Chapter XI

, to prove that attention involves inward reproduction, go to prove this point as well. In looking for any object in a room, for a book in a library, for example, we detect it the more readily if, in addition to merely knowing its name, etc., we carry in our mind a distinct image of its appearance. The assafœtida in 'Worcestershire sauce' is not obvious to anyone who has not tasted assafœtida _per se_. In a 'cold' color an artist would never be able to analyze out the pervasive presence of _blue_, unless he had previously made acquaintance with the color blue by itself. All the colors we actually experience are mixtures. Even the purest primaries always come to us with some white. Absolutely pure red or green or violet is never experienced, and so can never be discerned in the so-called primaries with which we have to deal: the latter consequently pass for pure.--The reader will remember how an overtone can only be attended to in the midst of its consorts in the voice of a musical instrument, by sounding it previously alone. The imagination, being then full of it, hears the like of it in the compound tone. Helmholtz, whose account of this observation we formerly quoted, goes on to explain the difficulty of the case in a way which beautifully corroborates the point I now seek to prove. He says:

"The ultimate simple elements of the sensation of tone, simple tones themselves, are rarely heard alone. Even those instruments by which they can be produced (as tuning-forks before resonance-chambers), when strongly excited, give rise to weak harmonic upper partials,

## partly within and partly without the ear.... Hence the opportunities

are very scanty for impressing on our memory an exact and sure image of these simple elementary tones. But if the constituents are only indefinitely and vaguely known, the analysis of their sum into them must be correspondingly uncertain. If we do not know with certainty how much of the musical tone under consideration is to be attributed to its prime, we cannot but be uncertain as to what belongs to the

## partials. Consequently we must begin by making the individual elements

which have to be distinguished individually audible, so as to obtain an entirely fresh recollection of the corresponding sensation, and the whole business requires undisturbed and concentrated attention. We are even without the ease that can be obtained by frequent repetitions of the experiment, such as we possess in the analysis of musical chords into their individual notes. In that case we hear the individual notes sufficiently often by themselves, whereas we rarely hear simple tones, and may almost be said never to hear the building up of a compound from its simple tones."[421]

THE PROCESS OF ABSTRACTION.

Very few elements of reality are experienced by us in absolute isolation. The most that usually happens to a constituent _a_, of a compound phenomenon _abcd_, is that its _strength_ relatively to _bcd_ varies from a maximum to a minimum; or that it appears linked with _other_ qualities, in other compounds, as _aefg_, or _ahik_. Either of these vicissitudes in the mode of our experiencing _a_ may, under favorable circumstances, lead us to feel the difference between it and its concomitants, and to single it out--not absolutely, it is true, but approximately--and so to analyze the compound of which it is a part. The act of singling out is then called _abstraction_, and the element disengaged is an _abstract_.

Consider the case of fluctuations of relative strength or intensity first. Let there be three grades of the compound, as _Abcd, abcd,_ and _abcD_. In passing between these compounds, the mind will feel shocks of difference. The differences, moreover, will serially increase, and their direction will be felt as of a distinct sort. The increase from _abcd_ to _Abcd_ is on the _a_ side; that to _abcD_ is on the _d_ side. And these two differences of direction are differently felt. I do not say that this discernment of the _a_-direction from the _d_-direction will give us an actual intuition either of _a_ or of _d_ in the abstract. But it leads us to _conceive_ or _postulate_ each of these qualities, and to define it as the _extreme_ of a certain direction. 'Dry' wines and 'sweet' wines, for example, differ, and form a series. It happens that we have an experience of sweetness pure and simple in the taste of sugar, and this we can analyze out of the wine-taste. But no one knows what 'dryness' tastes like, all by itself. It must, however, be something extreme in the dry direction; and we should probably not fail to recognize it as the original of our abstract conception, in case we ever did come across it. In some such way we get to form notions of the flavor of meats, apart from their feeling to the tongue, or of that of fruits apart from their acidity, etc., and we abstract the touch of bodies as distinct from their temperature. We may even apprehend the quality of a muscle's contraction as distinguished from its extent, or one muscle's contraction from another's, as when, by practising with prismatic glasses, and varying our eyes' convergence whilst our accommodation remains the same, we learn the direction in which our feeling of the convergence differs from that of the accommodation.

But the fluctuation in a quality's intensity is a less efficient aid to our abstracting of it than the diversity of the other qualities in whose company it may appear. _What is associated now with one thing and now with another tends to become dissociated from either, and to grow into an object of abstract contemplation by the mind._ One might call this the _law of dissociation by varying concomitants_. The practical result of it will be to allow the mind which has thus dissociated and abstracted a character to analyze it out of a total, whenever it meets with it again. The law has been frequently recognized by psychologists, though I know of none who has given it the emphatic prominence in our mental history which it deserves. Mr. Spencer says:

"If the property A occurs here along with the properties B, C, D, there along with C, F, H, and again with E, G, B,... it must happen that by multiplication of experiences the impressions produced by these properties on the organism will be disconnected and rendered so far independent in the organism as the properties are in the environment, whence must eventually result a power to recognize attributes in themselves, apart from particular bodies."[422]

And still more to the point Dr. Martineau, in the passage I have already quoted, writes:

"When a red ivory ball, seen for the first time, has been withdrawn, it will leave a mental representation of itself, in which all that it simultaneously gave us will indistinguishably coexist. Let a white ball succeed to it; now, and not before, will an attribute detach itself, and the _color_, by force of contrast, be shaken out into the foreground. Let the white ball be replaced by an egg, and this new difference will bring the _form_ into notice from its previous slumber, and thus that which began by being simply an object cut out from the surrounding scene becomes for us first a _red_ object, then a _red round_ object, and so on."

