Chapter XIII

that likeness and difference are an elementary relation, not to be resolved in every case into a mixture of absolute identity and absolute heterogeneity of content (cf. Vol. I, pp. 492-3).

I conclude, then, that although in its more superficial determinations the blind man's space is very different from our space, yet a deep analogy remains between the two. 'Big' and 'little,' 'far' and 'near,' are similar contents of consciousness in both of us. But the _measure_ of the bigness and the farness is very different in him and in ourselves. He, for example, can have no notion of what we mean by objects appearing smaller as they move away, because he must always conceive of them as of their constant tactile size. Nor, whatever analogy the two extensions involve, should we expect that a blind man receiving sight for the first time should recognize his new-given optical objects by their familiar tactile names. Molyneux wrote to Locke:

"Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere,... so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table and the blind man to be made to see; query, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?"

This has remained in literature as 'Molyneux's query.' Molyneux answered 'No.' And Locke says:[208]

"I agree with this thinking gentleman whom I am proud to call my friend, and am of opinion that the blind man at first sight would not be able to say which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only saw them; though he could unerringly name them by his touch and certainly distinguish them by the difference of their figures felt."

This opinion has not lacked experimental confirmation. From Chesselden's case downwards, patients operated for congenital cataract have been unable to name at first the things they saw. "So, Puss, I shall know you another time," said Chesselden's patient, after catching the cat, looking at her steadfastly, and setting her down. Some of this incapacity is unquestionably due to general mental confusion at the new experience, and to the excessively unfavorable conditions for perception which an eye with its lens just extirpated affords. That the analogy of inner nature between the retinal and tactile sensations goes beyond mere extensity is proved by the cases where the patients were the most intelligent, as in the young man operated on by Dr. Franz, who named circular, triangular, and quadrangular figures at first sight.[209]

VISUAL SPACE.

It is when we come to analyze minutely the conditions of _visual_ perception that difficulties arise which have made psychologists appeal to new and _quasi_-mythical mental powers. But I firmly believe that even here exact investigation will yield the same verdict as in the cases studied hitherto. This subject will close our survey of the facts; and if it give the result I foretell, we shall be in the best of positions for a few final pages of critically historical review.

If a common person is asked how he is enabled to see things as they are, he will simply reply, by opening his eyes and looking. This innocent answer has, however, long since been impossible for science. There are various paradoxes and irregularities about _what_ we appear to perceive under seemingly identical optical conditions, which immediately raise questions. To say nothing now of the time-honored conundrums of why we see upright with an inverted retinal picture, and why we do not see double; and to leave aside the whole field of color-contrasts and ambiguities, as not directly relevant to the space-problem,--it is certain that the same retinal image makes us see quite differently-sized and differently-shaped objects at different times, and it is equally certain that the same ocular movement varies in its perceptive import. It ought to be possible, were the act of perception completely and _simply_ intelligible, to assign for every distinct judgment of size, shape, and position a distinct optical modification of some kind as its occasion. And the connection between the two ought to be so constant that, given the same modification, we should always have the same judgment. But if we study the facts closely _we soon find no such constant connection between either judgment and retinal modification, or judgment and muscular modification, to exist._ The judgment seems to result from the combination of retinal, muscular and intellectual factors with each other; and any one of them may occasionally overpower the rest in a way which seems to leave the matter subject to no simple law.

The scientific study of the subject, if we omit Descartes, began with Berkeley, and the particular perception he analyzed in his New Theory of Vision was that of distance or depth. Starting with the physical assumption that a difference in the distance of a point can make no difference in the nature of its retinal image, since "distance being a line directed endwise to the eye, it projects only one point in the fund of the eye--which point remains invariably the same, whether the distance be longer or shorter," he concluded that distance could not possibly be a visual sensation, but must be an intellectual 'suggestion' from 'custom' of some non-visual experience. According to Berkeley this experience was tactile. His whole treatment of the subject was excessively vague,--no shame to him, as a breaker of fresh ground,--but as it has been adopted and enthusiastically hugged in all its vagueness by nearly the whole line of British psychologists who have succeeded him, it will be well for us to begin our study of vision by refuting his notion that depth cannot possibly be perceived in terms of purely visual feeling.

