Fig. 63.
Drawing a square inside the circle (Fig. 62) gives to the outline of the latter an indented appearance where the square's corners touch it. Drawing the radii inside of one of the right angles in the same figure makes it seem larger than the other. In Fig. 63, the retinal image of the space between the extreme dots is in all three lines the same, yet it seems much larger the moment it is filled up with other dots.
In the stereoscope certain pairs of lines which look single under ordinary circumstances immediately seem double when we add certain other lines to them.[224]
Ambiguous Import of Eye-movements.
These facts show the indeterminateness of the space-import of various retinal impressions. Take now the eye's movements, and we find a similar vacillation. When we follow a moving object with our gaze, the motion is 'voluntary'; when our eyes oscillate to and fro after we have made ourselves dizzy by spinning around, it is 'reflex'; and when the eyeball is pushed with the finger, it is 'passive.' Now, in all three of these cases we get a feeling from the movement as it effects itself. But the objective perceptions to which the feeling assists us are by no means the same. In the first case we may see a stationary field of view with one moving object in it; in the second, the total field swimming more or less steadily in one direction; in the third, a sudden jump or twist of the same total field.
The feelings of convergence of the eyeballs permit of the same ambiguous interpretation. When objects are near we converge strongly upon them in order to see them; when far, we set our optic axes parallel. But the exact degree of convergence fails to be felt; or rather, being felt, fails to tell us the absolute distance of the object we are regarding. Wheatstone arranged his stereoscope in such a way that the size of the retinal images might change without the convergence altering; or conversely, the convergence might change without the retinal image altering. Under these circumstances, he says,[225] the object seemed to approach or recede in the first case, without altering its size, in the second, to change its size without altering its distance—just the reverse of what might have been expected. Wheatstone adds, however, that 'fixing the attention' converted each of these perceptions into its opposite. The same perplexity occurs in looking through prismatic glasses, which alter the eyes' convergence. We cannot decide whether the object has come nearer, or grown larger, or both, or neither; and our judgment vacillates in the most surprising way. We may even make our eyes diverge, and the object will none the less appear at a finite distance. When we look through the stereoscope, the picture seems at no determinate distance. These and other facts have led Helmholtz to deny that the feeling of convergence has any very exact value as a distance-measurer.[226]
With the feelings of accommodation it is very much the same. Donders has shown[227] that the apparent magnifying power of spectacles of moderate convexity hardly depends at all upon their enlargement of the retinal image, but rather on the relaxation they permit of the muscle of accommodation. This suggests an object farther off, and consequently a much larger one, since its retinal size rather increases than diminishes. But in this case the same vacillation of judgment as in the previously mentioned case of convergence takes place. The recession made the object seem larger, but the apparent growth in size of the object now makes it look as if it came nearer instead of receding. The effect thus contradicts its own cause. Everyone is conscious, on first putting on a pair of spectacles, of a doubt whether the field of view draws near or retreats.[228]
There is still another deception, occurring in persons who have had one eye-muscle suddenly paralyzed. This deception has led Wundt to affirm that the eyeball-feeling proper, the incoming sensation of effected rotation, tells us only of the direction of our eye-movements, but not of their whole extent.[229] For this reason, and because not only Wundt, but many other authors, think the phenomena in these partial paralyses demonstrate the existence of a feeling of innervation, a feeling of the outgoing nervous current, opposed to every afferent sensation whatever, it seems proper to note the facts with a certain degree of detail.
Suppose a man wakes up some morning with the external rectus muscle of his right eye half paralyzed, what will be the result? He will be enabled only with great effort to rotate the eye so as to look at objects lying far off to the right. Something in the effort he makes will make him feel as if the object lay much farther to the right than it really is. If the left and sound eye be closed, and he be asked to touch rapidly with his finger an object situated towards his right, he will point the finger to the right of it. The current explanation of the 'something' in the effort which causes this deception is that it is the sensation of the outgoing discharge from the nervous centres, the 'feeling of innervation,' to use Wundt's expression, requisite for bringing the open eye with its weakened muscle to bear upon the object to be touched. If that object be situated 20 degrees to the right, the patient has now to innervate as powerfully to turn the eye those 20 degrees as formerly he did to turn the eye 30 degrees. He consequently believes as before that he has turned it 30 degrees; until, by a newly-acquired custom, he learns the altered spatial import of all the discharges his brain makes into his right abducens nerve. The 'feeling of innervation,' maintained to exist by this and other observations, plays an immense part in the space-theories of certain philosophers, especially Wundt. I shall elsewhere try to show that the observations by no means warrant the conclusions drawn from them, and that the feeling in question is probably a wholly fictitious entity.[230] Meanwhile it suffices to point out that even those who set most store by it are compelled, by the readiness with which the translocation of the field of view becomes corrected and further errors avoided, to admit that the precise space-import of the supposed sensation of outgoing energy is as ambiguous and indeterminate as that of any other of the eye-feelings we have considered hitherto.