_Why_ the repetition of the character in combination with different wholes will cause it thus to break up its adhesion with any one of them, and roll out, as it were, alone upon the table of consciousness, is a little of a mystery. One might suppose the nerve-processes of the various concomitants to neutralize or inhibit each other more or less and to leave the process of the common term alone distinctly active. Mr. Spencer appears to think that the mere fact that the common term is repeated more often than any one of its associates will, of itself, give it such a degree of intensity that its abstraction must needs ensue.

This has a plausible sound, but breaks down when examined closely. For it is not always the often-repeated character which is first noticed when its concomitants have varied a certain number of times; it is even more likely to be the most novel of all the concomitants, which will arrest the attention. If a boy has seen nothing all his life but sloops and schooners, he will probably never distinctly have singled out in his notion of 'sail' the character of being hung lengthwise. When for the first time he sees a square-rigged ship, the opportunity of extracting the lengthwise mode of hanging as a special accident, and of dissociating it from the general notion of sail, is offered. But there are twenty chances to one that that will not be the form of the boy's consciousness. What he _notices_ will be the new and exceptional character of being hung crosswise. He will go home and speak of that, and perhaps never consciously formulate what the more familiar peculiarity consists in.

This mode of abstraction is realized on a very wide scale, because the elements of the world in which we find ourselves appear, as a matter of fact, here, there, and everywhere, and are changing their concomitants all the while. But on the other hand the abstraction is, so to speak, never complete, the analysis of a compound never perfect, because no element is ever given to us absolutely alone, and we can never therefore approach a compound with the image in our mind of any one of its components in a perfectly pure form. Colors, sounds, smells, are just as much entangled with other matter as are more formal elements of experience, such as extension, intensity, effort, pleasure, difference, likeness, harmony, badness, strength, and even consciousness itself. All are embedded in one world. But by the fluctuations and permutations of which we have spoken, we come to form a pretty good notion of the _direction_ in which each element differs from the rest, and so we frame the notion of it as a _terminus_, and continue to mean it as an individual thing. In the case of many elements, the simple sensibles, like heat, cold, the colors, smells, etc., the extremes of the directions are almost touched, and in these instances we have a comparatively exact perception of what it is we mean to abstract. But even this is only an approximation; and in literal mathematical strictness _all_ our abstracts must be confessed to be but imperfectly imaginable things. At bottom the process is one of _conception_, and is everywhere, even in the sphere of simple sensible qualities, the same as that by which we are usually understood to attain to the notions of abstract goodness, perfect felicity, absolute power, and the like: the direct perception of a difference between compounds, and the imaginary prolongation of the direction of the difference to an ideal terminus, the notion of which we fix and keep as one of our permanent subjects of discourse.

This is all that I can say usefully about abstraction, or about analysis, to which it leads.

THE IMPROVEMENT OF DISCRIMINATION BY PRACTICE.

In all the cases considered hitherto I have supposed the differences involved to be so large as to be flagrant, and the discrimination, where successive, was treated as involuntary. But, so far from being always involuntary, discriminations are often difficult in the extreme, and by most men never performed. Professor de Morgan, thinking, it is true, rather of conceptual than of perceptive discrimination, wrote, wittily enough:

"The great bulk of the illogical part of the educated community--whether majority or minority I know not; perhaps six of one and half a dozen of the other--have not power to make a distinction, and of course cannot be made to take a distinction, and of course never attempt to shake a distinction. With them all such things are evasions, subterfuges, come-offs, loop-holes, etc. They would hang a man for horse-stealing under a statute against sheep-stealing; and would laugh at you if you quibbled about the distinction between a horse and a sheep."[423]

Any personal or practical interest, however, in the results to be obtained by distinguishing, makes one's wits amazingly sharp to detect differences. The culprit himself is not likely to overlook the difference between a horse and a sheep. And long training and practice in distinguishing has the same effect as personal interest. Both of these agencies give to small amounts of objective difference the same effectiveness upon the mind that, under other circumstances, only large ones would have. Let us seek to penetrate the _modus operandi_ of their influence--beginning with that of practice and habit.

