The Principles of Psychology, Vol.

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Table of Contents

DOVER BOOKS ON WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

Title Page
Copyright Page
PSYOHOLOGY. - CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX. - THE PERCEPTION OF ‘THINGS.’
CHAPTER XX. - THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE.
CHAPTER XXI. - THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXII. - THE PRODUCTION OF MOVEMENT.
CHAPTER XXIV. - INSTINCT.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII. - HYPNOTISM.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
INDEX.
DOVER BOOKS ON BIOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY AND MEDICINE
PSYOHOLOGY.
CHAPTER XVII.
SENSATION.
AFTER inner perception, outer perception! The next three chapters will
treat of the processes by which we cognize at all times the present world of
space and the material things which it contains. And first, of the process
called Sensation.

SENSATION AND PERCEPTION DISTINGUISHED.

The words Sensation and Perception do not carry very definitely
discriminated meanings in popular speech, and in Psychology also their
meanings run into each other. Both of them name processes in which we
cognize an objective world; both (under normal conditions) need the
stimulation of incoming nerves ere they can occur; Perception always
involves Sensation as a portion of itself; and Sensation in turn never takes
place in adult life without Perception also being there. They are therefore
names for different cognitive functions, not for different sorts of mental
fact. The nearer the object cognized comes to being a simple quality like
‘hot,’ ‘cold,’ ‘red,’ ‘noise,’ ‘pain,’ apprehended irrelatively to other things,
the more the state of mind approaches pure sensation. The fuller of relations
the object is, on the contrary; the more it is something classed, located,
measured, compared, assigned to a function, etc., etc.; the more
unreservedly do we call the state of mind a perception, and the relatively
smaller is the part in it which sensation plays.
Sensation, then, so long as we take the analytic point of view, differs from
Perception only in the extreme simplicity of its object or content.1 Its
function is that of mere acquaintance with a fact. Perception’s function, on
the other hand, is knowledge about 2 a fact; and this knowledge admits of
numberless degrees of complication. But in both sensation and perception
we perceive the fact as an immediately present outward reality, and this
makes them differ from ‘thought’ and ‘conception,’ whose objects do not
appear present in this immediate physical way. From the physiological point
of view both sensations and perceptions differ from ‘thoughts’ (in the
narrower sense of the word) in the fact that nerve-currents coming in from
the periphery are involved in their production. In perception these nerve-
currents arouse voluminous associative or reproductive processes in the
cortex; but when sensation occurs alone, or with a minimum of perception,
the accompanying reproductive processes are at a minimum too.
I shall in this chapter discuss some general questions more especially
relative to Sensation. In a later chapter perception will take its turn. I shall
entirely pass by the classification and natural history of our special ‘sense-
tions,’ such matters finding their proper place, and being sufficiently well
treated, in all the physiological books.3

THE COGNITIVE FUNCTION OF SENSATION.

