Chapter V

, above, will doubtless have remarked that the illustrious physiologist has fallen, in these paragraphs, into that sort of interpretation of the facts which we there tried to prove erroneous. Helmholtz, however, is no more careless than most psychologists in confounding together the object perceived, the organic conditions of the perception, and the sensations which _would_ be excited by the several parts of the object, or by the several organic conditions, _provided_ they came into action separately or were separately attended to, and in assuming that what is true of any one of these sorts of fact must be true of the other sorts also. If each organic condition or part of the object is there, its sensation, he thinks, must be there also, only in a 'synthetic'--which is indistinguishable from what the authors whom we formerly reviewed called an 'unconscious'--state. I will not repeat arguments sufficiently detailed in the earlier chapter (see especially pp. 170-176), but simply say that what he calls the 'fusion of many _sensations_ into one' is really the production of one sensation by the co-operation of many _organic conditions_; and that what perception fails to discriminate (when it is 'synthetic') is not _sensations_ already existent but not singled out, but new objective _facts_, judged truer than the facts already synthetically perceived--two views of the solid body, many harmonic tones, instead of one view and one tone, states of the eyeball-muscles thitherto unknown, and the like. These new facts, when first discovered, are known in states of consciousness never till that moment exactly realized before, states of consciousness which at the same time judge them to be determinations of the same _matter of fact_ which was previously realized. All that Helmholtz says of the conditions which hinder and further analysis applies just as naturally to the analysis, through the advent of _new_ feelings, of _objects_ into their elements, as to the analysis of aggregate feelings into elementary feelings supposed to have been hidden in them all the while.

The reader can himself apply this criticism to the following passages from Lotze and Stumpf respectively, which I quote because they are the ablest expressions of the view opposed to my own. Both authors, it seems to me, commit the psychologist's fallacy, and allow their later knowledge of the things felt to be foisted into their account of the primitive way of feeling them.

Lotze says: "It is indubitable that the simultaneous assault of a variety of different stimuli on different senses, or even on the same sense, puts us into a state of confused general feeling in which we are certainly not conscious of clearly distinguishing the different impressions. Still it does not follow that in such a case we have a positive perception of an actual unity of the contents of our ideas, arising from their mixture; our state of mind seems rather to consist in (1) the consciousness of our inability to separate what really has remained diverse, and (2) in the general feeling of the disturbance produced in the economy of our body by the simultaneous assault of the stimuli.... Not that the sensations melt into one another, but simply that the act of distinguishing them is absent; and this again certainly not so far that the fact of the difference remains entirely unperceived, but only so far as to prevent us from determining the amount of the difference, and from apprehending other relations between the different impressions. Anyone who is annoyed at one and the same time by glowing heat, dazzling light, deafening noise, and an offensive smell, will certainly not fuse these disparate sensations into a single one with a single content which could be sensuously perceived; they remain for him in separation, and he merely finds it impossible to be conscious of one of them apart from the others. But, further, he will have a feeling of discomfort--what I mentioned above as the _second_ constituent of his whole state. For every stimulus which produces in consciousness a definite content of sensation is also a definite degree of disturbance, and therefore makes a call upon the forces of the nerves; and the sum of these little changes, which in their character as disturbances are not so diverse as the contents of consciousness they give rise to, produce the general feeling which, added to the inability to distinguish, deludes us into the belief in an actual absence of diversity in our sensations. It is only in some such way as this, again, that I can imagine that state which is sometimes described as the beginning of our whole education, a state which in itself is supposed to be simple, and to be afterwards divided into different sensations by an activity of separation. No activity of separation in the world could establish differences where no real diversity existed; for it would have nothing to guide it to the places where it was to establish them, or to indicate the width it was to give them." (Metaphysic, § 260, English translation.)

Stumpf writes as follows: "Of coexistent sensations there are always a large number undiscriminated in consciousness, or (if one prefer to call what is undiscriminated unconscious) in the soul. They are, however, not fused into a simple quality. When, on entering a room, we receive sensations of odor and warmth together, without expressly attending to either, the two qualities of sensation are not, as it were, an entirely new simple quality, which first at the moment in which attention analytically steps in _changes into_ smell and warmth.... In such cases we find ourselves in presence of an indefinable, unnamable total of feeling. And when, after successfully analyzing this total, we call it back to memory, as it was in its unanalyzed state, and compare it with the elements we have found, the latter (as it seems to me) may be recognized as real parts contained in the former, and the former seen to be their sum. So, for example, when we clearly perceive that the content of our sensation of oil of peppermint is partly a sensation of taste and partly one of temperature." (Tonpsychologie, i, 107.)

I should prefer to say that we perceive that objective fact, known to us as the peppermint taste, to contain those other objective facts known as aromatic or sapid quality, and coldness, respectively. No ground to suppose that the vehicle of this last very complex perception has any identity with the earlier psychosis--least of all is contained in it.

[432] Physiol. Psych., ii, 248.

[433] Wundt's Philos. Studien, i, 527.

[434] _Ibid._ p. 530.

[435] Mind, xi, 377 ff. He says: "I apparently either distinguished the impression and made the motion simultaneously, or if I tried to avoid this by waiting until I had formed a distinct impression before I began to make the motion, I added to the simple reaction, not only a perception, but a volition."--Which remark may well confirm our doubts as to the strict _psychologic_ worth of any of these measurements.

[436] Mind, xi, 379.

[437] For other determinations of discrimination-time by this method cf. v. Kries and Auerbach, Archiv f. Physiologie, Bd. i, p. 297 ff. (these authors get much smaller figures); Friedrich, Psychologische Studien, i, 39.