That 'practice makes perfect' is notorious in the field of motor accomplishments. But motor accomplishments depend in part on sensory discrimination. Billiard-playing, rifle-shooting, tight-rope-dancing, demand the most delicate appreciation of minute disparities of sensation, as well as the power to make accurately graduated muscular response thereto. In the purely sensorial field we have the well-known virtuosity displayed by the professional buyers and testers of various kinds of goods. One man will distinguish by taste between the upper and the lower half of a bottle of old Madeira. Another will recognize, by feeling the flour in a barrel, whether the wheat was grown in Iowa or Tennessee. The blind deaf-mute, Laura Bridgman, had so improved her touch as to recognize, after a year's interval, the hand of a person who once had shaken hers; and her sister in misfortune, Julia Brace, is said to have been employed in the Hartford Asylum to sort the linen of its multitudinous inmates, after it came from the wash, by her wonderfully educated sense of smell.

The fact is so familiar that few, if any, psychologists have even recognized it as needing explanation. They have seemed to think that practice must, in the nature of things, improve the delicacy of discernment, and have let the matter rest. At most they have said: "Attention accounts for it; we attend more to habitual things, and what we attend to we perceive more minutely." This answer is true, but too general; it seems to me that we can be a little more precise.

* * * * *

_There are at least two distinct causes_ which we can see at work whenever experience improves discrimination:

First, the _terms_ whose difference comes to be felt contract disparate associates and these help to drag them apart.

Second, the _difference_ reminds us of larger differences of the same sort, and these help us to notice it.

Let us study the first cause first, and begin by supposing two compounds, of ten elements apiece. Suppose no one element of either compound to differ from the corresponding element of the other compound enough to be distinguished from it if the two are compared alone, and let the amount of this imperceptible difference be called equal to 1. The compounds will differ from each other, however, in ten different ways; and, although each difference by itself might pass unperceived, the total difference, equal to 10, may very well be sufficient to strike the sense. In a word, _increasing the number of 'points' involved in a difference may excite our discrimination as effectually as increasing the amount of difference at any one point_. Two men whose mouth, nose, eyes, cheeks, chin, and hair, all differ slightly, will be as little confounded by us, as two appearances of the same man one with, and the other without, a false nose. The only contrast in the cases is that we can easily name the _point_ of difference in the one, whilst in the other we cannot.

Two things, then, B and C, indistinguishable when compared together alone, may each contract adhesions with different associates, and the compounds thus formed may, as wholes, be judged very distinct. _The effect of practice in increasing discrimination must then, in part be due to the reinforcing effect, upon an original slight difference between the terms, of additional differences between the diverse associates which they severally affect._ Let B and C be the terms: If A contract adhesions with B, and C with D, AB may appear very distinct from CD, though B and C _per se_ might have been almost identical.

To illustrate, how does one learn to distinguish claret from burgundy? Probably they have been drunk on different occasions. When we first drank claret we heard it called by that name, we were eating such and such a dinner, etc. Next time we drink it, a dim reminder of all those things chimes through us as we get the taste of the wine. When we try burgundy our first impression is that it is a kind of claret; but something falls short of full identification, and presently we hear it called burgundy. During the next few experiences, the discrimination may still be uncertain--"which," we ask ourselves, "of the two wines is this present specimen?" But at last the claret-flavor recalls pretty distinctly its own name, 'claret,' "that wine I drank at So-and-so's table," etc.; and the burgundy-flavor recalls the name burgundy and some one else's table. _And only when this different_ SETTING _has come to each is our discrimination between the two flavors solid and stable._ After a while the tables and other parts of the setting, besides the name, grow so multifarious as not to come up distinctly into consciousness; but _pari passu_ with this, the adhesion of each wine with its own _name_ becomes more and more inveterate, and at last each flavor suggests instantly and certainly its own name and nothing else. The names differ far more than the flavors, and help to stretch these latter farther apart. Some such process as this must go on in all our experience. Beef and mutton, strawberries and raspberries, odor of rose and odor of violet, contract different adhesions which reinforce the differences already felt in the terms.

The reader may say that this has nothing to do with making us feel the _difference_ between the two terms. It is merely fixing, identifying, and so to speak substantializing, the _terms_. But what we feel as their _difference_, we should feel, even though we were unable to name or otherwise identify the terms.

To which I reply that I believe that the difference is always concreted and made to seem _more substantial_ by recognizing the terms. I went out for instance the other day and found that the snow just fallen had a very odd look, different from the common appearance of snow. I presently called it a 'micaceous' look; and it seemed to me as if, the moment I did so, the difference grew more distinct and fixed than it was before. The other connotations of the word 'micaceous' dragged the snow farther away from ordinary snow and seemed even to aggravate the peculiar look in question. I think some such effect as this on our way of feeling a difference will be very generally admitted to follow from naming the terms between which it obtains; although I admit myself that it is difficult to show coercively that naming or otherwise identifying any given pair of hardly distinguishable terms is essential to their being felt as different at _first_.[424]

