suppose he walks at right angles towards the midmost man of the line. As he advances, and surveys the line in either direction, he looks more and more down it and less and less at it, until, when abreast of the midmost man, he feels the end men to be most distant; then when the line casts hardly any lateral image on his retina at all, what distance shall he judge to be that of the end men? Why, half the length of the regiment as it was originally seen, of course; but this length was a moment ago a retinal object spread out laterally before his sight. He has now merely equated a retinal depth-feeling with a retinal breadth-feeling. If the regiment moved, and the colonel stood still, the result would be the same. In such ways as these a creature endowed with eyes alone could hardly fail of measuring out all three dimensions of the space he inhabited. And we ourselves, I think, although we may often 'realize' distance in locomotor terms (as Berkeley says we must always do), yet do so no less often in terms of our retinal map, and always in this way the more spontaneously. Were this not so, the three visual dimensions could not possibly feel to us as homogeneous as they do, nor as commensurable inter se.
Let us then admit distance to be at least as genuinely optical a content of consciousness as either height or breadth. The question immediately returns, Can any of them be said in any strictness to be optical sensations? We have contended all along for the affirmative reply to this question, but must now cope with difficulties greater than any that have assailed us hitherto.
Helmholtz and Reid on Sensations.
A sensation is, as we have seen in [Chapter XVII], the mental affection that follows most immediately upon the stimulation of the sense-tract. Its antecedent is directly physical, no psychic links, no acts of memory, inference, or association intervening. Accordingly, if we suppose the nexus between neural process in the sense-organ, on the one hand, and conscious affection, on the other, to be by nature uniform, the same process ought always to give the same sensation; and conversely, if what seems to be a sensation varies whilst the process in the sense-organ remains unchanged, the reason is presumably that it is really not a sensation but a higher mental product, whereof the variations depend on events occurring in the system of higher cerebral centres.
Now the size of the field of view varies enormously in all three dimensions, without our being able to assign with any definiteness the process in the visual tract on which the variation depends. We just saw how impossible such assignment was in the case where turning down the head produces the enlargement. In general, the maximum feeling of depth or distance seems to take the lead in determining the apparent magnitude of the whole field, and the two other dimensions seem to follow. If, to use the former instance, I look close into a wash-basin, the lateral extent of the field shrinks proportionately to its nearness. If I look from a mountain, the things seen are vast in height and breadth, in proportion to the farness of the horizon. But when we ask what changes in the eye determine how great this maximum feeling of depth or distance (which is undoubtedly felt as a unitary vastness) shall be, we find ourselves unable to point to any one of them as being its absolutely regular concomitant. Convergence, accommodation, double and disparate images, differences in the parallactic displacement when we move our head, faintness of tint, dimness of outline, and smallness of the retinal image of objects named and known, are all processes that have something to do with the perception of 'far' and of 'near'; but the effect of each and any one of them in determining such a perception at one moment may at another moment be reversed by the presence of some other sensible quality in the object, that makes us, evidently by reminding us of past experience, judge it to be at a different distance and of another shape. If we paint the inside of a pasteboard-mask like the outside, and look at it with one eye, the accommodation- and parallax-feelings are there, but fail to make us see it hollow, as it is. Our mental knowledge of the fact that human faces are always convex overpowers them, and we directly perceive the nose to be nearer to us than the cheek instead of farther of.
The other organic tokens of farness and nearness are proved by similar experiments (of which we shall ere long speak more in detail) to have an equally fluctuating import. They lose all their value whenever the collateral circumstances favor a strong intellectual conviction that the object presented to the gaze is improbable—cannot be either what or where they would make us perceive it to be.
Now the query immediately arises: Can the feelings of these processes in the eye, since they are so easily neutralized and reversed by intellectual suggestions, ever have been direct sensations of distance at all? Ought we not rather to assume, since the distances which we see in spite of them are conclusions from past experience, that the distances which we see by means of them are equally such conclusions? Ought we not, in short, to say unhesitatingly that distance must be an intellectual and not a sensible content of consciousness? and that each of these eye-feelings serves as a mere signal to awaken this content, our intellect being so framed that sometimes it notices one signal more readily and sometimes another?
Reid long ago (Inquiry, c. vi. sec. 17) said:
"It may be taken for a general rule that things which are produced by custom may be undone or changed by disuse or by contrary custom. On the other hand, it is a strong argument that an effect is not owing to custom, but to the constitution of nature, when a contrary custom is found neither to change nor to weaken it."
More briefly, a way of seeing things that can be unlearned was presumably learned, and only what we cannot unlearn is instinctive.