A pure sensation is an abstraction; and when we adults talk of our
sensations’ we mean one of two things: either certain objects, namely
simple qualities or attributes like hard, hot, pain; or else those of our
thoughts in which acquaintance with these objects is least combined with
knowledge about the relations of them to other things. As we can only think
or talk about the relations of objects with which we have acquaintance
already, we are forced to postulate a function in our thought whereby we
first become aware of the bare immediate natures by which our several
objects are distinguished. This function is sensation. And just as logicians
always point out the distinction between substantive terms of discourse and
relations found to obtain between them, so psychologists, as a rule, are
ready to admit this function, of the vision of the terms or matters meant, as
something distinct from the knowledge about them and of their relations
inter se. Thought with the former function is sensational, with the latter,
intellectual. Our earliest thoughts are almost exclusively sensational. They
merely give us a set of thats, or its, of subjects of discourse, with their
relations not brought out. The first time we see light, in Condillac’s phrase
we are it rather rather than see it. But all our later optical knowledge is
about what this experience gives. And though we were struck blind from
that first moment, our scholarship in the subject would lack no essential
feature so long as our memory remained. In training-institutions for the
blind they teach the pupils as much about light as in ordinary schools.
Reflection, refraction, the spectrum, the ether-theory, etc., are all studied.
But the best taught born-blind pupil of such an establishment yet lacks a
knowledge which the least instructed seeing baby has. They can never show
him what light is in its ‘first intention’; and the loss of that sensible
knowledge no book-learning can replace. All this is so obvious that we
usually find sensation ‘postulated’ as an element of experience, even by
those philosophers who are least inclined to make much of its importance,
or to pay respect to the knowledge which it brings.4
But the trouble is that most, if not all, of those who admit it, admit it as a
fractional part of the thought, in the old-fashioned atomistic sense which
we have so often criticised.
Take the pain called toothache for example. Again and again we feel it
and greet it as the same real item in the universe. We must therefore, it is
supposed, have a distinct pocket for it in our mind into which it and nothing
else will fit. This pocket, when filled, is the sensation of toothache ; and
must be either filled or half-filled whenever and under whatever form
toothache is present to our thought, and whether much or little of the rest of
the mind be filled at the same time. Thereupon of course comes up the
paradox and mystery: If the knowledge of toothache be pent up in this
separate mental pocket, how can it be known cum alio or brought into one
view with anything else ? This pocket knows nothing else; no other part of
the mind knows toothache. The knowing of toothache cum alio must be a
miracle. And the miracle must have an Agent. And the Agent must be a
Subject or Ego ‘ out of time,’—and all the rest of it, as we saw in Chapter
X. And then begins the well-worn round of recrimination between the
sensationalists and the spiritualists, from which we are saved by our
determination from the outset to accept the psychological point of view, and
to admit knowledge whether of simple toothaches or of philosophic systems
as an ultimate fact. There are realities and there are ‘ states of mind,’ and the
latter know the former; and it is just as wonderful for a state of mind to be a
‘ sensation’ and know a simple pain as for it to be a thought and know a
system of related things.5 But there is no reason to suppose that when
different states of mind know different things about the same toothache,
they do so by virtue of their all containing faintly or vividly the original
pain. Quite the reverse. The by-gone sensation of my gout was painful, as
Reid somewhere says; the thought of the same gout as by-gone is pleasant,
and in no respect resembles the earlier mental state.
Sensations, then, first make us acquainted with innumerable things, and
then are replaced by thoughts which know the same things in altogether
other ways. And Locke’s main doctrine remains eternally true, however
hazy some of his language may have been, that
“ though there be a great number of considerations wherein things may be
compared one with another, and so a multitude of relations; yet they all
terminate in, and are concerned about, those simple ideas6 either of
sensation or reflection, which I think to be the whole materials of all our
knowledge. . . . The simple ideas we receive from sensation and reflection
are the boundaries of our thoughts ; beyond which, the mind whatever
efforts it would make, is not able to advance one jot ; nor can it make any
discoveries when it would pry into the nature and hidden causes of those
ideas.”7
The nature and hidden causes of ideas will never be unravelled till the
nexus between the brain and consciousness is cleared up. All we can say
now is that sensations are first things in the way of consciousness. Before
conceptions can come, sensations must have come; but before sensations
come, no psychic fact need have existed, a nerve-current is enough. If the
nerve-current be not given, nothing else will take its place. To quote the
good Locke again:
“It is not in the power of the most exalted wit or enlarged understanding,
by any quickness or variety of thoughts, to invent or frame one new simple
idea [i.e. sensation] in the mind. . . . I would have any one try to fancy any
taste which had never affected his palate, or frame the idea of a scent he had
never smelt ; and when he can do this, I will also conclude that a blind man
hath ideas of colors, and a deaf man true distinct notions of sounds.“8