I offer the explanation only as a partial one: it certainly is not complete. Take the way in which _practice refines our local discrimination on the skin_, for example. Two compass-points touching the palm of the hand must be kept, say, half an inch asunder in order not to be mistaken for one point. But at the end of an hour or so of practice with them we can distinguish them as two, even when less than a quarter of an inch apart. If the same two regions of the skin were constantly touched, in this experience, the explanation we have been considering would perfectly apply. Suppose a line _a b c d e f_ of points upon the skin. Suppose the local difference of feeling between _a_ and _f_ to be so strong as to be instantly recognized when the points are simultaneously touched, but suppose that between _c_ and _d_ to be at first too small for this purpose. If we began by putting the compasses on _a_ and _f_ and gradually contracted their opening, the strong doubleness recognized at first would still be _suggested_, as the compass-points approached the positions _c_ and _d_; for the point _e_ would be so near _f_, and so like it, as not to be aroused without _f_ also coming to mind. Similarly _d_ would recall _e_ and, more remotely, _f_. In such wise _c--d_ would no longer be bare _c--d_, but something more like _abc--def_,--palpably differing impressions. But in actual experience the education can take place in a much less methodical way, and we learn at last to discriminate _c_ and _d_ without any constant adhesion being contracted between one of these spots and _ab_, and the other and _ef_. Volkmann's experiments show this. He and Fechner, prompted by Czermak's observation that the skin of the blind was twice as discriminative as that of seeing folks, sought by experiment to show the effects of practice upon themselves. They discovered that even within the limits of a single sitting the distances at which points were felt double might fall at the end to considerably less than half of their magnitude at the beginning; and that some, though not all, of this improved sensibility was retained next day. But they also found that exercising one part of the skin in this way improved the discrimination not only of the corresponding part of the opposite side of the body, but of the neighboring parts as well. Thus, at the beginning of an experimental sitting, the compass-points had to be a Paris line asunder, in order to be distinguished by the little-finger-tip. But after exercising the _other fingers_, it was found that the little-finger-tip could discriminate points only half a line apart.[425] The same relation existed betwixt divers points of the arm and hand.[426]

Here it is clear that the cause which I first suggested fails to apply, and that we must invoke another.

What are the exact experimental phenomena? The spots, as such, are not distinctly located, and the difference, as such, between their feelings, is not distinctly felt, until the interval is greater than the minimum required for the mere perception of their _doubleness_. What we first feel is a bluntness, then a suspicion of doubleness, which presently becomes a distinct doubleness, and at last two different-feeling and differently placed spots with a definite tract of space between them. Some of the places we try give us this latest stage of the perception immediately; some only give us the earliest; and between them are intermediary places. But as soon as the _image of the doubleness_ as it is felt in the more discriminative places gets lodged in our memory, it helps us to find its like in places where otherwise we might have missed it, much as the recent hearing of an 'overtone' helps us to detect the latter in a compound sound (_supra_, pp. 439-40). A dim doubleness grows clearer by being assimilated to the image of a distincter doubleness felt a moment before. It is interpreted by means of the latter. And so is any difference, like any other sort of impression, more easily perceived when we carry in our mind to meet it a distinct image of what sort of a thing we are to look for, of what its nature is likely to be.[427]

_These two processes_, the reinforcement of the terms by disparate associates, and the filling of the memory with past differences, of similar direction with the present one, but of more conspicuous amount, _are the only explanations I can offer of the effects of education in this line_. What is accomplished by both processes is essentially the same thing: they make small differences affect us as if they were large ones--that large differences should affect us as they do remains an inexplicable fact. In principle these two processes ought to be sufficient to account for all possible cases. Whether in fact they are sufficient, whether there be no residual factor which we have failed to detect and analyze out, I will not presume to decide.

PRACTICAL INTERESTS LIMIT DISCRIMINATION.

It will be remembered that on page 509 personal interest was named as a sharpener of discrimination alongside of practice. But personal interest probably acts through attention and not in any immediate or specific way. A distinction in which we have a practical stake is one which we concentrate our minds upon and which we are on the look-out for. We draw it frequently, and we get all the benefits of so doing, benefits which have just been explained. Where, on the other hand, a distinction has no practical interest, where we gain nothing by analyzing a feature from out of the compound total of which it forms a part, we contract a habit of leaving it unnoticed, and at last grow callous to its presence. Helmholtz was the first psychologist who dwelt on these facts as emphatically as they deserve, and I can do no better than quote his very words.

"We are accustomed," he says, "in a large number of cases where sensations of different kinds, or in different parts of the body, exist simultaneously, to recognize that they are distinct as soon as they are perceived, and to direct our attention at will to any one of them separately. Thus at any moment we can be separately conscious of what we see, of what we hear, of what we feel; and distinguish what we feel in a finger or in the great toe, whether pressure, gentle touch, or warmth. So also in the field of vision. Indeed, as I shall endeavor to show in what follows, we readily distinguish our sensations from one another _when we have a precise knowledge_ that they are composite, as, for example, when we have become certain, by frequently repeated and invariable experience, that our present sensation arises from the simultaneous action of many independent stimuli, each of which usually excites an equally well-known individual sensation."

This, it will be observed, is only another statement of our law, that the only individual components which we can pick out of compounds are those of which we have independent knowledge in a separate form.

