The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 · William James
FOOTNOTES:
And let it not be said that what makes us judge the felt pain to be weaker than the imagined one of a moment since is our recollection of the _downward nature of the shock of difference_ which we felt as we passed to the present moment from the one before it. That shock does undoubtedly have a different character according as it comes between terms of which the second diminishes or increases; and it may be admitted that in cases Where the past term is doubtfully remembered, the memory of the shock as _plus_ or _minus_, might sometimes enable us to establish a relation which otherwise we should not perceive. But one could hardly expect the memory of this shock to overpower our actual comparison of terms, both of which are _present_ (as are the image and the sensation in the case supposed), and make us judge the weaker one to be the stronger.--And hereupon comes the second reply: Suppose the mind does compare two realities by comparing two ideas of its own which represent them--what is gained? The same mystery is still there. The ideas must still be _known_; and, as the attention in comparing oscillates from one to the other, past must be known with present just as before. If you must end by simply saying that your 'Ego,' whilst _being_ neither the idea of _m_ nor the idea of _n_, yet knows and compares both, why not allow your pulse of thought, which _is_ neither the thing _m_ nor the thing _n_, to know and compare both directly? 'Tis but a question of how to _name_ the facts least artificially. The egoist _explains_ them, by naming them as an Ego 'combining' or 'synthetizing' two ideas, no more than we do by naming them a pulse of thought knowing two facts.
The _a_'s will then appear single, and so probably will the _b_'s. But the now single-seeming _b_ on slide 1 will look nearer, whilst that on slide 2 will look farther than the _a_. But, if the diagrams are rightly drawn, _b_ and _b'''_ must affect 'identical' spots, spots equally far to the right of the fovea, _b_ in the left eye and _b'''_ in the right eye. The same is true of _b'_ and _b''_. Identical spots are spots whose sensations cannot possibly be discriminated as such. Since in these two observations, however, they give rise to such opposite perceptions of distance, and prompt such opposite tendencies to movement (since in slide 1 we _converge_ in looking from _a_ to _b_, whilst in slide 2 we _diverge_), it follows that two processes which occasion feelings quite indistinguishable to direct consciousness may nevertheless be each allied with disparate associates both of a sensorial and of a motor kind. Cf. Donders, Archiv f. Ophthalmologie, Bd. 13 (1867). The basis of his essay is that we cannot _feel_ on which eye any particular element of a compound picture falls, but its effects on our total perception differ in the two eyes. _a b_ _a b'_ _Slide_ 1. . . . . _a b''_ _a b'''_ _Slide_ 2. . . . . [425] A. W. Volkmann: Ueber den Einfluss der Uebung, etc., Leipzig Berichte, Math.-phys. Classe. x, 1858, p. 67.
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.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.