The brain is so made that all currents in it run one way. Consciousness of
some sort goes with all the currents, but it is only when new currents are
entering that it has the sensational tang. And it is only then that
consciousness directly encounters (to use a word of Mr. Bradley’s) a reality
outside itself.
The difference between such encounter and all conceptual knowledge is
very great. A blind man may know all about the sky’s blueness, and I may
know all about your toothache, conceptually ; tracing their causes from
primeval chaos, and their consequences to the crack of doom. But so long
as he has not felt the blueness, nor I the toothache, our knowledge, wide as
it is, of these realities, will be hollow and inadequate. Somebody must feel
blueness, somebody must have toothache, to make human knowledge of
these matters real. Conceptual systems which neither began nor left off in
sensations would be like bridges without piers. Systems about fact must
plunge themselves into sensation as bridges plunge their piers into the rock.
Sensations are the stable rock, the terminus a quo and the teminus ad quem
of thought. To find such termini is our aim with all our theories—to
conceive first when and where a certain sensation may be had, and then to
have it. Finding it stops discussion. Failure to find it kills the false conceit
of knowledge. Only when you deduce a possible sensation for me from
your theory, and give it to me when and where the theory requires, do I
begin to be sure that your thought has anything to do with truth.
Pure sensations can only be realized in the earliest days of life. They are
all but impossible to adults with memories and stores of associations
acquired. Prior to all impressions on sense-organs the brain is plunged in
deep sleep and consciousness is practically non-existent. Even the first
weeks after birth are passed in almost unbroken sleep by human infants. It
takes a strong message from the sense-organs to break this slumber. In a
new-born brain this gives rise to an absolutely pure sensation. But the
experience leaves its ‘ unimaginable touch ’ on the matter of the
convolutions, and the next impression which a sense-organ transmits
produces a cerebral reaction in which the awakened vestige of the last
impression plays its part. Another sort of feeling and a higher grade of
cognition are the consequence ; and the complication goes on increasing till
the end of life, no two successive impressions falling on an identical brain,
and no two successive thoughts being exactly the same. (See above, p. 230
ff.)
The first sensation which an infant gets is for him the Universe. And the
Universe which he later comes to know is nothing but an amplification and
an implication of that first simple germ which, by accretion on the one hand
and intussusception on the other, has grown so big and complex and
articulate that its first estate is unrememberable. In his dumb awakening to
the consciousness of something there, a mere this as yet (or something for
which even the term this would perhaps be too discriminative, and the
intellectual acknowledgment of which would be better expressed by the
bare interjection ‘ lo ! ’), the infant encounters an object in which (though it
be given in a pure sensation) all the ‘ categories of the understanding’ are
contained. It has objectivity, unity, substantiality, causality, in the full sense
in which any later object or system of objects has these things. Here the
young knower meets and greets his world; and the miracle of knowledge
bursts forth, as Voltaire says, as much in the infant’s lowest sensation as in
the higliest achievement of a Newton’s brain. The physiological condition
of this first sensible experience is probably nerve-currents coming in from
many peripheral organs at once. Later, the one confused Fact which these
currents cause to appear is perceived to be many facts, and to contain many
qualities.9 For as the currents vary, and the brain-paths are moulded by
them, other thoughts with other ‘objects’ come, and the ‘same thing’ which
was apprehended as a present this soon figures as a past that, about which
many unsuspected things have come to light. The principles of this
development have been laid down already in Chapters XII and XIII, and
nothing more need here be added to that account.

“THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE.”

To the reader who is tired of so much Erkenntnisstheoric I can only say
that I am so myself, but that it is indispensable, in the actual state of
opinions about Sensation, to try to clear up just what the word means.
Locke’s pupils seek to do the impossible with sensations, and against them
we must once again insist that sensations ‘clustered together’ cannot build
up our more intellectual states of mind. Plato’s earlier pupils used to admit
Sensation’s existence, grudgingly, but they trampled it in the dust as
something corporeal, non-cognitive, and vile.10 His latest followers seem to
seek to crowd it out of existence altogether. The only reals for the neo-
Hegelian writers appear to be relations, relations without terms, or whose
terms are only speciously such and really consist in knots, or gnarls of
relations finer still in infinitum.

“Exclude from what we have considered real all qualities

constituted by relation, we find that none are left.” “Abstract the
many relations from the one thing and there is nothing. . . .
Without the relations it would not exist at all.” 11 “The single
feeling is nothing real.” “n the recognition of relations as
 constituting the nature of ideas, rests the possibility of any
tenable theory of their reality.”

Such quotations as these from the late T. H. Green12 would be matters of

curiosity rather than of importance, were it not that sensationalist writers
themselves believe in a so-called ‘Relativity of Knowledge,’ which, if they
only understood it, they would see to be identical with Professor Green’s
doctrine. They tell us that the relation of sensations to each other is
something belonging to their essence, and that no one of them has an
absolute content:

“That, e.g., black can only be felt in contrast to white, or at

least in distinction from a paler or a deeper black; similarly a
tone or a sound only in alternation with others or with silence;
and in like manner a smell, a taste, a touch, only, so to speak, in
statu nascendi, whilst, when the stimulus continues, all
sensation disappears. This all seems at first sight to be
splendidly consistent both with itself and with the facts. But
looked at more closely, it is seen that neither is the case.”13