"This induces us to think that nothing can be easier, when a number of different sensations are simultaneously excited, than to distinguish them individually from each other, and that this is an innate faculty of our minds.

"Thus we find, among other things, that it is quite a matter of course to hear separately the different musical tones which come to our senses collectively; and we expect that in every case when two of them occur together, we shall be able to do the like.

"The matter becomes very different when we set to work to investigate the more unusual cases of perception, and seek more completely to understand the conditions under which the above-mentioned distinction can or cannot be made, as is the case in the physiology of the senses. We then become aware that _two different kinds or grades must be distinguished in our becoming conscious of a sensation_. The lower grade of this consciousness is that in which the influence of the sensation in question makes itself felt only in the conceptions we form of external things and processes, and assists in determining them. This can take place without our needing, or indeed being able, to ascertain to what particular part of our sensations we owe this or that circumstance in our perceptions. In this case we will say that the impression of the sensation in question is _perceived synthetically_. The second higher grade is when we immediately distinguish the sensation in question as an existing part of the sum of the sensations excited in us. We will say, then, that the sensation is _perceived analytically_. The two cases must be carefully distinguished from each other."[428]

By the sensation being perceived synthetically, Helmholtz means that it is not discriminated at all, but only felt in a mass with other simultaneous sensations. That it _is_ felt there he thinks is proved by the fact that our _judgment_ of the total will change if anything occurs to alter the _outer cause_ of the sensation.[429] The following pages from an earlier edition show what the concrete cases of synthetic perception and what those of analytic perception are wont to be:

"In the use of our senses, practice and experience play a much larger part than we ordinarily suppose. Our sensations are in the first instance important only in so far as they enable us to judge rightly of the world about us; and our practice in discriminating between them usually goes only just far enough to meet this end. We are, however, too much disposed to think that we must be immediately conscious of every ingredient of our sensations. This natural prejudice is due to the fact that we are indeed conscious, immediately and without effort, of everything in our sensations which has a bearing upon those practical purposes, for the sake of which we wish to know the outer world. Daily and hourly, during our whole life, we keep our senses in training for this end exclusively, and for its sake our experiences are accumulated. But even within the sphere of these sensations, which do correspond to outer things, training and practice make themselves felt. It is well known how much finer and quicker the painter is in discriminating colors and illuminations than one whose eye is not trained in these matters; how the musician and the musical-instrument maker perceive with ease and certainty differences of pitch and tone which for the ear of the layman do not exist; and how even in the inferior realms of cookery and wine-judging it takes a long habit of comparing to make a master. But more strikingly still is seen the effect of practice when we pass to sensations which depend only on inner conditions of our organs, and which, not corresponding at all to outer things or to their effects upon us, are therefore of no value in giving us information about the outer world. The physiology of the sense-organs has, in recent times, made us acquainted with a number of such phenomena, discovered partly in consequence of theoretic speculations and questionings, partly by individuals, like Goethe and Purkinje, specially endowed by nature with talent for this sort of observation. These so-called subjective phenomena are extraordinarily hard to find; and when they are once found, special aids for the attention are almost always required to observe them. It is usually hard to notice the phenomenon again even when one knows already the description of the first observer. The reason is that we are not only unpractised in singling out these subjective sensations, but that we are, on the contrary, most thoroughly trained in abstracting our attention from them, because they would only hinder us in observing the outer world. Only when their intensity is so strong as actually to hinder us in observing the outer world do we begin to notice them; or they may sometimes, in dreaming and delirium, form the starting point of hallucinations.

"Let me give a few well-known cases, taken from physiological optics, as examples. Every eye probably contains _muscæ volitantes_, so called; these are fibres, granules, etc., floating in the vitreous humor, throwing their shadows on the retina, and appearing in the field of vision as little dark moving spots. They are most easily detected by looking attentively at a broad, bright, blank surface like the sky. Most persons who have not had their attention expressly called to the existence of these figures are apt to notice them for the first time when some ailment befalls their eyes and attracts their attention to the subjective state of these organs. The usual complaint then is that the _muscæ volitantes_ came in with the malady; and this often makes the patients very anxious about these harmless things, and attentive to all their peculiarities. It is then hard work to make them believe that these figures have existed throughout all their previous life, and that all healthy eyes contain them. I knew an old gentleman who once had occasion to cover one of his eyes which had accidentally become diseased, and who was then in no small degree shocked at finding that his other eye was totally blind; with a sort of blindness, moreover, which must have lasted years, and yet he never was aware of it.