_The Third Dimension._

Berkeleyans unanimously assume that no retinal sensation can primitively be of volume; if it be of extension at all (which they are barely disposed to admit), it can be only of two-, not of three-, dimensional extension. At the beginning of the present chapter we denied this, and adduced facts to show that all objects of sensation are voluminous in three dimensions (cf. p. 136 ff.). It is impossible to lie on one's back on a hill, to let the empty abyss of blue fill one's whole visual field, and to sink deeper and deeper into the merely sensational mode of consciousness regarding it, without feeling that an indeterminate, palpitating, circling depth is as indefeasibly one of its attributes as its breadth. We may artificially exaggerate this sensation of depth. Rise and look from the hill-top at the distant view; represent to yourself as vividly as possible the distance of the uttermost horizon; and then _with inverted head_ look at the same. There will be a startling increase in the perspective, a most sensible recession of the maximum distance; and as you raise the head you can actually see the horizon-line again draw near.[210]

Mind, I say nothing as yet about our estimate of the 'real' amount of this depth or distance. I only want to confirm its existence as a natural and inevitable optical consort of the two other optical dimensions. The field of view is always a _volume-unit_. Whatever be supposed to be its absolute and 'real' size, the relative sizes of its dimensions are functions of each other. Indeed, it happens perhaps most often that the breadth- and height-feeling take their absolute measure from the depth-feeling. If we plunge our head into a wash-basin, the felt nearness of the bottom makes us feel the lateral expanse to be small. If, on the contrary, we are on a mountain-top, the distance of the horizon carries with it in our judgment a proportionate height and length in the mountain-chains that bound it to our view. But as aforesaid, let us not consider the question of absolute size now,--it must later be taken up in a thorough way. Let us confine ourselves to the way in which the three dimensions which are seen, get their values fixed _relatively to each other_.

Reid, in his Inquiry into the Human Mind, has a section 'Of the Geometry of Visibles,' in which he assumes to trace what the perceptions would be of a race of 'Idomenians' reduced to the sole sense of sight. Agreeing with Berkeley that sight alone can give no knowledge of the third dimension, he humorously deduces various ingenious absurdities in their interpretations of the material appearances before their eyes.

Now I firmly believe, on the contrary, that one of Reid's Idomenians would frame precisely the same conception of the external world that we do, if he had our intellectual powers.[211] Even were his very eyeballs fixed and not movable like ours, that would only retard, not frustrate, his education. For the _same object_, by alternately covering in its lateral movements different parts of his retina, would determine the mutual equivalencies of the first two dimensions of the field of view; and by exciting the physiological cause of his perception of depth in various degrees, it would establish a scale of equivalency between the first two and the third.

First of all, one of the sensations given by the object is chosen to represent its 'real' size and shape, in accordance with the principles laid down on pp. 178 and 179. _One sensation measures the 'thing' present, and the 'thing' then measures the other sensations._ The peripheral parts of the retina are equated with the central by receiving the image of the same object. This needs no elucidation in case the object does not change its distance or its front. But suppose, to take a more complicated case, that the object is a stick, seen first in its whole length, and then rotated round one of its ends; let this fixed end be the one near the eye. In this movement the stick's image will grow progressively shorter; its farther end will appear less and less separated laterally from its fixed near end; soon it will be screened by the latter, and then reappear on the opposite side, and finally on that side resume its original length. Suppose this movement to become a familiar experience; the mind will presumably react upon it after its usual fashion (which is that of unifying all data which it is in any way possible to unify), and consider it the movement of a constant object rather than the transformation of a fluctuating one. Now, the _sensation of depth_ which it receives during the experience is awakened more by the far than by the near end of the object. But how much depth? What shall measure its amount? Why, at the moment the far end is ready to be eclipsed, the difference of its distance from the near end's distance must be judged equal to the stick's whole length; but that length has already been judged equal to a certain optical sensation of breadth. _Thus we find that given amounts of the visual depth-feeling become signs of fixed amounts of the visual breadth-feeling. The measurement of distance is, as Berkeley truly said, a result of suggestion and experience. But visual experience alone is adequate to produce it, and this he erroneously denied._

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