The two leading facts from which the doctrine of universal relativity
derives its wide-spread credit are these:
1)The psychological fact that so much of our actual knowledge is of the
relations of things—even our simplest sensations in adult life are habitually
referred to classes as we take them in; and
2)The physiological fact that our senses and brain must have periods of
change and repose, else we cease to feel and think.
Neither of these facts proves anything about the presence or non-
presence to our mind of absolute qualities with which we become sensibly
acquainted. Surely not the psychological fact; for our inveterate love of
relating and comparing things does not alter the intrinsic qualities or nature
of the things compared, or undo their absolute givenness. And surely not the
physiological fact; for the length of time during which we can feel or attend
to a quality is altogether irrelevant to the intrinsic constitution of the quality
felt. The time, moreover, is long enough in many instances, as sufferers
from neuralgia know.14 And the doctrine of relativity, not proved by these
facts, is flatly disproved by other facts even more patent. So far are we from
not knowing (in the words of Professor Bain) “any one thing by itself, but
only the difference between it and another thing,” that if this were true the
whole edifice of our knowledge would collapse. If all we felt were the
difference between the C and D, or c and d, on the musical scale, that being
the same in the two pairs of notes, the pairs themselves would be the same,
and language could get along without substantives. But Professor Bain does
not mean seriously what he says, and we need spend no more time on this
vague and popular form of the doctrine.15 The facts which seem to hover
before the minds of its champions are those which are best described under
the head of a physiological law.

THE LAW OF CONTRAST.

I will first enumerate the main facts which fall under this law, and then
remark upon what seems to me their significance for psychology.16
[Nowhere are the phenomena of contrast better exhibited, and their laws
more open to accurate study, than in connection with the sense of sight.
Here both kinds—simultaneous and successive—can easily be observed, for
they are of constant occurrence. Ordinarily they remain unnoticed, in
accordance with the general law of economy which causes us to select for
conscious notice only such elements of our object as will serve us for
æsthetic or practical utility, and to neglect the rest; just as we ignore the
double images, the mouches volantes, etc., which exist for everyone, but
which are not discriminated without careful attention. But by attention we
may easily discover the general facts involved in contrast. We find that in
general the color and brightness of one object always apparently effect the
color and brightness of any other object seen simultaneously with it or
immediately after.
In the first place, if we look for a moment at any surface and then turn
our eyes elsewhere, the complementary color and opposite degree of
brightness to that of the first surface tend to mingle themselves with the
color and the brightness of the second. This is successive contrast. It finds
its explanation in the fatigue of the organ of sight, causing it to respond to
any particular stimulus less and less readily the longer such stimulus
continues to act. This is shown clearly in the very marked changes which
occur in case of continued fixation of one particular point of any field. The
field darkens slowly, becomes more and more indistinct, and finally, if one
is practised enough in holding the eye perfectly steady, slight differences in
shade and color may entirely disappear. If we now turn aside the eyes, a
negative after-image of the field just fixated at once forms, and mingles its
sensations with those which may happen to come from anything else looked
at. This influence is distinctly evident only when the first surface has been
‘fixated’ without movement of the eyes. It is, however, none the less present
at all times, even when the eye wanders from point to point, causing each
sensation to be modified more or less by that just previously experienced.
On this account successive contrast is almost sure to be present in cases of
simultaneous contrast, and to complicate the phenomena.
A visual image is modified not only by other sensations just previously
experienced, but also by all those eaterienced simultaneously with it, and
especially by such as proceed from contiguous portions of the retina. This is
the phenomenon of simultaneous contrast. In this, as in successive contrast,
both brightness and hue are involved. A bright object appears still brighter
when its surroundings are darker than itself, and darker when they are
brighter than itself. Two colors side by side are apparently changed by the
admixture, with each, of the complement of the other. And lastly, a gray
surface near a colored one is tinged with the complement of the latter.17
The phenomena of simultaneous contrast in sight are so complicated by
other attendant phenomena that it is difficult to isolate them and observe
them in their purity. Yet it is evidently of the greatest importance to do so, if
one would conduct his investigations accurately. Neglect of this principle
has led to many mistakes being made in accounting for the facts observed.
As we have seen, if the eye is allowed to wander here and there about the
field as it ordinarily does, successive contrast results and allowance must be
made for its presence. It can be avoided only by carefully fixating with the
well-rested eye a point of one field, and by then observing the changes
which occur in this field when the contrasting field is placed by its side.
Such a course will insure pure simultaneous contrast. But even thus it lasts
in its purity for a moment only. It reaches its maximum of effect