"Who, besides, would believe without performing the appropriate experiments, that when one of his eyes is closed there is a great gap, the so-called 'blind spot,' not far from the middle of the field of the open eye, in which he sees nothing at all, but which he fills out with his imagination? Mariotte, who was led by theoretic speculations to discover this phenomenon, awakened no small surprise when he showed it at the court of Charles II. of England. The experiment was at that time repeated with many variations, and became a fashionable amusement. The gap is, in fact, so large that seven full moons alongside of each other would not cover its diameter, and that a man's face 6 or 7 feet off disappears within it. In our ordinary use of vision this great hole in the field fails utterly to be noticed; because our eyes are constantly wandering, and the moment an object interests us we turn them full upon it. So it follows that the object which at any actual moment excites our attention never happens to fall upon this gap, and thus it is that we never grow conscious of the blind spot in the field. In order to notice it, we must first purposely rivet our gaze upon one object and then move about a second object in the neighborhood of the blind spot, striving meanwhile to _attend_ to this latter without moving the direction of our gaze from the first object. This runs counter to all our habits, and is therefore a difficult thing to accomplish. With some people it is even an impossibility. But only when it is accomplished do we see the second object vanish and convince ourselves of the existence of this gap.

"Finally, let me refer to the double images of ordinary binocular vision. Whenever we look at a point with both eyes, all objects on this side of it or beyond it appear double. It takes but a moderate effort of observation to ascertain this fact; and from this we may conclude that we have been seeing the far greater part of the external world double all our lives, although numbers of persons are unaware of it, and are in the highest degree astonished when it is brought to their attention. As a matter of fact, we never _have_ seen in this double fashion any particular object upon which our attention was directed at the time; for upon such objects we always converge both eyes. In the habitual use of our eyes, our attention is always withdrawn from such objects as give us double images at the time; this is the reason why we so seldom learn that these images exist. In order to find them we must set our attention a new and unusual task; we must make it explore the lateral parts of the field of vision, not, as usual, to find what objects are there, but to analyze our sensations. Then only do we notice this phenomenon.[430]

"The same difficulty which is found in the observation of subjective sensations to which no external object corresponds is found also in the analysis of compound sensations which correspond to a single object. Of this sort are many of our sensations of sound. When the sound of a violin, no matter how often we hear it, excites over and over again in our ear the same sum of partial tones, the result is that our feeling of this sum of tones ends by becoming for our mind a mere sign for the voice of the violin. Another combination of partial tones becomes the sensible sign of the voice of a clarionet, etc. And the oftener any such combination is heard, the more accustomed we grow to perceiving it as an integral total, and the harder it becomes to analyze it by immediate observation. I believe that this is one of the principal reasons why the analysis of the notes of the human voice in singing is relatively so difficult. Such fusions of many sensations into what, to conscious perception, seems a simple whole, abound in all our senses.

"Physiological optics affords other interesting examples. The perception of the bodily form of a near object comes about through the combination of two diverse pictures which the eyes severally receive from it, and whose diversity is due to the different position of each eye, altering the perspective view of what is before it. Before the invention of the stereoscope this explanation could only be assumed hypothetically; but it can now be proved at any moment by the use of the instrument. Into the stereoscope we insert two flat drawings, representing the two perspective views of the two eyes, in such a manner that each eye sees its own view in the proper place; and we obtain, in consequence, the perception of a single extended solid, as complete and vivid as if we had the real object before us.

"Now we can, it is true, by shutting one eye after the other and attending to the point, recognize the difference in the pictures--at least when it is not too small. But, for the stereoscopic perception of solidity, pictures suffice whose difference is so extraordinarily slight as hardly to be recognized by the most careful comparison; and it is certain that, in our ordinary careless observing of bodily objects, we never dream that the perception is due to two perspective views fused into one, because it is an entirely different kind of perception from that of either flat perspective view by itself. It is certain, therefore, that two different sensations of our two eyes fuse into a third perception entirely different from either. Just as partial tones fuse into the perception of a certain instrument's voice; and just as we learn to separate the partial tones of a vibrating string by pinching a nodal point and letting them sound in isolation; so we learn to separate the images on the two eyes by opening and closing them alternately.

"There are other much more complex instances of the way in which many sensations may combine to serve as the basis of a quite simple perception. When, for example we perceive an object in a certain _direction_, we must somehow be impressed by the fact that certain of our optic nerve-fibres, and no others, are impressed by its light. Furthermore, we must rightly judge the position of our eyes in our head, and of our head upon our body, by means of feelings in our eye-muscles and our neck-muscles respectively. If any of these processes is disturbed we get a false perception of the object's position. The nerve-fibres can be changed by a prism before the eye; or the eyeball's position changed by pressing the organ towards one side; and such experiments show that, for the simple seeing of the position of an object, sensations of these two sorts must concur. But it would be quite impossible to gather this directly from the sensible impression which the object makes. Even when we have made experiments and convinced ourselves in every possible manner that such must be the fact, it still remains hidden from our immediate introspective observation.

"These examples" [of 'synthetic perception,' perception in which each contributory sensation is felt _in_ the whole, and is a co-determinant of what the whole shall be, but does not attract the attention to its separate self] "may suffice to show the vital part which the direction of attention and practice in observing play in sense-perception. To apply this now to the ear. The ordinary task which our ear has to solve when many sounds assail it at once is to discern the voices of the several sounding bodies or instruments engaged; beyond this it has no objective interest in analyzing. We wish to know, when many men are speaking together, what each one says, when many instruments and voices combine, which melody is executed by each. Any deeper analysis, such as that of each separate note into its partial tones (although it might be performed by the same means and faculty of hearing as the first analysis) would tell us nothing new about the sources of sound actually present, but might lead us astray as to their number. For this reason we confine our attention in analyzing a mass of sound to the several instruments' voices, and expressly abstain, as it were, from discriminating the elementary components of the latter. In this last sort of discrimination we are as unpractised as we are, on the contrary, well trained in the former kind."[431]

After all we have said, no comment seems called for upon these interesting and important facts and reflections of Helmholtz.

REACTION-TIME AFTER DISCRIMINATION.

The _time required for discrimination_ has been made a subject of experimental measurement. Wundt calls it _Unterscheidungszeit_. His subjects (whose simple reaction-time--see p. 85 ff.--had previously been determined) were required to make a movement, always the same, the instant they discerned _which_ of two or more signals they received. The exact time of the signal and that of the movement were automatically registered by a galvanic chronoscope. The particular signal to be received was unknown in advance, and the excess of time occupied by those reactions in which its character had first to be discerned, over the simple reaction-time, measured, according to Wundt, the time required for the act of discrimination. It was found longer when four different signals were irregularly used than when only two were used. In the former case it averaged, for three observers respectively (the signals being the sudden appearance of a black or of a white object),

0.050 sec.; 0.047 sec. 0.079 sec.

In the latter case, a red and a green signal being added to the former ones, it became, for the same observers,

0.157; 0.073; 0.132.[432]

Later, in Wundt's Laboratory, Herr Tischer made many careful experiments after the same method, where the facts to be discriminated were the different degrees of loudness in the sound which served as a signal. I subjoin Herr Tischer's table of results, explaining that each vertical column after the first gives the average results obtained from a distinct individual, and that the figure in the first column stands for the number of possible loudnesses that might be expected in the particular series of reactions made. The times are expressed in thousandths of a second.

2 | 6 | 8.5 | 10.75 | 10.7 | 33 | 53 3 | 10 | 14.4 | 19.9 | 22.7 | 58.5 | 57.8 4 | 16.7 | 20.8 | 29 | 29.1 | 75 | 84 5 | 25.6 | 31 | ... | 40.1 | 95.5 | 138[433]

The interesting points here are the great individual variations, and the rapid way in which the time for discrimination increases with the number of possible terms to discriminate. The individual variations are largely due to want of practice in the particular task set, but partly also to discrepancies in the psychic process. One gentleman said, for example, that in the experiments with three sounds, he kept the image of the middle one ready in his mind, and compared what he heard as either louder, lower, or the same. His discrimination among three possibilities became thus very similar to a discrimination between two.[434]

Mr. J. M. Cattell found he could get no results by this method,[435] and reverted to one used by observers previous to Wundt and which Wundt had rejected. This is the _einfache Wahlmethode_, as Wundt calls it. The reacter awaits the signal and reacts if it is of one sort, but omits to act if it is of another sort. The reaction thus occurs after discrimination; the motor impulse cannot be sent to the hand until the subject knows what the signal is. The nervous impulse, as Mr. Cattell says, must probably travel to the cortex and excite changes there, causing in consciousness the perception of the signal. These changes occupy the time of discrimination (or perception-time, as it is called by Mr. C.) But _then_ a nervous impulse must descend from the cortex to the lower motor centre which stands primed and ready to discharge; and this, as Mr. C. says, gives a will-time as well. The total reaction-time thus includes both 'will-time' and 'discrimination-time.' But as the centrifugal and centripetal processes occupying these two times respectively are probably about the same, and the time used in the cortex is about equally divided between the perception of the signal and the preparation of the motor discharge, if we divide it equally between perception (discrimination) and volition, the error cannot be great.[436] We can moreover change the nature of the perception without altering the will-time, and thus investigate with considerable thoroughness the length of the perception-time.

Guided by these principles, Prof. Cattell found the time required for distinguishing a white signal from no signal to be, in two observers:

0.030 sec. and 0.050 sec;

that for distinguishing one color from another was similarly:

0.100 and 0.110;

that for distinguishing a certain color from ten other colors:

0.105 and 0.117;

that for distinguishing the letter A in ordinary print from the letter Z:

0.142 and 0.137;

that for distinguishing a given letter from all the rest of the alphabet (not reacting until that letter appeared)

0.119 and 0.116;

that for distinguishing a word from any of twenty-five other words, from

0.118 sec. to 0.158 sec.

The difference depending on the length of the words and the familiarity of the language to which they belonged.

Prof. Cattell calls attention to the fact that the time for distinguishing a word is often but little more than that for distinguishing a letter:

"We do not, therefore, distinguish separately the letters of which a word is composed, but the word as a whole. The application of this in teaching children to read is evident."

He also finds a great difference in the time with which various letters are distinguished, E being particularly bad.[437]

I have, in describing these experiments, followed the example of previous writers and spoken as if the process by which the nature of the signal determines the reaction were identical with the ordinary conscious process of discriminative perception and volition. I am convinced, however, that this is not the case; and that although the results are the same, the form of consciousness is quite different. The reader will remember my contention (_supra_, p. 90 ff.) that the simple reaction-time (usually supposed to include a conscious process of perceiving) really measures nothing but a reflex act. Anyone who will perform reactions with discrimination will easily convince himself that the process here also is far more like a reflex, than like a deliberate, operation. I have made, with myself and students, a large number of measurements where the signal expected was in one series a touch _somewhere_ on the skin of the back and head, and in another series a spark _somewhere_ in the field of view. The hand had to move as quickly as possible towards the place of the touch or the spark. It did so infallibly, and sensibly instantly; whilst both place and movement seemed to be _perceived_ only a moment later, in memory. These experiments were undertaken for the express purpose of ascertaining whether the movement at the sight of the spark was discharged _immediately_ by the visual perception, or whether a 'motor-idea' had to intervene between the perception of the spark and the reaction.[438] The first thing that was manifest to introspection was that no perception or idea of _any_ sort preceded the reaction. It jumped of itself, whenever the signal came; and perception was retrospective. We must suppose, then, that the state of eager expectancy of a certain definite range of possible discharges, innervates a whole set of paths in advance, so that when a particular sensation comes it is drafted into its appropriate motor outlet too quickly for the perceptive process to be aroused. In the experiments I describe, the conditions were most favorable for rapidity, for the connection between the signals and their movements might almost be called innate. It is instinctive to move the hand towards a thing seen or a skin-spot touched. But where the movement is _conventionally_ attached to the signal, there would be more chance for delay, and the amount of practice would then determine the speed. This is well shown in Tischer's results, quoted on p. 524, where the most practised observer, Tischer himself, reacted in one eighth of the time needed by one of the others.[439] But what all investigators have aimed to determine in these experiments is the _minimum_ time. I trust I have said enough to convince the student that this minimum time by no means measures what we consciously know as discrimination. It only measures something which, under the experimental conditions, leads to a similar result. But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.[440]

THE PERCEPTION OF LIKENESS.

The perception of likeness is practically very much bound up with that of difference. That is to say, the only differences we note _as_ differences, and estimate quantitatively, and arrange along a scale, are those comparatively limited differences which we find between members of a common genus. The force of gravity and the color of this ink are things it never occurred to me to compare until now that I am casting about for examples of the incomparable. Similarly the elastic quality of this india-rubber band, the comfort of last night's sleep, the good that can be done with a legacy, these are things too discrepant to have ever been compared ere now. Their relation to each other is less that of difference than of mere logical negativity. To be found _different_, things must as a rule have some commensurability, some aspect in common, which suggests the possibility of their being treated in the same way. This is of course not a theoretic necessity--for any distinction may be called a 'difference,' if one likes--but a practical and linguistic remark.

The _same things, then, which arouse the perception of difference usually arouse that of resemblance also_. And the analysis of them, so as to define wherein the difference and wherein the resemblance respectively consists, is called _comparison_. If we start to deal with the things as simply the same or alike, we are liable to be surprised by the difference. If we start to treat them as merely different, we are apt to discover how much they are alike. _Difference, commonly so called, is thus between species of a genus._ And the faculty by which we perceive the resemblance upon which the genus is based, is just as ultimate and inexplicable a mental endowment as that by which we perceive the differences upon which the species depend. There is a shock of likeness when we pass from one thing to another which in the first instance we merely discriminate numerically, but, at the moment of bringing our attention to bear, perceive to be _similar_ to the first; just as there is a shock of difference when we pass between two dissimilars.[441] The objective extent of the likeness, just like that of the difference, determines the magnitude of the shock. The likeness may be so evanescent, or the basis of it so habitual and little liable to be attended to, that it will escape observation altogether. Where, however, we find it, there we make a genus of the things compared; and their discrepancies and incommensurabilities in other respects can then figure as the _differential_ of so many species. As 'thinkables' or 'existents' even the smoke of a cigarette and the worth of a dollar-bill are comparable--still more so as 'perishables,' or as 'enjoyables.'

Much, then, of what I have said of difference in the course of this chapter will apply, with a simple change of language, to resemblance as well. We go through the world, carrying on the two functions abreast, discovering differences in the like, and likenesses in the different. To abstract the _ground_ of either difference or likeness (where it is not ultimate) demands an analysis of the given objects into their parts. So that all that was said of the dependence of analysis upon a preliminary separate acquaintance with the character to be abstracted, and upon its having varied concomitants, finds a place in the psychology of resemblance as well as in that of difference.

But when all is said and done about the conditions which favor our perception of resemblance and our abstraction of its ground, the crude fact remains, that _some people are far more sensitive to resemblances, and far more ready to point out wherein they consist, than others are_. They are the wits, the poets, the inventors, the scientific men, the practical geniuses. _A native talent for perceiving analogies_ is reckoned by Prof. Bain, and by others before and after him, as _the leading fact in genius of every order_. But as this

## chapter is already long, and as the question of genius had better wait

till